Chapter III: Prove All Things

Sam edged through the door of Dr. Henry Ware's study. He looked around apprehensively, but no one except the doctor was within hearing. Sam had something on his conscience; he expected its disclosure to shock Ware and threaten his own career.(1) He, Samuel Joseph May, son of a pioneer Unitarian father(2) and himself a candidate for the Unitarian ministry, could no longer accept the theory of Christ's virgin birth.

It was 1819. Sam was studying divinity at Harvard. As an undergraduate he had drifted into a decision to enter the ministry, but he no longer approached his career so casually. The boy who had once decided which freshman courses were worth his time had now undertaken to evaluate all of Unitarian doctrine. Some of it, he was shocked to discover, he could not accept.

Henry Ware listened silently while the details tumbled out. As Harvard's divinity professor since 1805, he must have entertained many such distraught young men. When Sam finished, silence filled the room. Sam felt like a criminal about to receive sentence. Finally Ware spoke.

"My young friend," he said tenderly, "I am grad to find that you have arrived at a doubt. I perceive that you have begun to think on the great subjects to which you have turned your attention,—that you have entered upon study of Theology in good earnest."

Sam took a gulping breath of surprise and relief. But he could not leave the matter there. How, he wanted to know, could he ever resolve all his troubling doubts?

"Mr. May," said Ware, "I cannot resolve your doubts for you if I would; and I should not resolve them for you if I could. When finite minds turn to the contemplation of the nature, character, providence, and work of the Infinite, it is to be expected that some things will appear difficult to be understood, that doubts will arise."

He himself still had doubts, Ware confided, and expected to have them until the day he died.

"But sir," May persisted, "what are the essential truths, — truths that I must believe?"

The older man may have permitted himself a smile.

"All truth," he said in his peculiarly comforting way, "is essential. You are bound to believe whatever, at any time, shall appear to you to be true."

If young Mr. May sincerely desired the truth, Ware assured him, God would not permit him to remain satisfied in error. If May's belief at any time led him to reverence God, keep his commandments, love his fellow beings and delight in doing them good, Ware concluded, such belief could not be a "dangerous error."

And with this pragmatic test for truth, May had to be content. It did satisfy him. Comforted and strengthened, he emerged from his crisis determined to keep at his poking and probing, uncomfortable though the results might be. After that encounter, he liked to say, perhaps in echo of Jefferson, he was never afraid to pursue any inquiry after truth, however it might seem to threaten cherished beliefs.

"Many there may be ready enough to lean on your word," he warned a later generation of Harvard divinity students in 1847. "Refuse the responsibility of allowing them to rest there. Insist that they go to Christ for themselves."(3) And whenever he stirred strident controversy, he would say happily, "This is what I want to do — to get people to think. If they think they will come to the truth."(4) Somewhere there existed an absolute truth. Of this, May felt certain. Each man, however, must make his way alone toward that truth. It was not surprising that the Pauline injunction, "Prove all things, hold to that which is food,"(5) became a guiding principle for this probing spirit. May inscribed it on the masthead of the newspaper he founded in his first parish(6) and acted as consistently on it as he could in the years that followed.

Dr. Ware's reaction that day in 1819 and the advice he gave were typical, both of the man and of the divinity faculty he represented. Founded in 1636 for the express purpose of training Puritan divines, Harvard College had been captured from orthodox Congregationalism by the Unitarians in 1805. Ware's appointment that year s Hollis professor of divinity signaled this Unitarian triumph. After that date, young men who wanted to enter the liberal ministry came to the campus to read with the president of the college and Dr. Ware.(7) This informal style of professional education continued without much modification until 1815 when President Kirkland issued an appeal for funds specifically for divinity education. Appended to his appeal was an ominous warning by William Ellery Channing that the "profession of the ministry has an aspect not inviting to the young. . . . to the hasty observation of youth, there is a gloominess, a solemnity, a painful self restraint belonging to the life of a minister." The profession of the ministry, intoned Channing, is thus "comparatively deserted. He also asked for money for scholarships.(8) Shortly thereafter subscribers to the new fund organized themselves into the Society for the Promotion of Theological Education in Harvard University.(9) After that memorable event, instruction was somewhat amplified but as late as 1819 May found the course of study "meager indeed."(10) With books few and poor and lectures sporadic, the students wandered about the college and acquired what education they might.

Ware and the other Harvard professors summoned on occasion to give special series of lectures to the divinity students may have provided an education sketchy in content, but it was an education devoted in spirit to the basic principle of freedom of inquiry. Such a principle the founders had written in to the constitution of the Society for the Promotion of Theological Education. Every encouragement, specified this document, must be given to the "serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation of Christian truth. . . . " No student or teacher was to be required to endorse" the peculiarities of any denomination of Christian."(11)

So punctilious in this regard was Dr. Ware that in setting doctrinal problems for class investigation he was careful to suggest readings expressing the most divergent points of view. Primed by such contrasting sources, students usually came back next time to clash sharply in class discussion. At the end of such vigorous sessions, Dr. Ware summarized the discussion impartially, giving full consideration to all views expressed and no inkling al all as to his own.(12)

If most of the divinity professors only hinted at the nature of final truth, one man was certain he had found it and did not hesitate to recommend it to others. This man was the Rev. Andrew Norton, giant among defenders of early rational Christianity and, beginning in 1819, Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature in the divinity program. Scholarly, ardent, aggressive, the doughty Norton loved to argue with his students, stimulating in them an equal joy in intellectual combat.(13) May was to charge into many a future battle, head high, arguments ready, and a beatific smile on his face.

When May first knew him, Norton had already embarked on his lifework, the demolition of the orthodox position that every word of Scriptures is equally divinely inspired. To understand the Bible and rightly divide the word of truth, Norton maintained, one must interpret the scriptures in the light of the culture and history of Biblical times. To this he brought the most scrupulous scholarship and new German methods of scriptural criticism.(14)

Equally important to an incipient educational reformer was Norton's enthusiasm for the philosophy of John Locke.(15) Locke could provide a firm foundation for a whole framework of reform thought. The human spirit at birth, Locke declared in his "Essay on the Human Understanding," is like a sheet of whitepaper. (16) As this "tabla rosa" is etched by experience, Locke, held, the only way of gaining knowledge is through the senses. The more subtle conclusions stem from reflection on this basic stuff experience.

This "sensationalist" view of human nature contrasted sharply with the traditional Calvinist concept of man as essentially evil. Seeing Adam's original sin in every child, Calvinists relied on an authoritarian education as the only way to cope with the depraved nature of the young. The best way to educate a child, they held, is to tell him what to believe, to break his spirit, and to put the fear of God into him. Traditional education based on this theological concept, both in Europe and in America , emphasized rote learning, harsh discipline, and liberal use of the rod.(17)

Locke's view paved the way for Rousseau and the French humanitarians to contend that human nature instead of being innately evil is essentially good and capable of perfection. Locke's theory that human nature is shaped by its surroundings also made it possible to argue that individual sin might arise at least in part from an unfavorable environment. Social evil might stem not alone from God's wrath at sinful man, but from environmental, conditions which could be changed.(18) From this rationalist-humanitarian thought grew much of nineteenth century reform in America . It was to be particularly important to educators. Reformers like May, bred such a tradition, could argue that a child's own nature might better be developed through love than through fear. They could develop teaching methods encouraging a child to draw conclusions from his own experience rather than depending entirely on rote learning of disembodied facts and figures that had no meaning for him. (19)

On Locke, May reared his own philosophical structure for reform. He prescribed the Essay on the Human Understanding as the first piece of required reading for young men eager to enter the ministry; a year spend studying this one work, he believed, was in itself a liberal education.(20)

Norton was a major influence in May's intellectual development. As a divinity student May not only attended Norton's lectures, but lived next door to him in the pleasant Appian Way and occasionally dropped in on the bachelor professor for a talk.(21)

Few teachers, May recalled later, inspired such respect and confidence as did Andrews Norton.(22) Many of the younger man's deepest convictions on educational practice echoed Norton's views. Norton thought that the system of encouraging children by comparing them with others was heathenish.(23) May did too, once refusing the principalship of a promising Boston school because the system of "emulation" was required by law.(24) Norton thought that whipping children was savage.(25) May spent a lifetime denouncing corporal punishment in the classroom.(26)

Thus, in this small seminary May found both the philosophy and the stimulus for a career of social reform. Rational Unitarian doctrines emphasizing human reason, and the goodness and perfectibility of human nature.(27) Harvard's divinity professors exemplified this progressive Unitarian philosophy. Twenty years later the transcendentalists would sneer at these early Unitarian teachers as a cold, bloodless lot, but the students of 1820 who learned from them while American Unitarianism was young found them warm, encouraging, and exciting to hear.

May finished divinity school in 1820 and was approbated to preach by the Berry Street Conference of Unitarian ministers in Boston.(28) He then preached at a series of churches and served as aide to William Ellery Channing. In 1823 the Rev. James Freeman, pastor of King's Chapel in Boston, preached May's installation sermon at his first parish in Brooklyn, Connecticut.

May was to cast his eyes carefully about to "discover what moral evils have sprung up in the present age," Freeman admonished. "To them you will pay your principal attention; and you will exert yourself to eradicate them, wherever they appear."(29)

Under such a charge, what young minister could resist a try at reform?

Footnotes

(1) The details of this incident together with the direct quotations and the account of May's feelings come from his autobiographical fragment in the May Memoir, pp. 44-48.

(2) May's father, Colonel Joseph May, was one of 20 men in 1785 who voted to convert King's Chapel in Boston into the country's first Unitarian church. The oldest Episcopalian church in New " England , King's Chapel became Unitarian almost a generation before other liberal churches in New England adopted Unitarian views. See the May Memoir, page 2, and Our Unitarian Heritage by Earl Morse Wilbur (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1925), pp. 335, 390 and 399.

(3) Samuel J. May, Jesus The Best Teacher Of His Religion (Boston: William Crosby and R. P. Nichols, 1847), p.10.

(4) Joseph May, A Memorial Study, Samuel Joseph May, By His Son. . . . (Boston: Ellis Publishing Co., 1898), p. 21.

(5) 1 Thessalonians, 1:21.

(6) This newspaper, devoted to religion and reform, was named The Christian Monitor and Common People's Advisor and published in Brooklyn, Conn., beginning in 1832.

(7) Conrad Wright, "The Early Period (1811-40)." The Harvard Divinity School: Its Place in Harvard University and in American Culture, ed. George Huntston Williams (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1954) p. 23.

(8) William Ellery Channing, Observations on the Proposition for Increasing the Means of Theological Education at the University in Cambridge (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf: 1816), pp. 12-14. A copy of this publication may be found in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress.

(9) Wright, "Early Period," Harvard Divinity School, pp. 24-27.

(10) As students, May recalled, he and his fellows were "left to ourselves to pursue our studies as we might, receiving no thorough training in any department." Mumford, May Memoir, p. 44.

(11) Wright, "Early Period," Harvard Divinity School pp. 36-7.

(12) Ibid., pp. 39-40. Says Wright on pages 59 and 60: "They [the Harvard divinity faculty] believed that careful training in biblical criticism would enable students to form for themselves sound conclusions on disputed points of theology. If was their conviction that free enquiry by disciplined minds was the only way to enlarge the domain of truth."

(13) Brooks, Flowering of New England, p. 43.

(14) Wright, "Early Period," Harvard Divinity School, p, 46.

(15) Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 253.

(16) Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, A History (New York: Harper and Brothers, Harper Torchbook Edition, 1959), pp. 3. 118. The Transcendentalists were always very detailed when they wrote about Locke. They wanted everybody to know precisely what they disagreed with. Also helpful on Locke in this context is The American Transcendentalists edited by Penny Miler, (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1957) pp. 4, 104, 105.

(17) R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin, A History of Education in American culture (Henry Holt and Company: New York, 1953) p. 66.

(18) Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (2d ed.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), p. 122.

(19) See Chapter VII for a discussion of the new educational methods May helped to develop.

(20) James Freeman Clarke. "Samuel Joseph May," Memorial and Biographical Sketches (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1878), pp. 202-203.

(21) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 43. In a note to May's autobiography, May's friend George B. Emerson speculated that such visits "could not fail to awaken and encourage the highest thoughts and noblest purposes in a person so receptive of good as Mr. May."

(22) Samuel J. May to C. E. Norton, October 18, 1867.

(23) Emerson, Reminiscences, p. 21.

(24) In Memoriam, Samuel Joseph May (Syracuse: Syracuse Journal Office, 1871), p.21

This pamphlet was a reprint of May's obituary published in the Syracuse Journal after his death, July 1, 1871. The "emulation" system involved comparing children and awarding prizes to the best. May believed each child's work should only be compared with his own best performance.

(25) Emerson, Reminiscences, p. 21.

(26) See Chapter XI.

(27) Butts and Cremin, History of Education, p. 167.

(28) Mumford, May Memoir, pp. 60-61.

(29) James Freeman, "Charge to the Pastor," A Sermon Preached in Brooklyn, Connecticut, At The Installation Of Rev. Samuel Joseph May, November 5, 1823, By James Walker of Charleston. (Boston: John B. Russell, 1824), p. 25.