ABSTRACT
Abner Kneeland (1774-1844) pursued a more and more liberal and rational religious course beginning with the Baptists, moving to association with the Congregationalists and on to Universalist pulpits in which he was beset by doubt about the status of the Scriptures. His work as editor and journalist brought him into contact with the free-thinkers, Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, and eventually he suspended himself from the Universaliste. His rigorous insistence on the utterly inadequate evidential bases of the central claims of Christianity was only a prelude to his notorious trial for blasphemy in Boston in 1834, leading to a short term of imprisonment. His case was seen as a test of the limits of freedom of opinion in religion and, as such, received public support, in the form of a petition for his pardon, by Channing, Theodore Parker, (a leading younger Unitarian minister), Emerson and the abolitionist Garrison, even though they did not share his views.
