Introduction: notes towards a converging system of faiths

Addressing the annual church meeting of Northgate End Unitarian Chapel, Halifax, in 1893, the Reverend F.E. Millson, long-time Pastor of that Society, made the following observation: ‘[T]here is less need for us to build new chapels because we, in our teaching, are getting close to yours [i.e. to other denominations] and … the principles … which we have taught are now accepted as true by most, if not all, of the religious leaders of Halifax.’ This had certainly not always been the case: ‘When I came here [in 1870],’ he recalled, ‘I found this congregation professing a belief that all men are the children of God, and [in] no sense children of the devil, and relying on reasonable enquiry and common experience as the tests to which all religious teaching should submit itself’. And ‘these principles [were] fiercely attacked in the interest of the doctrines of the fallen nature of man, the need of an atoning sacrifice, and the final authority of the Bible as a divine revelation’. However, such ‘doctrines’, though ‘[still] enshrined in the Trust Deeds of Halifax churches’, he assured his listeners, ‘are seldom preached from their pulpits now’. As a result, ‘we [i.e. Unitarians] can go into Independent and Baptist and Wesleyan chapels without much risk of hearing a word about doctrines from which we would dissent’.