Our Unitarian Gospel | Page 2

part of most of the old- time churches that Jesus
made it perfectly plain to his disciples that he was a divine being, that
he claimed to be one himself, and that the claim was recognized.
So far, however, as any authentic record with which we are familiar
goes, Jesus himself was a Unitarian. All the disciples were Unitarians.
Paul was a Unitarian. The New Testament is a Unitarian book from
beginning to end. The finest critics of the world will tell you that there
is no trace of any other teaching there. And so, for the first three
hundred years of the history of the Church, Unitarianism was its
prevailing doctrine.
I have no very good memory for names. So I have brought here a little
leaflet which contains some that I wish to speak of. Among the Church
Fathers, Clement, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and
Lactantius, all of them in their writings make it perfectly clear and
unquestioned that the belief of the Church, the majority belief for the
first three centuries, was Unitarian. Of course, the process of thought
here and there was going on which finally culminated in the doctrine of
the Trinity. That is, people were beginning more and more to exalt, as
they supposed, the character, the office, the mission of Jesus; coming
more and more to believe that he was something other than a man, that
he was above and beyond humanity.
But one other among the Fathers, Justin Martyr, one of the best known
of all, takes care to point out explicitly his belief. I will read you just
two or three words from it. He says: "There is a Lord of the Lord Jesus,
being his Father and God, and the Cause of his existence."
This belief, then, was universal, practically universal, throughout the
first three centuries. But the process of growth was going on which
finally culminated in the controversy which was settled by the Council
of Nicaea, held in the early part of the fourth century; that is, the year
325. The leaders of this controversy, as you know, were Arius, on the
Unitarian side, and Athanasius, fighting hard for the doctrine then new
in the Church, of the Trinity.

The majority of the bishops and leading men of the Church at that time
were on the side of Arius; but at last the Emperor Constantine settled
the dispute. Now you know that the sceptre of a despotic emperor may
not reason, may not think; but it is weightier than either reason or
thought in the settlement of a controversy like this at such a period in
the history of the world. So Constantine settled the controversy in favor
of the Trinitarians; and henceforth you need not wonder that
Unitarianism did not grow, for it was mercilessly repressed and crushed
out for the next thousand years.
Unitarianism, however, is not alone in this. Let me call your attention
to a fact of immense significance in this matter. All this time the study
of science and philosophy, that dared to think beyond the limits of the
Church's doctrine, were crushed out. There was no free philosophy,
there was no free study of science, there was no free anything for a
thousand years. The secular armed forces of Europe, with penalties of
imprisonment, of the rack, of the fagot, of torture of every kind, were
enlisted against anything like liberty of thinking.
So you need not wonder, then, that there was neither any science nor
any Unitarianism to be heard of until the Renaissance. What was the
Renaissance? It was the rising again of human liberty, the possibility
once more of man's freedom to think and study. Though the armed
forces of Europe were for a long time against it, the rising tide could
not be entirely rolled back, and so it gained on human thought and
human life more and more. And out of this the Renaissance came, the
new birth of science, on the one hand, and on the other, issuing in the
Reformation's assertion of the right of thought and of private judgment
in matters of religion; and along with this latter the rebirth of
Unitarianism, its reappearance again as a force in the history of the
world.
During this Reformation period there are many names of light and
power, among them being Servetus, whom Calvin burned because he
was a Unitarian; Laelius and Faustus Socinus, Bernardino Ochino,
Blandrata, and Francis David; and, more noted in some ways than any
of them, Giordano Bruno, the man who represents the dawn of the

modern world more significantly than any other man of his age, not
entirely a Unitarian, but fighting a battle out of which Unitarianism
sprung, freedom of thought, the right of private judgment, the scientific
study of the universe,