name, holding the same doctrinal
standards, observing the same ritual and governed by the same
discipline, and occupying the same great territory, and yet completely
dissevered from each other and at times in relations of sharp mutual
antagonism.[297:1]

The theological debate which had split the Presbyterian Church from end
to end was quite as earnest and copious in New England. But owing to the
freer habit of theological inquiry and the looser texture of
organization among the Congregationalist churches, it made no organic
schism beyond the setting up of a new theological seminary in
Connecticut to offset what were deemed the "dangerous tendencies" of the
New Haven theology. After a few years the party lines had faded out and
the two seminaries were good neighbors.

The unlikeliest place in all American Christendom for a partisan
controversy and a schism would have seemed to be the Unitarian
denomination in and about Boston. Beginning with the refusal not only of
any imposed standard of belief, but of any statement of common opinions,
and with unlimited freedom of opinion in every direction, unless,
perhaps, in the direction of orthodoxy, it was not easy to see how a
splitting wedge could be started in it. But the infection of the time
was not to be resisted. Even Unitarianism must have its heresies and
heresiarchs to deal with. No sooner did the pressure of outside attack
abate than antagonisms began pretty sharply to declare themselves. In
1832 Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, pastor of the Second Church in Boston,
proposed to the church to abandon or radically change the observance of
the Lord's Supper. When the church demurred at this extraordinary demand
he resigned his office, firing off an elaborate argument against the
usage of the church by way of a parting salute. Without any formal
demission of the ministry, he retired to his literary seclusion at
Concord, from which he brought forth in books and lectures the oracular
utterances which caught more and more the ear of a wide public, and in
which, in casual-seeming parentheses and _obiter dicta_, Christianity
and all practical religion were condemned by sly innuendo and
half-respectful allusion by which he might "without sneering teach the
rest to sneer." In 1838 he was still so far recognized in the ministry
as to be invited to address the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity
School. The blank pantheism which he then enunciated called forth from
Professor Henry