“self-poised on manhood’s solid earth
  Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,
  Fed from within with all the strength he needs.”

It is this sense of independence which arouses in Goethe a perennial enthusiasm.  It is the greatest bliss, he says, that the humanist won back for us.  Henceforth, we must strive with all our power to keep it.

We have attempted this brief sketch of one of the chief sources of the contemporary thought movement, that we may realize the pit whence we were digged, the quarry from which many corner stones in the present edifice of civilization were dug.  The preacher tends to underestimate the comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into many institutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon him and his message.  They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious conceptions of the community.  Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to the influence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently religious character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the church which are impinging upon it, and upon the rest of the thinking of the moment.

Now, this abstract humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a considerable influence upon early American preaching.  The latter part of the eighteenth century marked a breaking away from the Protestant scholasticism of the Reformation theology.  The French Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty of the individual person.  Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion in our infant republic.  It was a mark of sophistication with many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious consideration.  College students modestly admitted that they were infidels and with a delicious naivete assumed the names of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable egotist Rousseau.  It is said that in 1795, on the first Sunday of President administration in Yale College, only three undergraduates remained after service to take the sacrament.  The reasons were partly political, probably, but these themselves were grounded in the new philosophical, anti-religious attitude.

Of course, this affected the churches.  There was a reaction from Protestant scholasticism within them which, later on, culminated in Unitarianism, Universalism and Arminianism.  The most significant thing in the Unitarian movement was not its rejection of the Trinitarian speculation, but its positive contribution to the reassertion of Jesus’ doctrine of the worth and dignity of human nature.  But it recovered that doctrine much more by the way of humanistic philosophy than by way of the teaching of the New Testament.  I suppose the thing which has made the weakness of the Unitarian movement, its acknowledged lack of religious warmth and feeling, is due not to the place where it stands, but to the road by which it got there.