myself unable to adopt this language’—­not, he says, but that he does think them actually ‘unscriptural.’  ’But I am prepared to maintain, that if they were in the Bible, they would still be incredible....  Reason is the ultimate appeal, the supreme tribunal, to which the test of even Scripture must be brought.’  It abates nothing from the force of these declarations that then, and for some time afterwards, Martineau himself accepted the miracles.  The ‘old school’ perceived the sharp edge of such a weapon, and its wielder was during many years regarded as a ‘dangerous’ innovator.

The other young writer to whom reference has been made was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), son and grandson of ministers of the liberal Congregational type in New England and himself for a short time minister of the Second Church, Boston.  Preferring the freedom of the lecturing platform, Emerson had already withdrawn from the ministry, but in 1838 he gave an ‘Address to the Senior Class’ in the Divinity School, Harvard, which proved a second landmark in the history of American Unitarianism.  Nineteen years before, Channing had decisively pointed out that Unitarianism and orthodoxy are two distinct theologies.  In the Divinity School Address, Emerson maintained that the idea of ‘supernaturalism’ is rendered obsolete by a recognition of the reality of things.  Bringing a gift of pungent prose to the service of a poetic imagination, Emerson startled the decorously dignified authorities of the New England pulpit; he ‘saved us,’ says Lowell, ’from the body of this death.’  He pointed from the record of miracles past to an ever-present miracle.  To the illumination of ‘reason,’ which Unitarians had followed so loyally—­within the proviso of a special revelation—­he brought the light of a mystic intuition.  Some of his elders judged it to be ‘false fire’ perilously akin to the ‘enthusiasm’ which their predecessors had so often condemned.  In daring simplicity he urged that there had been ‘noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.’  ’The soul knows no persons.’  The divine is always latent in the human.  Revelation is not ended—­as if God were dead!

The shock to the old-fashioned minds was immense.  Long and far-sounding debate followed, though Emerson, with provoking self-possession, declined to argue.  He simply ‘announced.’  This oracular attitude certainly affected some of the younger men greatly, but fortunately for the success of the new gospel one of these younger men translated the oracular into a more popular and reasoned form.  Three years after Emerson’s Address, Theodore Parker (1810-60) completed the Unitarian trilogy by a sermon on The Transient and the Permanent in Theology.  It may be said to have done for Emerson’s message the kind of service rendered by Huxley to Darwin’s.  Parker at once became a marked man; most Unitarian pulpits were closed against him, but a large hall accommodated the vast crowds that came to hear him.  It is doubtful