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platform, Emerson had already withdrawn from the ministry, but in 1838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