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.The Western Messenger, amonthly magazine published in Cincinnati, came to Emerson s de-fense and wondered about the spirit of free inquiry.Orestes Brown-son also contributed a response that extolled the expression of thefree spirit.He had another chance to enter the fray in January 1839after Norton s masterpiece The Evidence of the Genuineness of theMITCHELL, MARIA (1818 1889) " 335Four Gospels was published in late 1838.Emerson played virtuallyno role in the fight over his address.Oliver Wendell Holmes com-pared him to Patroclus when the Greeks and Trojans were fightingover his body.The leading voice in the Transcendental counterattackwas again that of George Ripley.In July 1839 Norton had delivered Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity before an alumni asso-ciation at Harvard Divinity School.Here Norton said that miraclesauthenticated Christianity.Ripley responded with  The Latest Formof Infidelity Examined. Ripley said that Norton s belief that mira-cles were the only possible way to prove the truth of Christianity wasjust personal dogma.Then Norton fired back in  Remarks on. The Latest Form of Infidelity Examined,  that miracles show thatthese truths come from God.The two adversaries found some mea-sure of accommodation, as Norton admitted that truth can be discov-ered by other means than through the empirical.At this pointTheodore Parker entered the debate under the pseudonym of LeviBlodgett.Parker said that faith in Christ cannot depend upon faith inmiracles, but that faith must come by intuition.In his final salvo,Norton published Two Articles from the Princeton Review, whichcalled the German philosophy  hideous and godless.After 1840 Norton withdrew from the debate, as most other Uni-tarians refused to support his policy of exclusion.Ripley, too,dropped from the action shortly thereafter when he resigned from thePurchase Street Church in Boston in 1841 and found his energies ab-sorbed in Brook Farm.After 1840 both the Christian Register andthe Examiner were arguing for a neutral position suggesting greaterattempts to understand the foreign philosophies without hysterical re-actions against them.The miracles question would surface again.Most of the mainstream Unitarian ministers defended the belief inmiracles and the supernatural underpinning of Christianity, and yetfew refused to follow Norton in his desire to withdraw the nameChristian from the Transcendentalists.One other result of the contro-versy was that after 1838 the Harvard Divinity School faculty re-served the right to approve graduation speakers.MITCHELL, MARIA (1818 1889).The astronomer who discovereda comet, born on August 1, 1818, on the island of Nantucket, Massa-chusetts.Raised a Quaker, Mitchell never officially joined any336 " MODERATORchurch but regularly attended the Second Congregational Meeting-house Society (Unitarian) on Nantucket.Once when confronted by awoman who feared her daughter was not Christian, Mitchell wrotethat she was strongly tempted to avow her Unitarianism.Largely self-educated in the sciences, she was elected to the American Academyof Arts and Sciences in 1848.This was a year after she had discov-ered the comet that now bears her name,  Mitchell s Comet. Sheworked for 19 years for the American Nautical Almanac computingtables for the planet Venus.The U.S.Coastal Survey employed her inan astronomical party at Mt.Independence, Maine.For many yearsshe was chairperson of the American Association for the Advance-ment of Science.In 1865 Vassar College appointed her as director oftheir observatory and professor of astronomy.Mitchell became awell-respected teacher who was devoted to helping her students de-velop their own abilities.Perhaps remembering her own lack of a col-lege degree, she became especially interested in the higher educationof women and was so devoted to this that she sacrificed her own sci-entific work.She died on June 28, 1889.MODERATOR.The position of Unitarian Universalist Association(UUA) moderator was created in response to a recommendation ofthe Commission of Appraisal in its 1936 report, Unitarians Face aNew Age.The proposal was made  to give a titular head apart fromthe administrative work. The commission recommended that themoderator be an official representative of the denomination to exalt the function of spiritual leadership. This was an unsalaried positionfor a two-year term with the initial intention that the person not be re-elected.An important part of the job description was the role of pre-siding at all meetings of the association.The first moderator was San-ford Bates, followed by Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, the first woman,in 1940.Under the new bylaws created for the UUA in 1961 the mod-erator, who was now the chairperson of the board of trustees (thepresident had served in this capacity before), was elected to serve afour-year term with a possibility of being reelected.The first UUAmoderator, Marshall Dimock, resigned before the end of his firstterm.He had hoped to have a greater role in the administrative work-ings of the UUA, but this was not realized under the strong presi-dency of Dana Greeley.MONTREAL " 337MONTANA INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.After 1871 several religiousdenominations became involved in the education of Native Ameri-cans.The most significant Unitarian effort was the Montana Indus-trial School, opened in 1886 just south of Custer Station, Montana,under the direction of the Rev.Henry F.Bond.The purpose was toprovide children with a practical education, and several buildings andshops were erected.Despite some early success and the financial sup-port of Mary Hemenway, this American Unitarian Association(AUA) effort began to flounder after Bond retired in 1891, and theschool was turned over to the federal government in 1895.MONTREAL.This city was the site of the first Unitarian church inCanada [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]