Other aspects of Unitarianism also failed to satisfy the needs of the Transcendentalists. As Emerson and others began careers in the ministry, it seemed to them that far too much of what was termed religion consisted solely of adherence to forms, doctrines, and literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Emerson decried the spiritual impoverishment of the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College." Minister at the Second Church in Boston, Emerson publicly rejected the practice of the Lord's Supper in 1832 and left his pastorate. Theodore Parker, in his 1841 "Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity" wrote, "It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as religion. An undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul. . . ." Moreover, the New Testament miracles that the Unitarians had embraced as evidence of revelation became the subject of heated controversy. Emerson stated in his "Divinity School Address" (1838), "But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain."
The Transcendental concept of truth was not based on the trappings of religion, which even relatively progressive Unitarian Christianity displayed. The Transcendentalists possessed a Platonic sense of the divine, independent of the changeable externals of religious practice. An individual's relationship with the kind of God the Transcendentalists envisioned could be achieved intuitively, without any connection to formal religion. This was a leveling notion, conferring authority upon the individual rather than upon those within the hierarchy of the church, elevating man from the position of passive recipient of divine truth as defined by the system and elucidated by the preacher. Channing's Unitarianism promoted liberal theology; Transcendentalism offered radical theology.
