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Greenfield GroupSince 1927
Greenfield Group, a semi-annual gathering of Unitarian Universlaist Ministers, meets to discuss papers and common readings related to a chosen topic. |
Canada's Unitarian and Universalist HistoryBY THE REV. DR. PEG GOODING |
8 Minute History of UUism |
UNITARIANISM . . . a religion that has had a hard time defining itself, but whose basic premise is that the final authority for belief lies in the individual, not in the writings of any bible or the utterances of any leader.
A religion that has often been full of controversy . . . in the beginning days of our national Unitarian history the verbal battle raged between those who wished to return to the "pure" teachings of Jesus and those who looked for inspiration in the teachings of science.
A religion which has endured persecution, more in word but sometimes in deed. A religion which has inspired men and women to dare to be in the forefront in the cause of a more humane world.
UNIVERSALISM . . . a religion which came to find definition more difficult as time and influence achieved its initial purpose but whose basic premise that all human beings are worthy of love remains.
A religion that has had its share of controversy . . . in its early days the great question was, "Is salvation immediately achieved at death or does the soul have to go through a period of punishment before being restored to God?"
A religion which has endured persecution, more in word but sometimes in deed.
A religion which has inspired men and women to make love more active in the cause of a more humane world. UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM, the religion we espouse today . . . still hard to define, but whose basic premise remains that human beings, each worthy of love, are each the final authority in matters of belief.
Still full of controversy . . . "Is lay leadership or professional leadership best?", "Is intellectualism or feeling most important in a Sunday morning service?"
A religion still occasionally persecuted in word if not in deed. And still inspiring us to make this a more humane world for ourselves and others.
How did these two religious denominations come to Canada?
First, the story of Universalism. Universalism in Canada was mainly a rural religion, preached by itinerant ministers and lay preachers travelling from small town to small town on horseback. It reached as far west as Olinda, Ontario. It was mainly the product of American Universalism, itself influenced by British Rellyan Universalism, although a small group of Scottish Universalists did settle in southern Ontario.
As American Universalists crossed the border they brought their religion with them. Christopher Huntington, moving from New England to Compton, Quebec in 1804, is presumed to have preached the first Universalist sermon in this country. Other Canadians were influenced by the Universalist message and worked for the establishment of societies in their own communities.
A Mrs. Eban Allen from Halifax visited Boston where she heard the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou with his message that the God of love promised universal salvation, a message of ringing hope to a people weighted down with the fears and personal uncertainty of a Calvinistic theology of salvation for the elect and eternal damnation for all others. On her return she told her experience to a woodcutter friend. And in the exciting way Universalism spread by word of mouth in the early 1800s a meeting was held - broken up by disapproving townspeople - but later reconvened, to form the Universalist Church of Halifax in 1843. Universalism had a firm hold in Halifax and other parts of the Maritimes, even though its adherents were often called "children of the devil" as they walked down the street. "If there is NO HELL, what will stop those Universalists from committing the direst of deeds?", was in the minds of their detractors.
The Universalist North American Almanac of 1850 lists 4 preachers, 10 societies and 3 meeting houses in Canada East; 4 preachers, 4 societies and 12 preaching stations in Canada West; plus 1 preacher and 2 societies each in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
The first woman preacher in Canada of any denomination was probably Universalist Mary Ann Church of Merrickville, Ontario; the first ordained woman minister in Canada probably Fidelia Gilette, who came to Bloomfield, Ontario in 1888.
Canadian Universalism produced few well known personages but its theology of "salvation through good works" assured that in any community where a Universalist society existed many charitable and helpful acts were performed, for this was the heritage and call of Universalism. The denomination grew smaller in numbers over the years, partly because the message of universal salvation was heard and adopted by others and partly because of the lack of large, influential city churches.
At the time of the merger of the two denominations in 1961 only four societies were left, Halifax, Nova Scotia, North Hatley, Quebec, Olinda, Ontario, and one in New Brunswick).
And so to the Unitarians, smaller in number than the Universalists during our beginnings in the 1800s, considerably larger at merger in 1961; the reason for our national denominational organization being called the Canadian Unitarian Council and not the Canadian Unitarian Universalist Council.
Montreal 1842 . . . the first organized Unitarian church in Canada, its emergence influenced by the Americans, the British, and the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians from Ireland. The actual beginnings in Montreal occurred before that official date.
The first Unitarian service in Montreal, indeed in Canada, was held in the Union School Room on July 29, 1832 in the middle of the cholera epidemic. The preacher was forty seven year old David Hughes from Somerset, England. On August 9 David Hughes was dead of cholera. His obituary named him a Christian called from the service of his Lord and Master to a higher presence. It brought forth a storm of protest. "He could not be called a Christian; Unitarians were not Christian. They reduced sin and its moral effects to mere unimportant circumstances. All Christians were to be warned against their soul killing tenets." His death, and public criticism, did not deter his congregation from forming a Sunday School and raising funds for a building. The building fund failed, perhaps due to the stresses of the Papineau Rebellion, perhaps to the overzealousness of the promoters. Nevertheless Unitarianism remained alive in Montreal.
In 1843, John Cordner, ordained as minister by the Remonstrant Synod of Ulster of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians of Northern Ireland (the Irish "Unitarians") became the minister of the Christian Unitarian Society of Montreal which had been formed in 1842, realizing the dream of Benjamin Workman, Elizabeth Cushing and others.
Cordner was minister for thirty five years, taking that stand mentioned earlier of a Unitarianism heavily based on Jesus and the Bible. He was attacked as blasphemous from outside the church and too Christian centered from within, but he stuck to his convictions. At the end of his ministry, the Montreal church broke its ties with the Irish Synod and became part of the American Unitarian Association.
Many of the Montrealers were businessmen. A statue of Unitarian John Young stands near the place where the Montreal wharves used to be. With Cordner, Young crusaded on humanitarian grounds for free trade. Cordner himself witnessed a continual concern for the poor. When plans were being made for the visit of the future Prince of Wales to Montreal Cordner advocated that money to be spent on an elaborate dinner be used instead for a farm on which vagrant boys could be taught trades and the old sheltered. His proposal was defeated by the city fathers in favor of the dinner!
The Workman family, prominent in the Montreal church, moved to Toronto and were instrumental in establishing a church there. In comparatively recent times branch churches of the Toronto church were formed and, now independent societies, cooperate to constitute the Unitarian Council of Metropolitan Toronto.
The Toronto church became the religious home of Emily Stowe, Canada's first woman physician and an early advocate of women's right to vote. Luigi von Kunits, founder of the Toronto Symphony, was also a member of the first Unitarian church in Toronto and often played his violin there.
Following sporadic attempts from 1867 on, including an effort by Cordner, Ottawa finally achieved organization in 1898. Its first minister was Albert Walkley. He campaigned for street cars to run on Sundays, his argument that all days were holy and if the wealthy could ride in their carriages on Sundays why couldn't the ordinary people be allowed the convenience of the street car. The more conservative religious groups in the city were not pleased but in the early 1900s the street cars did begin to run on Sundays.
It was with the help of people from the Ottawa church that Lotta Hitschmanova began the Unitarian Service Committee in 1945, and she remains a member of the congregation. In the late 1800s another stream enters the picture.
Winnipeg, Christmas Day, 1892 . . . the first service in the newly built Icelandic Unitarian Church. Icelandic Unitarians were the inheritors of a spirit of freedom and inquiry that they brought with them to Canada from their native land. When the cornerstone of this first church was removed in 1962 it was found to contain a small volume of poems by Bjorn Gunnlaugsson, poems which refuted the doctrine of a God of vengeance. Gunnlaugsson was just one of the influences that lead many of the Icelandic immigrants in Canada to reject the strict Lutheranism they found here for the Unitarianism of Channing, Priestly, Emerson, and Thoreau. There had been Magnus Stephensen, Chief Justice of Iceland, also a writer and publisher who had written a hymn book deleting all references to the devil. Magnus Erickson, a great teacher and theologian, taught that personal religion and social responsibility were indissolubly related, and that the Bible should be tested by experience as well as taught by tradition. The person most responsible for organizing this rich tradition into a free religious movement was Bjorn Petursson, the minister at the Christmas Day service. His tenure was short; he died barely a year later. His wife, Jennie McCaine Petursson, a New Englander who had been a charter member of the Unitarian church in St. Paul, Minnesota, conducted the services (in English) for nearly a year and then returned to her home in Francestown, New Hampshire. She was much loved and long remembered by the congregation. The Icelandic poet and statesman, Jon Olafsson, then conducted the services until the arrival of the Reverend Magnus Skeptason, a man whose ideas were similar to the poet's and whose verse was also found in the cornerstone. Other Unitarian churches as well as preaching stations sprang up in Manitoba. Like the earlier Universalists, Icelandic Unitarians on the prairies were served by circuit riders, and indeed much of their doctrine was as Universalist as it was Unitarian though they were not familiar with it. Icelandic Unitarianism prospered.
In 1912, Horace Westwood arrived from the United States to establish an English speaking Unitarian church, All Souls. In the 1930s the minister of All Souls, Philip Petursson, was sent to Iceland to study the Icelandic language so that he could conduct services at both churches. After his return the two congregations shared a building but maintained separate identities.
In 1945 they merged into one and soon afterwards the practice of conducting services in Icelandic was dropped. The Manitoba churches are still attended by descendants of the early Icelandic Unitarians. Vilhaljmur Stefansson, the great Canadian arctic explorer, was a product of Icelandic liberal religious thought and studied for the Unitarian ministry at Harvard before deciding upon a career in anthropology. Margret Benedictsson, editor of the Icelandic paper "Freya", was not only a proponent of women's voting rights but women's equality in all ways, a woman much ahead of her time.
Unitarian groups farther west had many ups and downs before becoming established.
As the Canadian west grew in population other denominations grew westward as well, encouraged and financially supported by their denominational organizations back east. This was not true of the Unitarians. For many years sporadic efforts were made by both the BFUA (British and Foreign Unitarian Association) and the AUA (American Unitarian Association) to establish groups, but these were poorly funded and the societies often floundered.
In 1907 the two organizations got together to the extent that each agreed to pay half the salary for an extension minister the British called a missionary and the Americans a field secretary. The term field secretary was decided upon and Frank Wright Pratt, formerly minister in Hopedale, Massachusetts, was chosen to fill the role. His job was to travel to various western cities where interest in Unitarianism was shown, helping groups to organize, find ministers, and build churches.
Although progress was slow and financial help still slight, Unitarianism did begin to take hold and both British and American ministers came to speak from pulpits and build congregations.
The times during and between the two world wars were low points - some congregations becoming dormant for awhile - but the seed was there and today Unitarianism grows strong in the west with a cluster of churches around Vancouver, three societies in Edmonton, as well as other churches and fellowships in the rest of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.
William Irvine, who became minister of the Calgary church in 1916, was elected to Parliament from Calgary East in 1926 and, with the exception of one year, served until 1935. Among his positions was the abolishment of capital punishment.
Ada Tonkin, who served the Victoria church in 1926 and 1927 and was the first woman Unitarian minister in Canada, was the pioneering force in the establishment of the Women's Protective Bureau of the Vancouver Police Force. She was its first director, strongly advocating rehabilitation and preventive work.
Although Canadian Unitarianism has become strongly linked with American Unitarian Universalism and has been part of the UUA (Unitarian Universalist Association) since the merger of the two denominations in 1951, it retains its own identity, furthered by the formation of its churches into the CUC (Canadian Unitarian Council) in the same year. Mainly Unitarian in its roots, many of its members consider themselves Unitarian Universalists while others prefer to be called Unitarian only.
Indeed, harkening back to the earlier phrase "often fraught with controversy", what to call ourselves is one of the controversies of our time. Ours not to conform to an edict from a hierarchal authority but to enjoy the freedom of individual expression; working towards consensus and corporate action but not excluding those with other opinions.
We value our Irish and British non-conformist roots and the Icelandic heritage as well as what has come to us from the United States.
Our ministers cross the borders with relative ease, barring immigration red tape! We have American and British ministers serving in Canada and Canadian ministers serving in the United States. Some come from the Unitarian heritage, some from the Universalist. We value this evidence of the Canadian mosaic in our religious development and make it our own.
The Rev. Dr. MK Gooding 1983.
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