A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM - Starr King School for the Ministry

PREFACE
THIS HISTORY is the fruit of attention that I have given the subject more
and more intensively during forty years. The first incentive to it was received
when, to fill a gap in a student’s required schedule, I offered an elementary
one-hour course, the study for which at once discovered a lamentable want of
works dealing with the subject save in the most superficial way. The only work
in English attempting to cover the entire field (J. H. Allen, Historical Sketch of
the Unitarian Movement, 1894) was in fact only a ‘sketch,’ hastily done and
with little use of primary sources. For the Continental section only two works
were at all satisfactory, and they were dated far back in the previous century (F.
Trechsel, Die protestantischen Antitrinitarier, 1839—44; and Otto Fock, Der
Socinianismus, 1847). For England there was nothing at all, and for America
only one work (G. W. Cooke, American Unitarianism, 1902) besides a series of
popular lectures by different persons, wholly done at second hand
(Unitarianism: Its Origin and History, 1895).
The reasons for this surprising neglect were two: first, the failure clearly to
recognize that here were not four separate though similar movements, arising in
Poland, Transylvania, England, and America, but rather four connected phases
of one single movement nearly as old as Protestantism, whose significance can
not be clearly grasped until they are considered together; and secondly, the
widely scattered location of the primary authorities and the forbidding barriers
of the languages in which many of them are written. For, in addition to
extensive sources in Latin and in the more familiar languages of western
Europe, a rich store of quite indispensable material is buried in Polish and
Hungarian, two difficult languages practically unknown to English-speaking