Though all this was so utterly different from the traditional classical education of our leading statesmen up to that day , everything had combined to give young Chamberlain a prompt , capable faculty ready to master any specific task a modern mind with many aptitudes .sx It was a rigorous course at Milk Street .sx Strict attention to business was the law .sx Good Friday and Christmas Day were the only week-days in the year when the warehouse closed .sx Even on them , an old servant at Milk Street brought up the letters to Camberwell .sx " The clerks and workmen were a very civil and obliging set , attached to their " .sx Shoe-makers then were as notoriously Radical as tailors .sx Nor must we forget that at the bench " young Mr. Joseph " mingled with Chartists , who always looked back to that movement as the ardent enthusiasm and vision of their lives .sx They held that the Reform Act had done little for the mass of the people ; that they had been cheated in 1832 by the aristocrats and the middle class together .sx They hated Whigs more than Tories and clung to the hope of a democratic franchise .sx Chamberlain began to acquire his acute insight into the political mind of the working classes and his sympathetic gift of managing them .sx v .sx For other reasons , and almost as a matter of course , the politics of this family were those of advanced Liberalism .sx They had welcomed Free Trade and the other commercial measures of Peel's great ministry .sx " Young Mr. Joseph " recollected how they shared national regret on Peel's death .sx They must have hailed later , in 1853 , Gladstone's first applauded Budget with its repeal or lowering of duties by hundreds , and its promise , above all , of the gradual reduction and ultimate abolition of the income-tax !sx As dissenters , determined to press on from enlarged liberty to complete equality in the State , they were energetic supporters of every effort for removing religious privileges and disabilities .sx The reduction of the newspaper stamp duty in 1836 , the year of young Joseph's birth , had given broad impetus to Liberal journalism .sx For many years the Chamberlains had read the Morning Chronicle under the powerful editorship .sx of John Black , whom Mill rated so high .sx But his energies declined ; and not long after he retired , the new Liberal organ , the Daily News , became the favourite newspaper of the Chamber-lain family .sx How plain a stamp Key's Liberalism had set on University College School has been seen .sx But in foreign politics , let it be well observed , the Chamberlains were not supporters of Cobden and Bright , but were Palmerstonian like the majority of the advanced middle classes .sx The European revolutions of 1848 had awakened enthusiasm amongst many of them .sx On these , Kossuth's oratory and Mazzini's writing left a lifelong impression .sx They sympathised with the foreign refugees , swarming in London .sx " Liberty " against " Tyranny " was their simple and fervid ideal .sx When the dispute with Russia moved towards armed conflict in 1853 and 1854 , while young Joseph was working in Milk Street , the Daily News supported the war , and so did its readers , the Chamberlains .sx Many of the most advanced Liberals and ex-Chartists of that time could not forgive the Emperor Nicholas for trampling out the Hungarian insurrection a few years before , and they thought the Tsardom a menace to all European liberty .sx VI .sx And from this we pass naturally to the moral background and to the intensely religious atmosphere of Chamberlain's life then and long afterwards .sx The Liberal politics followed inevitably from the Unitarian creed .sx In religion they were a minority apart , the extreme Left of the dissenters as conscious of their division from the mass of other Nonconformists as these were of their .sx separation from the Church .sx To speak somewhat more of this is vital to the subject .sx Chamberlain's inward life until nearly forty was directed by his religious upbringing .sx We need not go back to " the battle of the diphthongs " between Homoousians and Homoiousians the tremendous subtleties concerning divinity and humanity disputed by Arius and Athanasius .sx Amongst innumerable accounts the grandeur of Gibbon's treatment is familiar .sx Nor need we dwell much on the new movements almost immediately after the Reformation , when anti-Trinitarian doctrines seemed flagrant blasphemy to Lutherans and Calvinists alike .sx In England , from the Reformation to the Civil Wars , Arianism and Socinianism had their isolated martyrs , sharing at the hands of other Protestants the same fate of burning alive suffered by the brilliant Servetus at Geneva .sx The gifted and persecuted John Biddle is often called the father of English Unitarianism .sx Against the Trinity he preached openly under Cromwell ; and preached not merely by denial , as was too often supposed then and after , but fervently in favour of what he believed to be a higher creed of reconciliation and love between God and man .sx Adherents increased both in London and the West where the Chamberlains may very well have been early amongst them and it was soon cried with alarm , " The devil is at the door ; there is not a city or town , scarce a village in England wherein some of this poison is not poured " .sx After the ruin of organised Presbyterianism by the Act of Uniformity ; with the expulsion of the two thousand ministers like Joseph Chamberlain's ancestor Richard Serjeant ; and under further severities the banned Puritans only searched and questioned the more all things belonging to tradition and authority .sx Unitarians were excluded from the Act of Toleration .sx Their total suppression was demanded by other Nonconformists .sx But instead many of the old Presbyterian chapels passed over gradually to Unitarianism , and it was much recruited from former Independent congregations .sx It was as strong in Bristol and the neighbouring West , whence the Chamberlains sprang , as in London whither they went perhaps for the enjoyment of more religious and social opportunities than were possible in the villages for people of their persuasion .sx Until 1813 the law , though .sx nominal rather than enforced , still called it blasphemy to speak against the Trinity .sx Like Deism , in the eighteenth century , Unitarianism steadily increased .sx It claimed the adhesion or approval of many famous names persons as various as Dr. Priestley , Richard Price , the Duke of Grafton , Charles Lamb , Hazlitt ; and , as everyone knows , Coleridge ardently aspired at first to preach in the Unitarian pulpit and not otherwise .sx There was a stir in London when Dr. Lindsey , after resigning his ministry in the Church of England , became pastor in 1774 of the Essex Street Chapel .sx In the decades from that date to the point now reached , modern Unitarianism as a distinctive religious community was founded and extended .sx Somewhat of it , as held intensely and eagerly practised by Chamberlain's father , we are bound to understand .sx It was changing from dependence on rigid scriptural interpretation to a broader rationalism in belief and to warmly humanitarian ideals .sx The orthodox doctrine of the Atonement was almost necessarily abandoned with that of the Trinity .sx Hence the Unitarian hope .sx Adam's race did not fall with Adam .sx There was no radical corruption of human nature .sx Christ , though not deity , enriched supremely divine enlightenment in the soul of man ; or as old words put it , " What we had by Christ was that he taught us the way to " .sx The Holy Spirit was communicated to him at his baptism .sx Universal redemption was the truth of his message .sx Eternal punishment was rejected .sx By degrees were abandoned belief in miracles and in verbal inspiration of the Scriptures .sx Other postulates followed men are as immortal as they deserve much as Browning puts it , that " the soul doubtless is immortal where a soul can be " .sx The Kingdom of God is within you :sx there within is divine revelation to be sought .sx The Fatherhood of God implies the brotherhood of man .sx Right conduct is positive and demands personal good works .sx That only is the true imitatio Christi .sx In some sort where no more is permissible , these glances into the soul of a community then generally regarded as more heretical than the Jews may suggest what the household faith meant to Chamberlain's father and the growing boy ; and how , not without a touch of moral challenge , .sx they felt themselves set apart .sx The boy was bred with an instinct for assailing things usually accepted .sx That was to be his life .sx vii .sx There were , of course , Unitarian congregations in London as elsewhere long before Essex Street Chapel was opened and Unitarianism then declared its separateness .sx The Chamberlains almost from the first settlement in London had attended at the older chapel in Little Carter Lane , Doctors' Commons .sx There , between St. Paul's and the river , an inn , the " Saracen's " , was bought and pulled down .sx On its site was erected the new edifice of brick .sx The foundation-stone was laid in the very year , 1733 , when William from Lacock was bound apprentice to the Cordwainers .sx There the Chamberlains worshipped and served for over a century and a quarter .sx The congregation traced its descent to a " small but loving and attentive " , gathered together by Matthew Sylvester , one of the ejected divines .sx One witness re-cords more than a hundred years ago :sx " The Carter Lane people are few but united .sx .. one family in particular , the Chamberlains , have shewn me as much kindness as ever I received in my life .sx The congregation is composed for the most part of the higher sort of tradesmen , plain , honest and sincere .sx " Not the House of Commons was more familiar to our Joseph later than was to him in his youth the interior of this chapel .sx It was described in 1808 by a writer on dissenting churches in London .sx " This chapel is of square form and contains three galleries ; the inside is furnished with remarkable neatness , and in point of workmanship is scarcely equalled by any dissenting place of worship in London .sx The sombre appearance it exhibits appears suited in all ways to the solemnity of divine worship .sx " But the sombre interior was not so dark as the .sx swarming slums around .sx Henry Solly , once its well-known minister , sighed .sx No one who had not dived into the squalid and gloomy dens in the numerous courts and alleys and narrow streets on the South side of St. Paul's Cathedral , where the industrious poor were then crowded together , can form any conception of the state of things in that district , far worse , I believe , as regarded the wretched , filthy condition of the tenements and the number of families living in single rooms , than any other locality of the same area in London .sx The physical disease and the moral degradation engendered by this horrible over-crowding was such as no one would dare to describe .sx Leading members of the congregation removed more and more to the suburbs and outskirts .sx In many cases their sons and daughters became less available for Sunday school teaching and charitable work in the neighbourhood .sx To some it was " a most distasteful suggestion that they should come or remain in its disagreeable depths in order to have social intercourse , or to promote rational recreation among the denizens of Holiday Yard and Huggin " .sx If others shrank , not so the Chamberlains .sx They held to the principle of personal service .sx The minister during the most impressionable part of young Joseph's life was a man of high attainments and amiable character , Dr. Joseph Hutton , the father of Richard Holt Hutton of the Spectator .sx In this dismal environment , but with all the glow of that spiritual and social spirit , young Chamberlain , between the ages of sixteen and eighteen , became a Sunday school teacher .sx At that period no attempt was made by any other Anglican or dissenting communion to carry religious ministrations amongst the wharfingers , the riverside workers , the " roughs" .sx The Unitarians who took up that mission added to Carter Lane Chapel a place called Cobbs Hall .sx There young Joseph , with the older teachers , held the Sunday school class for the slum children .sx But these labours of the arch-heresy in the shadow of St. Paul's roused .sx displeasure and alarm amongst some of the Anglican clergy of the neighbourhood .sx Once two curates stood at the entrance of Cobbs Hall and warned the children against going in lest they should be led to perdition .sx It must be recollected again and always in this study of the early making of a character , that Unitarians still felt themselves a community emphatically differentiated from all Trinitarians whether Anglican , Catholic or Nonconformist .sx