nd essence--is
the very God for a supposed denial of whom Bruno died. '_Cosi vince
Goffredo!_'
Thus rolled on the centuries. Germany, France, England, and Scotland had
each contributed her knights to the great tournament of Mind. And now
the first symptoms of agitation appeared on the hitherto unruffled
surface of Thought in the New World. Still panting after her victories,
scarcely used to her new freedom, at first the presence of a power
antagonistic to the orthodox faith was unsuspected even by those who
first entertained it. But the stone had been dashed into the tranquil
ocean when the May-flower was moored on the New England coast, and its
circling eddies drew curve after curve among the descendants, brave,
conscientious, energetic, of the old Puritans. The stern Calvinism, by
which their fathers had lived and died, was, by these early recreants,
first mistrusted, then questioned, and finally abjured. The murmurs of
dissent that had long agitated the sturdy upholders of the accepted
faith, broke out in a demand for a system whose claims should be less
absolute, and whose nature should satisfy those fugitive appeals to
Reason and the Understanding, that, weak indeed, and faint, were yet
distinctly audible to the thinkers of the day. From the cloud of
accusation and denial, of suspicion and trial, the new Perseus,
Unitarianism,--whilom a nursling of Milton, Locke, and Hartley,--was
born, and took its place among the sects, sustained by the few, dreaded
and condemned by the many.
To brand this new theory, no terms were found too strong even by the
religious periodicals of the day. Unwilling to bide their time, to test
its soundness by its strength and duration, its opponents rested not. It
was confidently predicted that the movement would influence its
followers to skepticism and atheism. The accusation of the sixteenth
century was revived, and St. Bernards cried from pulpit and press, 'The
limits of the forefathers have been transgressed!' To the great mass of
the opposition, the horror was not that Trinitarianism had been
assailed, but that men had been found so bold as to question it. The
crime with the unlearned and the majority of the professors was not
heresy, but daring. But Christians, fervent and earnest, were not
wanting who denounced the movement in its anticipated consequences. The
young and adventurous, the men of impulse and daring, would drift, it
was feared, to the very borders of open infidelity.
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