position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous
outside of eastern Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New York
and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such,
was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy,
under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and
Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of
Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of
several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a
church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed,
with justice, that their opinions had, to a great extent, modified the
theology of the orthodox churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of
Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach
Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement;
and the "progressive orthodoxy" of Andover is certainly not the
Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to
the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative
and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the
Boston pulpits; while, contrariwise, the central thought of
transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God,
was pronounced by Dr. Channing a "crude speculation." This was the
thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity
School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative
Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter, in an
address before the same audience, on the _Latest Form of Infidelity_,
said: "Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its
miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no
direct perception, of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet
supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an
intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are
conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our