m that has grown
up luxuriantly of late in England. The welcome has been most cordial. A
Unitarian clergyman has become the American editor of the _Essays and
Reviews_;[257] and hails the appearance of such a book as representing a
new and better era in modern theology. He holds that the real "life of
Anglican theology is now represented by such men as Powell and Williams
and Maurice and Jowett and Stanley;" that the Broad Church is the only
one which fully embodies true progress and conservatism; that
Rationalism is the only alternative of Romanism; and that, as a matter
of course, the former should be adopted. He expresses the hope that the
spirit of Rationalistic criticism, "which is now leavening the Church of
England, may find abundant entrance into all the churches of our land,"
and that the _Essays and Reviews_, "its genuine product, may contribute
somewhat thereto."[258]

The quarterly organ of the Unitarians, _The Christian Examiner_, has
passed an encomium on the same exponent of English Rationalism, in which
it manifests no tempered gladness at skepticism within the pale of the
church. It says, with undisguised satisfaction, that "either these seven
essayists must have been in very close and intimate confidential
relations as friends or fellow-students, and have held many precious
conferences together in which they were mutually each other's
confessors; or, there must be quite a large number of very able and very
heretical sinners in the Church of England, within easy hail of each
other, and so thick in some neighborhoods that it is the readiest thing
in the world to pick out a set of them who, 'without concert or
comparison,' will contribute all the parts of a _fresh and unhackneyed
system of opinion_."

One of the most direct and outspoken of all the organized attacks of
American Rationalism upon evangelical Christianity occurred at the first
public anniversary of the Young Men's Christian Union, of New York. Its
importance was due to the diversity of unevangelical bodies there
represented, and to the celebrity of several of the speakers.
Unitarianism, Swedenborgianism, and Universalism mingled in happy
fraternity. The speakers were Drs. Osgood, Bellows, Sawyer, and Chapin;
Rev. Messrs. Barrett, Peters, Mayo, Higginson, Miel, Blanchard, and
Frothingham; and Richard Warren and Horace Greeley, Esquires.

The Union seems to have been designed as a counterpoise to the large and
flourishing Young Men's Christ