Page "religion" Paragraph 66

Furthermore, as an encouragement to revisionist thinking, it manifestly is fair to admit that any fraternity has a constitutional right to refuse to accept persons it dislikes.

The Unitarian clergy were an exclusive club of cultivated gentlemen -- as the term was then understood in the Back Bay -- and Parker was definitely not a gentleman, either in theology or in manners.

Ezra Stiles Gannett, an honorable representative of the sanhedrin, addressed himself frankly to the issue in 1845, insisting that Parker should not be persecuted or calumniated and that in this republic no power to restrain him by force could exist.

Even so, Gannett judiciously argued, the Association could legitimately decide that Parker `` should not be encouraged nor assisted in diffusing his opinions by those who differ from him in regard to their correctness ''.

We today are not entitled to excoriate honest men who believed Parker to be downright pernicious and who barred their pulpits against his demand to poison the minds of their congregations.

One can even argue -- though this is a delicate matter -- that every justification existed for their returning the Public Lecture to the First Church, and so to suppress it, rather than let Parker use it as a sounding board for his propaganda when his turn should come to occupy it.

Finally, it did seem clear as day to these clergymen, as Gannett's son explained in the biography of his father, they had always contended for the propriety of their claim to the title of Christians.

Their demand against the Calvinist Orthodoxy for intellectual liberty had never meant that they would follow `` free inquiry '' to the extreme of proclaiming Christianity a `` natural '' religion.