Phillip Hewett, Minister Emeritus
Unitarian Church of Vancouver, BC
Canada

Let me begin with a brief citing of what qualifications I might have to
assess the Canadian Unitarian picture in an historical and theological
perspective. I have lived in Canada for 46 years now, and although the
great bulk of that time has been spent in British Columbia, I have lived
also for significant periods of time in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba.
Canada is a vast and varied country, and what takes place in any one
part of it can certainly not be regarded as a microcosm of the whole. As
one of our leading politicians has said, it is a "community of
communities". To geographical variations must be added rapid historical
change. The population of the country has doubled during the time I
have been there, and in recent years net immigration has been a larger
factor in this than the natural increase of the pre-existing population. In both cases what has been called the "revolving door" has been in evidence: there has been emigration as well as immigration and of course deaths as well as births.

Many of the same features can be seen in the Unitarian movement in
Canada. The number of Unitarians has also doubled, according to the
census, during the same period of time, and the revolving door has also
been very much in evidence. If we had had to rely upon natural increase
from the pre-existing membership we would simply be a shadow of our
former size by now; we are massively dependent upon the immigration of
newcomers. As all of us are aware, I think, this is a feature common to
our movement in all the English-speaking countries, and it is one to
which we might give some attention. Why are we less successful than
many other religious bodies in holding the allegiance of the rising
generation, especially when we claim to be in tune with the changing
mood of the times?

The same theme of unity in diversity that has often been singled out as
the most important identifying characteristic of Canada as a whole is
central in our Unitarian movement. The traditional Canadian term for
this has been mosaic; it has been emphasized more and more strongly in
recent decades with the deliberate cultivation of multiculturalism.

In setting the scene within the context in which we are gathered here, I should say a word or two about the other term in the title of ICUU: Universalists. There was a time, back in the nineteenth century, when there was a substantial number of Universalists in Canada --considerably larger, in fact, than the number of Unitarians. Unlike the Unitarians, they were almost entirely an overspill from the United States, and as in the latter country they suffered a massive decline from the mid-nineteenth century onward. By the middle of the twentieth century they were reduced to three congregations, two of them in villages, reporting a combined membership of under seventy, and even this total included a number of Unitarians who had moved to the areas they served. When the Canadian Unitarian Council was formed, the surviving Universalists became members. They were consulted about the name of the organization, but agreed that the Universalist name had no impact upon the public consciousness outside the limited localities in which they had existed and within which they wished to maintain it.

In more recent times, under the influence of American thinking, there
has been an attempt to introduce the term "UU", and a motion to change
the name of the CUC was introduced and defeated at the annual meetings
seven years ago. This debate over the adoption of American usage or that
of the rest of the world was just one example of the continuing tension
in Canada between continentalism and internationalism, illustrated
strikingly in our attitude to the metric system. This has been the
official Canadian standard for many years, but the influence from across
the border is so strong that in popular usage there is a crazy mixture.
We measure road distances in kilometres and building materials in feet;
we measure milk in litres and meat in pounds. Beneath the confusion,
our resistance to moving to the American usage and calling ouselves
"UU"s can be seen as one more example of the emphasis upon the mosaic
rather than the melting-pot.

Our situation in Canada of having only one international neighbour, with
an immensely greater population and power, is a fact of life never far
from our consciousness. We are saturated with the output of American
media. To an increasing extent our industries have come under American
control. When we speak of the value of our Canadian dollar, it is the
exchange rate with the American currency that we have in mind, so that
in recent months we have deplored its decline, though in relation to
most of the world's currencies it has risen.

It is an interesting coincidence that I stand here today little more than a month after attending meetings in Montréal that marked a major transition in the life of Canadian Unitarians. I don't propose to speak at any length about that transition, because it was more a matter of organization and administration than of basic orientation. None the less, these matters have in the recent past consumed an inordinate amount of time and attention, serving as a distraction from more
essential religious concerns, and yet at the same time driving us back to renewed reflection on who we are, how we have arrived at where we now
stand, and where we hope to go from here.

To understand the current developments, one has to go back a few years.
During the first half of the twentieth century there were only a few
scattered congregations in Canada with no overall organization to
represent them, though from time to time there had been discussion of
starting one, and one abortive attempt to set up a Canadian Unitarian
Association during the unpromising years of the First World War. The
individual congregations found their wider associations through
membership in both the British and Foreign Unitarian Association and the
American Unitarian Association; much earlier the Montréal congregation
had belonged to the Irish synod, but had ended that membership in the
mid-nineteenth century. The coming of the Second World War accelerated
a process that had already begun, weakening the ties with the British
association and strengthening those with the American one, and the new
congregations which came into being in the 1950s became members only of
the AUA.

Then, in 1961, at long last a Canadian national organization was formed,
the Canadian Unitarian Council, affiliated to both the British and the
American associations. The congregations across the country became
members of it without relinquishing their membership in the American
Unitarian Association, which in that same year became the Unitarian
Universalist Association. They gave financial support to both bodies and
received services from both. Over the past few years the financial
aspects of this dual membership have become increasingly difficult, and
furthermore it has become increasingly evident that many of the services
provided by the UUA and designed for its American congregations are
marginally relevant if not totally irrelevant in another country. The
outcome has been the vote last month to maintain membership in and give
financial support to the CUC alone, leaving it free to purchase whatever
outside resources it might need from the UUA or any other appropriate
source.

These developments are entirely consistent with our history as a whole.
The Unitarian movement in Canada has from the outset been marked by
features that it shares only with those in Australia and New Zealand.
Everywhere else Unitarian movements came into being as the result of an
evolution in thinking on the part of a section of a long-established
tradition, usually Calvinist. In Canada, Australia and New Zealand the
movements were begun by immigrants who were already Unitarians when they
arrived, and who set out more or less self-consciously to try to
establish as close a replica as possible of what they had known in the
places from which they came. In the case of Canada, those places wereIreland, Great Britain, New England and Iceland. The Canadian
congregations were thus outposts of movements which had their centre
elsewhere, and only slowly began to gather an identity of their own. In
this, they were representative of many other social and cultural
organizations, and indeed of the political development of the country
itself, which became autonomous by evolution rather than revolution,
with an unusual degree of modesty in regard to the usual symbols of
national identity. It was not until 1965 that we even had a flag of our
own.

The French Canadian historian Jean-Charles Bonenfant summed up this
reticence in regard to a national ideology when he wrote that the nation
was formed "non pas par des gens qui désiraient intensément vivre
ensemble, mais plutôt par des gens qui ne pouvaient vivre séparément."
This inability to live separately was the result of an environment which
often demanded that people co-operate or perish, and which for Canadians
generally has radically reduced the degree of individualism that has
been so marked a feature of our neighbour to the south. The recent UUA
publication Interdependence notes that, in its words, "Canadian
Unitarian Universalists generally value the ethic of community more
highly than that of individualism" -- a statement that I would regard as
far too sweeping. As I see it, Unitarians in Canada have always been
more individualistic than Canadians generally, but now public opinion as
a whole seems to be moving in that direction. Concern for the public
good as exemplified in measures supporting health and education still
looms large, as was shown in last November's elections, but the
sociologist Reginald Bibby has made a good case for his contention that
American individualistic values have moved much more strongly into
Canada in recent years, without being tempered as they are in the United
States by the pervasive pressures toward group loyalties from the local
to the national, even to the point of displaying the national flag in
places of worship -- a phenomenon completely absent in Canada.

The tentative and far from unanimous move towards a fully autonomous
Unitarian organization in Canada is paralleled at a theological level by
equally tentative moves to outgrow the colonial past in which it was
assumed that all serious thinking was going on elsewhere and needed to
be imported into Canada. Still, there is movement. A few years ago the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a contest for the most succinct
statement of Canadian identity. The winning entry read: "As Canadian as
possible, under the circumstances." It is only in the most recent
decades that the circumstances have seemed to be such that the
possibilities can be more fully exploited. In this, religious thinkers
are following paths marked out by artists and literary figures.
Arthur Lismer, one of the Group of Seven who revolutionized Canadian
art in the early twentieth century and ended the tradition of simply
copying European models, was a Unitarian. He articulated what he and his
fellow-artists were attempting as follows: "We have a background of
epic grandeur. It is a land where romance and rugged charm lie, not in
resemblance to another country, but in their own significant forms of
beauty and colour.... This design or form of our country is its
character, the elemental nature which we recognize as one recognizes a
familiar face. It partakes of our own character; its vitality and
emphatic form is reflected in the appearance, speech, action and thought
of our people. It is the setting for our development, firing our
imaginations, establishing our boundaries. It is homeland, stirring the
soul to aspiration and creation."

The application of this theme in a religious context had been expressed
more succinctly by John Cordner, minister of the Montreal church, many
years earlier. In a sermon on the theological and moral aspects of a
national identity he declared: "Our nationality as it grows must savour
of the soil on which it grows", and the rest of that sermon made it
clear that the same must apply to one's religion. But it took many more
years for that truism to be really appreciated. Not until 1988 did the
CUC make contextual theology the theme for one of its annual meetings,
and for this it had to call in a couple of theologians from other
religious bodies that were already well ahead of the Unitarians in
taking it seriously. Colonial dependency dies hard.

Douglas Hall, one of Canada's leading theologians in the most recent
period, complained: "The very idea of a theology 'Made in Canada' seems
to many a contradiction in terms." Then he went on: "Had we any
imaginative awareness of our own 'place', we might realize that it
contains dimensions which are highly evocative for theology. To exist
on the edge of empire (as ancient Israel nearly always did) is for
instance an intensely suggestive situation for bearers of our particular
religious tradition. To be the inhabitants of a 'space' where extremes
of cold and heat dominate, where nature is writ large and is not always
'user friendly'; where a sparse population has never been able
enthusiastically to imbibe even the pale Canadian version of the
American Dream that it nonetheless clearly envies; to be therefore a
people whose literature and mythos abounds in the theme of 'survival'
rather than 'success' -- what could be more provocative...? To be
founded upon two European cultures, which were never easily compatible;
to have in our midst the peoples of many nations, and so enjoy the
prospect of being perhaps [as Barbara Ward put it] 'the first
international nation' in a world of deadly conflict -- what could be
more beckoning to the spirit of a theological tradition based on theGood News of reconciliation and peace? One could go on." One could.
For my part I would add the growing dialogue with the people of our
aboriginal First Nations, with their intense feeling for the sacredness
of the land and all the living beings it supports. Yes, there are many
themes here for a Canadian theology which builds upon our own first-hand
experience and refuses to be simply the wearer of second-hand garments
that don't really fit.

Let me take a few moments to consider these distinctive contributions
that Canada might bring to the international Unitarian and Universalist
community. Our goal, I take it, is to build bridges of understanding,
but bridges can be trusted only if they are based upon firm foundations
at both ends. I don't want to claim that those foundations are already
firmly laid in Canada, but there is a growingly concrete realization of
where and how they have to be established.

Douglas Hall's point of being on the "edge of empire" can be a fruitful
one not only in Canada but also in many other parts of the world outside
but in close relationship to the seats of power. It does affect our
religion, and as Hall's analogy with ancient Israel indicates, it can
provide opportunities for great creativity. To give one Unitarian
example of religion from the heart of empire, let me cite from the
prayer written by James Martineau in the middle of the nineteenth
century: "Thou hast gathered our people into a great nation, and sent
them to sow beside all waters and multiply sure dwellings on the earth.
Deepen the root of our life in everlasting righteousness; and let not
the crown of our pride be as a fading flower. Make us equal to our high
trusts; reverent in the use of power, generous in the protection of
weakness...." Appropriate though such sentiments may have been for the
citizens of an imperial power, they did not really fit the inner
feelings of the worshippers when the prayer was used (as it was) in the
Unitarian churches of Montréal and Toronto. For although there was
vicarious pride in being part of a great empire, Canada itself has never
been an imperial power, and has no such ambition. Today the USA has
succeeded to the position Great Britain held in the nineteenth century,
and it is from there that resource materials and ministers, and
therefore ideas and attitudes, are imported into Canada. One does not
have to denigrate the real values that can accrue from these if one
insists that much may have to be modified to fit the experience of
people living on the margin rather than at the heart of empire.

The first-hand challenge that does exist in Canada is that of
multiculturalism. It has been expressed in the traditional Canadian
symbol of the mosaic, and was memorably worded by a well-informed
outsider in a speech to which Hall referred, delivered in Vancouver more than three decades ago by Barbara Ward. She spoke of a role for Canada
as "a model-builder ... prepared to pioneer with lucidity and daring the
role of the first 'international nation' in history." Since that
challenge was thrown out the diversity of the country has greatly
increased. Immigration, which used to be mostly from Europe, is now
predominantly from Asia. Most of the children in the schools of the
city where I live come from homes in which everyday conversation is in
neither of Canada's two official languages, and the circulars from City
Hall come in eight different languages. Unitarians have been in the
forefront in supporting acceptance of this diversity with respect for
all, and also in promoting multifaith activities to provide a spiritual
basis for such mutual respect. But they have been far less successful
in diversifying their own congregations, where people of Asian or
African origin still constitute a tiny minority. The Eurocentric
tradition we have inherited has, in spite of sporadic efforts, not
broadened sufficiently to make such people feel really at home.

One way of broadening it and at the same time assimilating newcomers to
the reality of being in Canada lies through the dialogue now taking
place with the aboriginal peoples of the land, whose spirituality was
for many decades repressed by the dominant race but is now being given a
new recognition and respect not only by many of the churches but also by
governmental agencies. This has not been a simple progression. It
still has a long way to go. Margaret Laurence, one of Canada's leading
literary figures in the second half of the last century, and who was
during her time in Vancouver a member of the congregation I was serving,
set forth an idea rich with potential consequences. She pointed out
that just as one can adopt children, and thus descendants, so one can
adopt ancestors, and she hoped to attain a condition of mind and heart
to be worthy to adopt the people of the land as her own ancestors. As a
participant in dialogues with this in view, I can testify to its value.
After all, as a person who came into the Unitarian movement from the
outside, I adopted ancestors from many lands in that tradition, and now
I am in process of adopting ancestors in my own land, to which I
likewise came from the outside. Many of my fellow-Unitarians are doing
the same, and finding aboriginal spirituality very much in tune with the
best of our own spiritual traditions.

One of the major features of that spirituality is its earth-centredness,
its feeling for the land, and this of course ties in closely with one of
the dominant trends in the Unitarian movement in Canada as elsewhere in
recent decades, arising largely out of our growing ecological insights
and awareness. This again leads us back to what I have already quoted
from Douglas Hall and Arthur Lismer about the land. We in Canada live
in a place where the land has not been tamed and humanly engineered,despite past and present efforts in that direction. Much of the country
is still primeval wilderness, a feature shared with few other nations
today. Though most of our people live in cities, all are conscious at a
deeper level of the presence of that wilderness, and a growing number of
us are coming to appreciate the positive values to be incorporated into
our lives from that presence.

This has certainly modified the dominant theology amongst Canadian
Unitarians in recent decades. I mentioned earlier that in the nineteenth
century our theology was imported. The most influential figures who set
the tone were John Cordner in Montréal and William Hincks in Toronto,
both of them nurtured in the Irish liberal Christian version of
Unitarianism. That school of thinking continued to predominate with
very little change for the first four decades of the twentieth century.
Developments south of the border such as Transcendentalism and the Free
Religious movement had had no parallel in Canada. But along with the
much closer organizational connection with the American Unitarians that
took place during and after the Second World War went a much closer
connection with American Unitarian thinking. Within a remarkably short
space of time the dominant outlook in the Canadian congregations moved
across the spectrum from liberal Christianity to humanism -- often a
more or less completely secular humanism. While in the United States
this move was controversial, divisive and incomplete, in Canada it took
place smoothly and with no acrimony.

The new outlook accorded well with the spirit of the age. It really
seemed that human control would be extended even over the intractable
Canadian terrain. Economic progress was the order of the day, and no
end to the boom was in sight. The trans-Canada highway, trans-Canada oil
and gas pipelines, the St Lawrence Seaway, were all being built; huge
dams generated hydro-electric power; new means were being perfected of
exploiting what were generally called 'natural resources'; new means of
travel and communication were annihilating the barriers of distance that
had hitherto been so marked a feature of the country; there was even
talk of building vast geodesic domes containing a hospitable
microclimate within the Arctic. Increasing control over all aspects of
the natural world reinforced the humanist outlook that was celebrated
with varying degrees of enthusiasm and unanimity within the
congregations.

Then came the crash. Terrifying and unforeseen side-effects of the
human efforts to dominate and control the environment began to emerge
into consciousness. The economic boom came to an end. While the older
humanists still held fast to their vision of a rational re-ordering of
the whole scheme of things, younger people began to urge a more modest place for human beings in a picture that acknowledged that there were
limits to our attempts to play God. There was confusion, and the
congregations were losing more members than they were gaining. Though
these losses eventually came to an end and there have been modest gains
during the past two decades, it would be an exaggeration to say that the
confusion has ended. In some of the fellowships, the little company of
ageing humanists still calls the tune; in the larger congregations, what
has often emerged is a kind of party system in which various coteries of
like-minded people find a closer and more congenial place than they do
in the congregation at large.

The response has been to emphasize openness and inclusivity to a point
where it has become increasingly difficult to point out the identifying
features which are shared in common. Unity in diversity always requires
a greater effort to maintain the unity than to see the diversity, and in
the Unitarian congregations many members have been at a loss to find the
unifying factors. During the past few months I have been following a
fascinating e-mail exchange between lay members trying to articulate how
they would explain to outsiders just what a Unitarian congregation
stands for, and I think it would not be unfair to say that the
cumulative impression one gets from such an exchange is that it does not
stand for anything. Pluralism and agreement to co-exist are valuable
pre-requisites for dialogue and proposals for joint action, but by
themselves they can scarcely be expected to generate the motivation that
people earlier derived from liberal Christianity (especially as
expressed in the Social Gospel movement) or from the vision of personal
rationality and social progress that was at the heart of humanism.
People have to co-exist for some purpose if they are to form a nation, a
religious body or any other kind of community. The symbol of the mosaic
may be instructive here, for the individual tiles forming the mosaic
could be arranged in many different patterns, but there has to be some
pattern, not just a random conglomeration. I believe that Canadian
Unitarians are at a crossroads today, and the most recent developments I
described earlier do provide an opportunity for setting a course and
following it. Where there is no vision the people perish -- or at least,
they remain uninspired.

As a nation and as a religious movement we have long known what we are
not, and a negative identity is not totally without merit. Historically
Unitarians have often been a protest group, usually against unacceptable
theological demands; and today, at least in the context with which I am
familiar, they find a fair degree of unanimity in being a protest group
against the religion of consumerism which, together with globalization
under the aegis of the transnational corporations, has in Western
society supplanted the traditional religions as the most potent motivating force. But protest is but the first step; the next step is  to be able to affirm to what we are communally committed. It is no longer possible to claim to be in harmony with the dominant trends of the times, as was true in the days when humanism or bourgeois liberalism ruled. Unitarians may still claim to be 'liberal', but few have given any depth of thought to what liberalism might or might not mean. In any case, the word may have less and less value in the twenty-first century
as applied to a religious body, and Canadian Unitarians, in company with
their co-religionists in the United States, may stand to gain by
discussing this theme with Unitarians from other parts of the world.

Such an international dialogue is going to be of increasing usefulness
in other aspects of finding one's way into an uncertain future. Each
participant has much to contribute and much to learn. Let me add a
couple of further examples from the context out of which I am speaking
today. Many of our problems in Canada arise out of our deracination, our
rootlessness. Most of us have moved into the Unitarian context by
deliberate decision, usually a very personal individual decision, at
some point or other in our lives. Likewise many of us have moved into
the country by a similar decision, and once inside it, we may more often
than not have continued to move. We have gained from this process, but
we have also lost a great deal. In a rootless environment we are more
vulnerable to being seized by the passing fads of the moment, or to
being manipulated by those who come into our open environment intent
upon promoting some special agenda of their own. I believe we have much
to learn from a dialogue with those who have not left home as we have
done, whether fellow-Unitarians who have a long-continuing tradition and
heredity within one single context, or from people in our own context
who have maintained a continuity with their historic faith notwithstanding their openness to the contemporary world. As in the story in the Book of Exodus, there are times when the cloud that hovered over the encampment indicated that it was time to move on and there are times when the call is to stand fast.

At the other end of the process -- what we may be able to teach -- I
have spoken of the deep feeling for the sacredness of the land which can
be cultivated as an essential feature of religion, and which can
obviously be cultivated anywhere in the world, but there are features in
our Canadian attachment to the land which we might be almost uniquely in
a position to offer to others. Our northern land and climate are shared
only with Russia and the Scandinavian countries, and there are things to
be learned from living in such an environment.

I want to acknowledge my indebtedness in what I am to say now to the
late Mark DeWolfe, whose early death deprived our Canadian Unitarian movement of one of its most promising leaders, and who lived in a part
of the country which qualified him to speak of winter with more
authority than I can muster, living as I do in the temperate zone of the
west coast. Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's leading poets, wrote: "the
true and only season here is winter: the others are merely preludes to
it or mirages concealing it." Gilles Vigneault sang memorably and
succinctly, "Mon pays, c'est l'hiver." Mark DeWolfe picked up this
theme and pointed out its religious significance as what Karl Rahner has
called a 'wintry spirituality', which understands life best "in terms of
its struggles, its cold time, its ending in death." He added: "If we
are as a people truly to belong to the land and country of Canada, then
we must learn spiritually how to be at home in winter. And it might be
possible to develop a stance for living creatively in Canadian winters
which applies to the winters of the soul, which arrive in any season,
which might be the gift of Canadian spirituality, a Canadian theology,
to the larger world."

I would suggest that such a contribution might be of particular value to
those of us from Unitarian and Universalist traditions, no matter where
we live. The optimism which has been so much a feature of our outlook
needs to be tempered in this way if we are to cope effectively with the
tragic aspects of life, which unfortunately seem likely to loom very
prominently during the century we have now entered.

Before I close I need to place what I have been saying about the
Canadian contribution to our worldwide dialogue within a broader
perspective. After all, what brings us together here is a vision of a
global fellowship of Unitarians and Universalists which will transcend
all differences of place. As with every kind of unity in diversity, the
diversities are always more immediately apparent than the unity, which
nonetheless remains the most important feature of the scene. If we
aspire to be a world faith, what do we still have to accomplish?

There are certain features generally found in such a faith in which we
are to date conspicuously lacking. I am acutely conscious of this when
I am asked, as happens not infrequently, to participate in interfaith
services. It may be suggested that we might read a passage from our
scriptures -- but what is our scripture? For Unitarians and
Universalists who identify with the Christian tradition it is the Bible;
for others among us the whole of the world's literature is potentially
available, according to what we find speaks to us at a deep spiritual
level. But this latter is almost inevitably a personal choice. There
have been attempts to put together collections of readings that might
have the value of scripture for corporate use among us, but none of
these ever met with a wide level of acceptance. Might it be possiblefor us to assemble a collection of what we could all agree to be deeply
significant Unitarian writings that could be shared and used throughout
the world -- not to supplant the Bible or any other scripture
traditional in particular places, but to supplement it?

In the same way, most forms of religion have festivals that are uniquely
their own, celebrated on a date that can be marked on a calendar. For
years past, the multifaith organization to which I belong in Canada has
put out an annual calendar. The Unitarians are listed as one of the
member groups, but it is the only one that has no dates of its own to be
marked on the calendar. The only unique Unitarian celebration we could
think of is the flower communion devised by Norbert Capek, but it is not
celebrated everywhere on the same date. Could we imagine agreeing upon
such a date and observing it, and then doing the same for at least one
or two other festivals, in addition to those we share with other forms
of faith? In the same way, could we commemorate the acknowledged heroes
in our history, as other faiths do in their calendar of saints, sharing
everywhere an observance, say, of the death of Ferenc Dávid, and
building from there?

At least we do have our own symbol now, in the flaming chalice; the fact
that it has different shapes in different places is not too much of a
problem, as it is everywhere recognizable.

In pursuing this world-embracing vision, let me close with words from
someone who in my view epitomized it. The most spectacularly successful
ministry in Canadian Unitarian history, if judged by what was
accomplished in the short space of five years, was that of Jabez T.
Sunderland in Toronto a century ago. Sunderland was born in England, to
which he later returned for one ministry. He grew up and spent the
greater part of his life in the United States, and made a significant
contribution to the Unitarian movement there. He made many visits to
India and worked for that country's liberation from imperialistic rule.
Besides his Toronto ministry, he returned to Canada for a ministry in
Ottawa. Here are the words of his that I wish to quote:
"Unitarianism to be true to its great name must be the religion of the
Eternal Unities. It cannot be less... Looked at in one aspect,
diversity seems to be the law of life.... In everything, religion
included, we see a growing diversity in the world.... [But] right along
with and in the diversity which manifests itself so conspicuously
everywhere, there is also revealed a growing unity -- a unity profounder
than the diversity, subtler than the diversity, larger than the
diversity, and gathering all the diversities. Diversity is a fact, but
it is the superficial fact. The deeper fact is unity....
"History and the comparative study of religions are revealing the fact
that all the religious faiths in their deeper meanings are one; social
science that all social interests are one; ethnology that humanity is
one; biology that all life is strangely one; astronomy and kindred
sciences that all worlds unite to make one orderly and harmonious
universe.

"The mission of Unitarianism is nothing less than to be faithful to this
rising truth, in all that is deepest and most religiously significant in
it."