We have no recognized principles by which any
man who chooses to be a Christian disciple, and desires to be numbered
with us, whatever he believes or denies, can be excluded."
But Unitarianism has ever remained true to a few points. One of them is
antagonism to orthodoxy. It was an old cry of the German skeptics,
"Away with orthodoxy. It fetters us to forms and creeds, makes us blind
devotees to system, converts us into bigots, and dwarfs reason into an
invisible pigmy." Yet we frequently meet with language of similar import
in the present day. If we did not know its authorship we could easily
tell the ecclesiastical fountain whence it flows. "The implications of
false and shallow reasoning," says an American Unitarian divine,
"partial observation, intellectual grouping, moral obliquity, spiritual
ignorance,--in short, of puerility and superstition involved in a large
part of the appeals, the preaching, the cant terms, the popular dogmas,
the current conversation of Christendom,--are discouraging evidences how
backward is the religious thought of our day, as compared with its
general thought; how little harmony there is between our schools and our
churches, our thinkers and our religious guides, our political and
national institutions and our popular theology.
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