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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
The date was 19 July 1859; the occasion, the commencement address at the Harvard Divinity School. Twenty-one years earlier, as Henry Whitney Bellows well knew, Ralph Waldo Emerson had there delivered the famous Divinity School Address, which offended the Unitarian faculty by berating historical Christianity, by advancing that the moral and religious sentiments were synonymous, and by claiming that intuitive apprehension of these sentiments could elevate persons to Christ-like stature. The ensuing “miracles controversy”—including, on the one hand, Andrews Norton's charges about “The Latest Form of Infidelity” and, on the other, George Ripley's, Theodore Parker's, and (early on, at least) Orestes Brownson's efforts to establish a “religion of the heart” by championing Kant over Locke—has been chronicled elsewhere. More to the present point is the way that, at a time when heated controversy over Emerson and his intuitionalist disciples might have seemed dated, Bellows attacked the self-reliant tendencies of Emerson's 1838 address: “The Emersonian and transcendental school at home, acknowledge[s] only one true movement in humanity—the egoistic—the self-asserting and self-justifying movement—which is Protestantism broken loose from general history.” Such criticism was hardly unprecedented in the school of divinity from which Bellows himself had graduated just a year before Emerson would deliver the Divinity School Address; nor would the faculty at Harvard have deemed Bellows innovative in chastising “the transcendental philosophy” for “making the … human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, one and the same.
1 See Hutchison, William R., The Transcendental Ministers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) 52–97.Google Scholar
2 Bellows, , The Suspense of Faith: An Address to the Alumni of the Divinity School at Harvard University (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1859) 24, 43.Google Scholar
3 These assessments are those of Kring, Walter D.. Henry Whitney Bellows (Boston: Skinner, 1979) 191Google Scholar, 197. Essential essays and chapters on Bellows include Stokes, Harry M., “Henry W. Bellows's Vision of the Christian Church.” Proceedings of the Unitarian Historical Society 15:2 (1965) 1–16Google Scholar; Clark, Clifford E. Jr, “Religious Belief and Social Reforms in the Gilded Age: The Case of Henry Whitney Bellows,” New England Quarterly 43 (1970) 59–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Wright, Conrad. The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston: Beacon, 1970) 81–109Google Scholar; Robinson, David, The Unitarians and the Universalists (Westport. CT: Greenwood, 1985) 87–92.Google Scholar
4 Bellows, Suspense of Faith. 45. Robinson (Unitarians and Universalists, 90) holds that Bellows refers to the Catholic Church in its broadest, organizational sense.
5 See, e.g., The Broad Church: Some Considerations Upon “The Suspense of Faith”; (Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co., 1859); Kring, Bellows, 191–99.Google Scholar
6 Bellows, , A Sequel to “The Suspense of Faith” (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1859) 12.Google Scholar
7 Bellows, , “Bush on the Resurrection.” Christian Examiner 38 (March 1845) 190. For Bellows's early attraction to Emerson's address, see Kring, Bellows, 25.Google Scholar
8 Bellows to William Silsbee, 6 January 1852. in Kring, Bellows, 115; Bellows, Sequel. 42.
9 See William Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 23 February 1842, in Rusk, Ralph L., ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (6 vols.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) 3. 14 n. 49.Google Scholar
10 Bellows to William Silsbee, 29 March 1842, in Kring, Bellows. 43.
11 Bellows to Eliza Bellows, 28 January 1852, in Kring, Bellows, 116, 117.
12 Bellows, , The Leger and the Lexicon (Cambridge: John Bartlett, 1853) 24, 30, 25.Google Scholar
13 Emerson declined the invitation. See Emerson to Bellows, in Rusk, ed., Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 5. 207–8.
14 Quoted by Kring, Bellows, 198.
15 Ibid., 191, 194.
16 Bellows, “Religious Experience and Theological Opinions,” Christian Inquirer (hereafter Cl; 27 November 1847) 26; Bellows, “Ways in Which the Inquirer May be Useful,” Cl (21 April 1849) 2. Neither Bellows nor other editors of the Cl usually signed their names to editorials. Still, with respect to the perimeters of this study, we may attribute to Bellows lead editorials for the following dates: 24 October 1846 through 10 July 1847; 16 October 1847 through 8 April 1848; 24 March 1849 through 29 June 1850. William Kirkland edited the opening issue (see 17 October 1846, 1 col. 1; 31 October 1846, 12 col. 4). From 24 October 1846 through 9 October 1847 the Cl was edited by Bellows and Frederick A. Farley, with Farley editing the paper during Bellows's tour of upstate New York from 17 July 1847 through 9 October 1847 (see 23 January 1847, 57 col. 3; 17 July 1847, 158 col. 2; 11 September 1847, 191 col. 1; 9 October 1847, 206 cols. 1, 4). From 16 October 1847 through 8 April 1848 Bellows assumed full editorial charge of the paper and implied that Farley's contributions had been limited to “arguments touching the points of dogmatic dispute between Unitarians and Trinitarians” (16 October 1847, 2 col. 2). Preparing for a tour of Europe in 1848, Bellows acknowledged as his own the fine-print columns which had usually (i.e., since 6 February 1847) commenced the editorial page (8 April 1848, 102 cols. 2–3; also see 4 December 1847, 30 col. 2; 22 January 1848, 57 col. 4). From 15 April 1848 through 7 October 1848, during Bellows's tour of Europe. George W. Briggs edited the Cl (see 18 March 1848, 90 col. 1; 7 October 1848, 206 col. 1; 31 March 1849, 98 cols. 1–4). From 14 October 1848 through 17 March 1849, the Cl had no regular editor. From 24 March 1849 through 29 June 1850, Bellows edited the paper and contemplated on 31 March 1849 his “future efforts as avowed Editor of the Inquirer” (98 col. 4). From 7 April 1849 through 29 June 1850, he printed “REV. HENRY W. BELLOWS, EDITOR” atop p. 1. Lead editorials usually appeared on p. 2 (pages were no longer numbered in the upper corners) under the subtitle “The Christian Inquirer.” Other columns on the editorial page may have been written by Bellows, or more frequently, by such “supporting” editors as James Freeman Clarke, G. W. Bumap, Frederick Farley, Orville Dewey, or Samuel Osgood. Osgood became the main editor on 6 July 1850 and Bellows a supporting editor (see 29 June 1850, 2 col. 1). Osgood directed the paper until 30 September 1854 (see 2 col. 2). The identity of the main editor from October 1854 through 3 January 1857 is unclear, but Abiel Abbot Livermore became editor on 10 January 1857 (see 3 January 1857, 2 col. 1). When crediting Bellows with authorship, I draw only upon lead editorials which conform to the preceding attributions. As Bellows himself disclosed, in a letter of 4 November 1846. in which he mentions his expectations of a division of labor with Frederick A. Farley, “[I] expect to furnish a leader weekly, [and] that Frederick Farley would do his part” (quoted by Kring, Bellows. 65). Any attributions to Bellows of articles in the Cl following 29 June 1850 reflect contributions—always outside of the editorials—to which he penned either his name or initial(s).
17 Bellows. Suspense of Faith, 8.
18 Bellows, , “Preface,” to Re-statements of Christian Doctrine, in Twenty-five Sermons (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1860) iii–vi.Google Scholar
19 Miller, Perry, “From Edwards to Emerson” (1940). in idem. Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap, 1964) 195–97. My analysis of Bellows's major, though perhaps necessarily surreptitious, encounter with Edwards (as opposed to the popularizations of Edwards by his “New Divinity” disciples) seeks to modify the way we might encounter what Lawrence Buell rightly calls the “perfunctory, grudgingly respectful nature” of commentary on Edwards among Unitarian and transcendental writers (New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance [London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986] 471 n.).Google Scholar
20 Bellows, “Past History and Present Plan of Our Paper,” Cl (14 April 1849) 2.
21 Bellows, “Name of the Paper” (an insertion which features the editorial “we” directly following Bellows's lead editorial) Cl (31 March 1849) 98; idem. On the Alleged Indefiniteness of Unitarian Theology (New York: Unitarian Association of the State of New York, 1847) 7; idem, “Written Creeds,” Cl (17 April 1847) 106.
22 Bellows, “Artificial Issues in Theology,” Cl (25 March 1848) 94 (misnumbered p. 93); Ferguson, Alfred R. et al., eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (hereafter CW I; Cambridge: Belknap, 1971) 31.Google Scholar
23 If only from Bellows's Religious Education, from Within and from Above (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, & Co., 1857), we know that Bellows understood Kantian and transcendental notions about “original powers and faculties of the mind” that make it “something besides a mere receiver” (9).Google Scholar
24 Bellows, “Written Creeds,” 106 (emphasis added). This early, quasi-transcendental dimension of Bellows is discussed in Duban, James, “Conscience and Consciousness: The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau's Political Ethics,” New England Quarterly 60 (1987) 214–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 ”The American Scholar” (1837), in CW I, 53.
26 Quoted from Bellows's editorial review essay in CI (10 July 1847) 154.
27 Bellows, “Creeds,” CI (4 August 1849) 2; idem, “An Established Religion and Voluntaryism,” CI (18 August 1849) 2. On the insufficiency of ethics in the Harvard curriculum, see Fiering, Norman. Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 10–103.Google Scholar
28 Ripley, George, ”The Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined (Boston: James Munroe. 1839) 12.Google Scholar
29 Bellows, “Morality and Religion. (Concluded),” CI (26 June 1847) 147. Also see Bellows's thoughts about the “narrow and chilling” tendencies of “the exclusive … operation of morality, or conscientiousness” (A Sermon Preached at the Installation of Adams Ayer [Brattleboro: O. H. Platt. 1855] 9).
30 Bellows. Adams Ayer, 8: idem, Suspense of Faith. 16. See David Robinson, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1982).
31 Bellows to William Silsbee, 29 March 1842. in Kring. Bellows. 43; Bellows. Suspense of Faith. 24.
32 Bellows. Suspense of Faith. 29.
33 Ibid., 35; idem, Religious Education, 14.
34 ”Editorial Correspondence” (Letter III, signed H.W.B.) CI (28 August 1847) 182; Bellows, “Extracts from a private letter,” CI (30 October 1847) 11.
35 Bellows, Adams Ayer, 8 (emphasis added). For Emerson's reference, in the Divinity School Address, to the “sentiment of virtue,” that is, to “the moral sentiment” as “the essence of all religion,” see CW I. 77.
36 Bellows, “Morality and Religion,” CI (19 June 1847) 142.
37 Bellows, “Nature and Origin of Sin,” CI (30 March 1850) 2. In his essay “Compensation,” Emerson celebrates the prospects of “Optimism.” See Slater, Joseph et al., eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2: Essays: First Series (hereafter CW II; Cambridge: Belknap, 1979) 71.Google Scholar
38 Bellows, “Human Nature—Its Need of the Holy Spirit” (4 June 1859), in Re-statements, 262. For Bellows's ambivalence about human nature, see also his Relation of Christianity to Human Nature (Boston: Wm. Crosby & H. P. Nichols, 1847) 17.
39 Bellows, Relation of Christianity, 25. The “natural man” is the subject of Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and of his lesser-read Men Naturally are God's Enemies. The latter's outcry against the “natural man” is loosely quoted in CI(15 May 1847) 122.
40 ”Revivals of Religion,” CI (24 February 1849) 78. Although we may not definitively attribute this editorial to Bellows (see n. 16), its attention to “the personal relations of the soul to God” corresponds radically to Bellows's ideas about humanity's “relations” to a “personal” Christ (to be discussed below). For Edwards's use of John Locke's rhetoric of sensation, see Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Sloane, 1949) 52–68.Google Scholar
41 Bellows, “Human Nature,” 260–61. See also Bellows's belief that “Sin is … the spirit of rebellion, of self-assertion” (The Sovereignty and Fatherhood of God [London: Edward T. Whitfield, 1868] 19).Google Scholar
42 Bellows, . Leger and Lexicon, 7; idem, The Christian Liberal (Buffalo: Steam Press of Thomas & Lathrops, 1855) 4; idem. Orthodox and Liberal Christianity Compared and Contrasted (Boston: American Unitarian Association, n.d.) 8.Google Scholar
43 Bellows, . “Religion and Goodness,” Christian Examiner 33 (January 1843) 286.Google Scholar
44 A Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue, in Rogers, Henry, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, A. M. (hereafter WJE; 2 vols.; London: Westley & Davis, 1834) 1. 122, 135.Google Scholar
45 Bellows, “Religion and Goodness,” 279–87.
46 Bellows, “Conservative Progress,” CI (12 February 1848) 70; cf. idem. Christian Liberal, 14.
47 Emerson, The Divinity School Address, in CW I. 77; Edwards, True Virtue, in WJE, 1. 126.
48 Bellows, “Personal Religion. Morality and Piety,” CI (5 January 1850) 2.
49 Emerson. Nature, in CWI. 23. 18. 10. 19. 12.21.8.29,38. For Emerson's effort (if only nominal) to balance “self-reliance” with “God-reliance” in the “Spirit” chapter of Nature, see Van Leer, David. Emerson's Epistemology (London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 69.Google Scholar
50 Emerson, The Divinity School Address, in CW I, 82; Bellows, “Christianity—An Historical Religion” (12 April 1857), in Re-statements, 74; idem. “The Essential of Christianity,” CI (9 March 1850)2.
51 Bellows, Religious Education, 19.
52 Bellows, “God and Christ in the Heart” (4 March 1854), in Re-statements, 136 (emphasis added).
53 Emerson, Nature, in CW I. 11; Bellows, , Testimony of Four Witnesses to the Divine Goodness (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1845) 7–8, 6.Google Scholar
54 Bellows, “Personality,” CI (1 September 1849) 2; idem, “Preaching Christ,” CI (26 January 1850) 2; idem, The Supernatural: A Discourse (Washington, DC: H. Polkinhom, 1861) 11–12.Google Scholar
55 Bellows, Relation of Christianity, 20, 18.
56 Bellows, “Docility” (14 February 1858), in Re-statements, 119; Emerson, “The Oversoul,” in CW II, 170; Brownson, “Benjamin Constant On Religion.” Christian Examiner 17 (September 1834)71.
57 Bellows, “Docility,” 119. 120. The reference to “divine power.” which we shall see to have major importance for Edwards's idealism, is from an account of Edwards's thoughts about selfabasement in CI (27 January 1849) 61.
58 Bellows. “Religion a Refuge from Evil” (4 November 1855), in Re-statements, 170. The Edwardsian text that comes to mind is God Glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Man's Dependence upon Him in the Whole of It (1731).
59 Bellows, The Supernatural, 21, 11, 21, 11. Bellows here targets both an Emersonian tenet of self-reliance and the influence of such ideas in Horace Bushnell's conflation of nature and the supernatural.
60 Ibid., 28; idem. Relation of Christianity, 14, 16.
61 WJE, 1. 125, 127.
62 Ibid., 1. 125. The quoted summary of Hutcheson's outlook is from the editors’ “Introduction” to Faust, Clarence H. and Johnson, Thomas H., eds., Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962) lxxix.Google Scholar
63 WJE, 1. 127, 128, 127, 128, 129, 141, 127. With the exception of my emphasis of “altogether above them,” italics are original.
64 Bellows, Testimony of Four Witnesses, 7–8; WJE, 1. 124.
65 ”Original Sin,” in WJE. 1. 224, 225; Colacurcio, Michael J., “The Example of Edwards: Idealist Imagination and the Metaphysics of Sovereignty,” in Elliott, Emory, ed., Puritan Influence in American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979) 64Google Scholar (see also p. 90 for Colacurcio's sense of Edwards's pun on “solidity”). Edwards's tendency to consider God's power and ideas synchronically dates to his youthful Notes on the Mind: “That, which truly is the Substance of all Bodies, is the … stable Idea, in God's mind, together with his stable Will” (quoted in Faust and Johnson, eds., Jonathan Edwards, xxvii). On the debated sources and extent of Edwards's idealism, see nn. 8–10 of Colacurcio, “Example of Edwards,” and Fiering, Norman, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 39–45.Google Scholar
66 “True Virtue,” in WJE, 1. 123, 125, 134 (emphasis added to the last of these citations).
67 Bellows, “The Soul's Renewal” (2 January 1859). in Re-statements, 353 (emphasis added): “Original Sin,” in WJE, 1. 224 (emphasis added).
68 Bellows, “Preaching Christ,” 2.
69 Bellows, “God and Christ in the Heart.” 136.
70 Colacurico, “Example of Edwards,” 77.
71 Bellows, Religious Education, 5, 10, 13, 12.
72 Bellows, “Preface,” to Re-statements, v, vi.
73 Bellows. Religious Education, 12.
74 Hooker, as quoted in Perry Miller, “‘Preparation for Salvation’ in Seventeenth-Century New England,” JHI 4 (June 1943) 276, 277; Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) 47Google Scholar: Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939; reprinted Boston: Beacon, 1961) 293.Google Scholar
75 The first quotation is from Bellows's “Human Nature—Its Exposure to Sin” (12 December 1858), in Re-statements. 249; the second, from a summary of Bellows's sermon at the installation of Adams Ayer, in CI(16 June 1855)3.
76 Bellows. Relation of Christianity, 18, 33 (emphasis added).
77 Bellows, “Universal Salvation Worse than Endless Misery,” CI (1 January 1848) 46; idem. Relation of Christianity, 16. In the former. Bellows defines “salvation” as an “inheritance of privileges and means of grace” and complains about Universalists who “neglect … the means” of grace.
78 Ames, William, The Marrow of Theology (ed. Eusden, John D.; 1623; reprinted Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1983) 159. On this dimension of preparation, see Pettit, Heart Prepared, 23; Miller. “Preparation for Salvation,” 267; Colacurcio, “Example of Edwards,” 61. Edwards, however, would have discouraged overt attention to the means of grace (his closing the Northampton communion table to all but regenerate Christians comprised his rejection of Solomon Stoddard's use of communion as a preparatory means—rather than a seal—of grace).Google Scholar
79 Bellows, Relation of Christianity, 32–33.
80 Bellows, Suspense of Faith, 40–41: idem, “Personal Religion. Submission of the Will,” CI (16 February 1850) 2; idem, Sequel. 23. This readjustment of faith stands to cast light, as well, upon Bellows's flirtation with a “new” Catholicism. The suggestion, worth further study, is that Protestantism—whether conceived of as Calvinism, Unitarianism, or an “ideal” union of Edwards and Emerson—would by 1859 appear to Bellows so incompatible with the subordination of human will to divine sovereignty as to mandate a more authoritative order of worship.