MEMORABLE UNITARIANS BEING A SEWIEA OF BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES " Biography is the moat u~liversallypleasant, and most universally profitable, of a11 readir!g."--CARLYLE. www.unitarian.org.uWdocs LONDON BRITP8H AND FOREIGN UNITAEIAN ASSOCIATION ESSEX HALL, ESSEX STREET, STRAND. W.C. 1906 PREFACE The very useful biographical compendium which the late Rev. Robert Spears published, entitled '' A RECORD OF UNITARIANWORTHIES," has long been out of print. Mr. Spears died before accomplishing his purpose of re-issuing it in a revised and extended form. In hopes of facilitating such a re-issue, one of his colleagues in the compilation of that RECORDhas (with the sanction of Mrs. Spears) selected and revised some of the principal memoirs contained in it. These, with the addition of a few supplementary sketches, constitute the present volume. The philosophical and the Scriptural arguments in support of Unitarianism have been set before the world by very many authors. Moreover, each of the arguments against it has repeatedly been shown-as by Mr. Wilson in his " Trinitarian Concessions "-to have been abandoned as unsound by one or another of the defenders of ortho- doxy. But beyond all appeals to argument there is the appeal to experience. Many an inquirer wishes to test the tree by its fruits, and to learn what has been the moral and intellectual calibre of the men whom Uni- tarianism has produced or has attracted. The reply might be given in general terms by quoting orthodox theologians. Canon Curteis, in his Bampton Lectures, wrote, " Can we Churchmen possibly be doing right in retaining our present hostile attitude towards Unitarians ? In personal character many of them repre- PREFACE sent the highest type of Christian manhood . and many s good book of Unitarian authorship has been adopted and widely used by Anglicans." Dean Plumptre peached before the University of Oxford of " those Unitarians in whom we find a zeal in all good works, MEMORABLE UNITARIANS and a bright sympathy which comes nearer than any- thing else we have seen to the charity which hopeth and endureth all things." And we are told by Dr. L. W. ULFILAS. Bacon (History of American Christianity, p. 227), that THE APOSTLE OF THE GOTHS. '' one of the most strenuous of the early American dis- putants against Unitarianism remarked, in his later years, One of the most learned of living defenders of Trini- concerning devout Unitarians, that it seemed as if the tarianism, the Rev. Professor Gwatkin, of Cambridge, contemplation of Jesus Christ as the example for our writes (in his "-Arian Controversy," p. G) :--"Whatever imitation had wrought in them an exceptional beauty be the errors of the creed of Arianism, it was a power of and Christ-likeness of living." In more collective terms, life among the Northern nations. Let us give Arianism the present Bishop of Carlisle, Dr. Diggle, has said (The full honour for it,s noble work of missions in that age of Churchmalz for 1899), " The homes of Unitarians, whether, deep despair which saw the dissolution of the ancient %h or poor, are generally homes of singular refinement world." In that high work the noblest worker was the and of active interest in intellectual movements. Their great Arian scholar, Ulfilas, whose name is the brightest generosity and charitable benevolence are proverbial." in the whole Christian records of the fourth century. Of him Gibbon says (" Decline and Fall," chap. xxxvii.) :- A more detailed and more precise reply, however, it "Ulfilas, the bishop and the apostle of the Goths, acquired is the object of the present volume to give, by describing their love and reverence by his blameless life and indefati- individual men. In some of these, who were educated in gable zeal ; and they received with implicit confidence the Unitarianism, the reader will see how noble and devout d~ct~rinesof truth and virtue which he preached and a spirit that education produced. In others, who were practised. He executed the arduous task of translating educated in Trinitarianism-like Milton, Locke, Newton, the Scriptures into their native tongue-a dialect of the Watts, Porson, Paley-he will see by what acute thinkers, German or Teutonic language. (But he prudently sup- even when originally prepossessed against Unitarianism,, pressed the four Books of the Kings, as they might tend the arguments in support of it have been pronounced to irritate the fierce and sanguinary spirit of the bar- irresistible, barians.) " MENORABLE UNITARIANS ULFILAS The birth of Ulfilas-or, in the simpler form of his the Arian Goths became (as the orthodox historian Socrates name, Wulfel (the wolf-cub)-took place in Dacia (roughly records) martyrs for the faith of Christ. speaking, our modern kingdom of Roumania), in 311 A.D. Ulfilas lived amongst his people as a true shepherd. He It was a critical time in the history of Christianity and of set them an example by his peaceable rind blan~elesslife ; the Empire. In that very year the persecution of the and, moreover, lie laboured for their s3lces at a great task Christians ceased; and within a dozen years later, a -that of enabling tl:eln to read the Scriptures in their Christian-Constantine-became the sovereign of the own tongue. But this involved enormous di6cultics. Roman world. And, three years later still, the great IIe had not only to translate the Bible into their Gothic Council of Nicea was assembled, which formulated the speech, but also to teach them to read. Nay, far more, famous " orthodos " creed. he had to give them, for the first time in their history, a But, in 311, the Goths were still heathens. So it pro- written language. He reduced their Gothic tongue into a bably was only in his early manhood that Ulfilas embraced written form, sncl selected (or invented) characters 2nd the faith of Christ. (Just about this period' occurs the symbols to compose an alphabet for it. Such a Cnslr as fist trace of Arianism in England. It is a letter, writte~i this, difficult and laborious at any time, wap, in the days on a leaden tablet, dug up at Bath about 1880, in which a in which Ulfilas worked, beset with uuexamplcd obstacles. Wroxeter man called Biliconus is denounced as a dog of Undetersocl and undalznted, he undertook it;. I3.e did not hius." Mr. E. W. B. Nicholson has published it.) At desist until he had put into G~tllicthe entire Nc'iv Testa- Constantinople Ulfilas educated himself assiduously, and ment and the greater part of the Old. For this his name became familiar with Greek and Latin. Then he became will be held in honour so long as any bmnch of the desirous to return to his heathen countrymen and win Teutonic languages shall exist. For, if Tve 1006 at his them to his own new faith. In 341, at the age of thirty, Bible, it is startling to note how much these anoient Gothic he was ordained bishop of Gothia, and received the over- words resemble our earliest English forms. About tmo- sight of all Goths living north of the Danube. Seven thirds of the words of Ulfilas' Gothic version of the Lord's years later, a heathen persecution drove him back to the Prayer are of the same origin as those used in our English Roman territory southward of the river, into the lands we version. Thus, by mzking his new alphabet and his new now call Servia and Bulgaria. For forty years altogether version of the Script~~res,he laid the foundation of all his missionary work went on. These years were full of Soandinavian and German and English literature. So the labours and perils. But the desires of his heart were ful- day on which his Gothic Bible was given to the world was filled. .For his countrymen became a Christian people, the s9ed-time of a harvest which has been garnering in spite of the bitter opposition of their king-in spite, through fifteen centuries. His was the first book written too, of persecutions, which raged so fiercely that many of in the tongue whose offsl~ootsnTere to be the 1angzagcs L; 2 MEMORABLE UNITARIBXS used by the pens of Csedmon and Alfred the Great, of a great multitude of Christians." Doubtless both Wyclif and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, Emerson Arians and Athanasians joined together in doing this and Charming, Luther and Goethe. homage to the man who had won the Gothic nation from Ulfilas' Arian form of faith was imparted by himself heathenism. and his disciples to most of the tribes of the Gothic stock. At this Council of A.D. 35 l the Athanasian party gained Notwithstanding his Unitarian heresy, orthodox writers, a majority, nnd promulgated that creed which is now used both Protestant and even Boman Catholic, have uniformly in the Established Church of England under the misnomer paid much homage to his zealous and blameless life, and of the " Nicene Creed " (though it is much more detailed to his success in Christianising n people most unlikely to than the one actually promulgated, two generations earlier, receive the peaceful tenets of Christianity. Ulfilas is by the Council of Nicaa.). The Arians were not only vividly portrayed by his pupil Ausentius as a man of " defeated but soon were persecuted, so sharply that many most upright conversation, truly a confessor of Christ; a of them fled into the northern wilds. For, henceforward, teacher of piety and a preacher of tuth ; a man whom I no Arian was safe except aiiiongst the " barbarian" am not competent to praise according to his merit, yet nations, the Goths and Vandals, and Burgundians ; and keep silent about him I dare not#' A recent writer calls even tliese races were brought round to orthodoxy within him a true leader of men, whose influence moulded the " some two hundred years later.