No church is more illustriously associated with the traditions of U.S. freedom than Boston's Unitarian Second (Old North) Church. Founded in 1649, used by Silversmith Paul Revere for his famed "one if by land, two if by sea" signal, stripped for firewood by the British troops in 1776, it was the only church Ralph Waldo Emerson ever served as pastor. The Rev. Clayton Brooks Hale, its 20th, was proud to be called there in 1950. But last week New Hampshire-born, 36-year-old Unitarian Hale, a graduate of Tufts College and Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, sorrowfully found his congregation riven by a controversy for...
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