I go on to discuss the principles underlying our movement,
I wish to call your attention to a few more names; and I trust you will
pardon me for this. There is no desire for vain-glory in the
enumeration. I simply wish that people should know, what only a few do
know, who have been Unitarians in the past, and what great names,
leading authoritative names in the world's literature and science and
art, find here their place.
Among the Fathers of the Revolution, all the Adamses, Dr. Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson, and many another were avowed Unitarians. And, when we
come to modern times, it is worth your noting that all our great poets
in this country, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and in
this city Stedman, are Unitarian names.
Then the leading historians, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Sparks,
Palfrey, Parkman, and John Fiske, are Unitarians. Educators, like
Horace Mann, like the last seven presidents of Harvard University,
Unitarians. Great scientists, like Agassiz, Peirce, Bowditch, Professor
Draper, Unitarians. Statesmen and public men, like Webster, Calhoun,
the Adamses, the Hoars, Curtis. Two of our great chief justices,
Marshall and Parsons. Supreme Court Judges, Story and Miller. Literary
men, like Whipple, Hawthorne, Ripley, and Bayard Taylor; and eminent
women, such as Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, Helen
Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.
I mention these, that you may know the kind of men, ethical,
scientific, judicial, political, literary, who have been distinguished,
as we think from our point of view, by being followers of this grand
faith of ours.
And now I wish you to note again, what I hinted at a moment ago, that
it is not an accident that Unitarianism should spring into being in the
modern world coincidently with the great movements of liberty in France
and England, and the outburst that culminated in our own Revolution and
the establishment here of a State without a king as well as of a church
without a bishop.
Wherever you have liberty and education, there you have the raw
materials out of which to make the free, forward looker in religious
thought and life.
Now what are the three principles out of which Unitarianism is born?
First, I have already intimated it, but I wish to emphasize it again
for a moment with an addition, Liberty. Humanity at last had come to a
time in its history when it had asserted its right to be free; not o
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