Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/195

Rh professors of Harvard College, the judges on the bench are Unitarian.” That was in 1823. The movement continued among the scholars and intellectuals until about 1836, when it reached the people and spread like contagion. Elias Hicks became the unorthodox leader of the Quakers, and Hosea Ballou was with less intellectual difficulty attacking the Calvinistic dogma with the doctrine of Universalism. This last was the really popular reaction in New England. Unitarianism was scholarly, Universalism popular. But it all amounted to a revolt against dogmatic theology. Channing denied the depravity of man to show “how capable God had made him of righteousness.” He was the center of a bitter fight, but to-day he looks calmly down from his pedestal in the Public Garden of Boston, and the average passer-by may wonder why he is there. Emerson taught that the revelations God made to man were made within the soul, that the soul had infinite dignity and capacity, that transcendentalism was an experience of the immanence of God. He also had his bitter fights with the college men — all forgotten now in the universal reverence for his name. Margaret Fuller described the idea of transcendentalism as an exalting conception of the Godlike nature of the human spirit.

Now it must be remembered that this liberalizing work had been going on in New England for fifty years. Its most prominent teachers were Channing, Emerson, and Theodore Parker. There was a danger in the work, looked at religiously, for whereas the scholars might be supposed to take care