XVI Unitarians and Reforms
The belief of Unitarians in the innate goodness of man and in his progress towards a higher moral life, together with their desire to make religion practical in its character and to have it deal with the actual facts of human life, has made it obligatory that they should give the encouragement of their support to whatever promised to further the cause of justice, liberty, and purity. Their attitude towards reforms, however, has been qualified by their love of individual freedom. They have had a dread of ecclesiastical restriction and of any attempt to coerce opinions or to establish a despotism over individual convictions. And yet, with all this insistence upon personal liberty, no body of men and women has ever been more devoted to the furthering of practical reforms than those connected with Unitarian churches. No one, for instance, was ever more zealous for individual freedom than Theodore Parker; but he was essentially a reformer. He was a persistent advocate of peace, temperance, education, the rights of women, the rights of the slave, the abolition of capital punishment, reform in prison discipline, and the application of humanitarian principles to the conduct of life.