ianism, as that had been from Calvinism. From
Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker,
there was a natural and logical unfolding; not logical in the sense
that Channing accepted Edwards's premises and pushed them out to their
conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's premises, but in
the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards's premises into their
conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral
_reductio ad absurdum_ and a state of opinion against which Channing
rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in
the carrying out of his own principles. Thus the "Channing
Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of
divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came into
the world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "vicarious sacrifice"
they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor, and that
his supernatural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker and
Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ was a
good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed him
more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his
preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any
special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and
not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission.
In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha,
Socrates, or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the "Ethnical
Scriptures" or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were
published in the transcendental organ, the _Dial_. As against these
new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative
position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous
outside of eastern Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New York
and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such,
was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy,
under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and
Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of
Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of
several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a
church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed,
with justice, that their opinions had, to a great extent, modified the
theology of the orthodo