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quarters with more or less vague and undefined, but none the less vital human interests and passions, should tend to give rise to a variety of radical opinions and judgments, was to be expected. And thus it operated, 1 not, to be sure, without the assistance of significant concurrent causes.
- 1 Riley, American Philosophy, p. 192. Note: It is not here maintained that radical religious ideas in New England had their earliest roots, or found their sole stimulus, in the controversy which the theological formulations incident to the Great Awakening provoked. Incipient religious liberalism is distinguishable as far back as the publication of Cotton Mather's Reasonable Religion, in 1713. In his erudite essay on " The Beginnings of Arminianism in New England/' F. A. Christie adopts the position that prior to the Great Awakening there were rumor and alarm over the mere arrival of Arminian doctrines in this country; but that after 1742 the heresy spread rapidly, chiefly due to the growth of the Episcopal church, with its marked leanings to the Arminian theology. Cf. Papers of the American Society of Church History, Second Series, vol. iii, pp. 168 et seq. But however that may be, the cause of Arminianism during the eighteenth century was promoted by men in New England who drew at least a part of their inspiration from the writings of leaders of thought in the mother country whose theological positions inclined strongly toward rationalism. Cf. Cooke, Unitarianism in America, pp. 39, 44 et seq., 79. Harvard College, from the close of the seventeenth century on, was increasingly recognized as a center of liberalizing tendencies, although none will dispute that the kernel of intellectual independence was found, all too frequently, well hidden within the tough shell of traditional conceits. Cf. Quincy, The History of Harvard University, vol. i, pp. 44-57, 199 et seq. Independent impulses were largely responsible for the following events which mark the definite emergence of Unitarianism in America: the organization of the first New England Unitarian congregation at Gloucester, Mass., in 1779; the publication in this country, five years later, of the London edition of Dr. Charles Chauncy's Salvation for All Men; and the defection from Trinitarian standards of King's Chapel, Boston, in 1785-87. Still it must be maintained that the controversies which raged around the doctrines of the New Calvinism beyond all other factors stiffened the inclinations and tendencies of the century toward liberal thinking. Such terms as "Arminianism", " Pelagianism", " Socinianism", "Arianism", etc., which occur with ever-increasing frequency from the fourth decade of the century on, are in themselves suggestive of the divergencies in religious opinion which the doctrinal discussion incident to the Great Awakening provoked. Cf. Fiske, A Century of Science and Other Essays: " The Origins of Liberal Thought in America", pp. 148 et seq.
