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Liberty and Religion, the First Century of the British And LIBERTYAND THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE BRITISH & FOREIGN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION BY SYDNEY HERBERT MELLONE 'c, M.A., D.%. Secretary of the Associatiow THE LINDSEY PRESS www.unitarian.org.uWdocs 5 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, >LONDON, W.C. 2 1925 CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE ENGLANDIN 1825 . i CHAPTER I1 MOVEMENTSBEFORE 1825 . CHAPTER I11 FOUNDATIONAND CONSTITUTION. CHAPTER IV WORKAMID ANXIETY. C CHAPTER V WIDENINGSYMPATHIES AND HOPES CHAPTER V1 ORGANISEDWORK TO 1890 . CHAPTER V11 ORGANISEDWORK . EXTENDED, 1890-rgoz CHAPTER V111 THE NEW CENTURY,1902-1925 CHAPTER IX RELIGIOUSCONDITIONS IN 1925 Printed in Great Britain by ELSOM& CO. LTD., BULL PREFACE This book dealing with the first century of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, has been prepared by authority of the Executive Committee of the Association. It is based on an exhaustive study of the successive Annual Reports of the Asso- ciation since its foundation in 1825, and of other relevant documents. The author wishes to make cordial acknowledgement of the assistance given by the Rev. W. G. Tarrant, B.A., member of the Exe- cutive Committee since 1887, and the Rev. W. Copeland Bowie, D.D., Secretary from 1892 to 1921, who have read the whole of the proofs and made many valuable suggestions which have been embodied in the book. S. H, MELLONE. ENGLAND IN 1825 HE condition of England during the first T quarter of the nineteenth century, re- garded from the outside, gave little ground for any hopeful view of the coming years. Neither the political nor the economic order was adapted to the changes which were taking place under the eyes of men. The industrial revolution was not half way through. Since Watt's final elaboration of his steam-engine in 1785, the new power was harnessed to the making of all kinds of other machines, which were slowly improved, and slowly won their way; and the agony of the change was long. Thus when the wealth and population of the country were in- creasing, the people were miserable and poor. The progressive elements in Parliament and else- where were in the grip of an economic creed which blessed the struggle of all with all, and for the sake of that struggle temporized with the con- stant waste of life through accident and excessive hours of work, and with the nameless horrors of child slavery. LIBERTY AND RELIGION ENGLAND IN 1825 The redeeming influence of the higher literature by its division into two societies-Bell enlisting was indirect, and its results were not apparent in the National Society, representing the Church, until the next generation. Keats died in 1821, and Lancaster in the British and Foreign School Shelley in 1822, and Byron in 1824. In 1825 Society, representing the Dissenters. The Dis- Hazlett was forty-seven years old, Charles senters were poor, and their schools few. In Lamb fifty, and Coleridge fifty-three; of the two many districts they had to choose between greatest names in the literature of that time, Scott, leaving their children untaught and sending aged fifty-four, had already written most of his them to be instructed in Anglican principles. Waverley Novels, and Wordsworth, aged fifty- Churchmen were of opinion that to impart know- five, had already done most of his influential ledge without mixing it with Anglican doctrine, work. Criticism, of the kind which proves was an intolerable neglect of duty. The result everyone wrong but the critic and his friends- was that in most of their schools the children were the criticism which drove Shelley and Keats out drilled to repeat the Catechism and Creed without of the country-was plentiful. There was little understanding, and half of them left the schools forward-looking hope or faith in the bettering of unable to read or write.l the world, and no consciousness of an ideal aim The currents of the time were bearing England before Society as a whole. Philosophers analysed forward rapidly into a future then undiscerned. human nature, or what they supposed to be such ; In the few years of the Napoleonic wars the but there was scarcely any new literature moved old order had gone to pieces, and the fabric of by love of human nature, or by imaginative society needed rebuilding. Organized govern- penetration into the passionate aspirations of ment, central and local, the franchise, the civil mankind. and commercial order, the main provisions of a During the eighteenth century most of the modern State for a modern people-were yet to provision made for the education of the poor be called into being; and the profound misery in England, was provided by an organization of of millions of men and women gave the upper Anglican churchmen-the Society for promoting classes short respite for reform. Fortunately, the Christian Knowledge, founded in 1699. At the statesmen of the time found to their hands a great close of the eighteenth century, Andrew Bell and volume of charity and social beneficence. It was Joseph Lancaster started a new movement for the day of the Evangelical Crusades against primary education; but it wgs much weakened Henry Craik, The State ilz Relation to Education, Ch. i. LIBERTY AND RELIGION ENGLAND IN 1825 slavery, brutal sports, cruelty to children and to power can save." A storm was about to break animals. Such crusades were sometimes capri- on the Church, which " stunned and bewildered " cious and erratic, and drew from Ebenezer Elliott her leaders and friends and ended her slumbers? (born 1781, died 1849) the caustic lines :- John Henry Newman, in 1839, wrote of the reaction against " the dry and superficial char- Their lofty souls have telescopic eyes, Which see the smallest speck of distant pain, acter of the religious teaching and literature of While at their feet a world of agonies the last generation " and of " the need felt both Unseen, unheard, unheeded, writhes in vain. by the hearts and intellects of the nation for a deeper philosophy." It was, he said, " not so The battle for the factory children and the ten much a movement as a spirit afloat, rising up in hours day was fought by a small party of inde- hearts where it was least suspected, and working pendent men of different creeds, moved not by itself, though not in secret, yet so subtly and im- care for any party but by the impulse of mercy. palpably as hardly to admit of encounter on any Among these, the Unitarian John Fielden (1784- ordinary human modes of opposition The 1849) holds an honorable place. In 1833 Lord truth of this statement goes further and deeper Ashley (afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury) took up than its author dreamt of. Already the great the leadership of the group, and began his long German thinker Hegel (born 1770), through the career of service in the struggle for humanizing historical spirit of his teaching had stirred up conditions in the factories and mines. many of the ablest Continental scholars to read In later years Charles Dickens (1812-1870) the history of the past in the light of the idea of did much to sway the emotions of the philan- Development, and among these were the founders thropists to genuinely humanitarian ends ; and of modern Biblical criticism. The influence of with all its caprice, their enthusiasm was accom- their work was being felt by open-minded religious panied by an energy of thought and imagination thinkers-chiefly Unitarians-in England and which broadened and vivified the social con- America. But Newman truly discerned the sciousness of the time. beginnings of a new religious movement, fed by a The reputation of the Church at the time when host of new emotions stirring the hearts of men. our story begins is indicated in the simple words It divided into two rivers of thought : the Anglo- of Thomas Arnold, written a few years after Dean Church, The Oxford Movement, Ch. i. 1825: " The Church, as she now is, no human 2 History of my Religiows Opinions, Ch. iii. LIBERTY AND RELIGION ENGLAND IN 1825 Catholic movement and the Liberal movement later. So the remarkable coincidence of the birth in theology were born at the same time as the of the American Unitarian Association a few political movement for reform. hours earlier than its British sister was not pre- If in 1825 the question of questions had been arranged. Emerson was then a young man of set forth in the familiar words "Watchman, twenty-two, and Longfellow of eighteen. what of the night ? " the best men of that time Abraham Lincoln was a boy of sixteen, and could have given only a hesitating and partial Theodore Parker of fifteen. William Ellery answer. But the promise of a full and final Channing, six years before, had delivered his answer was present with them, though unknown. famous exposition and defence of Unitarian It lay in the lives of those who in that year were Christianity in Baltimore. only in their childhood, boyhood, or early man- Before proceeding to tell the story of the hood, but were destined to mould the thought and British and Foreign Unitarian Association and its life of the age. It is of much interest to recall work from 1825 onwards, we must indicate the their names. When the British and Foreign place of the Unitarian movement in the English Unitarian Association was founded, on May ~6th~ Nonconformity of the early nineteenth century; 1825, John Ruskin was a child of six; Charles and this involves a brief reference to its earlier Dickens and Robert Browning were boys of history. thirteen ; Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Ewart Gladstone, boys of sixteen; John Stuart Mill was nineteen ; James Martineau was a young man of twenty, as was Richard Cobden, and Ashley (Earl of Shaftesbury) and John Henry Newman were young men of twenty-four.
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