WHAT IS UNITARIANISM?

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 110, 10 May 1923, Page 11

WHAT IS UNITARIANISM?

ADDRESS BY REV. W S. HEATHCOTE.

An address on "What is Unitarianism?" was delivered by the Rev. Wyndham S. Heathcote in the Concert Chamber, Town Hall, last evening. "It is difficult," he said, "for us in New Zealand, where there are only four struggling bodies, to realise that within a radius of twenty milss of Boston there are more than one hundred Unitarian churches, or to realise that the great University" of Harvard is the Unitarian University. Prestige counts for much with the masses. In this country and in Australia Unitarianism has no prestige, but in America it has great prestige, because so many* of America's great Presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to William Tait, have been Unitarians; and so many of its men of letters —such as Emerson, who waß once a Unitarian minister; also Longfellow, and many others. Whether Unitarianißm will ever become a large, widespread, organised chuveh. is, I think, open to doubt. I am doubtful for the following reasons. Throughout''the churches, including the Catholic Church, in the form of modernism, the principles of Unitarianism are now so widespread and so generally taught that there is little necessity for the Unitarian Church, as such, to exist. "If is _ extremely difficult to define what UnitariaTxism is, for the simple reason that as a church we have no clearly.defined dogmas. We are content to confess thai we are largely agnostic, hut at the same time we affirm certain great ideas, viz., the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the idea of progress. We naturally allow that the firat is a metaphor. Because we affirm the Fatherhood of God we do not therefore think that God is to the race what an earthly father is to his children. That is, the instructed Unitarian does not hold anthropomorphic views about the Deity. He does not think of God as a glorified man, but rather as Spirit, mind, or universal consciousness, and we humans are children of_ God because in the essence of our beings we .are, to quote the phrase of William James, 'Flecks of eternal consciousness.' Consequently, we humans are all divine and of one essence'with the universal consciousness. Thus, by a metaphor, we speak of the Fatherhood of. God,., and-so'far from denying the Divinity of Jesus, we affirm the Divinity of Man." The speaker then dealt at some length with the difference between Unitarianism and the various forms of orthodox Christianity. -