UNITARIAN CENTENARY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19032, 1 June 1925, Page 10

UNITARIAN CENTENARY.

AUCKLAND CELEBRATION. HISTORY OF MOVEMENT. The centenary of the British and American Unitarian Associations was celebrated in Auckland yesterday by special services at the church in Ponsonby Road. In the evening the Rev. A. Thornhill delivered a lecture on the history and effects of Unitarian principles. He stated that the Act of Toleration which g&,ve liberty to Protestants specially exempted Unitarians from. its protection and it was not until 1813 that this grave disability was removed. In spite of that disability Priestley, the great scientist and theologian, and Lindsey, the Anglican scholar, became its dauntless champions. And at the beginning of the nineteenth century Channing and other Congregationalists in and around Boston began to proclaim it in America. Mr. Thornhill proceeded to sketch the lives of several of the leaders of the movement during the last liuhdred years. He showed how Lindsey, arriving at the opinion that the Bible was a Unitarian book, sought to get Parliament to free the Anglican clergy from their ordination vows. Failing in this, he seceded, and set up the first avowedly Unitarian church in London in .1773. The preacher referred to dramatic episodes in the lifo of Priestley, who suffered much because <ef liis convictions. He was driven from Birmingham by a drunken ' mob who sacked and burned his house and destroyed scientific instruments which it had taken years to perfect. In atonement for this outrage the Birmingham Corporation had the expulsion of the great scientist depicted in fresco on the walls of tho Town Hall, while a statue of Priestley adorns the city square. In many respects Unitarians of to-day differed from Priestley, but from him they inherited the scientific habit of mind which made them realise that science and religion were not enemies but allies.