- Quincy Josiah jun
r
Communion day at Meeting— Mr Lunt preached his morning
Sermon, from Acts 17.21. “For all the Athenians and Strangers which were
there, spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear
some new thing”— It is the doom of the Christian church to be always
distracted with controversy; and where religion is most in honour, there
the perversity of the human heart breeds the sharpest conflicts of the
brain— The Sentiment of Religion is at this time perhaps more potent and
prevailing in New-England, than many other portion of the Christian
world— For many years since the establishment of the theological school
at Andover the Calvinists and Unitarians have been battling with each
other upon the atonement, the divinity of Jesus Christ and the Trinity—
This has now very much subsided—but other wandering of minds takes the
place of that, and equally lets the wolf into the fold. A crack-brained
young man named Ralph Waldo
Emerson, son of my once loved friend, William Emerson, and a Classmate of
my lamented son George, after
failing in the every day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and
school-master, and starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism, declares
all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the
approach of new Revelations and prophesies— Garrison and the Non-resistant
abolitionists, Brownson and
the Marat Democrats, Phrenology and Animal Magnetism all come in
furnishing each some plausible rascality as an ingredient for the
bubbling cauldron of religion and politics— Pearce Cranch ex-ephibis preached
here last week, and gave out quite a stream of this transcendentalism,
most unexpectedly— Mr Lunt’s discourse this
morning was intended to counteract the effect of these wild and
visionary phantasies, and he spoke with just severity of the application
of this Spirit of hurly burly innovation to the most important and
solemn duties of the Christian faith— He treated the subject but in
part; and promised to discourse further upon it hereafter— Mr Lunt’s opinions favour a compromise
between the past and the future; disapproving alike the obstinate and
bigoted adherence to establishments and dogmas, merely because they are
old; and the restless and reckless pursuit of mere innovation— Mr Peter
Whitney was not in the pulpit and Mr Lunt administered the Communion alone. After dinner, Mr Lunt’s Sermon was from Matthew 28.19. “Go ye, therefore, and teach
all Nations, baptizing them, in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost.” This is also a deeply controversial text, and
Mr Lunt admitted that it was one of
those upon which the doctrine of the Trinity was built, and is
advocated— But he thought that Doctrine so incompatible with the first
principle of the unity of the supreme Creator of the universe, that it
was not worth discussing, and that the Holy Ghost was but the emanation
of the Spirit of God, pervading all time and all space but giving no
countenance whatever to the Creed of a divine Trinity. I read part of a
Sermon of Barrow, upon rash
judgments— Coll. Josiah Quincy junr. paid us an Evening visit.