Bible the author says, 'Enough is it for us, that the matter is divine,
the doctrines true, the history authentic, the miracles real, the
promises glorious, the threatenings fearful.' There is good ground for
taking this as a fair example of the ideas prevalent among American
Unitarians at that time. Perhaps the statement was made the more
emphatic in view of some remarks recently uttered by two young men whose
influence, along with more general tendencies, proved fatal to the old
doctrine.

One of these young men was _James Martineau_ (1805-1900), who at the age
of thirty-one was already known as a writer and preacher far above the
average. He was then resident in Liverpool, where he wrote a remarkable
little book with the title _The Rationale of Religious Inquiry_ (1886).
More than fifty years later he published an even more remarkable book,
_The Seat of Authority in Religion_. There is, indeed, half a century of
development between the two books, yet the germinal thought of the
second may be detected in the first. The point at issue is where the
ultimate appeal should lie in matters of religion. With the keen eye for
the weaknesses of his fellow-worshippers which always characterized him,
Martineau said, 'The Unitarian takes with him [to the study of the
Bible] the persuasion that nothing can be scriptural which is not
rational and universal.' This fixed opinion, which he ranks along with
the foregone conclusions of other types of theologian, was just that
which we have observed in the general course of liberals from Locke
onwards. Though in a note Martineau concedes that his words may somewhat
strongly accentuate the common opinion, he represents Unitarians as
virtually saying, 'If we could find the doctrines of the Trinity and the
Atonement, and everlasting torments in the Scriptures, we should believe
them; we reject them, not because we deem them unreasonable, but because
we perceive them to be unscriptural. For my own part, I confess myself