2.
The Gospel of Unity

The statue of Thomas Starr King (1824–64) stands in Washington, D.C., along with that of Father Junipero Serra, as one of the two outstanding persons in California history. Both, significantly, were men of religious profession. Yet King is best known in California legend and popular history as the man who "saved California for the Union"—who kept the state from seceding during the Civil War. He was remembered as a preacher of Unionism; but deeper than that, as we will see, he was a preacher of unity. Not that the legend is false; there was agitation for secession in California, both by Southerners who wanted the state to join the Confederacy and by others who wanted to form an independent Pacific Republic. Historians generally agree, however, that even without King the secession movement would likely have failed; King himself observed that Union sentiment was strong from the beginning.^[1] His political role was to encourage and fortify Union sentiment and to raise funds to support Union efforts.

Starr King had another role, however; he was first of all a minister, the pulpit orator of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. Even when he spent much of his time stumping around the state delivering patriotic speeches, he almost always lectured or preached in a church as well. He was spreading Unitarian Christianity—or, as he would have preferred to call it, "spiritual Christianity."^[2] The relationship of this part of King's work to emerging California Protestant culture has received little attention from his biographers and other historians; so we must examine it more carefully.

It is remarkable that Starr King has been portrayed as saving California for the Union when in fact he did not, and as performing primarily a political duty when in fact he was a minister, and himself regarded his patriotism and his religion as identical.^[3] When we observe such incongruities between historical evidence and historians' interpretations, we must look for the reason behind them. In this

case, it is likely that California historians have failed to recognize Starr King's religious impact because King himself did not seem to care about traditional church religion. He did not become a denominational leader or form any organization outside the churches. He refused to enter denominational controversies; he did not care whether people became Unitarians or not. His religious vision was so large that it transcended what most nineteenth-century Christians, and most historians until recently, have considered religious. It has been simpler to view him as an orator, than to delve into his controversial religious beliefs.

In fact, Starr King became a "savior" of California because he, like most charismatic figures, epitomized the highest values of the people to whom he spoke; he articulated the beliefs and feelings of his audiences. There is no doubt of his popularity; he spoke to packed houses in halls and churches all over northern and central California for nearly four years. Sometimes his lectures lasted two or three hours, but he held people spellbound. Of course, oratory was a familiar medium to white northern Protestants in the midnineteenth century. Californians recently arrived from the East were eager for a good lecture, and King's were among the best. His mastery of the medium, together with his own presence and the things he stood for, were deeply admired by Protestant Californians.

Moreover, California of the mid 1800s was a region in flux, with high social mobility, heavy immigration, and rapidly changing social and economic patterns. It might have been a site of exceptional religious excitement, but there were compelling reasons for people to resist a highly emotional religion. Starr King offered another alternative: a grand religio-political vision that appeared to be founded on reason rather than emotion. People could see King as an exemplary person, and his vision as a source of order in a time of social disorder; he served as a kind of "prophetic" figure. But since he did not try to found a new church or organization or even mobilize a new movement, and instead supported existing religious and political institutions, it was only his image and his published speeches that survived his death.

Starr King himself was a self-made man. He had worked for a living from his teenage years and was largely self-educated, with the help of tutors, in metaphysics, theology, and classical and modern languages. At the age of twenty-two, without a divinity degree, he was called to his first pulpit, in his father's former church, the Uni-

versalist Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts. From there he went to Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston. While in Boston, he made a name for himself and was called to lecture frequently in other parts of New England; he was invited to become the permanent minister in churches as far west as Cincinnati. Yet because of his lack of a divinity degree and other status symbols important in the East, some regarded him as belonging to the second rank among the liberal ministers of New England. Popular as he was, he could not command the highest salaries or the most prestigious pulpits; sometimes it was difficult for him to support his family.^[4]

Nevertheless he stayed in Boston until, in 1860, he was invited to San Francisco by the struggling Unitarian church there. He intended to take only a leave of absence from Hollis Street, but once in California—he arrived in 1861–he became involved in the life of the region and especially in supporting the Northern cause in the Civil War. He was homesick and spoke often of wanting to return to New England, but felt that California needed him. So he stayed, working harder and harder, until in 1864 he contracted diphtheria and died that spring, at the age of forty. In the meantime he had spoken to thousands in lecture halls and churches in all the cities and most of the substantial towns in California. He had raised contributions for the Sanitary Commission (which aided Northern soldiers) in an amount that exceeded any other state's share. And he had made a name for himself, coming from comparative obscurity in Boston to become one of the great figures of California history.

Starr King was small in stature, with a powerful voice; he had achieved some status in Boston, but he had the potential for greatness. That potential was realized in California. Here he seemed to blossom, to expand in his oratory and personal presence. Californians admired his development; we may guess that they saw in it what they experienced, or hoped for, in themselves. Transplanted New Englanders, now Californians, loved to tell their acquaintances back home that those "who heard him only in New England have not the faintest idea of what King became after he had passed through the Golden Gate."^[5] In this respect he mirrored them: it was more the rule than the exception that Californians of white middle-class Protestant background went through many changes in adapting to California life. A young man raised on a farm in upstate New York might become a miner, a temporary government employee, a shipping merchant, and eventually a real estate speculator. Someone

from the upper levels of society might do only moderately well on the Pacific coast. Those who survived the early chaos had taken risks and had dedicated a great deal to their new life—just as had Starr King. For that reason he could be a model of what they had become, or what they hoped to be.

Moreover, King shared and articulated the religious attitudes of openness and tolerance that, as we observed in Chapter I, were becoming characteristic of California in the 1860s. He supported all the churches, saying that different church governments and different rituals were suited to different temperaments. It did not matter which denomination one chose so long as it helped bring one closer to God. For that reason he did not enter into denominational controversies. He preached in a wide variety of churches, even one as conservative as Old School Presbyterian. His colleagues in other Protestant denominations disavowed his liberalism, but judged him more nearly orthodox than most eastern Unitarians. (Whether they were right in that judgment is questionable.)^[6] His open attitude and his ability to travel freely in all religious circles appealed to Californians who did not want to be tied to a denomination. In that respect, too, he was both a model and someone they could see as similar to themselves.

Starr King offered them even more. In his lectures and sermons he formulated a set of beliefs and attitudes and an imaginative vision that captured the hearts of Californians. His denomination was Unitarian, but he did not preach a doctrinal Unitarianism. Classical Unitarianism, emerging in Boston in the early 1800s, rejected the Trinity for a belief that only God the Father had supreme divinity (hence the name Unitarian ). It taught the rationality and benevolence of God and emphasized the human side of religion. This classical view had already developed into a diverse movement. By the mid 1830s it had sprouted Transcendentalism in many forms, from the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the humanitarianism of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Starr King had immersed himself in the writings of William Ellery Channing, the principal spokesman for the movement in the 1820s, but was also a protégé of Parker. His father, who died when he was fifteen, was a Universalist pastor; from him King may have inherited his belief in the eventual salvation of all, with no one damned to eternal punishment. Clearly, he was a product of a wideranging liberal movement.

Following the liberal thought of his day, King's first principle was

that true Christianity could not be contained in doctrines and creeds or in any one sect or denomination. Religious truth was a light that illumined everything and everyone, spreading life, grace, beauty, joy, and all good things. In his lecture on "Spiritual Christianity," delivered in the East as the last in a series by different denominational representatives, King declared one could find no unity in Christianity if one looked at dogma, clergy, or institutions—in short, any of the specific forms of religion. Christianity had to be understood rather as "the communication of life to the [human] race from the heavens . . . an unsealing of the treasury of the skies, an overflow into time of the infinite light and grace to illumine and regenerate the world."^[7] God's overflowing love and truth, he said, had been disclosed when he poured it first into Jesus Christ, and then into human souls. If a person now would repent and have faith, he too could receive that communication and inflow from God, the "Infinite Spirit" indwelling as the substance of life, illumining the world. The question was not what one believed, the creed to which one subscribed, or the church to which one belonged, but "how near is the man to the Spirit of God?" Grace, King added, did not flow in prescribed channels of ritual and organization, but was, rather, like the rains:

It falls on the mountain slopes; it collects in rills; it combines into streams and rivers; it hides underground, and bubbles in fountains. Now it floods all its channels; now it leaves the old beds to cut new paths for its leaping music; and it will often burst up in fresh districts to gladden the ground with beauty.^[8]

With such images Starr King could appeal to the self-proclaimed tolerance of Californians and reinforce their resistance to organized religion, while still not offending any particular church. But something else appeared in the images King used: a strong mystical element, speaking of the "inflow" of God and Infinite Spirit into human souls and lives and employing metaphors from nature to express the grace of God. Both of these would become important in the religious vision of the alternative tradition among Protestants.

We will return later to the overall character of Starr King's mysticism. First, however, it will be helpful to look at his use of images from nature. The beauties of California were part of the emerging mythology, and few people came so prepared as Starr King to appreciate nature and its potential for defining Californians' identity. In New England, King had spent summers either at the seashore or in

the mountains, finally choosing the mountains as best for his health and spirit. His book on the White Hills of Vermont was regarded as a masterpiece of description and travelogue. In California he was drawn to the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada and wrote sermons using his Sierra experiences as a theme.

King's "Living Water from Lake Tahoe" (1863) is perhaps the most eloquent of these pieces. In it he took the lake as an allegory, a lesson by which we should understand God. Essentially, he instructed his audiences in the principles of a Christianity founded on a religion of nature. He argued, from the brilliant colors of the lake and surrounding mountains, that God's message to humanity was above all a message of beauty and joy—those were the central truths of existence. To be sure, nature also showed God's awfulness, power, and rugged justice, but it clothed them in the play of light and color. Lake Tahoe showed that the Creator's holiness was not severe, but like "the purity of a lily's leaf, of a tree's robe of blossoms, of the light of a star, of the sunset radiance on mountain snow."^[9] To know God was to know purity, beauty, and joy beyond mere human conception; Christianity, indeed all true religion, was to be founded on these things more than on severity and justice.

King was telling Californians that the glory of nature by which they were surrounded and often entranced was not a distraction from religious duty, but an expression of the essence of religion itself. And, he said, we should regard our institutions and authorities likewise: as sources of inspiration, not literal truth. He even introduced the question of whether the Bible was truly divine by an analogy with nature: he heard in the murmur of the pines around Lake Tahoe, he said, a sound like the Hebrew genius from which Christianity sprang. But we do not know how much of that genius was from God, and how much from man.

We cannot tell in the forest how much of the tone we hear is of the wind and how much of the tree. Neither can we tell in the great passages of the Bible what proportion of the music is of God and what proportion is of man. . . . We must go to the Bible as to a grove of evergreens, not asking for cold, clear truth, but for sacred influence, for revival to the devout sentiment, for the breath of the Holy Ghost, not as it wanders in pure space, but as it sweeps through cedars and pines.^[10]

Here again, he established a basis for Christian liberalism by using analogies from nature.

Finally, King likened Lake Tahoe to another, cosmically significant lake: the Sea of Galilee. Jesus and his followers who traveled there were craftsmen and laborers, and therefore, King said (bowing to miners and other laborers), "not distinguished from those who ply their calling under the shadows of the Sierra." Jesus' healing of demoniacs called to mind the miracles of the Spirit in healing the insane minds of King's own day—in the Stockton asylum. These correspondences between Lake Tahoe and the Sea of Galilee led King to a grand synthesis. The Sea of Galilee, site of many miracles, was a "fountainhead of living water" that has flowed throughout the globe: "The truth that first fell upon its shores has cast a glory, by association, upon all other inland lakes, and indeed has illumined all nature."^[11] Such lakes were, in King's view, to be regarded "as realizing a conception or a dream" by God; Tahoe, as one of many mirrors of Galilee, reflected the mind of God:

He delights in his works. . . . And it is our sovereign privilege that we are called to the possibility of sympathy with his joy. The universe is the home of God. He has lined its walls with beauty. He has invited us into his palace. He offers to us the glory of sympathy with his mind. By love of nature, by joy in the communion with its beauty, by growing insight into the wonders of color, form, and purpose, we enter into fellowship with the Creative art. We go into harmony with God. . . . But the inmost harmony with the Infinite we find only through love, and the reception of his love. Then we are prepared to see the world aright, to find the deepest joy in its pure beauty, and to wait for the hour of translation to the glories of the interior and deeper world.^[12]

Beginning with an experience of California's natural beauty, Starr King offered Californians a mystical cosmology that promised communion with God through nature and revealed correspondences between their own experience and Christian mythology. He often based sermons on such analogies between particular experiences and universal truths. He preached, for example, on the comet of 1861; and he had in his repertoire a sermon called "Religious Lessons from Metallurgy" (1863), in which he related the life of miners and the science of mining to the universe as a whole.^[13] Although his oratory may seem flowery to twentieth century tastes, it was certainly not so for the 1860s. His images were concrete and clear, his analogies carefully elaborated. He painted a cosmic vision into which Californians could enter because of their experience of nature.

Sermons based on nature, important as they may have been in forming bonds with other Californians, were only a small part of Starr King's repertoire. More prominent and more frequent were his patriotic speeches. These were most famous during the Civil War, but he had often lectured on political subjects before coming to California; he was famous for his lectures on Daniel Webster and George Washington. Starr King, like Theodore Parker and many other activists of the time, saw political issues and patriotic causes as grounded in religion. This was certainly true of King's efforts to assure California's support for the Union cause. His speeches sought to accomplish that end by, again, relating the particular to the universal, California to the destiny of America, and that destiny in turn to God's purposes.

According to Starr King, God had predestined the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to be the possession of one race, the Anglo-Saxon. This was a common theme of the period, the idea of "manifest destiny"—a destiny supposedly obvious to any observer, because indeed Anglo-Saxons were conquering the continent. King argued his point not only from history, however, but also from the aesthetics of geography. God, he claimed in "American Nationality" (1863), had created the American continent exactly the opposite of Europe and Asia. Those continents had mountain ranges radiating out from their centers, so as to scatter and separate the inhabitants into may different peoples. The United States, however, was shaped like a great basin between two coastal ranges, encouraging the formation of one nation instead of many. "The Constitution of American Nationality," he declared, "is written not on parchment but on nature."^[14] Therefore no group or section had the right to disrupt the unity of the continent as a whole.

We recognize today, of course, that such concepts as Anglo-Saxon destiny often have racist overtones. King apparently did not intend such a meaning; he came out clearly for equality of the races and for the rights of human beings whatever their skin color or background. Yet he also subscribed to the prevailing philosophies that held that each race had its distinctive traits—Saxon energy, Greek intellect, Hebrew poetic genius. He could uphold the rights of blacks and in the same paragraph make a slur on the Irish bartender, without seeing the self-contradiction; in that respect he was a product of his time, and racist by twentieth-century standards. But he believed that

Anglo-Saxon liberality would uphold human rights and allow all races to become part of one America, all equally protected by the law, all speaking the English language.

Beyond this, however, the crucial element in Starr King's nationalism was that he wanted each person to be aware of wholes larger than himself and see himself as part of larger and larger wholes. In that way unity could be sustained in the midst of diversity. In "The Privileges and Duties of Patriotism" (1862) he made this point with powerful images. He argued that we cannot base our actions on some general love for all humanity, but must love particular people and communities; then we can develop to the point where we can feel "a nation's life in our veins." This is the emotion of patriotism, and it is a privilege of human, as distinguished from animal, nature to be able to feel it. Again he used an analogy from his beloved mountains: patriotic feeling is like being a part of a great mountain and knowing the whole,

as if each particle of matter that belongs to a mountain, each crystal hidden in its darkness, each grass-blade on its lower slopes, each pebble amid its higher desolation, each snow-flake of its cold and tilted fields, could be conscious, all the time, of the whole bulk and symmetry and majesty and splendor of the pile. . . . as if each could exult in feeling—I am part of this organized majesty; I am an element in one flying buttress of it, or its firm-posed peak; I contribute to this frosty radiance; I am ennobled by the joy it awakens in every beholder's breast!^[15]

Patriotism thus understood was a grand, expansive emotion, second only to divine love; for, like love of God, it involved the individual in a whole greater than himself.

This preaching of a larger unity was Starr King's constant theme, whether he spoke of nature and God, the Union and God, or the soul and God. To Californians in the 1860s, hearing this message was crucial. Many of the independent farmers, miners, and merchants, having built a modern society in little more than a decade at great financial and emotional risk, were considering extending their independence to the political sphere as well, by creating a Pacific Republic. Starr King sensed that California's isolation needed to be overcome. He appealed therefore to promises of greatness if California continued the course of American destiny, and to fears that if she chose to separate herself, the United States might end up like Europe, a group of small, squabbling nations. Such appeals were the right

tactic politically for strengthening Union sentiment. But they also touched Anglo-Protestant Californians at a deeper level. Their modern, wealthy society was a remarkable achievement, but they had not yet struck deep roots in their new land. They were but one among many ethnic and religious groups. They were not sure they belonged to California, let alone where California belonged. This lack of rootedness could have been a temporary social problem; Starr King made it also a religious one. A proper attitude toward the universe, he implied, meant seeing yourself as belonging to larger and larger unities. You are not simply individuals; you are Californians. You are also Americans; you belong to that larger destiny that spreads from Lake Tahoe to the Sea of Galilee; and you are part of a mysterious cosmos that is the reflection of the mind of God.

Thus King honored the California experience and integrated it into God's grand plan. God's providence in forming the American nation was like his ordering of stars and comets or beautifying the earth with lakes and mountains. The apparently unique experiences of Californians—Tahoe and the Sierras, panning for gold in the creekbeds or mingling with the crowds in San Francisco—were linked to the Sea of Galilee and the Himalayas, the carpenter Jesus, the crowds in Jerusalem, and the westward march of humanity. Even the high incidence of insanity called up images of Jesus' healing miracles. The strangeness of it all—the mixture of all races and professions digging side by side for gold—was not condemned, but valued as Californians valued it: for King as for them, it was a culmination of the movement for equality and dignity of labor. The universe was all of a piece, and Starr King tried to show Californians how it fit together. Virtually the only part of California experience or legend that did not appear in Starr King's oratory was a romanticization of Old California, the Spanish and Mexican era—but that would not have been easy to integrate into Anglo-Saxon destiny.

This inspiring image of California's place in the universe would probably be enough to account for Starr King's popularity. But there is one final element of his thought that I want to emphasize, for it is important in understanding some of the directions taken by later religious thinkers in California: namely, Starr King's emphasis on the spiritual reality behind every apparent material reality. This idea—implicit in his notion that nature mirrors the mind of God, or that a larger purpose lies behind every apparent accident, surprising similarity, or correspondence—is not fully elucidated in any of the works

we have examined so far; but it appears as the main theme of one of his most popular lectures, "Substance and Show." Originally written in 1851 and slightly revised while King was in California, this, his biographers said, was the most requested of all the speeches and sermons in his repertoire. In it he brought forth clearly the theme of his whole religious perspective: the idea of substance over show .

Substance is King's term for the forces that lie behind appearances, standing under and supporting what we see; show is his term for external facts. Substance is more important; it is the spirit providing motion, force, order, and organization; it "rules, disposes, penetrates, and vivifies matter." What gives iron, glass, diamonds, and crystals their shape and hardness is the force or substance, just as subtle forces such as electricity energize matter. That being so, King suggested, "the prominent lesson of science to men . . . is faith in the intangible and invisible."^[16]

King argued, further, that ideas are powerful, substantial entities. Indeed, the whole universe is an image of thought—it is, he said, citing Jonathan Edwards as his authority, "the continuous image of the Creator's constant thought." Here we see the deeper vision of the world that was echoed in the Lake Tahoe sermon. King went on in a similar vein to say that to delight in the material universe and the beauty of nature, and to receive it deeply into one's soul, is to be in touch with "the world of Divine Substance." To refuse deeper communion with nature is to live only in a superficial world of show.^[17]

Not only is love of nature fundamentally religious, but also, the lecture went on, national spirit is substance, as is the cultivation of individual spirit. All the concrete realities, or show, of social life—from brick buildings to whole nations—are manifestations of ideas, affections, spiritual forces. History, our heritage, is a substantial and real influence. The unique character of the American people, like a grand rock formation, is matter held together by the cohesive force of all the spiritual influences of centuries past. Ultimately, what keeps people alive individually and collectively are their ideas and emotions, their attachment and dedication to ideals. "Character," King concluded, "is the culminating substance of nature." Without it a person would be a mere ghost. To build character—to build spirits, to shape great souls—is humanity's great task, for "the stuff a great soul is made of is the most real and unwasting material of the universe."^[18]

The popularity of this lecture rested not only on Starr King's use, as always, of compelling imagery and excellent rhetorical structure, but on the force of his point: the world is not the way you see it. The aim of the piece, he once wrote, was to reverse people's usual perceptions of the world—to exchange their reliance on external sense perception for a recognition of inner realities and forces. To see the substance behind the show, the spirit behind the matter, was to see everything in a totally different way. His audiences appear to have gotten the message, or at least to have been intrigued by it. Indeed, they wanted to hear it again and again.

The perspective of "Substance and Show" was novel and significant for Californians. Novel, because many of them felt thoroughly immersed in the material world of wealth and technical progress, building houses and stores and towns, forming corporations, and competing for rewards. Traditional Anglo-Protestants offered pictures of rather alien worlds—of sinners facing judgment and damnation, or of long-lost wanderers coming home to mother and Jesus. To think of spiritual reality in their own midst, undergirding those very stores, towns, and corporations was at the very least an interesting shift in perspective. It suggested still more than that: King held that there was an organizing force behind all the disparate elements, behind all the apparent chaos of a new society. There was a purpose behind the fast-paced lives that people lived. In a society where most institutions had been constructed ad hoc, order and purpose seemed a slow and often distant achievement. In his patriotic speeches, King had tied California to a larger national purpose; in "Substance and Show" he declared order and purpose to be present even when invisible and unnameable.

This was a religious approach to which Californians could respond warmly, whether or not they could grasp the entire philosophy that Starr King was elaborating. They could not name the purpose behind their experience and their continuing work. It did not fit into categories of religious doctrine; it was not like anything they knew from their home states; it was not based on an "ism" or creed or political platform. Nevertheless, the California experience was formative and the makers of the state wanted to believe it was purposeful and meaningful. King's ideas implied that it was more than that: it was "substantial"—just as real as the material reality of California, perhaps more so.

This emphasis on spirit over matter, on a religious perspective that transcended all concrete forms and was different from and more powerful than the forms themselves, was destined to remain a part of California's religious heritage. Starr King influenced some liberal thinkers in California to espouse similar points of view. For example, David Starr Jordan, an Eastern liberal who became the first president of Stanford University, was so impressed by King's work that he took "Starr" as his middle name. Joseph Pomeroy Widney, an influential Southern California minister, spoke of Starr King as one of the few great and broad-minded spirits of the church.^[19] In the Bay Area, Laurentine Hamilton was somewhat influenced by King and kept the liberal tradition alive in the years immediately following King's death.

But the traces of King as a direct influence on the life of religious intellectuals are few and far between—generally because most of them were trained in the East, where King always remained a lesser light. We may suspect that something of his ideas or the spirit behind them was transmitted by the people who remembered him, and they and their children would be attracted by people who brought similar ideas. California Unitarians honored him by naming their Berkeley seminary after him. But the memory of Starr King rises up in much stranger places. We find, for example, a brief record of a Mrs. E. P. Thorndyke, a spiritualist and health resort owner who held gatherings of spiritualists at her home in southern California.^[20] Mrs. Thorndyke, the memoir tells us, was visited in 1906 on her deathbed by the spirit of Thomas Starr King, who spoke through her lips. The spirit urged everyone to patriotism on the one hand and devotion to the spirit world on the other—themes which, while somewhat distorted in the context of spiritualism, we can see in Starr King's actual messages.

We can say with confidence that Starr King laid a foundation for liberal Christianity in California tradition. His style of liberalism was laced with a Transcendental mysticism and a grounding in love of nature, which recur frequently in California religiosity. His brand of Christianity affected orthodox Protestantism in the long run, as liberal ideas took their different courses through different transmitters of religious traditions. In the short run, however, liberalism came under attack—not while King was alive, because he was careful to avoid controversy among Christians, and his popularity made him almost invulnerable. But soon after his death, some ideas similar to King's appeared in the sermons of the Rev. Laurentine Hamilton, an

Oakland minister who was becoming one of the more prestigious preachers in the Bay Area.^[21] Hamilton, however, was a Presbyterian, not a Unitarian. His liberal tendencies eventually brought him into a conflict with his denomination that disturbed churchpeople throughout the Bay Area. In the next chapter, we will look closely at the nature and context of Hamilton's trial for heresy.