nly
to cast off fetters that hampered the body, not only to dethrone the
despots that made liberty impossible in the State, but to think in the
realm of religion, to believe it more honorable to God to think than to
cringe and be afraid in his presence.

Second, coincident with the birth of Unitarianism is an enlargement and
a reassertion of the conscience of mankind. A demand for justice. Just
think for a moment, and take it home to your hearts, that up to the
time when this free religious life was born, according to the teaching
of all the old creeds, justice and right had been one thing here among
men and another thing enthroned in the heavens. The idea has always
been that might made right, that God, because he was God, had a right
to do anything, though it controverted and contradicted all the ideas
of human righteousness; and that we still must bow in the dust, and
accept it as true.

If I could be absolutely sure that God had done something which
contradicted my conscience, I should say that probably my conscience
was wrong. I should wait at any rate, and try to find out. But, when I
find that the condition of things is simply this, that certain
fallible, unjust, uneducated, barbaric people have said that God has
done certain things, then it is another matter. I have no direct word
from God: I have only the report of men whose authority I have no
adequate reason to accept.

At any rate, the world came to the point where it demanded that
goodness on earth should be goodness up in heaven, too; that God should
at least be as just and fair as we expect men to be. And that, if you
will think it out a little carefully, is enough to revolutionize the
theology of the world; for the picture of the character of God as
contained in the old theologies is even horribly unjust, as judged by
any human standard.

In the third place, Unitarianism sprang out of a new elevation of love
and tenderness. As men became more and more civilized, they became more
tender-hearted; and they found it impossible to believe that the Father
in, heaven should not be as kind and loving as the best father on
earth.

And here, again, if you think it out, you will find that this is enough
to compel a revolution of all the old theological ideas of the world.

Just as soon, then, as the civilized modern world became free, there
was a new expansion of the sense of the right to think; there was a new
expansion of conscience, the insistent demand