Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[206] Jonathan Mayhew, and Charles Chauncy, are thus accounted to have been upon the verge of Unitarianism. Mayhew (died 1766）¹ had been a champion not more of civil than of religious liberty. Stiles exhibited the Unitarian tolerance: he was the friend not only of Hopkins but of the Boston progressives and of the Newport rabbis. His administration at Yale is said to have broadened and secularized the college. In his pursuit of the intellectual life he touched another side of Unitarianism: he and Cotton Mather were the two American scholars whom Timothy Dwight considered able to stand comparison with British scholars. Chauncy² had condemned the more violent manifestations of the Great Awakening of 1740. In the pre-Revolutionary controversy concerning the establishment of Episcopacy in America, he had opposed the Anglican views of William White of Philadelphia (afterward the first Bishop of Pennsylvania), asserted that the English Church had best leave the American to develop independently, and contended for the right of the congregation to ordain its own minister. He leaned also toward the Arminian emphasis upon human choice as a genuine factor in salvation, thus falling in with the Unitarian tendency to magnify man. At the same time he is credited with ‘high’ Arianism, and with a touch of Universalism. He had written, too, upon the benevolence of the Deity. He is thus found upon several characteristic Unitarian pathways.

It was the Boston Episcopalians, however, rather than the Congregationalists, who took the first decisive step. In 1785, the congregation of King's Chapel, having adopted a modification of the Anglican liturgy, from which all Trinitarian doctrine had been omitted, ordained and installed as its rector James Freeman, who, together with William Hazlitt (father of the essayist), had performed the revision. This ordination is usually held to mark the formal beginning of Unitarianism in New England.

The Rev. Joseph Buckminster (1751-1812) of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a strict Calvinist, from first to last was doomed to lift up his voice against the liberal movement in vain. He protested against the Rev. Mr. Foster's Sermon at New Braintree (1788), which, he thought, offered salvation upon too easy