William Ellery Channing, minister of religion

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WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. With
two photogravure Portraits. Crown 8vo,
gilt top, $1.75, «^/. Postage extra.

THEODORE PARKER: Preacher and
Reformer. With two photogravure Por-
traits. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY,
Boston and New York.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

WILLIAM ELLERY
CHANNING

MINISTBE OF EELIGION
By JOHN WHITE CHADWICK

'm^^^^m

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY JOHN WHITE CHADWICK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published March, igos

To 3

SDeDicateO

To those men and women of the present

time who are endeavoring

in the spirit of

WILLIAM ELLEKY CHANNING

to unite all social classes, sects, and nations in

the bonds of mutual understanding,

fraternal sympathy, and

sincere good-will

PEEFACB

I HAVE been impelled to write a new life of
Channing by several motives, two of which have a
somewhat contradictory appearance, one of them
being the deeper interest in Channing which has
of late been manifested in quarters where there
had been imperfect knowledge of his qualities, too
little sympathy with his spirit, and the other the
disproportion which, I thought, existed between
the significance of his thought and message and
their limited appreciation. The deeper interest
seemed to invite a fresh delineation ; the inade-
quate appreciation to lay on me a clear command.
Moreover, even among those who have had the
special care of Channing' s name and fame, I had
found the younger generations more ignorant of
him and more indifferent to him than I thought
was right, and I desired to communicate to them
something of the enthusiasm and delight which for
many years had animated my own breast. I was
encouraged to make the attempt by the cordial
reception accorded to my " Theodore Parker,"

viii PREFACE

which was published two years since. I knew
without warning that to write Channing's life was
a very different thing from writing Parker's, —
as different as carving a statue from painting a
picture, so much warmth and color were there
in Parker's experience and personality, so little in
the older and the greater man's ; but I was per-
suaded that there were aspects of Channing's life
that assured to any faithful presentation of it a
peculiar and dramatic interest, and these I have
endeavored to make plain. There has been for
me additional instigation in my sense that while
on certain lines the thought and purpose of our
time are approximating Channing's, and should
enjoy a livelier conscious sympathy with him, on
other lines they are departing from him to their
hurt and shame, and making themselves amenable
to his deprecation and rebuke. Simultaneously I
have felt that Channing's best work, his surest
prophecy, was more upon the social side than on
the theological, and I have thought I could not do
the present time a better service than to confront
it with his lofty spirit and his serious aims.

In the way of sources, I need hardly say that
my principal indebtedness has been to Channing's
" Works " (which, as published by the American
Unitarian Association, contain in one volume the

PREFACE ix

six originally published and " The Perfect Life ")
and the " Memoir " of 1848, which, however defec-
tive its arrangement, is remarkable for its full dis-
closure of Channing's mind in his own words. Two
misfortunes have attended my work : the burning
of a car in southern California which contained
nearly all of Dr. Channing's manuscripts and let-
ters, and the death of his son, William Francis
Channing, only a little while before I began the
collection of my material. His affectionate and
reverent memory would have been an inestimable
service, and its loss to me I account much greater
than that of Channing's manuscripts, which, I am
persuaded, had ample representation in the " Me-
moir " and " Works." Some of the most precious
escaped the general destruction ; and of these two
of the most important, the Baltimore Sermon and
that on Self-Denial, I now proudly call my own.
I have had a full line of Channing's publications
in their original pamphlet forms, which have
seemed to bring me into closer touch with liim
than the books in which, with few exceptions, they
were ultimately incorporated. Much has been
written about Channing; little of the best has,
I trust, escaped my attention. The hundredth
anniversary of his birth was particularly fertile
in reminiscences and appreciations. But I have

X PREFACE

valued quite as much, or more, the side glances of
many biographies of his contemporaries, and other
books illustrative of his time. It was at one time
my purpose to make and print a list of the books
and articles which had served me in various de-
grees, but I found that, while it would contain
several hundred titles, to make it complete would
be very difficult. My footnotes and other refer-
ences will, in part, make good the lack of such a
list.

One of the happiest fortunes of my life has been
an affectionate relation with some of the early
leaders who knew Channing well, — Dewey, Fur-
ness, Bartol, Bellows, Hedge, — and many things
which they told me I have not forgotten. I have
had much direct help from others, from so many
that I cannot name them all ; but some expression
of my gratitude there must be to Dr. Channing's
granddaughter, Mrs. Grace Ellery Channing-Stet-
son, to whom I am much indebted, and to my
friend William Channing Gannett, whom little
that throws light on Channing has escaped. For
the index — a laborious task, which for me would
have been harder than to write the book — I am
indebted to my wife ; also for much help in the
proofreading, to say nothing of her good advice
at many doubtful points, and her continuous en-
couragement.

PREFACE xi

It is sixty years to-day since Channing died.
So long dead, almost his lifetime, lie yet speaks to
many minds and hearts. If what I have written
extends the sphere of his influence ever so little, I
shall be glad. If this satisfaction is denied me,
I shall still have had for two years such discourse
with the spirit of this great and good man as has
been to me a holy contemplation, to be prized
hereafter among the happiest fortunes of my life.

J. W. C.
October 2, 1902.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I
The Newport Boy 1

CHAPTER II
Cambridge and Richmond 28

CHAPTER ni
The Parish Minister 55

^ CHAPTER IV
4 Evolution and Reaction 84

CHAPTER V
The Divided Fold 115

CHAPTER VI
Things New and Old 149

CHAPTER VII
Letters and Politics 184

CHAPTER VIII
What Channing preached 215

CHAPTER IX
Between Two Fires 259

CHAPTER X
The Social Reformer 296

CHAPTER XI
The Open Mind ; 328

xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER XII
The Personal Aspect 359

CHAPTER XIII
The Last Stage , o . . 393

CHAPTER XIV
As Dying and Behold! 422

The frontispiece portrait of WiUiam EUery Channing is from
the original painting (1839) by S. Gambardella, owned by Miss
Elizabeth P. Channing of Milton.

The portrait at page 212 is from the painting (1811) by
Washington AllstODj at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

CHRONOLOGY

1780. April 7. Born in Newport, R. I.

1780. May 28. Baptized by Dr. Ezra Stiles.

1792. Goes to New London, Conn., to study with his

uncle, Henry Channing.

1792. September 21. His father dies.

1794. Enters Harvard College.

1798. Is graduated from Harvard.

1798. Goes as tutor to Richmond.

1800. Returns to Newport.

1802. Studies theology in Cambridge.

1803. June 1. Ordained and installed Minister of the

Federal Street Society.

1809. New church is built.

1810. His brother Francis dies and (May 25) his nephew,

William Henry Channing, is born.
1812. Preaches anti-war sermon.

1814. Preaches at King's Chapel on Fall of Napoleon

Bonaparte.

1814. Is married to his cousin, Ruth Gibbs.

1815. Liberal Christians assailed, and Channing an-

swers assaults with letters to Thacher and
Worcester. Most signal year of "Unitarian
Controversy."

1816. Sermon upon War before Congregational minis-

ters of Massachusetts.

1819. Preaches " Baltimore Sermon " at ordination of

Jared Sparks.

1820. Founds Berry Street Conference.

1821. Delivers Dudleian Lecture at Harvard College.

1822. Goes to Europe for health in May.

XVI CHRONOLOGY

1823. Returns from Europe in August.

1824. Ezra Stiles Gannett becomes his colleague,

Channing preaching his ordination sermon.

1825. American Unitarian Association organized.
1825-30. Writes articles on Milton, Fdnelon, and Napoleon.

1826. Preaches sermon at dedication Second Unitarian

Congregational Church, New York.

1828. Preaches "Likeness to God" at ordination of

Frederick A. Farley, in Providence, R. 1.

1830. May 26. Preaches " Spiritual Freedom " : an-

nual Election Sermon.

1830. Publishes "Discourses, Reviews, and Miscella-

nies."

1830. Goes to West Indies in November.

1831. January 1. First number of Garrison's "Lib-

erator " appears.

1831. Channing returns from West Indies in May.

1832. Publishes second volume : eleven sermons.

1834. May 25. His mother, Lucy EUery Channing,

dies.

1835. Publishes " Slavery " soon after pro-slavery mob.

1835. Preaches and publishes sermon upon War.

1836. Publishes " The Abolitionists," an open letter to

James G. Birney.

1837. Writes open letter to Henry Clay on Ajmexation

of Texas.

1837. Takes leading part in Faneuil Hall meeting,

called to consider murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy.

1838. Delivers and publishes " Lecture upon War."
1838. Heads petition for release of Abner Kneeland.
1838. Delivers " Self-Culture " lecture.

1838. July 15. Emerson's Divinity School Address.

1839. " Remarks on Slavery Question " : an open letter

to Jonathan Phillips criticising Henry Clay.

1840. Delivers and publishes " Elevation of the Labor-

ing Classes " lectures.

1840. Publishes " Emancipation."

1841. May 19. Theodore Parker's South Boston ser-

mon.

CHRONOLOGY xvii

1841. May 30. Channing preaches sermon, " The

Church," in Philadelphia.

1841. Works published in five volumes ; sixth in 1843.

1842. April 7. His sixty-second birthday. Preaches

for the last time at Federal Street.
1842. Publishes "Duty of the Free States," in two

parts.
1842. August 1. Delivers " Lenox Address " on eighth

anniversary of West India emancipation.
1842. October 2. Channing dies at Bennington, Vt.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

CHAPTER I
THE NEWPORT BOY

Channing might well tliank God, as he did
with much fervor, that he was born in Rhode
Island. He was speaking of the beautiful island
of that name on which Newport is here built com-
pactly together and there loosely spread out, but he
had reason to be further grateful for the good
fortune of being born in a State consecrated by
memories of Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton
to those principles of religious liberty which were
the most animating principles of his life. Wil-
liams's doctrine of " soul hberty " was a splendid
legacy, not only to the particular denomination from
which he passed, after brief tarrying, to a more
open fellowship, but to "a free church in a free
state " in its now continental breadth. Gorton's
service, though less conspicuous, was perhaps more
consistent in its entire expression than Williams's
impulsive and erratic course. Even those historians ^

1 John Fiske aud Charles Francis Adams. But see an excel-
lent monograph by Lewis G. Janes, Samuell Gorton : A For-
gotten Founder of our Liberties ; First Settler of Warwick, B. L
Providence : Preston & Rounds, 1896.

2 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

who should have done him fuU justice have done
him less than that, but many who have done better
than Gorton have fared worse with those who are
the arbiters of fame.

The " beautiful island " of Channing's devout
admiration had its peculiar associations with reli-
gious liberty, its first settlers having been Anne
Hutchinson and the little company who went out-
side the camp with her, sharing her honorable
reproach. During Channing's boyhood the natural
beauty was not so diversified as it has been of late
by the lordly pleasure houses of a summer popula-
tion ; and though Newport had even then its social
pride, it was humility compared with the lavish
ostentation with which wealth and fashion now
disport themselves along the brilliant avenues and
in the palatial villas which express and flatter the
self-importance of the newly rich. The cliffs and
beaches are less purely natural than they were
when young Channing revelled in their beauty, but
man's control stops with the ocean's edge. Un-
changed in its sublimity of calm or storm, that
gleams and glooms to-day as then, yet to few of
the gay throng which drifts seaward on the tidal
heat of summer does it speak the language which
it had for Channing's youth and for his latest
years. In one respect, Newport and the island
round about were never less beautiful than at the
time of Channing's birth. The British occupation
had made havoc everywhere, and especially it had
denuded the landscape of the woods and trees

THE NEWPORT BOY 3

which had been its special pride. Every grow-
ing thing that promised firewood the British had
cut down, so that in the winter before Channing's
birth a cord of such wood sold for 820 ; in good
money, I suppose, for in the depreciated currency
of the time that would be too little rather than too
much.

The light of poetry, adventure, and romance
lies warm on the New England seaport towns;
on few, if any, quite so pleasantly as on New-
port. The town attracted the most fond regards
of Curtis in his " lotus-eating " days, and from the
vantage of his Easy Chair his eye took in its Re-
volutionary episodes, bright with the red English
uniforms and the white and gold of our gay
French allies ; attractive with the tender fortunes
of the Robinson sisters, those Quaker beauties
whose chariot set a little world on fire, and distin-
guished by the presence of Washington and Ro-
chambeau walking up the Long Wharf together
to their joint reception in the town. In his
" Oldport Days " Colonel Higginson has harvested
more intimate associations, the growth of a pro-
tracted residence, out of his treasures bringing
things new and old of rival worth. Only to the
touchstone that he brought to the old streets
and wharves and the vessels rotting at the piers
would these things have yielded up their mysteries.
Many have lived long with them and never guessed
what tales they had to tell.

Before the Revolution the town enjoyed com-

4 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

mercial prominence, and abeady was a watering-
place much prized by Southern planters, who,
before their pleasure, had, perhaps, first their busi-
ness on the wharves, where there were slaves from
Africa for such as cared to purchase them for rum
or cash. One of the cages in which these slaves
were huddled was a visible testimony a short time
since, if it is not so still. Three hundred Jew-
ish families in the town were proof of the com-
mercial tone. Many of these had been landed in
Newport by the Lisbon earthquake, among them
Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, who owned eighty-eight
square-riggers, sailing in his foreign trade. No
wonder the town boasted bigger mail-bags than
New York! Its population in 1774 was 9000,
but it fell off 4000 the next year, and must have
continued falling off as the war for independence
dragged its slow length along. If English and
French occupation and the annual Southern visita-
tion did not improve the morals of the town, these
circumstances touched its manners to a finer grace,
while the seafaring and sailor life of the townfolk
made swearing, drinking, and licentiousness of
speech and manners so abound as to give the town
what was esteemed by many its most characteristic
note.

Of hardly any period of Newport's earlier his-
tory have we more vivid information than of that
which, from our immediate point of view, had for
its main incident Dr. Channing's birth. The infor-
mation is furnished by the journal of the Baron

THE NEWPORT BOY 5

du Bourg and the letters of Count Rocliambeau,^
whose impression of the well-to-do Newporters was
that they spent all their time at table. Lafayette
had left France for America March 6, 1780, with
the good news of an intended fleet and army for
the support of the overworn and sometimes despair-
ing revolutionists, and, arriving April 27, he was
still on the high seas when William Ellery Chan-
ning was born April 7, the third of ten children,
nine of whom reached maturity and three ^ attained

^ See also the diary of Ezra Stiles, who, just after Channing's
birth, made a pastoral visit to his Newport flock, which had not
yet formally surrendered him to Yale College. The term of his
visit included " the dark day," which he describes minutely, and
with more of scientific than of superstitious inclination. His
description of the devastated town and desecrated church is full
of interest. He preached two Sundays, and on the afternoon of
the second. May 28th, he baptized the infant son of his friends,
William and Lucy Channing.

2 WiUiam Ellery ; Walter, a much-valued Boston physician of
literary and aesthetic tastes, born 1786 ; Edward Tyrrel, Har-
vard Professor of Rhetoric, who exerted a profound influence on
a generation of writers, sometime editor and often contributor to
the North American Review, born 1790. An older brother, Francis,
who graduated from Harvard in 1794 and died in 1810, was
esteemed by his brothers and friends as the most gifted of the
family. William Henry Channing, only son of Francis, published
in 1848 the biography of Dr. Channing, which is my richest
mine. His own biography, written by 0. B. Frothingham, was
published in 1886. Born in 1810, he died in 1884. His cousin,
" Ellery Channing " (William Ellery), of Concord, a poet of some
perfect poems, many noble passages, and a few immortal lines,
born 1818, died 1901, was son of Dr. Walter Channing. He was
Thoreau's intimate friend and biographer. Dr. W. E. Chan-
ning's son, William Francis, recently dead, was a man of admira-
ble parts, a distinguished inventor and eager social reformer.
His daughter Eva is well known in Boston on educational and
other lines. His daughter Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson is a

6 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

distinguished reputation. I have seen the record
of William's birth, made by his father with quick
haste in the family Bible,^ with no possible pre-
science that the name he wrote would be

" Sweeter than honey to the lips of men."

The child came of good stock on both sides of
the house, being allied on the maternal side with
the Cabots, Lees, Jacksons, Lowells ; on the pa-
ternal with the Gibbs, Ellery, Dana, and Allston
families, " the glories of whose blood and state "
are not to be despised. The father, WiUiam
Channing, was the son of John Channing, a New-
port merchant, whose fortunes, generally prosper-
ous, at last came to grief. John married the widow
Robinson, whose maiden name was Mary Chalo-
ner, and she, after his death, kept a little shop for
the maintenance of her family, between one cus-
tomer and another her bright needles knitting up
"the ravelled sleave of care," her old-fashioned
dignity and courtesy combining with her cheerful
energy to win for her a sincere, if sometimes
amused, respect. Her husband's father was another

poet who has written some very beautiful things. Edward Chan-
ning, the present historian and Harvard professor, born 1856, is
the youngest son of Ellery Channing, the Concord poet, who mar-
ried a sister of Margaret Fuller. But I must arbitrarily break
off the lengthening roll at the name of Elizabeth P. Channing, a
thoughtful essayist, daughter of the Rev. George Channing, who
was Dr. Channing's youngest brother except Edward, and out-
lived the one hundredth anniversary of the doctor's birth.

1 Some twenty years since, when I saw it, it was in the posses-
sion of Professor W. C. Russell, a nephew of Dr. Channing, at
the time acting president of Cornell University.

THE NEWPORT BOY 7

Jolin Channing, the first American Clianning
known to tlie genealogists, who came from Dorset-
shire, Eng.,in 1711. On the same vessel with him
came Mary Antram. Either they were mutually
pledged when they set out, or the long voyage
afforded such conditions for a successful courtship
as could hardly be escaped. It is certain that they
were married soon after their arrival in Boston.

William Channing, Dr. Channing's father, was
born in Newport, June 11, 1751, and graduated
from Princeton College, N. J., in 1769. Heading
law in Providence, he began its practice in New-
port in 1771, and two years later married Lucy
Ellery.^ With much professional ability, his in-
clination to politics may have done something to
qualify his success. A large family had the same
effect, and, at his death in 1793, he had done
little towards amassing a fortune, or even a com-
petency. Yet he was an official pluralist, being at
the same time attorney-general of the State and
United States district attorney. His son's recol-
lections of him were among the pleasantest of his
early years. He was so much attached to Prince-
ton, that he thought to send William there, and
it is interesting to imagine what a difference for
him and many others the hyper-orthodox influences
w^ould have made. His character was sincerely

1 At the time of William's birth, the house occupied by his
parents was that which is now 24 School Street, and serves the
uses of a Home for Friendless Children. There is a g-ood picture
of it in Charles T. Brooks's Clianning : A Centennial Memory.

8 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

religious, and he was devoted to the interests of
the local Congregational church. He was particu-
larly active in restoring its meeting-house, which
the British troops had occupied and wantonly de-
faced, to the uses of public worship. His reli-
gious sentiments were marked by a liberality that
was in some degree prophetic of his son's liberal
preeminence. His relations with Dr. Ezra Stiles,
at one time his minister, contributed to his mental
breadth. Newport was much given to profanity,
but the father had for this habit a particular ab-
horrence. " I recollect with gratitude," says Wil-
liam, " the impression he made on my own mind.
I owed it to him, that, though living in the atmos-
phere of this vice, no profane word ever passed
my lips." Genial, though dignified and impressive,
his style and manner were described as " melliflu-
ous " by a professional friend. William neverthe-
less recalled a burst of indignation so vehement
as to drive him from the court-house in a spasm
of fear. He was a gentle boy, and unused to
seeing his father in his " Ercles' vein." A hap-
pier experience was his being present, May 29,
1790, at the Rhode Island convention, which
adopted the national Constitution of 1787. He
never forgot the enthusiasm of the moment, nor
his father's happiness in the event.^ The elder

1 It should be remembered that Rhode Island was so tardy in
her adoption of the Constitution that she came near to losing-
the distinction of being- one of " the original thirteen." Vermont
■was close upon her heels.

THE NEWPORT BOY 9

Channing was warmly sympathetic with the earlier
stages of the French Revolution, but by the exe-
cution of Louis XVI. his hopes were overclouded,
not to reemerge. The grandfather, following the
local habit of his generation, had domestic slaves,
and it was a grief to Dr. Channing's memory that
his father had no sensibility to the evil done.
These slaves were set free soon after the Revolu-
tionary war, and Dr. Channing had the pleasure of
remembering how kind his father was to them in
their "bewildering freedom." One of the scanty
pleasures of the boy's life was admission to his
father's office when the choir gathered there to
practise the Sunday hymns in which the father
took great interest. He also held the faith of
Bacon, that gardening is the purest of all plea-
sures. Not content with one garden, he had two,
and in these he cultivated a great variety of
plants and vegetables, the latter doing much to
make his table liberal for his family and the
friends to whom he extended a hospitality which
was perhaps too generous for his means. For all
the benignity of his face and voice, he was too
observant of the traditional proprieties to have
any real comradeship with his children, and his
discipline, if less impulsive than the mother's, was
not less severe.

The mother's father, William Ellery,^ was a man
of more engaging qualities. Born in 1727, he

1 See Life by Edward Tyrrel Channing in Sparks's American
Biographies.

10 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

made an early marriage with Ann Remington, of
Cambridge, Mass., a woman who looked well to the
ways of her house, and was cheerfully devoted to
her husband's and her children's happiness. She
died in 1764, while the older of the children were
still young, and for more than fifty years her hus-
band kept her memory green in reverent loneliness.
In the first years of his married life his habits were
convivial, but he at once mended them when he
found that his vnie had recorded in her almanac
her tender gratitude for an evening he had spent
at home. There could have been little virulence
in a disease that could be cured by a remedy so
simple, taken once for all. He wrote a brief auto-
biography which is remarkable for its blended
self-esteem and careful modesty. Looking back
over his life, he found that he had been " a dab-
bler" when he might have been a skilful physician
or attorney. He wrote, —

I have been a clerk of a court, a quack lawyer, a
member of Congress, one of the lords of the admiralty,
a judge, a loan officer, and finally a collector of the cus-
toms, and thus, not without many difficulties, but as
honestly, thank God, as most men, I have got through
the journey of a varied and sometimes anxious fife.

His commercial prospects were ruined by the
embarrassments growing out of British trade re-
strictions. In 1770 he began the practice of the
law, and simultaneously he became one of the most
ardent of the " Sons of Liberty," and of " those
active spirits who were preparing themselves and

THE NEWPORT BOY 11

the people for a separation from the mother coun-
try." So distinguished was the part he played
upon this memorable scene, that he was sent, with
Stephen Hopkins, of more venerable fame, to
represent Rhode Island in the Congress which, on
July 2, 1776, resolved upon the independence of
the colonies, and two days later gave the reasons
for their actions in a declaration, which, after a
century and more of good repute, has recently
excited the suspicions of our progressive politicians
and divines. Eight years in Congress secured
him a delightful intimacy with influential men,
and his wit and raillery endeared him to them and
many others as a companion to be greatly prized.
Yet there seems to be a defect of humor in some
of the comments that he makes on his own char-
acter. For example, —

His very kindness and gentleness had none of the
inertness of mere good temper, but were animated by
an active cherished principle of love, which discrimi-
nated its objects, and was all alive for the happiness of
others.

All this may have been well deserved, but it
would have come with better grace from some
other person. So, too, the testimony to the hon-
esty and fairness of his mind as the great distinc-
tion of his character, and its most satisfactory
explanation. Yet these qualities were recognized
by the grandson who bore his name as unques-
tionably real, and the correspondence of the two
men, continued till past Channing's middle life, was

12 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

always valued by Channing as a means of better
insight into the deep things of morals and religion.
Mr. Ellery lived to be ninety-two years old, a ven-
erated friend and citizen, dying in 1820 in the
town where he was born.

His daughter, Lucy, Channing' s mother, was a
little woman, destined in this respect to set the
seal of her physical character upon her son. Her
face, as painted by Allston,^ is also much like his,
but with a difference, being hard and cold where
his was mild and luminous. The engraver may
have been unfaithful to the artist, or the artist to
his subject. She made the most of her inches
by her erect carriage and elastic motion. Her
mind was quick and versatile, and her speech had
a touch of Saxon simplicity and quaintness which
made her formidable to pretenders and to evil-
doers. The " rough nobleness " ascribed to her
by her nephew, William Henry Channing, was, I
infer, sometimes conspicuously rough. Hers was
not, he says, a tranquil temperament, and to smooth
its ruffled waters was an office to which her more
placid husband was frequently called. " Don't
trouble yourself, Lucy ; I will make all smooth,"
was a familiar household note. Without his help
and with the increasing care and worry that his
death involved, her temper possibly took on a
sharper edge. Whatever the necessary qualifica-
tions, she was a woman of the most generous im-
pulses, and the most loving heart. Her son's trib-

1 See Brooks's Channing : A Centennial Memory.

THE NEWPORT BOY 13

ute to her worth was written when he had made full
proof of her goodness. She lived to see him past
his fiftieth year, and attaining to the full measure
of his power, though hardly to the consummation
of his fame.

The most remarkable trait in my mother's character
was the rectitude and simplicity of her mind. Perhaps
I have never known her equal in this respect. She
was true in thought, word, and life. She had the firm-
ness to see the truth, to speak it, to act upon it. She
was direct in judgment and conversation, and in my
long intercourse with her I cannot recall one word or
action betraying the slightest insincerity. She had
keen insight into character. She was not to be imposed
upon by others, and, what is rarer, she practised no
imposition upon her own mind. She saw things, per-
sons, events, as they were, and spoke of them by their
right names. Her partialities did not blind her, even
to her children. Her love was without illusion. She
recognized, unerringly and with dehght, fairness, hon-
esty, genuine uprightness, and shrunk as by instinct
from everything specious, the factitious in character,
and plausible in manners.

It was a fortunate circumstance that the child
who lived to bear this witness did not in one partic-
ular — the body's health — make good the Words-
worthian doctrine ; he was not father of the man.
There was no likeness of the chronic invalid of
his majority in the glowing health and active mo-
tions of the boy, or in the young man's sprightly
vigor and athletic grace. Had it been otherwise,
his childhood would have been a greater burden

14 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

than he could bear. The boon of health was cer-
tainly an alleviation of that childhood's conscious
weight. But he looked back upon no happy child-
hood from the summit of his later years. He said
repeatedly that his childhood was the least happy
period of his life, and that, as he had grown older,
each year had been happier than the last. Possi-
bly, and probably, there was some shadow falling
backward here from the experience of his later
prime. The sober fact was, however, sufficiently
deplorable. He was not a happy boy because his

I parents, doing their duty by him in the most con-
scientious manner, were not affable and friendly
with him, gave him a stony formalism when he
craved spontaneous affection, were of the opinion
that he should be seen and not heard, and that he
should know his place. Then, too, there was the
burden of the inherited theology and the cheerless
piety of the New England Puritan early to solem-
nize his tremulous heart. Wholly believing what
his elders only partly believed, how could the
child be gay ? Besides, his early schoohng was of
no pleasant kind. But the main fact at this stage
of his development was that he was a young ideal-
ist, and " wanted better bread than could be made

[_ jof wheat." He found it hard to meet the require-
ments of the parental rule, and those, more exigent,
of his own sensitive conscience.

An aged relative remembered him in his third
or fourth year as " the most splendid child she
ever saw." Her memory made a pretty picture of

THE NEWPORT BOY 15

him standing beside his mother in her pew, with
bright eyes and rosy cheeks, his light brown hair
falling in curls over his ruffled collar and green
velvet jacket, his eager gaze surveying the congre-
gation with prophetic interest. The beauty of this
picture is confirmed by many recollections. The
mother's delicate health sent him to school at such
an early age that an old colored servant often took
him thither in his arms. His first teacher died, and
he was taken to see her in her coffin, in the spirit
of the hymn my grandmother taught me when my
own years were few.

O lovely appearance of death !

What sig-ht upon earth is so fair !
Not all the gay pageants of earth

Can with a dead body compare.

The impression which the boy got was so strong
that the recollection of it always remained with
him. So did that of his next mistress, as well it
might, for the sceptre of her autocracy was a long
stick or fishing-pole, with which she could keep in
touch with the remotest scholar in the room. So
agile was it that it seemed, at least to one imagi-
native boy, to be gifted with sight and hearing.
It beset the delinquent behind and before, and
there was no escape from it. One teacher did her
best to spoil him by holding him up as a model,
saying to the bad boys, " I wish in my heart you
were like WiUiam Channing ! " Later he went
to Mr. Rogers, who kept a day and boarding-
school of such repute that boys came to it from a

16 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

distance ; some from the far South. Flogging was
the regular discipline, and William seems to have
suffered with the rest. The infliction outraged his
sense of honor and helped to form in him a life-
long sentiment of opposition to all corporal pun-
ishments of his fellow creatures, young or old.
That the girls never got a " clapping " gave him
his first sense of the peculiar sacredness of the
gentler sex. Thus early was its loveliness borne
in upon his mind, particularly by a little girl who
used to take " French leave," and go dancing down
the street, her hair upon the wind, her dainty
hands making derisive gestures to the unhappy
prisoners she had left behind. This story gains
in interest when we discover that the little girl,
when grown to womanhood, became Channing's
wife.

So far was the boy from being precocious, that
his teachers and schoolmates were nigh to thinking
him a dunce. It taxes our credulity to think that
he was ever " Bill " to any one, but the story goes
that he was particularly slow at Latin, and that an
assistant in his father's office said to him, " Come,
Bill, they say you 're a fool, but I 'U soon teach
you Latin ; " and he did. Soon William was read-
ing Virgil with delight, and he had more aptitude
for mathematics than generally accompanies the
literary mind. He was indifferent to superficial
acquirements from his early years, liking to under-
stand things thoroughly.

There was education out of school as well as on

THE NEWPORT BOY 17

the severely simple benches and behind the desks
inscribed with proud initials and with many a
mystic sign. Much of the home gardening was
done by Mrs. Channing's boys, and she kept them
well in hand, exacting careful work, and punish-
ing neglect by cutting off the meals which ordina-
rily her enforced economies made scant enough,
a feast impossible. The boys were forbidden to^
go in swimming except when personally conducted
by some one who had reached years of discretion.
Those who disobeyed were detected by the wet ends
of their hair, and the fruit of each last disobedi-
ence was a good whipping. But they learned to
swim, while William, an obedient boy, did uot,
and by that sign went sorrowing all his days.
Regard for his mother's wishes withheld him more
than fear of punishment, though he had an honestj
dread of that ; even more as humiliating than as
hurting horribly. Such was the importance at-
tached to good eating in Newport that Channing
said, " My first notion of glory was attached to an
old black cook belonging to my uncle's household,
whom I saw to be the most important personage in
town." Calling with Miss Peabody upon a New-
port friend, and pressed to eat a piece of her nice
cake, he said, " Ah, Mrs. Clarke, its rich cake has
been the ruin of Newport ! " He suffered more
from reaction from this social temper than from
sympathy with it. Better fed, he would have been
a better man. We read of an itinerant preacher
that he had two forms of grace at table, suited to

18 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

different conditions, one beginning, "Bountiful
Providence ! " and the other, " For the least of
all thy mercies." Doubtless it was a bountiful
providence day when Washington came to New
port and was dined by Channing's father.^ So
the small boy, then ten years old, saw the great
hero plain ,2 and let us trust that he was stopped
and spoken to. John Jay and other Federalists
of great repute were also entertained under the
Channing roof. But though the boy was much
impressed by such visitors, and their significance
for his later Federalism was appreciable, Dr. Stiles
made a more profound because a more continuous
impression. In the Newport sermon of 1836,
when the church in which Hopkins had preached
was dedicated to Unitarian faith and worship,
Channing said of Dr. Stiles ; —

To the influence of this distinguished man in the
circle in which I was brought up, I may owe in part
the indignation which I feel at every invasion of human
rights. In my earliest years I regarded no human
being with equal reverence. I have his form before
me at this moment almost as distinctly as if I had
seen him yesterday.

1 The day was August 17, or thereabout, 1790. When Washing-
ton made his Eastern tour in 1789, Rhode Island was foreign ter-
ritory, and Washington, as President, could not enter it. But
after Rhode Island's tardy adoption of the Constitution he made
the State a visit of courtesy, arriving at Newport August 17th.
2 And did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak with you ?
And did you speak to him again ?
How strange it seems and new !

Browning.

THE NEWPORT BOY 19

His playmates called him " The Peacemaker "
and " The little Minister," ^ but too much might
easily be made of the latter designation and of his
marshalling the family with an extemporized bell
— a warming-pan — to occupy the seats he had
arranged for a religious service and listen to his
eloquent harangue. So many boys have been
through these motions that no prophetic character
can be ascribed to them. The lad's surroundings
were in general such as to foster his religious sen-
sibility. His father was the main pillar of the
Second Congregational Church. His mother sec-
onded his father's religious efforts with unflagging
zeal. Once a week she opened the best parlor,
hermetically sealed at other times, for a Scripture
reading to which all the children were compulsorily
invited, and at which they were expected to put on
a solemn behavior — a difficult business when they
were shivering in their chairs and Touser was
playful with the carpet, which the irreverent wind
bulged into little heaps. The father's aunt, a
woman of feeble health and active piety, held
meetings in her sick-room, presumably at such
times as did not conflict with the home service. A
more cheerful influence was that of Rachel De
Gilder, a strong-minded woman in no doubtful
sense, an upper servant in the house. She wore
her piety with a difference from the common habit
of the time that recommended it to the thoughtful

^ There is a mythical embroidery of this legend to the effect
that he was also called " William the Silent."

20 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

boy. His gratitude to her through her long life
was such that we might easily believe him conscious
of tracing back into her faithful heart some of the
sources of that happy faith which was the inspira-
tion of his maturest service to mankind.

When but a mere child he was, he tells us,
" quite a theologian," though he hated to hear his
grandfather Ellery and others "chopping logic
after the controversial manner of the time." He
remembered the general tone of religion in New-
port as exerting an unhappy influence on his
youthful mind ; and, indeed, it was a questionable
environment which united uncircumscribed pro-
fanity and the Assembly's Catechism in about
equal parts. But if there were influences that
were doubtful or distinctly bad, there were others
that were distinctly good, besides those already
named, one of which, that of Dr. Stiles, requires
fresh emphasis. The doctor had left Newport in
1778 to assume the presidency of Yale. But it
would seem that his returns to Newport were not
infrequent, and that a high value was set on them.
His cordial relations with Benjamin Franklin at-
tested at once his interest in scientific matters and
his religious liberality. Dr. Channing wrote in
1836: —

I can well remember how the name of Dr. Stiles was
cherished among his parishioners, after years of sepa-
ration. His visit to this place was to many a festival.
When little more than a child, I was present at some
of his private meetings with the more religious part of

THE NEWPORT BOY 21

his former congregation, and I recollect how I was
moved by the tears and expressive looks with which his
affectionate exhortations were received. In his faith,
he was what was called a moderate Calvinist ; but his
heart was of no sect. He carried into his religion the
spirit of liberty, which then stirred the whole country.
Intolerance, church tyranny, in all its forms, he ab-
horred. He respected the right of private judgment,
where others would have thought themselves authorized
to restrain it. . . . His friendships were confined to no
parties. He desired to heal the wounds of the divided
church of Christ, not by a common creed, but by the
spirit of love. He wished to break every yoke, civil
and ecclesiastical.-^

The more important of Channing's recollections
of Dr. Samuel Hopkins are those touching the re-
lations of the two men in the younger's early man-
hood. Those touching his first impressions were
much less favorable. But the slightest contact be-
tween two religious leaders who, differing widely,
had still much in common, is too precious to be
overlooked. After Jonathan Edwards, with whom
Hopkins enjoyed an affectionate intimacy, no one
brought to New England Calvinism a more intel-
lectual and spiritual interpretation. Some forty
years ago Mrs. Stowe's " Minister's Wooing " re-

1 I have in my possession a number of his manuscript sermons
given to me by his great-grandson, Rev. William C. Gannett, and
I do not seem to find in them the qualities which Dr. Channing
found inherent in the man, -which only shows how relative im-
pressions are. But they are less oppressively solemn than a
number by his father, Rev. Isaac Stiles, which I also have in
MS., the collection bearing his own label, " Chiefly on Death."

22 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

newed the popular interest in his character and
thought, with some violence to the facts affecting
his domestic life.^ It has been his too exclusively
known opinion that " we should be willing to be
damned for the glory of God." The fact that he
was actually and very practically willing to be,
and was, damned by many Newport gentlemen and
traders, for liis interference with their business of
slave-catching and owning, has had scanter recog-
nition. Of his earlier and less favorable impres-
sions of this remarkable man Dr. Channing wrote :

My recollections of Dr. Hopkins go back to my earliest
years. As the Second Congregational Church was closed
in my childhood, in consequence of Dr. Stiles's removal
to New Haven, my father was accustomed to attend on
the ministry of Dr. Hopkins. Perhaps he was the first
minister I heard, but I heard him with no profit. His
manner, which was singularly unattractive, could not
win a child's attention ; and the circumstances attending
the service were repulsive. The church had been much
injured by the British during their occupation of the
town, and the congregation were too poor to repair it.
It had a desolate look, and in winter the rattling of the
windows made an impression which time has not worn
out. It was literally " as cold as a barn," and some of
the most painful sensations of my childhood were ex-
perienced in that comfortless building.

Only a stretch of gardens lay between the Chan-
ning house and the Hopkins parsonage, with its

^ See Professor Williston Walker's admirable account of Hop-
kins in his Ten New England Leaders; also his History of the
Congregational Churches of the United States.

THE NEWPORT BOY 23

gambrel roof, under which the doctor had his
study, and there of an early winter morning he was
seen by Channing working away by candle-light at
some great thought that would not let him sleep.

The most classical story of Channing's boyhood
is so familiar that, were it omitted, it would be
supplied by the majority of my readers, but to
omit it would too obviously diminish the complete-
ness of my narration. Going to hear a famous
preacher at some distance, his father took him with
him in his chaise, as if, though bent on his own
edification, he had a mind to please his little boy.
The sermon was successfully designed to harrow up
the feelings with a vivid description of man's fallen
state and the awful penalties attaching to his im-
penitent condition. " In the view of the speaker,
a curse seemed to rest on the earth and darkness
and horror to veil the face of nature ; " and the
boy entered into this view with ready sympathy
and assumed that all who heard the preacher must
be equally impressed. He was confirmed in this
opinion when his father upon leaving the church
said to an acquaintance or stranger accosting him,
" Sound doctrine, sir." " It is aU true, then," re-
flected the boy, and his heart became like lead.
As they started homeward he tried to speak about
these dreadful things, but the words stuck in his
throat. Moreover the father's silence made the
boy think that he, too, was overwhelmed. But pre-
sently the father began to whistle, — an incon-
ceivable and startling incongruity. Worse still, on

24 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

getting home, he said nothing about the sermon,
but, putting his feet in slippers, sat down before
the open fire, the mere sight of which should have
been terribly ominous, and settled to his newspaper
as if nothing had happened. Whereupon the boy
reflected, "Could what he had heard be true?
No, his father did not believe it ; people did not
believe it. It was not true ! "

Here was a lesson in the value of oratorical piety
which he did not forget. He became more and
more distrustful of the emotional ardors of religion ;
more and more exigent in his demand for a com-
plete sincerity.

At this time, though small and delicate, he was
well-knit and muscular, quick in his motions, ac-
tive in his disposition, a comrade prized by other
boys even while they resented something of the
censor in his dealing with their profane and dirty
talk. It is comforting to know that there was
some salt of imperfection to redeem his reputation
from the suspicion of being too flattering, if that
is the right word. His was a certain toucliiness of
disposition and he was not averse (indeed he never
was) to the exercise of his will on others. We are
glad to read that he pounded a bigger fellow than
himself for imposing on a little one, and that —
when a fight was on between town and gown, Mr.
Rogers's boys and the unwashed — his voice was
for immediate war. Also, that when a whole dol-
lar was given to him at once by some prodigal re-
lation, he did not spend it carefully or put it in his

THE NEWPORT BOY 25

little bank, but hunted up Washington AUston and
his other playmates and had what the boys of my
own town and generation called " a regular blow-
out." There was promise of abundant health in
his good wrestling, pitching quoits, and adven-
turous climbing to the masthead of the brig or
schooner Ijang at the wharf. Once he came down
a stay on such a lively run as nearly to spoil his
chance of further reputation. He was never at
any time lacking in physical or moral courage.
The boy was prophetic of the man when he begged
to be permitted to spend the night on board an
old vessel that was said to be haunted, and prob-
ably was — by rats. The story of his command-
ing a company of boy soldiers which took part in
the reception of Count Rochambeau, and making
an address to the count which impressed him and
others very much, comes in a shape too questionable
for our belief. The day of the count's reception
was March 6, 1781, at which date Channing was
eleven months less one day old.

He had a tender heart. If he could not answer
Emerson's requirement, —

Canst thou name all the birds without a ^n ? —

he could say, with less than his usual dignity of
form, " Thanks to my stars, I can say I never killed
a bird," adding, " I would not crush the meanest
insect that crawls upon the ground." One of the
tragedies of his boyhood was the finding of a bird's
nest in his father's field, the little ones in which he

26 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

had fed from day to day, desjDoiled, and the little
birds not only killed, but with such incidents of
wanton cruelty as our modern lynchers have writ
large in many of our States. His hatred of all
cruelty to dumb creatures did not begin with this
experience, but was intensified by it, and it grew
with his growth and strengthened with his strength.
Already nursing a remote and solitary habit,
there was one place in Newport which he loved
beyond all others, and to which he went even in
his early boyhood for an unspeakable delight. This
was the Newport beach, which has been more beau-
tiful for many people through their association of
it with Channing's person and his familiar words : —

No spot on earth has helped to form me so much as
that beach. There I lifted up my voice in praise amidst
the tempest. There, softened by beauty, I poured my
thanksgiving and contrite confessions. There, in rever-
ential sympathy with the mighty power around me, I
\ became conscious of power within. There struggling
thoughts and emotions broke forth, as if moved to ut-
terance by nature's eloquence of the winds and waves.
There began a happiness surpassing all worldly pleasures,
all gifts of fortune, the happiness of communing with
the works of God.

The emotions thus described were doubtless those
of his later boyhood, but the roar or murmur of
the beach was from his earliest years " part of his
life's unalterable good."

In his thirteenth year he was sent away from
home to the care of an uncle, Henry Channing,

THE NEWPORT BOY 27

then preaching in New London, Conn., who was to
prepare him for college. But this plan was sud-
denly interrupted (September 21, 1792) by his
father's death of some swift marching but obscure
disease. By this sad event the boyhood of Channing,
which had not been overstocked with the blessings
which naturally pertain to being a boy, came to a
decisive end. After the funeral he returned to his
studies in New London for a year, but it was with
the knowledge that the father had left his wife and
children with but meagre provision for their sup-
port, and with the consciousness that henceforth
his mother would look to him and to his older
brother for advice and counsel, and that, as soon
as possible, they must relieve her of all respon-
sibility for their comfort and advantage, and be
doing what they could for her.

CHAPTER II

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND

A YEAR at New London enabled young Chan-
ning to pass successfully the Harvard examina-
tions and enter the college in the faU of 1794.
His fifteenth year was not yet much advanced, but
it should be remembered that boys entered Har-
vard habitually, a century since, at an earlier age
than they do now, and that the requirements were
proportioned to their years. There were roots of
Channing's life which struck down into the Cam-
bridge soil, for hither his grandfather had come
for his wife, Ann Remington, and here, too early
dead, she had been buried, and her epitaph told
the young student of the virtues which were en-
graved more deeply in her husband's heart than
on the simple stone. In a more cheerful manner,
Channing, coming to Cambridge, was coming to
his own, for while there he made his home in the
family of Chief Justice Dana,^ an arrangement

1 Francis Dana, born 1743, died 1811, father of the poet, Rich-
ard Henry Dana, and grandfather of the lawyer and publicist of
the same name, whose popular and enduring title to fame is his
Two Years Before the Mast. Francis Dana, the chief justice, dis-
tinguished himself in a long- political, legal, and diplomatic career.
He became chief justice of Massachusetts in 1791. He married a

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 29

which had the defects of its qualities. It secured
to him the advantages of a refined society, but
that a less sheltered life would have been better
for his moral temper, there can be little doubt.
Judge Story,^ his most distinguished classmate, is
our best historian of his college course and of the
college in his time, and he mentions that, as a
result of Channing's living with his uncle at some
distance from the college buildings, " he did not
associate much with his classmates generally," but
" drew about him a circle of choice and select
friends." He should have lived in the college
yard and been ground together with his classmates
in the social mill. It seems, however, that he was
generally liked in spite of his comparative seclusion.
We are much subject to the fallacy which im-
putes the conditions of a later to an earlier time.
We know distinguished men in their full-orbed

sister of Lucy Ellery, Channing's mother. His " country seat " in
Cambridge was situated in the angle now made by Dana Street
and Massachusetts Avenue.

1 Born in Marblehead, Mass., 1779, died 1845, second only to
Marshall in his judicial fame, only to Hamilton and Madison as
a general interpreter of our national Constitution ; father of Wil-
liam Wetraore Story, an excellent sculptor, writer, and poet,
Lowell's classmate and friend. Other classmates were Joseph
Tuckerman and Jonathan Phillips, Channing's most intimate
friends for the remainder of his life, and Sidney Willard (son of
President Willard) whose ultimate distinction was that of an
amiable Latin professor in the college. Of college mates who
were not classmates the most notable were Washington Allston,
Leonard Woods, Joseph Stevens Buckrainster, Channing's bril-
liant rival in the Boston pulpit, Charles Lowell, father of James
Russell Lowell, and Lemuel Shaw, a man and judge as noble as
he looked.

30 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

success, and we think of them as wearing their
present attributes when they were callow youth.
So, reading of Yale or Harvard a century or more
ago, until we pull ourselves up, we think of the
one college or the other as it is in these last days.
But Harvard in 1794-98 was a very different
institution from what it is now, with its millions
of money, thousands of students, scores of profes-
sors and other teachers, and its immense scientific
and literary apparatus. There were but two dor-
mitories ^ then, and two other buildings, Holden
Chapel the more inconspicuous, as modest in its
appearance as if it had not housed " the Great and
General Court of Massachusetts " only twenty
years before, when General Gage was holding Bos-
ton down with British troops. The number of stu-
dents at one time during Channing's residence was
one hundred and seventy-three, and the teaching
force was less than relatively small; the profes-
sors, Tappan, Pearson, and Webber, gravely cour-
teous, but too unconquerably reserved and staid to
encourage undergraduate approaches. The tutors,
aU young men, had not in those days won the
reputations which they afterwards acquired as
Professors Popkin and Hedge ^ and Dr. Pierce of

1 Massachusetts Hall (1720), HoUis (1763), Harvard (rebuilt
1766), Holden Chapel (1741). Stoughton, torn down in 1780,
was not rebuilt until 1804, and Holworthy and University were
not built untU 1813 and 1815.

2 Levi, father of Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, whom George
William Curtis introduced to Mr. Blaine at the Concord Centen-
nial celebration of 1875. Mr. Blaine, with the happy conscious-

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 31

Brookline.^ Dr. Willard, the president, set an ex-
ample of forbidding coldness to the other members
of the faculty. The Jews had more dealings with
the Samaritans than the students with the president
and the professors and their families in a social
way. The passage of a professor through the col-
lege yard bared every student's head anywhere
visible to the professor within its bounds — or,
the homage failing, there was stern reproof for
those who could not prove themselves ignorant of
the solemn apparition. The segregation of the
students from the social life of Cambridge was
complete, except for special incidents like that
which furnished Channing with his social oppor-
tunity.

In his account of the college studies, Judge
Story names, with some slight qualification, fifteen

ness of the man saying the right thing, said, " One hardly needs
to be introduced to the author of Hedge's ' Logic' " Whereupon
Dr. Hedge pursed up a little and replied, ' ' I am getting to be
an old man, Mr. Blaine [he was then seventy], but I am not yet
old enough to be my own father."

1 The most beautiful thing I saw when I first went to Cam-
bridge, in 1861, was Dr. Pierce's portrait, that of the venerable
man, which then hung in Harvard Hall. See Dr. Hedge's de-
lightful sketch of him in Sprague's Annals of the American
Pulpit. He was one of those diarists of whom Wendell Phillips
had a poor opinion. He was proud of his walking above all
things, and having walked from Brookline to Cambridge to hear
Everett's welcome to Lafayette, in 1824, he slept soundly through
the oration. Dr. Hedge imagined him saying on his arrival in
another world, " Just " so many '' minutes from earth ! Walked
all the way ! " One of his daughters married Dr. Hedge and
one Rev. Thomas B. Fox, and it was my privilege to know them
well in their beautiful old age.

32 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

books and authors as exhausting the entire course
of study. There was small Latin and less Greek.
He writes of Channing as not excelling in any one
study so much as doing generally well ; in some
things by faithful drudgery, in some from sheer
delight in them. Historical and literary studies
had for him an irresistible attraction, especially
English literature in its double range (De Quin-
cey's the distinction) of knowledge and of power.
Studies which in our time would be classed as
forms of social science had for him, even then, a
strong appeal.

In Judge Story's opinion, he surpassed all his
classmates in " his power of varied and sustained
written composition." Now, as at each later time,
his mind reacted vividly on what he read, and to
put his thoughts on paper was as necessary to him
as meat and drink ; more necessary as he viewed
the matter. His mature habit of reading pen in
hand was early formed, if not already in his col-
lege years. The semi-annual packet from London
to Boston was awaited eagerly at Cambridge by a
few reading men and by no one more eagerly than
by Channing. The importations of books were,
however, extremely meagre, and but one English
periodical came along with them, the old " Montlily
Magazine." The isolation of Cambridge from
Boston was hardly less than that of Boston from
London. The only bridge had been recently built,
and the road leading to it was of the roughest
description, often deep with mud, with no regular

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 33

conveyance,^ and not inviting to those inclined to
" jog the footpath way." The proximity of Cam-
bridge to Boston was not, therefore, an appreciable
element in Channing's Cambridge life.

Washington Allston, with his artistic sense of
form and motion, should be good authority as to
Channing's appearance at this time, and he writes
that, though short in stature, he was rather mus-
cular than slender, and was even athletic, tiring
heavier fellows in the wrestling matches which
were the leading college sport. He overflowed
with animal spirits as with intellectual enthusiasm,
and sometimes abandoned himseK to unrestrained
hilarity. His laugh would have pleased Carlyle,
not Emerson, for Allston says, " It could not have
been heartier without being obstreperous." And
no one invited it more successfully than Allston.
A joke with Channing was so rare a bird that we
read with peculiar pleasure of one that Allston
hatched — a drawing in mensuration into which
the young artist introduced caricatures of the pro-
fessors and tutors, and Channing had the temerity
to offer this at recitation. The professor had a
human heart by which he lived, and joined in the
general laugh. Dr. Pierce also remembered his
college looks as those of vigorous health. There
was in Newport another artist besides Allston, —
the celebrated miniature painter, Malbone, whose
name, and nothing further, Colonel Higginson has

^ Before Channing died there was a " long omnibus " every
hour and a *' short omnibus " every half hour.

34 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

economized in a pathetic novel. Both he and
Allston were Channing's mates at Mr. Rogers's
school in Newport, and Malbone made a sketch of
Channing in his Cambridge days. It is repro-
duced in Mr. Brooks's " Centennial Memory," and
is interesting, if not impressive. The cast of coun-
tenance is decidedly Wordsworthian, and prophe-
sies the meditative rather than the active and
philanthropic man.

He was interested at Cambridge in everything
that promised the improvement of his natural
ability in writing and speaking. Not without
patient effort did he obtain that grace of style
which seemed to come as easily as an infant's
breath ; and back of the unstudied appearance of
his utterance there was rigorous discipline of his
voice and the manner of his delivery in all its
parts. His interest in writing and speaking, and
the pleasure he took in pleasing others, made him
" a clubable man " to a degree which otherwise he
would not have attained. The clubs attracting
him were those which gave liim an opportunity for
literary and forensic rivalry, — the Speaking Club,
later called the Institute, formed from the Sopho-
more and Junior classes, each contributing from
twelve to fifteen of its choicer spirits ; the Phi
Beta Kappa ; the Adelphi, whose members gener-
ally were looking toward the ministry as their pro-
fession ; the Hasty Pudding,^ which originated with

1 Its name, suggestive of the fact that the club took its plea-
sures cereally, also suggests the motto proposed by Sydney Smith

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 35

Channlng's own class in 1795. The Porcellian,
into which Channing was elected, was too frankly-
epicurean and convivial for his taste, and he sel-
dom or never availed himself of his membership to
attend its meetings. It is eloquent of his stand-
ing in the Speaking Club that his extreme youth
did not prevent his achievement of the double
honor of its presidency and the delivery of the
valedictory address.

Our general impression of the college life in
Channing's time depends a good deal on the char-
acter of the writer, who is our informant. Judge
Story's construction is less stern than Channing's
own. To the former, the students appeared
"moral, devoted to their studies, and ambitious
of distinction." There was an occasional out-
break, but little dissipation or immorality. It is,
however, conceded that the drinking habit was
much more excessive during Channing's college
course than it was a few decades further on.
Channing's recollections took on a darker hue.

College was never in a worse state than when I en-
tered it. Society was passing through a most critical
stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagi-
nation and unsettled the understanding of men every-
where. . . . The tone of books and conversation was
presumptuous and daring. The tendency of all classes
was to scepticism. At such a moment the difficulties
of education were necessarily multiplied. . . . The state

for the Edinburgh Beview, — Musam meditaris avena, — and
translated, " We cultivate the muses on a little oatmeal."

36 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

of morals among the students was anything but good ;
but poverty, a dread of debt, and an ahnost instinctive
shrinking from gross vice, to which natural timidity and
religious principle contributed not a little, proved effec-
tual safeguards. I look back on the innocence of my
early life with no self-complacency, and with no dispo-
sition to exalt myself above those who yielded to temp-
tation, and among whom I doubt not there were much
nobler characters than my own. But I do recollect it
with great satisfaction and with fervent gratitude to
Divine Providence. Had the bounds of purity once
been broken, I know not that I should ever have re-
turned to virtue.

The naive conclusion of this passage reminds
me of the good woman, who, speaking of Dr. Gan-
nett, Channing's colleague and successor, said, " If
Dr. Gannett were not such a good man, what a
bad man he might be." It is quite impossible to im-
agine Channing as succumbing to or even seriously
pressed by sensual temptation, but there are vari-
ous passages in his letters and journals which do
not read as if the passions which assailed him were
a painted flame, and it may be that, like many
another stern ascetic, his preoccupation with temp-
tation made it more real for him than if he had
lived a life less tense and strained.

It is significant of the sceptical tendencies work-
ing in the community and the college, that in
1796 every student was presented with a cojDy of
Watson's " Apology for the Bible " in reply to
Paine's " Age of Reason." It would seem that
no one seriously infected could be cured by such

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 37

treatment, but Wat son, ^ though weaker than water
to our present apprehension, had some skiU in find-
ing the joints of Paine's critical armor, which was
not very closely knit. Channing's friend hence-
forth, Jonathan Phillips, was for some time under
the influence of Paine, and completely so, while
Channing, then or a little later, seems to have
given the whole freethinking school some careful
study.

The years of Channing's college life coincided
with the closing years of Washington's double
administration, and the first two years of Adams's
single term. Franco-English politics divided the
country as sharply as could any domestic question.
The Federalists were sympathetic with the English
party to the foreign quarrel ; the Jeff ersonian-
Eepublicans with the French. The Harvard stu-
dents, mainly the sons of wealthy New England
parents, took from these a strong Federalist bent.
In 1798, Channing, who was, says Story, " among
the most warm and decided in his political opin-
ions," procured a meeting of the students with the
consent of the faculty, " for the purpose of express-
ing their opinion on the existing crisis in public

1 Zeal for ecclesiastical preferment was at the bottom of Wat-
son's righteous indignation against Paine and Gibbon. De Quincey
says that he was privately heretical, and a letter to Gibbon dis-
closes his real animus. In 1791 President Willard made pub-
lic denial in the Centinel of a charge that an abridgment of
Gibbon was used as a college text-book. The book used was Mil-
lot's Elements of General History. See C. F. Adams's Massachu-
setts : Its Historians and its History, p. 40.

38 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

affairs." Channing made a rousing speech, and
moved the appointment of a committee to draw up
an address to President Adams. Story and others
warmly seconded, and the address was written,
published, and sent. It was Channing's handi-
work, and marks at once the skill in writing to
which he had already attained, and the faults of
eighteenth century grandiloquence from which he
would eventually cut himself clear. Kecounting
the ill deeds of France and her American friends,
the address ^ continued, —

We have seen this, Sir, and our youthful blood has
boiled within us. When, in opposition to such conduct,
we contemplate the measures of our own government,
we cannot but admire and venerate the unsullied in-
tegrity, the decisive prudence, and dignified firmness
which have uniformly characterized your administra-
tion. Impressed with these sentiments, we now sol-
emnly offer the unwasted ardor and unimpaired energies
of our youth to the service of our country. Our lives
are our only property ; and we were not the sons of
those who sealed our liberties with their blood if we
would not now defend with these lives that soil which
affords a peaceful grave to the mouldering bones of our
forefathers.

These were good mouth-filling words, and their
sincerity was shortly tested in some slight degree
by an episode, which was the closing one of Chan-
ning's college life. The principal oration at Com-
mencement was assigned to him, — the class all

1 It was signed by 170 students, so that the opposition must
have been a beggarly minority of some half a dozen or less.

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 39

approving, except Channing himself, who insisted
that Story ought to have the honor. But Story
preferred reading a poem,^ The subject assigned
was " The Present Age," with the condition that
all reference to current politics should be avoided.
It seems that the Republicans (not yet called Demo-
crats) had been handled rougldy by some ardent
young Federalist the previous year. One of Chan-
ning's friends wrote him with incongruous effu-
sion that his indignation had dried up the fount of
tears. " The government of the college have com-
pleted the climax of their despotism. . . . William,
should you be deprived of your degree for not
performing at commencement, every friend of lib-
erty must consider it a glorious sacrifice upon the
altar of your country." It must be good to be so
young as that. But some concessions were made
to Channing's sturdy refusal to take the emascu-
lated part, and he got his innings when he said,
" But that I am forbid, I could a tale unfold that
would harrow up your souls." Whereat the plau-
dits rang.

Writing of his college years long afterwards to
a young friend, Channing said, —

At your age I was poor, dependent, hardly able to
buy clothes, but the great idea of improvement had

1 Story published an early volume of poems, and that he had
skill in the epigrammatic form is proved by the impromptu
motto which he made for the Salem Gazette.

Here shall the Press the People's Rights maintain,
Unawed by Influence, and unbribed by Gain ;

Here Patriot Truth her glorious Precepts draw,
Pledged to Religion, Liberty, and Law.

40 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

seized upon me. I wanted to make the most of myself,
I was not satisfied with knowing things superficially or by
halves, but tried to get some comprehensive views of
what I studied. I had an end, and for a boy, a high
end in view. I did not think of fitting myself for this
or that particular pursuit, but for any to which events
might call me. . . . The idea of carrying myself for-
ward did a great deal for me. . . . You are in danger
of reading too fast. . . . Walk out in the pleasant, still,
autumnal days. Such days did a great deal for my
mind and heart when I was in Cambridge.

He was perhaps thinking of one day in particu-
lar, when lie was reading Hutcheson under a clump
of willows 1 which were still vigorous when Wil-
liam Henry Channing wrote his uncle's life in 1848.
Here was a favorite retreat, from the heart of
which he could look out across the marshes and the
winding river to the Brookline hills, and here, on a
day of days, came to him his first vision of the
dignity of human nature, henceforth, as his nephew
quotes, " the fountain light of aU his day, the mas-
ter light of all his seeing." He never forgot the
day marked by this morning vision, nor the book
which drew aside for him the veil. Such was his
exaltation that he "longed to die; as if heaven
alone could give room for the exercise of such emo-
tion." He did better : he wrote a letter to a young
lady, the same who, as a little girl in Mr. Kogers's

1 I looked for them in vain September 8, 1901. They were per-
haps some of the old willows which were planted to make palisades
ag'ainst Indian invasion when Cambridg-e was first settled. Some
sturdy specimens of these I found on Brattle Street, and was told
of others.

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 41

school, had pleased him so much, summoning her
to rouse her sex to an apprehension and service of
his overmastering idea. But he never sent the
letter : nor did he ever destroy it. He should have
known Coventry Patmore's

Awake, 0 queen, to thy renown.

Require what 't is our wealth to give,

And comprehend and wear the crown
Of thy divine prerogative !

Hutcheson's influence with him was permanent.
Esteemed inconsequent and superficial by some of
our later ethical critics,^ what Channing thought
he found in him was really there. It certainly
was not the utilitarianism or determinism which
Martineau exposes that attracted him, but the
alliance of beauty with goodness and the doctrine
of disinterested benevolence. Another writer who
attracted Channing at this time and long after was
Adam Ferguson,^ whose vogue was for a long time
remarkable. His " Essay on Civil Society " was
his best book for Channing. AVhat attracted him
was the enthusiasm for social progress, and the

^ For a not too cordial estimate see Martineau, Types of Ethical
Theory, ii. 474-523. Also, Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century, ii. 56-62.

2 Whom Leslie Stephen calls " a facile and dexterous de-
claimer." English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 214-216.
He was a disciple greater than his master, Montesquieu, to many
of his contemporaries. He was, with Wesley and Dr. Johnson,
opposed to our American Revolution, and wrote against Dr.
Price's views on that subject, which were those of Burke, whose
Reflections on the French Eevolution were excited by Dr. Price's
sympathy therewith.

42 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

idea of moral perfection as the central princi-
ple of ethics. This was Ferguson's improvement
on Hutcheson's disinterested benevolence, but in
Channing's thought the two ideas assumed an in-
dissoluble unity or fraternity which we encoun-
ter in his maturer writings at every stage of their
advance.

With Hutcheson and Ferguson, Channing, be-
fore leaving Cambridge, read and studied Locke,
Berkeley, Reid, Hume, and Priestley; Richard
Price, also, whom Franklin loved and Burke as-
sailed, with peculiar interest and satisfaction. Chan-
ning has generally been represented as a follower
of Locke and as subject to the limitations of his
sensational philosophy, but some have found in
him vivid anticipations of the transcendental school.
The fact would seem to be that what attracted him
most in the sensationalists was their unconscious
leanings to the other side. He conceived himself
to be free from Locke's overlordship. While read-
ing Jouffroy's " Ethics," in 1840, he said to Eliza-
beth Peabody : —

I have found a fact here which interests me personally.
Jouffroy says that Dr. Price's " Dissertations" were trans-
lated into German at the time of their first appearance
and produced a much greater impression than they did
in England ; and he thinks they were the first movers of
the German mind in the transcendental direction. Now
I read Price when I was in college. Price saved me
from Locke's philosophy. He gave me the doctrine of
ideas, and during my life I have written the words
Love, Right, etc., with a capital. That book profoundly

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 43

moulded my philosophy into the form it has always re-
tained.'^

Another abiding satisfaction of Channing's life
which began at Cambridge was that furnished by
Shakespeare. There was during his Harvard course
an enthusiastic Shakespearean revival in the col-
lege, and his share in it was not inferior to that of
any. The interest thus awakened was one of the
constants of his life when he exchanged the quiet
and still air of college life for what to him was
relatively storm and stress.

Before this exchange was made he had chosen
the profession which in his own person he so much
exalted and adorned. He was not spared the
perturbation which so many suffer before coming to
a stable choice. In his junior year he was equally
indifferent to law and gospel, and took medicine
as ni ; but this shortly attracted him so much as
to be a subject of earnest correspondence with his
grandfather EUery ; next law was in the lead, but,
even while his classmates supposed this to be his
final choice, he had resolved to be a minister of

1 For able but contrasted views of Price, see Martineau's
Types of Ethical Theory, ii. 439-447, and Stephen's English
Thought, ii. 12-15. Both find in him anticipations of Kant, Ste-
phen of his " categorical imperative " and Martineau of Kant's
distinction of the " Critical and Practical Reason." Strangely
enough. Price's objective was the moral sense view, the moral cbs-
theticism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson by which Channing was
attracted. But Channing's habit, like Mirabeau's, was to " pounce
on his own wherever he found it," and often what attracted him
in another was a mere symbol of something more profound in
his own thought.

44 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

religion. The freethinking about him, or, as he
phrased it, " the prevalence of infidelity," led him
to examine the evidences for Christianity, " and
then," he says, " I found for what I was made."

But before he could enter the ministry, a period
of seK-support and special study nearly ^ve years
long was to work many changes in his body and his
mind, to blanch the ruddy cheeks and waste the
vigorous frame ; to shadow even while it deepened
his life's intellectual and moral flow. He had
already done some teaching (in Lancaster, Mass.)
on one of his vacations, and he now accepted an
invitation from Mr. David Meade Randolph, of
Richmond, Va., who had seen him in Newport
and been much impressed by his character and
acquirements, to become a tutor in his family.
With Mr. Randolph's own children there were a
few of his neighbors', some twelve all told. For
a time he entered freely into the social life of Rich-
mond, which was at its best in Mr. Randolph's own
house, at his own table. Here came John Mar-
shall, already a great figure in law and politics,
and many leading citizens of the town and State.
Channing was captivated by the Virginian man-
ners. " The men do not forget the friendship and
feelings of their youth. They call each other by
their Christian names. . . . How different from our
Northern manners. There avarice and ceremony at
the age of twenty graft the coldness and unfeeling-
ness of age on the disinterested ardor of youth."
The trait which most attracted him in comparison

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 45

with " the selfish prudence of a Yankee " was the
less talk and thinking about money. One is re-
minded of very similar impressions received by
Phillips Brooks some fifty years further along.
Also of Thackeray, who said, " Catch me speaking
ill of people who have such good claret." But
Channing did not care for the claret, and concern-
ing the dark side of Virginia he could not hold his
peace. " Could I only take from the Virginians
their sensuality and their slaves, I should think
them the greatest people in the world. As it is,
with a few great virtues they have innumerable
vices." The tradition of slavery was fresh in the
Newport of Channing's boyhood, but there the
slaves had been house-servants for the most part,
thus furnishing that aspect of slavery which in the
South has disguised, for many bland apologists,
the lower condition of those working in the fields.
The Kandolphs, husband and wife, would gladly
have been quit of slavery altogether. Channing
could write, " I hear it everywhere spoken of
with abhorrence." Eli Whitney, of Connecticut,
had invented the cotton-gin only five years before,
and it had hardly begun to work the miracle which
made Virginia the great breeding-pen for the sup-
ply of negroes for the cotton-raisers further south.
Channing, however, formed his opinions on direct
observation. To his tutoring he sometimes added
the distribution of the field-hands' weekly rations,
and once, for a short time, he was left in sole charge
of these slaves, during the absence of the Randolphs

46 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

from home. Hence germinal convictions which
flowered and fruited in due time : —

There is one object here which always depresses me.
It is slavery. Language cannot express my detestation
of it. Master and slave ! Nature never made such a
distinction or established such a relation. Should you
desire it, I will give you some idea of the situation and
character of the Negroes in Virginia. It is a subject so
degrading to humanity, that I cannot dwell on it with
pleasure. I should be obliged to show you every vice
heightened by every meanness and added to every mis-
ery. The influence of slavery on the whites is almost as
fatal as on the blacks themselves.

Hitherto, politically, Channing's had been a
Federalist environment. It was now Jefferso-
nian. The least questioning of Federalist infalli-
bility stamped him for his Northern friends as a
traitor, a red Republican, a Jacobin. He made an
elaborate disclaimer, but could not wholly clear
himself, seeing that he had a good word for El-
bridge Gerry, whose politics were Virginian, and
had views of a standing army which are as per-
tinent to-day as then : " A soldier hy j^rqfession
is too apt to forget that he is a citizen. . . . An
army in time of peace is a hotbed of vice." It does
ill and communicates. Worst of all he wrote, " I
blush when I think of the Alien and Sedition
laws," — then sacrosanct in Federalist estimation,
though Marshall had manfully opposed them and
so dimmed for many Northern eyes the laurels he
had won in France. But notwithstanding these

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 47

deductions Channing's Federalism was still tol-
erably sound. He made little or no distinction
between the principles of Jefferson and those of
Dan ton, Robespierre, and Marat. He gets very
anxious and resolved when he contemplates the
triumph of these principles in America : —

I never will breathe the same air with those who are
tainted with the foul impurities of French principles.
. . . With tears in my eyes I will bid farewell to the
roof which sheltered my infancy and to the green graves
of my fathers and take up my abode in the foreign land
from which I boast my descent, and which my honest
ancestors left in hopes of finding climes more favorable
to liberty and the rights of man.

Nevertheless Channing was at this time dream-
ing dreams of social betterment which had much in
common with those of the radical French idealists
and their English followers and friends. He was
reading Rousseau with great admiration ; Godwin's
"Political Justice" and Mary Wollstonecraft's
" Rights of Woman " with hardly less. Mrs. Woll-
stonecraft's book he thinks " a masculine perform-
ance," and on other subjects than marriage finds
her sentiment " noble, generous, and sublime."
Even for her irregular marriage he pleads that
" she acted on principle." It is even probable that
he thought of joining himself to a body of Scotch
immigrants who were intending a basis of common
property. Renan's version is, " The idea of com-
munism, the first, and consequently the falsest, that
meets the mind when it begins to reflect on the

48 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

reform of human society, crossed his mind for a
moment." But Renan concedes that " on aU ques-
tions of social, moral, and political order, he medi-
tated very early and with a great deal of force."
A letter written in his twentieth year, which is our
fuUest expression of his social aspirations during
his stay in Richmond, is certainly remarkable for
a boy of that age, and also as showing how soon
the main lines of his ultimate moral system were
laid down. He says that he derives his sentiments
from the nature of man. Here was a charac-
teristic note. The chief end of man is the im-
provement of his mind in knowledge and virtue.
Avarice is the great bar to such improvement.
The cure for avarice is a community of goods.
The wants of the body are few, and the labor of
man, which should be directed to the improvement
of the mind, is misapplied to them. He is con-
vinced that virtue and benevolence are natural to
man ; that the principle of benevolence is "so
strongly impressed on the human heart by God him-
self " that it may become the conscious principle of
action. In all which the voice is Channing's, the
hands are the hands of Hutcheson and Ferguson
and Adam Smith. Selfishness and avarice have
their roots in the false ideas that the individual has
interests distinct from the community and that the
body requires more care than the mind. Then for
the cure ! You must destroy all distinctions of
property; make men conscious of their dignity
of mind. " You must convince mankind that they

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 49

themselves and aU that they possess are but parts
of a great whole ; that they are bound by God,
their common Father, to labor for the good of this
great whole ; that mind, mind, requires all their
care ; " and that the dignity of their nature and the
happiness of others require them to improve this
mind in knowledge and in virtue. In conclusion
he summons the friend to whom he is writing to
join him in his great crusade : —

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,

will unite our exertions in the cause of virtue and
science. We will beat down with the irresistible engines
of truth those strong ramparts consolidated by time,
within which avarice, ignorance, and selfishness have
intrenched themselves. We will plant the standards of
virtue and science on the ruins, and lay the foundation
of a fair fabric of human happiness, to endure as long
as time, and to acquire new grace and lustre with the
lapse of ages. — My dear Shaw, I fear you will say I
am crazy. No, no, —

My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time.
And makes as healthful music.^

His friends did think him crazy or inclined that
way. His brother Francis, for whom he had the
warmest admiration, wrote him, " You know no-
thing of yourself. You talk of your apathy and
stoicism, and you are the baby of your emotions,
and dandled by them without any chance of being
weaned." Other correspondents poked fun at his
exalted views in a manner that must have hurt the

1 The whole letter should be read m the Memoir, i. 111-116.

50 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

young enthusiast a good deaL His grandfather
EUery used the opprobrium of French influence to
dam the swelling flood. Eventually this subsided,
but it left behind it a deposit into which the seeds
of social theory and aspiration always feU as into
good ground. Brook Farm got a better hearing
because of those early hopes and dreams. His
nephew characteristically questions whether his
influence would not have been wider and deeper
if the realization of these had been the engrossing
purpose of his whole career.

Meantime he was reacting from the Gallican
criticism of Christianity which was rife about him
to a conservative opinion of its character. He
read the " infidel books," but a study of Christian
evidences convinced him that Christianity was a
divine revelation. He applied " to the Bible, —
that only source of divine knowledge, — and to the
Bible alone," for the principles of conduct which
should regulate his life. The " happiness of another
state " bulked large on his horizon, — a less noble
and less characteristic ideal than the social one
it had displaced. The perturbations of his mind
were reflected in the letters he received. One cor-
respondent announces himself a " Price-ite," as if
that kind of heretic had for Channing any terrors.
Another commends to him Butler's " Analogy "
for proof that the mysteriousness of doctrines does
not militate against their truth. Evidently Chan-
ning's tendency during the last part of his stay in
Richmond was to a more evangelical temper, if not

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 51

to a more orthodox opinion. It was accompanied
by a profound religious experience which disquali-
fied, as a genuine " conversion," an experience in
New England from which he had heretofore dated
the beginning of his Christian life. This new
experience, in its turn, resolved itself into an
incident of a process which was the significant
matter. Asked, as he grew old, if he had ever
experienced conversion, he answered, " I should
say not, unless my whole life may be called, as
truly it has been, a process of conversion." But,
while his Richmond life was a present reality with
him, he could find no expression for its deepest
part more apt than " that change of heart, which
is necessary to constitute a Christian." What
actually happened seems to have been the infusion
of an element of sincere piety into his morality,
together with a deepening sense of the importance
of the personal influence of Jesus in history and
to the individual soul.

I once considered mere moral attainments as the only
object I had to pursue. I have now solemnly given
myself up to God. I consider supreme love to him as
the first of all duties, and morality seems but a branch
from the vigorous root of religion. I love mankind
because they are the children of God.

He found a better reason for loving them as he
went on, and there was nothing prophetic here of
Channing's ultimate conception of religion as "the
worship of goodness," as morality flowering at its
top into the love of God. He reversed, in short,

52 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

the doctrine of his youth. Yet not, therefore, less
real for the time being, or in its permanent effects,
was the experience which coincided with his stay in
Richmond. A few months before his death he
wrote to a friend : —

P I spent a year and a half there, and perhaps the
most eventful of my life. I lived alone, too poor to
buy books, spending my days and nights in an outbuild-
ing, with no one beneath my roof except during the
hours of school-keeping. There I toiled as I have never
done since, for gradually my body sank under the unre-
mitting exertion. With not a human being to whom I
could communicate my deepest thoughts and feelings,
and shrinking from common society, I passed through
intellectual and moral conflicts of heart and mind so
absorbing as often to banish sleep and to destroy almost
whoUy the power of digestion. I was worn well-nigh
to a skeleton. Yet I look back on those days of loneli-
ness and frequent gloom with thankfulness. If I ever
struggled with my whole soul for purity, truth, and

j^ goodness it was there. Then, amidst sore trials, the
great question, I trust, was settled within me whether
I would be the victim of passion, the world, or the free
child and servant of God. ... In a licentious and
intemperate city, one spirit, at least, was preparing in
silence and loneliness to toil not wholly in vain for
truth and hoHness.

Much besides the unremitting study and seclu-
sion contributed to Channing's physical misery and
the depression of his spirits. It would have been
better for him if his opinion that " the wants of
the body are few," " mind, mind, requires all our
care," had been a mere opinion. But it was with

CAMBRIDGE AND RICHMOND 53

him a rule of life. Not only did lie remain at his
books till two or three o'clock in the morning, and
often tiU the daylight broke, but/he made harsh j
experiments in living, went insufficiently clothed,
without an overcoat in winter weather, sleeping
upon the bare floor in a cold room, eating very )
little, and that what he did n't like. He fancied
he was curbing his animal nature, when the temp-
tations that assailed him were the spawn of his
ascetic glooms. He thought he was hardening
himself when he was making himself frail and
pervious to every wind that blew. His brain, for
lack of nourishment, grew weak, and from real
thinking turned to aimless revery. The printed
page conveyed no ideas to his mind. Walking, he
dragged one foot after the other for whole hours
together, observing little, enjoying nothing. The
lovely banks of the James River were his favorite
haunt, and their luxurious growths of tree and vine
and their too balmy air begot a languor in his
blood and mind that intensified his habit of revery.
" Do anything innocent," he wrote a young friend
from some vantage of his later years, " rather than
give yourself up to revery.''^ He relates his own
experience and goes on : "I suppose I was seduced
in part by physical debility, but the body suffered
as much as the mind. I found, too, that the
imagination threatened to inflame the passions, and
that, if I meant to be virtuous, I must dismiss my
musings. ... I beg you to avail yourself of my
experience."

54 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

An adventurous voyage in a leaky vessel, a mis-
erable little coaling sloop, the captain and crew
habitually drunk, brought him back to Newport in
July, 1800. He had been in Richmond twenty-
one months, a painfully eventful period. If he had
saved his soul alive, he had made a wreck of his
body, which was never after this to know a day of
perfect health. Could this be so and the informing
soul receive no detriment ? Sound as the mind in
the unsound body came to be, surely the total per-
sonality was less effective than it would have been
if the boy's joyous health had been transmitted
unimpaired to the young minister, and the mature
" friend and aider of those who would live in the
spirit."

CHAPTER III

THE PARISH MINISTER

On Channing's return to Newport the family
received him the more tenderly because his broken
health seemed ominous of fatal ill. Francis, the
elder brother, had gone to Cambridge to engage in
the practice of his profession (law), and William
found himself installed as the head of the family.
He had inherited something of his mother's irrita-
bility and something of his father's skill in soothing
her with his embracing arm and his assurance, " It
will all be well." With his own irritability and
sharpness of speech and manner he made a good
fight and came off more than conqueror. His reg-
ular duty was the tuition of his youngest brother
and a young Randolph who had followed him from
Virginia. He busied himself also with his sisters'
studies, and with the happy confidence of twenty
summers set himself to form the mind of one of
these, more or less fortunate than the oth^ers, and to
be her spiritual guide. He went little into society,
nursing a habit solitary and recluse ; introspective
and self-searching to a dangerous degree. He found
" a degrading selfishness reigning in his heart."
He must avoid all levity and unmeaning gayety

66 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

and make himself an example of the beauty of
holiness. " When I feel irritable, let me be silent ;
let me quit society." If he " must vindicate his
character, let it be in as few and temperate words
as consist with the regard to what I owe to truth."
With much of this kind there are intimations of
the coming man : " Let charity embrace in her
broad arms all sects. Why should I brand any
who differ from me with opprobrious epithets ? "

Meanwhile he was carrying on his theological
studies with impassioned eagerness, with a view to
entering the ministry. A httle office near the house
served him for a study, and there his evening lamp
frequently vied with Dr. Hopkins's, a few rods away,
as herald of the dawn. Besides the little office he
had " two noble places of study," one the Redwood
library, the other his much-loved beach. It was
during this Newport interval that he came to know
this great companion best, and without the morbid
inclination of an earlier period, to sink to rest in
its embracing arms. The Redwood hbrary was a
stiUer place, and at all seasons a much less fre-
quented one. Week after week sometimes went
by without the interruption of a single visitor, while
Channing took the astonished books, dust-buried,
from their shelves, and found in them, like mummy
wheat, the nourishment he craved. The library
had been founded by a liberal thinker, and though
the Episcopalians had gradually monopolized the
management and driven the founder out, as the
historian of the library has faithfully set down,

THE PARISH MINISTER 57

the original impulse had perhaps insured a more
inclusive range of books than it would otherwise
have had.

One personal influence was at this time predom-
inant, that of Dr. Hopkins. In Channing's New-
port sermon of 1836, in his note to that sermon,
and in a letter which he wrote to Professor Park
of Andover, Hopkins's biographer, there is some of
the most serviceable material which those writing
about Hopkins have discovered to this day. Chan-
ning's impression was that Jonathan Edwards owed
much to Hopkins of his later and nobler views
of religion, embodied in his " Nature of Virtue "
and " End of God in Creation." ^ "I was attached
to Hopkins," he says, "mainly by his theory of
disinterestedness." For this Hutcheson had pre-
pared him, httle as there would seem to be in com-
mon between the calm philosopher and the impas-
sioned theologian. It is quite as strange, but only
superficially, that Channing should have been most
attracted to Hopkins by his most startling paradox.
He heard Hopkins debate this with a friend who
made some critical objection to the translation,
" I could wish myself accursed," etc. (Rom. ix. 3).
Hopkins said that Paul ought to have said this,
whether he did or no. That Hopkins practised

^ Edwards's development was from the idea of virtue as the love
of God considered as pure being to the idea of virtue as the
love of God considered as morally excellent. Here was a change
that would appeal powerfully to Channing. For Hopkins's rela-
tion to these views, see A. V. G. Allen's Jonathan Edwards,
pp. 318, 321. See also pp. 327-338.

58 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

the disinterestedness lie preached was an additional
bond. At a time when he was getting next to no
salary he dropped a hundred-doUar bill he had just
got for copyright into a missionary collection. His
antislavery preaching was further testimony to the
same effect. So was his doughty Federalism, which
did not spare his sole male church member and
deacon, who was an ardent Jeffersonian. Chan-
ning was drawn to Hopkins by his perfect honesty
and his love of honesty in others even while he
despised their heresies. He was repelled by his
doctrine of predestination, which he thought wholly
incompatible with the freedom of the human will.
When Channing preached for him (his first New-
port sermon), Dr. Hopkins smiled approval and
said, " The hat is not yet made." It seems that
Dr. Bellamy had compared a progressive science of
theology to tlie making of a hat. You must first
catch your beaver, and so on. Having told the
story, Dr. Hopkins added, " The hat is not yet
made, and I hope you will help to finish it."
And so he did, much widening the brim.

Channing returned to Cambridge early in 1802,
having been appointed regent in the college, his
office to preserve order, if possible, in one of the
college buildings where he had his room, and have
an eye upon the students in a general way. If not
quite a sinecure, it was approximately that, though
probably less so for him than it might have been
for some others. Meantime it assured him shelter,
with food and clothing sufficient for his modest

THE PARISH MINISTER 59

wants, and abundant opportunity to carry on his
theological studies. His friends, who had expected
the boy's return, found that the boy, so full of
health and joy, had been displaced by a young
man, thin to emaciation, all of whose physical
elasticity had gone, while his mind had taken on a
solemn, almost mournful cast. A classmate ^ found
him profoundly subject to the authority of Hop-
kins, but protests that it was " rather owing to the
influence of his virtues than to the weight of his
opinions." The truth was that Hopkins's virtues
had recommended his opinions, and these — that
virtue is disinterested benevolence ; that moral per-
fection is the goal of human life — were opinions
which, derived from Hutcheson and Ferguson, and
intensified by Hopkins, Channing made central to
the ellipse of his completest scheme of thought and
life.2

Little is known of those theological studies which
Channing pursued under the guidance of President
Willard and Professor Tappan. The latter was
considered a fine preacher by George Cabot and
Fisher Ames, — men whose judgment was regarded

1 Daniel Appleton White, the " Judge White " of a long and
honorable fame. See A. P. Peabody's Harvard Graduates, pp.
76-97. The sketch is painfully interesting for its account of
Harvard life in Channing's time : " At least one fourth of every
class became sots." "College work was sometimes suspended
for several days, the entire Faculty being employed on inquest
into some recent escapade or outrage." The account agrees with
Channing's, as already given, better than with Judge Story's.

2 The same opinions constituted F^nelon's attraction for him
in a preeminent degree, though not without some sober qualifi-
cation.

60 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

as infallible by tbe Federalists of Boston and the
region round about. What Channing thought of
the writers who did most to form his adolescent
mind must be gathered mainly from a letter writ-
ten further on and which may be, to some extent,
the older man's correction of the younger's aberra-
tions. There is general depreciation of English
theology, too general, with marks of special appro-
bation. The Established Church had been "a
dozing place for minds which anywhere else would
have distinguished themselves," and " you will not
find broad views of Christianity, showing its har-
mony with human nature and with the great laws
of the universe, and its tendency to secure the true
perfection of the individual and the race ; " that is,
his own final scheme of thought. A list follows,
headed, too conventionally, by Butler's " Analogy,"
with which Channing had no natural sympathy, and
strangely enough omitting Butler's " Sermons," ^
which he held most precious, coequal with the writ-
ings of Hutcheson and Price, another proof of
the steady gravitation of his mind to the intuitive
and transcendental point of view. The entire list
is much the same as was commended to me by
my teachers in the Divinity School, 1861-64 :
Lardner and Paley, Campbell and Farmer, on
" Miracles," Priestley's " Letters to a Philosophi-

1 My own copy (1792) was Dr. Gannett's book, boug-ht in his
Divinity School days, and enriched by a marginal comment by his
classmate, William Henry Fumess. I please myself with think-
ing that Channing's copy was of the same edition, the liberal page
fit symbol of the liberal thought.

THE PARISH MINISTER 61

cal Unbeliever," Watson's answers to Paine and
Gibbon (in my day tliese had gone to their own
place) Locke's " Reasonableness of Christianity,"
Edwards on the " Will " and Samuel Clarke for
counter - blast, Lowth's " Lectures on Hebrew
Poetry," etc. William Law's writings are men-
tioned with special admiration, while Hartley's
" Observations on Man," " on the whole an admi-
rable work, is disfigured by a gross mechanical
philosophy." Here, as everywhere, we have his re-
pulsion from the materialistic, necessarian, utilita-
rian, to the opposing views. If the intellectual board
seems spread but meagrely, we may well ask our-
selves how many of the books produced in our own
time and which we batten on with fearless joy will
tempt men's appetites a century hence. Channing,
though writing some time ^ after he had left Cam-
bridge, confesses not to have read Hooker, or
Chillingworth, or Cudworth, whose " Intellectual
System of the Universe" (1678) enjoyed a re-
markable revival during the Transcendental period.
The exigent self-examination of the Newport
days was still kept up. Many pages of his journal
were devoted to the conduct of his mind, the ethics
of the intellect being to him, even then, a favorite
haunt, where he was much alone. It is strange to
find him saying, " It is my misfortune that I have
read much, reflected little." He reformed this
altogether. The bodily weakness increased and

1 It is an exasperating circumstance that W. H. Channing-, in
the Memoir, often omits the date where it is essential to our right
understanding.

62 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

there with came " a kind of stupefaction of mental
inactivity, a weight of dulness oppressing all my
faculties." It was great good fortune that he had
his brother Francis to walk and talk with. The
Mount Auburn woods enticed them, not yet made
over to the dead, and so at once sanctified with
sacred dust and marred by

Granite permanence of cockney taste.

But for this affectionate communion, it seems pos-
sible that Channing would have gone to utter wreck.
Drawing near to the work of the ministry with
trembling heart, as if approaching a new world, he
united himself with the First Church in Cambridge,
of which Dr. Abiel Holmes, father of Oliver Wen-
dell, was then pastor, " a moderate Calvinist," being
in this respect one of the majority of preachers round
about. At this time Channing drew up some arti-
cles of belief, supposed to represent his own. They
were notably Hopkinsian in some respects, but, in
their views of Christ's nature, they inclined to that
Arian doctrine of Jesus which figured him as
neither God nor man, nor God and man, but a
being sui generis^ preexistent, the creator of all
worlds, only less eternal and less infinite than God.
Approbated to preach by the Cambridge Associa-
tion, the ministers of that association anticipated his
gravitation to the Hopkinsian side in the division
that was getting every day more definite. There
was some ground for the anticipation. " There was
a time," he wrote long after, " when I verged to
Calvinism, for iU health and depression gave me

THE PARISH MINISTER 63

a dark view of things. But the doctrine of the
Trinity held me back." Reading Doddridge's
" Rise and Progress " he *' came upon a prayer to
Jesus Christ." That gave him pause. "I was
never in any sense a Trinitarian." What is most
interesting here is that, in the event, the doctrine
of the Trinity was among the least of his objections
to the orthodox system. It was the Calvinism of
that system that excited his celestial ire ; its repre-
sentation of human nature as totally depraved and
of God's nature as much the same, with its doc-
trines of election and reprobation and of the atone-
ment as a reconciliation of a wrathful God to sinful
men.

When he began to preach for one congregation
and another, his first sermon, several times re-
peated, was from the text, " Silver and gold have
I none, but such as I have give I unto thee." We
have several accounts of that sermon, one of them
written by Charles T. Brooks, with his eye on the
object. It underwent various changes of a kind
that throws some light upon Channing's progress
from a less to a more simple style. It was his
first sermon at Federal Street and also his first at
Newport. That he did not despise its youth is
made plain by his preaching it a second time at
Federal Street in 1804 and again in 1808. He was
making public confession when he wrote of the
wretchedness caused by fretfulness and anger in
social intercourse, and he was already verging on
the heresy of Theodore Parker's South Boston ser-

64 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

mon when he said, " Perhaps Christ when on earth
won the hearts of publicans and sinners more by
his gentle manners and offices of kindness, when
he ate and drank with them, than by exhibiting his
miracles."

This sermon, and others of like quality, with a
manner fervid and solemn to an unusual degree,
attracted not only the Federal Street Society, but
also the Brattle Street, where Dr. Peter Thacher,i
who was getting old, wanted a colleague. Federal
Street, as the weaker plant, naturally attracted
Channing, and on February 12, 1803, he accepted
the call extended in December, 1802, and was or-
dained and installed June 1, 1803. He would
have had his uncle Henry Channing, with whom
he had studied in New London, preach the ordina-
tion sermon, but in the event he gave the charge
to the candidate, — Dr. Tappan, the Harvard pro-
fessor of Theology, preaching the sermon. Other
men of note took part : Dr. Holmes, Dr. Osgood
of Medford, whose memory with that of his daugh-
ters has been widely blessed, while Joseph Tucker-
man, Channing's classmate, and henceforth, with
Jonathan Phillips, one of his dearest friends, gave
the right hand of fellowship. George Ticknor, of
" Spanish Literature " and other literary fame,
never forgot the impression which Channing made
on him on the occasion of his ordination : the pale,

^ Father of Samuel Cooper Thacher, one of Channing-'s dearest
friends. The father died in 1804, and was succeeded by Chan-
ning's brilliant rival, Buckminster.

THE PARISH MINISTER 65

enraptured face, " the spirit-small hand" raised in
benediction, and especially his reading of the clos-
ing hymn : —

My tongue repeats her vows,

Peace to this sacred house !
For here my friends and brethren dwell,

And since my glorious God

Makes thee his blest abode.
My soul shall ever love thee well.

The different parts of the service were always for
Channing like the different characters of Shake-
speare's plays for the great poet : none of them
was slighted. There were those for whom the
hymns and prayers were more than the preaching ;
" the first hymn a service," as one said.

The " sacred house " on Federal Street, built in
1744, was already nearly sixty years old. It was
small and phenomenally plain, bare, and ugly,
even for its time and type. The society had been
formed by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in 1729, and
their place of worship until they built their church
was a commodious barn. The church had had its
historic moment in 1788, when the State conven-
tion met in it which acceded to the national Con-
stitution of 1787. The street was named by this
event, than which nothing could have honored the
building more in Channing's eyes, or have re-
minded him more vividly of the most enthusiastic
moment of his earlier life, when he shared his
father's triumph in the tardy accession of Rhode
Island to the Union of these States.

We must beware of thinking of the Boston to

66 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

wliicli Channing came as being in anything Kke the
present city, except its general situation and its
topography to a less degree. It was far more like
the Boston of 1703 than like the Boston of our
time. The expansion of the United States had
just been initiated by the Louisiana Purchase
(May 2), but as yet the United States were a
fringe along the Atlantic coast, having the Alle-
ghanies for its western edge. Contracted as they
were, they were not homogeneous, and Thomas Jef-
ferson, then President, knew less of New England
than we know of the Philippines, though in gen-
eral he was well informed. It was a day of smaU
things, the expenses of New York City in 1800
amounting to 1130,000 ; in 1900 to 198,000,000.
In the same year. New York, the State, for the
first time led Massachusetts (then including
Maine) in population, by 16,000 souls. The cen-
sus recently completed counted 25,000 inhabitants
of Boston, about one twentieth of the population
of the State. The general appearance was that of
an old English market town.^ The sidewalks as
well as the streets were paved with cobble-stones ;
a custom which persists in many foreign towns, as,
to my sorrow, I have learned. The few oil lamps
on the streets at night but served to make the
outer darkness more compact.

The social aspect was that of the eighteenth cen-
tury, and conservative at that. Gentlemen of means

^ See Henry Adams's History of the United States, vol. i., for
these details and especially for the social aspect.

THE PARISH MINISTER 67

wore colored coats and figured waistcoats, with knee-
breeches and long white-topped boots, ruffled shirt-
fronts and wristbands and stuffed white cravats,
cocked hats (the more elderly) and wigs. As in
the Marblehead of my boyhood, the streets on
Saturday evenings were full of boys carrying pots
of beans or pudding to the baker's oven, so, when
Channing came to Boston, they were full of boys
carrying home piles of wig-boxes for the better ob-
servance of the Lord's Day.^ The stately minuet
was still the evening dance. In the summer season
Boston rivalled Newport as a place of Southern re-
sort, its antislavery atmosphere not yet sharpen-
ing its east wind. The big English dinner was
the king-pin about which the best society revolved.
This society was as exclusive of Jeffersonian Re-
publicans as freezing water of animal germs. A
lady of the period said, " I should as soon have
expected to see a cow in a drawing-room as a Jaco-
bin."

Boston had, in 1803, little to show of that in-
tellectual life of which eventually it had so much.
In fact Channing, Buckminster, and Norton were
the prime movers of the new regime. Few could
speak French or read it. Madame De Stael's
"L'Allemagne " (1814) was the first seed of Ger-

^ For the best possible description of a social magnate of the
time, see in 0. B. Frothingham's Memoir of William Henry Chan-
ning, pp. 9-13, Channing's description of his grandfather Stephen
Higginson, a Federalist of the deepest dye, and an important
member of that Essex " junto " which bulks so large in Massa-
chusetts politics of a century since.

68 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

man studies, and its growtli was slow. The Queen
Anne men reigned in literary taste. If Burns had
been discovered, it was probably by some miser-
able Jeffersonian. Wordsworth's first American
reprint was in Philadelphia in 1802. Of creative
ability there was none except as Nathaniel Bow-
ditch's " Practical Navigator " had set sail in
1800, and Jedidiah Morse, of whom more here-
after, had published his geography. The best
promise of Prescott and Bancroft and Motley and
Parkman and Fiske and Rhodes was the local
work of Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massa-
chusetts Historical Society, who died in 1798.
There were good lawyers like Dexter and Parsons ;
and Fisher Ames was magnified in the local at-
mosphere to the proportions of a Burke or a Bos-
suet. The sure thing about Ames was that he
was a political pessimist of such sombre hue that
his temper overhung the common consciousness of
Boston like a leaden pall. In 1795 he had feared
that he might outlive the government and the Con-
stitution of his country, and naturally his gloom
had deepened with the triumph of democratic
principles. He complained that even the Federal-
ists did not appreciate as they should " the progress
of licentiousness," a euphemism for the spread of
Jeffersonian opinions. There were perhaps five
hundred who did so, and perhaps not. Within a
few months after Channing's settlement, Pickering,
one of the Essex " junto," was writing from his sen-
atorial post at Washington that the time for New

THE PARISH MINISTER 69

England to secede had come, and submitting plans
for attaching New York to the projected Northern
confederacy. George Cabot, in 1814 president of
the famous Hartford Convention, writing for him-
self, Higginson, and Ames, Pickering's colleagues
in the " junto," counselled that the time for action
had not yet come, but they would nurse their
wrath, meanwhile, to keep it warm. It was some
comfort when Samuel Adams, the Father of the
Revolution and of New England democracy, died
in October, 1803. So long as there was any life
in his decrepit frame the old times might come
back.

Fisher Ames's five hundred thoroughgoing pes-
simists included, Mr. Henry Adams thinks, nearly
all the Massachusetts clergy. In Boston and vicin-
ity these clergymen were nearly all Unitarians,
the doctrine of the Trinity and the more distinc-
tive doctrines of Calvinism having for them no
longer any attraction. Had Jefferson been aware
of this, his fear and hate of the New England
clergy would have been qualified in no slight de-
gree, for his enthusiasm for rehgious liberality was
even greater than for political. But he formed his
ideas of them upon the clergy against whom he
had contended in Virginia, men impervious to
ideas, " beasts at Ephesus," whose fangs had left
their memories in his shrinking flesh. But what
we are bound to consider is the effect which the
political temper of the clergy had upon the expres-
sion of their theological opinions. Within a week

70 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

of Channing's ordination, the Eev. Jedidiah Morse,
of Charlestown, preached the Election Sermon,
and he said, " Let us guard against the insidious
encroachments of innovation — that evil and be-
guiling spirit which is now stalking to and fro in
the earth seeking whom it may destroy." Morse
was Calvinistic, but his temper, a more important
matter than his opinions, was that of the whole
body of clergy of which Channing had now be-
come a conscious part. Dr. Hedge has character-
ized the period immediately preceding Channing's
settlement as "the dryest in the history of the
American pulpit." The impression made by Chan-
ning's early preaching was enhanced immensely by
its vivid contrast with the prevailing tone.

Channing was fortunate in being welcomed for
some months after his ordination to the home of
Stephen Higginson, Jr.,^ in Brookline. That the
kindly influences abounding there coidd not dis-
perse the gloom now settling on his mind is ample
proof how thick and dark it was. An angel un-
awares may be a distinguished and at the same time
an uncomfortable guest. " Society seemed distaste-
ful ; he joined but little in conversation ; took his
meals in haste ; was retired in his ways ; lived
mostly in his study ; appeared rather annoyed than
pleased with visitors ; seldom went abroad, — de-
clining, if possible, all invitations ; and, in a word,
was most content when left uninterruptedly to him-

1 Son of the Federalist magnate and father of Colonel T. W.
Higginson, in whose Cheerftd Yesterdays he is carefully portrayed.

THE PARISH MINISTER 71

self." ^ And still the awful register of his intro-
spective search went on. A " subject " was his
besetting sin, and had for him the concreteness of
Luther's personal devil. If he did not throw his
inkstand at the intruder, he did much of its con-
tents. He complains, " A subject has been very-
injurious to me. It has shut me up in my room
till my body has been exhausted." He must try
to fix the number of hours during which he wiU
attend to a subject. His long absorption in a sub-
ject enfeebles his mind, prevents its free action,
casts a gloom over his thoughts and produces pain-
ful anxiety. " Because doubt spreads over one sub-
ject I ought not to doubt aU." His search for
truth was vain and the laurels of the successful
seekers would not let him sleep. When he writes
his uncle Henry, " Every day teaches me more of
my weakness and corruption and yet I seem to
grow no better," we may have something of the
expected note, but his sorrows were for the most
part real enough. " I cannot describe to you the
weight which weighed down my mind at the be-
ginning of my ministry." There was little need of
the political infusion in a cup which, without that,
was so bitter to his taste. The depression con-
tinued for some years. But for the encouragement
of his brother Francis he would probably have been
lost to his profession before putting forth more
than the smallest fraction of his strength.

That some who heard the young preacher found
1 Memoir, i. 175-176.

72 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

him oppressively solemn and called him " gloomy "
is what we should expect from what we have seen
of him in his personal isolation. Shortly (1805)
Buckminster came to Brattle Street and his more
cheerful manner and more glowing style attracted
those whom Channing could not please. Andrews
Norton said that " hearing Buckminster, one seemed
to be walking in the triumphal procession of truth."
Kirkland, soon to become president of Harvard,
had a like, but milder, less irresistible attraction,
while S. C. Thacher, who succeeded him in 1811 as
minister of the New South, was much like Chan-
ning, but of a more genial spirit; and all these
men were strong where Channing was always weak-
est, on the social side. But Channing's seriousness,
his spirituality, his fervor, the passionate earnest-
ness of his direct appeals, the tenderness of his
devotion, his awed and trembling sense of infinite
things, could not but draw to him many who had
been hungering for such bread from heaven as he
brought. His congregation, as he found it, was
one representing little wealth or culture. It soon
represented more of these unequal advantages, and
in 1809 the increasing numbers compelled the
building of a much larger church, a good example
of its kind, in which the society worshipped until
1859,^ when, in the spirit of Channing, nine or ten

1 After tliat there was a three years' interval in tabernacles
■while the present Arlington Street church was building-, a noble
structure in that style to which Gibbs and Wren gave its most
characteristic note.

THE PARISH MINISTER 73

ministers, of various denominations, joined with Dr.
Gannett in the tenderness of his farewell. Doubt-
less the main defect of Channing in those first years
of his ministry constituted his chief attraction for
a good many persons. The physical immensity of
Phillips Brooks would not then have been counted
to him for righteousness. The passion for bigness
of all kinds had not yet taken possession of the
public mind. The less body, the more spirit, was
an accepted axiom, even with those who thought
the heavy English dinner a great institution ;
and Channing' s physical delicacy — the thin, pale
cheeks, and the large eyes that seemed conversant
with all hidden mysteries — made him appear less
human than angelic, a spirit visible and audible to
mortal sense. But Channing was himself already
cured of his conceit that body and spirit were op-
posing terms and that he must build his spiritual
temple on the ruins of his bodily frame. From
his earlier misconception, —

This frame so weak, sharp sickness' hue,
And this pale cheek God loves in you, —

he reacted manfully, hating the valetudinarian habit
from which he could not shake himself free, and
trying hard to guard himself against the dangers
of which he was as well aware as Dr. Johnson or
Mr. Emerson, though he left us no dictum so con-
cise as the latter's, " Sickness is felony," and the
former's, " Every man is a rascal as soon as he is
sick."

His stern self-scrutiny convicted him of self-

74 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

consciousness in the pulpit and of ambition for dis-
tinction in his private heart. He finds himself
wishing to preach striking rather than melting
sermons, a contrast which discloses the quality of
his earlier ideal and its inferiority to that of char-
acter-building and social reformation to which he
finally attained. In the first years of his ministry
it was difficult for those on either side of the
widening breach to say with much complacency,
" He has become as one of us." The more and
less orthodox made him equally welcome to their
pulpits in the course of that round of exchanges
which was then strictly habitual. Possibly and
probably the more orthodox were friendlier with
him than the less. It has been much insisted
that Channing's religious thought was all of one
piece from his first preaching till the last. But if
his early preaching was not formally Calvinistic
it was frankly evangelical. Judged by the present
standards of orthodoxy it was hyper-orthodox, and
this for six or eight years or more after his settle-
ment.

The truth of this position was first made clear
to me by my quaint and picturesque old friend,
Captain John Codman, whose father was ordained
in Dorchester in 1808. The father was avowedly
a Calvinist of the stricter sort, yet not only did
Channing have no hesitation in preaching his ordi-
nation sermon, but he embodied in that sermon the
traditional scheme of salvation without stint, in
his description of an everlasting heU, trying, it

THE PARISH MINISTER 75

seemed, to be as impressive as Jonathan Edwards.
Captain Codman's recollection of this sermon from
some early reading was accurate and comprehen-
sive, but I have confirmed his memory by other in-
formation.i We find Dr. Channing warning the
same Rev. John Codman against the liberal opin-
ions of the time. The burden of his early preach-
ing was, in no slight degree, " the guilt of sin, the
depravity of human nature, the danger of impeni-
tent sinners, the glories of the divine character, and
the riches of redeeming grace." " So solemnly and
tenderly did he preach on these and kindred sub-
jects, and so forcibly and pungently did he apply
them to his hearers that some of his people, it
was said, began to be alarmed lest he would come
out, as they expressed their fears, ' a rigid Hop-
kinsian.' "

There was no schism in these particulars be-
tween his pulpit utterance and his self-communion
as this found expression in the journal he so dili-
gently kept, and which, even as partially printed,
lays bare to us the recesses of his inmost soul.
" It becomes men," we read, " to weep, to feel true,
hearty sorrow at sin itself, to abhor and condemn
themselves as without excuse, to feel themselves
dependent on the free, unmerited, imobligated,

1 See " Dr. Channing's Progress," in Christian Register, Marcli
8, 1883, and Gillett's " Unitarian Controversy," Historical Maga-
zine, April, 1871, pp. 251, 252. Best of all, I have the entire ser-
mon, as originally published, in a volume of sermons of the time,
preserved by Dr. George R. Noyes and given to me by his son,
Rev. Charles Noyes, of Andover, Mass.

76 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sovereign grace for pardon and renewal." Simi-
larly, " Every man must be new-born, have a new
heart, a new principle, end, motive, disposition, a
change by the spirit into a meek, submissive, self-
renouncing, self-abhorred, benevolent state of soul,
before he can believe, approve, choose the gospel,
and receive the kingdom of heaven." Everywhere
in his journal of this period his temper, whatever
his theology, is that of the Puritan ascetic, the
Calvinistic saint. It was more genial, further on,
when Fenelon drew him as to a brother's heart.
Then, looking back, he saw that he had made a
tyrant of his conscience and had served it as a
slave. Only relatively to this condition did he
ever attain to joyous freedom. His beatitude.
Dr. Furness said, was that of those who mourn.

When Channing had arrived at perfect self-
possession, it was vain to look for his complete st
self-expression in his theological sermons and dis-
cussions. It was yet vainer to do this in the first
years of his ministry, before his theology had been
moralized, when that and his best aspirations stood
over against each other in mutual isolation and
hostility. In the " Memoir " and other sources
we find expressions corresponding to those years
that have abiding excellence and charm. These
were not so much anticipations of the nobler sen-
timents of his maturest growth as they were ex-
ponents of his moral continuity, the insurgence of
that faith in human nature which had come to
him under the Cambridge willows, which grew

THE PARISH MINISTER 77

with his growth and strengthened with his strength,
and was fortified by those loved writers whom he
had taken for his guides, Hutcheson, Ferguson,
and Price, sometimes obscured by the Hopkinsian
cloud, but never wholly lost. And he was never
an active propagandist of his darker views. Ser-
mons like that of the Codman ordination were in-
frequent ebullitions. In general he avoided con-
troversy and those who loved to stir up its inglorious
dust. He was content to leave the outlines of his
Theology, Christology, and Soteriology indistinct,
so long as they circumscribed for him an ethical
and spiritual reality ; and he insisted that vital
Christianity was not dependent on a strictness of
construction which the New Testament did not
disclose.

If the Fatherhood of God had not assumed that
dominance with him it afterward enjoyed, it had
already a peculiar prominence for him : —

No character could bring God so nigh as this of the
Father. ... I fear it has been the influence of many
speculations of ingenious men on the Divine character to
divest God of that paternal tenderness which is of all
views most suited to touch the heart. ... Is it not the
character of a perfect man that the happiness of others
is his own, that he knows no higher joy than to confer
and to witness felicity, that his heart responds to the
feelings of those around him ? And if this is perfect in
man, can it be an imperfection in God ? (1811.)

This argument ad hominem was anthropomor-
phic certainly, but that it was a favorite one \vith

78 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Jesus — " If ye then, being evil," etc. — was for
Channing a sufficient recommendation. How gen-
tle the reprehension of the New England Calvin-
ism in the above passage ! In the same spirit is
his deflection from the traditional line of vicarious
atonement : —

Mercy is an essential attribute of God, not an affec-
tion produced in him by a foreign cause. His blessings
are free, bestowed from a real love of his creatures, —
not purchased from him and bestowed by another on
those whose welfare he disregards. [Nevertheless] his
very character as the universal Father obliges him to
punish and humble the disobedient, selfish, unjust, proud,
and impure, to redress every principle and practice op-
posed to the order and happiness and perfection of his
creatures. (1811.)

In this last and similar passages I have fancied
that he might be girding at the Universalism which
was at this time making a lively stir in the commu-
nity, and of which, especially of Ballou's improve-
ment upon Murray, Channing had no adequate
knowledge and appreciation. And when he bids
men not confound the love of God with " the
ravings of enthusiasm," he had probably the Meth-
odists in mind, and was speaking from that side of
his culture which had been nourished by Charles
Chauncy and other critics of the Great Awakening.
Channing often used the word " enthusiasm " in
connections that are convincing that the word had
not acquired for him its modern sense, but was
equivalent, as commonly in the eighteenth century,

THE PARISH MINISTER 79

to fanaticism.^ As early as 1805 we have one of
those expressions which had a perennial freshness
in his thought : —

Religion is the rectification of the soul ; it is inward
health ; it is the direction of the affections to the most
interesting objects. It consists of feelings and dispo-
sitions which include everything generous, disinterested,
sympathetic, and pure. . . . When one is growing in
religion he converts more and more the common pursuits
of life into means of piety and goodness, and makes
them the way to heaven.

If Channing had been one of the quoters, as
he was not, and he had had Keble's " Christian
Year " at hand, which was not published till 1827,
he would certainly have quoted here : —

The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask :
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God.

Already in much that touches spiritual growth
we have a nice fore-feeling of BushneU's " Christian
Nurture." Conversion is regarded as a process,
and the influences of a Christian home as being a
better introduction to the Christian life than any
catastrophic spiritual experience. Already, too,
there is such praise of intellectual honesty as rings
in the braver man that was to be : —

It is a quality of character without which the most
splendid talents are of little avail. . . . Perhaps it in-

1 Professor Woodberry, with perfect justice, finds enthusiasm
one of the three distinguishing notes of Channing' s complete
and final character ; the others, rectitude and sensibility.

80 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

eludes more magnanimity, courage, and self-denial than
any other virtue. Multitudes have dared to face death
on the field of battle, who have yet wanted strength
and spirit to oppose their own and others' prejudices.
(1811.)

He pleads for a careful cultivation of " the art
of meditation " which, to his maturer apprehension,
was something as different from that revery which
had despoiled his youth as the ship's course, obe-
dient to her helm, is from the aimless drifting of
the derelict upon the trackless sea. Of this art he
was already master, for close and steady application
of his mind to the great problems, as by him con-
ceived, not shamed by Amiel or Joubert, much less
by Senancour, whose sentimental meditation always
verged upon that revery which is the abandonment
of self-control.

When he speaks of Jesus, the emphasis is on
his moral grandeur rather than upon his special
nature or peculiar gifts. That human nature was
glorified in him is a recurrent note which seems to
require his pure humanity for its logical accuracy,
but Channing was not always the logician, and it
is certain that his conception of Jesus at this time
was not Socinian, or more purely humanitarian, but
Arian. " It is an argument in favor of Jesus
Christ," lie says, " that he appeared in a character
altogether new." In due time we shall find him
leaving this position leagues behind.^ There is

1 See W. C. Gannett's Ezra Stiles Gannett^ p. 218, where we
have Dr. Gannett's comment on Dr. Channing's sermon of Jan-
uary 5, 1840.

THE PARISH MINISTER 81

much insistence on " the simplicity of Christ."
Christianity " is a plain, perspicuous religion, and
suited to the comprehension and the wants of
all classes of society. A universal religion ought
to have the clearness and brightness of the sun."
This is a very characteristic note, which had for
its objective the orthodox delight in the mystery
of the trinity, atonement, and " the decrees."
The true Church is the body of " Christ's friends
and followers ^o7lO truly imbibe his spirit, no
matter by what name they are called, in what
house they worship, by what peculiarities of mode
and opinion they are distinguished, under what
sky they live, or what language they speak."
With this forecast of that unsectarian spirit which
was to animate his fidl-grown powers with a pe-
culiar ardor and delight we have abundant promise
of that conception of religion as the reformation
of society which was in its completeness, perhaps,
his most significant anticipation of our present
aspirations and ideals. What he wrote of party
spirit should be " appointed to be read in churches "
at the beginning of every political campaign. He
denounced it as " the worst enemy of free govern-
ments, the one from which we have most to fear."

You may look to any man for fairness of mind and
sensibility to truth rather than to a confirmed partisan.
He gives up his reason, his dignity as a rational being
to his party. Party spirit has as fatal effects on the
heart as on the understanding. The man who sur-
renders himself to the interests of his party becomes a

82 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

malignant man. Irritation becomes the habit of his
mind. . . . Look anywhere for candor, generosity, and
tenderness rather than to the breast of a partisan.
(1812.)

When war was declared against Great Britain
in 1812, Massachusetts appointed a day of public
fast, and Channing improved the occasion with a
sermon which was the flattest treason, if it be trea-
son, as we have recently been taught, to oppose
any war in which our country happens to be en-
gaged. Channing, then and always, conceived that
it was the highest and most patriotic duty to
denounce an unjust war, by whomsoever waged.
Nevertheless, his judgment of the war of 1812 may
have taken its color unduly from the Massachusetts
Federalism of the time, which fell far below Chan-
ning's standard of disinterested benevolence.

Above the general range of Channing' s thought
and speech during the first decade of his ministry
soared the high peak of his passionate engagement
with the idea of perfection as man's proper goal.

Do you ask in what this perfection consists ?

I answer in knowledge, in love, and in activity. The
mind devoted to these ends is as happy as it is perfect.
Its happiness partakes of the purity and serenity of the
divine felicity. Now this I conceive is the end of God,
to bring his rational offspring to this perfect and blessed
state, to give them the widest, clearest, and brightest
views, to give them the strongest, purest, most disin-
terested love, and to form them to the most vigorous and
efficient exertion of all their powers in the promotion of
the best designs. (1810.)

THE PARISH MINISTER 83

I cannot end my account of Channing's early
ministry upon a better note than this, or one more
characteristic of the man. That word " activity "
recurs with significant frequency. The conception
to which it is related unifies Channing's life and
work as perfectly as any, while at the same time it
anticipates that energistic view of ethics which
avoids the defects of the utilitarian view, and does
not leave ethics where the intuitionalist leaves it
— hanging in mid-air. This view is at once as
new as Friedrich Paulsen's " System of Ethics,"
whose main doctrine is that the will does not aim
at pleasure^ but at definite concrete activity^ and as
old as Aristotle, who wrote (what Channing might
have written), " The highest good of man consists
in the exercise of the energies and excellences of
the soul, especially the most perfect." Apart from
Channing's too simple and mechanical theology,
nothing is more obvious than his large anticipation
of our best recent thought ; if I should not say his
large expression of that better thought which is at
once the oldest and the latest born, the common
wisdom of all those who have meditated most pro-
foundly on the origin, the destiny, and the business
of the human soul.

CHAPTER IV
EVOLUTION AND REACTION

The Federal Street Society had its parsonage
on Berry Street, in the rear of the meeting-house,
and to this, in the fall of 1803, Channing invited
his mother, with his younger brothers and sisters,
so urgently and so adroitly that the Newport
house and garden were given up and a family mi-
gration to Boston was assured. How could they
refuse him when his rooms were so empty, his
wood-pile heaped in vain, his heart an aching void ?
He and Francis had agreed that one or the other
of them should remain a bachelor until the other
children were grown up and the mother without
anxiety as to their education and support, and Wil-
liam now assumed the burden of this contract and
left his brother free. With something of the wis-
dom of the serpent, or, if one prefers, the shrewd-
ness of the saints, he invested his kindness with
an air of gratefulness for the benefits which he
expected to derive from this arrangement. His
petty salary (11200), at which the young can-
didate of to-day would look askance, however
moderate his gifts, then seemed to Channing " the
potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 85

avarice," and lie addressed himself carefully to
prevent the accumulation of an unnecessary hoard.
His board was definitely fixed and regularly
paid, and what remained was, for the most part,
intrusted to his mother for " her safe-keeping,"
which meant her use in so far as she could be per-
suaded to that end. His sisters, too, were made to
feel that they were only doing their duty when
they relieved him of his wedding fees, those bur-
densome additions to his stated recompense of
reward. A relative tells how grieved he was that
he had only fifty dollars with which to buy her a
wedding present, but here we seem to have quite
as much a naive expression of her generous expec-
tancy as a proof of his distressing lack of funds.
If he had already ceased to pride himself on his
bad health, he stiU had his silly side in the manage-
ment of his physical hfe. He was as much afraid
as ever of self-indulgence, and hence took for his
study the smallest room in the house, while a
much better one was crying to be used, and for his
sleeping-room the attic, which was ill furnished,
cheerless, cold, and every way ill suited to the con-
dition of his health. Sometimes, when this pressed
him hard, he was driven into more comfortable
quarters ; but on the first sign of improvement, he
beat a masterly retreat upon his favorite position.
Only the perfect neatness of his dress redeemed
its lack of style and quality. Happily there was
an exuberance of spirits in other members of the
family that prevented them from being sicklied o'er

86 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

with the pale cast of William's gravity, if it did
not do anything to enliven his habitual mood, so
painfully aloof, so introspective and absorbed. His
mother's lively sallies contrasted sharply with his
inviolable calm. It is conceivable that one of these
produced that momentary ruffling of the waters
when he cried, " Pray stop, for if you go on, I shall
feel bound to repeat every word to the person of
whom you are speaking." After that, there must
have been silence in the domestic heaven for the
space of haK an hour.

The early years of Channing's ministry were
stirring times in the political field. They coin-
cided with the triumph of Democracy, than which
Theodore Dwight, brother of Timothy, could con-
ceive " nothing more dreadful this side of heU ; "
the Embargo, which infuriated the commercial
mind of Massachusetts ; the war of 1812, with
which it had no sympathy ; while still the ship of
state forged bravely on her destined track, much
buffeted, but little swerved. Channing's Federal-
ism was ingrained too deep to be easily eradicated,
and his social setting tended to increase its violence,
but the grave justness of his mind preserved him
from the extravagance of thought and speech that
was the general note. In his war sermon of 1816
and in his " Examiner " article, " The Union," of
1829, we have his calmer retrospection on the
events which in their course might well have hur-
ried him into irrational speech. For judgment on
Lis temper in the thickest of the trouble we have

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 87

his sermon of 1812, preached on the Fast Day
which was Massachusetts' comment on the declara-
tion of war. Much of it was devoted to an attempt
to allay the harsher passions of the time. But he
did not anticipate that conception of lese majeste
which has recently found favor in men's eyes. He
said : —

Rulers are not to be viewed with a malignant jeal-
ousy ; but they ought to be inspected with a watchful,
undazzled eye. Their virtues and services are to be re-
warded with generous praise, and their crimes and arts
and usurpations should be exposed with a fearless sin-
cerity. . . . Freedom of opinion, of speech, and of the
press, is our most valuable privilege, the very soul of
republican institutions, the safeguard of all other rights.

We seem to be reading much more modern
history when we come to his reply to those who
would have had criticism silent in the midst of
arms : —

The cry has been that war is declared, and all opposi-
tion should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more un-
worthy of a free country can hardly be propagated. . . .
Admit this doctrine, let rulers once know that, by placing
the country in a state of war, they place themselves
beyond the only power they dread, the power of free
discussion, and we may expect war without end. Our
peace and all our interests require that a different senti-
ment should prevail.

Many things were happening in theological as
well as in political circles, during the first dozen
years of Channing's ministry. Doubtless these

88 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

had their effect upon Channing, though his dispo-
sition was to keep himself as far as possible from
the madding crowd of controversial theologians.
His own theology was steadily becoming less Cal-
vinistic under the influence of improving health
and an environment of domestic cheerfulness, to-
gether with the subjection of the special doctrines
of Calvinism to the purifying flame of his great
central conception of the Fatherhood of God. Two
things that touched him very closely marked the
years 1811, 1812 : the first, hopefuUy and cheer-
fully, Thacher's installation; the second, Buck-
minster's death, with profound melancholy and
regret. Thacher had read theology under Chan-
ning's supervision; Channing gave him the right
hand of fellowship at his ordination, and their
mutual affection was complete. '* Heaven can
hardly bestow on me," said Channing, " a greater
blessing than the friendship of Thacher." During
the brief term of Thacher's ministry (six years),
the promise of his ability and influence was hardly
less than Channing' s during the same period, and
it was much greater, apparently, than Channing's
in the six years between his and Thacher's or-
dination.^ But the younger Buckminster was a

1 W. C. Gannett calls Thacher " the Harry Percy " of the
young liberals, and that there was in him some joy of battle is
shown by his attack on Andover and its ambiguous creed (1809).
His literary, theological, and controversial activity covered thir-
teen years, six of these in advance of his ordination, while he was
conducting the Monthly Anthology, teaching in the Boston Latin
School, and holding the post of librarian in Harvard College.

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 89

luminary who outshone them both while they all
hung together in the Boston sky. Settled two
years in advance of Buckminster, Channing was
of slower growth in liberal ideas, if I should not
rather say that his early growth was, for a time,
arrested by the personal influence of Hopkins, and
a state of health which gave his thought a Calvin-
istic flow. Buckminster was a far more brilliant
preacher, a much abler scholar, singularly beautiful
in face and form, with such a voice as Boston had
not known, — his literary taste and judgment and
manner of writing the delight of the Anthology
Club and the chief ornament of the '' Monthly
Anthology " (1804-11) ; his social graces excelled
only by a piety as of one who had acquaintance
with invisible things. As I compare his with
Channing's early sermons, I find less difference of
thought than of style, and Buckminster's style less
ornate as compared with Channing's than the tra-
dition, formed, perhaps, on his Phi Beta Oration,
had led me to conceive. It is more remarkable
for its purity than for its richness. It has more
vigor than Channing's and less stream. It is not
a whit more literary in the sense of being marked
by literary allusion and quotation. Emerson had
not yet come to educate the young men with his
quoting manner, as he had been educated by Plu-
tarch and Montaigne. In a volume of Buckmin-
ster's sermons, I find only two verse quotations, each
of two lines, and not one prose quotation, except
from the Bible. Buckminster's more striking

90 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

effect must have been owing to his graces of per-
son, voice, and manner, and his more cheerful tone.
"After his death," says Mr. Henry Adams, " Uni-
tarians learned to regard William EUery Channing
as their most promising leader." There is a hint
of disparagement in that expression, and it is sig-
nificant of a tendency of which I seem to have
encountered a good deal from first to last. Buck-
minster was, in fact, preeminently the founder of
literary Boston, and the first of that coterie of Bos-
ton ministers whom O. B. Frothingham has de-
scribed so happily in his " Boston Unitarianism,"
— Frothingham's father one of the most typical.
Buckminster celebrated that marriage of Unitari-
anism with Literature, the offspring of which have
been so numerous and so honorable to the parental
stock. Edward Everett succeeded him at Brattle
Street with promise of an equal pidpit fame, but
was quickly drawn away from the ministry to a life
of literature and politics. It does not seem un-
likely that Buckminster would have anticipated his
course if he had lived a little longer. He had been
appointed shortly before his death to the Dexter
professorship of Biblical Criticism in Harvard Col-
lege, a position for which he was eminently fitted
by his Greek and Hebrew studies. Had a full
measure of years been granted him, and had he
given to his preaching all his strength, I cannot but
believe that Channing would have much the same
historical preeminence that he has now. Buck-
minster's would have been the greater literary

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 91

name ; Channlng's the greater in religion. His was
the deeper note, an ethical passion to which Buck-
minster did not attain. But there was to be no
generous rivalry of their maturer powers. Buck-
minster's brief ministry was overclouded by that
dreadful malady (epilepsy) which, in June, 1812,
suddenly put out the light of reason, and in a few
days the light of life. His father, as fine a spirit,
clinging to the faith from which his son had grown
away, died twenty-four hours later in Vermont. A
fearful thunderstorm swept over the village where
he lay awaiting death, and a few hours later over
Boston, but it bore no message on its wings. The
message went the other way. On the morning of
the 10th, the elder Buckminster said to his wife,
" My son is dead." There was no knowledge of his
sickness to suggest the faithful intuition. Chan-
ning, with the help of Mr. Thacher, selected a vol-
ume of the son's sermons for publication, and did
his best to justify the preacher's fame. The choice
must have been difficult, for there was a remark-
able evenness in the flow of Buckminster's sermonic
thought.

And now, as we approach the time (1815) when
the deep calm of Channing's life was to be swept
by a strong wind of controversy, and the quiet
of his meditation was to be invaded by interests
and passions foreign to his natural inclination, it
becomes necessary to go back for a considerable
stretch along the way New England thought had
come and note the antecedents that prepared for

92 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

the Unitarian controversy on the local scene. Back
of every beginning in thought or action there is
another of less obvious character, and for the be-
ginnings of that Unitarianism, or liberal Chris-
tianity, of which Channing was the leading spirit,
we must go back quite to the beginning of the
New England settlement. We must, indeed, go
back much further, — to the sources from which
early English Arians and Socinians, as well as
those of New England, drew their widening stream.
So far as these were Spanish and Italian they have
been exhibited by Professor Bonet-Maury in his
"Early Sources of English Unitarian Christianity,"
with immense learning and ardor of conviction, and
the statues of Valdes and Ochino are appropriately
crowned. Beyond these the thread that stretched
back to Arius and the New Testament, however
tenuous, was never wholly lost. The blood of the
Waldenses and the Albigenses reddened it. The
same thread stretching forward was tried as by fire
when certain Baptists out of Holland were burned
by Henry VHI. in 1535 for denying the doctrine
of the Trinity. The theory of several concurrent
beginnings of the English Unitarian development is
more reasonable than any bent too eagerly on sim-
plifying the account of this. The Protestant revo-
lution was a spring wind, dancing like a psaltress
on the hard sods of the traditional belief, and
many a heresy sprang flower-like where it passed.
If we go for Unitarian beginnings preeminently to
Servetus and the Socini, Laelius and Faustus, a

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 93

more careful searcli will discover them under the
shadow of more unsuspected names. Calvin was
too good a critic not to recognize the absence from
the New Testament of any specific doctrine of the
Trinity, and his friend Farel, who superintended the
burning of Servetus, omitted the Trinity from his
" Summary " of things necessary to salvation, while
Luther, omitting the word Trinity from his liturgy,
wrote, " This name Trinity is never found in the
Scriptures, but men have devised and invented it"
as " a heavenly matter which the world cannot un-
derstand," and, setting themselves to explain which,
" the schools have become fools." But Erasmus,
of quite different temper, was a more fertile source
of anti-trinitarian thought, though he was not him-
self frankly committed to that thought. His re-
vised New Testament Text and Annotations were
an armory from which " the Dutch and English
Anabaptists, who disowned for the most part the
doctrine of the Trinity " (sic Martineau), drew out
the weapons of their Unitarian and Arminian war-
fare against the received theology.

To go further into this matter is to be convinced
with Martineau that the English Bible exerted a
more powerful influence than any individual or
sect in spreading Unitarian belief. The dullest
could but note the enormous gulf that widened be-
tween the vociferous Trinitarianism of the mass,
the rosary, the creeds, the liturgies, and the silence
of the New Testament. The more exaggerated the
Trinitarianism of the ecclesiastical forms, the more

94 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

conspicuous and impressive was tlie difference of
the New Testament therefrom. Shutting the
Prayer Book with its " Holy, Blessed, and Glorious
Trinity, three Persons in One God," they opened
the New Testament at the surprising words, " To
us there is One God, the Father." As here so
everywhere. No such fount of heresy was ever
opened in a barren land as that which flowed in
Wiclif's translation of the Bible, and later in
Tyndale's and Coverdale's and the next of kin.
It is absurd to view the English and American
development of Unitarianism before Channing's
time as distinct and separate forms of a theological
evolution, one merely influencing the other, and
that one the English exclusively. English theo-
logy was American theology in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, American theology was Eng-
glish. Sometimes the American end of the strenuous
team was in the lead and sometimes the other. If
America furnished no such names to the liberal
tendency as Milton's and Locke's and Newton's
and Samuel Clarke's, England furnished no such
protagonist of orthodoxy as Jonathan Edwards.
There was constant interchange of thought and
books between the mother country and the colony.
Tracking the course of the English development
by the light of burning heretics, that guidance
fails us after 1612, when Bartholomew Legate and
Edward Wightman, both Unitarians of the Arian
type, went to the stake, and were the last to
suffer in that way. About the same time Emlyn

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 95

was subjected to a heavy fine and long imprison-
ment for privately holding similar views. In 1697,
Aikenhead, an Edinburgh University student,
eighteen years old, was put to death for saying
that " god-man " was as absurd as " goat-stag " or
" square-round." If the boy was not a representa-
tive Unitarian, the killing was very strictly repre-
sentative of the place and time. It was a company
of persecuted Irish Presbyterians that found its
way to Boston in 1729 and dedicated a barn to the
praise and glory of God, built a church on Long
Lane (afterward Federal Street) in 1744, and
about 1787 assumed the Congregational form of
government, so building up the pulpit in which
Channing was to stand in God's good time.

It is one thing to show that Boston Unitarian-
ism was not a graft upon the English Priestley-
Belsham stock, and another to prove it an in-
digenous gTowth. There were Unitarians before
Belsham and Priestley, — notably Clarke, Newton,
Milton, Locke; and there were others, contem-
porary with them, who were not of their Socinian
mind, — Dr. Kichard Price among them, than
whom no one affected Channing's thinking more
profoundly.! However questionable the shape of
English Unitarianism (Socinianism) to Channing
and the main body of his friends, their liberalism
struck its roots deep down into a soil that had been
wonderfully enriched by such fertilizing books as

^ In strange contrast with Martineau's early indifference to
him. See Drummond's Life of Martineau, ii. 263.

96 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

those of Emlyn, Whiston,^ Taylor ^ of Norwich,
Samuel Clarke, Locke, Newton, Lardner, Price,
Priestley, Watts, Lindsey, and many others, some
of them Arians, some of them Socinians, some of
them modifying the conceptions so designated with
personal accentuations.

The first troubles of the New England churches
were ecclesiastical, but those caused by Mrs. Hutch-
inson's Antinomianism were doctrinal, and they
came very soon (1637). The first heretic who
tended to Unitarian doctrine has a statue in Spring-
field, Mass., one of the finest works St. Gaudens
has produced. It is the statue of William Pynchon.
It was not erected to him as a Unitarian heretic,
but as the founder of the town. His book, " The
Meritorious Price of our Redemption," was an-
swered by John Norton by direction of the Gen-
eral Court. It was also burned in the marketplace,
and Pynchon was fined one hundred pounds. To
avoid the infliction of some sterner penalty he took

1 For all these see Leslie Stephen's English Thought, Tay-
ler's Beligious Life of England, Allen's Unitarianism since the
Beformation, Bonet-Maury's Early Sources of English Unitarian-
ism, Brooke Herford's Religion in England.

2 It is interesting that John Taylor of Norwich (to be distin-
guished from Henry Taylor, vicar of Portsmouth, another Arian,
author of a ponderous Apology for Christianity), whose octagon
church excited Wesley's admiration, did much to create that tra-
dition of liberalism in Norwich into which Martineau was born,
and that in Dublin, his first parish, Martineau was a colleague of
Taylor's venerable grandson. Dr. John Taylor was in his later
years the first principal of that Warrington Academy from which
Manchester New College, of which Martineau was for a long time
principal, was evolved.

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 97

himseH off to England, wherein, as lie was dealing
witli the same people who hung Mary Dyer and
other Quakers seven and eight years later, he was
doubtless wise. The institution of the Halfway
Covenant^ in 1662 was a sign that already the
non-church-members of the community were numer-
ous, in its turn a sign that doctrinal laxity had set
in. That the " Confession of 1680 " was not made
binding on the churches, and was accepted by few
of them, if it marks no increase of liberal opinions,
marks that independence of the individual churches
which was ultimately the charter of societies that
had become Unitarian to mind their own business
and expect no interference. Solomon Stoddard,
grandfather of Jonathan Edwards and pastor of the
Northampton Church from 1669 to 1729, was for a
long time the most influential preacher in the Con-
necticut valley. He made the Halfway Covenant
less binding by admitting non-regenerate but ear-
nest-minded members of the churches to the Lord's
Supper (1706). One need not be a conscious saint
to partake of this, only a seeker for the Christiasn
life. Here was a step towards Bushnell's, which
was first Channing's if not Fenelon's doctrine of
Christian Nurture and the Educational Church.
If it was true that Stoddard was ordained unre-
generate and was converted at the Lord's Supper,
there was a strong personal equation in his argu-
ment. It converted many ministers and churches,

^ Admitting to baptism children of baptized parents who were
not professing Christians, but of sober and reputable life.

98 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

but not Jonatlian Edwards, who in 1750 broke
himself in bis attempt to reverse the Stoddardean
innovation and was driven out, to find among the
Stockbridge Indians leisure to write his treatise
on the "Freedom of the Will."

The course of the debate has no clearer witness
than the annual Convention Sermon. If one year
this leaned to the liberal side, there was sure to be
a counterblast the next. It is probable that a little
heresy went a great way in stirring up such pure
minds as those of Cotton Mather by way of re-
prisals. He lamented the " deplorable degeneracy"
of his fellow ministers who were reading Whiston
and Samuel Clarke, " a far more dangerous abettor
of that damnable error," Arianism. In the Con-
vention Sermon of 1722, he comes to the rescue of
the Trinitarian doctrine, with all the italics and
exclamation points in the printer's font. He de-
mands, What has this glorious mystery done " to
deserve Excommunication from the House of our
God ? " Let that go and " the Glorious God will
himself be gone ; yea, be gonQfar from a forsaken
Sanctuary.'" In the summer of 1726, the Kev.
Mr. WiUiams preached to the same effect, incited
mainly by the anti-Trinitarian movement going on
among Enghsh and Irish Presbyterians, and by
the sympathy manifested towards this in New Eng-
land, and the possible infection of the Irish Pres-
byterians coming to Long Lane. In the summer of
1743, Nathaniel Apple ton brings a like railing ac-
cusation, yet must he have been feared by the more

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 99

sternly orthodox as a Danaan bringing gifts, for
lie denounced theological systems and the endeavor
to "make everything quadrate with a particular
scheme," as tending to " darken rather than en-
lighten some Christian doctrines." Here was a
foregleam of Channing and his kind, also of Hamp-
den at Oxford, who in 1835 excited Newman to
unseemly wrath. Mr. Apple ton's uneven progress
was profoundly typical of the general aspect of the
century as theologically conditioned. There was
little all-round heresy, and no more consistency in
the holding of particular views. Here the advance
was along the Arminian, there along the Socinian
or Arian line ; oftenest along Mr. Appleton's, — a
dislike of systematic theology, tending to a dislike
of " man-made creeds," and an insistence on the
Christian life as superior to these, or independent of
them. Channing's personal experience exhibited
the general course of the advance, much as a moun-
tain's heightening altitudes do the extended zones
of the earth's surface. As he was first anti-Trin-
itarian, then anti-creed-and-system-mongering, then
anti-Calvinistic, and finally opposed to such less
distinctly Calvinistic doctrines as those of vicari-
ous atonement and eternal punishment, so, in a gen-
eral way, was the New England theological mind.
There was much variety, and there were some queer
combinations. It was customary for the heresy
hunters to hold those who offended in the least
particular to have offended in all, and men were
called Arminians or Socinians or Arians according

100 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

as one title or the other seemed likeliest to stick or
stain. Time and again the protagonist of ortho-
doxy found himself convicted of heresy in the very
act of trying to convict some brother minister.
Indeed such was the refinement of the dogmatic
system that a man could hardly think about it
at all without slipping over the dangerous verge.
Dr. Hopkins was to the elder Buckminster a very
grievous heretic, and Jonathan Edwards probably
did more than any one in the eighteenth century,
except possibly Whitefield, to bring in the Unita-
rian day. For Edwards was nothing if not ration-
alist, his chief end to give the system of Calvin a
reasonable appearance. No man could think so
powerfully and acutely as Edwards did and not set
many others to thinking after the fashion of
Abraham's going out from Haran — not knowing
whither. Emerson has not exaggerated the pos-
sibilities entailed " when God lets loose a thinker
on the planet." Moreover, Edwards insisted stoutly
on the right of the new generations to revise the
thinking of the old. He said, as if he had set
Milton's trumpet to his lips, " He who believes
principles because our forefathers affirm them
makes idols of them, and it would be no humility,
but baseness of spirit, for us to judge ourselves in-
capable of examining principles which have been
handed down to us."

It was in 1734 that Edwards's dread of the Ar-
minian invasion roused him to the pitch of those
terrible sermons which produced the Great Awaken-

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 101

ing of the following year, which in its turn incited
Whitefield to cross the ocean in 1740, to sow New
England with the wheat and tares of an enthu-
siastic piety and party strife. His several visits
mark the stages of a great recoil from his theology
and from the exaggerations of his fiery zeal, and
when he died on his last visit (1770), the reaction
still went on, assisted by the disintegrating influ-
ences attendant on the Kevolutionary War. Be-
tween Whitefield's first visit and his second, in
1744, a critical temper had set in, to which Ed-
wards's " Thoughts " on the Revival, and Chaun-
cy's " Seasonable Thoughts," had contributed the
weightier part. Before Whitefield's next coming
(1754), the reaction had so gathered strength that
it had swept Edwards from his Northampton pulpit
in temporary "disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes." ^ But it would be a mistake to regard the
liberal tendencies of the half century, 1750-1800,
as mainly the result of a reaction from the Great
Awakening and the Whitefield revivals. These
dramatic events did something to retard, much to
accelerate the pace of liberal theology, but this
went on in spite of them or because of them, much
as it would have done if they had not intervened.

^ But Yale and Harvard were already going different ways,
ani while Whitefield was received coldly in Cambridge on his
third visit, at New Haven the college president " received him
9-s if he were a gentleman " (the second pronoun is ambiguous),
— the same president who at first repelled him violently and ex-
pelled the saintly Brainerd because of his too active sympathy
with him.

102 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

They made the process of amelioration more irregu-
lar ; they did not seriously affect its general course
and end, except when rising from the dead in the
last decade of the century and the first decade of
the next, when there was that very positive reaction
from the conditions brought about by two centuries
of gradual evolution which names this chapter of
my book.

Two men stand out from aU others in the earlier
stages of the revolt from Whitefield's Calvinism
and his disorganizing zeal, — Charles Chauncy, of
the First Church in Boston, and Jonathan Mayhew,
of the West Church. In one particular these bore
no likeness to Whitefield's description of the New
England clergy as "dumb dogs, half devils and
half beasts, unconverted, spiritually blind, and lead-
ing their people to hell." They were not dumb
dogs. Chauncy 's " Seasonable Thoughts on the
State of Keligion in New England" (1743) is
agreed to have been the most effective criticism
made on Whitefield and his friends. It claimed
for a diligent use of the ordinary means of grace
a more efficient operation than that of revivalism,
with its spasms of sense and sensibility. In the
next decade there was a great battle incidental to
the long war of the Whitefieldians and their oppo-
nents, in which Chauncy took a general's part,
convicting one of the Calvinists, Clark of Danvers,
of plain disloyalty to Calvin in his declaration
that the fate of children dying in infancy may be
left to "the secret Things which belong to God

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 103

alone." Calvinism required that they should, ex-
cept as specially elect, suffer the utmost penalty of
Adam's sin. Mayhew was diligent in republishing
Emlyn's and other English Unitarian books. He
was one of the most vigorous of those denouncing
human creeds as tests of doctrinal soundness, the
sole proper test being " the infallible word of God."
(In general the liberal temper was intensely
scriptural.) He was not without a pretty gift of
satirical writing, contending that " nonsense and
contradictions can never be too sacred to be ridicu-
lous." " A burning faggot," he said, " may set our
bodies in a light blaze, but it has no tendency to
illuminate the understanding." " A blow with a
club may fracture a man's skull, but I suppose he
will not think and reason the more clearly for that,
though he may possibly believe the more ortho-
doxly after his brains are knocked out than while
he continues in his senses." Till the revivalists
" have lost aU human understanding they think it
impossible they should get a divine one^ Mayhew
is set down by his biographer as " the first Cler-
gyman in New England who expressly and openly
opposed the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity."
As to the nature of Christ he was more Arian than
Socinian, but preferred to leave this matter where
it is left by the New Testament, — not sharply
defined. Lemuel Briant,^ of Braintree, did about

^ See Charles Francis Adams's account of Briant in Three
Episodes of Massachusetts History, which is, however, strang-ely
defective through the absence of any mention of Briant' s Uni-

104 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

as much as Chauncy or Mayhew to turmoil the
churches. From the title of a sermon which he
preached in 1749, and from that of one of the
opposing screeds, we get a clear impression of the
acrid humors of the time. Briant's title was, " The
Absurdity and Blasphemy of depretiating (sic)
Moral Virtue," and the answering one, " The Ab-
surdity and Blasphemy of substituting the personal
Righteousness of Men in the Room of the Surety-
Righteousness of Christ in the important Article
of Justification before God."

But the liberal theology was a sporadic growth,
appearing sometimes where there was least sign of
any careful sowing. In New Hampshire, wrote
Dr. Bellamy, the liberals had " got things so ripe
that they had ventured to new model our Shorter
Catechism^ to alter or entirely leave out the doc-
trines of the Trinity^ of the Decrees^ of our first
parents being created holy^ of original sin, Christ
satisfying divine justice, effectual calling, justifi-
cation, etc., and to adjust the whole to Dr, Taylor^ s
scheme." Edwards at Stockbridge, too deep in his
" Original Sin " to rise to the occasion, besought
his son-in-law. President Burr of Princeton, father
of the redoubtable Aaron, to join battle with the
enemy. Burr did so in a treatise on the " Deity
of Christ," which was published in Boston, as if to

versalism. The account is incidental to a history of the Braintree
church, a typical example of the ecclesiastical evolution, and, as
such, deserving attention. It is interesting to imagine how Mr.
Adams would have made the chips fly from the old blocks if he
had lived a century or two ago.

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 105

beard tlie roaring Mayhew in his den. Mayhew
was a prime mover of the political revolution, and
in 1767 surrendered his pulpit to Simeon Howard,
who was denounced as viewing the doctrine of the
Trinity as " an antiquated doctrine, very unfashion-
able and unmodish ; the high mode to laugh at it."
The next year Hopkins preached a strong Trini-
tarian sermon there " under a conviction that the
doctrine of the Divinity of Christ was much neg-
lected, if not disbelieved by a number of the minis-
ters in Boston." In 1780 — I quote Dr. Peabody
— there was only one Calvinist preacher in Boston,
the minister of Brattle Street (Samuel Cooper) ;
he with a liberal congregation, while Eckley of the
Old South Church was a liberal with an orthodox
congregation. Such mixtures were not uncommon,
and generally the people in the pews were more
radical than the ministers in the pulpits, an inter-
esting comment on the charge of timid reticence
which was brought against the ministers a little
later, and which has persisted till our time. The
first President Adams, a parishioner of Lemuel
Briant, could count many Unitarian ministers be-
sides his own as early as 1750, and lawyers, phy-
sicians, tradesmen, and farmers, in blocks of vari-
ous size. Mr. Gannett's estimate ^ of the two special

1 In Ezra Stiles Gannett, where the account of the Unitarian
evolution before Channing is the best I know, and " as interesting
as a novel." But see also for this, Allen's Unitarianism since the
Heformation, Walker'' s History of the Congregational Churches, and
Gillett's invaluable History and Literature of the Unitarian Con-
troversy, with its bibliography of nearly tliree hundred titles, a

106 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

emphases tliat were growing stronger all the time,
is confirmed by all the literature concerning the pe-
riod which I have looked into : 1, few fundamentals
in religion ; 2, no human creeds : only Bible words
for Bible mysteries.

Strangely enough the first definite schism was
not at any point along the Congregationalist line,
where it seemed threatening, but at the fountain-
head of New England Episcopacy, King's Chapel,
Boston. It is interesting to note that the first
English Unitarian to frankly take the Unitarian
name was an Episcopalian, the saintly Theophilus
Lindsey, whose Essex Place Chapel, London, is
now a place "whither the tribes go," the head-
quarters of the British and Foreign Unitarian Asso-
ciation. It was at his torch that James Freeman,
grandfather by marriage of James Freeman Clarke,
kindled his own. By its light the proprietors of
King's Chapel saw their way in 1785 to strike out
from the Prayer Book everything savoring of Trin-
itarian doctrine. For two years Freeman had been
their lay reader, and he remained in that office till
1787, when, no bishop being willing to lay his
hands upon a head so full of heresy, he received
lay ordination at the hands of his vestrymen, in
the validity of which Freeman was indoctrinated
by a Kev. Mr. Hazlitt in 1784. Mr. Hazlitt was
an English clergyman travelling in America, and
his son, William Hazlitt, the brilliant essayist, who

monument of diligence and carefulness, needlessly disfigured in
some parts.

EVOLUTION AND KE ACTION 107

in due time would be Channing's sharpest critic,
was then six years old.^ Freeman's light was not
hid under a bushel, but set on a high candlestick.
He was active in the distribution of English Uni-
tarian books, published a " Scripture Confutation of
the Thirty-Nine Articles," and negotiated the gift
of Priestley's works to Harvard College. The ex-
odus of Boston loyalists during the Revolutionary
War had brought King's Chapel to its lowest ebb.
When the time came for reconstruction there was
young blood in the ascendant whose " moral flow "
was away from all things English, the English
Church and its formularies included. There were
other Episcopal churches which the new wine made,
for a time, unsteady in their gait, but they all
settled down at length into a genial acquiescence
with the traditional forms.^ Increasingly loved
and venerated till his death in 1835, it is probable
that Freeman's close alliance with the English
(Socinian) Unitarians made him a questionable
figure in the eyes of Boston Unitarians of the
stricter (Arian) sort.

The minister of the Federal Street Church, from
1787 till his death in 1798, was Jeremy Belknap,

1 For some account of the elder Hazlitt's stay in America, see
BirreU's new life of Hazlitt in English Men of Letters, which is,
however, weak, as touching his relation to King's Chapel.

2 See Tiffany's and McConnell's histories of the Episcopal
Church in the United States for evidence of the liberal tendencies
of Bishop White and many others at the time when their church
was setting out on its career of distinct American development.
Also, Annals of King^s Chapel, for an invaluable mine of local
ecclesiastical history.

108 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

one of our best early historians and founder of the
Massachusetts Historical Society. In 1792 he
published a Unitarian sermon; in 1794 a life of
Watts with that of Doddridge, the purpose of
which was, as he frankly confessed, to exhibit Dr.
Watts's anti-Trinitarian opinions ; in 1795 a " Col-
lection of Psalms and Hymns," in which no hymn
or version of a psalm was included that ascribed
to Jesus the honor and worship due to God alone.^
The book was adopted by a good many congrega-
tions, and was " a sign to be spoken against " with
others. It was one of many straws that showed
which way the wind was blowing. But that the
differentiation of orthodox and heretic had as yet
hardly begun was evident from the fact that the
redoubtable Jedidiah Morse, the father of the
Unitarian controversy, 'par excellence^ collaborated
with Dr. Belknap in the making of the book, fur-
nishing the little marks which indicated the sharp
key or the flat in which the hymns should be
sung.

Meantime, partly parallel with the development
I have traced and partly in close affiliation with it,
was the development of Universalism. Murray,

^ The Brooklyn Historical Society has a copy, beautifully
bound in red morocco, which was the personal property of Jane-
Sig-ourney, who married Frederick A. Farley, whose first pastorate
was in Providence, R. L, his second, more than twenty years in
length, in Brooklyn, N. Y. All the psalms are versified, and
there are three hundred additional hymns. Watts's hymns were
not all approved. The prophet Jeremy remarks in his preface
that Watts uses terms of endearment in speaking of God with
" a disgusting licence."

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 109

wlio died in the very year when Dr. Morse con-
trived his brilliant artifice for converting heresy
into schism (1815), was a Calvinist in his major
and minor premises, but drew a different conclu-
sion from that of Edwards and Hopkins : only the
elect were saved, but everybody was elect ; "As
in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made
alive," as good a text as any controversialist ever
found in the whole Bible armory, its edge much
dulled by the grinding of Dr. Orello Cone and
other modern critics. The early Universalist soci-
eties were recruited more in Baptist and Methodist
quarters than among the Congregationalists, and on
more democratic social lines. The early Unitari-
ans, as socially aristocratic, were naturally averse to
a promiscuous salvation. Men might be " born free
and equal" (the habitual misquotation), but that
they died so was another matter, not to be lightly
entertained. There had been Universalist think-
ing in America before the kindly and lachrymose
Murray came over and found a church without a
minister awaiting him on the New Jersey shore.
Chauncy, of Boston, and Briant, of Brain tree
(Quincy), whom we have already met, were clearly
committed to the humaner creed. Adam Streeter
began to preach Universalism in Ehode Island,
without having heard of Murray, in 1777. A lit-
tle later came Elhanan Winchester, In his diary
Ezra Stiles compares his book with Chauncy's and
finds it much more important. Winchester started
from the Arminian side, and Murray, starting from

110 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

the Calvinistic, declared that he " knew of nothuig
further from true Christianity than such Univer-
salism," but, when they met, he could not resist
the tender saintliness of Winchester's face and
speech.

In 1775 the light of Universalism dawned upon
the soul of Caleb Rich, a Baptist Calvinist, kick-
ing against the pricks of an inhuman creed amidst
the glory of the New Hampshire hills. He, again,
had never heard of Murray. But Rich shines less
by his own light than by that reflected back on
him from his son in the spirit, Hosea Ballou, of
all Universalist chiefs and founders easily the first.
When BaUou preached for Murray, who had come
from Gloucester to Boston in 1793, Mrs. Murray
instigated a hearer to stand up and say, " That is
not the doctrine usually preached in this place."
And it was not. There was no Calvinism left in
it. All the five points were gone, and with them
the Trinity and Vicarious Atonement and Adam's
Fall, with all mankind upon his back. Ballou' s
book on the Atonement was published in 1805,
when Channing, never Trinitarian, was still en-
tangled in the meshes of the Calvinistic scheme,
and it anticipated the full-grown expression of
Channing's thought on all its principal lines, with
a difference in the way of viewing the relations of
the present and the future life. It was Ballou's
doctrine that we get our full and just punishment
in the body for sins committed in the body. Was
this very different from Emerson's doctrine that

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 111

the fruit of every action is immediate ? It seemed
to miss the fact that a man's character is the result
of his experience, and himself is hell or heaven as
the case may be, and hardly to be made very dif-
ferent by the beneficent event of death, though we
now believe much more in the effectiveness of the
environment than formerly. But his doctrine in
its entirety was an immense correction of the cur-
rent Calvinism and transformed the Universalism
that he found growing where Murray had diligently
sowed the seeds and watered them with his tears.
From 1790 to 1800 Universalists were a hetero-
geneous body, some of Murray, some of Winchester,
only united in the one glorious idea that at last
" every tongue should confess and every knee should
bow." By 1815 they had a compact body of ideas,
the ideas which Universalism was to express for
the next half century. The ideas were One God
the Father, Reconciliation of man to God by the
self-sacrificing spirit of Jesus, the sufficiency of our
mortal life for the punishment of its own sins.
Ballon was not a learned, not an educated, man,
but he knew his one book, the Bible, as well as
any man could know it who knew no other. He
was a great preacher and he was a greater soul.
It was not by exegesis but by humanity that he
prevailed. He warmed the heart of the Eternal,
as the Calvinists had made him, at his own loving
breast. We cannot honor him too much.^

^ See John Coleman Adams's address, " Rosea Ballou," at the
Universalist Convention in Buffalo, 1901.

112 WILLIAM ELLERY CHAINING

Such movements as this of Ballou's and of Mur-
ray's before him, together with the more general
tendency to liberal opinions, could not but excite
a reaction in the minds of the more conservative
representatives of the creed that was being every-
where diminished and assailed. The sense of
danger must have been aggravated a great deal by
the appearance of Thomas Paine's " Age of Rea-
son" in 1794, and by the vogue to which it
speedily attained. Men's agitated nerves so dis-
turbed their vision that to confound Paine's ideas
with those of the Boston liberals was most natural.
A composite photograph was made of all the liberal
and radical doctrines of the time, and with the re-
sulting ogre good clergymen and laymen frightened
themselves and each other in a quite dreadful
fashion. And indeed there was good ground for
fear if the traditional orthodoxy was an ideal con-
struction of the world, deserving of men's love and
praise. Something must be done to stay the in-
coming tide of liberalism, or, continuing to rise as
it had risen from 1750 to 1790, there would not
be a New England steeple left in sight at the ex-
piration of another period of equal length. Some-
thing was done. There was an orthodox reaction.^
It began about 1790. It forced the Unitarian
schism in the course of the next forty years, not
putting forth half its strength until twenty-five of
these had passed. There never was a quieter or more

1 For details see Williston Walker's History of the Congrega-
tional Churches in the United States, chap, ix., pp. 309-369.

EVOLUTION AND REACTION 113

natural evolution than that of New England liber-
alism in the eighteenth century. There never was
a more conscious and deliberate reaction than that
which thwarted this evolution for a time and
divided, until now, the Congregationalist fold.
That the men of the reaction were as conscientious
and well meaning as the men of the reform needs
hardly to be said. That some of them were much
more in earnest does not admit of any doubt.

This reaction was intimately associated with the
expansion of New England, the overflow of its
population into neighboring States, the closer affili-
ation of New England Congregationalism with the
Presbyterianism of New York resulting in the
"Plan of Union" (1801) ; and it was illustrated
by a series of revivals, widely extended, an out-
burst of missionary zeal, and a sharp awakening to
the presence and the danger of the liberal develop-
ment. A local revival in Maine (1791) soon be-
came general throughout New England. A Hart-
ford pastor, using the swollen diction which was
the trademark of the time, said of the last decade of
the eighteenth century, " I saw a continued succes-
sion of heavenly sprinklings ... in Connecticut,
until in 1799 I could stand at my door in New
Hartford, . . . and number fifty or sixty congre-
gations laid down in one field of divine wonders,
and as many more in different parts of New Eng-
land." On the tide of this revival came in the
new Sunday-school organization, the missionary
beginnings of Mills, Newell, and Judson, an exten-

114 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sion of home missionary work, and — the special
matter of our immediate concern — a searching
of the joints and marrow of all those deliberately
opposed or negatively indifferent to the revival,
or betraying liberal tendencies in any way, shape,
or manner. Into the turmoil of this inquisition
many were drawn who did little credit to them-
selves or to their cause, many who lost little of the
beauty of their holiness in the hot and dusty fray,
and one who stands out from all others, less be-
cause of the ethical nobility and the sainthood
which he shared with many upon his own and the
opposing side than because of the clean vigor that
he brought to the defence of the assailed and his
entire and perfect apprehension of the nature and
the magnitude of the interests involved. There is
little need that I should write his name.

CHAPTER V

THE DIVIDED FOLD

The year 1815, as significant of the beginning
of the Unitarian Controversy, is hardly less precise
than the majority of dates commonly accepted as
the starting points of great events. Its relative
significance, as we shall see, was very great, but
we have seen already that the " seeds and weak
beginnings " of the liberal thought were germinat-
ing all the way along from the early settlement
of New England, and pushing through the hard
ground into the windy air all through the eighteenth
century. Even the schism of the Unitarians from
the orthodox body — more properly, perhaps, the
schism of the Calvinists from the liberal body —
was not a sudden cleft. All the way along from
the beginning of the last century, and from farther
back, there were signs of a definitive partition of
the divided house, — on the one hand the growing
strength of the liberal party, on the other an in-
creasing disposition to exclude the liberals from fel-
lowship or to withdraw from their assembly. In
the event the schism was predominantly an ortho-
dox schism. Not that the liberals were the main
body of Congregation alists (they were so in Bos-

116 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

ton and its vicinity, but not far beyond), but that
it was the orthodox party that forced the separa-
tion, the liberals pleading against it with a pathetic
earnestness which the more kindly hearts or less
conscientiously dogmatic minds could not with-
stand. Meantime each side pressed steadily for
the advantage, sometimes with equal disregard of
that Christian spirit in which their inevitable dif-
ference should have been met.

It was now (after 1800) advance and opposition
all along the line, the opposition generally the
more self-conscious and more vigorous. Just as
the century turned, the church in Plymouth, that
of the Pilgrim Fathers, became quite definitely Uni-
tarian, the more orthodox of the church proper
(the body of communicants) soon afterward with-
drawing and setting up for themselves. Generally,
as the gulf widened, the " church " was found on
one side of it — the orthodox — and the "society,"
owning the church property, upon the other. Here
was a fruitful source of acrimony, with grave in-
justice perpetrated here and there. Its more pro-
found significance was that with the " church '*
went often the more spiritual elements to leaven
the new lump, — a far-reaching influence. But
there were able, shrewd, and active non-church-
members of both kinds. Notably the lay founders
of the Andover Theological School were men who
had not " experienced religion." The action of
the Pilgrim Fathers' church was an ominous busi-
ness. More than a hundred churches of the Puri-

THE DIVIDED FOLD 117

tan founding^ followed its lead upon tlie lines of
Pastor Robinson's prophecy, " There is more truth
yet to break out from God's word." In 1802, Rev.
Samuel Worcester was dismissed from the Fitch-
burg pulpit by the society in opposition to the
wishes of the church. He went to Salem and there
nursed his wrath for thirteen years, and kept it
warm until the striking of his hour. The starting
of the " Monthly Antholog}^" (1803) by the liberal
party brought Jedidiah Morse, of Charlestown, to
the fore with the " Panoplist," pledged to the use
of its full armor for the defence of the beleaguered
faith. That Channing sometimes wrote for it was
proof that the line of di\4sion was not yet sharply
drawn, or that he had not yet made his final choice.
On both sides the event was seen to be critical
when in 1805 Henry Ware was made Hollis Pro-
fessor of Theology in Harvard College. The col-
lege became Unitarian by this act, which excited
violent opposition, the redoubtable Morse heading
it with a vigorous pamphlet, which was practically
the first number of the " Panoplist." There were
other reprisals. Eckley, the Hberal minister of the
Old South, was dead, and the conservative congre-

1 Notable examples making much noise and causing much ex-
citement at the time were those of John Sherman and Abiel Ab-
bot in Connecticut, where the semi-Presbyterian Consociation
made heresy a more punishable offence. Sherman's book (1805)
" was the most positive anti-Trinitarian treatise that had yet origi-
nated in New England " (sic Walker's Congregational Churches).
For both cases see Gillett's Unitarian Controversy, pp. 249, 250 ;
259-261.

118 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

gation, under the guidance of Dr. Morse, chose a
strict Calvinist for the succession. Another note
of the reaction was the settlement of Codman by the
Dorchester society, after the frankest exposition
of his Calvinistic views, Channing preaching the
ordination sermon and Morse taking part in the
service, another sign of the still wavering line of
cleavage and of Channing' s slow development, his
sermon, above mentioned, witnessing. In 1810,
Dr. Porter, of Roxbury, had declared, in the Con-
vention Sermon, that of the whole list of orthodox
doctrines, including eternal punishment, neither
the belief or rejection of one of them was essential
to Christian faith and character. What wonder
that it seemed necessary to " the party of the other
part " to bring a sturdy Calvinist to Boston, from
whose preaching sprang the new Park Street
Church, built expressly to stand four square to
every liberal assault and superheat the controver-
sial air. Mr. Codman's Dorchester congregation
soon found that they had reckoned without a suf-
ficient knowledge of their minister. He refused
to exchange with liberal ministers, and by a small
majority it was voted by the society that " his con-
nection with it had become extinct." Seventy-one
male and one hundred and eighty-three female mem-
bers of the church and society protested vigorously.
There was a first council and a second. Another
minister was placed in the pulpit, and the ap-
proaches to it were guarded against Mr. Codman,
who, nevertheless, preached from the lower plat-

THE DIVIDED FOLD 119

form ; if simultaneously with the other minister
there must have been a confusion of tongues.
Finally the moderator's casting vote gave Mr. Cod-
man's side the victory, and all the exclusionists
round about took cheerful heart. There were ven-
tures towards a new style of Congregationalism,
akin to the Connecticut Consociation, to work the
exclusive policy.^ But not even the most orthodox
could be relied on for this retrogression. Nathanael
Emmons, stoutest of them all, did more than any
one to give it pause. " Association," he maintained,
"leads to Consociation, Consociation to Presbyte-
rianism, Presbyterianism to Episcopalianism, and
Episcopalianism to Popery." The strength of the
liberals was largely in their Congregational tradi-
tion. " Protestantism," said Dr. Holmes, " means.
Mind your own business." Congregationalism
meant the same thing, more clearly. If the con-
gregations were well satisfied with their liberal
ministers, it was nobody else's business.

The reaction took on many forms, one of the
most obvious the establishment of the Andover
Theological Seminary in 1808. This was a coun-
terblast to the accession of Harvard College to the
liberals three years before. It was brought about
by mutual concessions of the Old Calvinists and

1 Buckminster wrote Belsham, Feb. 5, 1809, " There is among
us an increasing' party of Calvinists and Hopkinsians who wish to
promote a more exclusive union on the basis of the Westminster
Confession of Faith and who will, therefore, form a schism in our
Congregational connection and separate from us, and probably
send delegates to the General Assembly."

120 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Hopkinsians, Leonard Woods, who was something
of one kind and the other, and anything against
the liberals, furnishing the callida junctura of the
broken chain. If there had been no liberals form-
ing so strong a party as to make the Hopkinsians
and Calvinists fearful of their ability to cope with
them alone, we should probably have had a Hop-
kinsian instead of a Unitarian schism. In New
York, where there were no liberals to speak of, the
Calvinists dealt with the Hopkinsians as sternly as
these rivals, pooling their issues in Massachusetts,
dealt with the Unitarians. They declared Hopkin-
sianism " at war with the philosophy of the human
mind, with common sense, and with the word of
the living God ; " that it " ought to be exposed
SLnd reprobated in the most decided manner ; " that
" in some very material points it was another
Gospel." It was " time they [the Hopkinsians]
were known and A line of distinction drawn."
They had " gained a reputation far beyond what
nonsense and impiety should acquire." They were
" preparing the way for a more extensive diffusion
of infidel principles and even of atheism in our
country." It takes inappreciable differences to
breed the bitterest hostility. Terrible would have
been the battle of Old Calvinists and Hopkinsians
in Massachusetts but for the common foe and fear.
It was no easy matter to compound their differences
to the end that they might meet the liberals with
an unbroken front. It looked as if there would be
one school at Andover and another at Newbury-

THE DIVIDED FOLD 121

port. The danger was so imminent that the Old
Calvinists bowed their proud necks to the Hop-
kinsian yoke. The resulting creed was a piece of
theological patchwork of unrivalled intricacy. It
aroused young Thacher, not yet a settled minister,
to the most drastic bit of writing which has come
down to us with his superscription. " This we
believe," he said, " to be the first instance of a
creed's being originally formed with a designed
ambiguity of meaning, with the express intention
of permitting men of different opinions to sign it.
The circumstance which pollutes the old age of
creeds in other countries pollutes the infancy of
this." As to the device for securing an unpro-
gressive orthodoxy — the creed to be re-signed
every five years by the professors — he said, " It
is a yoke too galling to be endured by any man
who has felt the difficulty of investigating truth."
Apparently this prophecy was not made good. For
more than half a century the yoke was found easy
enough by such deep scholars and good men as
Woods and Porter and Stuart and Park ; then it
began to chafe and fret; with what results we
know. A statute unrepealed, it is only there for
lack of all obedience.

And now, before passing on to that series of
events which made the year 1815 so memorable in
Channing's life and in the history of New England
Congregationalism, let us go back a little and see
how Channing had been musing that such a fire
should burn in those letters and sermons that were

122 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

his contribution to that controversy which found
the Congregational churches at least formally
united and left them, when the storm abated, two
distinct bodies of believers, less sadly alienated in
their minds than in their hearts.

We have seen that Channing, never a Trinita-
rian, was during the first years of his ministry not
only somewhat evangelical^ in his thought and
temper, but even Calvinistic, the profound influ-
ence of Hopkins and his own miserable health con-
spiring to this end. Yet even the first years of
his ministry — even his first sermon ! — had inti-
mations of his maturest thought and spirit; and
these, not steadily, but with some wavering, became
more definite as he settled to his work and found
himself obliged to approve some men and things
and withstand others, as the liberal sentiments of
the community gathered strength and the reaction
became more exclusive in its temper and more
definite in its aims. What we seem to find very
clearly is that he arrived at liberal principles
sooner than at Unitarian doctrines ; that his larger
and more characteristic thoughts anticipated the
minor Unitarian expression. A noble confidence
in reason, a fear of worse results from its repres-
sion or neglect than from its free exercise, distrust
of theological precision as making for sectarian
division, the insistence upon character as supe-

1 I use the word here and elsewhere protestingly to express
those traditional aspects of orthodoxy which stop short of the
five characteristic points of Calvinism.

THE DIVIDED FOLD 123

rior to creed, a lofty faitli in the Eternal Father-
hood and in the dignity of human nature, — such
was the warp of his religion, while for the woof
there was material of quite different, not to say
inferior, grade. There was as yet no " wholeness
of tissue " in his web of thought. There were
giants in those days among his opinions and be-
liefs, but the traditional conceptions walked in and
out between their legs, either unnoticed or toler-
ated with a certain proud indifference, so confi-
dent was he of the superior energy of his essential
thought.

The eagle suffers little birds to sing-,

And is not careful what they mean thereby,

Knowing that with the shadow of his wing
He can at pleasure stint their melody.

No feature of Channing's early mind was more
prominent than a devout biblicism. He and his
liberal friends were much more biblical than the
more orthodox. If there was " pride of reason "
anywhere it was with those who fashioned elabo-
rate creeds that had no Bible warrant. It was
because the Bible had no " clear word of prophecy "
about the nature of Christ and the Atonement that
the liberals were vague and hesitating as to these
matters ; and Channing was so to a remarkable
degree his whole life long.

It is probable that through his personal sympa-
thies with Buckminster, and more especially with
Thacher, whom he loved so much, Channing's
attraction to the liberal party was much enhanced,

124 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

but one has only to follow the course of his thought
from 1803 to 1815 to see that such events as
those of the later year were bound to conquer his
distaste for controversy and carry him, full armed,
into the fight which he had vainly hoped to make
impossible.

In 1806 he seems to speak as consciously con-
servative in opinion, yet from the standpoint of
religious liberty : "I cannot charge a man with
damnable heresy unless I see that his sentiments
prove an opposite temper, or, at least, exclude the
exercise of Christian love." A little later his
grandfather complains that Channing's standard is
" not particular enough." " But this," the grand-
son answers, " is the distinguishing feature of our
system of liberality. The greater the variety of
sentiments with which a system will harmonize, or
the fewer its fundamentals, the more worthy it is
of liberal minds." Here, then, we have the con-
servative thought and the liberal disposition side
by side. In 1807, in another letter to his grand-
father, a devout Hopkinsian, he is clearly jus-
tifying his tolerance for others, while himself
consciously orthodox. " Taught by experience to
know my own blindness, shall I speak as if I could
not err, and as if [others] might not, in some dis-
puted points, be more enlightened than myself ? "
In 1811 he writes of a doughty assailant of Hop-
kins's and other departures from Old Calvinism,
" I can only lament that such powers are not
employed in recommending a purer and simpler

THE DIVIDED FOLD 125

form of Christianity. ... I cannot suffer even a
superior to strip my religion of its reasonableness,
beauty, and simplicity." Here were the marks of
his high calling plain enough. A year later we
have views of the Lord's Supper in sharp contrast
with the Edwardsian standard, " Saints only need
apply." He looked into his own heart and wrote,
Dec. 29, 1812, in such a way as to show that the
Calvinistic spell upon his mind had wholly lost its
power ; —

I know that Calvinism is embraced by many excel-
lent people, but I know that on some minds it has the
most mournful effects, that it spreads over them an im-
penetrable gloom, that it generates a spirit of bondage
and fear, that it chills the best affections, that it represses
virtuous effort, that it sometimes shakes the throne of
reason . . .

The passage breaks off sharply in the middle of
a sentence, and what foUows is not addressed to his
correspondent : —

O my merciful Father ! I cannot speak of thee in the
language which this system would suggest. No ! Thou
hast been too kind to deserve this reproach from my lips.
Thou hast created me to be happy ; thou callest me to
virtue and piety, because in these consists my felicity ;
and thou wilt demand nothing from me but what thou
givest me ability to perform.

Farther along in the same letter he objects to
" that unscriptural phrase, ' the merits of Christ,' "
and writes of the Son's equality with the Father as

126 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

" the darkest of all doctrines." ^ He urges his
friend to read Noah Worcester's " Bible News of
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," and in 1813 we
find him writing to the peaceful author of that
bomb-like book, urging him to accept the editor-
ship of the " Christian Disciple," a new magazine,
in place of Andrews Norton's "General Reposi-
tory" (1812, 1813), which had succeeded the less
theological and polemic " Anthology." The " Pan-
oplist's" demand for "the immediate erection of
ecclesiastical tribunals " required a counteracting
influence. Channing would not have Worcester
devote the new magazine to any particular view of
" the person and dignity of Christ."

We have no desire to diffuse any religious peculiar-
ities. Our great desire is to preserve our fellow Chris-
tians from the systematic and unwearied efforts which are
making to impose on them a human creed and to infuse
into them angry and bitter feelings towards those who
differ from them.

A comparison of the " Christian Disciple " with
the " Panoplist " is certainly very favorable to the
liberals as less controversial than the orthodox.
In ten years their new organ contained but six
controversial articles, and the " Christian Exami-
ner" (1824-1869) had as clean a record, while
the " Panoplist " and " Spirit of the Pilgrims " re-

1 He had Waterland, that ^eat Trinitarian coryphaeus, to hack
him here with his declaration, *' You can never fix any certain
principle of individuation," i. e., between the Father and Son,
and the ideas of Being and Person.

THE DIVIDED FOLD 127

sounded with the din of controversial zeal as their
most characteristic note.

Already in 1811 Channing was stating the im-
portance of free inquiry so clearly and forcibly
that there was little room for further gain in this
particular. He wrote and underscored, " The only
way of 'producing uniformity is to encourage seri-
ous and earnest inquiry »'' It was upon a spirit
tempered to this fineness, a man singularly sen-
sitive to any imputation cast upon his personal
honor, and dreading the spirit of exclusion in re-
ligion as he dreaded nothing else, that the events
of 1815 came with an earthquake force, shaking
his island of reserve from that propriety which
hitherto it had observed.

Early in the year 1815 Dr. Jedidiah Morse, on
whose tracks we have come several times already,^

^ See his Life by Dr. W. B. Sprag-ue, compiler of the invalu-
able Annals of the American Pulpit. The book contains a portrait
which might be a composite photograph of all the sourer saints in
the Puritan calendar. Yet he not only suffered the little children
to come unto him but welcomed them ; Lucy Osgood, daughter
of Dr. Osgood, of Medford, and, like him, of blessed memory,
tells how pleasantly, though he warned her that Worcester's
Bible News was a short road to " the everlasting bonfire."
Strangely enough one of his kindest actions was the rescue from
debt of the father of Thomas Whittemore, that hard-hitting
Universalist. He was born in Woodstock, Conn., in 1761, licensed
to preach in 1785, settled in Charlestown, Mass., in 1789, on a
salary of $11 per week, house and firewood. One dollar a week he
relinquished because his people had not yet recovered from the
burning of their homes by the British soldiers in 1775, after the
battle of Bunker Hill. Old experience attained to nothing of
prophetic strain in Dr. Belknap's installation sermon from the
text, " Neither as lording it over God's heritage, but as ensamples

128 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANGING

always keen upon the scent of heresy, ran to cover
game of unprecedented size and danger to the fold.
This game was Belsham's life of Theophiliis Lind-
sey, the saintly Unitarian founder to whom Belsham
had succeeded in the ministry of the first English
Unitarian church which frankly took the Unitarian
name. Belsham was a lesser light than Lindsey,
Priestley, or Price, the three Unitarian leaders, in
conjunction with whose names we often find his
own. Belsham was a vigorous and manly follower
on Priestley's materialistic line. His life of Lindsey
contained a chapter on American Unitarianism
which was animated by a desire, if not a determi-
nation, to make the Americans speak out more
boldly and make a party by themselves after the

to the flock." No man of his time so lorded it over God's heri-
tage as Dr. Morse. He was the head and front of orthodox
opposition to the liberal offending. At every stage of that oppo-
sition he was, if not easily first, always well in the lead. The in-
stitution of the General Association, the attempted Consociation,
the arming of the Panoplist, the criticism of Ware's Harvard ap-
pointment, the Andover counterblast to this, the building and
manning of the Park Street Church, — in all these pithy and
momentous enterprises his was an active and aggressive part.
His central purpose was to unite the Old Calvinists and Hopkin-
sians in opposition to the liberals. But Unitarianism and Univer-
salism grew rank in the shadow of his preaching, and his own
people tired of him and turned him out. Not the least of his
distinctions was to be the father of S. F. B. Morse, the inventor
of the electric telegraph and the founder of the New York Acad-
emy of Design, whom I knew as one of O. B. Frothingham's de-
voted adherents. It is graved upon Jedidiah's monument that
he was "The Father of American Geography," but his most
characteristic paternity was that of the separation of the New
England Congregational churches into two rival sects.

THE DIVIDED FOLD 129

English fashion. Dr. Morse made haste to believe
that the book had been practically suppressed on
account of this chapter. It is certain that few
copies of it were circulated in Boston and Cam-
bridge. This really meant that few had any liking
for Belsham's Socinian dogmatism. Dr. Morse's
construction was different and not wholly wrong.
It was that the Boston liberals were afraid to have
the truth come out. They were, because it was
such partial and misleading truth. The facts were
generally as stated, but inferences would be drawn
from them that would be cruel and unjust. The
event more than justified their grave anticipations
and their fears.

Dr. Morse was so much impressed by Lord
Chesterfield's "Letters" that he Bowdlerized them
for Boston use, " Chesterfield on Politeness, im-
proved by Dr. Morse." He now set out to improve
on Belsham's chapter on American Unitarianism.
He printed it separately ^ in a pamphlet, " without
note or alteration," as deposed, but with ten pages
of preface to thirty-eight of borrowed matter,
abounding in adroit insinuations and reproducing

1 American Unitarianism, or a Brief History of the Progress
and Present State of the Unitarian Churches in America. Com-
piled from Documents and Information Communicated by the
Rev. James Freeman, D. D., and William Wells, Jr., Esq., of Bos-
ton, and from other Unitarian gentlemen in this country. By the
Rey. Thomas Belsham, Essex Street, London. Extracted from
the Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey, published
in London, in 1812, and now published for the benefit of the
Christian Churches in this country, without note or alteration.
The date is interesting : for three years the laws which Mr. Bel-
sham had laid down for the Americans had been silent in the
midst of arms.

130 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

from other sources Belsham's elaborate personal
creed. I look at the brown old pamphlet^ and
wonder that so great a matter could be kindled by
so little fire. But it was the improvement that was
most combustible. This was a review of the pam-
phlet in the " Panoplist" by Jeremiah Evarts, father
of Senator Evarts, whom Dr. Morse had brought
to Boston in 1810 to edit the "Panoplist." The
review was ably written and admirably calculated
to do the mischief it was contrived to bring about.
It had a threefold purpose : first, to identify Amer-
ican liberals with English Unitarians ; second,
to convict the former of dishonesty in covertly
teaching or hypocritically concealing their Unita-
rian opinions ; third, to demand the denial to all
Unitarians of the Christian name and their ex-
clusion from all Christian courtesy and fellowship.
It was this review, with its damaging reflections
and insinuations and its exclusive spirit, that
brought the Unitarian Controversy to its acutest
stage and roused William Ellery Channing, now
thirty-five years old, to the assumption of duties
to which he had no natural inclination. Yet, for a
man averse to controversy, it must be conceded
that he had for it an aptitude and skill second to

1 My private copy, as of other pamphlets principal to the con-
troversy, was first owned by the Hon. Ezra Starkweather, of Worth-
ington, Mass. If he was not one of the liberals, he was a man
who read both sides. Then, however, almost every hill town had
its group of deep-reading and deep-thinking men ; Chesterfield,
my own summer town, a very notable one, with Luther Edwards
for preeminence, elbow on knee and chin on hand, when he would
utter oracles.

THE DIVIDED FOLD 131

none of those who were eventually drawn in to-
wards the storm centre and there behaved them-
selves, some well, and others not so well. The form
of Channing's original contribution was that of a
letter to his friend Thacher, with whom he had
talked the matter over carefully. It was probably
upon Thacher's urgency that Channing accepted
the unwelcome task. Could he have prevailed on
Thacher to accept it, the whips to which the ortho-
dox objected as swung by Channing would have been
scorpions in the hands of his less cautious friend.
The letter as written was not, perhaps, a model of
sweetness or amenity, but then the provocation was
immense. And what it set out to do, it did most
royally. There was a deep personal note in Chan-
ning's repudiation of the attempt to identify Boston
liberalism with English Unitarianism. Martineau,
in his noble article on Channing ( " Essays, Re-
views, and Addresses," i. 81), contends that Chan-
ning was closer kin to Hopkins and Edwards than
to Belsham and Priestley. There was little to
choose on the point of moral freedom, but the
materialism of Belsham and Priestley was to Chan-
ning an intolerable offence. There were various
particulars in which his thoughts were not their
thoughts, nor his ways their ways. For one thing
Belsham, as shown by his own words in the Morse
pamphlet, was frankly Universalist, and Channing
had not yet come into so large a place. But few of
the liberals had done so, and many more of them
were Arians, with Channing, in their doctrine of

132 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Christ's nature, rather than Socinians, with Priest-
ley, Belsham, and Lindsey. It is difficult to imag-
ine how it could seem right to Morse and Evarts to
affix the English stigma generally to their Unita-
rian brethren. In England only the Socinian Uni-
tarians were called Unitarians ; those of the Arian
type were called simply Arian s. Here was a good
reason for American hesitation as to accepting the
proffered brand. The liberals accounted them-
selves Christians and Congregationalists, and here
were names enough. While differing from Bel-
sham in almost every particular of his creed, Chan-
ning did not wish to be considered as casting the
least reproach on him or others who, in England
or America, believed in the simple humanity of
Christ. " Whilst I differ from them in opinion, I
have no disposition to deny to them the name and
privileges of Christians." In this part of Chan-
ning's letter there was a too nervous anxiety lest
his views should be confounded with those of Bel-
sham, and an exaggerated estimate of their differ-
ence. But Channing had not yet come to the full
breadth of his religious sympathy, and one is apt
to dent his controversial sword in the very act of
grinding it.

The second part was of much more importance.
This was in rebuttal of the charge of base, cowardly,
and hypocritical concealment of their opinions by
liberal Christians. The concealment he did not
deny, but rather conceded to a degree not justified
perfectly by the facts at our command.

THE DIVIDED FOLD 133

But, in following this course, we are not conscious
of having contracted, in the least degree, the guilt of
insincerity. We have aimed at making no false impres-
sion. We have only followed a general system, which
we are persuaded to be best for our people and for the
cause of Christianity, — the system of excluding contro-
versy as much as possible from our pulpits.

The doctrine of the Trinity he had never as-
sailed in the pulpit, nor the doctrines of total
depravity and election, " the most injurious errors
which ever darkened the Christian world," the
exposing of which would delight any congregation,
a fact showing how little fear had to do with the
reticence. He and his friends could, had they
wished, have made the word Calvinist a byword
and a hissing, but they had never uttered the
name in the pulpit. As " the most unintelligible
doctrine about which Christians had ever dis-
puted," the doctrine of the Trinity had not seemed
a fit one for popular discussion. It was much the
same with the nature of Christ. The best men
were divided on this point ; whence modesty with
regard to it was becoming, and scanty speech.

No aspect of the Unitarian Controversy has been
more dwelt upon than this of the " silent brother-
hood." Was the concealment, as Morse and Evarts
charged, base, cowardly, and hypocritical, or was
it, as Channing insisted, noble, generous, self-deny-
ing ? It was the latter for the most part, but not
altogether.^ Caution and prudence had their place

1 See W. C. Gannett's Ezra Stiles Gannett, pp. 50, 51, at -which
Dr. Dewey (private letter) demurred, as conceding too much to
the charge of prudential motives.

134 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

and influence here and there. That Channing's
motives were precisely what he represented them
as being, there cannot be a moment's doubt, and
in this respect hQ spoke in order that the thoughts
of many hearts might be revealed. It was of the
very essence of the liberal movement to emphasize
the ethical and spiritual, and treat theological
dogmas as negligible quantities. It was its peculiar
joy to preach a positive religion, and especially to
exhibit " the simplicity of the gospel " in prefer-
ence to its obscurer traits. Moreover, the peace
and unity of the Congregational body were very
dear to liberals. There will be less and less ques-
tion of their high sincerity in proportion as the
facts are understood, while there may be persistent
difference as to the wisdom of their course. That
a bolder method would have been fatal to their
cause seems not so sure as Morse and Evarts
thought. But for the orthodox reaction, the whole
body of New England churches would have become
liberal before Channing's death. Yet might not
a bolder method have arrived more speedily at the
same result ?

It was when Channing came to the third part
of his letter, — his depreciation of the exclusive
policy, — that he put forth all his strength. " For
myself," he said, " the universe would not tempt
me to bear a part in this work of dividing Christ's
church and of denouncing his followers. If there
be an act which, above all others, is a transgression
of Christian law, it is this." Seldom at any time

THE DIVIDED FOLD 135

have the vaticinations of prophetic souls been real-
ized more obviously or more painfully than were
Channing's when he raised the veil on the long
train of irritations, hatreds, recriminations that
would ensue upon the adoption of the exclusive
policy. Fearing nothing for himself, he feared
countless miseries for the church of Christ, and
not least for " the very Christians who denounce
us, who seem indeed to be united, no^ that a com-
mon enemy is to be trodden under foot, but who
have sufficient diversities of opinion among them-
selves to awaken against each other all the fury of
intolerance when this shall have become the temper
and habit of their minds." All the passion of
which Channing's nature was capable went out in
the strong crying of this noble plea for a ministry
of reconciliation.

I sometimes wonder that his plea did not pre-
vail. But Dr. Morse did not. He was not reckon-
ing without his host of strong allies. One of these
was Dr. Samuel Worcester, brother of that Noah
Worcester of the " Bible News " and " Christian
Disciple," whose feet were shod with the prepara-
tion of the gospel of peace. Already the divisive
sword had cleft one family asunder. Samuel Wor-
cester had suffered for his orthodox belief — the
loss of his Fitchburg pulpit ; now was his day and
hour. But there was genuine surprise for Chan-
ning in his sharp attack. He did not expect this
noble Brutus to be striking with the rest. And he
struck hard, three times. To his first and second

136 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

letters Channing replied promptly, reserving pre-
terition for the third, which ran out into a technical
discussion of the Trinity, for which Channing had
imperfect training and no taste. There were joints
in his armor which his opponent found and pierced,
yet reached no vital part. Channing kept steadily
in view the great headlands of the controversy;
fidelity to Scripture and the fallibility of human
creeds ; avoidance of theological preaching with a
view to spiritual edification ; the lack of cowardly
concealment here; the melancholy promise of a
divided fold. Several of his allusions to the Soci-
nians as " the lowest Unitarians " could not have
been much relished by Dr. Freeman and those like-
minded. But Channing' s last letter was braver
than his first in its demand for open fellowship
with these. He praised their Christian spirit and
their Christian life ; —

Such men we have not dared to exclude from the
Christian Church, on the ground of what seems to us
great errors, any more than to exclude the disciples of
Calvin, whose errors we also deeply lament, hut whose
errors are often concealed from us by the brightness of
their Christian virtues.

Touching the Trinity, he went nigh to the dis-
covery of a late orthodox scholar ^ that, for all their
differences as to whether " the blessed three " were
three substances, or three somewhats (Stuart's
word), or three persons, so called for want of a

1 Professor Levi Leonard Paine, Evolution of Trinitarian Doc-
trine.

THE DIVIDED FOLD 137

better name, no one of them was strictly orthodox
according to the orthodoxy of the Nicene creed.

And ought [he asked] phrases hke these — of which
we find not a trace in the Bible, which cannot be defined
by those who employ them, which convey to common
minds no more meaning than the words of an unknown
tongue, and which present to the learned only flitting
shadows of thought instead of clear and steady concep-
tions, — to separate those who are united in the great
principles which I have stated ? ^

What follows reads very much as if it were an
extract from William Channing Gannett's recent
sermon on " Reconciliation in Religion," and is far
more apt to present conditions than to those of
seventy-five years since.

Trinitarians, indeed, are apt to suppose themselves
at an immeasurable distance from Unitarians. The
reason, I think, is that they are surrounded with a mist
of obscure phraseology. Were this mist dispersed, I
believe that they would be surprised at discovering their
proximity to the Unitarians, and would learn that they
had been wasting their hostility on a band of friends
and brothers.

So, too, on the other hand, if the Unitarians
could pierce the mist and know what the orthodox
are trying to enunciate, they might sometimes say,
"We also believe that." And there is the barest
possibility, of course, that sometimes the Unitari-
ans are a little mystified themselves.

1 " God's infinite perfection," " salvation through Jesus Christ,"
" the same great principles of duty " which he taught, and " the
same exalted view of human perfection."

138 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

If Channing withdrew from the initiatory con-
test, leaving with his opponent that confidence of
victory which generally pertains to the last word,
it was only that he might continue the work he
had begun on longer lines and in a more effective
way. He never made himself cheap ; he knew how
to reserve his fire ; large solid shot were much
more to his mind than smaller, scattering stuff.
These fighting metaphors seem strangely out of
keeping with his peaceful disposition, but, as one
of our own poets has written, —

When once their slumbering passions bum,
The peaceful are the strong.

The passions that rather glowed than flamed in
the few great things which Channing contributed
to the controversy were for the unbroken fellow-
ship, and, that soon declaring itself impossible, for
the clearest possible enunciation of the principles
and doctrines of the liberal movement. We have
the principles in an article considering " The Sys-
tem of Exclusion and Denunciation in Religion "
(1815). It is much less elaborate than the more
classical treatment of the same subject a few years
later by James Walker, but, because simpler, not,
I think, less effective. The contention was that
the honor of religion would never suffer by admit-
ting to Christian fellowship men of irreproachable
character. What good had the exclusive spirit
done ? " Could the thunders and lightnings of
excommunication have corrected the atmosphere
of the church, not one pestilential vapor would

THE DIVIDED FOLD 139

have loaded it for ages. The air of Paradise
woiild not have been more pure." ..." Bearing
testimony to the truth " by branding men as here-
tics and denouncing on them the pains of hell,
with a view to preventing candid inquiry, was a
very doubtful business. " Persecution has given
up its halter and fagot, but it breathes venom
from its lips, and secretly blasts what it cannot
openly destroy." There is a reminiscence of Shake-
speare, but no quotation, when he says, " Now for
myself, I am as wiUing that my adversary should
take my purse or my Hfe as that he should rob me
of my reputation, of the affection of my friends,
and of my means of doing good." Nothing is
more characteristic of Channing's controversial
tone than its lofty self-respect, its proud resent-
ment of all imputations cast on his own character
or that of his friends. They were insulted, he de-
clared, by the concession of their honesty. The
exclusive system was wholly subversive of free in-
quiry into the Scriptures. What is the use of
sending men to the Scriptures and telling them
that unless they find in them what they do not
contain they will be cut off from the church on
earth and that above ? This system was hostile
to "the great principles of Congregationalism."
Resort was to be had to " ecclesiastical coukts "
(Channing seldom resorted to such typographical
devices to deepen his impression), " the most de-
grading form of vassalage, palsying the mind and
imposing on it the dreams and fictions of men

140 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

for the everlasting truth of God." In conclusion
there was a more elaborate prophecy than in the
last letter to Worcester of the miserable divisions
that would ensue on the success of the exclusive
system. Beginning with the convention of Con-
gregational ministers of Massachusetts, he ran the
line of cleavage down through all the smaller
aggregations until it reached the family and there
separated wives and husbands, parents and chil-
dren, by an impassable gulf.

In 1819 and 1820 two articles in the " Christian
Disciple," " Objections to Unitarian Christianity
Considered " and " The Moral Argument against
Calvinism," were significant and weighty contri-
butions to the progress of events. They marked
the fading hope of any ministry of reconciliation
that would heal the widening breach. It may not
be amiss to quote from the " Moral Argument "
Channing's description of Calvinism, seeing that
in our own time it has fallen into such disrespect
and desuetude that its features are well-nigh for-
gotten. Even then there were attempts to soften
them and coax a smile onto the hard-set lips, but
it is certain that Channing did not exaggerate
" the most authentic records of the doctrine " or
its popular appreciation.

. Calvinism teaches that, in consequence of Adam's
sin in eating the forbidden fruit, God brings into life
all his posterity with a nature wholly corrupt, so that
they are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite
to all that is spiritually good, and wholly inclined to all

THE DIVIDED FOLD 141

evil, and that continually. It teaches that all mankind,
having fallen in Adam, are under God's wrath and
curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to
death itself, and to the pains of hell forever. It teaches
that, from this ruined race, God, out of his mere good
pleasure, has elected a certain number to be saved by
Christ, not induced to this choice by any foresight of
their faith or good works, but wholly by his free grace
and love ; and that, having thus predestinated them to
eternal life, he renews and sanctifies them by his al-
mighty and special agency, and brings them into a state
of grace, from which they cannot fall and perish. It
teaches that the rest of mankind he is pleased to pass
over, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for
their sins, to the honor of his justice and power ; in
other words, he leaves the rest to the corruption in
which they were born, withholds the grace which is ne-
cessary to their recovery, and condemns them to " most
grievous torments in soul and body without intermission
in hell-fire forever."

" How can it be possible," he asked, " that men
can hold these doctrines and yet maintain God's
goodness and equity ? " Here he was met by the
rejoinder that we cannot understand the mysteries
of God. To this there was an elaborate reply, a
justification of man's use, in judging God, of the
moral reason God had given him. What good, he
asked, in the divine perfections, if they are con-
sistent with the Calvinistic representation ? To
the question, Calvinism rejected, what becomes
of Christianity, he answered, " Christianity con-
tains no such doctrines. Christianity was designed
to manifest God in a character of perfect benevo-
lence."

142 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Now is it probable that a religion, having this object,
gives views of the Supreme Being . . . which if made
our pattern would convert us into monsters ? It is plain
that were a human parent to form himself on the uni-
versal Father, as described by Calvinism, that is, were
he to bring his children into life totally depraved, and
then to pursue them with endless punishment, we should
charge him with a cruelty not surpassed in the annals
of the world ; or were a sovereign to incapacitate his
subjects in any way whatever for obeying his laws, and
then to torture them in dungeons of perpetual woe, we
should say that history records no darker crime.

In the " Objections to Unitarian Christianity
Considered," there v^as the unconscious tendency
to make the Unitarian statement of " the divinity
of Jesus Christ " as strong as possible consistently
with the denial of his identity with God.

We believe that Jesus Christ was the most glorious
display, expression, and representative of God to man-
kind, so that in seeing him we see and know the invisi-
ble Father ; so that, when Christ came, God visited the
world and dwelt among men more conspicuously than
at any other period.

To the Calvinistic doctrine that sin, as against
an infinite being, is infinite sin, and requires infi-
nite atonement, he said, " Not even a whisper of
this doctrine comes to us from the Scriptures,"
and he denied the metaphysics of it altogether.
Where, then, our hope ? " In the boundless and
almighty goodness of our Father ; in God's un-
changeable mercy, not Christ's infinity." Next he
came to the more terrible charge that Unitarians

THE DIVIDED FOLD 143

were " preaching morality." If by morality was
meant merely the outward decencies of life, the
charge was false. If it meant inward purity, heav-
enly-mindedness, love of Jesus Christ and God,
then it was true, and grandly so, "all the doc-
trines, precepts, threatenings, and promises of the
Gospel having been revealed for no other end
than to make men moral in this true and generous
sense."

The next charge he attended to was a lack of
zeal, and here spoke the Channing whose in-
heritance on one line had been from Mayhew's
strenuous opposition to the Whitefield revival, the
Channing for whom the words enthusiasm and
fanaticism meant much the same.

We dread a showy religion. We are disgusted with
pretensions to superior sanctity, that stale and vulgar
way of building up a sect. . . . We think it no part of
piety to publish its fervors, but prefer a delicacy in re-
gard to these secrets of the soul ; and hence, to those
persons who think religion ought to be worn conspicu-
ously and spoken of passionately, we may seem cold and
dead, when, perhaps, were the heart uncovered, it might
be seen to be " alive to God " as truly as their own.^

^ The article concluded with a rebuttal of the charge that Uni-
tarianism was " a half-way house to infidelity." He cited Locke
and Newton and Clarke and Lardner as eminent defenders of
Christianity against " infidels," i. e., the deists and freethinkers of
their time, whose ideas are now well domesticated not only in
the Unitarian households but in the orthodox. Worcester had
challenged his claim to Dr. Clarke, but no one would dispute
it now. Coming to Priestley, Channing at first balked a little
and then took a good, wide leap : " Whatever we may think of

144 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

But aU that was stated in these articles and in
the controversial letters, scantily and imperfectly,
was embraced more fully and more carefully in
the famous " Baltimore Sermon," preached at the
ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks in 1819. Mr.
Sparks is better " named and known by that hour's
feat " than by his subsequent historical writing
and presidency of Harvard College. The sermon
is agreed to have been the strongest ever preached
by Channing on distinctly Unitarian lines, his
most important contribution to the Unitarian Con-
troversy, and to the definite integration of the
Unitarian body. It is an interesting paradox that
this devout anti-sectarian, who could, with Lessing,
" hate Truth itself if it should make a sect," was
more instrumental than any other in the inspira-
tion of that courage which finally braced itself to
answer the exclusionists, " If you loill have it so, so
be it." The Baltimore society had been organized
on distinctly Unitarian lines, and it had built unto
itself a church, than which there was not at that
time a more beautiful and imposing one in the
United States. Lately it has been improved in
its acoustic properties and much enriched in deco-
rative effect. I have stood (reverently, I trust) in
the pulpit from which Channing preached. It is
not unlike a mortar in its shape, and it is, hence,
suggestive of the projectile which went soaring out

some of his opinions, we believe that none of his opposers ever
questioned the importance of his vindications of our common
faith."

THE DIVIDED FOLD 145

of it that May morning to scatter consternation
far and wide. Channing did not stint his space
that day ; the sermon ^ contains some 14,000
words, and as delivered by Channing must have
consumed nearly or quite two hours. It is too
easily accessible to require any extended descrip-
tion or summary. The plan was very simple:
first to set forth the principles adopted by Unita-
rians in interpreting the Scriptures, and then some
of the doctrines which the Scriptures, properly
interpreted, seemed clearly to express. The main
principle of scriptural interpretation was a strong
one from the general view-point of the time, to
which the Bible was one book, from Genesis to
Kevelation a consistent whole, which, whenever
not appearing to agree with itself, must be made
to do so. How ? Simply, said Channing, by in-
terpreting the obscurer by the clearer and more
dominant parts. It is easy to observe that this
method has not an inch of standing-room in our
later critical thought. But in 1819 the unity of

1 The original MS. is my very own, having been given to me
by Dr. Channing's granddaughter, Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson,
Nov. 27, 1901. It differs from the printed form somewhat.
There could not be a greater contrast than between the smooth
and limpid flow of the printed page and the brokenness and
mending of the manuscript, the writing unconscionably bad, the
erasures and interlineations numberless. It is hard to conceive
how Channing could preach with that even stream which was
habitual with him from such a manuscript. I think his hand-
writing worse than Theodore Parker's, because, while Parker
finished every word after a fashion, Channing, generally begin-
ning well, often ran out into a formlessness that was dreadfully
obscure.

146 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

the Bible was common ground to orthodox and lib-
eral, and Channing's method was that of the most
obvious wisdom and the plainest common sense.
Incidentally there was a noble defence of reason
against those who treated it with contempt.

Passing to the second part of his discourse,
Channing dealt first with the unreasonableness
of the Trinitarian dogma, its perplexity for the
understanding, its confusion for the pious heart,
and, second, with the unity of Christ's nature as
opposed to the doctrine of his double nature. At
this point the argument was very clear and strong.
A few Scripture texts were cited in support of
both God's unity and Christ's, but the argument
was mainly an appeal to men's rational natures.
It was always so with Channing, and especially in
his maturer years. There was the stated reliance
upon Scripture, but this was the least dust of the
balance in comparison with the rational argument.
His next point was the moral perfection of God,
the oneness of his justice and his mercy, his
parental character, his freedom from those traits
which constituted him " a being whom we cannot
love if we would, and whom we ought not to if we
could." He struck hard at the distinction of
natural and moral inability, declaring it to be a
distinction without a difference, both equally dis-
honorable to God and man, absolving the latter
from all guilt and laying it at the door of heaven.
Coming to the Atonement, he confessed a differ-
ence among Unitarians as to " the precise influ-

THE DIVIDED FOLD 147

ence of Christ's death on our forgiveness," adding
that many were dissatisfied with the idea of its
being a purely moral influence, — clearly his own
feeling, this. But there was no wavering as to the
rejection of the idea that Christ's suffering was a
price to God to buy his mercy to mankind. In
conclusion the preacher gave the Unitarian view of
Christian virtue. He recurred to his distrust of
spasmodic enthusiasm. The love of God and
Christ were pictured in a deep, heart-moving way
as virtue's top and crown. Nor did the sermon
end without some drastic treatment of those who
elevated their human creeds above the oracles of
God, and made them standards of the character of
those who were seeking with all diligence to con-
form their lives to the pattern which they had seen
in the mount of Christ's transcendent holiness.

Strangely enough, in this sermon there was
no special stress upon Channing's "one sublime
idea," as he called it, the dignity of human nature,
the greatness of the human soul. Weighed in
the scales of an ethical and spiritual judgment,
there are among his sermons some that outweigh
this. Channing was never at his best when in his
controversial vein. Nevertheless, the Baltimore
sermon is fully equal to its fame. What it set out
to do, it did right gloriously. Various editions
straightway appeared, and its circulation was not
exceeded by any American publication until in
1830 Webster made his memorable reply to
Hayne. The echoes rolled through all the country

148 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

from the Alleghanies to the sea. We hear of men
far down in Maine — which was a part of Massa-
chusetts then — reading it and saying, " We must
organize a Unitarian church," and doing it with
joyfid heart. We have heard Andrews Norton
saying that to hear Buckminster was " like walking
in the triumphal procession of Truth." Those who
heard the Baltimore sermon must have had that
feeling in full strength. Some of us have it when
we read the sermon now, though it was written
more than eighty years ago.

CHAPTER VI

THINGS NEW AND OLD

It is no part of my intended scheme to write a
history of the Unitarian Controversy in its various
expression during the fifteen to twenty years that
corresponded with its liveliest ebullition. A much
bigger book than this has been written on that sub-
ject and still left the most untold. I should have
little space for Channing if I wrote of that with
an ungrudging hand. And it is not as if his part
in it was conspicuous, measured by the amount of
his spoken or written contribution to the course
of the debate. Rather it was conspicuously small.
The items already mentioned go nigh to exhaust
the list of his controversial sermons and articles.
A more significant fact is that, with a few notable
additions, they do completely exhaust the contro-
versial product of his mind. Some half dozen
sermons and articles after the letters of 1815, in-
cluding those already named, are printed in his
collected works, and William Henry Channing
assures us that there was nothing more to print :
a careful examination of his manuscripts brought
nothing more to light of a distinctly controversial
character. But this note must not be pressed too

160 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

far. Not to strike often, but to strike hard was
Channing's policy. While he was musing the fire
burned, and when he spoke again it was with the
strength he had been slowly gathering, and had not
wasted in a multitude of effortless effusions having
too much in common with the average stock in
controversial trade. And then, too, it should be
remembered that much of his preaching that was
not definitely controversial held a good deal of
controversial matter in solution. No names were
called, no doctrines specified, but there was the
criticism of the rejected system by a larger view,
as, when Michael Angelo would question Eaphael's
conception, he projected his own bolder thought
upon the wall and quietly withdrew, leaving the less
confronted by the greater thing.

If a detailed history of the controversy is im-
possible, a few of its more striking incidents are
necessary to our apprehension of the general pro-
gress of events. One of these was John Lowell's
pamphlet, " Are you a Christian or a Calvinist ? "
which came close upon the heels of the Channing-
Worcester letters. It took an aggressive, where
Channing's had been a defensive line. It was a
sharp, but not an unprovoked attack. It was a
rejoinder to the question which had been stealth-
ily set going, " Are you of the Boston or of the
Christian religion ? " and it was as effective as
Huxley's retort on Fitz-James Stephen's account of
Positivism as " Romanism minus Christianity ; "
viz., that Stephen's doctrine was " Calvinism minus

THINGS NEW AND OLD 151

Christianity." Lowell was a lawyer who preferred
preaching to practice, taking for his pulpit a news-
paper or a pamphlet, as the occasion led. He was
a brother of the Kev. Charles Lowell, and uncle to
the poet, and to that John Lowell, Jr., whose monu-
ment is the Lowell Institute. After the death of
Fisher Ames he was the leading Boston publicist
and political authority. For twenty years he was
the most active spirit in the affairs of Harvard
College, and his first business in his pamphlet was
to vindicate the University from the aspersions of
Jedidiah Morse. The history of intolerance was
brought to bear upon the situation in an effective
manner, and every departure from pure Congrega-
tionalism in the direction of association or conso-
ciation was challenged in such terms as left no one
in doubt as to what the writer meant and where he
stood. It seems to be a fair construction that the
liberal party was much heartened by these trumpet
tones. Channinoj's Baltimore sermon was a sisfn of
this, and, blown through silver, had a more rich but
not less penetrating note than Mr. Lowell's bronze.
It brought on the two most significant sub-contro-
versies of the time, two battles of the giants, — one
especially, that of Professor Stuart, of Andover,
with Mr.^ Andrews Norton. The controversy car-
ried on by Professors Woods and Ware (the
" Wood'n Ware Controversy " of the irreverent)

1 He preferred the coefficient " Mr." to " Rev." or '* Prof.," and
his preference was generally respected by his contemporaries, a
peculiar distinction thus attaching to the simpler form.

152 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

was of less marked ability. It must be confessed
that Professor Woods, the Andover founder, had
a more disagreeable task to perform than his col-
league. Professor Stuart. It was to defend the
doctrines of total depravity, vicarious atonement
(reconciliation of God to man), election, and repro-
bation. It was not denied that these were ugly
" facts," but they were facts the Bible proved
conclusively (to Dr. Woods), and from the Bible
there was no appeal. As against Professor Ware
(" the elder Ware," father of Henry Ware, Jr.) he
had, perhaps, the best of the argument in his meta-
physics of necessity, and he had easily the best of
it in his appeal to St. Paul, as if he were the
whole Bible, Jesus included. But Ware was much
the stronger in his insistence that the necessarian
doctrine, as by Woods conceived, made morality
impossible.^ Shifting from the old Calvinistic
ground to the Hopkinsian, Woods argued for a
" natural depravity," which partly anticipated our
more recent recognition of the diversity of human
nature and the infected grain of natural heredity.
Ware's doctrine of human nature was too much
the modest ascription of his own unspotted good-
ness to all sorts and conditions of men. His ap-
peal from the authority of St. Paul was to certain
clearer deliverances of Jesus and to men's rational
knowledge of the divine character. The comment

1 See, in Professor William James's The Will to Believe, the
chapter on " Determinism." I know of nothing- better in the
range of the discussion of this inexhaustible dilemma.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 153

of our later knowledge on tliis controversy is as
mixed as if it were a supreme court decision. It
is that Ware's exegesis was as faulty in its endea-
vor to make Paul square with Jesus as Woods's
was in its endeavor to make Jesus square with
Paul, but that Ware's procedure was the more
humane. It is, further, that if Ware's view of
human nature was too genial, Woods's "depra-
vity " was not " total," and, moreover, was not the
traditional dogma. It is, finally, that Ware's ap-
peal from an intolerable God, whether Calvin's or
St. Paul's, was defective only in being too timidly
pronounced.

It must have been a great relief to Channing
for Ware to take the burden of this controversy
off his hands ; yet it may be questioned whether the
good cause would not have been more advantaged
by his own defence of his position. It cannot,
however, be questioned that Mr. Norton was much
better qualified than Channing to cope with Stuart
on the Trinitarian field. With a drier mind than
Stuart, Norton was his superior in critical know-
ledge and acumen ; and " the consensus of the
competent," as at present organized, is extremely
favorable to his results. The gravamen of his con-
tention was that neither the Trinity of three per-
sons in one God nor the double nature of Christ
had New Testament warrant. Our latest criti-
cism, that is not hopelessly unscientific, tends to
this conclusion, taking the New Testament texts at
their face value, while, if the critic seeks the fact

154 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

of which the text is a distorted shadow, Gilbert in
America, Harnack in Germany, finds the actual
Jesus a much more simply human being than the
Jesus of the Arian, or even the Socinian, Unita-
rian. In the course of the discussion, Stuart's
Trinity, for greater safety, took on a Sabellian form,
his three " persons " becoming three " somewhats,"
a conception hardly more soundly orthodox than
the Arian or Socinian heresy.^ The scholarship
of the controversy reached to its top and crown in
Mr. Norton's tract. Yet, in the year of its appear-
ance, Channing, a member of the Corporation,
objected to Mr. Norton's being made Dexter Pro-
fessor of Biblical Criticism in Harvard College,
because of his Socinian or too boldly critical opin-
ions. Was this after Norton had brought to him and
to the cause those splendid gifts ? It seems impos-
sible, but in the freedom of his biblical criticism,
Norton was then much in advance of Channing,
and if Channing was anywhere intellectually timid
or capable of prejudice, it was where Socinianism
was involved, as we shall have further reason to
observe.

1 Mr. Norton's Statement of Reasons for not Believing the Doc-
trines of the Trinitarians was first published in the Christian Dis-
ciple, 1819, and the same year in pamphlet form. Not until 1833
did it take the form of the more familiar and elaborate book
with the same title. The reason given for the republication in
the preface was that the Trinitarian doctrine was breeding infi-
delity. That preface is as full of the stuff that went to the
making of Mr. Norton's Latest Form of Infidelity, va. 1839, reply-
ing to Emerson's Divinity School Address of the previous year, as
an egg is full of meat.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 155

Into a situation already overcharged with ele-
ments of danger and distress, was projected, in
1820, the famous " Dedham decision " of the su-
preme court. The Dedham parish had settled
Alvan Lamson two years before, a good man who,
for more than forty years, went in and out among
his people as a faithful pastor and preacher, while
yet so studious withal that Theodore Parker hailed
him as one of three or four of the good scholars
left. Channing was one of the ordaining council.
Very soon the majority of the church members
became dissatisfied with Mr. Lamson's Unitarian
preaching, a majority of the parish being more
than pleased with it. The decision of the supreme
court left the majority in possession of the church
name, records, and even the comnmnion plate.
The decision was that " when the majority of the
members of a Congregational church shall sepa-
rate from the majority of the parish, the members
[of the church] who remain shall constitute the
church in such parish and retain the rights and
property belonging thereto." No other circum-
stance did so much as this to embitter the relations
of the conservatives and liberals. Nor can we
wonder at its operation. It seemed to reverse all
the traditions of the New England churches, and,
where these had so long subordinated the secular
powers, to subject them to their use and sway.
However technically just, the decision could not
appear so to the suffering minorities. It is per-
mitted us to believe that its asperity was tempered

166 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

in some cases by the kindness of those occupying
the seats of the mighty, though oftener rigidly en-
forced. The bad blood of the martyrs became the
seed of many " second " churches, until in Mas-
sachusetts more than a hundred schisms marked
the extent of liberal declension from the ancient
standards and the reactionary zeal. In the mean-
time, new Unitarian societies were organized in
New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and other
towns.

The leaves that strewed the brooks of VaUom-
brosa were hardly thicker than the printed ser-
mons, letters, pamphlets, articles in periodicals,
that we find lying scattered or in heaps along the
years from 1820 to 1830; and once or twice after
the latter date there was an angry whirl. For us the
most of them are quite as dead as are the fallen
leaves, but some of them just tingled with vitality
when they were put forth by faithful witnesses to
the truth as apprehended in the new or older way.
It is an interesting fact that as Channing had in
1815, and again in 1819, furnished occasion for
the intensest controversial heat, so he did again in
1826, and yet again in 1830, and that, as the first
gun was his, so the last rumbling echoes were the
resonance of certain of the most characteristic ex-
pressions of his thought and spirit. I speak now
of his Election Sermon of 1830, and of the preface
to his first published volume, " Discourses, Reviews,
and Miscellanies," on the one hand, and, on the
other, of the retort which these evoked from Stuart,

THINGS NEW AND OLD 157

of Andover, followed by Bernard Whitman's coun-
terblast and " Cheever's Vituperations."

It was such aspects of the controversy as those
furnished by Whitman and Cheever that sickened
Channing's heart. . When his own side showed
savage teeth or failed in Christian charity, he
mourned with deeper grief than when his oppo-
nents were at fault, because hberal Christianity
was the immediate jewel of his soul ; and by lib-
eral Christianity he meant, not a Christianity
which put a liberal interpretation on the creed, but
a Christianity which is liberal, kindly, gentle, and
considerate in its judgment of those differing from
ourselves. But it is time we were considering
some of the later aspects of the controversy which
reflected the image of Channing's thought and
personality in a special manner.

Though Channing once described himself (much
further on) as " little of a Unitarian," — to what
end we shall see hereafter, — he probably did as
much as any one to stamp the new departure with
its Unitarian name. Mr. Andrews Norton gives
him the credit, or the blame, of being the first
among the liberals to name himself and those in
substantial agreement with him. Unitarians. With
him and others there was, however, some wavering
at first ; a general preference for the term " lib-
eral" or "liberal Christian," yet with hesitation,
lest this might prove the assumption of a virtue
where they had it not. But already, in the Bal-
timore sermon, Channing wears the Unitarian

158 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

name as frankly as great generals wear the decora-
tions on their breasts.

In 1818 the Federal Street society built a
chapel, or vestry, on Berry Street, in the rear, if
I should not say " by the side," of its meeting-
house ; and that Channing might better economize
its convenience ^ he instituted the Berry Street
Conference, which flourishes unto this day, though
the place of its early meetings knows them no
more. The conference met for the first time in
1820, and Channing made the opening address.
It must be regarded as one of his principal contri-
butions to the treasury of controversial opinion,
pure gold where much of baser metal was thrown
in. The institution of the conference was another
sign of the process of segregation that was now
rapidly going on. It was to be " confined to those
who harmonize generally in opinion," but not sim-
ply with a view to extending their peculiar views ;
rather as " having for its object the general dif-
fusion of practical religion and of the spirit of
Christianity.^'' The question he proposed for the

^ Which was meant to serve the uses of a Sunday-school, now
first begun, the catechism of young people, a charity school,
women's meetings for the study of the Bible with the minister —
a beautiful feature of Dr. Channing's work to which Elizabeth
Peabody has furnished copious illustration. Still another use of
the vestry was for a parish library, one of many in the churches
of that period, owing much, perhaps, to Channing's inspiration.
This was, I think, very direct in Marblehead, where Parson Bart-
lett was much shaped by Channing's moulding hand, and where
the admirable collection of books in the " Teachers' Library "
was one of the happiest fortunes of my later boyhood and my
early youth.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 159

first discussion was, " How far is Reason to be
used in explaining Revelation?" Once more he
insisted that the Scriptures reveal God's unity
and fatherhood " with noontide brightness," and
that this revelation agrees perfectly with the teach-
ings of nature and the sure dictates of our ra-
tional and moral faculties.

Passages of Scripture which, taken separately, might
give different ideas of God's nature and government,
are, in common candor to the sacred writers, to be con-
strued in consistency with these fundamental truths. . . .
Before such an interpretation, the doctrines of Trinity,
of Infinite Satisfaction, of Election, of Irresistible
Grace, and Sudden Conversion, fly as the shades of
night before the sun. . . . Let an irrational Protes-
tantism be exclusively propagated, so that the intelli-
gent will be called to make their election between this
and infidelity, and [Norton's contention also] the result
can hardly be doubted. The progressive influence of
Christianity depends mainly on the fact that it is a
rational religion ; by which I mean not that it is such a
system as reason could discover without revelation, still
less that it is a cold and lifeless scheme of philosophical
doctrines, but that it is a religion which agrees with
itself, with our moral nature, with our experience and
observation, with the order of the universe, and the
manifest attributes of God.

The time would come when the supremacy of
Reason and the coordinate subordination of Reve-
lation, already implicit in Channing's thought,
would be clearly announced. Did he not believe
that the liberal system was better fitted than the

160 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

orthodox to make good men and assure social
progress, he would say, " Let us at once lay down
the weapons of controversy." But while never
inferring evil character from erroneous opinions in
particular cases, he hastened to insist that " it is
the practical influence of liberal views, the baneful
tendency of orthodox views, that summons us to
the zealous advocacy of rational and consistent
Christianity."

The Dudleian ^ Lecture of 1821, though per-
haps the best, as it is the most elaborate, ex-
pression of Channing's theory of a supernatural
Christianity, does not fall within the limits of his
controversial work, and for the next great incident
of this we must skip five eventful years, and com-
ing to 1826, address ourselves to the considera-
tion of his most famous (the orthodox of that day
said " most infamous ") sermon after that preached
in Baltimore. The event it signalized was the dedi-
cation of the Second Unitarian Church in New
York, that in which Dr. Dewey at first preached
his living word.^ The subject was, " Unitarian
Christianity most favorable to Piety." I have
imagined that the best part of the sermon is the
introduction, with its philosophical account of the
reason why men's opinions do not determine their
characters. In this kind of writing Channing was
always at his best.

1 Young Waldo Emerson's great admiration of it was for " the
highest species of reasoning upon divine subjects ; " " the fruit
of a sort of moral imagination."

2 It stood at the corner of Prince and Mercer streets. The
dedication sermon was preached December 7.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 161

Nothing is more common than to see a doctrine be-
lieved without swaying the will. Its efficacy depends,
not on the assent of the intellect, but on the place which
it occupies in the thoughts, on the distinction and vivid-
ness with which it is conceived, on its association with
our common ideas, on its frequency of recurrence, and
on its command of the attention, without which it has
no life. ... A creed is one thing as written in a book,
and another as it exists in the minds of its advocates.
In the book all the doctrines appear in equally strong
and legible lines. In the mind many are faintly traced
and seldom recurred to, whilst others are inscribed as
with sunbeams and are the chosen, constant lights of
the soul.

Having disclaimed all intention of measuring
individual character by opinion, the preacher went
on to give nine separate reasons for the justice
of his contention that Unitarian Christianity was
most favorable to piety. They were (1) that it
presents one Object of supreme homage, and does
not distract the mind with three persons having
distinct qualities and relations ; (2) that it holds
inviolate the spirituality of God, not giving liim
a material human frame ; (3) that its object of
devotion is as simple as it is sublime (this a
favorite note) ; (4) that it asserts the absolute
and unbounded perfection of God's character ; (5)
that it accords with nature, with the world around
and within us ; (6) that it introduces us to new
and ever larger views of God ; (7) that it assigns
to Jesus his highest proper place — that of the
greatest of the sons of God ; (8) that it meets the

162 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

wants of sinful men; (9) — the climax is signifi-
cant — that it is a rational religion. Under each
of these heads the higher was contrasted with the
lower view. Under the fifth head we have an
example of his most incisive manner. He was
often less vivid and more colorless.

Nature is no Trinitarian. It gives not a hint, not
a gUmpse of a tri-personal author. Trinitarianism is a
confined system, shut up in a few texts, a few written
lines, where many of the wisest minds have failed to
discover it. It is not inscribed on the heavens and
earth, not borne on every wind, not resounding and re-
echoing through the universe. The sun and stars say
nothing of a God of three persons. They all speak of
the One Father whom ive adore. To our ears one and
the same voice comes from God's word and works, a full
and swelling strain, growing clearer, louder, more thrill-
ing as we listen, and with one blessed influence lifting
up our souls to the Almighty Father.

The most elaborate section was the eighth. This
was for the most part a criticism of the " infinite
substitute " doctrine of the atonement. In due
course came the passage which represented this
doctrine as saying, in effect, that " God had erected
a gaUows in the centre of the universe and had
publicly executed upon it, in room of the offenders,
an Infinite Being, the partaker of his own Supreme
Divinity." The passage was introduced with a
profuse apology. The preacher warned his hearers
that he was going to say something dreadful. He
anticipated the severest reprobation, and his antici-

THINGS NEW AND OLD 163

pation was made good. Nothing else in the whole
scope of his utterance gave so much offence. One
cannot easily imagine why. The stone of stum-
bling and the rock of offence was that word '' gal-
lows," as if " the shame of the cross " were not
that crucifixion was, as Channing said, "a punish-
ment more ignominious and agonizing than the
gallows, a punishment reserved for slaves and
the vilest malefactors." He made large allowance
for the possible idealization of the doctrine by " the
love, the disinterestedness, the moral grandeur and
beauty of the sufferer," whereby " the cross is made
a source of peace, gratitude, love, and hope." This
part was clean forgotten, and the outcry was im-
mense. But I have found no proof that Channing
ever regretted the plainness of his illustration.

The Election Sermon of 1830, which, together
with his nearly simultaneous preface to his first
volume of sermons and articles, was his last great
affront to the New England orthodoxy, was one of
the most eloquent of all his sermons and addresses.
By spiritual freedom he intended the " moral
energy of holy purpose put forth against the senses,
against the passions, against the world, thus liberat-
ing the intellect, conscience, and will," to the end
that they may act powerfully and efficiently. He
did not fight as one who beat the air : " We are
in the midst of influences which menace the intel-
lect and heart ; and to be free is to withstand and
conquer these." Not content with his first meagre
definition, he burst into a splendid series of expan-

164 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sive characterizations, each beginning, " I caU that
mind free." We all know the nephew's " Sym-
phony," that beautiful expression of the ideal
conduct of life. The uncle's characterization of
spiritual freedom is his Oratorio. Hardly can I
deny myself the quotation of its every part. Never
was Channing more autobiographical than here.
The exigency of the grand enumeration gives us at
once the mark of his high calling and that to which
he actually attained. Where all is so profoundly
characteristic, it is hard to say which part is most
so, but the third paragraph is certainly as much so
as any.

I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intel-
lectual rights and powers, which calls no man master,
which does not content itself with a passive or heredi-
tary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it
may come, which receives new truth as an angel from
heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still
more of the oracle within itself and uses instructions
from abroad, not to supersede but to exalt and quicken
its own energies.

Throughout we have an individualism as stern
and exigent as that of Emerson's " Self -Reliance."
The method is to show that civil or political lib-
erty is of little worth except as it springs from,
expresses, and invigorates spiritual freedom. The
influence exerted by religion is first exhibited, then
that exerted by government. There are points
made under the second head that are as sharp to-
day as then, and as much needed to force us back

THINGS NEW AND OLD 165

on our reserves of political idealism. Now, as
then, —

We need to learn that the forms of liberty are not its
essence ; that, whilst the letter of a free constitution is
preserved, its spirit may be lost; that even its wisest
provisions and most guarded powers may be made
weapons of tyranny. In a country called free, a major-
ity may become a faction and a proscribed minority may
be insulted, robbed, oppressed. Under elective govern-
ments a dominant party may become as truly a usurper,
and as treasonably conspire against the state as an in-
dividual who forces his way by arms to the throne.

If he had ever caught the infection of the notion
that an ideal form of government is the one thing
needful he was by this time completely cured:
" Free institutions secure rights only when secured
by, and when invigorating, that spiritual freedom,
that moral power and elevation which is the su-
preme good of our nature." Three years before De
Tocqueville, he put his finger on our ailing spot :
" The power of opinion grows into a despotism ^
which more than all things represses original and
free thoughts, subverts individuality of character,
reduces the community to a spiritless monotony,
and chills the love of perfection."

And this despotic power of opinion was most
in evidence in that conception of religion which
converts the principle which should take man out
of the grasp of custom and fashion and refer him
to a higher tribunal, into the chief instrument of
usurpation over the soul.

166 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

And the worst of these evils were not by any
means the tortures inflicted on men's shrinking
flesh, the horrors of the dungeon and the faggot
and the wheel. The worst things were the enslave-
ment and starvation and destruction of the mind.

I look with a solemn joy on the heroic spirits who
have met freely and fearlessly pain and death in the
cause of truth and human rights. But there are other
victims of intolerance on whom I look with unmixed
sorrow. They are those, who, spell-bound by early
prejudice, or by intimidations from the pulpit and the
press, dare not think ; who anxiously stifle every doubt
or misgiving in regard to their opinions as if to doubt
were a crime ; who shrink from the seekers after truth
as from infection ; who deny all virtue which does not
wear the livery of its own sect ; who, surrendering to
others their best powers, receive unresistingly a teaching
which wars against reason and conscience ; and who
think it a merit to impose on such as live within their
influence the grievous bondage which they bear them-
selves.

It was the application of these considerations to
the state of religion in and about Boston that
made Channing the object of a fresh attack, of
which Stuart, of Andover, was the head and front.
Making the application, Channing said : —

We say we have no Inquisition. But a sect skilfully
organized, trained to utter one cry, combined to cover
with reproach whoever may differ from themselves, to
drown the free expression of opinion by denunciations
of heresy, and to strike terror into the community by

THINGS NEW AND OLD 167

joint and perpetual menace, — such a sect is as perilous
and palsying to the intellect as the Inquisition. It
serves its ministers as effectually as the sword.

In a pamphlet of fifty-two pages, Professor Stuart
went about to show that Channing's allegations
were " not true." In reply to this came Bernard
Whitman's succession of letters, which were to
Channing's sermon very much what Mrs. Stowe's
" Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin " was to her novel.
Terrible was their array of modern instances.
Vigorous counterblasts ensued, some following
eagerly the lead of Parsons Cooke, who, in 1828,
had published " Unitarianism an Exclusive Sys-
tem." It was not an exclusive system, but it had
its exclusive moments. In some of the church
divisions, where it had a giant's strength, it used
it like a giant. In many individual cases a mere
change of opinion left the old virus of illiberality
and ecclesiasticism working as fatally as ever.

The effect of Channing's sermon was intensified
by the almost simultaneous appearance of his
" Discourses, Keviews, and Miscellanies." No-
where has he given a clearer account of his con-
troversial attitude and spirit than in the preface
to that book, and I cannot do better than to
bring my story of his controversial action to an
end with his own rendering of its conditions and
its aims.

It was my lot to enter on public life at a time when
this part of the country was visited by what I esteem
one of its sorest scourges ; I mean by a revival of the

168 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

spirit of intolerance and persecution. I saw the com-
mencement of those systematic efforts, which have since
been developed, for fastening on the community a par-
ticular creed. Opinions, which I thought true and puri-
fying, were not only assailed as errors but branded as
crimes. Then began what seems to me one of the gross
immoralities of our times, the practice of aspersing the
characters of exemplary men, on the ground of differ-
ences of opinion as to the most mysterious articles of
faith. Then began those assaults on freedom of thought
and speech, which, had they succeeded, would have left us
only the name of religious liberty. Then it grew perilous
to search the Scriptures for ourselves, and to speak freely
the convictions of our own minds. I saw that penalties,
as serious in this country as fine and imprisonment, were,
if possible, to be attached to the profession of liberal
views of Christianity, the penalties of general hatred
and scorn ; and that a degrading uniformity of opinion
was to be imposed by the severest persecution which
the spirit of the age would allow. At such a period, I
dared not be silent. To oppose what I deemed error
was to me a secondary consideration. My first duty, as
I believed, was to maintain practically and resolutely
the rights of the human mind ; to live and to suffer, if
to suffer were necessary, for that intellectual and reli-
gious liberty which I prize incomparably more than any
civil rights. I felt myself called, not merely to plead in
general for freedom of thought and speech, but, what
was more important and trying, to assert this freedom
by action. I should have felt myself disloyal to truth
and freedom had I confined myself to vague common-
places about our rights, and forborne to bear my testi-
mony expressly and specially to proscribed and perse-
cuted opinions. The times required that a voice of
strength and courage should be lifted up, and I rejoice

THINGS NEW AND OLD 169

that I was among those by whom it was uttered and
sent far and wide. The timid, sensitive, diffident, and
doubting needed this voice ; and, without it, would have
been overborne by the clamor of intolerance. If in any
respect I have rendered a service to humanity and re-
ligion which may deserve to be remembered when I am
taken away, it is this. I believe that had not the spirit
of religious tyranny been met, as it was, in this region,
by unyielding opposition, it would have fastened an iron
yoke on the necks of this people. The cause of religious
freedom owes its strength to nothing so much as to the
constancy and resolution of its friends in this quarter.
Here its chief battle has been fought, and not fought in
vain.

The controversial incidents of Channing's life
were set in a large environment of personal, do-
mestic, and social circumstance. Great joys and
sorrows had qualified the main course of his ex-
perience with their tributary streams. In the
summer of 1814 he had married his cousin Ruth
Gibbs, his playmate when she was a little girl, al-
ready fascinating him when she was his school-
mate in Newport with dim portents of her perfect
charm, the woman whom he summoned to remake
the world in the light of Hutcheson's revelation
under the Cambridge willows (but never sent the
letter), to whom for a long time he never told his
love, because she was so rich and he so poor,
bringing his courage to the daring point only
when her persistent refusal of all other lovers
made plain to him that her regard for him was
more than cousinly. Her mother, his father's

170 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sister, had a beautiful home in Boston, spacious
enough for two families, and thither, soon after
his marriage, he went to live. Here was good for-
tune, for the influence of Mrs. Gibbs, no less than
that of her daughter, made for him a domestic at-
mosphere that was surcharged with pleasantness.
With lighter cares, his own mother's anxious heart
had learned to go more quietly, but the sharp sallies
of her wit had taken wider range. For Chan-
ning to lose these would have been sad, and he did
not altogether, for almost every well day of his life
for the next twenty years he made her a little ^dsit,
and thereby added something to her stock of cheer
and to his own. Almost simultaneously with his
marriage began the long summer vacations at
" Oakland," the Gibbs country-seat in Portsmouth,
near Newport, on the island of Rhode Island.
Channing's oldest brother died in 1810, just after
the birth of his son William Henry, whose life of
noble service was not to be complete without his
biography of the greatest of the Channiug line.
The year 1815 meant more for Channing as
marked by the death of his sister Ann, who had
married Washington Allston, than as marked by
the outbreak of the Unitarian Controversy. In
1816, as a bird comes and goes, came his first
child, but not as the bough, which trembles for a
moment and then is still again, was his pained and
disappointed heart. A second daughter was born
in 1818, in whom he and many others were to
take great satisfaction and delight. The next year

THINGS NEW AND OLD 171

a son was born who died in infancy, and in 1820
(February 22) a second, William Francis, in the
maturity of his powers inventor and sociologist,
whose recent death (March 19, 1901) deprived
me of what would have been an inestimable help,
for he was indifferent to no aspect of his father's
life, and he admired him to the bounds of adorar
tion and beyond.

The years of interwoven domestic happiness and
sorrow did not synchronize with any improvement
of Channing's health, and the strain of religious
controversy must have been injurious to it, sub-
ject as he was to nervous excitement, lassitude,
and depression. Some betterment, apparently,
after the extreme debility of his early ministry
was subject in 1820 to a lamentable falling off,
and in 1821 he made a considerable journey
through New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York,
in the hope of gaining strength. The journey
brought him much exhilaration and delight, but
little, if any, physical advantage. Remarkably
sensitive to natural beauty, both by nature and
by the grace of Wordsworth, his best loved poet,
he drank deep draughts of mountain gloom and
glory, and what he saw he told with a minuteness
that anticipated the pre-Raphaelites in whom Rus-
kin took such vast delight. At Oakland again in
September, he wrote of the journey as " a speci-
men of the life he had led for many years." " One
day undoes the work of many weeks." He would
seem to have gained a little, when some new de-

172 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

rangement would take from him his power of body
and mind ; " then I slowly work my way upwards
to fall as low again." But he did not account the
journey lost. As if thinking of Wordsworth's
" Yarrow Unvisited," he wrote, " I should hardly
dare to travel over the same ground again, lest the
bright images which are treasured up in memory
should be dimmed by a second sight."

In the spring of 1822, a year's absence was
granted him, and he set out for Europe at the end
of May. It looks as if he " took his pleasures
sadly," as Froissart did not say the English do,
though he has been quoted a thousand times to that
effect. What he needed was the frank objectivity
of varied scenes, and what he imagined himself
after was indicated thus : —

A great object in travelling is to discover by compar-
ison what is primary and universal in our nature, to
separate the adventitious, secondary, temporary, to learn
the deep principles on which all permanent improve-
ments are to rest, to behold and to love what is human,
to shake off our prejudices in favor of the unessential
modifications of our nature, and to recognize the essential
through these modifications.

But in the event he builded better than he
planned. Crossing the Atlantic, the beauty of the
ocean contended for the mastery of his thoughts
with its scientific phenomena. SheUey, the most
meteorological of poets, could hardly have been
more sensitive to the atmospheric conditions, while
Professor Tyndall could not have brought to them

THINGS NEW AND OLD 173

much more of scientific curiosity. The English
and Swiss lakes and mountains stirred in him deep
delight, but everything in Italy, where he spent
the winter months, was seen as through a mist of
tears, news having come to him in Rome that his
older boy was dead. That Mrs. Channing was
with him made his grief more sharp, for had she
not left her children to take care of him ? His
mother was still living (she lived till 1834), and
he wrote to her on his forty-third birthday from
Florence, but not a word of the beautiful city or
its glorious memories ; on the contrary, a letter of
filial devotion mingled with severe introspection
and regret for the overabundance of his personal
good fortune in material things. Emerson had not
yet written, —

Well I know no mountain can
Measure with a perfect man ; ^

but Channing could anticipate the thought, and
even such an imperfect man as Coleridge was more
interesting to him than Skiddaw or Mont Blanc,
while to meet Wordsworth was for him an experi-
ence as impressive as for Emerson his later meet-
ing with Carlyle. Coleridge recognized in him " a
philosopher in the double sense of the word ; "
" He has the love of wisdom and the wisdom of
love." After Channing had written his articles on
Napoleon, a report somehow sprang up that they

1 Changed, much for the worse, by Emerson, in his later
editions, to —

Well I know no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.

174 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

" had their birthplace and received their shape in
Coleridge's study." Channing could not remem-
ber that Napoleon was so much as named in their
sole interview. Moreover, there was little in the
substance of the articles that Channing had not
conceived before he went abroad and openly ex-
pressed. Coleridge wrote Allston, who had intro-
duced Channing to him, that he had seldom met a
person so interesting in conversation. Channing
was much amused, seeing that Coleridge had done
all the talking, and his own part had been that of
" a passive bucket." He had, however, asked a
few questions which had broken the dam of Cole-
ridge's pent-up enthusiasm for German philoso-
phy and the reformation and reorganization of the
English Church. He was not exactly " pumped
into for two stricken hours." He was obliged to
withstand an inundation, and he found it more
exhilarating than Carlyle imagined the experience
could possibly be to any mortal.^

The visit to Wordsworth proved very satisfac-
tory. There was stuff in it for another " Lyrical
Ballad." It seemed so to Channing, as he was
jolted along with Wordsworth in a rude farmer's
cart, the only vehicle of which Channing could
avail himself for the two and a half miles from the
inn at Grasmere to the poet's home. When he
set out to return, "after an interview of great

^ For his London preaching, which made a profound impres-
sion, see " Channing the Man " in Miss E. P. Channing's Kindling

Thoufjhts.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 175

pleasure and interest," Wordsworth suggested that
they should walk together until Channing was tired.
But Channing's strength gave out at the end of the
first half mile, and he invited "Wordsworth to share
his seat in the cart, which straightway became a
chariot of the sun.

We talked so eagerly as often to interrupt one an-
other, and as I descended into Grasmere near sunset,
with the placid lake before me, and Wordsworth talking
and reciting poetry with a poet's spirit by my side, I
felt that the combination of circumstances was such as
my highest hopes could never have anticipated.

What Wordsworth remembered best of the talk,
after the lapse of twenty years, was that Chan-
ning's one great evidence of the divine origin of
Christianity was " that it contained nothing which
rendered it unadapted to a progressive state of
society \_sic Harnack's " What is Christianity?"],
that it put no checks on the activity of the human
mind, and did not compel it to tread always in a
beaten path."

So far as Channing's health was concerned, the
European tour was disappointing. He felt this so
keenly that, after once preaching to his people on
his return, he went straight to Newport and wrote
a letter to the parish officers, calling their atten-
tion to his condition and requesting some action on
their part that would meet the needs of the society.
What he wished for was a colleague, and knowing
this, or divining it, the society hastened to vote that
one should be secured, Mr. Dewey, whose promise

176 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANGING

was already that of a very great preacher, had been
Channing's assistant during the broken year preced-
ing his European journey and his substitute during
the year's absence, but he had now gone to New Bed-
ford. It was, however, in no half-hearted way that
the society turned to young Ezra Stiles Gannett,
then twenty-three years old, and just through with
his theological studies. If Channing had the saintly
temper, Gannett did not have it in a less degree.
Channing, economizing his energy, that he might
use it more effectively, could spare himself as Gan-
nett never could or did. That he was a grandson
of that Ezra Stiles whom the young Channing
had revered must have been one attraction of the
younger for the older man. Between them there
was a difference of gifts, with the same spirit.
Channing's temper was the less conservative, the
more sympathetic with the bolder methods of re-
form, and inclined him more to say, " The field is
the world." Gannett had more confidence than
Channing in denominational forms and instru-
ments. He had one gift to a degree that Channing
did not approximate, — that of extemporaneous
preaching. The judgment of Wendell Phillips on
this head should be worth something, and he once
told me that he had never known Dr. Gannett's
equal in such preaching, while his casual utterance
was yet more remarkable. He described to me a
meeting — of some Bible Society, I think — which
was intolerably dull and cold till Dr. Gannett got
the floor, " when," said Phillips, " he poured a flood

THINGS NEW AND OLD 177

of lava over that sea of ice." Dr. Gannett's biogra-
phy has been better written than that of any other
Unitarian preacher, and for a good account ^ of his
relations with Channing my readers must go back
to that. The young colleague's position was a very
trying one. The word in his heart might be like
a fire shut up in his bones, but on Sunday morning
he must go to church, not knowing whether he
would be permitted to deliver his soul, or, Chan-
ning being well enough to preach, find that he
must repress his noble rage. I have sometimes
wondered if, in these relations, Dr. Channing did
not suffer from his consciousness of preeminent
standing, and show a lack of intelligent sympathy
to which Dr. Gannett would have been superior in
a like situation.

Mr. Gannett was ordained June 30, 1824.
Ministers of every sect, " other than those of
the Methodists " (!) were invited. Dr. Channing
preached the sermon of which Henry Ware, Jr.,
wrote, " I have never seen the enthusiasm equalled.
To hear such a sermon is one of the memorable
things in a man's life, ... an epoch in his ex-
istence." The subject was " The Demands of the
Age on the Ministry." They were for the correc-
tion of scepticism and false views of religion, and,
preeminently, for its alliance with the spirit of

1 But apparently there was not much to tell, and we are obliged
to infer that the personal relation, if much was expected, was a
disappointing one. With the older man so reserved, the younger
so eager and so sensitive, this was bound to happen.

178 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

practical reform. Consciously or unconsciously the
preacher was here sounding a note prelusive of
the character of his own ministry henceforth to a
progressively pronounced degree.^

Meantime the aggregation of the Unitarian
churches into a distinct denomination was being
every year more perfectly assured, and had its signs
of various importance, some of them spoken against
not only by the orthodox critics but also by the

1 The sermon as originally printed in pamphlet form had a
note upon Dr. Priestley which gave great offence to Priestley's
English friends. Mr. Belsham replied to it sharply and effec-
tively in the Monthly Bepository, xix. (1824), 678-681. At one
point he was amusing, — where, speaking of Channing's view of
the doctrine of necessity as having a chilling influence, he cited
Jonathan Edwards to the contrary and said, "If any persons
think that Mr. Edwards was a chilling writer, let them read what
he has written on the eternity of hell-torments." In 1838 Har-
riet Martineau followed up Belsham's criticism of Channing in
the chapter on Priestley in her Metrospect of Western Travel, i.
109-123. Few criticisms upon Channing were so well deserved
as this. It is certain that he did not appreciate Priestley's char-
acter and that he had not qualified himself to speak of him as
he did by carefully attending to his thought and life. What-
ever he might think of Priestley's necessarian ethics and materi-
alistic philosophy, for him to write of him as " constitutionally
deficient in moral enthusiasm and deep feeling " was not to hit
even the target, much less the bull's-eye. In 1831 Lucy Aikin
wrote him an illuminating letter on this subject, in reply to which
he said that he had " no prejudices or dislikes to overcome," and
went on to give a different impression : " I know little of his
works, and probably shall not read them, for I have little sym-
pathy with his ethical and metaphysical doctrines, and seldom
turn my thoughts to the religious controversies on which he spent
so much of his zeal." Here we have less of Channing's habitually
open mind than anywhere else. Those who like to batten on the
faultiness of the great and good should make the most of it. See
the Channing-Aikin Correspondence, pp. 93, 110.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 179

most liberal. The fear and dread of making one
more sect were strong in many liberal minds ; in
Channing's very strong, indeed, and yet he lent
himself more cordially than some others to the
new organization and the Unitarian name. The
first number of the '' Christian Register " was pub-
lished April 20, 1821, the second not until August
24, but since then there has been no break in the
line of its weekly publication. Its first editor
and publisher was Mr. David Reed, who brought
to it the enthusiasm and the pertinacity without
which it would not have survived the vicissitudes
of its earlier and more precarious life. The end
in view was a more popular presentation of the
rational and liberal exposition of religion to which
the " Christian Disciple " gave a learned form,
and that too infrequently. In 1824 the " Disciple "
gave way to the " Christian Examiner," which had
an honorable course till 1869. No one contributed
more to its original standing and success than
Channing, with his articles on Milton, Fenelon,
and Napoleon. But a matter of much more denom-
inational importance and definitiveness was the
organization of the American Unitarian Associa-
tion in 1825. Little knowing how good the omen,
the Berry Street Conference on May 25, Emerson's
birthday, appointed a meeting for the afternoon of
that day, at which it was voted to form " a new
society to be called the American Unitarian Asso-
ciation." It was John Pierpont, of heroic soul, who
struck out boldly for the Unitarian name. There

180 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

were those who balked at it ; notably Mr. Norton,
who had made the first motion for a new organi-
zation in the Anonymous Club in the previous
December.! In accordance with the terms of that
motion there was a meeting on January 27, at
which Dr. Channing was present with many others,
clerical and lay, and the discussion, of which David
Reed preserved a full account, was long and gen-
eral. Dr. Channing's line was cautious, if not
deterrent, and for some reason, although a com-
mittee was appointed to call another meeting, it
declined to act. Nowhere is the liberal temper of
that time disclosed more faithfully than in the min-
utes of the Berry Street meeting of January 27.

When the association was formed, May 25,
Channing was chosen president, but pleaded phys-
ical disability. He was not a leader in the new
organization except as in all meetings in which he
took part he gravitated naturally to the highest
place. "Wherever MacGregor sits, there is the
head of the table." The leaders of the new organ-
ization were some of the younger and the youngest
men : James Walker (31), Henry Ware, Jr. (31),
Gannett (24) ; and the last of these was first.
These took the lead, and kept it, though they drew
in many aiders and abettors. Especially was young

^ At the house of the Hon. Josiah Quincy. Quincy was one of
eight distinguished laymen, — judges, mayors, etc., with a col-
lege president, — belonging to the Anonymous Association, the
membership of which was numerically small. The energy and
initiative of laymen in those days was in remarkable contrast with
their present submergence in the clerical flood.

THINGS NEW AND OLD 181

Gannett's flaming zeal conspicuous, — to some
a warning, to many guiding home. Aaron Ban-
croft,^ the historian's father, was the first president
of the association ; Kalph Waldo Emerson was
one of its first missionary preachers.^ It was no
easy thing for Channing to keep the pace set by
his eager and impulsive mate. He had his hesita-
tions and reserves ; was surprised that the business
was getting on so fast, but never opposed himself
to it, was never in the least unfriendly. The
avowed purpose of the association — " to diffuse
the knowledge and promote the interests of pure
Christianity " — was as simple, as untheological,
as if he had chosen the words. It was not the
association which affrighted him with visions of
" a Unitarian orthodoxy " as he lay upon his bed.
After attending one of its annual meetings he
wrote a friend delightedly : there had not been the
slightest savor of the sectarian spirit. At another
meeting he gave an elaborate address, insisting on
the formation of character as the main purpose of
the organization. At a third, we find him, strangely
enough, though not inconsistently, opposing the in-

^ Minister at Worcester, an able, influential man, who antici-
pated his son's predilection for history and wrote a good life of
Washington.

2 For many particulars see Christian Register for some weeks
following the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Meeting in 1900, and
Rev. George Willis Cooke's article in New England Magazine
of same year ; also an article by Dr. Samuel A. Eliot in Christian
Register, September 19, 1901, based on researches of G. W. Cooke ;
best of all, G. W. Cooke's " Unitarianism in America," which
comes to hand too late for me to profit by its careful presentation.

182 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

tersectarian management of the ministry to the
poor : only Unitarians, as having a right view of
human nature, were qualified for such a work. The
doctrine of total depravity was an impossible edu-
cational basis.

It was a necessity with Channing to take a
large and general view of every matter in which
he had a vital interest. We are not then surprised
to find him making a report of the Unitarian Asso-
ciation, together with reports of certain Temper-
ance and Sabbath Observance societies, the text
of one of his most elaborate discussions, " Remarks
on Associations." The same strong wind blows
through it as through his " Spiritual Freedom " of
the following year. We do not wonder at Em-
erson's delight in Channing when we read this
superb anticipation of his own " Self -Reliance."
We have here as there the conspiracy of society
against the individual set forth with unmistakable
plainness of speech. The influence of the good
may be hardly less pernicious than that of the bad.
" There is no moral worth in being swept away by
a crowd, even towards the best objects." " What
many of us have to dread chiefly from society is,
not that we shall acquire a positive character of
vice, but that society will impose on us a negative
character ; that we shall live and die passive be-
ings ; that the creative and self-forming energy of
the soul will not be called forth in the work of our
improvement." " Could a perfect individual be
found^ we should injure ourselves by indiscrimi-

THINGS NEW AND OLD 183

nate and servile imitation." But the value of
associated action was not denied. " The value of
associations is to be measured by the energy, the
fi'eedom, the activity, the moral power which they
encourage and diffuse." It was by this standard
that he would judge the Unitarian Association. In
so far as it was " fitted to call forth energy, active
talent, religious inquiry, a free and active virtue,"
it would justify itself and deserve men's confidence
and loyalty. If it illustrated the dangers and not
the possible, though difficult, advantages of associ-
ated action, it would be a cumberer of the ground.

CHAPTER VII

LETTERS AND POLITICS

It has been remarked by one of tbe many who
have written upon Channing's intellectual and
moral development that he returned from Europe
a changed man ; that henceforth we find him " less
ministerial and more manly," as he expressly con-
gratulated himself on being as he drew near the
end of his career, more social in his temper and
his aims, more robust or less meticulous in his
speech and action. This writer has imagined the
European journey to have furnished the line of
division between the life of the recluse and that
of the social reformer. But such sharp divisions,
though convenient and attractive, commonly mis-
state the facts. The evolution of Channing's life
was so uniformly from within outward, that no
change of circumstance could seriously affect his
character except as it afforded him an opportunity
to enter more deeply into the springs of his own
thought and action. This the European journey
did for him in some degree, serving him the good
turn the sojourn in Arabia served Paul, and the
Wartburg the little Erfurt monk ; making it possi-
ble for him to take account of stock more care-

LETTERS AND POLITICS 185

fully than he could do in the discharge of his
regular professional duties. But for the begin-
nings of that change which gives much the effect
of contrast to Channing's life after 1825, as com-
pared with the twenty years preceding, we must go
back farther than to the European journey. The
earliest beginnings of this change antedated the
Unitarian Controversy as precipitated in 1815.
But that controversy brought to it increments of
distinct importance. It was somewhat with Chan-
ning as it was with Lowell and Whittier. We
have had regrets that they were distracted by their
antislavery ardors from the proper field of their
activity — that of the poet's art. But the fact is
that their antislavery ardors brought them to them-
selves and liberated their faculties for such poetical
expression as we never should have had from these
poets if the antislavery conflict had found them
indifferent and left them cold. The natural oper-
ation of a theological controversy is to make men
narrower. The particular controversy in which
Channing engaged had no such effect on him. It
broadened him. It increased his force, his freedom
of thought and utterance ; it invigorated his style.
It fortified his self-respect and self-assertion.
Though a new sect was developed by the contro-
versy and he joined himself to its assembly, he
was not made sectarian by this experience. The
new sect was for him what Dr. Kirkland chris-
tened it, "the unsectarian sect." And the contro-
versy did him a real service. It went far to break

186 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

up tlie cloistered habit of his life, which had been
aggravated by his thorn in the flesh, — the recur-
rence of his periods of broken health ; if I should
not say the acuter manifestations of a disability
from which he was never wholly free.

Carefid investigation would, no doubt, assure
us that the later Channing was an evolution from
the earlier and earliest by a gradualism which left
little room for catastrophic influences and effects.
It would find Adam Ferguson's " Civil Society,"
read in his college days, and his communistic
dreams at Richmond nourishing the germs of his
interest in social problems and of his conception
of Christianity as a means of improving the life
that now is and not merely a promise of that which
is to come. The distinction thrust upon him by
the Unitarian Controversy ; the fame achieved and
the debate excited by his Baltimore sermon ; the
offer which came to him of the Dexter professor-
ship in Harvard College, and which he eagerly ac-
cepted, only to find his health making it impossi-
ble; the violence of admiration which would have
robbed Boston of his ministry to enrich Baltimore
or New York, — all of these things conspired to
give him a more public character, and obliged him
to think of himseK as something more than a mere
theological recluse.

Simultaneously there came a noticeable invigo-
ration of his thought and style. In the "Moral
Argument against Calvinism " (1820), we find
him criticising a style which, " intended to be ele-

LETTERS AND POLITICS 187

gant, fell into jejuneness and insipidity. It de-
lighted in words and arrangements of words which
were little soiled by common use, and mistook a
spruce neatness for grace." He fancied times had
changed. "Men have learned more to write as
they speak, and are ashamed to dress up familiar
thoughts as if they were just arrived from a far
country, and could not appear in public without a
foreign and studied attire." The comment is sug-
gested that Channing could more easily write as
he talked, because he talked as he wrote, formally
and precisely, with little of the ease and freedom
that make good conversation. But it was some-
thing that he cherished an ideal of homelier things.
There were those who thought his sermons char-
acterized by that " smooth, watery flow of words "
which he deprecated in his contemporaries. But
all things are relative, and Channing's sermon-
style avoided at once the barrenness of the Puritan
inheritance and the floridity of the extreme revolt.
It was significant of his manlier taste that, while
hoping that the new strength would not degenerate
into coarseness, he thought " even this would be a
less evil than tameness and insipidity."

But as yet we have not touched what was a prime
factor in the broadening of Channing's social con-
sciousness and his relation to the social questions
of his time — his interest in political affairs. This
never had the concreteness of Theodore Parker's. In
Parker's letters we are in a world of persons and
personalities ; we are continually running up against

188 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

this or that individual who is characterized in terms
of unmistakable candor. In Channing's letters
there is a painful lack of personal elements. Prin-
ciples, not persons, were the main haunt and re-
gion of his mind. But the interest in politics that
had been excited by that nipping air which, as a
boy, he breathed with his father and grandfather
in Newport, that later fed upon the passions which
the French Revolution excited in the bosoms of
American Federalists and Republicans, never lost
its hold upon him. In his first Boston years, as
earlier, an ardent Federalist, opposing the War of
1812 with something of partisan feeling mingled
with his humane detestation, not even his depress-
ing health availed to submerge him bodily in the
slough of that pessimistic temper which the Essex
" junto " cultivated with assiduous and acrid zeal.
More than one aspect of the war incited him to
public utterance in his own pulpit and elsewhere.
This meant little courage, so sure was he of gen-
eral applause. There was one grand exception to
the impersonal character of Channing's private
political writing and public speech. It was that
of Napoleon. For a quarter of a century that
mighty apparition bulked his ethical horizon, a
fascinating and intolerable shape. One of his first
great successes was his sermon on the downfall of
Napoleon, delivered in King's Chapel, June 15,
1814. The Hundred Days and Waterloo were yet
to come, but they were not to reverse the word of
doom. It was at once a sign of Channing's promi-

LETTERS AND POLITICS 189

nence and an immense enhancement of it that he
was chosen for an occasion of such exalted public
interest. Never before or after did Channing let
himself go as in that passionate denunciation of
Napoleon, and in that paean over what seemed to be
the ruinous end of his career. When he reached
the climax of his description, " The oppressor is
fallen and the world is free," there was tumultuous
applause, a sound which those sacred walls had
never echoed until then, and which Channing has-
tened gently to reprove.

The aristocratic temper of the Boston Feder-
alists harmonized well enough with Channing's
natural inclination, but little with his moral confi-
dence in human nature ; and the latter was bound
to gain upon the former steadily. Always in Chan-
ning, and ever more pronouncedly, we have the
aristocratic inclination, and the intellectual and
moral criticism upon it and suppression of it. With
a constitutional and educated " aloofness," equal
to Emerson's, he did his best to force himself into
the popular contacts that were proper to his delib-
erate estimate of social values and ideals. The
Hartford Convention did more to repel him than
to attract him closer to the Federalist party. In
1817, addressing a " Society for the Education of
Indigent Boys," we find him saying things that
must have been the gall of bitterness to his Feder-
alist friends, and have encouraged the gods of the
local Democracy to say, " He has become as one
of us."

190 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Should the history of the world be traced, I believe
it would be found that society has derived a consider-
able portion of its best materials — I mean superior
minds — from the inferior classes of society. . . . The
higher classes have a tendency to intellectual imbecility,
and need to be replenished from the lower. The looser
relations of the poor are more favorable to native vigor,
originality, freshness of thought, where real genius is
possessed ; and, from all this, it follows that the intel-
lectual progress of a community, its mental activity, its
energy of thought and action, will be promoted by
extending to all classes the means of education, by
giving everywhere to superior minds the opportunity of
emerging and of lending their impulse to society.

In a social atmosphere so sensitive as that of
Boston here was offence enough to tag him as a
Jacobin, but we wonder less that this tag was
affixed to him in the thirties, when, apart from his
antislavery affiliations of those years, we read his
article, "The Union," which appeared in 1829. It
begins with a too generous defence of the Hartford
Conventionists against the aspersions of John
Quincy Adams,^ which is a too genial construc-
tion of their purposes and spirit, and it ends with
a lofty tribute to George Cabot, president of the
Hartford Convention, which is qualified with ex-

1 See Henry Adams's History of the United States, passim, and
particularly vol. viii. We of the present time know much more
than Channing did, or could, of the Hartford Convention, and Mr.
Adams's History is a sufficient justification of his grandfather's
opinions. Timothy Pickering and John Lowell were violent
disunionists. Cabot, more absolutely distrustfid of democracy,
was of a less active or more cautious disposition.

LETTERS AND POLITICS 191

pressive blame. " He wanted a just faith in man's
capacity for freedom, at least in tliat degree of
it which our institutions suppose. . . . He had
too much the wisdom of experience. He wanted
what may be caUed the wisdom of hope." In
these respects he was a typical Federalist. " The
Federalists as a body wanted a just confidence in
our national institutions. They wanted that faith
which hopes against hope and which freedom
should inspire. Here was their sin, and it brought
its penalty. . . . The taint of anti-republican ten-
dencies was fastened upon them by their oppo-
nents, and this reproach no party could survive."

When this was first published the differenti-
ation of the Kepublican (Democratic) party of
that time into National Republicans (soon to be
Whigs) and Democrats was rapidly going on. The
divisive questions were those of a protective tariff
and internal improvements. In the '* Union " arti-
cle, Channing with aU possible frankness took the
Democratic, anti-Federalist side. Granting that
such internal improvements as would be benefi-
cial to the whole country might justly be fostered
by the general government, " but let Congress
propose narrow local improvements, and we need
no prophet to foretell the endless and ever-mul-
tiplying intrigues, the selfish combinations, the
jealousies and discontents that will follow by a
necessity as sure as the laws of nature." It was
as if he saw the scandals of our successive river
and harbor bills passing before him, like Mac-

192 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

beth's vision of the kings upon the witches' heath.
To the protective tariff he addressed himself with
more lively scorn. As habitually convinced as
Herbert Spencer that " that is the best govern-
ment which governs least," he said, " The crying
sin of all governments is that they intermeddle
injuriously with human affairs, and obstruct the
processes of nature by excessive regulation." " The
promotion of free, unrestricted commerce through
the world " was a " sublime object of philanthropy."
" Tariffs never will be impartial. They wiU al-
ways, in a greater or less degree, be the result of
selfish combinations of private and public men,
through which a majority will be secured to par-
ticular interests ; and such is the blindness of
avarice that to grasp a short-lived, partial good,
the infinite blessings of union will be hazarded and
thrown away."

When writing these things Channing had no
longer his earlier assurance of wide public sympa-
thy. Massachusetts had discovered that her inter-
ests, once commercial, were now manufacturing;
protection was now her god, and Daniel Webster
was its prophet. The splendid anti-protectionist
of 1824 had become the obsequious apologist of
1828.1 ]gut even " a tariff for revenue only " was
not agreeable to Channing's sense of justice. He
hailed a future when " every custom-house should
be shut from Maine to Louisiana." *' The inter-

^ See Henry Cabot Lodge's account and criticism of Webster's
action in his Daniel Webster, American Statesmen Series.

LETTERS AND POLITICS 193

ests of human nature require that every fetter
should be broken from the intercourse of nations ;
that the most distant countries should exchange
their products of manual or intellectual labor as
freely as the members of the same community."
As time went on, and the Kepublican party of
those days was definitely parted into Democrats
and Whigs, Channing held fast the integi-ity of
his economic principles and sinned not with his
mouth or pen. He never enunciated them so
clearly as in 1841, and that, too, in Philadelphia,
of all places in the world.

A reference in the " Union " article to the postal
service, pleading for the use of every cent of its
income to cheapen postal rates, is a reminder that
this year (1829) was that of a great discussion of
the Sunday mail service. Channing at first signed
the petition to abolish this, but the report of
Eeverdy Johnson convinced him that he had done
so on mistaken grounds. He had done so, not on
account of the day's sacredness, but because he
thought the Sunday mail increased the burdens of
the postal clerks. Mr. Johnson convinced him to
the contrary, and also that the prohibition was
unconstitutional ; and Channing hastened to make
known his changed opinion, not without indigna-
tion at the unreflecting carelessness of those gentle-
men whose signatures to the petition had seemed
to him to justify his own.

It is certainly disappointing that in Channing's
letters we have so little reference to the political

194 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

events that made the fourth decade of the nine-
teenth century such a noisy and excited one for
the United States. It is possible that something
of this disappointment is owing to the scruples of
William Henry Channing, on whose anticipatory
salvage we are obliged to place our principal reli-
ance, since the destruction by fire, a few years
since, of those parts of Channing's correspondence
which his nephew did not use. In what remains
to us, the amount of concrete political reference is
infinitesimal. The great debate of Webster and
Hayne, the South Carolina Nullification and Jack-
son's decisive action thereupon, the tariff conces-
sions thereto, the removal of the deposits, "the
expunging resolution," the suppression of the Na-
tional Bank, the financial troubles, the "kitchen
cabinet," to say nothing of Jackson's difficulties
with Mrs. Eaton's social problem — all these things
were, apparently, for Dr. Channing as if they had
happened in another world. And indeed many of
them had, for his world was one of principles, and
too much one of abstract generalizations. He was
not indifferent to persons, he was more than in-
different to personalities. The impersonal and
uneventful character of his correspondence is an
immense deduction from its charm. But there are
many who supply his lack, few who invite us to
his upper air. The antislavery movement fur-
nishes only a partial exception to the rule of
abstract character and generalized views. Chan-
ning adds nothing to our knowledge of its main

LETTERS AND POLITICS 195

events, even when he was himself a part of them,
and the lesser incidents do not exist for him.

Turning to Channing as a man of letters, it is
of prime importance that we get the appropriate
point of view. Neglecting this, we may well find
ourselves astonished at the estimation in which he
was held in his lifetime as a literary character and
at his own literary self -consciousness. His purely
literary output, or what was then considered so,
was limited to three or four articles in the " Chris-
tian Examiner," which were published between
the years 1825 and 1830. I say "three or four,"
because the two Napoleon articles were one article
in two parts. In our own time for a distinguished
clergyman to drop into literature flutters nobody.
He may drop to the depth of a short story or a
novel, or into poetry, and we are not surprised.
But Dr. Channing's " Examiner " articles were
great events in Boston and beyond when they
appeared. Dr. Furness tells us that he was sur-
prised to find Dr. Channing making the Milton
venture. In the Unitarian circle, after the first
doubt of its propriety had subsided, it was prob-
ably thought superior to Macaulay's " Milton,"
which had appeared a year earlier in the ''Edin-
burgh Review." Something must be pardoned,
Dr. Furness says, to the admiration of the small
new sect for what was done by its own chief.
More must be pardoned to the state of literature
at that time in the United States. About 1830
Channing wrote certain elaborate " Remarks on Na-

196 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

tional Literature," which should go to the account
of his h'terary achievement. The article was writ-
ten in the future tense. The writer was no lau-
dator temporis acti. He calls no honored names
except those strangely contrasted ones of Edwards
and Franklin. A better illustration of the lucus
a non lucendo it would be hard to find. And yet
in 1830 there were some brave beginnings of the
century's literature which a less abstract method
than Channing's would have interwoven with the
texture of his prophetical discourse. That he was
kin with Allston and Dana may have made him
less than kind to them, but Bryant had already
written his best pieces, " Thanatopsis " and " A
Forest Hymn," still unexcelled; Pierpont some
admirable things ; while if Charles Brockden
Brown's chamber of horrors did not invite him,
Irving's " Sketch Book " should have done so, and
Cooper's likeness to Scott should not have been
sufficient to obscure the rugged strength of his
own proper face. But when Channing's articles
appeared there was no such " mob of gentlemen
who write with ease " and write extremely well as
we have now. Judged by purely literary standards,
hundreds of these write better than Channing.
But " in the country of the blind, the one-eyed
man is king," and it is not strange that under the
general conditions that prevailed from 1825 to
1830 Channing's literary product earned for him
the enthusiastic admiration of his co-religionists
and of many who were not joined to their assem-
bly.

LETTERS AND POLITICS 197

It is eloquent of Channing's confidence in his
own powers that having read Macaulay's essay he
should follow it up with his own. Bracketing the
two in one reading, I find Macaulay's, though it
was his first " Edinburgh " essay and had faults
which he outgrew, incomparably superior to Chan-
ning's as literature, while Channing's leaves a
moral afterglow which is more inspiring than the
dazzling brilliancy of Macaulay's noonday light.
Channing's introductory defence of poetry, which
seems to us remarkable for its banality, probably
seemed much less flat to the " Examiner " public.
The criticism upon Milton's poetry, to those of us
who have read the criticisms of Scherer and Seeley
and Arnold and Pattison, must seem frail indeed
compared with theirs. It is when we come to the dis-
cussion of Milton's religious and ecclesiastical opin-
ions that Channing is himself again. He is against
Milton's opinion that the primitive church was
meant to be a model for aU ages ; " that Christian-
ity, instead of being carried forward, was to be car-
ried hack to its original purity." He is for him
when he would " strip the clergy of that peculiar
artificial sanctity, with which superstition has long
arrayed them, and which has made their simple,
benignant office one of the worst instruments of
ambition and despotism." He would not have an
ignorant ministry, but he would not have religious
instruction a monopoly of ministers ; he would have
men of superior intelligence engaging in it and
substituting " a more natural, free, and various

198 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

eloquence for the tecknical and monotonous mode
of treating subjects wMcli clings so obstinately to
the performances of the pulpit." Of evolution be-
fore Spencer, perhaps more Channing's than Mil-
ton's, we have a good example where Channing
says of the great classical Puritan, —

He believed justly that all the periods and generations
of the human family are bound together by a sublime
connection, and that the wisdom of each age is chiefly a
derivation from all preceding ages, not excepting the
most ancient, just as a noble stream through its whole
extent and in its widest overflowings still holds commu-
nion with its infant springs.

Describing Milton, Channing unconsciously de-
scribed himself : " He rendered to mankind a far
greater service than that of a teacher of an im-
proved theology. He taught and exemplified that
spirit of intellectual freedom, through which all
the great conquests of truth are to be achieved and
by which the human mind is to attain to a new
consciousness of its sublime faculties and to invigo-
rate and expand itself forever."

Henry T. Tuckerman, a critic much valued in
his generation, writing of Dr. Channing in a tone
of mild depreciation, makes an allegation which
must be very shocking to those whose admiration
of Channing is without any qualification. He says,
" Egotism was a striking trait in Dr. Channing."
Those who know Channing best wiU know precisely
what this means and what measure of truth there
is in. it. For it does contain a measure of truth.

LETTERS AND POLITICS 199

Mr. Tuckerman furnished various particulars;
" The first person singular appears on every page
of his writings." Yes, and often because he would
have it understood that he is only saying what Tie
thinks. " His opinions are rather announced as
truths than suggested as possibilities." Yes, be-
cause by long and deep meditation they had become
inwrought with the substance of his personality.
" He had the serious, collected air of one who had
enjoyed special revelations;" "his calm trust in
himself communicates itself to his writings and
acts, and hence the authority they exert over the
multitude." Mr. Tuckerman finds in this trait
that which " gives nerve and clearness to Dr. Chan-
ning's diction and impressiveness to his style."
Acknowledging its reality, I find in it a deeper
significance, — Channing's complete surrender to
the sway of his few leading thoughts. It was as
entrusted with these that he could not but take
himself very seriously. The apparent egotism was
his recognition of the impersonal truth. It was
the egotism of that self-effacement which declares,
" The words which I speak unto you are not mine,
but the Father's that sent me."

It is not to be denied, however, that an acute
self -consciousness was one of the most character-
istic attributes of Channing's personality. It was
fostered by the isolating habits of his life ; by the
immense deference that was paid to him, try as he
would to check its grosser exhibitions ; by his ap-
prehension of the greatness of the human soul, in

\

t.

200 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

which, in virtue of his human character, he shared.
That there were defects of these qualities only the
blind or wilful can deny. There were defects, too,
of the larger quality, — his entire possession with
the grandeur of his thought and work. He was
too prone to make this a universal standard, to go
to books and men for confirmation of it, and not
simply for what they had to give. All his reading
came around to this at last. The climax of his
praise of Milton is that he was another Channing
in his main intent ; the climax of his dispraise of
Napoleon is that he was not a man of the Chan-
ning kind, a man of the brooding intellect and the
reformer's zeal. This was the brunt of Hazlitt's
criticism, and it was well conceived. A defect of
sympathy was the concomitant of Channing's pro-
found engrossment in his personal ideals. He had
no use for men who sailed by other stars. He
might praise them with his lips, but his heart was
far from them. He might recognize them in set
terms, but the emphasis of his enthusiasm and in-
sistence was exclusively upon the words of his pe-
culiar message and on his own type of personality.
So it happened that he was not a discerner of
spirits. WiUiam Henry Channing writes that the
Fenelon of the Fenelon article is Channing him-
self. He is too much so. In many things Fenelon
was quite other than Channing. When we read
Sainte-Beuve, the perfect critic, upon Fenelon, we
appreciate the defect of Channing's method. Sainte-
Beuve is disengaging for us Fenelon's personality ;

LETTERS AND POLITICS 201

Channing is taking another text for his habitual
presentation of his besetting thought.

Lamb, asked by Coleridge, " Did you ever hear
me preach?" replied with his habitual stammer
that he had never heard him do anything else.
To Channing, asking the same question, a candid
friend might properly have made Lamb's answer.
He was subdued to the business that he worked at
to a degree of which he was painfully conscious,
and against which he chafed, but which he could
not put off. In his letters and conversation he
slid easily into the sermon tone. So in the " Ex-
aminer " articles. The best part of the Fenelon
article reproduces the great sermon on seK-denial,
the contention in either case being that we should
not deny our reason. The second article on Napo-
leon reads like a slightly altered sermon on tempta-
tions to the abuse of power. In the first there are
swelling passages which read as if written with the
Sunday audience in the writer's mind. We know
Napoleon as Channing did not, for better and
for worse. Could he have read Lanfrey's story of
his diplomatic treacheries, he might have dipped
his pen in blacker ink. But he does less than jus-
tice to the intellectual and civic Napoleon of the
great Code. In general the article differs from
a biographical study much as a fourteenth-cen-
tury " morality " differs from one of Shakespeare's
plays. But for preaching it is grand. Because
Channing's preaching so fed upon his vitals, he had
little strength for other things. The preacher in

202 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Mm was a jealous sovereign who could admit no
brother near the throne.

If the " Examiner " articles brought upon him
encomiums that were excessive, they brought upon
him censures which erred in like manner and de-
gree. The most famed of these were Hazlitt's and
Brougham's articles in the " Edinburgh Review."
It was Channing's apparent invasion of the liter-
ary sphere that invited these reprisals. Had he
remained simply the preacher he would, probably,
have been let alone. It was " significant of much "
that an essayist of Hazlitt's standing and a politician
of Lord Brougham's should consider Channing a
fit subject for their sublime denunciation. It meant
for one thing that Channing had, especially when
Brougham wrote, in 1839, an English vogue
which no other American writer had at that time
achieved. Hazlitt's review appeared in 1829.^ He
said, " We like Dr. Channing's Sermons best ;
his Criticisms less ; his Politics the least of all."
To the first term of this series no one can demur.
Many, and the most of us, would invert the order
of the second and the third. But to Hazlitt, who
had glorified Napoleon in four volumes octavo,
Channing's politics meant his execration of Napo-
leon's character and career. ^ Hazlitt was right in

^ It was based upon Sermons and Tracts ; including Remarks
on the Character and Writings of Milton and of FSnelon ; and an
Analysis of the Character of Napoleon Bonaparte. This collection
anticipated the first American collection of Channing's writings,
the copyright of which was not taken out until April, 1830.

* Charles Sumner's senior part in 1830 reflected severely upon

LETTERS AND POLITICS 203

his contention that, making an example of Napo-
leon, his ethical abstraction did scant justice to
the immense variety of Napoleon's genius. To
see only the selfish and cruel tyrant in that perso-
nal congeries of stupendous gifts and powers was
significant of a certain narrowness in Channing's
ethical obsession. He galled Hazlitt's kibe in
another fashion when he separated himself from
that Socinian type of Unitarianism to which Haz-
litt's father, a Unitarian minister,^ was attached.
But what must have confounded Channing's Amer-
ican friends and admirers beyond measure was the
assault on Channing's intellectual morality : —

Dr. Channing is a great tactician in reasoning ; and
reasoning has nothing to do with tactics. We do not
like to see a writer constantly trying to steal a march
upon opinion without having his retreat cut off — full of
pretensions and void of offence. It is as bad as the
opposite extreme of outraging decorum at every step ;
and is only a more covert mode of attracting attention,
and gaining surreptitious applause. We never saw any-
thing more guarded in this respect than Dr. Channing's
" Tracts and Sermons," — more completely suspended
between heaven and earth. He keeps an eye on both
worlds ; kisses hands to the reading public all round ;
and does his best to stand well with different sects and
parties. He is always in advance of the line, in an ami-
able and imposing attitude, but never far from succor.

Channing's view, possibly taking its cue from Hazlitt's article.
He came round to Channing in due course and in general looked
to him for guidance as to no other person, until Channing's death.
1 "Who, as we have seen in chap, iv., had helped Dr. Freeman's
Boston Unitarianism to a happy birth.

204 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

It would be difficult to frame an indictment less
correspondent with Channing's traditional reputa-
tion than was this. His Unitarian friends, and, more
obviously, his orthodox opponents, must have won-
dered whether the British edition of Channing's
writings had not been emasculated, or, possibly, an-
other set of writings been published under his name.
But Hazlitt's savage criticism may well give us
momentary pause. It reflects the caution of Chan-
ning's intellectual procedure, his anxiety to do jus-
tice to all sides ; and it reminds us that what would
have been timidity in the longitude of London was
courage in the longitude of Boston, — in the little
Puritan town as compared with the great metropo-
lis. We can never take a just measure of Chan-
ning's moral stature and the courage of his opinions
without a relative appreciation of the stunting at-
mosphere in which he grew, the scared and petrified
conservatism from which he freed himself as best
he could. As an account of Channing's inner con-
sciousness and his relation to the public and his
work, a grosser misconception than that of Hazlitt's
article would be quite impossible.

But Lord Brougham's criticism was that of one
resolved to better Hazlitt's instructions, however
hard it might go with Channing. It was interest-
ing, to me to find that its next neighbor in the
" Edinburgh," which had gathered " dust o' books "
for more than sixty years, was Macaulay's famous
review of Gladstone's " Church and State," in the
opening paragraph of which he describes Gladstone

LETTERS AND POLITICS 205

as " the rising hope of " certain *' stern and un-
bending Tories." Less contrary was that hope to
Gladstone's ultimate repute than Lord Brougham's
view of Channing's literary ambition to the fact of
his habitual simplicity. It is against Channing's
style that he directs his accusation. " False Taste
— Dr. Channing " runs the head-line through some
sixteen pages. Channing is held up as a flagrant
example of euphuistic prettiness and of intentional
and meaningless obscurity — vices from which
Channing sought and prayed to be delivered as
from a dreadful fate. The accusation was a strange
one as directed against an author whose writing
has fitly been described as " naked thought," — of
whom Renan wrote, " His works display no literary
ambition." But Brougham had found a handle
in a passage in the Milton article, where Chan-
ning had a good word to say for Milton's tortuous
obscurity. He never wrote anything less character-
istic, anything more at variance with his habitual
endeavor to make his meaning plain. And who
of us would not give acres of Lord Brougham's
and much other perspicuity for a few patches of
Milton's daring and splendid involution? Chan-
ning's eccentricity from his habitual orbit was at
this point one of the most pardonable aberrations
of his life. Bat Lord Brougham referred his read-
ers to particular passages in Channing as guilty
of that obscurity which Channing had too rashly
praised. The trouble was, in part, that Channing
was endeavoring to find a language for realities

206 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

which evaded Brougham's utilitarian rule of thumb.
At the same time there may have been some jus-
tification of the charges made. Renan was too
genial, and not accurate, when he said, " There is
not one of Channing's writings that exhibits the
smallest pretensions to art and style." Channing
was the conscious stylist in aU his published writ-
ings. In the " Examiner " articles he was more
ambitious than elsewhere, and striving for a richer,
struck a falser note. Generally his style is remark-
able for its lucidity. He knew that some things
were impossible for him. Charles Lamb's style
was his ideal of perfection ; Goldsmith's contend-
ing with it. But he wrote to Miss Aikin that,
while he thought himself able to do something in a
kind of eloquent writing, the ease and charm of
Addison and Goldsmith were heights that he could
never reach.

It is commonly set down to his credit that he
never read Brougham's article. His not doing so
was one of his mistakes. If he had conned and
inwardly digested it, it might have done him good.
He was, perhaps, too disdainful of external aids.
It is permitted us to believe that a more liberal
scholarship and a fuller habit of reading would
not have been detrimental to his mind and work.
A scholar he was not, though suffering the lin-
guistic tools of his profession, Greek and Hebrew,
to rust in a less degree than many of the clergy
now, or even then. Of the New Testament he
was a persistent student in the naive, unscientific

LETTERS AND POLITICS 207

fashion of his time. He was probably a good
Latinist, and well skilled in French, reading his
Fenelon in a splendid set of quartos, which have
to-day lost but little of their first magnificence.
Madame de Stael's ^' Germany " first introduced
him to German literature. Upon the philosophic
side, it brought him confirmation of many things
he had been thinking privately. Coleridge and
Carlyle took him farther on that road, but where
the translators failed him, he stopped short. He
knew Richter and Schiller and Goethe well, —
Schiller's personality appealing to him more than
Goethe's, whose selfishness was an offence. As for
Channing's general reading, it was much more
extensive than it has commonly been represented.
It was far enough from Theodore Parker's insa-
tiable voracity, and the meat on which he fed was
not that purveyed by the great scholars. Nor had
he Parker's passion for old books. The new and
newest had for him a much greater attraction. He
enjoyed the shock of such a manner as Carlyle's,
reading everything he wrote with avid interest ; so
Emerson's earlier things. For a good idea of his
general reading, one cannot do better than to go
to Miss Peabody's " Reminiscences " and his cor-
respondence with Miss Aikin, in whose literary
friendship he was fortunate. A daughter of Dr.
John Aikin, and a niece of Mrs. Barbauld, she
was a writer of no mean ability on historical and
other lines. In his letters to her, less constrained
and pleasanter as they go on, we get a picture of

208 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

his everyday mind that is most attractive and
agreeable. Not that the letters on either side are
ideal letters. The correspondence was too much
an exchange of brief essays on current reading and
events. But Dr. Channing's letters have this ad-
vantage over Miss Peabody's reports of his con-
versations, — we know in them that we are getting
Dr. Channing pure and simple, and of that we are
never quite sure with Miss Peabody's reports.
Often we have that effect of the Fourth Gospel,
where the great teacher's style is so much that of
the narrator that it breeds suspicion. But read
either Miss Peabody's " Reminiscences " or the
Aikin letters, and we find that Channing's read-
ing was quite other than that modicum of the ordi-
nary misapprehension heretofore. It included the
best and better books of his generation to a liberal
extent. If it is hard to sympathize with certain
of his admirations, we may well ask ourselves if
our own are likely to bear the tests of time and tide
as well. Mrs. Hemans and Joanna BaiUie do not
stir us now, but they might with better warrant than
some of our own time to whom we are more partial.
What Scott thought of Miss BaiUie and Miss Edge-
worth makes Channing's opinion of them at least
respectable. Some of us are going back to Miss
Edge worth with considerable zest. If Channing
went astray in thinking so much of Scott (Howells
jiidice), he went astray with a large company, in-
cluding nearly all the better spirits of his own and
later times. I recall no reference to Jane Austen,

LETTERS AND POLITICS 209

but I trust lie did not miss that fountain of un-
spoiled delight.

Channing's favorite contemporary poet was
Wordsworth, and therein he made no mistake. He
knew him well, and though he seldom quoted him,
we often are aware, some whiff of scent apprising
us, that his vase has been with Wordsworth's rose.
It is possible that his delight in Coleridge's prose
made relatively dim his satisfaction in his incom-
parable verse. His attraction to Southey seems
to have been less than was common in his day, and
to have anticipated the verdict of posterity. Shelley
he called " a seraph gone astray," a designation
having in it more of praise than blame. If he did
not care for Keats, it was perhaps because he was
discouraged by the over-sweetness of " Endymion."
His judgment of Byron was that his letters testi-
fied to his intellectual force as did not his poetry.
This was one of many of Channing's judgments
that the consensus of time and criticism has con-
firmed. At all points there was a sharp reaction
on the books he read. He prized them to the de-
gree they made him think, sending him back upon
his " central solitude " to see how they agreed or
disagreed with what was there. He read widely
in history and biography, and in moral and social
philosophy. The depreciation of his reading, here-
tofore, is mainly a caricature of the fact that his
reading was the smaller part of his intellectual
life ; the larger was his meditation on the books he
read and on the ideas that arose in his own mind.

210 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

A more meditative habit I have not found in any-
one of .many dozens of biographies. For days and
weeks together he turned things over in his mind,
getting every possible light upon them. He was
never happier than when some new book confirmed
effectively his own dearest thoughts. By this hoop
of steel he was grappled to Degerando,^ whose " Du
Perfectionnement Moral " brought back the glow
of his young joy in Hutcheson. Channing's origi-
nality was far less that of novelty than that of
vital appropriation. Not only did he "pounce
upon his own wherever he found it" with keen
avidity, but he made others' thoughts his own by
the sincerity with which he adopted them, by the
free and careful consent of his deliberate thought.
No man's body of thought was ever, I think, more
honestly his own than Channing's, so patiently
did his convictions wait upon his brooding quiet-
ness, and meet the challenge of his hesitations and
his doubts.

Our next step is to a consideration of the mes-
sage which he brought with him from his study
into the high pulpit of the Federal Street Church.

^ Channing singles him out in his National Literature, where he
is pleading- for other European aids to reflection than those fur-
nished by England. I use Channing's form of the French writer's
name, though I believe Gerando is the more proper. The book
was translated by Miss Peabody in 1830, and republished in 1860.
The translation " endeavors to be strictly faithful to the author's
ideas, while keeping in mind a decidedly different style of expres-
sion." Gerando was one of the men to whom Channing gave
young Sumner letters when he went abroad in 1838. For Sum-
ner's visit to Gerando, see Pierce's Memoir of Sumner, i. 254, 255.

LETTERS AND POLITICS 211

Before entering upon this I would fain produce
some image of the man as he appeared to those
whose privilege it was to attend upon his ministra-
tion of religion. Of Gambardella's portrait, painted
in 1839, we are assured that it is "remarkably-
faithful," indeed " faultless." The same friend i
from whose lips we had these things a few years
since, tells of a velvet softness in his face, and of
his smile " all the sweeter for the appearance around
the mouth of physical weakness, through which
it struggled, a sunbeam through a cloud." The
rather high cheek bones and hollow cheeks gave
him an emaciated look. In bodily presence Paul
was not more weak. Short of stature, he was
slight of frame and very spare of flesh. His
person conveyed the impression of such feebleness
as made his hold on life seem a precarious tenure.
Robert Collyer was once the proud possessor of one
of Channing's coats. Like Samuel's it was, he said,
a little one, as if made for a boy. But Mr. Collyer
may have compared it with his own. His great
fist beside Channing's little one would have af-
forded a more notable contrast. When Chan-
ning told Dr. Furness that he " could n't strike a
man," Dr. Furness could not help wondering if
the man would feel it if he did. But Channing's
slight physical habit was somewhat obscured by
the manner of his pulpit dress. I have seen the

^ William Henry Furness, born in 1802, was ordained in 1825,
and at the same time installed minister of the Philadelphia So-
ciety, of which he was pastor emeritus when he died in 1896.

212 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

beautiful silk belted gown which he wore in the
pulpit under his surplice ; also the thick quilted
silk cloak or long cape that he wore over the gown
from his house to the church,^ and the tiny bands
which he discarded at some time in the course of
his ministry. I have seen one of his neck-cloths,
wonderful for its fineness and for the narrowest
hem imaginable. With his throat swathed in that
cradle sheet, I wonder that his vocal organs could
produce an audible sound. But what says Dr.
Furness ? —

His voice, — ah, that wonderful voice ! — wonderful
not for the music of its tones, but for its extraordinary
power of expression. Whether from the delicacy of the
vocal organ or from bodily weakness, I do not know, it
was flexible to tremulousness. When he began to dis-
course, it ran up and down, even in the articulation of a
single polysyllabic word, in so strange a fashion that
they who heard him for the first time could not antici-
pate its effect, — how, before it ceased, that voice would
thrill them to the inmost. I cannot hken it to any-
thing but a huge sail, flapping about at first at random,
but soon taking the wind, swelling out most majestically,
as Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh that,
" when the spirit came upon him, he spread his enormous
canvas, and launched into a wide sea of eloquence."

1 Mrs. Dall writes me of seeing' him enter the pulpit wearing
a large red shawl, and blames his wife for that defect of taste. But
Dr. Channing had a will of his own, and Mrs. Channing did not
often err upon the side of taste. Where Channing was indifferent
except to neatness, she had an exquisite regard for his apparel.
Only the finest underwear, she thought, was good enough for
him, when, had he known in what fine silk and linen he was
dressed, a hair-cloth shirt would less have torn his flesh.

^Jt. J/

^

LETTERS AND POLITICS 213

We have had many testimonies to the magic of
that voice and to the luminous dilation of the deep-
set gray eyes. There was an illusion of increas-
ing physical height and amplitude as his discourse
drew on to its deeper part. His reading of hymns
and Bible passages is described as exceedingly
impressive. A stillness waited on it that could
be felt and almost heard, it was so positive. He
made single words so big with meaning, says Dr.
Furness, that could the eye have reproduced them
they would have covered the side wall of the
church. Here was something very different from
Whitefield's mellifluous "Mesopotamia." Here
was the enlargement of the informing soul. The
strength of Dr. Channing's preaching was that of
his conviction of the reahty of his message and its
importance to men's lives. Those who heard him
felt that his inmost soul was uttering itself in ser-
mon, hymn, and prayer. " Preaching," says Dr.
Dewey, " was the great action of his life. It was
the greatest action that could be demanded of any
life." If ever a man magnified his office, Chan-
ning did so, and in the loftiest possible way. He
could not imagine a more sacred task than that
which every sermon called him to perform.

In W. H. Channing's somewhat grandiloquent
account of his uncle's preaching we read with
special pleasure of " the owners of pews hospitably
welcoming strangers," for such was not the Boston
manner of those days. Rather a man's pew was
his castle, as was not his house. But the social

214 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

bonds may well have been dissolved for those
caught up into the preacher's vision of a new
humanity in which men would be brothers all. The
sermon over, there was little remaining in the
preacher of that nervous elasticity with which he
had hurried up the pulpit stairs. The virtue had
gone out of him. He was now to pay the penalty
of physical and cerebral prostration and collapse ;
of sleepless, agitated hours. Reading of this recur-
rent aspect of his suffering and heroic life, one
thinks of Shelley's self-description in the " Ado-
nais," and feels that it was not inapplicable to
Channing ; that here, too, was —

a power
Girt round with weakness, that could scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT CHAKNING PREACHED

It would be an abuse of terms to say that for
our knowledge of what Channing preached we are
limited to the six volumes^ published in 1841 and
to the volume published in 1873, "The Perfect
Life," because the fulness of this representation of
his mind prevents any sense of limitation. If, in ad-
dition, we had all the manuscript sermons that were
destroyed by that melancholy burning on the trans-
continental train (September, 1900), it is unlikely
that they would add much to our impression. This
might, with their help, be more extensive than it
is now ; it could hardly be more intensive. There
is no aspect of Channing' s preaching or his thought
which is not fully illustrated by the volumes of
1841 and "The Perfect Life." These, moreover,
have the advantage of being of his own selection.
This is true in a hardly less degree of " The Perfect
Life " than of the six earlier volumes. The twelve
sermons in that volume he stamped with his approval

^ Now published in one volume by the American Unitarian
Association, with The Perfect Life, 1060 pages, 8vo. The three
volumes of the Memoir have been made similarly inexpensive and
compact, 719 pages, 8vo.

21G WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

by his frequent preaching of them, and he set some
of them apart with a view to publication. It must
be understood that the order of their present
arrangement is that of the editor, W. H. Chan-
ning, not that of Dr. Channing, and that it does
not correspond to the order in which they were
written and preached. The progressive order in
which the nephew arranged them is very inge-
nious, but not quite convincing. The little volume
called " Dr. Channing' s Note-Book," selected and
published by Grace EUery Channing in 1887, is
profoundly interesting, but it gives us only new
varieties of Channing's thought — no new species.
The same is true of the projected work on Man,i
from which we have some fragments in the " Me-
moir " arid some suggestive sentences in the " Note-
Book." Both confirm the opinion of Renan. Had
the book been written it would have added a little
to our knowledge of Dr. Channing's philosophi-
cal opinions (as idealistic as those of Emerson's
"Nature"), but in a form that would have been
less engaging than his sermons, though we may be
sure that the sermon note would have been often
heard. The range of Channing's preaching was
not wide, and if we only had the one volume of
1830 ^ we should be hardly less secure than we are

1 Of which Renan says : " The plan of this book was neither new
nor original. It would have been an essay, like so many others,
on man and human nature, the perpetual theme of the Anglo-
Scotch philosophy, and no exception to the weariness of books of
this sort."

2 I write with this at hand, a handsome royal octavo, tlie

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 217

now on pulpit lines ; but we should be incom-
parably poorer on lines of sociology and philan-
thropy, including the antislavery writings.

The larger unity of Channing's thought, when
he had got so far as " midway on the road of our
life," so far transcended its particular variations
that I am, I trust, justified in making a general
exposition of his preaching at this stage of my
advance, and in helping myself with equal freedom
from the material produced before and after 1830.1
Of its controversial import up to this date I have
already said enough, and that part of his theology
which he held in common with his Unitarian con-
temporaries, in a general way, need not detain us
long. Whatever his anticipations of more modern
thought, any conscious suspicion of the soundness
of his supernaturalist theor}^ of Christianity was
not among them. He was as thoroughgoing a
supernaturalist as any of his orthodox opponents.
For the best expression of his Christian supernat-
uralism we must go to the Dudleian Lecture of
1821. One may have travelled far from this out-
liberal pag-e suiting- the liberal thought. It has a personal inter-
est for me because it was the valued possession of Dr. Charles
Cotton, of Newport, a descendant of the Rev. John Cotton, of
Boston, England and Massachusetts, and was presented to him by
a near relative of Washington AUston. In 1832 a second volume
was published. It contained sermons only — eleven of these —
which were all taken up into the six volumes of 1841 (the sixth
1843). The selection was made by Dr. Dewey, Dr. Channing's
health proving unequal to the task.

^ The volume of 1830, less the plain-spoken preface, which
gave so much offence, was taken up bodily into the six-volume
edition of 1841.

218 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

look and yet not be so dull that he cannot enter
into the enthusiasm which was aroused by Chan-
ning's exposition. Its arguments were the stock
arguments of the time, but they were presented
in a remarkably persuasive manner. There was

" demur at those who, doubting the miraculous evi-
dence for Christianity, were inclined to rest it
wholly on internal evidence ; " for Christianity is
not only confirmed by miracles, but is in itself,
in its very essence, a miraculous religion. It is
not a system which the human mind might have
,^' gathered in the ordinary course of nature." No
note recurs more frequently than this in Chan-
ning's earlier statements, but its variations widen
as he goes on until we have a new species : the

'' supernatural designed to concentrate the natural ;
the glory of the former its resemblance to the best
produced by the latter and not its difference from

yit. In the Dudleian we have, representatively,
the endeavor of the whole contemporary school to
reconcile acceptance of the New Testament mira-
cles with a general distrust of the miraculous. The
character of those miracles and the moral necessity

\ f or their occurrence are found to plead for them.

' Here is the concession that the less the miracle,
the likelier is it to be a valid one, and we skirt the
coasts of Locke's opinion that the doctrine proves
the miracle more than the miracle the doctrine.
Channing argues the supernatural character of
Christianity both from the incompetency of the
human mind to produce it, and from the incom-

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 219

petency of the times and circumstances in which,
and under which, it appeared. Nowhere is he less
his proper seK than in the first contention; no-
where more subject to the limitations of his time
than in the second. His characteristic exaltation
of human nature should have prevented his saying
that " being partakers of it [human nature] we can
judge with sufficient accuracy of the operation of its
principles and of the effects to which they are com-
petent." That exaltation of human nature should
have made it easy for him to conceive of such a
" sun of righteousness " as Jesus, swinging with easy
and unfettered motion in its boundless space. The
limitations of his time appear in the astonishing
assertion that we " can discover in Jesus no impres-
sion of the time in which he lived." Our later
scholarship has not so learned Christ. It finds
his time full of anticipations of his thought and
of agreements with it.^ As for the personality
of Jesus, personality is something that can never
be accounted for. Its most splendid apparitions
add little to our persuasion of " the transmission of
acquired traits," and advise us that we should
expect to be frequently and incalculably surprised.
If all these surprises, except that of Jesus, are
accounted " natural," why make of him " a party
by himself " ?

A further limitation of his time is shown in
Channing's treatment of the Gospels, his elaborate
pleading that they are not forgeries. No one who

1 See Professor C. H. Toy's Judaism and Christianity.

220 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

has any critical standing now considers that they
are. Our present understanding is that these
gospels " grew as grows the grass " and that, doing
so, in many particulars they grew away from the
prime facts of Jesus' history ; that there was, within
the limits of the New Testament, a progressive
idealization of his person and office, and that a
similar process, quite as active, filled in the gap
between the original events and the proto-Mark or
first written document of any kind.

Emerson was not the only young man who was
greatly impressed by the Dudleian Lecture. His
friend William Henry Furness also heard it gladly
and got from it an impulse that lasted him more
than seventy years. The passage which gave it
was that on the internal evidence of the truth of
the New Testament narratives from their natural-
ness and naive simplicity. All that Dr. Furness
wrote on this subject was an expansion of that
passage. The original passage and the expansion
suggest the criticism that the natural selection of
a growing legend is as simple and naive as any
possible product of the most unstudied individual
narrator.

The growth of Channing's mind can nowhere be
traced more plainly than in those parts of his writ-
ings which convey his views of Christianity. The
chronological order cannot always be made out, but,
in so far as it can be, it makes for the impression
that while always holding fast to the supernaturalist
view, his emphasis upon it steadily decreased, and

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 221

his recommendation of Christianity to his hearers
became steadily more rational and moral. While
there is much scattered evidence to this effect, it
is heaped up conspicuously in the sermons " Chris-
tianity a Kational Religion," " The Great Purpose
of Christianity" (1828), and two sermons on the
" Evidences of Christianity," which were included
in the 1832 volume, while for the climax of this
development we cannot do better than to read the
tenth and the eleventh sermons in " The Perfect
Life," which are " The Essence of the Christian
Religion " and " Perfect Life the End of Chris-
tianity." In " Christianity a Rational Religion "
we seem to have passed already from the early
view that the contents of Revelation, albeit ra-
tional, could not have been attained by reason
without supernatural aid. The contention is that
" revelation is founded on the authority of reason
and cannot therefore oppose or disparage it with-
out subverting itself." " Reason alone makes us
capable of receiving a revelation." " A religion
claiming to be from God can give no surer proof
of falsehood than contradiction of those previous
truths which God is teaching in our very nature."
" Nothing but the approving sentence of reason
binds us to receive and obey revelation." He does
not find revelation teaching " all things necessary
to salvation ; " "I must not think it the only
source of instruction to which I must repair."
There is here, he assures us, no " pride of reason,"
for pride finds its delight in its sense of superiority ;

222 WILLIAjVI ELLERY CHANNING

but reason is " the common property of all human
beings." For "pride of reason" we must go to
men's " infatuated trust in their own infallibility,'*
their " impatience of contradiction," their " arro-
gance towards those differing from them in opin-
ion." The general argument for the rationahty of
Christianity is from its internal consistency, and
its consistency with other truths, and from its uni-
versality.

In the two sermons of " Evidences " the main
course of the argument is much the same as in the
Dudleian Lecture, but the change of temper is
shown by a noble introductory passage in which
Channing contended for the possibility of an un-
belief more excellent and honorable than the cur-
rent orthodoxy of the time. " Our religion is at
this moment adopted and passionately defended by
vast multitudes on the ground of the very same
pride, worldliness, love of popularity, and blind de-
votion to hereditary prejudices which led the Jews
and Heathens to reject it in the primitive age."
" To confess Jesus at the present moment argues
no moral courage. It may even betray a servility
and worldliness of mind."

When I think what Christianity has become in the
hands of politicians and priests, how it has been shaped
into a weapon of power, how it has crushed the human
soul for ages, how it has struck the intellect with palsy
and haunted the imagination with superstitious phan-
toms, how it has broken whole nations to the yoke, and
frowned on every free thought ; when I think how,

WHAT CHAXyiXG PREACHED 223

under almost every form of this religion, its ministers
have taken it into their own keeping, have hewn and
compressed it into the shape of rigid creeds, and have
then pursued by menaces of everlasting woe whoever
should question the divinity of these works of their
hands ; when I consider, in a word. how. nnder such in-
fluences. Christianity has been and still is exhibited, in
forms which shock alike the reason, conscience, and
heart. I feel deeply, painfully, what a different system
it is from that which Jesus taught, and I dare not apply
to unbelief the terms of condemnation which belonged
to the infidelity of the primitive age.^

It may be said here, yery properly, that by this
time such •• unbelief '* as Channing's could be ex-
pressed in Boston with as little expense of courage as
the traditional belief. When Di\ Lyman Beeoher
was brought to Boston in 1826 to withstand the
rising flood of Unitarianism with a form of ortho-
doxy that was all the more yehement because of
its indi\*idual note, — an enterprise that met with
good success, — his account of the condition of
affairs was epitomized after this fashion : —

All the Hterary men of Massachusetts were Unita-
rian : all the trustees and professors of Harvard Col-
lege were Unitarian ; all the elite of wealth and fashion
crowded Unitarian churches : the judges on the bench
were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the pecuUar
features of church organization so carefully ordered by

1 Sentences so long as this were frequent in Clianning's earlier
writing's, infrequent in the later. Some of the sermons in Ji^-
Perfect Life g\-> to the opposite extreme, and the effect is choppy :
partly from the use of periods where semicolons had been used
aforetime.

224 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

the Pilgrim Fathers had been nullified, and aU the
power had passed into the hands of the congregation.

In the Motte ordination sermon of 1828, we
have " the great purpose of Christianity " declared
to be the strengthening and uplifting of the mind,
the elevation of the soul. We have left far behind
the doctrine of the earlier sermons which put spe-
cial emphasis on future happiness. The preacher
deprecates the separation of Christian virtue from
its rewards. Men '' think of being Christians for
the sake of something beyond the Christian char-
acter, something more precious. That the chief
reward lies in the very spirit of religion they do
not dream." But it is to the tenth and eleventh
sermons of " The Perfect Life " that we must go
for the ripest form of Channing's thought of Chris-
tianity. In the former of these, " The Essence of
the Christian Religion," he says, "I believe that
/ Christianity has one great principle which is
central^ around which all its truths gather, and
which constitutes it the Glorious Gospel of the
Blessed God : it is the doctrine that God purposes,
in his unbounded Fatherly Love, to perfect the
HUMAN SOUL ; ^ to purify it from all sin ; to fill
/ it with his own spirit ; to unfold it forever." No
word was oftener on Channing's lips, or in his
thought, than " perfection." It was significant of

^ W. H. Channing' is probably responsible for the use of capitals
and small capitals in this passage. Channing- was very sparing of
such devices, even his pronouns referring to the Deity being with-
out capitals.

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 225

an Idea that was with him in the early college days,
and, like

Divine Alpheus, who, by secret sluice,
Stole underseas,

it reappeared beyond the flood of his Hopkinsian
time, and added strength to strength. But what
he meant by perfection was never something stati-
cal ; it was always something dynamic, a " career
of endless improvement." The thought of his
" Essence of Christianity " is reiterated in the
next sermon, " Perfect Life the End of Christian-
ity." He said, " I affirm that Excellence of Char-
acter is the Great Object of Christianity ; is the
Great Blessing which Christ came to Communi-
cate." By this standard he tried men, Jesus, God.
Perfect goodness is the supreme good, the only
good for men. The goodness of Jesus is all that
recommends him to our love. So far as his death
has any significance for us, it is as an example of
his goodness. The love of God — it is the love of
goodness ; it is nothing less than this, and can be
nothing more. "The adoration of goodness —
this is religion."

Incidentally we have already seen something of
the particular forms of Channing's supernatural-
istic theology, — its doctrine touching the Scrip-
tures (Baltimore sermon), Christology (contro-
versy of 1815), and Atonement (New York sermon
of 1826). It can hardly be denied that Chan-
ning's method was, in its intent, more scriptural
than that of his orthodox contemporaries. It was

226 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

his confidence in the sufficiency of Scripture that
made him so averse to "man-made creeds." It
was its lack of scriptural confirmation, for one
thing, that made the Trinitarian system so impos-
sible for him. It was his reverence for the letter
of Scripture that indisposed him for all those alle-
gorical interpretations, without which, said Car-
dinal Newman, orthodoxy would have no case at
aU. But his distrust of such interpretations did
not import that every superficial meaning was the
Xbest. "Let me go to the Bible," he said, " dis-
' missing my reason, and taking the first impression
which the words convey, and there is no absurdity,

[ however gross, into which I may not fall." The

actual meaning was to be sought in precisely the
same manner as that of other books. Here was a
fruitful seed ; but the soil in which it grew afforded
it no proper nourishment. Incidentally, there was
much anticipation of the higher criticism of to-day.
It was with a forefeeling for Matthew Arnold's
" Literature and Dogma " that he wrote, " The
language of the Bible is not that of logicians, nor
the language of retired and inanimate speculation,
but of affection, of zeal, of men who burned to
convey deep and vivid impressions of truth." "With
much appearance of difference and contradiction,
how was the essential teaching of the Bible to be
found ? " Nothing is plainer than that I must
compare passage with passage, and limit one by
another, and especially limit all by those plain and
universal principles of reason which are called

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 227

common sense." The vice of this method was,
that it imposed common sense on every biblical
writer, — a rule of thumb for agonies and exalta-
tions of the spirit, and that, with as little scientific
warrant, it assumed the unity of the Bible, argu-
ing from part to part as if it were all the work of
one man, the expression of one mind, whereas, it
is, in fact, the free and independent expression of
a hundred or more different minds, subject to the
social influences of a thousand various years and to
the special stress of each separate writer's individ-
uality. What his exegesis — the interpretation of
the obscure and the inferior by the simplest and
the best — actually came to was his transfigura-
tion of the given form in the light of his own
extraordinarily un-" common-sense," his personal
conviction of what was just and right. So much
of the Bible was inspired as appealed to his moral
and religious sensibility. The woes denounced
upon the Pharisees were swallowed up in the Beati-
tudes. He read the former so tenderly that an
objector said, " If Jesus spoke them in that way,
they are all right." But did Jesus speak them in
that way? Did he mean, "Alas for you Scribes
and Pharisees ! " ? I doubt it very much. Jesus
was not exactly another Channing, writ however
large. And Channing's method with the Scrip-
tures was at once an enhancement of their inferior
parts and a deduction from their infinite reality,
richness, and variety. He went to them too much
as one seeing his natural face in a glass.

228 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

It should be noted, by the way, that the unity
of the Bible was for Channing practically a New
Testament unity. Formally he considered "the
Christian dispensation a continuation of the Jew-
ish," but his emphasis anticipated the reminder of
one of his later sermons that when he speaks of
Kevelation he means the Christian religion. Here
he had something of the narrowness which was
much more markedly characteristic of Andrews
Norton, whose opinion of the Old Testament was
lacking in due respect. Channing was emphati-
cally a man of the New Testament. His texts were
drawn from it almost exclusively. Much less his
arguments. His appeals to its authority, except in
a very large and general way, were few and far be-
tween. His sermons were developments of his own
broadening thought, not attenuations of Bible
texts. These were points of departure, not anchors
to be dragged astern, when every sail was bellying
with the wind. He theorized very little on the
subject of inspiration, but that plenary, not verbal,
inspiration was his working hypothesis, there can
be no doubt. The Bible, and especially the New
Testament, contained rather than was a revela-
tion. The tendency was to the now familiar strain
of liberal orthodoxy, the Bible the natural record
of a supernatural revelation ; and to that other,
the substance of the revelation the personality of
Jesus rather than anything he taught : " Chris-
tianity is Christ."
, In no respect did Channing withstand the ortho-

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 229

doxy of his time more sharply, because it ought,
according to his judgment, to be blamed, than in
the matter of its determination to convert what
was most fluid and intangible in the New Tes-
tament into the hardest dogmas, to reject which por-
tended moral ruin and eternal hell. And where
he deprecated over confidence, he was not himself
at fault. He never dogmatized concerning the
nature and rank of Jesus, because the New Testa-
ment had for him on these points no sure word of
prophecy. What he felt sure of was that it did
not declare his deity, nor his double nature, and
his rejection of these doctrines^ was absolute and
without shadow of turning. It was different with
Christ's preexistence. He inclined to this till he
drew near the end of his life, but with slackening
conviction of its certain truth. He recognized that
vagueness of the New Testament which presented
so many difficulties to those who received the New
Testament as a theological unit, which presents so
few to those who, from the diversity of its author-
ship, expect variety of thought. Lately we have
had Professor Gilbert confirming the view of Mr.
Norton that the New Testament Christ is not a
preexistent being, but there were texts which might
well arrest Channing for a time on this line of ad-
vance. We have heard a thousand times that he
was an Arian in his Christology, but the proverb
which declares labels to be libels has here a vivid

1 He contended that a revelation would not leave such doc-
trines to doubtful inference and interpretation, if they were
true.

230 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

illustration. What is certain is that the Socinian
doctrine, as presented by Priestley and Belshara,
did not attract him, but his Christ was far too
human to represent the Arian conception in an
exhaustive manner. He was no careful student of
patristic theologians. If he had read Newman's
" Arians of the Fourth Century," when it appeared
in 1838, he would probably have found how little
of an Arian he was. For Arianism had far less
scope for that human side of Jesus which was so
inexpressibly dear to Channing than had the Atha-
nasian doctrine. I find no evidence that he ever
entered sympathetically into the merits of the great
Arian controversy ; that he ever appreciated the
fact that Arians and Athanasians were striving by
different paths for the same goal — escape from a
polytheistic ditheism — and that Athanasius took
the better way. But Channing' s final escape from
Arianism was not by way of Athanasianism, any
more than by way of Socinianism. It was by way
of a humanitarianism much less mechanical and
artificial than that of the Socinian scheme. This
last was made impossible for him by the increasing
sympathy of his thought with the various Tran-
scendentalism of his later years. We have the tes-
timony of his son, carefuUy transmitted to Colonel
Higginson and Dr. Bellows, that he said (1841),
" I am more and more inclined to believe in the
simple humanity of Jesus." If he did not openly
so preach, it was from no dictation of an esoteric
policy, but because he preached nothing of which

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 231

he had not assurance doubly sure ; also because
the main effect of Jesus for his mind — his moral
influence — was independent of any theory of his
personality.

All this is quite apart from the object of this
chapter, to set forth " What Channing preached."
He did not preach an Arian Christology. Infre-
quently there was some cold and formal reference
to it, but what he warmed to was the example and
the inspiration of Christ's moral character. Here
was that emphasis by which he must be judged.
Long before there was any conscious deliverance
from the Arian bonds, the body of his preaching
went forth with a glad rush of enthusiasm upon
lines that had no congruity with the Arian con-
ception of Christ as a being so nearly of an age
with God that Arius would not say, " There was
a time when he was not," but only " There was
when he was not ; " who was the creator of all
worlds, and all men's judge in the last great assize.
Take all the published sermons which express his
thought and feeling for Jesus of Nazareth, and,
with these, all the corresponding matter in the
" Memoir," " Note-Book," and elsewhere, and,
from end to end, the emphasis is on the moral ex-
cellence of Jesus, and on love of that as the only
love of him deserving of the name. The sermon
called " The Character of Christ " is quite certainly
the earliest of those sermons dealing specifically
with Jesus. Nowhere else is he exalted with so
much rhetorical effusion. It is a far cry from this

232 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

separation of him from humanity to that sermon
of January 5, 1840, which Dr. Gannett thought
"suited to do more harm than good," because
" even the character of Christ and the character of
God," Dr. Channing thought, " were excellent and
glorious rather for what they had in common with
other good beings than for any attribute which they
alone possessed." Yet even in the earlier sermon
it was the character of Christ that was the top
and crown of his sublimity. Without abating any-
thing from this exaltation, he preached, some time
before its publication in 1832, a sermon on " The
Imitableness of Christ's character." He still said
of Jesus, " I believe him to be more than a human
being ; separated by a broad distinction from other
men." Yet the difference was not an Arian dif-
ference. It was a difference of degree and not
of kind. Indeed the difference of man from God
also was one of degree. It is in this sermon that
we have (in one of many places) that affirmation
so dear to Channing's heart, "All minds are of
one family ... of one origin, one nature, kindled
from one divine flame. . . . This greatest of aU
truths lies at the foundation of all religion and all
hope. ... It mingles unperceived with aU our
worship of God, which uniformly takes for granted
that he is a Mind having thought, affection, voli-
tion like ourselves. . . . When I feel that all
minds form one family, that I have the same na-
ture with Jesus, and that he came to communicate
to me his own mind, to bring me into communion

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 233

with what was sublimest, purest, happiest in him-
self, then I can love him as I love no other being,
excepting him only who is the Father alike of
Christ and of the Christian." All this is as far as
possible from the Arian type of thought, to which
Christ was a being sui generis. The imitableness
of such a being could not reasonably be maintained.
When Channing invited men to the conviction that
they might become " one with Jesus in thought,
in feeling, in power, in holiness," — *' his sublim-
est virtues may be yours," — he had joined him-
self unconsciously to those whose confidence is in
the pure humanity of Jesus ; he was realizing the
logical significance of his "one sublime idea," "the
greatness of the soul."

If the two noble sermons on " Love to Christ,"
do not carry us farther, they reinforce with fresh
illustrations the teaching already indicated. As
well go, he said, to the genealogy of a saint or
hero for a laiowledge of his character as to theories
of Christ's nature for any real knowledge of him.
" Christians have yet to learn that inspiration and
miracles and outward dignities are nothing com-
pared with the soul." Love to Christ is love of
his character, of " that divine philanthropy which
made him the Son of God." In the second of these
sermons he contrasts the sufferings of Jesus on the
cross with his character as a means of exciting
our affection ; not his sufferings, but the great-
ness of the spirit in which he suffered, the one
thing above all. The sermon upon Jesus as

234 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

" Brother, Friend, and Saviour," in " The Perfect
Life," was probably one of the later of those
which he devoted to a theme of which he never
tired. He refers to the preexistence of Christ as " a
doctrine supported apparently by the letter of
various texts," but what delights him is that he
came to earth trailing no clouds of a preexistent
glory. " Jesus by his birth was truly a human
being, and in this we should rejoice." " Thus he
was one of us. He was a Man. I see in him a
Brother and a Friend. 1 feel the reality of that
large loving human sympathy which so gloriously
distinguished his whole character and life." There
is no taint of Arianism here. He conceives that
"his miracles were studiously performed in the
most unostentatious way." They must not be per-
mitted to blind men to his real worth, and this con-
sisted in his character. " The great impulse which
is to carry forward the human race is the chak-
ACTER of Jesus, understood ever more clearly, ever
more deeply felt." He was the Emancipator of
the intellect and conscience ; the Liberator of a
boundless hope.

It must not be supposed that Channing's views
of Jesus and of Christianity were confined to the
few sermons dealing with these subjects exclu-
sively. We come upon them, take what road we
will. The preacher who fears to repeat himself
can go to Channing for an habitual justification of
the fault, if such it is. His " one sublime idea "
and its glorious companions were constantly reap-

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 235

pearing in his sermons, his letters, and his talk.
He might set out with one or the other, and soon
or late all his great ideas, " like gods, talking all
around Olympus," would be about him in full choir.
Like all minds, as he conceived them, they were
of one family, and they dwelt together in unity.
One of the most radiant was " The Character of
Jesus," his peculiar glory ; another was, " Love of
that Character the true Love to Christ ; " a third,
" The Character of Jesus the heart of Christian-
ity," at once its source and end. Sometimes these
seemed to overtop the other great ideas, the dignity
of human nature, spiritual freedom, the kinship of
all minds, the Fatherhood of God. Again, this
order was reversed. The fact is that the idea on
which Channing gazed, for the time being, most
intently, loomed for him into preeminence. But
through the veil of this illusion we glimpse a cul-
minating point.

An important part of Channing's view of Christ
and Christianity was his view of the atonement.
This doctrine bulked so huge across his path, at
that time when he was working through the tangle
of the traditional theology, that he tried to make
some terms with it, conceding some mysterious
efficacy in the death of Jesus as affecting the re-
demption of mankind from sin to holiness and
heaven. But the use of mystery by the orthodox
as a postern by which to escape from those who
had fairly gained possession of their citadel on
the rational side, made resort to it soon distastefid

236 WILLIAM ELLERY CHAINING

to Channing, and then quite impossible. Words
spoken with the understanding wholly displaced in
his affection those spoken in an unknown tongue.
He became passionately enamored of " the simpli-
city of Christ." It was of the essence of a revela^
tion that it should be intelligible. To be so was
its final cause. If there were mysterious aspects
of Christ's nature or of his death, in so far as they
could not be appropriated by the intellect, they
were without significance for the conscience and
the heart.^ I do not recall, and have not been
able to find in Channing' s writings, public or per-
sonal, any approximation to the idea that the pur-
pose of the atonement was to reconcile God to
man. He habitually reversed this proposition.
With equal energy he rejected the doctrine of
Christ's " infinite satisfaction ; " jyar excellence^ in
the Baltimore and New York sermons. There was
a growing disposition to deprecate the rhetorical
exhibition of the sufferings of Jesus, a tendency to
find their ultimate significance in their illustration
of his self-sacrificing spirit. That " mysterious
agency " of the Cross, which he had not willingly
let go, he at length repudiated as "our peril,

^ In Channing-'s later sermons one finds a lofty satisfaction in
the sentiment of mystery. But here was no reversion to the
orthodox infusion of an element of mystery into difficulties which
it could not resolve, though in the main they were of its own
creation. Channing-'s adorable mystery was that " mystery be-
hind every act and appearance " into which all special mysteries
are merged in the progressive experience of mankind. Cf. Her-
bert Spencer's Study of Sociology, p. .310.

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 237

which may become our ruin." " I cannot receive
from the Cross of Christ any good so great as that
sublime spirit of seK-sacrifice, of love to God, and
of unbounded charity, which the Cross so glori-
ously manifested." His later preaching of " Christ
and him crucified " was with fond reiteration, but
wholly of this kind. Here was a " moral view of
the atonement " which had much in common with
Bushnell's first volume on this subject, little with
his second. Bushnell's method was subtle (not
merely subtile) to a degree to which Channing's
bald simplicity made no approximation, so that
even in his first volume the subject is considered
much more curiously than at any time by Chan-
ning. It was in the second volume that Bushnell
expounded his idea of God's passibility.^ To Chan-
ning the idea of a suffering God was a monstrosity.
As logically implied in the doctrine of "Christ's
infinite atonement," it was that doctrine's grand
defect. Its pantheistic character did not com-
mend it to him, seeing that his Christian deism
was utterly averse to pantheism. But it is strange
that those of our own time who rationalize the vicari-
ous suffering of Jesus, as a symbol of that vicarious
suffering in which the world abounds from the
ascidian to the saint, can find in Channing no
anticipation of their thought. It is, perhaps, as
well that they cannot, seeing that the original doc-
trine intended no such symbol, was not feeling
after any such, and is not entitled to be regarded

1 See Hunger's Horace Bushnell^ pp. 235-273.

238 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

as productive of a pathetic truth with which it
had no genetic relation whatsoever.^

There is something arbitrary in my attempt to
separate Channing's larger and more personal
opinions from those which he held more or less in
common with the liberal supernaturalists of his
time, because we do not find the latter in disjunc-
tion with the former, but associated with them on
the most intimate terms, construed in sympathy
with them, and taking up into their structure
much of the substance of the more characteristic
thought.2 But there are aspects of his thought

^ The symbolism of the traditional dogmas is much over-
worked. Symbols should not be denials or destructive limita-
tions of the truths they symbolize. " One in three " is no kind
of a symbol of the One in all ; it is a denial of the One in all.
So " God incarnate in Christ " is a denial of God incarnate in
humanity, and " Revelation " is a denial of universal inspiration.
Carefully considered, the old forms. Original Sin, Election, Total
Depravity, are found to be entirely lacking in any symbolical
intimation of the new doctrines of Heredity, Environment, and
so on. Moreover, the perpetuated symbol is a perpetual menace
to the larger thought it is supposed to shadow forth. See Har-
nack, What is Christianity ? p. 188 : " How often and often in
the history of religion has there been a tendency to do away
with some traditional form of doctrine or ritual which has ceased
to satisfy inwardly, but to do away with it by giving it a new
interpretation. The endeavor seems to be succeeding ; the temper
and the knowledge prevailing at the moment are favorable to it
— when, lo and behold ! the old meaning suddenly comes back
again. The actual words of the ritual, of the liturgy, of the
official doctrine, prove stronger than anything else."

^ For an anthology of this which is wonderfully rich and full,
see W. C. Gannett's and Judson Fisher's Selected Passages, pub-
lished by the Western Unitarian Conference. I could wish that it
might be read in connection with this chapter. At almost every
point I have found it anticipating my own selections. But though

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 239

concerning religion, human nature, intellectual lib-
erty, a future life, the Fatherhood of God, which
have not come fairly into view in my exposition
heretofore. I now turn to these, reserving for the
two chapters following an account of his thought
and action on social and reformatory lines.

In the most central things " the voice obeyed
at eve " was for him, as for Emerson, the voice
" obeyed at prime," while incidentally there were
survivals in his earlier of his earliest thought, and,
to the end, surprising incongruities, trivial con-
ceptions neighboring with the most elevated, as
where the Old Testament theophanies as little
troubled him as they did George Herbert when he
sang : —

One might have sought and found Thee presently
At some fair oak, or bush, or cave, or well :

" Is my God this way ? " " No," they would reply,
*' He is to Sinai gone, as we heard tell."

In the earher sermons the idea of a heavenly re-
ward for this world's righteousness lagged super-
fluous on the stage, which was already being crowded
vdth a company of larger mould. As early as 1805,
we find him saying, " True religion is not to be
measured by subservience to a farther end ; but it ^
is the end of ends in itself. . . . Religion is the
rectification of the soul ; it is inward health. . . .

Channing shows much better in passages than in sentences, even
the passages are much more impressive in their proper setting
than taken disconnectedly, or classified in the manner of the
Gannett-Judson anthology.

240 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

It consists of feelings and dispositions which in-
clude everything generous, disinterested, sympa-
thetic, and pure." Very soon we have, in one form
or another, religion identified with moral idealism
seeking its image and its inspiration in a divine
personality. " What is there that gives such dig-
nity to our nature as the capacity for knowing and
loving the best of beings ? " Already in 1816 we
find the thought which reached its climax in the
sermon " Likeness to God," which was preached
at Dr. Farley's ordination in 1828, and was then
denounced as " blasphemy " by the orthodox party,
— by a part of it, to speak more exactly. With
Channing, no more than with Parker, was piety
something quite apart from morality, something
exclusively concerned with God. Indeed Chan-
ning's resolution of piety into morality was more
absolute than Parker's. '' Eeligion," he said, " is
a high degree of delight in all the perfections of
God, — in his wisdom, his rectitude, his benevo-
lence ; and what is the most acceptable expression
of this veneration ? " He answered that it was
imitation of the perfections of God, his justice, his
benevolence.

Benevolence and righteousness are the attributes on
which Piety chiefly rests as its object and by commu-
nion with which it acts and grows. But are they not
the very qualities which we mean by Morality ? What
is morality but the exercise of a benevolent and just
temper towards all beings within our knowledge and
influence ? If so, what is God's character but Perfect

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 241

Morality ? — what but the very dispositions, in their
fulness, which conscience enjoins upon every man, and
which form what we call rectitude. To love God, then,
is to love morality in its most perfect form ; and thus
we see how religion and morality pass into each other
and become one. The love of God is but another name
for the love of essential benevolence and justice. . . .
Religion is the perfection of morality.^

So far was Channing from regarding religion as
an exotic supernaturally planted in the soul that he
regarded it as the soul's most natural and charac-
teristic trait.

What is religion ? not a foreign inhabitant, not some-
thing alien to our nature, which comes and takes up its
abode in the soul. It is the soul itself, lifting itself up
to its Maker. What is virtue ? It is the soul listening
to, and revering, and obeying a law which belongs to its
very essence — the law of duty . . . We hear men de-
crying human nature, and in the same breath exalting
religion : as if religion were anything but human nature
acting in obedience to its chief law ! ReUgion and virtue,
so far as we possess them, are ourselves ; and the homage
which is paid to these attributes is in truth a tribute to
the soul of man.

One of the most interesting and important as-
pects of Channing's conception of religion is his
insistence that " it is not an exclusive principle."
He knew nothing of religion as a " faculty," being
in this respect a step in advance of Theodore Par-

^ It is not a far cry from these constructions to that of W. C.
Gannett, familiar to many Unitarians, "Morality thought out is
religious thought, felt out is reUgious feeling, Hved out is rehgious
life."

242 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

ker. " The Religious Principle in Human Nature
is the desire to establish relations with a Being
more perfect than itself." As such, " it is not an
exclusive impulse. It does not grow from an emo-
tion that is centred wholly upon God and seeks
no other object. . . . All the great principles of
human nature are germs of religion, impulses to-
wards God." Seeking for anything better of any
kind, men are feeling after God if haply they may
find him. The intellect, the heart, the love of
beauty, seeking their appropriate ends, are seeking
God, and have no rest till they find rest in him.
The first sermon in " The Perfect Life " emphasizes
this doctrine ; the second gives us Channing's doc-
trine of the larger revelation. " He who studies
nothing but the Bible does not study even that
book aright. Rightly read, it would send him back
to every creature that God hath made and to every
event wherein God is acting." Such was the
supremacy of ethics in Channing's mind that it en-
dured no brother near the throne, and the cosmic
part of his theology is comparatively small. It has
unusual prominence in this sermon. Here grows
the flower which has been so often plucked from
Tennyson's crannied wall : —

Behold tlie humblest wild flower. To produce that
weed all nature has conspired. Into itself it receives the
influence of all the elements — light, heat, and air. Sun,
earth, and ocean meet to pay it tribute. The least thing
in nature acts upon all things and is acted on by all ; so
that each impUes and is represented in all. In a word,

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 243

to understand the simplest work of God, the universe
must be comprehended.

It is in this same sermon that the great mystery
of life appeals to him, a mystery so much vaster
and better than that which men, dog-like, had
hidden away in irrational dogmas and then un-
buried with frantic simulation of an astonishing
discovery.

Look at a grain of wheat ! That seed is the fruit of
all harvests, of all ages, since the creation of the world.
It carries us back to the hour when the morning stars
sang for joy over the new-born earth. In it are centred
the combined forces of suns and rains, of soils and cli-
mates, for a period of which history has no record. And
again this tiny seed has within it prolific energy to cover
whole kingdoms, and it may be the whole globe. Such
mysteries open a deeper mystery still, — Life, that awful
power, so endlessly various in the forms it assumes, —
Life that fills earth, air, and sea, with motion, growth,
activity, and joy! . . . What sight can discern, what
thought explore its mystery ?

From " the infinite veiled in the lowliest crea-
tions," he turns to the immensity which it informs
and overfills. " An infinite universe is each mo-
ment opened to our view. What blessedness it
is to dwell amidst this transparent air, which the
eye can pierce without limit, amidst these floods of
pure, soft, cheering light, under this immeasura-
ble arch of heaven, and in sight of these countless
stars ! " But there is a revelation of more penetra-
tive force. It is that of the Principle of Right re-

244 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

vealed in every human soul. Here Channing's moral
idealism took a daring flight, so daring that Dr.
Gannett, listening to his senior colleague's sermon,
again made grave demur, writing in his journal,
" I did not like the sermon. It seemed to be based
on the unsound philosophy that morality is, in
theory at least, superior to the divine will, instead
of being, as it is, nothing but an expression of this
will." What Channing said was, " Do you not
recognize that a law of right is promulgated within
you, to which all men are subject ? Still more, do
you not feel that this great law of right binds not
only men, but all intelligent beings ; that it is the
law, not of the earth only, but of the universe ? " ^
From Channing's more general religious princi-
ples, I pass to those views of human nature which
have been very properly regarded as being more
significant than any other parts of his preaching. In
generous appreciation of these views, liberal ortho-
doxy has of late outdone the Unitarians, to whom
these are, perhaps too much, the unregarded air
by which they live. Everything else in Channing's
thought and work was inference from, and applica-
tion of, these views. They constituted his impas-
sioned faith in man's intellectual being, and his
jealousy for its dignities and rights. They were
fundamental to his interest in every great reform :
it was because of man's exalted nature that he

1 This sermon does not seem to have the ending which Dr. Gan-
nett praised, but the thought which he deprecated was precisely
that indicated.

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 245

must not be enslaved; must not be licentious or
intemperate ; must not be crushed by legal penal-
ties ; must be educated to all noble use and aim.
They were equally fmidamental to his conceptions
of the infinite Father, whose nature differed in de-
gree only intellectually and morally from that of
man. That " humanity of God," for which many
Christian agnostics have had recourse to Jesus,
Channing found in God the Father, in virtue of
his simple Fatherhood. There was a correlation
of energy among all of Channing's leading thoughts,
an easy transformation of them each into the other,
but it was into the dignity of human nature, the
greatness of the soul, that they were all most easily
resolved. Here was no " exiguous homogene-
ity," — nevertheless, homogeneity. If we go to
Channing for variety of thought, we shall come
away sorrowful in proportion to the greatness of
our expectations. But in its homogeneity, its ab-
sorbent unity, there was the simplicity and the
intensiveness of the man who does one thing ; or,
if many things, all in one spirit.

The pervasiveness of Channing's one " sublime
idea " prepares us to be disappointed when we in-
quire for the particular sermons in which it finds
distinct and separate expression. Such are hard
to find. One, "Honor all Men," raises our hopes,
but proves, though very noble, to be less significant
for our immediate purpose than some others, whose
direct concern is with a less promising subject. In
his more controversial writings, the dignity of

246 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

human nature shines in contrast with the doctrines
of total depravity and man's fallen nature. There
are concessions to the latter in the earlier preach-
ing, but they are not fatal to man's greatness. In
his fallen state, he is not

Less than archangel ruin'd and th' excess
Of glory obscured.

It is his character and not his nature that is bad.
Channing's dignity of human nature did not blind
him to the defects of human character, though he
took more delight in dwelling on its nobilities.
But no defect of character worked corruption of
nature to his understanding. On the contrary, he
found humanity " magnificent in sin " (not his
phrase, I need hardly say, but Browning's), proofs
of its grandeur in the heights from which it falls,
the daring of its disobedience, the energy of its
seK-recovery.

Its most classical form was given to his perva-
sive thought in one of the letters of his later life.
There has been, he says, more unity in his preach-
ing than in that of some other Liberal Christians,
" in consequence of the strong hold which one sub-
lime idea has taken on [his] mind. This is the
greatness of the soul, its divinity, its union with
God, its unity with God, — not by passive depend-
ence, but by spiritual likeness, — its receptiveness
of his spirit, its self-forming power, its destina-
tion to ineffable glory, its immortality. ... To
awaken men to what is within them, to help them
to understand the infinite treasure of their own

WHAT CHANGING PREACHED 247

souls, such seems to me the object which is to be
ever kept in sight. This is an entirely different
thing from filling their heads with vague notions
about human dignity. What we want is to awaken
in them a consciousness of their own nature and
of the intimate relation it establishes between them
and God, and to rouse their whole energy to the
work of their own redemption and perfection." In
his lecture on Self-Culture, and in the lectures on
" The Elevation of the Laboring Classes," and in
the sermons " Likeness to God " and " The Imita-
bleness of Christ's Character," the long mountain
range of Channing's most engrossing thought is
lifted into some of its higher peaks and domes, —
to the highest, possibly, in the second of the ser-
mons in " The Perfect Life."

I do and I must reverence human nature. ... I know
its history. I shut my eyes to none of its weaknesses
and crimes. . . . But the signatures of its origin and
its end are impressed too deeply to be ever wholly
effaced. I bless it for its kind affections, for its strong
and tender love. I honor it for its struggles against
oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight
of so many chains and prejudices, for its achievements
in science and art, and still more for its examples of
heroic and saintly virtue. These are marks of a divine
origin, and the pledges of a celestial inheritance.
(" Likeness to God.")

There was not, perhaps, entire coherency in the
terms of his appreciation of humanity. Sometimes
the intellectual, sometimes the moral aspect took

248 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

on the most entrancing light. But then it must
be remembered that the " reason " of his lofty and
perpetual praise was conceived by him as " moral
reason," and that he used the word " mind " inclu-
sively. It was for him as big a word as soul, im-
plying more than that, — at once the intellectual
and the moral elements. A careless person might
easily imagine Channing given over unduly to
"mind-worship," but a little attention to his use
of terms should correct the misapprehension. The
following passages illustrate the predominance of
the ethical note, even where the intellectual sounds
clear and strong.

The greatness of the soul is especially seen in the
intellectual energy which discerns absolute, universal
truth, in the idea of God, in freedom of will and moral
power, in disinterestedness and self-sacrifice, in the
boundlessness of love, in aspirations after affection, in
desires and affections, which time and space cannot con-
fine, and the world cannot fill. The soul, viewed in
these lights, should fill us with awe. It is an immortal
germ which may be said to contain now within itself
what endless ages are to unfold. It is truly an image
of the infinity of God. (" Introductory Remarks " to
six-volume edition.)

Am I asked for my conception of the dignity of a
human being? I should say that it consists, first, in
that spiritual principle called sometimes the reason,
sometimes the conscience, which, rising above what is
local and temporary, discerns immutable truth and
everlasting right; which, in the midst of imperfect
things, conceives of perfection ; which is universal and

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 249

impartial, standing in direct opposition to the partial,
selfish principles of human nature ; which says to me
with authority that my neighbor is as precious as myself,
and his rights as sacred as my own ; which commands
me to receive all truth, however it may war with my
pride, and to do all justice, however it may conflict with
my interest ; and which calls me to rejoice with love in
all that is beautiful, good, holy, happy, in whatever
being these attributes may be found. This principle is
a ray of divinity in man. (" Elevation of the Labor-
ing Classes.")

In " Honor Due to All Men " we read : " The
sense of duty is the greatest gift of God. The
Idea of Right is the primary and highest revela-
tion of God to the human mind, and all outward
revelations are founded on and addressed to it.
All mysteries of science and theology fade away
before the simple perception of duty wliich dawns
on the mind of the little child." It was such
passages as this that made Emerson bless Chan-
ning as one of those who had said his good things
before him. There were intimations of his " Over-
Soul " in that " law for God also " which Dr.
Gannett thought a spot on Channing's sun. Ex-
actly in his line, moreover, were Channing's recur-
rences to his beloved thought of the oneness of
all minds. His doctrine of the greatness of the
soul reached to its culmination in this thought.

Here, then, we learn the greatness of human nature.
This moral principle — the supreme law in man — is the
law of the universe — the very law to which the high-

250 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

est beings are subject, and in obeying which they find
their elevation and their joy. Thus man and the high-
est beings are essentially of one order. They form one
family. The same spirit of goodness enlivens all. To
all there is the same supreme law, the same supreme
good. Imagination and genius, in their most inspired
moments, can picture nothing in heaven brighter than
moral goodness — that very goodness which unfolds in
the humblest human heart. This goodness is seen by
us intuitively to be confined to no place, to no time, to
be the growth of no nation and no world, but to be uni-
versal, eternal, immutable, absolute, and worthy of high-
est veneration and love by all spirits, forever. Can we,
then, look on the human soul, which is at once the
oracle and the subject of this universal and eternal law,
as created only for time and this narrow earth ?

Here is the argument for immortality on which
Channing most relied when he had come into com-
pletest seK-possession. He believed very simply
in the resurrection of Jesus, and in his earlier
preaching (that of the Dudleian Lecture, for exam-
ple) he based all certainty of immortality on that.
I am not aware that in set terms he ever put this
view aside. But gradually the emphasis on it
faded out, while with equal step the emphasis upon
the natural argument for immortality increased.
He took no pleasure, as did many others, in mini-
mizing the natural intimations of a future life.
He delighted in all these, and, as he dwelt on
them, they became more and more persuasive to
his mind, until practically his faith in immortality
was based on these and not on the New Testa-
ment's climacteric miracle.

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 251

We have all felt, when looking above us into the
atmosphere, that there was an infinity of space which
we could not explore. When I look into man's spirit
and see there the germs of an immortal life, I feel
more deeply that an infinity lies hid beyond what I see.
In the idea of Duty, which springs up in every human
heart, I discern a Law more sacred and boundless than
gravitation, which binds the soul to a more glorious
universe than that to which attraction binds the body,
and which is to endure though the laws of physical
nature pass away. Every moral sentiment, every intel-
lectual action, is to me a hint, a prophetic sign, of a
spiritual power to be expanded forever. (" Ministry
for the Poor.")

The voice of our whole nature, indeed, properly in-
terpreted, is a cry after higher existence. The restless
activity of life is but a pressing forward towards a
fulness of good not to be found on earth. (" Perfect
Life," sermon ii.) ^

Such was Channing's relish for activity, intellec-
tual and moral, that the rest which remains for the
people of God had for him slight attraction. He
desired a heaven in which to work as his miserable
body had not permitted him to do on earth. " I
think of heaven," he said, " as a world of stupendous
plans and efforts for its own improvement. I think
of it as a society passing through successive stages
of development, virtue, knowledge, power, by the
energy of its own members." In such a heaven,
" one angel's history may be a volume of more
various truth than all the records of our race."
He had more homely and more comfortable

252 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

thouglits. Pure spirit was not to Ms mind. He '
could not endure " the thought of being separated
from this harmonious and glorious universe." He
expected death " to multiply his connections with
it." " An increasing variety of exquisite sensa-
tions " was certainly a strange demand from one
so hyperspiritual as Channing. It is a note that
we could ill afford to spare. It reflects his exqui-
site sensibility, — so exquisite that " a glance at a
natural landscape, or even the sight of a beautiful
flower" in moments of great bodily weakness
" gave [him] a bodily pain from which he shrank."
The most frequent and persistent objection to
Channing from the orthodox standpoint has been
that he did not sufficiently appreciate the exceed-
ing sinfulness of sin, — did not make enough of
sin in his doctrines of human nature and spiritual
development.^ He did not, we are told, habitually
trace back the diversified forms of selfish and
unrighteous action " to the fons et origo malorum
— the mysterious alienation of men from the fel-
lowship of God." For Channing the alienation
was not mysterious ; nay, more, it did not exist :
" If I make my bed in hell, thou art there." There
was no escape from the upholding of the everlast-
ing arms. Of any background of sin in human
nature Channing was certainly not aware, once he
had come into entire possession of the liberal
ground. But of sin in the concrete, and of its

^ See Professor Fisher's History of Christian Doctrine, pp. 421-
432, and particularly p. 429.

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 253

sinfulness, those must be hard to satisfy who do
not find enough in Channing's representation of
society and the individual. There is, too, in this
an adequate account of those sinful dispositions,
from " whence come wars and fightings " and con-
crete sins of all kinds. So far was his conception
of human nature from lessening the dreadfuhiess
of sin for him, that it gave him a ground of color
from which this dreadfulness stood out as clear as
winter stars from the deep blue-black sky. " Great
sin implies a great capacity ; it is the abuse of a
noble nature. . . . The malignity of sin can only
be understood and felt when sin is viewed as the
ruin of God's noblest work." Orthodoxy repre-
sented sin as infinite because it was sinned against
an infinite being. Here, Channing thought, was a
mere verbal catch. It was as the sin of " such an
infinite, eternal being as is the human soul " (sic
Coleridge) that it was terrible to Channing's mind.
" He alone can speak of sin as an infinite evil, and
concentrate against it the whole energy of the
soul's aversion and dread, who has faith in the
unlimited capacities of our spiritual nature and
who knows that by love man has affinity with
God."

A mechanical search for Channing's doctrine of
sin would take one first of all to his sermon, " The
Evil of Sin." But this is one of the most formal
and uninspired of all Channing's discourses, one
of a kind which many others could preach as well
as he, or better. It is interesting, however, as

254 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

containing Channing's most definite dissent from
the Universalism of his time, as by him under-
stood. Channing's aloofness cost him a good deaL
It was somewhat with Ballou as it was with Gar-
rison : Channing had not that personal knowledge
of either that could qualify him for a just under-
standing. Either's personality would have set the
doctrine of either in an attractive light. But as
Channing drew nearer and nearer to Garrison, so
he drew nearer and nearer to Ballou. He could
not conceive of the mere accident of death as
making any appreciable difference in a man's char-
acter. It could set no limit either way. There
would be the possibility of further lapse ; also that
of infinite advance. And all, at last, would set
their feet upon the upward climb. The fires of
the orthodox hell burned out for him before he had
proceeded far. " Infinite, endless punishment,"
he said, " would make hell the most interesting
spot in the universe. All the sympathies of heaven
would be turned towards it." He denounced the
idea of such punishment as blasphemy ; but —

There is something far worse than outward punish-
ment. It is sin ; it is the state of a soul which has
revolted from God, which renounces its Father, and
hardens itself against Infinite Love ; which, endued
with divine powers, entlu-alls itself to animal lusts ;
which makes gain its God ; . . . which, living under
God's eye, dreads man's frown or scorn, and prefers
human praise to its own calm consciousness of virtue ;
which tamely yields to temptation, shrinks with a cow-

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 255

ard's baseness from the perils of duty, and sacrifices its
glory and peace in parting with self-control. No ruin
can be compared to this.

Such is the involution of Channing's leading
thoughts that, coming to his thought of God, I find
that who will has already heard my story told in
good part. When our Liverpool preacher, Rich-
ard A. Armstrong, made a little book, " Man's
Knowledge of God," and sent copies of it to Car-
dinal Newman and the cardinal's ultra-heretical
brother, Francis, the same post brought him an-
swers of warm approval from them both. Chan-
ning's theology, in general, was less unlike the
cardinal's than was his brother's, but, like his, it
agreed with the cardinal's in finding conscience
to be man's open door to God : " We learn the
divinity through a divine principle within our-
selves ... by giving up all to virtue, and in no
other way. . . . Whenever we think, speak, or
act with moral energy and resolute devotion to
duty, be the occasion ever so humble, obscure,
familiar, then the divinity is growing within us."
But while the idea of God rises preeminently in
conscience, it is to conscience as its vital air.
" Religion gives infinite worth to conscience. From
it I learn that my idea of right is not an individual,
private, personal conviction, but that it is derived
from the Universal Parent ; that it is his inspira-
tion ; that it is not a lonely voice in my soul, but
the word of the Infinite Will."

Channing's persuasion of the divine reality an-

256 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

ticipated the Transcendentalists in its reliance
upon inward strength. In the later years, the
cosmic wonder grew upon his mind ; in the earlier
it was the drowsy echo of that natural theology
which Paley and his kind had taken over from the
Deists whom they so heartily despised. It is no
echo that we hear in the sermon, " God revealed
in the Universe and in Humanity," in " The Per-
fect Life," but the sincere cry of a strong man
looking out upon the world through his own eyes.
But from within outward was the habitual pro-
cession of his thought : " The idea of God, sublime
and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual
natures purified and enlarged to infinity." If Chan-
ning has a thought to which he recurs more fre-
quently than this, it is that of the eternal Father-
hood. In his earlier preaching, this is presented
as one of the great assets of supernatural Chris-
tianity, a conclusion not to be reached by any path
less steep than that. But the emphasis upon this
view soon began to slacken, then the view dropped
out of the enlarging thought, until at length we
have the Fatherhood of God firmly based on the
soul's normal experience. There was more exi-
gency than softness in the doctrine as Channing
entertained it in the plenitude of his power. He
expressly disclaimed the indulgent human parent
as the form on which the idea of the Divine Parent
should be shaped. Even when preaching on " The
Father's Love for Persons," that love is repre-
sented as his inflexible demand for moral excel-

WHAT CHANNING PREACHED 257

lence, without which there can be no joyous con-
sciousness of filial relationship with him. The
supreme satisfaction which Channing found him-
self and pressed on others, in the Divine Paternity,
was that unity of mind — "all minds of one fam-
ily " — to which we have already attended on its
manward side. Channing had his doctrine of
divine immanence as well as Parker, though with
less reiteration, and with scanty recognition on the
physical side. His was the thought for which the
words would come in time, " Our Father who art
within."

He pervades, he penetrates our souls. . . . We do
not discern him because he is too near, too inward, too
deep to be recognized by our present imperfect con-
sciousness. And he is thus near, not only to discern,
but to act, to influence, to give his spirit, to communi-
cate to us divinity. This is the great paternal gift of
God . . . his disinterested, impartial, universal good-
ness, which diffuses beauty, Hfe, and happiness. . . .
This influence of God, exerted on the soul to conform it
to himself, to make it worthy of its divine parentage, this
it is which most clearly manifests what is meant by God
being our Father.

When Channing says, " There is but one
ground for virtuous affection in the universe, but
one object of cherished and enduring love in
heaven or on earth, and that is Moral Goodness,'*
he not only says that which he repeats oftener
than anything else, but that which takes up and co-
ordinates aU his other thoughts to a preeminent

258 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

degree. What is more and better, we feel, we are
obliged to feel, that he is speaking with an abso-
lute sincerity, that a passion for moral goodness
was the consuming passion of his life, and that
what he aspired to be, he was. As we go along
with him, we sometimes seem to thread a labyrinth
and to come back over and over again to the same
point, not without weariness. But the last effect
is of emergence on some crowning height, from
which we look abroad upon a landscape bathed in
golden air, and feel upon our faces the freshening of
a mighty wind which blows forever through the uni-
verse of souls, — the spirit of good whereby God
lives, and we live also, now and forevermore in him
and with him.

CHAPTER IX

BETWEEN TWO FIRES

Channing was born in a slaveholding State,
and in a town known for some time after his
birth as "the slave market of America." The
gradual manumission of slaves in Ehode Island
was not quite complete at the time of Channing's
death. His immediate family had barely freed
itself from the common taint of the community, in
his early years. During the later he was charged
with " living in luxury at the price of blood," the
allusion being to Mr. Gibbs, his wife's father, who
had owned a distillery and had sometimes exchanged
its product with the slave dealers for their slaves.^
These things make it appear strange that Chan-
ning encountered slavery in Virginia as a fresh
experience. The field hand was a different slave
from the domestic servant of his Newport ac-
quaintance, but the slave traffic should, it would
seem, have impressed his youthful imagination
more painfully than it did. The main effect of
his earliest contact with slavery was, I think, to
breed in him that conviction of the possible good-
ness of individuals, enmeshed in an abominable

1 See his letter to Miss Peabody in her Eeminiscences, pp. 360-
363.

260 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

system, which runs through all his antislavery
writings, as a criticism upon the sterner Abolition-
ist construction. He had known those whom he
must remember as good men and women in de-
spite of their slave-owning and the fact that some
of them had looked to slavery as a source of gain,
a circumstance of peculiar horror in his eyes.

It is another strangeness that his impressions of
slavery in Virginia, so acute and painful, gave no
obviously continuous character to his antislavery
thought. I do not, for example, find any evi-
dence that the adoption of the Missouri Compro-
mise, in 1820, excited in him any noble rage,
though I have made diligent search. The argu-
ment from the silence of history is easily falla-
cious, but it is certainly strange that a commotion
which shook the country to its centre left no trace
upon the sermons, letters, journals, of which we
have so great an abundance. Surely, that " Doric
Hall meeting," of which Webster was the con-
spicuous light, and in which James T. Austin ^
played a leading part, must have warmed his blood
with its protesting resolutions ; or was he at that
time too deeply immersed in the consciousness of
his physical wretchedness to think of anything
else ? Never at any time was his interest in Eng-
lish social and political reforms much less than in

1 Of whom we shall see more hereafter as attorney-general of
Massachusetts, prosecuting Abner Kneeland and defending the
murder of Lovejoy, in either event confronting Channing as a
principal opponent.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 261

our own, and our first sign of his awakening con-
sciousness of our miserable condition is a letter to
an English correspondent in 1828. He did not
then appreciate the relative evil of our system :
he was always slow to entertain opinions sharply
traversing his good opinion of mankind. But the
most characteristic note of his opposition to slavery
appears in this early letter : " Even where slavery
provides sufficiently for the physical being, it de-
stroys the intellectual and moral being, and utterly
extinguishes the hope and capacity of progTess."
Here, as everywhere, the dignity of human nature,
the greatness of the soul, was central to Channing's
interest in practical reform.

But he was now to have another opportunity to
see slavery close at hand. The quest for health,
always fruitless, but ever hopefidly renewed, took
him in the fall of 1830 to St. Croix, in the West
Indies, thirty years later the first stage of Parker's
final pilgrimage. " Here was a volume on slavery
opened always before my eyes, and how could I
help learning some of its lessons? " How carefully
he studied them his letters of the time bear wit-
ness, and various writings after his return. With
characteristic but unfortunate judgment he omit-
ted from subsequent editions of his " Slavery " a
note which constituted the value of the first edi-
tion, as did not the " principles from which he was
unwilling to divert his readers' attention to details."
The details were those of the slave's subjection
to the master's cruelty and licentiousness. Return-

262 WILLIAM ELLERy CHANNING

ing to Boston after a six-months' course in this
study, he at once made his experience the subject
of a sermon to the Federal Street society. He
had found the old severity of discipline relaxed.
" Still," he said, " I think no power of conception
can do justice to the evils of slavery. They are
chiefly moral ; they act on the mind, and, through
the mind, bring intense suffering on the body. As
far as the human soul can be destroyed, slavery is
that destroyer." From that discourse, which de-
manded the same reprobation for American as for
West Indian slavery, dated the beginning of a pe-
riod throughout which the love of Channing's peo-
ple for him waxed cold. Or was the beginning
further back, in those assaults upon the love of
gain which he continually renewed, finding in that
love the main strength of slavery, and as much a
Northern as a Southern fault ? What is certain is
that Channing's impressive generalizations were
more congenial to his people than his particular
applications, and that, as these became more pro-
minent, many were irritated by his exalted reputa-
tion, which made it difficult to dispense with his
services in any summary manner.

Something had happened during Channing's
stay in St. Croix that might well make his people
hypersensitive to his criticism of slavery. In Jan-
uary, 1831, Garrison had flung the banner of the
" Liberator " to the wind, bearing a motto which
has not been bettered in the annals of reform. The
first numbers had been printed from " Examiner "

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 263

type, Garrison and his assistant paying for the use
of the type by work on the " Examiner." Chan-
ning at once became a subscriber i and a dili-
gent reader, with strong attraction to its essential
spirit, with serious doubts as to its manner of pre-
senting its ideas and its aims. Garrison's demoli-
tion of the colonization fallacy found in him ready
sympathy, and he could accept " immediate eman-
cipation " as meaning " the earliest practicable ; "
but Garrison and his coadjutors dealt with the
slaveholders as a mass, when to him they were
individuals of the most various degrees of immoral-
ity. It happened, consequently, that for ten years
Channing found himseK between two fires, never
pleasing the conservative part of the community
and of his own society ; seldom satisfying the Abo-
litionists with the extent of his adhesion to their
side ; in proportion as he pleased them grieving
the conservative party; denounced by this party
as an Abolitionist, while simultaneously regarded
by the Abolitionists as an open enemy. For the
most part these had kindlier feeling for him than
had their extreme opponents. They rejoiced in
his concessions while resenting his criticisms. To
the conservatives, meantime, he was more anathema
than Garrison. As one of their own set, he was
expected to abide by their traditions. He was
little better than a traitor in their eyes.

1 "One of the first," says Miss Peabody, but one can never
feel sure of her facts. In one short paragraph (p. 360) I have
found four mistakes, three of them gross.

264 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

It is unhappily true that the first effect of Abo-
litionism upon Channing was to defer his indi-
vidual action. While still in the West Indies he
planned and began to write his elaborate essay,
" Slavery," which after his return was put aside
and not taken up again for several years. He could
plead arrest of judgment on account of ill health
and self-distrust, but unwillingness to be con-
founded with the Abolitionists or to criticise them
publicly was probably the factor that was most
deterrent. The liarshest judgment of his general
course is that of Mrs. Chapman ^ in her appendix
to the autobiography of Harriet Martineau. It is
a railing accusation that is forced on our attention
by the nobility of its personal source.

Dr. Channing, between whom and Harriet Martineau
a true friendship subsisted to the day of his death, was
a good man, but not in any sense a great one. . . . He
had neither insight, courage, nor firmness. In his own
church had sprung up a vigorous opposition to slav-
ery, which he innocently, in so far as ignorantly, used
the little power he had to stay. He was touched by
Brougham's eloquent denial of the right of property in
man, and he adopted the idea as a theme ; but he
dreaded any one who claimed, on behalf of the slaves,

^ Maria Weston Chapman. " Her services to Mr. Garrison,"
say the Garrison sons, " were inestimable, her cooperation with
him perfect, and on her more than on any other woman the con-
duct of the cause rested." She joined the Abolitionists in 1834
against the advice of her pastor, Dr. Channing-, and soon became
the soul of the Women's Antislavery Society. After 1840 her
energy sustained the Antislavery Standard, and through that the
Antislavery Society, with unequalled ardor and efficiency.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 265

that their masters should instantly renounce that right
of ownership ; he was terror-stricken at the idea of
calling on the whole American people to take counsel on
so difficult and delicate a matter in antislavery associa-
tions ; and above all he deprecated the admission of the
colored race to our ranks. He had been selected by a
set of money-making men as their representative for
piety, as Edward Everett was their representative gen-
tleman and scholar, Judge Story their representative
jurist and companion in social life, and Daniel Webster
their representative statesman and advocate looking
after their interests in Congress.

Depreciation could not further go. Such " a
good man " would be good for nothing. We have
here Mrs. Chapman's superb devotion to Garrison
expressed in terms of immitigable contempt for
the man who had refused his personal sjmipathy
to Garrison in his sorest need. Garrison's own
resentment softened with the lapse of time, and in
1848 and again in 1880 he brought to Channing's
memory a generous appreciation. But Mrs. Chap-
man, who might have forgiven any personal affront,
could not forgive the slight vvhich had been put
upon her noble friend, and, long brooding on it,
brought a monstrous thing to birth. Harriet Mar-
tineau's conception of Dr. Channing was very dif-
ferent. Writing when his antislavery work was
not half done, and when every year was bringing
him into closer sympathy with the Abolitionists, she
said (" Ketrospect of Western Travel," pp. 121,
127) : " No one out of the United States can have
an idea of Dr. Channing's merit in taking the part

266 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

he has adopted on this subject. . . . He has shown
what his moral courage is by proofs which will long
outlast his indications of slowness in admitting the
full merits of the Abolitionists. Here his caution
led him into the rashness of giving sanction to
charges and prejudices against them, the grounds
of which he had the means of investigating. This
is all over now, however; and it was always a
trifle in comparison with the great service he was
at the same time rendering a cause which the
Abolitionists cared for far more than for what the
whole world thought of their characters. He is
now completely identified with them in the view
of all who regard them as in the vanguard in
the field of human liberties." The concluding
statement here was premature, and, perhaps, never
quite exactly true. The identification was never,
I think, complete from Channing's point of view,
and it certainly never was from Garrison's. And
some may be inclined to question Miss Martineau's
judgment, as that of one of those " carpet-baggers "
who were denounced by the " Daily Advertiser "
of those days, though she was for several weeks in
Dr. Channing's family and was admitted to his
inmost mind. But there were American Aboli-
tionists of unimj)eachable authority, who loved and
admired Garrison as much as any could, whose
opinion of Channing differed from Mrs. Chapman's
by the whole heaven's width. Lydia Maria Child,
whose best portrait is that sketched by Lowell in
the " Fable for Critics," was one of these ; Samuel

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 267

J. May, the mildest-mannered man that ever at-
tempted a slave rescue, was another. In 1833
Mrs. Child published her "Appeal in Favor of that
Class of Americans called Africans," the most
important of the first Abolitionist publications
after Garrison's " Thoughts on Colonization " of
the previous year.^ She sent a copy to Dr. Chan-
ning, and in a few days he came to see her. His
long walk from Mt. Vernon Street to Cottage
Place had taxed his strength severely, but he was
still good for nearly three hours' talk. He ex-
pressed great satisfaction in the " Appeal," and
urged Mrs. Child never to desert the cause, let
come what would. (She was faithful to that little
needed admonition, sacrificing her literary reputar
tion, as Whittier his political opportunity, on the
altar of humanity to man.) In some respects he
thought she went too far. " He then entertained
the idea, which he afterward discarded, that slav-
ery existed [in the South] in a milder form than
elsewhere." ^ The little woman stood out valiantly
for her opinion, and Dr. Channing did his best to

^ Whittier' s Justice and Expediency (1883) came next in time
and in degree. The year 1833 was fertile in productions that
sprang- from Garrison's prolific seed. Mrs. Child speaks of her
Appeal as " the first book of such a character," but this only-
means that Garrison's " word of God " was not bound. It was
an octavo pamphlet of 240 pages.

2 In 1839, Theodore D. Weld's American Slavery as it is, with
its *' Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses," was exceedingly con-
vincing on this point. James Freeman Clarke's six years in
Kentucky (1833-39) cured him effectually of Channing's early
view, and the Kentucky form of slavery was not the worst.

268 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

moderate her " with those calm, wise words which
none spoke so well as he." I can imagine how
her beautiful dark eyes, which I remember so well
in their last unfailing brilliancy, must have flashed
as she withstood the doctor to the face.

We afterwards had many interviews. He often sent
for me, when I was in Boston, and always urged me to
come and tell him of every new aspect of the antislavery
cause. At every interview I could see that he grew
bolder and stronger on the subject, while I felt that I
grew wiser and more just. At first I thought him timid,
and even slightly time-serving ; but I soon discovered
that I formed this estimate from ignorance of his charac-
ter. I learned that it was justice to all, not popularity
for himself, which made him so cautious. He constantly
grew upon my respect, until I came to regard him as
the wisest, as well as the gentlest, apostle of humanity.
. . . He never sought to undervalue the importance
of antislavery, but he said many things to prevent my
looking upon it as the only question interesting to hu-
manity. . . . His interest in the subject constantly in-
creased, and I never met him without being struck with
the progress he had made in overcoming some difficulty,
which for the time troubled his sensitive conscience. I
can now distinctly recollect several such steps.

Soon after Dr. Channing's return from the
West Indies, Mr. May discovered his interest in
the Abolitionists. Whenever they met, Dr. Chan-
ning was eager with his inquiries about them, and
he frequently invited Mr. May to his house for the
express purpose of talking over their affairs with
him. The most memorable of these visits was late

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 269

in the fall of 1834. So convinced was Mr. May
by this time of the soundness of the Abolitionist
position, and so earnest in its defence, that his ar-
dor got the better of his reverence and for the first
time he found himself debating the merits of Aboli-
tionism with the man for whom, of all living men,
he had the greatest admiration. " His principal,
if not his only objections were alleged against the
severity of our denunciations, the harshness of our
language, the vehemence, heat, and excitement
caused by our meetings." He dwelt upon these
objections until Mr. May became first impatient,
then indignant, and broke out warmly, —

Dr. Channing, I am tired of these complaints. . . .
It is not our fault that those who might have managed
this reform more prudently have left us to manage it
as we may be able. It is not our fault that those
who might have pleaded for the enslaved so much
more eloquently, both with the pen and with the living
voice, than we can, have been silent. We are not to
blame, sir, that you, who, more perhaps than any other
man, might have so raised the voice of remonstrance
that it should have been heard throughout the length
and breadth of the land, — we are not to blame, sir, that
you have not so spoken. And now because inferior men
have begun to speak and act against what you yourself
acknowledge to be an awful injustice, it is not becoming
in you to complain of us, because we do it in an inferior
style. Why, sir, have you not moved, why have you
not spoken before ?

There was an awful silence during which Mr.
May awaited with anxiety the answer to this dar-

270 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

ing speech. Then he heard Dr. Charming saying
very quietly, " Brother May, I acknowledge the
justice of your reproof ; I have been silent too long."
Soon after Mr. May was made general agent of the
Antislavery Society, and his work took him to
Boston. He was barely settled when Channing
called upon him and invited him to preach for him.
He received no similar invitation during his stay in
Boston, which extended over a year. But Dr.
Channing had not been wholly inactive before Mr.
May so lovingly admonished him. In a letter of
July, 1834, he had written Dr. FoUen ^ protesting
that unanimity was not necessary to the antislavery
cause ; that there should be a body of men, not for-
mally Abolitionists, " but who uncompromisingly
maintain that the abolition of slavery ought imme-
diately to be decided on, and means used for imme-
diately commencing this work." A little later he
was " much shocked by the New York riots " which
had greeted Garrison on his return from his first
visit to England. " The duty of the Abolitionists,"
he wrote, " seems to me clear. Whilst they ought
to review their principles with great dehberation,
they ought not, at this moment, to recant anything,

1 Dr. Charles Follen, a German scholar, teacher, and preacher,
who came to this country in 1824, seeking a refuge from Euro-
pean political espionage and imprisonment. He was one of Chan-
ning's dearest friends. He joined himself to Garrison in 1833,
but, while demanding emancipation, would have compensated the
masters. We shall find his name associated with the most pain-
ful experience of Channing's life. See Life (1844), by his wife,
his coequal mate in mind and heart and work, and "Charles
Follen," page 538 of Sprague's Unitarian Pulpit.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 271

because recantation will certainly be set down to
the account of fear." On his return from Newport
a few weeks later, he made the riots the subject of
his first discourse to his people. Dr. Follen hailed
it as " an Abolition sermon ; " others denounced it
as such. It is, for us, one of several proofs that
Channing did not confine his antislavery utterance
to Thanksgiving and Fast days, as some of the
" dumb dogs " of recent times have pleaded in their
own defence. But with its condemnation of the
mob spirit, and its demand for the Abolitionists of
the right of speech, he mingled adverse criticism
of their violence of denunciation, and he declined
to print the sermon because of its inadequacy :
" Were I to publish it, I should feel myself bound
not only to vindicate the invaded rights of the anti-
slavery societies, but to enlarge on what I deem
their errors." Yet he ranked himself with them
in the estimation of the slaveholders and their
allies when he exclaimed in the sermon, " Property
in man ! Property in man ! You may claim mat-
ter to any extent you please as property, — the
earth, the ocean, and the planets, but you cannot
touch a soul. I can as easily conceive the angels
of heaven being property as men." Mr. May was
not so easily convinced of Channing's complete Abo-
litionism as Dr. Follen. Indeed, it was with this
sermon fresh in his mind that he rebuked his tardy
sympathy.

Channing wrote in October, 1834, " This city has
not yet incurred the guilt and disgrace of outrages

272 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

intended to put down by force the public discus-
sion of slavery. May we be spared this infamy ! "
The hope was prophecy of coming storm. The
year 1835 was preeminently the year of mobs,
and Boston's turn came October 21, when, with
much incidental uproar and outrage, Garrison was
dragged in the noose of a rope over the ground of
the Boston Massacre, barely escaping alive, and was
finally shut up in jail by a distinguished mayor
who could assure his safety only by assuming
him to be the instigator of the mob. This had
no sudden inspiration, but originated in an anti-
Abolition meeting which was convened in Faneuil
Hall, on the 21st of the preceding August, Mayor
Lyman in the chair. Channing wrote a semi-
public letter in advance of the meeting, deprecat-
ing its spirit and purpose. He said : —

Any resolve passed at the proposed meeting, imply-
ing, however indirectly, that a human being can right-
fully be held and treated as property, — any resolve
intended to discourage the free expression of opinion on
slavery, or to sanction lawless violence which has been
directed against the antislavery societies, — any resolve
implying that the Christian and philanthropist may not
strive to abolish slavery by moral influences, by appeals
to the reason, conscience, and heart of the slaveholder, —
any resolve expressing stronger sympathy with the slave-
holder than with the slave, or tending at all to encour-
age the continuance of slavery, — will afflict me beyond
measure . . . That Boston should in any way lend
itself to the cause of oppression will be a dark omen
indeed.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 273

Four days after the meeting Channing wrote as
if his fears had been confirmed by the event. But
the Abolitionists, he said, " have a deep conscious-
ness of the truth and excellence of their cause.
They have, too, the immense advantage of acting
from great principles ; and these alone give per-
manent strength. Such men cannot be put down."
It is, however, remarkable that the Boston mob
leaves hardly a trace upon his contemporaneous
letters,^ while there can hardly be a doubt that it
was the inspiration of his first elaborate antislavery
publication, the " Slavery" pamphlet. In the six-
volume edition this covers one hundred and fifty-
three pages, embracing eight chapters and " Notes."
His first business was to show that man cannot be
justly held or used as property, his second to show
that he has God-given rights as a human being, of
which slavery is a gross infraction ; the next, " to
unfold the evils of slavery," foUowed by " some re-
marks on the means of removing it," and others
on Abolitionism. Here, as everywhere, Channing's
teaching ran up into the high peaks of his con-
fidence in the dignity of human nature and the
fatherhood of God. A man " cannot be property
in the sight of God and justice because he is a
rational, immortal, moral being ; because created
in God's image, and therefore in the highest sense

1 He had no immediate knowledge of it, being in Newport at
the time. A sharp taste of it would, perhaps, have stirred him
as it did Wendell Phillips and Dr. Bowditch, but generally the
most striking events were less influential with him than his pro-
found meditation.

274 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

his child ; because created to unfold Godlike fac-
ulties and to govern himself by a divine law writ-
ten on his heart and republished in God's Word."
" Such a being was plainly made for an End in Him-
self. He is a Person, not a Thing. He is an End,
not a mere Instrument or Means." The chapter on
"Rights" keeps to the same high ground. The
rights which are sacred above all others are those
which enable a man to unfold his intellectual and
moral nature, which as a slave he cannot do. Chap-
ter iv., " The Evils of Slavery," was that which
gave the least pleasure to the slaveholders and their
apologists and the most satisfaction to the Abolition-
ists. It was a terrible arraignment of the peculiar
institution. It was found "radically, essentially
evil," equally ruinous to master and slave, incapable
of improvement, except in the direction of its sub-
version. Coming to " Means of Removing Slav-
ery," the first mentioned was as unacceptable to
the slaveholder as immediate emancipation. He
" must admit the great principle that man cannot
rightfully be held as property." Colonization was
deprecated as " a resolution to perpetuate the evil
without end." A system of gradualism was pre-
ferred to immediate emancipation, some of the evils
which have attended the latter course being clearly
foreseen. To the objection that a mixture of races
would result from emancipation, he said, " Can this
objection be urged in good faith ? Can this mix-
ture go on faster or more criminally than at the
present time ? Can the slaveholder use the word

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 275

' Amalgamation ' without a blush ? " The next
chapter reversed the effect of that on the evils of
slavery. The Abolitionists, to whom it was devoted,
liked it least ; the proslavery party most. Of such
Abolitionists as he knew, he said, " I honor them
for their strength of principle, their sympathy
with their fellow creatures, and their active good-
ness." He characterized the party as " singularly
free from political and religious sectarianism, and
distinguished by the absence of management, cal-
culation, and worldly wisdom." He repudiated the
assumption that they were endeavoring to stir up
slave insurrection. He denounced the persecutions
to which they were subjected. He criticised " Im-
mediate Emancipation " as a motto likely to mis-
lead, the motto going farther than the explana-
tions. But the gravamen of his adverse criticism
was the fierce, bitter, and exasperating " tone of
Abolitionist agitation." From this criticism he
never receded, though assigning to it less and less
relative importance, and arriving at the conclusion
that it was not the form but the substance of
the Abolitionist attack on slavery that infuriated
the Southern, and the apologetic Northern mind.
Meantime he cordially exonerated the majority of
Abolitionists from blame upon this score, and ex-
cepted " many of their publications " as " calm and
well considered, abounding in strong reasoning, and
imbued with an enlightened love of freedom."

The two fires between which Channing habit-
ually found himself on antislavery ground now

276 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

made him the object of a lively fusillade. Garrison
summed up his objections in the " Liberator "
under twenty-five heads, denouncing the book as
"utterly destitute of any redeeming, reforming
power," as " calumnious, contradictory, and un-
sound ; " and, as such, it " ought not to be appro-
priated by any genuine Abolitionist. He that is
not with us is against us." But other Abolitionists
were disposed to take the proverb by the other
horn, " He that is not against us is for us." Ellis
Gray Loring, than whom there was no better
Abolitionist, not one of Channing's parishioners,^
but an untiring instigator of his antislavery spirit,
which they, for the most part, actively or sullenly
opposed, was " grieved at some few censures of the
Abolitionists," but added, " Nineteen twentieths of
the book are sound in principle, and I will not
grudgingly bestow my gratitude and praise for
this splendid testimony to the truth." Halfway
between the extreme of Garrison's criticism and
the opposite came John Quincy Adams,^ objecting

1 The Garrison Story reports him as one, other authorities agree-
ing, but Mr. F. J. Garrison sends rae a letter written by Mr. Lor-
ing-'s daughter which decides as above and even minimizes the per-
sonal relation.

2 It is refreshing to read of the " Jesuitical complexion " of
Channing's discrimination : it gives us a pleasant shock of differ-
ence from the traditional tone, and it is very interesting to note the
development of J. Q. Adams's opinion of Channing from this
point forward, until it became extremely favorable. For an elab-
orate Abolitionist criticism of "Slavery" in the best spirit, see
Samuel J. May's in Some Recollections of our Antislavery Con-
Jiict, pp. 177-185. It was, he says, " a far greater help to our
cause than we at first expected, and we look back with no little
admiration on one who, enjoying as he did, in the utmost serenity,

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 277

that slaveholders could quote parts of the " Slav-
ery " as a palliation of their system, " but it is in
fact an inflammatory if not incendiary publica^
tion." The most virulent assault upon the pam-
phlet was that of James T. Austin, whose role
throughout the fourth decade of the nineteenth
century was that of devil's advocate. He was a
devout Unitarian, a writer for the " Examiner,"
and a distinguished member of the Brattle Street
Society, sitting conspicuously in the broad aisle.^
He put the worst possible construction on the
pamphlet, especially upon Channing's indictment
of slavery for its encouragement of licentiousness.
Another point was better made : " I charge him,
in spite of his disclaimer, with the doctrine of
INSURRECTION." For had not Channing said that
" a human being cannot rightfully be held and
used as property; no legislation, not that of all
countries and worlds, could make him so"? "There

the highest reputation as a writer and as a divine, put at hazard
the repose of the rest of his life, and sacrificed hundreds of the
admirers of his genius, eloquence, and piety, by espousing the
cause of the oppressed, which most of the eminent men in the
land would not touch with one of their fingers."

^ Sic Dr. E. E. Hale in a private letter ; but Oliver Johnson,
Garrison's excellent coadjutor, says that he was one of Channing's
own people. He married a daughter of my townsman, Elbridge
Gerry, signer of the Declaration, and wrote his biography. Hence
he could not have spoken with the highest Boston authority,
which was first Federalist, then Whig. A Democrat was a social
pariah. George Bancroft, gentleman and scholar, after a brilliant
candidacy for the governorship of Massachusetts, met a lady of
the Whig aristocracy on the street, and said to her, " I did not
find you at home when I called." " No," she answered, " and
you never will." I am indebted to Senator Hoar for the story.

278 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

is, then," Austin argued, " no legal slavery ; " and
if no legal slavery, then why may not the slave
" rise in his strength or his madness, and shake
off his chains ? " There was nothing in the logic
of Channing's doctrine to prevent. There was the
bias of his peaceful disposition, his dread of vio-
lence. And it is interesting to find him taking
comfort in that unresisting meekness of the negro
which Theodore Parker set down against him as a
grave defect, contending that —

Who -would be free, themselves must strike the blow.

That Channing was drawing closer to the Aboli-
tionists was shown the next spring after the pub-
lication of " Slavery " by his first appearance at a
meeting of the Antislavery Society. He wished
to see with his own eyes, and hear with his own
ears, and judge accordingly. If he had gone sooner,
he might sooner have been disabused of some of
his exaggerated prepossessions. He " heard no-
thing so exceptionable as the vituperations, the
coarse, unfeeling personalities which too often dis-
honor Congress." He was struck with the talent
of so many plain people for effective utterance.
" I received the impression which I delight to re-
ceive of the intellectual energy of the mass of the
people." The most gratifying circumstance was a
speech by a colored man of apparently pure Afri-
can blood. " I felt that he was a partaker with
me of that humanity for which I unceasingly thank
my Creator." The life of the meeting he found

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 279

very striking. " Nothing was said or done mechan-
ically. . . . You know by instinct whether you are
surrounded by life or death. This body was alive.
I am sure that if the stirrers up of mobs could
have looked into the souls of these Abolitionists,
they would have seen the folly of attempting to
put them down by such persecutions as they can
bring to bear on them. Nothing but the Inquisi-
tion, the stake, the scaffold ; nothing but extermi-
nation can do the work." Abolition had most to
fear from the indifference of people " worshipping
what they call prosperity." But " there is one
ground for believing that Abolitionism may en-
dure, even if unopposed. With all its faults, it is
founded on religious principle. It is thus bound
up with the strongest principle of human nature.
It wiU not, therefore, be easily discouraged by
neglect . . . and unexpected events may prepare
a multitude for its influence." He found nowhere
such scepticism concerning human progress as in
Boston. Hence the town's proslavery spirit and
its opposition to all antislavery speech and action.
He cited Harriet Martineau's experience in proof
of the average social temper.

A distinguished lady from England, having every
moral as well as intellectual claim on kind attention,
was excluded from our hospitality in no small degree,
because in an Antislavery meeting she had expressed
the feelings which every man and woman in her coun-
try is known to partake, and in which she only gave
utterance to the sentiment of the civilized world. Her

280 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sex and character did not secure her from insult in our
newspapers.^

Under Channing's own roof, both at Newport
and in Boston, Miss Martineau enjoyed ample
hospitality, and no contemporary account of him
was more highly appreciative than that contained
in her " Retrospect of Western Travel."

The wide circulation to which the " Slavery "
pamphlet attained, and the attention it received,
encouraged Channing to another venture in the
fall of 1836. James G. Birney, a Kentucky slave-
holder, who had freed his slaves and set uj) an
antislavery paper in Cincinnati, " The Philanthro-
pist," was disappointed of his hope that, by bring-
ing his press across the Ohio, it would be safe
from mob violence. A mob, instigated and led by
such gentlemen as had organized the Boston mob,
destroj^ed the press and drove the editor from the
city. Thereupon the word in Channing's heart
was like a fire shut up in his bones, and he was
weary with forbearing until he had written a pub-
lic letter (26 pages) to Birney, in which he brought
an eloquent defence to the freedom of antislavery
speech, while at the same time he read the Abo-
litionists another lecture on the violence of their
denunciations. The Abolitionists resented this
(some of them) as they had resented their particu-

1 Cf. Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. The meeting- re-
ferred to was most notable ; the first of the Women's Antislav-
ery Society after the Boston mob. Francis Jackson offered his
house for it, at the risk of its destruction, and the women as-
sembled with the resolvedness of martyrs going to the stake.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 281

lar chapter in " Slavery." The letter was copied
entire into the " Liberator," Garrison commenting,
" A million letters like this would never emanci-
pate a single slave, but only rivet his fetters more
strongly." Yet the letter showed that Channing,
having " put the first shovelful upon the earth,"
like " the superior man " of Confucius, was " going
on." It was much less academic than the '' Slav-
ery," much more homely and vigorous in its style.
For the Abolitionists, for all the doubts, it had
such lofty praise as must have cost Channing
many " golden opinions." He had learned some-
thing from the reception which his former book
had met : " that the Abolitionists are not the only
people who exasperate the South. Can the calm-
est book be written on slavery without producing
the same effect ? " He held up a mirror, looking
wherein the Boston conservative found himself one
of " a palsying, petrifying order," " unwilling that
the most enormous abuses should be touched, lest
the established order of things, so propitious to
themselves, should be disturbed."

The letter to Birney suggests the fact that dur-
ing the last lustrum of Channing's life one section
of the Abolitionists was rapidly becoming more po-
litical in its methods and its aspirations ; whence
the Liberty Party, with Birney for its presidential
candidate in 1840, and again in 1844. Chan-
ning's sympathies were wholly with Garrison in
his opposition to this tendency. " Antislavery is
to triumph," he said, " not by force or appeals to

282 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

interest, but by becoming a living part of the pub-
lic conscience and religion [exactly Garrison's
view]. Just in proportion as it is complicated with
political questions and feelings it is shorn of its
strength." The words are Channing's, the thought
is the thought of Garrison when he says, " There
is a class of politicans who will use Abolitionism to
rise by, but will disgrace it by want of principle."
But it took all kinds to make the newer world.
Channing had more prescience in the matter of the
South' s threats to secede than had Parker further
on : " On this point the South does not merely
bluster, but is in earnest."

He wrote at Christmas, 1837, that the fear of
dissolving the Union was the great obstruction to
Northern antislavery progress, but he was then al-
ready upon record as contemplating such dissolu-
tion as the less of two evils. On the 1st of August
he had completed and signed an open letter to
Henry Clay (80 pages, 12mo) on the "Annexation
of Texas." Of all Channing's contributions to the
antislavery movement, this was the best adapted
to its end. An enthusiastic English critic hailed
it as the best pamphlet ever written. It went far
to put Channing in rank with the great pam-
phleteers, Defoe and Paine and Cobbett and Vol-
taire. Garrison's "Thoughts on Colonization,"
though more final in its operation, was not more
happily conceived. So exigent a critic as Mrs. Chap-
man gave it credit for delaying the annexation of
Texas for a term of years. No better evidence could

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 283

be afforded that Channing was becoming " less min-
isterial and more manly." But for its moral eleva-
tion, it would have had more the appearance of a
legal than of a clerical document. It reviewed the
Texan insurrection with energy and discrimination
and overwhelmed it with a flood of righteous indig-
nation. It proceeded to denounce the proposed an-
nexation as the adoption of a career of encroach-
ment, war, and crime. " The seizure of Texas
will not stand alone. It will darken our future
history. It will be linked by an iron necessity to
long-continued deeds of rapine and blood." Much
as he would deplore the dissolution of the Union
he could " submit to it more readily than to the
reception of Texas into the Confederacy." " I
shrink from that contamination. I shrink from an
act which is to pledge us as a people to robbery
and war, to the work of upholding and extending
slavery without limitation or end." Here, then,
was Channing anticipating that part of Garrison's
programme which a few years further on attained
to scriptural expression, and after the Compromise
of 1850, more especially brought on him peculiar
execration. But when the annexation of Texas
was again imminent, in 1844, there were a good
many " conscience Whigs " who were prepared to
follow Channing's lead.^ He said, " It seems to
me not only the right, but the duty, of the free

1 A Whig convention in Worcester passed a disunion resolu-
tion proposed by Rev. Samuel May (not Samuel J.), general agent
of the American Antislavery Society. This was in 1844.

284 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say
to the slaveholding States, 'We regard this act
as the dissolution of the Union. . . . We will not
become partners in your wars with Mexico and
Europe, in your schemes of spreading and per-
petuating slavery, in your hopes of conquest, in
your unrighteous spoils.' "

The Texan pamphlet was still damp from the
press when Elijah P. Love joy was shot and killed
(Nov. 7) while defending his antislavery press in
Alton, Illinois. When the news arrived in Boston
(Nov. 19), Dr. Channing, conversing with Samuel
E. Sewall, suggested a meeting in Faneuil Hall
to protest against the violence and murder, and
headed a petition of one hundred names to the
mayor and aldermen for the use of the hall. A
counter-petition was sent in, and in response to it
the hall was refused to Channing and his friends.
Thereupon he wrote a stirring " Appeal to the
Citizens of Boston," which was published in the
" Advertiser," with opposing editorial comments.
The fruit of the appeal was a crowded meeting in
the old supreme court room, at which Dr. Chan-
ning was thanked by resolution for the " eloquent
and dignified vindication " of his address and re-
quested to prepare the resolutions for a meeting in
Faneuil Hall, if the city officers could be induced
to recede from their refusal. They were so in-
duced by the re-presentment of Channing's original
petition with many names added to the original
number. Five thousand people crowded the hall

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 285

at ten o'clock in the morning. Channing's friend,
Jonathan Phillips, presided, and after the offering
of a prayer, Channing addressed the meeting. ^
His first words were a disavowal of any partisan
character in the meeting. Such a character would
have kept him away, " But when a great question
of humanity is discussed here, when a number of
my fellow citizens meet here to lift up their voices
against violence and murder, and in support of
the laws and the press, I feel that my place is
lierer The resolutions prepared by Channing
were presented by Benjamin F. Hallet, whose
name in my boyhood had come to be a by-word
and a hissing on account of his proslavery speech
and action. Garrison, in a letter of the follow-
ing day, pronounced them excellent ; but they
had not the " birr and smeddum " which Garrison,
a master in this kind, would have put into them.
George S. Hillard, who later fell so far away as to
approve Webster's " great refusal " of March 7,
1850, supported the resolutions in a speech the
effect of which " was at once elevated and sooth-
ing." There seemed to be some danger that the
Cradle of Liberty would justify its name by put-
ting the assemblage to sleep. But Attorney-Gen-
eral James T. Austin saved the day. He flouted
the resolutions as " abstract propositions," accused
Love joy of inciting the slaves to insurrection, said

^ One of Mrs. Chapman's depreciations of Channing -was that
he attended the meeting on the urgency of Ellis Gray Loring.
Such her recollection after the lapse of more than forty years.

286 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

that he had " died as the fool dieth," and com-
pared the mob to the fathers of the Revolution.
A tremendous uproar followed, during which Jona-
than PhiUips said to Channing, " Can you stand
thunder ? " " Such thunder as this in any mea-
sure," answered the little man. He sat as one
on the seashore overlooking a tempestuous sea and
expecting momentarily to be submerged, perhaps
with crimson waves. Then struck for Wendell
Phillips his first glorious hour. His speech reached
its climax, through a storm of cheers and hisses,
in words as memorable as any that he ever spoke ;
" I thought those pictured lips [those of the por-
traits in the hall] would have broken into voice to
rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the
dead. . . . Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered,
on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and
the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned
and swallowed him up." ^

In its main effect, the meeting answered the
purpose which inspired Channing's action : it vin-

^ Channing always loved to recall that " psychological mo-
ment," and to dwell upon the brilliant effect of Phillips's voice
and manner, seconding his words. The speech was not Phillips's
first, as we are commonly told. He had made several before at
antislavery meetings (sic Oliver Johnson), the maiden one in Lynn,
March 28, 1837. Miss Peabody (Reminiscences, p. 360) writes
of Channing's admiration for an anonymous reply to Austin by
Charles Sumner, which was the maiden fleshing of his antislav-
ery sword. But Sumner sailed on the day of the meeting for
Europe, and if he attended the meeting or wrote anything about
it, his omniscient biographer, E. L. Pierce, knew nothing of these
things.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 287

dicated the freedom of tlie press in Boston for the
time being. It was a signal for more parishioners
and friends to fall away from him than had before
done so. Had he not taken a leading part in the
defence of a notorious Abolitionist who had resisted
unto death an attempt to put a gag upon his mouth ?
But while the Lovejoy meeting identified Chan-
ning with the Abolitionists, both in the conserva-
tive and the antislavery mind, as he had not before
been identified with them, a letter from him to the
" Liberator," requiring their general disavowal of
Lovejoy's disposition to forcibly defend his rights,
did much to chill their satisfaction in his closer
sympathy. Garrison, more completely non-resist-
ant than Channing, had, in his first editorial on
the murder, expressed deep regret that Lovejoy
had taken an attitude of armed defence. But he
thought, very justly, that it was too much for
Channing to demand that all Abolitionists, non-re-
sistants, many of them, in less and less degrees
than Channing, should repudiate Lovejoy's course.
The bottom fact was that Channing' s disposition
was more peace-loving and non-resistant than Gar-
rison's, though he had mental reservations in his
peace doctrine which Garrison could not entertain.
That stern reformer often beat his ploughshares
and his pruning hooks into words that were half
battles.

Channing had no personal relations with Garri-
son. This is the most inexplicable feature of his
antislavery career, and the most unfortunate. We

^38 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

are told that in the early thirties Garrison was not
the inheritor of his present great renown, but the
obscure young man of Harrison Gray Otis's de-
scription and Lowell's poem, " with no visible aux-
iliary but a negro boy." But Channing did not
generally require a trumpet of fame to be sounded
before the young men to whom he lent a sympa-
thetic ear, if they came with any plea for his humane
consideration of a just and righteous cause. Gar-
rison's cause was preeminently such for Channing.
Moreover, among those holding up Garrison's hands
were men and women for whom Channing had an
affectionate admiration, Mrs. Child, the Chapmans
and Sewalls, Ellis Gray Loring, Samuel J. May,
and Charles Follen, with many others, and the won-
der is that he was not curious to know directly what
manner of man so won their love and trust. But
he was not, or he checked the impulse as often as
it stirred his heart. More than once Garrison
wrote to him, privately, soliciting his cooperation.
One of his letters is preserved for us in the Garri-
sons' " Story." It is more scriptural in its style
than Channing's writing, cast in a heavy mould,
but so intensely serious that its (apparent) failure
to elicit a response is passing strange. These two
chief men of Boston in those years — not forget-
ting Webster — met only once : this in the senate
chamber of the State House, March 4, 1836, at a
committee hearing of Abolitionists in the matter of
penal enactments for their supposed offences against
law and order. It was a critical moment for them,

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 289

and Channing's appearance on the scene was a
fresh sign of his growmg sympathy. His shawl
and muffler " more express'd than hid him " as he
walked the length of the room and coming to Gar-
rison shook hands with him. " Righteousness and
Peace have kissed each other," said Mrs. Chapman,
making an ambiguous quotation. Channing after-
wards explained that he did not know that he was
addressing Garrison, but that he was glad to speak
with him. Harriet Martineau was now visiting the
Channings, and Mrs. Chapman invited them with
her to tea " to meet Mr. Garrison." He did not
come and Miss Martineau explained that the Gar-
rison rider had defeated the biU. Here was a mys-
tery that I cannot solve. Could they have known
each other, it is hardly to be conceived that either
would have been much swerved by the other from
his characteristic course, — Channing would still
have questioned Garrison's severity, and his own
consistent individualism would have been repelled
by Garrison's organized agitation ; but they would
have understood each other better. Channing
would have discovered that Garrison's severity was
as dispassionate as his own mildness, — that it
was a deliberately adopted method of reform, —
and Garrison would not have had to wait for the
Channing " Memoir " of 1848 to discover that his
own strictures on Channing had been mistaken in
some essential particulars.^

^ Just after Garrison's criticism of the " Slavery " pamphlet, and
not long before the State House meeting, he went to hear Chan-

290 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

The cup of Channing's antislaveiy iniquity was
not yet fuU. The last years of his life were des-
tined to be more engaged with antislavery thought
and work than any of the preceding. Thus, in
1839, he wrote under the form of a letter to Jona-
than Phillips (the open letter was his favorite
vehicle when he would reach the general public
ear) a searching criticism upon Henry Clay's
speech of February 7 of that year; in 1840 he
wrote " Emancipation," a study of West India
emancipation as bearing on our own problem ; and
in 1842, the year of his death, a double pamphlet
on the case of the Creole, a slave-ship whose cargo
had mutinied, — a strange thing and yet most
natural ; and in the same year the swan-song of
his antislavery career and of his life, the Lenox
Address. I will speak further of these things
when I come to his last stage.

It was the manner of Channing's life to pile up
his energy in special tasks, undertaken and carried
out with great deliberation ; but the bulk and
weight of his antislavery work and influence were
not by any means exhausted by the half-dozen
monumental things on which he put forth his fuU

ning preach and found the sermon " full of heauty and power ;
■worthy to be written in starry letters upon the sky." He sat with
Mrs. Chapman, to whom its privilege had been extended, in the
Higginson pew. Next day came a note from Mr. Hig-ginson with-
drawing the privilege. If Channing had heard of that, he would,
I think, have invited Garrison to his house at once and have
learned what a kindly human face there was behind the vizor of
the warrior's casque. Mr. Higginson was Colonel T. W. Higgin-
son's uncle. E pur si muove !

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 291

strength. He had many correspondents in America
and Europe, and the burden of his letters for ten
years before his death was oftener slavery than
any other theme. As with his letters, so with his
conversation. Such a friendly critic and adviser
as Ellis Gray Loring was an inestimable good,
where every fresh aspect of the great anxiety had
to be considered with that openness of mind which
Channing brought to questions of all kinds. Some-
times he got illumination from the dark side of
the moon, as when a distinguished physician, who
owned a plantation in Cuba, begged him to come
and be his guest, and promised, as a special in-
ducement, that the slave-whipping should be done
on another plantation during his stay. Channing
turned suddenly upon his heel and left the room.
He could not trust himself, we are told, to express
his indignation. But he would seem to have ex-
pressed it very well. The long-drawn trouble had
its incidents of peculiar painfulness. Mrs. Chap-
man wrote in 1835 of a notice of George Thomp-
son's speaking given " in Dr. Channing' s church,
where a notice of our meetings has never been
refused a reading." A little later this could not
be said. Antislavery notices on their way to the
pulpit were waylaid and captured by the standing
committee and never saw the hght of day again.
This was a grief to Channing, and some things
were as bitter to him as gall, — for example, the
refusal of the church for a meeting of the Anti-
slavery Society, though Channing had indorsed the

292 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

request as " very agreeable " to him personally.
Shortly after, in contempt of his wishes, the use
of the church was granted to the Colonization
Society. And there was worse to come.

To measure justly the amount and quality of
Channing's courage in his antislavery utterance
and affiliation we must consider the nature and
character of the man and the circumstances of his
life. If he had relished controversy, if he had
dearly loved a moral fight, if his mind had been
easily made up, if he had had no fatal disposition
to hear the other side, if his parishioners and
friends had generally sympathized with his anti-
slavery views and had incited him to speech and
action, if his fellow ministers had acted in like
manner, — aU that he did on antislavery lines
would have been as easy as for him to turn his
hand. These would have been the lines of least
resistance. The charges of backwardness and
timidity that were brought against him could in
that case be easily sustained. But Channing did
not love controversy and opposition ; he had no
gaudium certaminis. He was not, I think, a man
of natural courage, but one of delicate and shrink-
ing flesh, and corresponding mind. His sermons
and addresses abound in praises of moral courage,
and he exemplified the trait he praised. But it
was hard for him to do it. These praises were
exhortations to himseK to keep right on. They
burned his ships ; they cut off his retreat ; they
made any flinching on his part impossible. The

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 293

things he said and did required of Mm a great deal
of courage, however much or little they might have
required of a quite different man.^ Wellington
said that men of natural courage did not make the
best soldiers, but those who, shrinking from the
conflict, did not flinch because their sense of duty-
held them to their work. Channing was a good
soldier of this kind.

Moreover, nearly all the influences pressing on
him were of a deterrent character. He was sensi-
tive to the social entourage, and would gladly have
kept on good terms with it, but its average tem-
per was hostile to all his higher aspirations. One
may read in Pierce's " Life of Sumner " what
that temper was when Sumner was taking up
his antislavery work.^ It had not changed much
in a dozen years. With this society, — " intel-
lectual (?), consolidated, despotic over individual
thought, insisting on uniformity of belief in mat-
ters which were related to its interests, and frown-
ing upon novelties which struck at its prestige," —
Channing, because of his antislavery sentiments,
was persona non grata. He was called a Jacobin.

^ I have in my possession Whittier's auto^aph letter to Mr. W.
F. Channing, in which, referring to Mrs. Chapman's depreciation
of Channing, he says, "As to the matter of courage and self-sacri-
fice very few of us have evinced so much of both as thy father.
He threw upon the altar the proudest reputation, in letters and
theology, of his day. With the single exception of Lydia Maria
Child, I know of no one who made a greater sacrifice than thy
father." For entire letter see Pickard's Whittier, p. 642.

2 See, also, C. F. Adams's Richard Henry Dana, which abounds
in confirmation of the truth of Pierce's characterization.

294 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Rumors were started and believed tliat he had
political ambitions, that he was about to abandon
the ministry and go into politics. He was not indif-
ferent to his good repute, his honored name, but
his antislavery course put these in constant jeop-
ardy. He knew it, and he kept right on. The
affection of his people was much more to him than
his public reputation, and to do what do he must
was to forfeit much of this. His well-bred par-
ishioners, " gentlemen of property and standing,"
often passed him on the street without a sign of
recognition or the most indifferent. His son never
forgot the look of tender pain upon his father's
face when such indignity was shown to him upon
the Boston streets. The incident of the FoUen
service was typical of many things that Channing
had to bear. That, in Wendell Phillips's opinion
(I had it from his lips), measured the lowest deep
of Boston's subserviency to the slaveholding inter-
ests. A deeper is not easily conceived.

Channing's antislavery course had the defects
of his qualities, if they were defects. To hear the
other side was as necessary for him as to hear one
side only is for the majority of men. To " con-
sider it again " was equally necessary. His was
the Hamlet disposition rightly understood, — a
holding back from action in the hope of reaching
its ideal form. Hence he was slower than some
others in the adoption of radical measures. But
as compared with the average temper of the com-
munity, of his co-religionists, of his people, his was

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 295

so free and bold that it scandalized the social and
religious Boston of his time. Good people won-
dered what he would do next. So, then, consider-
ing his shrinking delicacy of frame and mind, his
distaste for all rough contacts, his holy fear of
doing injustice to any person, or another's thought,
his conservative environment, and the sacrifice of
reputation, honor, and affection entailed by his
antislavery course, it may be doubted whether any
of his contemporaries did out his duty in a more
steadily heroic fashion, or at a heavier cost. And
it was not as if there was only one way of doing
antislavery work. Then, as always, God " fulfilled
himseK in many ways." The destruction of slav-
ery was, as Lincoln said of his own part in it,
" a big job," and it required the united strength
of many different individualities for its accomplish-
ment. There were notes in the great music that
once seemed discordant, but which to our later
apprehension blend in a harmonious unity. Among
these, that supplied by the exalted idealism of
Channing was one of the purest, and contributed
one of the most indispensable and effective parts
of the symphonic whole.

CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL REFORMER

It would be easy to misjudge the typical Boston
Unitarian layman of Channing's time, by dwelling
too exclusively upon Channing's relation to the
antislavery reform. The typical layman was not
highly cultured, but he was, perhaps, oftener col-
lege bred than he is now. He read the " Daily
Advertiser," which never affronted his conservar-
tism, but flattered his prejudices with assiduous
and prudent care. He read the " Christian Exam-
iner " and the London and Edinburgh quarterlies
to a degree that Unitarian laymen in this year of
grace do not read things of similar weight. He
wrote for the " Examiner " ^ such articles as that
of Nathan Hale on railroads, and that of James
T. Austin on Catholic emancipation. He took a
more active part in denominational affairs than
does the layman of our time, and was less abso-
lutely swamped in the excess of clerical self-confi-
dence. To be aware that he was gracious, kindly,

^ The meeting to establish the Examiner was called by Chan-
ning- and met in his study. His name headed the list of those
pledged to carry it on ; Professor Farrar's came next ; Andrews
Norton's next. The understanding that Channing would write
for it was its best asset.

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 297

benevolent, public-spirited, charitable, we have
only to think of such institutions as the Massa-
chusetts General Hospital, McLean Asylum, His-
torical Society, Perkins Institution for the Blind,
Charitable Mechanic Association, Boston Public
Library and Athenaeum, which he originated or
fostered. His portrait has been drawn by Octa-
vius Prothingham with entire sincerity. It is
nominally that of Mr. Frothingham's grandfather,
Peter C. Brooks ; but a good moral portrait of
any one of a hundred prominent Unitarians of
1830 would appear much the same. Narrow, gen-
ial, unimaginative, friendly, strictly honest, not
devoid of sentiment, but inhospitable to ideas,
strong in domestic virtue, and with a serene self-
consciousness of doing pretty well upon the whole,
— such was the Unitarian layman who furnished
Channing with the social material with and for
which he had to work towards higher social ends.
Up to a certain point Channing found him trac-
tile, and even ductile ; beyond that, oppugnant and
immovable. Hence moments of profound depres-
sion, and the feeling that his labor had been spent
in vain. His antislavery temper was but one man-
ifestation of a moral elevation that was wearisome
to the typical layman, as if Channing were expect-
ing creatures without wings to fly. Not moral ele-
vation, but a Pranklinian sobriety, a solid, stolid,
steady-going common sense, was the Unitarian
layman's characteristic note in Channing's time.
What he would do on lines of social reform must

298 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

be done with this kind of personal stuff. The
Unitarian layman would walk a mile with him, or
twain, but when Channing invited him to soar
with him into the upper air, he said, " I pray thee
have me excused."

If the later years of Channing's life emphasized
his engagement in social problems to a degree
without previous correspondence, it was not quite
the same on other lines as on those of his antislav-
ery development. There the early impressions
remained strangely in abeyance, until they were
renewed and reinforced by his acquaintance with
slavery in the West Indies. But from a very early
period in his ministry he conceived this as a social
work, and might have made " The field is the
world " the scriptural legend of its most distinctive
aim. The uses which he contemplated for his
new Berry Street annex in 1817, were, as we
have seen, more than parochial. His early inter-
est in socialism connects with his latest interest
in the Brook Farm experiment without a break,
whatever, here and there, the attenuation of the
thread. The Richmond communism and the teach-
ing of his admired Adam Ferguson found their
religious counterpart and fulfilment for him in
the New Testament conception of the kingdom of
heaven upon earth. It is nevertheless true that
his social interests tended to much more careful
and elaborate expression in his culminating period,
and the vast concerns of war, intemperance, crime
and its punishment, poverty, education, social re-

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 299

organization bulked the horizon of his mind in
ever more portentous, sometimes appalling shapes.

War, as Channiug viewed it, was one of the
greatest social evils of his time. From his tenth
year to his thirty-fifth, the world was full of it ;
the long peace of exhaustion followed ; his senti-
ments were independent of the change. Doubtless
they were profoundly nourished by the incidents
of the Napoleonic wars, but the piping times of
peace brought no abatement of his horror. The
same note that sounds in his anti-war sermons of
1812, 1814, 1816, sounds with equal clearness in
his great sermon of 1835 and his noble lecture of
1838 ; incidentally in many intervening sermons
and in letters innumerable. The Peace Society of
Massachusetts was instituted in his own parsonage,
and of all his personal tributes, that to its secretary,
the Eev. Noah Worcester, preeminently the peace
advocate of his time, has the accent of profoundest
admiration. Fundamental to Channing's detesta-
tion of war was the same principle that was fun-
damental to his detestation of slavery : " Let the
worth of a human being be felt; ... let it be
understood that a man was made to enjoy inalien-
able rights, to improve lofty powers, to secure a
vast happiness, and a main pillar of war will fall."
It was as a moral evil that war must be made to
cease. Its economic evils, its monstrous cruelties,
were a little matter in comparison with the pas-
sions it represented and let loose. With General
Sherman he believed that " war is hell," but in

300 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

a deeper sense. " The field of battle is a theatre
got up for the exhibition of crime on a grand scale.
There the hell within the human breast blazes out
fiercely and without disguise. A more fearful hell
in any region of the universe cannot well be con-
ceived. There the fiends hold their revels and spread
their fury." He would have the soldier's uniform
made as unattractive as the hangman's, whose
business, he said, is not more cruel or more tragi-
cal. He would have no military parades disfig-
uring great civic occasions. The soldier's courage
he depreciated in comparison with that demanded
by the exigencies of our everyday affairs. Never-
theless, he did not accept the principle of non-
resistance unreservedly. Driving with Dr. Farley
at Newport, a non-resistant tract of S. J. May's
the subject of their talk, he clenched and shook
his small, transparent hand, and said, " Brother
Farley, sometimes we must fight ! " But such a
solemn and tremendous concern is war, that men
must not entertain the possibility of it without full
conviction of its justice and moral necessity, nor
without unfeigned sorrow. Nothing could be more
horrible than the gayety of nations on the eve of
wars that bring them infinite suffering, and a long
entail of misery, " an army of cripples, an army of
beggars, and an army of thieves." ^ To the com-
mon notion that the able-bodied citizen is bound
to fight in whatever conflict may be precipitated

^ Not Channing's phrase, but the translation of a proverbial
German rendering of what war leaves behind.

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 301

by the rashness of the executive and legislative
powers, Channing opposed as frank a negative as
to the notion that the policy of a government in
time of war is something sacrosanct, not to be
criticised by any citizen. If called to take part in
unjust wars, he said, let the patriotic citizen delib-
erately refuse. " If martial law seize on him, let
him submit. If hurried to prison, let him submit.
If brought thence to be shot, let him submit. There
must be martyrs to peace as well as to other prin-
ciples of our religion. Let the good man be faith-
ful unto death."

The causes of war and the means for its preven-
tion were considered with an acumen that has had
many pregnant comments since Channing left our
earthly scene. It is pathetic to consider the mock-
ery of his hopes by the events of recent years and
by the national armaments that are handicapping
the wage-earner of all countries, as with a soldier
on each aching back. Particularly disappointed
has been his hope that freedom of international
communication and commerce would unharness the
war-gods. That industrialism which was to bloom
with the white flower of peace is proving a hotbed
of tiger-lUies^ the demand for new markets for the
overplus of production breeding dangerous rival-
ries. The beHef that "Trade follows the flag,"
as practically construed, means that the flag follows
trade, dragged in the mire behind its grinding
wheels. Nevertheless to read Channing's arraign-
ment of war, his praise of peace, is to take heart

302 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

of cheer. In tlie light of his ideals, those that are
most engrossing in the present shrivel into paltry
insignificance, and our sight is so purged that we
can clearly see the superiority of the better things
to their pretentious hollowness.

Channing abounds in prophecies of thoughts and
things that have been manifested progressively in
the sixty years that have intervened between his
death and now. His theology is the staple of
preaching in hundreds of (nominally) orthodox
churches. His antislavery sentiments were pro-
phetic of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
But it was on the lines of social reform that his an-
ticipation of our later thinking and working was
most strongly marked, and this nowhere more dis-
tinctly than in his recurrence to the problems fur-
nished by intemperance and its related pains and
penalties. His interest in these problems found
various expression. His sermons, his letters, and
his talk often gravitated to them with a serious-
ness that was eloquent of an intense preoccupa^
tion, but on one occasion he put all his best thinking
on the subject into an " Address on Temperance,"
which was to this subject what his Baltimore ser-
mon was to his Unitarian doctrine. This address
was delivered in the Boston Odeon on " the day
appointed for the simultaneous meeting of the
friends of temperance throughout the world,"
February 28, 1837. What he should perhaps
have reserved for his climax he produced on the
threshold of his elaborate discourse, where, ask-

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 303

ing, " What is the great, essential evil of intem-
perance ? " he made answer, " It is the voluntary
extinction of reason. The great evil is inward and
spiritual. The intemperate man . . . sins im-
mediately and directly against the rational nature,
that divine principle which distinguishes between
truth and falsehood, between right and wrong ac-
tion, which distinguishes man from the brute."
His invariable gravitation to the spiritual point
of view finds here another illustration, — and it is
precisely what our general acquaintance with his
mind would lead us to expect. The consequences
of intemperance were vividly described, — the ter-
rible disfigurement, the physical wreck, the ensu-
ing poverty, the domestic misery, but these punish-
ments of the sin were nothing in comparison with
the sin itself, the intellectual and moral degrada-
tion. " Honest, virtuous, noble-minded poverty is
a comparatively light evil. What matters it that
a man must for a few years live on bread and
water ? " The meagreness of Channing's diet
made for the sincerity of this expression where a
doubt of this would have been natural if he had
had the reputation for good living that was enjoyed
by some of his clerical contemporaries. " The
poverty of the intemperate man," he said, " owes
its great misery to its cause. He who makes him-
self a beggar, by having made himseH a brute, is
miserable indeed."

His next step was to " some remarks on the
extent of temptations to this vice." Here at the

304 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

outset, he disclaimed the narrow view of these
temptations as peculiar to the uneducated and the
unrefined. He declared men of education, genius,
sensibility, to be hardly less exposed, and a crowd
of " mighty poets in their misery dead " surged up
in confirmation of his words. He passed to " the
heavy burden of care and toil which is laid on a
large multitude of men ; " from this to " the intel-
lectual depression and the ignorance to which many
are subjected ; " next to " the general sensuality
and earthliness of the community. ... It is the sen-
suality, the earthliness of those who give the tone
to public sentiment which is chargeable with a vast
amount of the intemperance of the poor. . . . Un-
ceasing struggles for the outward, earthly, sensual
good constitute the chief activity which he sees
around him." Concluding this part of his address,
he named among the causes of intemperance the love
of excitement and the want of self-respect induced
among the poor and laborious by the general state
of society. " Just as far as wealth is the object of
worship, the measure of men's importance, the
badge of distinction, so far there will be a tendency
to self -con tempt and self-abandonment among those
whose lot gives them no chance of its acquisition."
But it was in that part of the address which dealt
more particularly with the prevention or cure of
intemperance that Channing's ideas were most con-
spicuously foregleams of the best thought upon
this subject that has been developed since his time.
" To save the laboring and poor from intemperance

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 305

we must set in action amongst them the means
of intellectual, moral, and religious improvement."
" Music might here be spread as freely as in Ger-
many, and be made a lightener of toil, a cheerer
of society, a relief of loneliness, a solace in the
poorest dwellings." Boston's wasted wealth might
be so economized as to build in a few years another
Louvre and stock it with pictures and statues. In
this connection Lowell, the founder of the Lowell
Institute, got a good meed of praise. There was
an earnest plea for a more fraternal intercourse
between the more and less cultivated people, and
at one point the brave spirits of Arnold Toynbee,
Octavia Hill, and their companions in their noble
work seem to be so near that we can hear the

stairs, to Sin and Famine known,
Sing with the welcome of their feet.

No prophet of the Old Testament or New ever
lifted the veil of the future and disclosed its secret
things more certainly than did Channing when this
vision of the neighborhood guild and coUege set-
tlement rose on his mind : —

One gifted man with his heart in the work, who should
live among the uneducated, to spread useful knowledge
and quickening truth, by conversation and books, by
frank and friendly intercourse, by encouraging meet-
ings for improvement, by forming the more teachable
into classes, and giving to these the animation of his
presence and guidance, by bringing parents to an acquaint-
ance with the principles of physical, intellectual, and
moral education, by instructing families in the means

306 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

and conditions of health, by using, in a word, all the
methods which an active, generous mind would discover
or invent for awakening intelligence and moral life, —
one gifted man, so devoted, might impart a new tone
and spirit to a considerable circle ; and what would be
the result, were such men to be multiplied and combined,
so that a community might be pervaded by their in-
fluence ?

Another prophetic intimation was the plea for
innocent amusements as a means of dissuasion
from unlawful pleasures. His good word for dan-
cing is one of the pleasantest of the surprises that
he has for us. He would not have it a rare plea-
sure, reserved for great occasions, but an everyday
amusement : —

No amusement seems more to have a foundation in
our nature. The animation of youth overflows spon-
taneously in harmonious movements. Its end is to re-
alize perfect grace in motion, and who does not know
that a sense of the graceful is one of the higher facul-
ties of our nature? It is to be desired that dancing
should become too common among us to be made the
object of special preparation, as in the ball ; that mem-
bers of the same family, when confined by unfavorable
weather, should recur to it for exercise and exhilara-
tion ; that branches of the same family should enliven
in this way their occasional meetings ; that it should fill
up an hour in all the assemblages for relaxation in which
the young form a part. . . . Why should not graceful-
ness be spread through the whole community ?

To appreciate the daring radicalism of this ad-
vice one should remember the time when it was

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 307

advanced and the average temper of the commu-
nity. Intolerant of the theatre as it was, he said,
" I can conceive of a theatre which would be the
noblest of all amusements." He would bring more
direct influences to bear upon intemperance. He
would discourage the social use of ardent spirits :
"- At the present moment, he who uses them or in-
troduces them into his hospitalities, virtually arrays
himself against the cause of temperance and hu-
manity." He w^ould discourage the sale of ardent
spirits. But he anticipated the difficulty of enfor-
cing any general prohibitory law, and the strength
of local option. " Law is here the will of the peo-
ple, and the legislature can do little unless sus-
tained by the public voice."

Channing's interest in education was bound to
be one of the most engaging interests of his private
thought and public speech, so largely did he ap-
prehend, not only his own work as that of a teacher,
but that of his great exemplar, Jesus of Nazareth.
He broke with the received tradition, and he an-
ticipated Bushnell (perhaps following Fenelon) in
his view of religion as an education of the soul
and not a catastrophic conversion. But to educa-
tion in its narrower denotation, as well as in its
wider connotation, he gave much careful thought.
He magnified the office of the teacher (" Remarks
on Education," 1833) as loftily as any teacher
could desire. " There is no office higher than that
of a teacher of youth, for there is nothing on earth
so precious as the mind, soul, character of the child.

308 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

... No profession sLould receive so liberal remu-
neration." He compared the teacher with the
statesman, and affirmed that " to educate a child,
in the true and large sense of that phrase, is a
greater work than to rule a state." His ideal of
a right education was so exalted that it outsoared
our present standards hardly less than those of his
own time. It was strictly an ideal of education,
not an ideal of instruction merely ; of leading out
and not mere building in. It was both intellectual
and moral. " Every school established by law
should be specially bound to teach the duties of the
citizen to the state, to unfold the principles of free
institutions, and to train the young to an enlight-
ened patriotism." Without definitively setting his
face against corporal punishment, he reprobated its
abuse in terms that were not less severe for being
carefuUy chosen. The cruelty of Englishmen as
soldiers and employers, he tentatively ascribed to
the unrestrained and barbarous use of whipping in
their s(jhools. It is surprising that his disapproval
of corporal punishment in schools was not more
absolute. Pleading for the abolition of flogging
in the navy, he said, with characteristic idealism,
" What ! Strike a man ! " To strike a child, if
not the same offence, can hardly be a less. It is
more than probable that Channing's intercourse
with Horace Mann led him to adopt the views of
that great educator opposing corporal punishment
in schools. When the " Examiner " article was
written this intercourse had not begun. Eight

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 309

years later, 1841, he wrote a letter showing what
good subjective reasons he had for his anxiety con-
cerning the qualifications of teachers and their un-
sparing use of the rod.

I look back on no part of my life with so much pain
as on that which I gave to school-keeping. The inter-
val of forty years has not reheved me from the sorrow
and self-rejDroach which the recollection of it calls forth.
. . . I was not only a poor teacher, but what was worse,
my inexperience in the art of wholesome discipline led
to the infliction of useless and cruel punishments. I
was cruel thi'ough ignorance ; and this is the main
source of cruelty in schools.

The letter from which this passage is taken was
in the main expressive of his satisfaction and de-
light in the first normal school at Lexington, of
which " Father Peirce " of blessed memory was
the principal. In the paternal relation between
Mr. Peirce and his pupils he very specially re-
joiced ; also in the precision of his teaching. The
development of the normal school system was very
dear to him from its first inception till his death.
He expected from the rich nothing but opposition
to all plans for universal education. (His distrust
of the rich seems to have steadily increased.) But
he thought they might be conciliated and the poor
advantaged by the multiplication of manual labor
schools. " They are yet in their infancy, and need
many experiments to determine the best modes of
action." On the other hand, child labor in facto-
ries must not be so construed as to deprive chU-

310 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

dren of play and education, and there must be
rigid factory inspection of the conditions of their
work. On similar lines we find him busy with
meetings and circulars (of his own writing) look-
ing to the shortening of mercantile apprenticeships,
with provisions for the extension of educational
opportunities into the earlier business life. His
interest in sailors was not confined to his endea-
vors towards the abolition of flogging in the navy.
His views of educational expansion included these
weather-beaten toilers of the sea. It would, per-
haps, be easier to name the benevolent enterprises
in which Dr. Channing was not a leading spirit
than those in which he was. Father Taylor's
Sailors' Bethel was certainly not one of the former.
He was Father Taylor's first subscriber and his
unfailing friend. His church was the first to
welcome the Bethel minister to plead the sail-
or's cause, and many were the " old sinners from
Beacon Street" whose eyes were moistened and
whose purse-strings were loosened by the strong
appeal. It was one of Channing's great delights
to go to the Bethel and listen to Father Tay-
lor's sea-born eloquence and watch the faces of
the sailors, mobile as the wind-swept sea.^ And
Father Taylor had for him a reciprocal apprecia-
tion, saying, " He has splendid talents. What a
pity that he has not been educated ! " A palpable
hit. He had not been educated in Father Taylor's

^ For the best account of Father Taylor, see Dr. Bartol's
Badical Problems, pp. 323-348.

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 311

way. He had never been to sea except as pas-
senger. He was not, like Dr. Eipley's reprobate
parishioner, " good at a fire." " Strip him of his
protections," said John Pierpont, " and he would
die." On the contrary, his protections were the
sluices that drained off his power. He knew it
to be so, and, hankering for a less sheltered life,
rejoiced that some of his protections were being
broken down.

No account of Channing's interest in educational
reform would approximate completion that did not
emphasize his relations of cordial sympathy with
Horace Mann. Their acquaintance began in 1833,
when Mann had already been in the lower house of
the Massachusetts legislature seven or eight years,
where Channing had watched his exceptionally
honorable course with increasing interest and sat-
isfaction. Mann remained an earnest coloniza-
tionist after Garrison's " Thoughts on Coloniza-
tion " had converted many to a saner mind, and
among these Dr. Channing. In 1834 we find
Mann presiding over a colonization meeting, and,
about the same time, Channing urging upon him
that colonization was " a delusion and a snare,
every freed slave creating a demand for a new
slave to fill his place," thus encouraging slave-
breeding in the South and an illicit slave trade.
When, in 1837, Mann sacrificed his high political
prospects to assume the secretaryship of the Massa-
chusetts Board of Education, Channing wrote him
a letter of enthusiastic approbation. "You could not

312 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

find," he said, " a nobler station. You must allow
me to labor under you according to my opportu-
nities. If at any time I can aid you, you must
let me know." Accordingly we find him shortly
going " into the interior," as he called it, as far as
Taunton, to attend and address a convention called
for the establishment of a county school association.
Going to hear, he stayed to speak, pouring out his
mind in a long extemporaneous speech, of which
an admirable report has been preserved. On the
same principle that he would educate one, he would
educate all. A common nature demanded common
schools, a common education. He had a patient
ear for every enterprise looking to an improved
education, but also had his hesitations and with-
drawals. He dreaded the political bias, and had
good reason to do so, as the event has shown. To
Dr. Dewey, interested in a particular scheme, he
wrote, " It grieves me that I am perpetually taking
views which prevent my cooperation with others."
He was much interested in Bronson Alcott's fine
experiment, but he had his doubts "as to the de-
gree to which the mind of the child should be
turned inward. . . . The [young] soul is somewhat
jealous of being watched ; and it is no smaU part
of wisdom to know when to leave it to its impulses
and when to restrain it." He would respect the
passion of the young for outward things, and not
nourish in them an exclusive spirituality. Chan-
ning's breadth of view, his freedom from one-
sidedness, is conspicuous in his relation to all social

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 313

matters. He conceived of penal legislation and
the treatment of criminals as educational matters,
and his views upon these subjects anticipated the
wiser apprehensions of our new penology. He kept
in touch with the prison reformers in this country
and abroad, reading their publications, correspond-
ing with them, studying their methods. In 1832
he was admitted by special privilege to the cells
of the condemned murderers in the Philadelphia
penitentiary, and his talk with them confirmed
his faith in the inextinguishable spark of good in
every soul.^ He opposed solitary confinement, but
favored the isolation of all prisoners from each
other and their subjection to good influences. He
opposed the monstrous cruelty of compulsory idle-
ness in prisons, little dreaming to what extent this
would be conceded to " organized labor " by our
more recent legislation, single-eyed to the next
voting day. He would have no vindictive and
exemplary punishments, but a prison discipline
looking exclusively to education, industry, and
reformation.

It was said of Lessing that to go back to him is
to go forward, and this might be said of Channing
in respect to many things ; most notably in respect
to his hopes and aspirations for those whom he
called " the laboring classes " — too proud a desig-
nation for the wage-earners to arrogate it to them-

1 " The only bad influences which I saw came from the preach-
ing-, and religious tracts. . . . Truly this plague of Calvinism,
like the vermin inflicted on Egypt, finds its way everywhere." —
Letter of April 10, 1830.

314 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

selves, or for it to be conceded them by those whose
work is salaried, or meets with an irregular re-
ward.i Two lectures, " Self-Culture " (1838), and
" The Elevation of the Laboring Classes " (1840),
were the most eloquent and elaborate expression
of these hopes and aspirations. Mr. Salter writes
that "there are few things more stirring in the
whole Hterature of social reform " than the second
of these addresses, and the praise is well deserved.
But it is no " lonely splendor " that these two ad-
dresses enjoy. They lift themselves in vaster bulk
than any other social utterances of Channing, but
not to a greater height than many of his letters,
sermons, and other writings. Like many other
things that Channing did, they are hard to classify,
so common was it for him to make a clean breast
of his whole social and spiritual philosophy on
every occasion that furnished him with a great
opportunity. I began to write of them when writ-
ing of his educational work, and they would not
have been out of place under that head. But, as
delivered, one of them in a course of " Franklin
Lectures " designed for " working people," and
the other before the Mechanic Apprentices' Library
Association, their fittest place seems at the point

^ The best study of Channing-'s industrial soeiolog-y and social
reform work is that of William M. Salter, now of the Chicago
Ethical Society, which first appeared in the Unitarian Beview,
March, 1888, and afterward in a pamphlet, Channing as a Social
Meformer. This aspect of Channing, he says, still waits its due
appreciation : " My conviction is that Channing- was ahead, not
only of his own time, but ours."

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 315

o£ Channing's engagement in social matters, to
which I have now come. Differing in their details
and manner of treatment, one and the same spirit
breathes through both of these great expressions
of Channing's interest in social and industrial re-
form. Nowhere does his characteristic faith in
human nature lift itself into a purer air, or sing a
braver song. That the ground of a man's culture
lies in his nature, not in his calling, is the central
note, and the first means of self-culture is the
solemn and deliberate determination to make the
most and the best of this nature. Men are not to
cultivate themselves in order to be rich, but in order
to be men. But while going far in the assertion
of man's independence of his economical condition,
Channing stopped short of recommending indiffer-
ence to this. " Improve your lot," he said ; " mul-
tiply comforts and, still more, get wealth, if you
can, by honorable means, and if it does not cost
too much . . . Only beware lest your motives
sink as your condition improves." To the control
of animal appetites he devoted some admirable
pages, with the emphasis on temperance, and a
stouter advocacy of prohibitory legislation than
that of the great " Temperance " address. What
he wrote of the choice of books is much more diffi-
cult of application now than it was then, but still
" the few large stars " shed their unfailing light,
and shame the fire-balloons that are distended only
to collapse and leave no trace. We must let no
book or man, he said, warp us from our own de-

31G WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

liberate opinion. " Even the influence of superior
minds may harm us by bowing us to servile acqui-
escence, and damping our spiritual activity." There
are noble passages on a man's idealization of his
work through its embodiment of justice and bene-
volence, every blow on the hot iron shaping not
only that, but the workman's malleable soul. " It
is strange," he said, " that laboring men do not
think more of the vast usefulness of their toils."
He found in party spirit one of the worst enemies
of self-culture. His early hatred of this spirit was
engendered in the fierce heats of Jeffersonian and
Federalist recrimination, but it was conceived so
rationally that it suffered no abatement in less
stirring times. " Human nature," he said, " seems
incapable of a stronger, more unrelenting passion.
. . . Truth, justice, candor, fair dealing, sound
judgment, self-control, and kind affections are its
natural and perpetual prey." Concluding, he
hailed, as the happiest feature of the age, the pro-
gress of the mass of the people in self-respect, in-
telligence, and all the comforts of life, while still
only a beginning had been made on the right road.
The conclusion is not to be escaped that, as
Channing drew on to the end of his career, his
hopes for the improvement of society centred more
in the poorer than in the better classes. As Paul
turned to the Gentiles, so he to the wage-earners
when he found the rich and cultured unable or
unwilling to translate his spiritual message into the
terms of social justice. It was with him and these

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 317

as with the prophet of old time and those to whom
he preached in vain : " And lo, thou art unto them
as a very lovely song of one who hath a pleasant
voice and can play well on an instrument, for they
hear thy words and they do them not." There was
much complaint that he did not preach " personal
religion " so much as formerly, but preached the
need of social reformation more. Nor can it be
denied that the pain and stress of this need were
on him hard and sore. The accusation that he
brought against the existing order was no mush of
indeterminate words and phrases. " Society," he
said, " has not gone forward as a whole. . . . The
elevation of one part has been accompanied with
the depression of the other. . . . Within the city
walls which enclose the educated and refined, you
meet a half -civilized horde, given up to deeper
degradation than the inhabitants of the wilder-
ness." He found the multitude " oppressed with
drudging toil," that their labor was " a badge of
inferiority," " that wealth forms a caste," that with
the degradation of the laborer's condition, there
was " degradation of mind and heart." He found
" the great features of society hard and selfish,"
and Christianity " so at war with the present con-
dition of society, that it can hardly be spoken and
acted out without giving great offence." " The
cry is," he wrote in 1835, " that ' property is inse-
cure, law a rope of sand, and the mob sovereign.'
The actual present evil, — the evil of that worship
of property which stifles all the nobler sentiments,

318 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

and makes men property, — this, nobody sees : the
appearances of approaching convulsions of pro-
perty,— these shake the nerves of men who are
willing that our moral evils should be perpetuated
to the end of time, provided their treasures be
untouched." On the other hand, his view of the
distribution of property was optimistic even for
the time when he accepted it ; or, if it was not so,
how remarkable, how incalculable, has been the
change ! " The vast and ever growing property
of the country " he declared to be " diffused like
the atmosphere." " The wealth of the rich is as
a drop in the ocean ; and it is a well-known fact
that those men among us who are noted for their
opulence exert hardly any political power." It is
very different now, and it is interesting to imagine
how Channing's powers of characterization and
denunciation would have met a state of things like
that which now prevails. His phrases do not seem
inadequate to this state, and, coming upon them
out of their connection, we might well imagine
them intended to describe its arrogant prosperity
over against the pitiful submergence of many mil-
lions of our civilized communities below the poverty
line.i

The situation, as Channing conceived it, was quite
bad enough, and his dealing with it frequently took
on a revolutionary tone which would be accounted

1 Some 7,000,000 in England and Wales, out of 25,000,000 1
We are doing better in America, but how much, and for how
long? See B. S. Rowntree's Study of Town Life, 1901.

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 319

dangerous, if not anarchistic, by those of our own
time who scent Tese majeste in every honest criti-
cism of public men and current policies. That
lofty indignation of which Channing was so easily
capable and which has been, not unfitly, called
" the wrath of the lamb," found nowhere freer
scope than here. To be surprised at Channing' s
capacity for it is simply not to know what manner
of spirit he was of. The social-industrial status
was for him frankly impossible : it must somehow
be reformed. '' Important changes must take place
in the state of the laboring classes; they must
share more largely in the fruits of their toil and
in means of improvement." " I am a leveller ;
but I would accomplish my object by elevating the
low, by raising from a degrading indigence and
brutal ignorance the laboring multitude." He
would do it with their help, mainly by that ; not
from above, but from beneath, the elevating power.
The revolutionary bogy had no terrors for his
mind. He was well over his misunderstanding of
the French Revolution. He had come to know that
it was worth all it cost ; that the Terror was an in-
cident of a great forward stride ; that the ideas of
'93 had fallen into the ground and died only to
bear much fruit. The revolution of 1830 he hailed
with pure delight. He had no patience with young
Harvard's deadness to the event. " You seem to
be the only young man that I know," said his
young Harvard friend. " Always young for lib-
erty ! " he cried with passionate warmth. He car-

320 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

ried this spirit into the pulpit and fluttered the
congregation with such manly utterance as this :
"I see ... in the revolutionary spirit of our
times, the promise of a freer and higher action of
the human mind, — the pledge of a state of society
more fit to perfect human beings." Again, in the
same discourse : " Men are now moved not merely
by physical wants and sufferings, but by ideas, by
principles, by the conception of a better state of
society, under which the rights of human nature
will be recognized and greater justice be done to
the mind in all classes of the community." No
wrongs done to the body appealed to him as did
the starved and stunted mind. He declared that
the old spells were broken, the old reliances gone.
" Mightier powers than institutions have come into
play among us, — the judgment, the opinions, the
feelings of the many ; and aU hopes of stability
which do not rest on the progress of the many
must perish." " The present selfish dis-social sys-
tem must give way." " No man has seized the
grand peculiarity of the present age who does not
see in it the means and material of a vast and
beneficent social change ; . . a mighty revolution
not to stop until new ties shall have taken the
place of those which have hitherto connected the
human race." " I have no fear of revolutions. . . .
What exists troubles me more than what is to
come." " We must suffer and we ought to suffer.
Society ought to be troubled, to be shaken, yea,
convulsed, until its solemn debt to the poor and

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 321

ignorant is paid." It may be imagined that these
dislocated sentences exaggerate Channing's reform-
atory, not to say revolutionary, spirit. On the
contrary they minimize its force. They are much
more impressive as they are carried along in the
general stream of his discourse and ride its buoy-
ant waves. The fact that they are taken from
many different sources — sermons, letters, and
addresses — proves that they signify no passing
mood, but the continuous temper of his mind.

But although the word " revolution " did not
impress Channing as too large a word, or too por-
tentous, to express the measure and the quality of
the social change which he felt must surely come
to pass, and he contemplated the certain revolution
as " silent or bloody," all the strength of his peace-
loving nature and his peacemaking principles was
on the side of a peaceful solution, if by any pos-
sibility that could be made to meet the exigency of
the case. When in 1841 Orestes Brownson seemed
to recommend an immediate death grapple of the
rich and poor, Channing, who had deeply sympa-
thized with his interest in the " masses," — " an
odious word, as if spiritual beings could be lumped
together like heaps of matter," — took grave of-
fence and pronounced his article at once " shock-
ing and absurd." On the other hand, he found
nowhere so little ground for hope to build upon
as " among what are called the ' better classes.'
These are always selfishly timid, and never origi-
nate improvements worthy of the name." In their

322 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

" want of faith in improvement " he found " the
darkest symptom" of the time, — "that frigid
tameness of mind which confounds the actual and
possible, which cannot burst the shackles of custom,
which never kindles at the thought of great improve-
ments of human nature, which is satisfied if religion
receives an outward respect and never dreams of
enthroning it in men's souls." To whom, then,
should we go for the initial energy of the new
social order ? To those working, however humbly
or obscurely, for " the spread of intellectual and
moral power among all classes and the union of all
by a spirit of brotherhood." Various forms of as-
sociation and cooperation attracted him, as at least
experiments that were well worth the trial. Among
these were Brook Farm and the Mendon " Frater-
nal Community." He wrote to Adin Ballou,^ the
noble founder of " Hopedale," " I have for a very
long time dreamed of an association in which the
members, instead of preying on each other, . . .
should lire together as brothers, seeking one an-
other's elevation and spiritual growth." At the
same time he foresaw the difficulties which were
developed at Hopedale, Brook Farm, in the North
American Phalanx, and other similar experiments.
" There is danger of losing in such establishments
individuality, animation, force, and enlargement of
mind." In the event those who were ground to-

1 Rev. W. H. Fish, now extremely old, -writes me of his visit to
Channing at Newport and of Channing's enthusiastic sympathy
■with his interest in the Hopedale work.

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 323

gether in these social mills did more, perhaps, to
sharpen each others' angles than to rub them down,
but the associations withered as the individual was
more and more. " One of my dearest ideas and
hopes," he wrote, " is the union of labor and cul-
ture^'' and he found " Mr. Alcott, hiring himself
out for day labor, and at the same time living in a
region of high thought, the most interesting object
in our commonwealth.'* He was more interesting
than practical. " Orpheus in the ' Dial ' '* was really
more effective than "Orpheus at the plough," if
less to Channing's mind. The surmise of an un-
friendly critic that Alcott's farming ^ would pro-
duce " very small potatoes " was more than justi-
fied on the material side. Yet such a failure was
more honorable than some of our notorious suc-
cesses.

Far more justly entertained than his interest in
Mr. Alcott's transcendental farming was Chan-
ning's interest in his friend Tuckerman's Ministry
at Large and the general work of the Benevolent
Fraternity of Churches.^ This work did not origi-

1 For the best account of it see Louisa M. Alcott's Transcenden-
tal Wild Oats.

2 See Channing's eulogy on Dr. Tuckerman in Works, and
sketch, with contributory letters, in Sprague's Unitarian Pulpit,
pp. 345-356. Born two years before Channing, he was his Har-
vard classmate and his most intimate friend after the college
days, Jonathan Phillips possibly excepted. After a ministry of
twenty-five years in Chelsea, he came to Boston, and found a place
prepared for him by an "Association for Religious Improve-
ment," which had originated in 1822, and had owed much to the
fostering care of Henry Ware, Jr., of the Second Church. (See

324 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

nate with him, nor, strictly speaking, with Dr.
Tuckerman, but it was Dr. Tuckerman who made
it so efficient that it attracted wide attention both
in this country and abroad, and furnished the in-
spiration and the power of the best work done for
the elevation of the poor for a long time after
Channing and Tuckerman had put off the encum-
bering frailty of the fleshly screen. The good
work still goes on. Channing furnished a useful
balance-wheel to Tuckerman' s impulsive disposi-
tion. These met every week with Jonathan Phil-'
lips to talk over the work. Channing was not
easily satisfied with its results. He wrote Dr.
Tuckerman in 1835, '*As yet, the ministry has
done little for the poor and will do little, if man-
aged on the old plan. . . . You have done good
by approaching the poor with more sympathy and
respect and more of the feeling of brotherhood
than had been expressed before. . . . But what I
want is that you should substitute for vague, con-
ventional, hackneyed forms of speech, distinct, sub-
stantial truths, which the intellect may grasp and
which answer to the profoundest wants of the spir-
itual nature. ... If the ministry shall degenerate
into a formal service or be carried on with no

Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Ministry at Large.)
The birthday of the Ministry at Large was December 3, 1826,
and Dr. Tuckerman was its most representative agent for the re-
mainder of his life, though from 1833 onward his efficiency was
much impaired by broken health. Born January 18, 1778, he
died April 20, 1840, in Havana, whither he had gone in the vain
hope of bettering his health.

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 325

more zeal than the common ministry, it will come
to nothing."^ Hence his interest in Brownson's
" Society of Union and Progress " and his disap-
pointment in its miscarriage. Hence his resolve,
at one time, to establish a Free Church in which
he might utilize his strength for the improvement
of wage-earners and assist their mutual co-opera-
tion, but too little strength remained for such a
task.

A sermon-pamphlet lies before me, browned with
age and mildewed here and there. The sermon
was preached by Dr. Tuckerman at the ordinar
tion of Messrs. Barnard and Gray, November 2,
1834. Dr. Francis Parkman, the clerical humor-
ist, was among those who heard it, and after the
service he said, " Brother Tuckerman, your sermon
was too long. It tired me. Did n't it tire you.
Dr. Channing ? " Here was a net spread in sight
of the bird, but the bird was not to be so easily en-
snared. " /was tired," said Dr. Channing, "before
Brother Tuckerman began." ^ The sermon required
an hour and a half for its delivery, and covers

1 Memoir, in. 51. This passage wiU not be found in the one-
volume edition, in which, quite unaccountably, ten pages of the
earlier edition have been omitted preceding the letter to Dr. Fol-
len, dated March 6, 1837, on page 481. There are many other
omissions, some of them important, all unfortunate. See ii. 390-
397 ; 400-402 ; 414, 415 ; 416-423 ; 425-431.

2 He was not so tired after the sermon but that he could give
a charge of one third its length, one of the strongest of a kind
which reached its climax in his charge to Charles T. Brooks at
Newport, and later, with some changes, to John S. Dwight at
Northampton. See Works, one-volume edition, pp. 88, 283.

326 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

thirty-six octavo pages. But few sermons of that
time were better justified in the demand they made
upon the public mind. " It is difficult," says Dr.
Francis G. Peabody, "to believe that this ser-
mon was preached more than sixty years ago. It
is a sermon for to-day, with a sense of modern
problems and a note of modern interpretation." It
is quite possible that some of its wisdom was of
Dr. Channing's contribution, for just before its
delivery he summoned Dr. Tuckerman for a good
talk about his work, for the support of which the
Benevolent Fraternity of Churches had just been
organized. Nowhere does Channing's mind appear
more soundly practical than in his formulation of
his thought concerning this organization. He was
strenuous for its subordination to the American
Unitarian Association. He believed that a new
life would be breathed into the Association by its
consciousness of participation in so great a work.
To those objecting that the new organization would
acquire a sectarian character from its connection
with the Unitarian Association he replied : —

I cannot consent to this view. I do not believe that
we can or ought to act with other Christians in this
cause. I earnestly desire to cooperate with them as far
as possible. For example, when a particular vice, Hke
intemperance, is to be warred against, we ought to join
with them heart and hand. But when the object is to
improve, elevate, the depressed classes of the community
. . . then we must go to them with our distinctive views ;
not our theological dogmas, but our views of human

THE SOCIAL REFORMER 327

nature, of God's character, of the true perfection of
man, etc., views as distinctive as those of the Trinita-
rians. In this work we ought not to be fettered by
compromise with other sects.

If in this construction there was any defect
of Channing's habitual liberality, we are assured
by it, as we could hardly be in any other way, of
that native centre of his thought to which he held
fast as a ship to her sheet-anchor in the shouting
gale. Fundamental to his social and religious, life
was his confidence in the dignity of human nature,
the greatness of the soul, and the end of all his
labor was a corresponding dignity of human char-
acter, intellectual, moral, and religious. Without
that starting-point, he saw no way to reach this
goal. Hence, a theology centering in a doctrine
of man's total depravity was a complete disqualifi-
cation for the work of social reformation in his
eyes. If this was treason to his unsectarian liber-
ality, those who objected might make the most
of it. So help him God, he could no otherwise.

CHAPTER XI

THE OPEN MIND

Channing's intellectual virtue was the most
characteristic aspect of his life. Were it not for
this, we might be tempted to embrace Dr. Andrew
Peabody's opinion that his preeminence was solely
that of his inclusive range. He was not saintlier
than Gannett or Lowell or Ware, than Dr. Green-
wood or Ephraim Peabody ; he was far less schol-
arly than Norton ; Buckminster was far more the
great pulpit orator, gifted in face and form and
voice as Channing never was ; Ichabod Nichols,
whose glory for the present generation has departed
as if it had never been, was a flame of glowing elo-
quence quite equal to if not surpassing Channing's ;
in sheer intellectual force and philosophical acu-
men. Walker took easily a higher rank; of good
pastors there were many more efficient, partly as
having better health, and partly as being strong in
social gifts and graces, where Channing was ex-
tremely weak, and caring more for people and
persons than he did or could ; small the minority
of faithful antislavery witnesses, himself the judge,^

^ " No sect in this country has taken less interest in the slavery
question, or is more inclined to conseryatism than our body." (Let-

THE OPEN MIND 329

among Unitarian preacliers, and the social height
from which it was projected gave to his testimony
a peculiar force, but Samuel J. May and a few
others were not inferior to him in their devotion
to the hated cause. Dr. Peabody found the signifi-
cance of Channing in his wide inclusion of the
various abilities and gifts which had such vivid
illustration in the several Unitarian ministers he
named. It was here in part, no doubt, but more
distinctly, I am persuaded, in an openness of mind
which would have been remarkable in any time,
and was preeminently so in a time so heavily
weighted with authority and prescription as his
own. Moreover, though there were as good men
as Channing in his generation, there was no other
for whom simple goodness loomed so vast on the
horizon of his mind, as the highest common attri-
bute of man and God.

A great many people in Channing's time had
not so much as heard that there was any ethics of
the intellect. It was his conception of this sphere
that assigned to him his place in the Unitarian
Controversy, that constituted his relation to the
Unitarian body, that made him suspicious of all
sects, that summoned him to the defence of intel-
lectual rights, however jeoparded ; that set a " frohc

ter to Blanco White, Sept. 18, 1839.) To this he added, April 13,
1840, "There are in the body individuals dissatisfied with the
present condition, and anxious for higher manifestations of the
truth and spirit of Christianity. The ministers deserve our great
praise. They seem to me, as a body, remarkable for integrity,
for the absence of intrigue, for superiority to all artifice."

330 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

welcome " in his eyes for all new thought, however
unconventional its dress and speech. It dictated
his letters of 1815 ; it flowered into the lyrical
ardor of his " Spiritual Freedom ; " it inspired
the preface to his first volume of collected sermons
and addresses ; it made him " a party by himself "
to those too resolutely bent on the sectarian organi-
zation of the New Movement ; it elected him the
champion of Abner Kneeland's right to print
opinions which he (Channing) honestly abhorred ;
it inspired his hatred of proslavery mobs ; it kept
his own mind always fresh and growing, until
death, coming untimely, found him

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse.

There was no more schism in the line of Chan-
ning's evolution here than in his social interests ;
much less than in his antislavery development, which
halted visibly between the Eichmond lesson and
that learned at St. Croix. He attained to liberal-
ity of temper while stiU semi-orthodox in thought.
It was far less his intellectual, or even his moral,
revulsion from Calvinism than his belief that new
restraints were being forged for religious thought
that carried him into the Unitarian Controversy.
He so represented it in his famous preface of 1830,
of which we have already taken cognizance ; and
he had anticipated this preface in substance, and
even formally, in a sermon preached to his people
on his return from Newj)ort in 1827. With some

THE OPEN MIND 331

variation in the expression of his life purpose, his
gravitation was habitual to the persuasion that in-
tellectual freedom was the grand object of his best
endeavors, both for himself and for his fellow men.
There was nothing here to contravene his ethical
passion. Without intellectual freedom there could
be, he thought, no unretarded moral victory.

The first of the two great continuous sermons
on Self -Denial anticipated much that was written
on the same subject in the Fenelon article.^ I am
the proud possessor of the manuscript of this ser-
mon, which I have always valued as one of Chan-
ning's greatest and best. Its strength is mainly
spent in a rejection of the idea that we should
" deny our reason." " Never," he said, " never do
violence to your rational nature. He who in any
case admits doctrines which contradict reason, has
broken down the great barrier between truth and
falsehood, and lays open his mind to every delu-

^ The sermon was written in 1825, the article in 1829. On the
back of the manuscript Channing inscribed the names of the
places where it was preached. One of these is Lyons, N. Y., and
thereby hangs a pretty tale. There was never any Unitarian
church in Lyons. How, then, did Channing' come to preach there?
For answer I did not have to go farther than my own life of
Sallie HoUey, A Life for Liberty. Myron Holley, the father of
Sallie, was a free-thinking person, and he held religious services
in his parlor, himself doing the preaching. When Channing was
on his way to Niagara, he persuaded him to stay in Lyons over
Sunday and preach for him in a public hall. Sallie Holley, then
a child of seven or eight summers, walked to the place of meet-
ing with Channing, he holding all the way her hand in his, a
never-to-be-forgotten sacrament. And now I know the very ser-
mon that delighted Myron HoUey's soul that day.

332 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sion. . . . The truth is, and it ought not to be
disguised, that our ultimate reliance is, and must
be, on our own reason. Faith in this power lies at
the foundation of all other faith. No trust can be
placed in God if we discredit the faculty by which
God is discerned. . . . Eeason is the very faculty
to which revelation is addressed." In this connec-
tion occurs one of the passages which has been
double-starred by all those who value Channing's
brave anticipation of the coming things. A thun-
derstorm (I have so read) can be compressed into
a drop of dew. So in the clear transparency of
this passage is gathered up the storm of May 19,
1841, when Theodore Parker's South Boston Ser-
mon split the Unitarian house in twain.

If, after a dehberate and impartial use of our best
faculties, a professed revelation seems to us plainly to
disagree with itself or to clash with great principles that
we cannot question, we ought not to hesitate to withhold
from it our beUef . / am surer that my rational nature
is from God than that any book is the expression! of his
will. This light in my own breast is his primary reve-
lation, and all subsequent ones must accord with it, and
are in fact intended to blend with and brighten it.

It is very interesting to find the sentence I have
italicised abridged in the manuscript, thus : "I am
surer, etc.," as if the rest were something that he
knew by heart.

With this noble confidence in the sufficiency of
reason he was extremely jealous of all limitations
of the free use of reason imposed by creeds and

THE OPEN MIND 333

sects. Hostility to creeds was part of his inher-
itance from the eighteenth-century liberals. They
were devout Scripturalists, and the ground of their
objection to creeds was that only Scripture words
were good enough to express scriptural thought.
" Human creeds " was the formula of the liberal
reproach. Channing entered cordially into this
view, and it never lost its attraction for his mind,
while yet, as time went on, other aspects became
more prominent, especially the barrier offered by
creeds to new invasions of ideas, and the temptation
to insincerity involved in the conflict of the old
creeds with the new light. The best expression of
a distrust to which his writings furnish countless
illustrations, is the article " On Creeds." It is part
of a long letter which appeared in the " Chris-
tian Palladium" of February 14, 1837, and was
addressed to the body of worshippers calling them-
selves " Christians." In so far as the letter is a
criticism of their ways, it has too much of that
ex cathedra tone into which Channing sometimes
fell. The part on creeds is better than the whole.
He complained that they separated men from
Christ ; that the churches drowned his voice with
the clatter of their articles. The believer is told
to listen to Christ, but also told that " he will be
damned if he receive any lessons but such as are
taught in the creed."

I cannot but look on human creeds with feelings
approaching contempt. When I bring them into con-
trast with the New Testament, into what insignificance

334 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

do they sink! What are they? Skeletons, freezing
abstractions, metaphysical expressions of unintelligible
dogmas ; and these I am to regard as the expositions of
the fresh, living, infinite truth which came from Jesus !
... I learn less of Jesus by this process than I should
learn of the sun by being told that this glorious luminary
is a circle about a foot in diameter. . . . Christian truth
is infinite. Who can think of shutting it up in the few-
lines of an abstract creed? You might as well com-
press the boundless atmosphere, the all-pervading light,
the free winds of the universe into separate parcels, and
weigh and label them, as break up Christianity into a
few propositions. Christianity is freer, more illimitable
than the light or the winds. ... It is a spirit rather
than a rigid doctrine, the sj^irit of boundless love. . . .
Who does not see that human creeds, setting bounds to
thought and telling us where all inquiry must stop, tend
to repress this holy zeal [for Christian truth], to shut
our eyes on new illumination, to hem us within beaten
paths of man's construction, to arrest that perpetual pro-
gress which is the life and glory of an immortal mind?

Doubtless the following words were pertinent
when they were written ; but where hundreds then
could feel their personal application, thousands can
do so now : —

If new ideas spring up in the mind, not altogether
consonant with what the creed-monger has established,
he must cover them with misty language. If he hap-
pen to doubt the language of his church, he must strain
its phraseology, must force it beyond its obvious import,
that he may give assent to it without departures from
truth. All these processes must have a blighting effect
upon the mind and heart. They impair self-respect.

THE OPEN MIND 335

They cloud the intellectual eye. They accustom men to
tamper with the truth. In proportion as a man dilutes
his thought and suppresses his conviction, to save his
orthodoxy from suspicion, in proportion as he borrows
his words from others, instead of speaking in his own
tongue ; in proportion as he distorts language from its
common use, that he may stand well with his party ; in
that proportion he clouds and degrades his intellect, as
well as undermines the manliness and integrity of his
character. How deeply do I commiserate the minister,
who, in the warmth and freshness of his youth, is visited
with glimpses of higher truth than is embodied in the
creed, but who dares not be just to himself, and is made
to echo what is not the simple, natural expression of his
own mind ! . . . Better for a minister to preach in barns,
or in the open air, where he may speak the truth with the
fulness of his soul, than to lift up in cathedrals, amidst
pomp and wealth, a voice which is not true to his inward
thought. If they who know the chains of creeds once
knew the happiness of breathing the air of freedom and of
moving with an unincumbered spirit, no wealth or power
in the world's gift would bribe them to part with their
spiritual liberty.

The sect was for Channing only the creed or-
ganized and personalized, and while he did as much
as any to effect the Unitarian differentiation, and
was one of the first cheerfully to accept the Uni-
tarian name for himself and those sharing his
beliefs and principles, his satisfaction with the
Unitarian fellowship was always in proportion to
its worthiness to bear the title given to it by Dr.
Kirkland, " the Unsectarian Sect." If the form
of the body was necessarily sectarian, so much the

336 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

more earnest must it be to prove its unsectarian
spirit, its free assent to truth wherever found, its
cordial recognition of Christian character in asso-
ciation with whatever form of thought. " Think
no man the better, no man the worse, for the
church he belongs to." " On sects, and on the
spirit of sects, I must be allowed to look with grief,
shame, pity — I had almost said contempt." Of
aU human history he found that of the Christian
sects to be the most painful and humiliating.

An enemy to every religion, if asked to describe a
Christian, would, with some show of reason, depict him
as an idolater of his own distinguishing opinions, covered
with badges of party, shutting his eyes to the virtues
and his ears to the arguments of bis opponents, arrogat-
ing all excellence to his own sect, all saving power to
his own creed, sheltering under the name of pious zeal
the love of domination, the conceit of infalUbility, and
the spirit of intolerance, and trampling on men's rights
under the pretence of saving their souls. . . . We see
Christians denouncing and excommunicating one an-
other for supposed error, until every denomination has
been pronounced accursed by some portion of the Chris-
tian world ; so that were the curses of men to prevail not
one human being would enter heaven.

In the spirit of these judgments he sustained a
relation to the Unitarian body that attracted to
him the sympathy of many Unitarians, the doubts
of many more. It might be difficult to bring aU
his utterances on this subject into an appearance
of entire consistency. They reflected different
stages of his experience, different moods of his

THE OPEN MIND 337

mind, different aspects of the Unitarian develop-
ment. He found much to praise in this and some
things to condemn. Especially, as he grew older
in years and younger in spirit, he found himself
out of sympathy with Unitarians whose conserva-
tive temper made them suspicious of all change.
But, again, some of the more conservative were
less sectarian than some others, and so grappled
him with hoops of steel. Octavius Frothingham,
in his " Boston Unitarianism," finds the later Chan-
ning hardly more a representative Boston Unitarian
than young Theodore Parker, who hailed Channing
as the head of a new Unitarianism, the old having
no head. In a great sermon of 1828 Channing
stated his position in terms that would have re-
quired little, if any, modification at any subsequent
period : —

I indeed take cheerfully the name of a Unitarian, be-
cause unwearied efforts are used to raise against it a pop-
ular cry ; and I have not so learned Christ as to shrink
from reproaches cast on what I deem his truth. Were
the name more honored I should be glad to throw it off ;
for I fear the shackles which a party connection imposes.
I wish to regard myself as belonging not to a sect, but
to the community of free minds, of lovers of truth, of
followers of Christ, both on earth and in heaven. I de-
sire to escape the narrow walls of a particular church,
and to live under the open sky, in the broad light, look-
ing far and wide, seeing with my own eyes, hearing with
my own ears, and following Truth meekly but reso-
lutely, however arduous or solitary be the path in which
she leads. I am, then, no organ of a sect, but speak
from myself alone. - —

338 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

In the same spirit we find him writing Rev.
J. H. Thom of Liverpool, after reading the vol-
ume of " Liverpool Lectures," in which Thom,
Martineau, and Henry Giles had made a splendid
defence of Unitarianism from a line much more
advanced than that of the earlier apologists : —

I was glad you did not undertake to defend any Uni-
tarianism but your own. I know that in this way the
benefit of authority is lost, and the unity of the sect is
threatened ; but what unity is of any worth, except the
attraction subsisting among those who hold, not nomi-
nally, but really, not in word, but with profound convic-
tion and love, the same great truths ? I see in these
Lectures the signs of a freer discussion than we have
yet had. ... It is no easy thing to let the [New Tes-
tament] records speak for themselves, to take them as
we find them, to let them say what will injure their
authority in the present state of men's minds.

Of his later inclination to a liumanitarian view
of Jesus, which eventually brought him to this
view, there are many intimations, more particu-
larly in his letters. The letter just quoted has an
important one which cannot but remind us of Em-
erson's regret of the " noxious exaggeration of the
person of Jesus." Channing wrote : —

We are more and more, and very properly, inclined
to rest Christianity on the character, the spirit, the divine
elevation of Jesus Christ, and the tendency of this is
to beget a swollen way of speaking about him and his
virtues, very inconsistent with the simple beauty and
majesty of his character, and which is fitted to throw a
glare over him, and not to present that distinct appre-

THE OPEN MIND 339

hension of him so necessary to a quickening and trans-
forming love. It is an age of swelling words. I must
plead guilt}^ myself, and I am not sure that the Lectures
are free from the offence.

A few months later, September 10, 1841, he
wrote to James Martineau, then preaching at Liv-
erpool, and thirty-six years old : —

Old Unitarianism must undergo important modifi-
cation or developments. Thus I have felt for years.
Though an advance on previous systems, and bearing
some better fruits, it does not work deeply, it does not
strike living springs in the soul. This is perfectly con-
sistent with the profound piety of individuals of the
body. But it cannot quicken and regenerate the world,
no matter how reasonable it may be, if it is without
'power. Its history is singular. It began as a protest
against the rejection of reason, — against mental slavery.
It pledged itself to progress, as its life and end ; but it
has gradually grown stationary, and now we have a ,
Unitarian orthodoxy. Perhaps this is not to be wotP"^
dared at or deplored, for all reforming bodies seem
doomed to stop, in order to keep the ground, much or
little, which they have gained. They become conserva-
tive, and out of them must spring new reformers, to be
persecuted generally by the old. With these views, I
watch all new movements with great interest.

To a friendly correspondent who had written
him that Unitarians might make " many conces-
sions " to the Trinitarians, he wrote : —

It is true I might adopt much of the Trinitarian lan-
guage, not only on the Trinity, but the Atonement. I
could say that Christ died to magnify the law, to satisfy

340 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Divine justice, and that God cannot forgive without
manifesting displeasure at sin. But I cannot think with
Talleyrand, that " the use of language is to hide our
thoughts." Such approximations to those from whom
we really differ seem to me to put in peril our " sim-
plicity and godly sincerity." I know not where they
will stop. They also obstruct the spirit of truth to
which every Christian must be willing to be a martyr.
Still more, the usurpation which demands such con-
cessions is a wrong to our common Lord and Master,
and to the human mind, which must not be debarred
from seeking truth and giving utterance to its deep con-
victions. In saying this I do not speak as a Unitarian,
but as an independent Christian. I have little or no in-
terest in Unitarians as a sect. I have hardly anything
to do with them. I can endure no sectarian bonds.

This letter should make it sufficiently plain that
his great, and perhaps growing, fear that the Uni-
tarian body would be captured by the sectarian
spirit, involved no least distrust of Unitarian opin-
ions as differing from those of the traditional
theology. But some of its expressions have been
exploited for much more than they are worth, with
a view to exhibit Channing as reacting from Uni-
tarian to orthodox opinions. Another letter has
more frequently been put to the same use. It was
written to a Welsh or Irish Methodist, in 1841,
and said : —

I distrust sectarian influence more and more. I am
more detached from a denomination and strive to feel
more my connection with the universal Church, — with
all good and holy men. I am little of a Unitarian, have

THE OPEN MIND 341

little sympathy with the system of Priestley and Bel-
sham,^ and stand aloof from all but those who strive
and pray for clearer light, who look for a purer and more
effectual manifestation of Christian truth.

This letter is explained in part, and mainly, by
Channing's unsectarian spirit, but in part also by
the fact that he was writing to a correspondent to
whom Unitarianism meant exclusively the system
of Priestley and Belsham, with which, because of
its necessarian and materialistic elements, Chan-
ning had " less sympathy than with many of the
' orthodox.' " In other letters to correspondents
in Great Britain, he will be found adapting him-
self to the foreign use of terms. So far was he
from reacting towards orthodoxy that it was, as
we have seen, " Unitarian orthodoxy " that ex-
cited his disapprobation. It was because the Uni-
tarians were not far enough from their traditional
moorings, not because they were too far, that he
visited on them his displeasure and distrust,

James Martineau contributed a similar problem
to the gayety of nations. He was avowedly a
Unitarian in his personal belief, but he did not
believe in any doctrinal basis of religious organiza-
tion, and, consequently, would not connect himself
with any organization, local or general, calling
itself Unitarian. Channing's construction was
much less severe. He was as frankly and clearly

1 The second clause of this sentence, " have . . . Belsham,"
is clearly meant for a restatement of the first, " I . . . Unita-
rian."

342 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Unitarian in his personal opinions as it was pos-
sible for him to be, and his divergence from the
traditional orthodoxy increased as he went on.
Moreover, he was from its beginning a member
of the Unitarian Association, would have been its
first president but for his miserable health, and
was a member of its official board. But he feared
the tendency, real or imaginary, of the new denom-
ination to become a sect in the opprobrious sense
which was so hateful to his mind, and in propor-
tion as he discovered, or thought he discovered,
signs of this tendency, his interest in organized
Unitarianism waned, waxing again at the first
sign of devotion to his ideal ends.

It is, however, necessary to remark that the less
favorable criticisms in the above letters were all
included in the closing period of his life, — its last
two or three years. In the early thirties he cher-
ished a more hopeful view. Sending his book of
1830 to the Baron de G'erando, he said : "I ought
to observe, however, that what is here called Uni-
tarianism, a very inadequate name, is character-
ized by nothing more than by the spirit of freedom
and individuality. It has no established creed or
symbol. Its friends think each for himself, and
differ much from each other ; so that my book,
after all, wiU give you my mind rather than the
dogmas of a sect." Similarly, in a letter of 1834,
to Dr. Lant Carpenter, writing of his " two excel-
lent friends," Phillips and Tuckerman, he says :
"Perhaps these gentlemen have enabled you to

THE OPEN MIND 343

understand American Unitarianism better than
you did before. They are fair specimens of our
body in one respect. I think you must have been
struck with the entire absence of a sectarian spirit
in their habits of feeling and thinking, and it
seems to me that, with our many and great defi-
ciencies, we may be said to be characterized by this
feature. We look at Christianity very much as if
no sect existed, and do not exaggerate the impor-
tance of certain doctrines because they distinguish
us from others." It was a growing sense of disap-
pointment as to these particulars, and, with this,
the growth of what Channing called a " Unitarian
orthodoxy," that tinged his later criticisms of the
Unitarians with reprehension and regret. When
these criticisms were written he had heard the
Unitarian denunciation of Furness's " Notes on the
Gospels " and " Biography of Jesus," the outcry
against Emerson's Divinity School Address and
Parker's South Boston Sermon. He had, more-
over, found little sympathy with his antislavery
ideas and purposes among his ministerial brethren,
and the indifference and opposition of his own
people had cut him to the heart. Then, too, it
should always be remembered that he brought to
the searching of the Unitarian spirit an individu-
alism as aloof as Emerson's from all organized
activity. If the Abolitionists had not been so
effectually organized, the harshness of their arraign-
ment would not have kept him from their fellow-
ship.

344 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

I find no first-hand expression ^ of Channing's
sentiments with regard to Emerson's withdrawal
from his Boston pulpit in 1832 because of his
conscientious inability to administer the Lord's
Supper, but ten years later he met a similar situa-
tion with a simplicity that left nothing to desire.
Frederic Augustus Eustis, a recent graduate of
the Harvard Divinity School, would have com-
memorated the death of Jesus without the custom-
ary bread and wine; whereupon his church was
denied the assistance it would otherwise have re-
ceived and he was refused ordination .2 " Have we
here," asked Channing, " no proof that the Unita-
rian body is forsaking ' its first love ' ? . . . Must
our brethren be taught that on this point they
must think and practice as we do or forfeit our
sympathy? Is this a ground on which to run
up a wall of partition ? Is this to be made a de-
nominational fence by the friends of free inquiry ?
. . . We prove ourselves ' carnal,' outward, earthly,
unspiritual, and sectarian, when, for such cause,
we deny sympathy and aid to single-hearted,
earnest brethren, who are laboring to 'hold fast
the light ' under great discouragements amidst the
darkness of antiquated, intolerant systems of theo-

1 But Miss Peabody remembers " his having expressed great
personal respect for Mr. Emerson's severe sincerity and moral
independence in relinquishing the pulpit of the North Church."

2 He never was ordained, but he fully justified Channing's con-
fidence when he went, among the first, to the Sea Islands on the
Carolina coast, to teach and guide the contrabands in their
" bewildering freedom." He married Channing's daugliter, Mary.

THE OPEN MIND 245

logy." After this, May 11, 1842, we have not
another utterance from Channing in the interests
of religious liberty of equal significance. He could
not have ended on a clearer note, nor on one more
disconcerting to those who would like to believe
that he returned again to the place from which he
set out.

One episode of Channing's later life put to the
proof the reality of his convictions concerning
the practical limits of religious liberty. It is to
the case of Abner Kneeland that I refer. This
gentleman, who had been an orthodox, and then a
Universalist, preacher, was now the editor of " The
Investigator," a sheet which renewed from week
to week the critical manners of Thomas Paine,
but had parted company with his belief in God.
In January, 1834, he was indicted for blasphemy
under three heads, — he had quoted a scurrilous
passage from Voltaire touching the virgin-birth of
Jesus ; he had published an article affirming the
absurdity of prayer ; he had said in a public let-
ter in his paper, " Universalists believe in a God,
which I do not, but believe that their god, with aU
his moral attributes (aside from nature itself), is
nothing more than a chimera of their own imagi-
nation." The case dragged its slow length along
for several years. The prosecuting attorney was
the same James T. Austin who won imperishable
renown at the Lovejoy meeting. In 1838 Knee-
land was finally sentenced to two months' imprison-
ment for having, in the language of the judge, ad-

346 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

dressed to the jury, " wilfully denied the existence
of God." Ellis Gray Loring, foremost in aU good
works, and among Channing's instigators to his
braver things, prepared a petition to the governor
asking that Kneeland's sentence be remitted. The
petition (revised by Dr. Channing) was an admi-
rable statement of the reasons why the publication
of atheistical opinions should not be punished as a
crime. It was signed by one hundred and sixty-
seven persons, and Dr. Channing's name led all
the rest. It provoked bitter attack and a counter-
petition which made the governor's path of duty
plain, and Kneeland's sentence was served out.
Channing, of course, was held responsible, not only
for Kneeland's atheism, but for the scurrility he
had quoted from Voltaire. But none of these
things moved him from his confidence in the essen-
tial justice and wisdom of his course. It can easily
be imagined what a grief it was to some of Chan-
ning's people to have him, not only mixed up in
such a business, but choosing for himself the lead-
ing part. On the other hand, he must have had
the satisfaction of seeing many of their names in
the list following his own.

Attorney-General Austin's scent for heresy was
so keen that in 1834 this devout Unitarian set his
heart on the public prosecution of Rev. George R.
Noyes for denying the New Testament fulfilment
of Old Testament prophecies. This he had done
in an " Examiner " article reviewing Hengsten-
berg's opinions. Either the indictment was quashed

THE OPEN MIND 347

or the due process of law suffered some other
equally efficient check. This incident, which must
have interested Channing profoundly, left no trace
upon his letters that is now discernible. Mr.
Noyes was then a young minister at Petersham,
Mass. ; it was not until 1840 that he became a
professor in the Harvard Divinity School. His
appointment was a sign that the argument from
prophecy for the supernatural character of Chris-
tianity had broken down. For the early Christians,
it was the main argument ; in the eighteenth-cen-
tury conflict of the Christian apologists with the
Deists, it was of equal if not greater prominence
than the argument from miracles. It has now few
to do it reverence. If any one has lingering doubts
he should read Kuenen's convincing " Prophets and
Prophecy in Israel." Beginning with the views
generally acceptable to both the orthodox and the
liberal parties, Channing finally arrived at Dr.
Noyes's view^ of no literal fulfilments, together
with the view of the new orthodoxy that the spirit
of the Old Testament prophets was prophetic, and
dynamically so, of the New Testament religion.

Channing's relations with John Pierpont in Pier-
pont's painful conflict with the distillers and rum-

1 By which he was probably much impressed, for the Examiner
article was a weighty and careful piece of work. He begged Mr.
Noyes to come and see him. He went, expecting to hear much
wisdom. But Dr. Channing's part of the conversation was a long
series of searching questions, in the Socratic manner. I had this
from Dr. Noyes in my Divinity School days. I can hear the sharp
crack of his laugh, as I recall the place and talk.

348 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

sellers of his congregation were of a piece with his
open sympathy with all ministers of religion who,
not content with exalting the beauties of "personal
religion," were resolved to bring their Christian
principles to bear on public interests and social
crimes.^ He wrote to Pierpont in his most perilous
hour, " Sir, should this struggle in your society
result in some ten or a dozen of your most active
opponents withdrawing from your church, and in
others who sympathize with you and sustain your
course, taking their places, HoUis Street pulpit
wiU stand the highest in the city." This apostrophe
was not a little weakened by the second clause.
To drive out the traffickers, to purify the temple,
was sufficient honor. In this incident Channing
saw, beyond the obvious, concrete effect, its illus-
tration of far-reaching tendencies. *' It was very
clear to him," says his nephew, " that the danger
was pressing of a complete subserviency of politics,
the press, public opinion, and the pulpit, to the
insidious tyranny of wealth." If the green tree
impressed him so, what would he now think of the
dry? One of our new writers does not much ex-
aggerate, if any, when he says that the seat of
government is only nominally at Washington ; that
our real governors are those controlling our great
corporate interests. Channing's forecast was in

^ It is related of Dr. James Walker that his confinement of his
calling to the sphere of " personal religion " was so close that he
did not permit himself to vote, fearing that such political action
would infect the simplicity of his office with a grievous taint.

THE OPEN MIND 349

no particular more just than when it troubled him
with visions of these things. He was a Cassandra
to his generation : his prophecy was not believed.
It would not be, if uttered now. But that they
were not believed was not the only peculiarity of
Cassandra's prophecies; another was that they were
justified by the event.

In no respect did Channing make better proof
of open-mindedness than in his relations with the
younger men who from 1830 to 1840 were striking
out upon new paths, and his relations to the new
movements, social and religious, which at that
time were springing into manifold and hopeful
life. Like Franklin, he would fain have lived to
enjoy the fuller vision of the coming times. His
"enthusiasm of hope " was to him " the evidence of
things not seen," but not the " substance " that he
craved. " You young thinkers," he said, " have
the advantage over us in coming to the words of
Scripture without superstitious preoccupation, and
are more likely to get the obvious meaning. We
shall walk in shadows to our graves." But he
did his best to dissipate the shadows, not only here,
but in all his mental processes. " It is a good
plan," he wrote, " ever and anon to make a clean
sweep of that to which we have arrived by logical
thought, and take a new view ; for the mind needs
the baptism of wonder and hope to keep it vigorous
and healthy for intuition." Again he wrote, " I
owe the little that I am to the conscientiousness
with which I have listened to objections springing

350 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

up in my own mind to what I have inclined and
sometimes thirsted to beheve, and I have attained
through this to a serenity of faith that once seemed
denied in the present state." It was in the spirit
of these various expressions that he met the bearers
of new light, making no base surrender of his long
cherished opinions, but bringing them patiently to
the test of such as seemed fairly to challenge them.
Orestes A. Brownson was a thinker whose in-
tellectual proportions have, perhaps, been obscured
for us by his perpetual motion from one point of
belief to another. His religious consciousness was
a dissolving view, and those who have read the
three big octavos that repeat the story of his
changeful life need not be told that its essential
restlessness did not cease when, in 1845, he joined
the Roman church. He was bound to be a free-
thinker, whether as Unitarian or Roman Catholic ;
and when the Roman Curia took offence, he kissed
the rod, and sinned no more — till the next time.
He described himself as having, at one time or an-
other, accepted and vindicated nearly every error
into which the human mind had ever fallen. From
his early Presbyterianism he passed to Universal-
ism, and then quite beyond the Christian pale, en-
gaging with Robert Owen and Fanny Wright in
their schemes of social regeneration. About 1832,
Channing's " Likeness to God " appealed to him
so powerfully that following up its lead, he became
a Unitarian, and the minister of a Unitarian
church. As an enthusiastic convert, but more as

THE OPEN MIND 351

an apt student and interpreter of Joiiffroy and
Cousin, and especially because of his desire to
bring home his new gospel to the poorer people
of Boston, Channing was deeply interested in him
and in his " Society for Christian Union and Pro-
gress," to which he preached from 1836 to 1843.
But his polemical temper was not at all to Chan-
ning's mind, and some of his rasher utterances
gave Channing' s waning confidence a serious
check.

Dr. Furness had a strong personal attraction
for Channing, who welcomed his "Notes on the
Gospels " as containing " the best biblical criticism
he had ever seen," but did not find his naturalistic
explanation of the miracles satisfactory, or even
well supported. On the other hand, the concession
to the sensible miracle in Martineau's " Rationale
of Religious Inquiry " seemed to him " a jump
backwards" from his (Martineau's) claim for in-
tuitive inspiration. Without ever abandoning the
New Testament miracles, Channing completely re-
versed the traditional view, holding them as sub-
stantiated by the truth of Christianity, and not as
substantiating it. " Sartor Resartus " took him
completely by storm, " not as giving him new ideas,
but as a quickener of all his ideas," its perfectly
original way of expressing spiritual truth. When
the " Dial " began to count the hours of the new
day, Channing was at first very hopeful, but after-
ward, like Parker, disappointed. He had great con-
fidence in Henry Hedge's character and culture, and

352 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

wished he might see more of him. For another
enterprise with which George Ripley was identi-
fied, — its inspiring soul, — Channing's hopes were
not extravagant, yet very high. I mean Brook
Farm. He distrusted absolutely the competitive
system of trade, and doubted a man's ability to
engage in it without loss of personal integrity. But
what attracted him most to Brook Farm was the
promise it held out of a blend of intellectual and
manual labor. For all his hesitations with the
Abolitionists, he found, in 1841, " but one de-
cided step towards a higher practical manifestation
of Christianity, and that is Abolition.'''' Then
he remembered the Adin Ballou community, and
added, " I look to that with a good deal of hope."
But that Brook Farm was then hardly begun, he
would have added that also. " I never hoped," he
said, " so strongly and so patiently." The Char-
don Street Convention, that astonishing aggrega-
tion of reformers and fanatics which Emerson
described with equal sympathy and humor in the
" Dial," found Channing there to listen, if he could
not approve the general drift, and quite unscared.
Some resented a moderator as an infringement of
their perfect liberty, but a wiser sentiment pre-
vailed. He could hope more from the soil that
yielded such vagaries than from Beacon Street
respectability. " Nothing," he said, " terrifies me
in these wildest movements. What has for years
terrified and discouraged me is apathy,'^

Between him and Emerson there was always

THE OPEN MIND 353

mutual appreciation. " In our wantonness," said
Emerson, " we often flout Dr. Channing, and say
lie is getting old ; but as soon as he is ill, we re-
member he is our bishop, and that we have not
done with him yet." Channing's deafness kept
him from Emerson's early Boston lectures, but
Channing's daughter heard them with great joy,
and Emerson graciously lent her his manuscripts
to read to her father, whose own idealism and in-
dividualism responded heartily to their main intent.
For his opinion of Emerson's Divinity School
Address, of July 15, 1838, which we now rank
with Channing's Baltimore and Parker's South
Boston Sermon as the second part of the great
trilogy of liberal religion, we are indebted solely
to Miss Peabody's recollections and notes made at
the time. The main impression is of the extraor-
dinary meekness and patience with which he sub-
mitted to her long drawn series of questions. Those
who have fancied in him an attitude of intellectual
superiority should read this " diligent inquisition,"
and also how he once read a sermon to Mr. Nor-
ton for his critical opinion, which, to Dr. FoUen,
who was present, seemed like "sacrilegious ice"
on Channing's fervent heat. What emerges from
Miss Peabody's report is that Channing found him-
self in essential agreement with the Address, but
deprecated its indifference to the miracles and
other facts of the New Testament narration. He
thought Henry Ware fighting a shadow when con-
tending against Emerson's denial of the personality

354 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

of God. Channing found personality in tlie Ad-
dress. He thought, considering on what basis the
Divinity School was founded, that Mr. Emerson
would have been more courteous if he had given
the Address elsewhere. Miss Peabody told him
of her begging Emerson to print " Friend " in
" friend of souls," describing Jesus, and how Em-
erson said, " No, if I do that, they will all go to
sleep ; " to which Channing smiled and said, " To
purify men's love of Jesus, it may be in some in-
stances desirable not to think of his individuality.
Perhaps Jesus meant to express this when he said
to his personal disciples, ' It is expedient that I go
away from you. Unless I go away, the Comforter,
which is the Sjnrit of Truths cannot come.' " ^

When in 1841 James Freeman Clarke returned
from Kentucky, where he had made his " Western
Messenger" the organ of Channing's antislavery
opinions and started Emerson's " Humble-Bee "
on its long upward flight, he went about to form
a society in Boston on original lines. Its support
was to be voluntary, its worship congregational, —
the people sharing in the hymns and prayers, —

1 One often feels that Miss Peabody mixes herself unduly with
what she professes to report, and I have followed her only to
the extent of her evident congruity with Channing- as directly
known. I have been surprised to find how large was W. H.
Channing's unacknowledged debt to her journal in the Memoir.
Miss Peabody published her Eeminiscences in 1880, thirty-two
years after the Memoir. If but an indifferent Boswell, we can-
not be too grateful for the words and traits she has preserved.
Moreover, the impregnable rock of Channing's letters crops
through in many places.

THE OPEN MIND 355

the method social ; that is, there were to be fre-
quent meetings for conversation on subjects of vital
interest. The programme sounds innocent enough,
but to the average Boston temper of the time it
was a daring innovation. To Dr. Channing it
opened a prospect that delighted him. He wel-
comed Mr. Clarke to frequent consultations as to
the best ways and means. He encouraged his Fed-
eral Street parishioners and members of his family,
his brothers and his son, to become members of the
new society. When the question was a declara-
tion of faith, it was Channing who took the larger
and more spiritual view. Mr. Clarke's formula
was " Our faith is in Jesus, as the Christ, the Son
of God ; " Channing preferred " in Jesus as the
divinely appointed teacher of truth." " He said,"
wrote Mr. Clarke, " that the danger would be a
tendency to conform to the old established ways,
as the mass exerted a great power of attraction.
He said again, emphatically, that we must be more
afraid of formality than of eccentricity."

One of the attractions of the West Koxbury
parish for Theodore Parker in 1837 was that Dr.
Channing would be near for counsel and encourage-
ment, and the event fully justified his hope. He
made daring inroads upon Channing' s isolation,
but was always cordially received. They discussed
" conscience," and Channing's was the more mod-
ern, scientific view. They talked over Strauss's
" Life of Jesus," which Parker reviewed for the
" Examiner " with more smartness than appreciar

356 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

tion, and Channing "observed very arcMy that lie
should not be vey^y sorry if some of Kneeland's fol-
lowers would do it into English," a sentiment that
should afford a moment of refreshment to those
whom Channing's moral elevation tires. Parker
was convinced that a young man with Channing's
liberal opinions and reformatory spirit " could not
find a place for the sole of his foot in Boston,
though half a dozen pulpits were vacant." But
Parker's South Boston Sermon did quite as much
to set the edge of Channing's Christian supernat-
uralism as to prove his sympathy with courageous
thought. He wrote, —

The great idea of the discourse — the immutableness
of Christian truth — I respond to entirely, and I was
moved by Parker's heartfelt utterance of it. Still there
was a good deal in the sermon I did not respond to.
I grieved that he did not give some clear, distinct expres-
sion of his belief in the Christian miracles. ... I see
not how the rejection of these can be separated from the
rejection of Jesus Christ. Without them he becomes a
mere fable ; for nothing is plainer than that from the
beginning miracles constituted his history. . . . With-
out miracles the historical Christ is gone. ... In regard
to miracles I never had the least difficulty. The grand
miracle is the perfect, divine character of Jesus. . . .
He was the sinless and spotless Son of God, distin-
guished from all men by that infinite pecuHarity, free-
dom from moral evil.

In his next following letter Channing made the
necessary criticism on this view of the miraculous
sinlessness of Jesus : " Thousfh he came to be an

THE OPEN MIND 357

example, yet in tlie points in whicli we so much
need an example, — in our conflict with inward
evil, in our approach to God as sinners, in peni-
tence and self -purification, — Uq wholly fails us.^^
He certainly does if his perfection was miraculous.
But Channing goes on to say that " tJieforination of
Ms character^ though wholly unknown to us, was
wholly free." Here is a tangled web of various
inconsistencies. If we know nothing of the forma-
tion of Jesus' character, how can we know that it
was wholly free? And, if it was wholly free, how
does the example fail ? And why should the unique
result be regarded as miraculous, if the process
was wholly natural? Channing was wiser in his
spontaneous utterance than in his more deliberate
speech. What a man cannot help saying is the
right measure of his thought. And Channing
could not help saying that Christ's character was
imitable both in its process and result. Hence his
great sermon on the imitableness of Christ's char-
acter, his great doctrine that all minds are of one
family, and a hundred similar things. In the very
letter I have quoted, he glides into his deeper mood
by irresistible attraction : " To my mind he [Jesus]
was intended to be an anticipation of the perfec-
tion to which we are guided, to reveal to us what
is in germ in all souls." " As to Mr. Parker," he
said, " I wish him to preach what he thoroughly
believes and feels. I trust the account you re-
ceived of attempts to put him down was in the
main a fiction. Let the f uU heart pour itseK forth !

358 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

... I honor his virtues, and I earnestly desire for
him that illumination which will make him an un-
mixed blessing to his fellow creatures." It was a
great misfortune for Parker and the Unitarians
that Channing did not live to see his (Parker's)
controversy with them come full circle. Surely his
benign influence on those engaged in that contro-
versy would have been an inestimable boon.

To those well acquainted with the course of
Channing's life and mind, many illustrations of his
open-mindedness wiU occur which I have not set
down. To take some and leave others was made
compulsory for me by the limitations of my space.
For they are not here or there, but everywhere in
his sermons, letters, talk. The style, in this sort,
was the man. I do not know of any one to whom
we can go with better certainty of encountering a
mind so open to all truth, so cordial with all hon-
est thought and generous action, that it is a per-
petual invitation to the communion of that church
which is transcendant of all sectarian divisions, —
the most petty, and those of deeper grain which
break up the unity of religion into the great reli-
gions of the world.

CHAPTER XII

THE PERSONAL ASPECT

As Channing's life drew past its mid-career, and
stretched forward to the untimely close, the look
of AUston's picture gradually faded from his face
and made way for those stronger features and
those deeper lines which are preserved for us in
the admirable portrait by GambardeUa, painted
in 1839. The deepening hollows in the cheeks
made the cheekbones more prominent and threw
the good straight nose into more sharp rehef, while
the increasing pallor of his countenance gave the
large sunken eyes even a more wonderful expres-
siveness than that of their earlier light. The sick
look hovered most about the mouth, qualifying its
natural firmness with tremulous and pathetic lines.
Matter of fact people called this face emaciated
and cadaverous ; the more poetic fancied an at-
tenuation of the bodily substance that revealed a
spiritual presence with the least possible obstruc-
tion.

Those who had known Channing only by hear-
say or his books, when they first met him or saw
him, were surprised, if not disappointed, to find
the physical man so incommensurate with his spir-

360 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

itual mate. " What ! " cried a big foreign admirer,
meeting him on the threshold of a friend's house
at Portsmouth, and holding out his arms as if ex-
pecting Channing to run into them, " What ! The
gr-r-reat Dr. Channing ! " A better known story
is that of the Kentuckian who, when told how
slightly he was built, could not believe the report.
" Dr. Channing smaU and weak ! " he cried ; " I
thought him six feet at least, with fresh cheeks,
broad chest, a voice like that of many waters, and
strong-limbed as a giant." There was less and
less sign of the sick man in the printed and the
spoken word as time went on and the sickness
actually increased. And somehow the informing
soul habitually triumphed over its frail tenement,
and gave assurance of abundant strength. " He
was a man of delicate frame," said Dr. Dewey,
"but of a great presence."

The catalogue of his infirmities is a long and
weary one, and, if he had been as watchful of his
sensations as some of our later literary invalids,
his memoirs would have been mainly pathological.
Dyspepsia, lassitude, insomnia, nervous excitement,
and depression were the peculiar notes that were
repeated endlessly in various combinations. A
good night's sleep was something calling for spe-
cial thankfulness. The sermon that was a delight
in the preaching set his pulse flying and put brain
and stomach out of gear. Greater exertions had
to be paid for in the coin of many sleepless nights.
In 1826 he writes, " I know not when I have been

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 361

so well as now, but I am not sanguine. Life and
health are most uncertain. But I am not the
less grateful for a bright and vigorous day because
it gives no pledge of many such to come. The
very feeling of the uncertainty of life increases its
value. I certainly do enjoy it highly." ... In
1827, "I have borne so long the burden of that
half -health, which makes a man unable to say
whether he is sick or well, and which restrains all
the soarings and continued efforts of the mind,
that I earnestly desire some release from it." Once
he writes (1831), "I have experienced during this
depression of the body, what I have sometimes
known before, — a singular brightness and clear-
ness of mind on the most interesting subjects. . . .
May it not be that, in this depression of the ani-
mal life, the mind is more free from the influence
of matter, is more itself, and gives us some earnest
of what it is to be? " But he did not often lay this
flattering unction to his soul. He had got well past
the " spite of this flesh " asceticism of his youth,
and looked to his best health for his happiest in-
spirations. As earl}^ as 1830 he ceased to hope
for any permanent improvement. " In another
world I trust that I shall renovate my youth ; but
for the present I must try to keep a sound mind in
a weak body." His steady purpose was to husband
his resources. To some he seemed to be always
carrying himself on a pillow, and perhaps less
babying would have been better, but he certainly
did not " enjoy bad health," and his self-tending

362 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

was the best trap he could devise to catch a few
more working hours. Dr. Dewey says that from
motives of prudence he sometimes changed one
coat for another ^\e or six times a day. A robust
satirist said that he had a different wrap for every
point of the compass, and I can testify that they
were many, judging from that variety which I have
seen, almost too sacred for my touch. But then
it should be remembered that his walks often took
him past that corner where Thomas G. Appleton
advised that a shorn lamb be tied, so that passers-by
might get the benefit of the attempered wind.
" Why do you not go out, sir, and take a walk ? "
said a parishioner who found him miserable and
depressed. Channing pointed a tragic finger to
the vane of Park Street Church and said, "Do you
see that ? " " Yes," answered the parishioner, " I
see it, and it has been stuck fast and pointing north-
east for a fortnight." Then Channing sallied out
and found the warm south wind turning the Com-
mon green.

The Newport summers lengthened out until each
took nearly half the year, and even when in Boston
Dr. Channing's appearance in his own pulpit was
infrequent for some years before his death. Dr.
Gannett not only bore the main burden of the
preaching ^ until his own strength, miserably over-

1 Dr. Gannett's manuscript record of his preaching from 1824
to 1842, the period of his joint ministry with Channing, puts me
in complete possession of the facts. The little brown book is a
pathetic testimony to his minute carefulness. In 1824, Dr.
Channing preached eleven times ; in 1825, sixteen ; 1826, twenty-

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 363

taxed, was broken, and after it had rallied, but all
the parochial work, for which he was much better
fitted than Dr. Channing, too cloud-wrapt in his
great soaring thoughts to respond quickly to the
personal appeal and reach a human hand. It is
hard to conceive that Channing was ever a good
pastor, and he did not improve in proportion to his
increasing engrossment in the large, social aspect
of religion. " I am strong," he said, " before the
multitude, but weak before the individual." He
had no skill to meet his visitors halfway or to
come down to the level of their interests. Espe-
cially do those in sorrow require a lively sympa-
thy rather than a lofty generalization. Channing,
standing in the midst of a heart-broken family,
and saying, " What a mysterious Providence ! " is
not an edifying spectacle.^ It is a mistake, how-
ever, to imagine that Channing's nature was not

six (this year and the next two were his most active years) ; 1827,
twenty-six ; 1828, twenty-seven ; 1829, twenty-two ; 1830, eigh-
teen ; 1831, fourteen (he was in the West Indies from November,
1830, to June, 1831); 1832, six; 1833, nine; 1834, six; 1835,
nine ; 1836, five (the record breaks o£B March 20, and is not
resumed till December, 1838. In the mean time, Dr. Gannett
was in Europe, trying- to recover his lost health. How much .Dr.
Channing- preached in his absence I have no means of finding out,
but there was certainly no regular dependence on him) ; 1839,
five times; 1840, four; 1841, not once ! 1842, twice, the last time
on his sixty-second birthday, April 7. It should be remembered
that there were two services each Sunday. Channing seldom
preached in the afternoon, when Dr. Gannett, after preaching in
the morning, generally exchanged. It should also be remem-
bered that Dr. Channing did more preaching than this record
signifies, — considerable away from home.

2 Henry T. Tuckerman, Characteristics of Literature, p. 71.

364 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

emotlonaL It was profoundly emotional, and what
seemed lack of emotion was habitual self-control.
He was stoical in his seK-suppression. When told
of FoUen's dreadful death, he buried an agonized
face in his hands for a few moments, and when he
spoke again it was with a steady voice. When an
ominous crack ran through the Old South Church
and a great panic ensued, he stood gazing quietly
about him, as if without anxiety. He was, per-
haps, too exigent in his demands on others for
a self-control as quiet as his own. When Doro-
thea Dix accompanied him and Mrs. Channing to
St. Croix, suffering from an intolerable languor,
she became, she writes, " the unfortunate subject
of Dr. Channing's jests." " ' My dear,' he says
to Mrs. Channing, ' where can Miss Dix be ? But
I need not ask; doubtless very busy as usual.
Pray what is that I see on yonder sofa, some object
shrouded in white? Oh, that is Miss Dix after
aU. Well, well, tell it not in Gath! How are
the mighty fallen ! ' " The saints often have this
exacting temper. In Channing it implied some
lack of personal imagination ; perhaps the penalty
of the chronic invahd's preoccupation with his own
feelings. He was stern with petty exhibitions of
half voluntary nervousness. When almost every
one in the church was coughing, he said : " This
coughing is sympathetic. I will pause till it has
ceased." The ensuing stillness was not so mirac-
ulous as it appeared. Dr. Furness says that Chan-
ning's people hardly dared to breathe when he

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 365

was preaching, and that sometimes, at the end
of a great passage, you could hear the long-held
breath escaping in a general sigh. If his anti-
slavery action meant some personal alienation, his
great and growing fame assured him an overflow-
ing congregation whenever it was known that he
would preach.

I have taxed the kindness of my friends in
making out the order of Channing's domestic
transmigrations. They have been for me through
the dusty volumes of the Boston Directory, and
not much is left in doubt. From the Berry Street
parsonage he removed after his marriage to the
house of his wife's mother on Mt. Vernon Street ;
next, to a house on Beacon Street, where now
stands the Athenaeum, having there his own home ;
and there his children were born. He probably
remained there until he went to Europe in 1822.
After his return, he went again to the large Gibbs
house on Mt. Vernon Street, and continued to
live there until his own house was built next door,
on the Gibbs house land, in 1835. There were
no changes after that. Miss Peabody writes of a
period of residence in Hamilton Place, dictated by
a desire for a less comfortable and pleasant life
than that with Mrs. Gibbs, and the house prov-
ing very smoky, his purpose was the better served.
But of this experiment the Boston Directory gives
no sign, nor any book or memory which I have
explored. Our most lively picture of the family
circle is furnished by an autobiographical fragment

366 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

from the pen of William Henry Clianning. But
it does not carry us beyond " the Federal Street
[Berry Street] parsonage, where all was so simple,
quiet, and plain."

My grandmother [Channing's mother] was mirthful
and witty, loved her grandchildren dearly, and rejoiced
to welcome them ; and nothing could have been kinder
than all my aunts and uncles. They were jovial,^ free-
spoken, fond of humor, keen at retort in the family
circle, and much laughter intermingled with their ear-
nest discussions. Still, the mere sense that this was
the parsonage, the recollection that the beloved saintly
brother was engaged in his study above, or gone out upon
his pastoral round, and might at any moment appear,
either from his books or his visits, gave a certain sedate
gravity to the manners of the family circle. And under
the commanding charm of his presence, and without
any wish on his part to curb hilarity, tones became sub-
dued and movements more tranquil, and mild pleasantry
took the place of harmless mirth. He was far removed,
however, from austerity, sadness, or depression, and he
greatly enjoyed the good laugh and sharpshooting of
raillery and badinage, indulging in occasional sallies
himself.

Few of these have been preserved, his judicious
refusal to be involved in Dr. Parkman's criticism
of Dr. Tuckerman's sermon having an almost soli-
tary conspicuity. His patience under severe trials
of this virtue, while certainly remarkable, was not
quite absolute. I have long cherished a story,
which I have never seen in print, but which bears

1 The context shows that Dr. Channing was not included in
this characterization.

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 367

upon this point. Dr. Tuckerman, on one of his fre-
quent visits, enquired for Mrs. Channing, and was
informed that she had gone to Newport to open the
house for the summer. " Alone ? " asked Dr. Tuck-
erman. Dr. Channing assented, and Dr. Tucker-
man, responding, said, " Do I understand you to say
that Mrs. Channing has gone into the country alone
to open the house for the summer?" "That is
what 1 said, Dr. Tuckerman." " Well, Dr. Chan-
ning," said his friend, " you will permit me to say
that / should not think of asking Mrs. Tuckerman
to go into the country alone to open the house for
the summer." Then Dr. Channing laughed his
small, dry laugh and said, " Very likely. Dr. Tuck-
erman; and, if you should, most probably she
would not go^ Whereupon questions of large
public interest were taken up. He was certainly
ungracious when he said, after a vain attempt to
make himself clear at one of the women's meet-
ings, " I wish women had more mind." We need
not imagine what " lightnings of his holy wrath "
would have shrivelled any one who had presumed
to tell him " a good story " of the evil kind, for we
cannot imagine any one so foolish as to do that.
But he had a modest repertory of stories which
had tickled his own fancy, and which he could
tell with good effect. A favorite one was that
of the milder brother who sat under his own pul-
pit while Tennent, the great revivalist, dealt dam-
nation from it with unsparing hand, until mercy
prevailing over justice, the good man slowly rose

368 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

and said : " Brother Tennent ! Brother Tennent !
Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no physician
there?" 1

The main impression that one gets of the Chan-
ning household in its successive stages is that of un-
limited talk. The accounts of Channing's conver-
sational attitude differ so much that we are obliged
to believe that it had much variety. Some found
him the monologist, and others the Socratic ques-
tioner. Some could not get on with him at all, and
others found themselves in heavenly places, hearing
cherubic things. Thirsty for fresh knowledge, let
him suspect a weU of it, and the part of wisdom
seemed to be to pump and pump. Whether the
visitor was swift to hear, or to speak, made a great
difference. So it happened that Dr. Noyes was
grieved because he heard so little, and Dr. Hedge be-
cause he heard so much. Said Dr. Hedge : " There
was no gossip at Dr. Channing's ; the conversation,
if you could call it conversation, was always on
some high theme. But, in truth, it was not conver-
sation : it was simply a monologue by Dr. Channing
himself. This, or something about it, led you to
feel very much dissatisfied with yourself when you
came away. He did not pay the slightest atten-
tion to anything you said. If you asked a question,
he probably did not answer it ; he went on talking
on the thing which interested him." It should

^ See Channing as a Man in Elizabeth P. Channing's Kindling
Thoughts. She speaks from her own recollections of her father's
" brother William."

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 369

be noticed that this is Dr. Hale's report of Dr.
Hedge, and something of the genial latitude of the
former's style has, perhaps, qualified the latter's
more exact discrimination. Our best reports of
Dr. Channing's talk are Miss Peabody's, and they
represent him as " receiving with meekness the
engrafted word," a good listener, eager to get at his
interlocutor's point of view, and to meet her objec-
tions, which were many, fairly and squarely.

Dr. Dewey's personal recollections of his friend
are an invaluable resource. He occupied Dr.
Channing's pulpit while he was abroad, and
preached for him often before the European jour-
ney, — not only for him, but to him. This was
no easy matter. " With him in the pulpit," one
preacher said, " my text might be ' Forgetting the
things that are behind,' but I could n't forget
Aim." His first criticism on Dewey's preaching
was, " You address yourself too much to the imagi-
nation and too little to the conscience." Dewey
found the singular weight of Channing's judgment
in its intrinsic worth and in the slow carefulness
with which it was put forward. " It came in as
a kind of reserved force that decides everything."
Of his conversation Dr. Dewey says : —

It was, indeed, altogether a most remarkable thing ;
and yet I do not know that I would purchase it at the
price he paid for it. He stood alone — I found him
embosomed in reverence and affection and yet living in
a singular isolation. No being was ever more simple,
unpretending, and kindly-natured than he, and yet no

370 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

such being was surely so inaccessible — not that he was
proud, but that he was venerated as something out of
the earthly sphere. Scarcely any of his professional
brethren, even those for whom he had the highest esteem,
had any familiarity or any proper freedom with him.
Even Henry Ware, possessing in so many respects a
kindred nature, said, " I go to Channing ; I listen to
him; I go away; that is all." One felt it necessary to
sit bolt upright in conversing with him, and to strain
his mind as to a task. ... In a quiet and low tone,
with little variety of intonation, without passion, without
a jest, without laughter, without one commonplace re-
mark, he went on day after day, either pursuing some
one theme, as he often did for days, or, if descending to
lower topics, always surveying them from the loftiest
point of view, and always talking with such mental in-
sight and such profound emotion as penetrated the heart
through and through. There was a kind of suppressed
feeling about him, far more touching than any other
manifestation could be. . . . It was long before I could
lounge upon the sofa, as I talked with him, and say
what I pleased. . . . Nobody, I think, ever threw an
arm around his shoulders. Nobody, I imagine, ever
said, on entering his study, " How d' ye do, Channing ? "

Dr. Dewey was curious to see if his biography
would exhibit Mm as ever writing, " My dear
Jonathan " or " My dear Phillips " to his nearest
friend. He was confident that it would not, and
his confidence was justified by the event. Pro-
fessor Woodberry reminds us that while the apostle
"handled the Word made flesh," no one ever
handled Dr. Channing. Yet he was averse to all
stiffness and formality, disliked his "semilunar

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 371

fardels," and would have been plain " Mr. Chan-
ning." He heartily disliked the isolating tendency
of his character and mourned pathetically, " I am
too serious^ His was a painful apathy to little
things, and to many things which were not little to
others, though they might seem so to him. What
seemed inattention was often abstraction, or the
stream running underground. Sometimes the
questioner would have his question answered after
he had himself forgotten it. At one time Dr.
Dewey found him in a small tenant's house in
Newport, close by the sea, " passing his days," he
said, " in questionings and doubts." Asked if his
doubts concerned religion, he said, " No, my doubts
are about myself." It was during this same visit
that Dr. Dewey, after a two days' stretch on one
deep theme, said to Dr. Channing, " I cannot bear
this any longer ; if you persist in talking in this
way, I must take my leave of you and go home."
" "Well," said Dr. Channing, " let it all drop ; let
us talk about something else." But in a little
while he was back again on the long trail of his
persistent thought.

We get glimpses of a less exacting seriousness
in the Boston evenings devoted to such "light
literature " as " Wilhelm Meister " and Schiller
and Richter and Wordsworth and Shelley, Miss
Peabody doing the prose reading, Channing him-
self the poets, with many a pregnant comment.
His judgment of Goethe was by no means so harsh
as we should anticipate. Indeed, for all the exi-

372 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

gency of his moral standards, his Christianity was
too closely identified with that of Jesus for him
to be otherwise than considerate of men's faults.
When the strain of " Wilhelm Meister " proved
too great, he would say, " Let us have something
a little more enlivening," and Miss Mitford's
sketches were brought on. He found Bulwer's
novels distressing and delighted in the humanity of
Dickens, and, bating his sentimental feudahsm, in
Scott's crowded and adventurous page.

Channing's domestic happiness was perfect, and
overflowed in many expressions of gratitude and
satisfaction in his correspondence with his friends.
The bright, sympathetic wife, " a great beauty " in
her younger days, abounding always in a noble
dignity and charm, suffered much from rheuma-
tism, affecting particularly her hands and eyes,
and her most scrupulous care was to keep him as
much in the dark as possible as to her disability
and pain, while guarding his own health and com-
fort with like assiduity, doing her good to him by
stealth. Had he known how much he was being
cared for, he would straightway have rebelled. He
wrote, in 1834 : —

Our cup runneth over. Life is truly a blessing to us.
Could I but see others as happy, what a world this
would be ! But it is a good world, notwithstanding the
darkness hanging over it. The longer I live, the more
I see the sun breaking through the clouds. I am sure
the sun is above them.

The " exuberant, irrepressible animation " of his

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 373

children was to him a source of mingled wonder
and delight. " The holiday life of my children
strikes me as a mystery. . . . Perhaps I do not
enjoy it less for comprehending it so little. I see
a simple joy which I can trace to no earthly source,
and which appears to come fresh from heaven. It
seems to me, I could never have been so happy as
my children are. I feel as if so bright an infancy,
though not distinctly recollected, would still offer
to memory a track of light ; as if some vernal airs
from that early paradise would give vague ideas
of a different existence from the present." He
talks of " romping " with them, but it must have
been with a restrained hilarity, even when " play-
ing horse " and being driven by his coat-tails
round the room. It was his wife who was sur-
prised in the act of playing horse upon all fours
when a small grandchild had been left to her pecu-
liar care. To no subject did he give more attention
than to his children's education. Miss Peabody
was one of their teachers and Miss Dix another,
and they enjoyed his constant interest in their
work. We find him sitting at his children's feet,
trying to learn the secret of their light-hearted
freedom from all care, and so become more child-
like in the Heavenly Father's house.

Natural influences were always congenial to
Channing's spirit, and to see him at his best upon
the personal and social side, we should see him in
his Oakland ^ " garden," as the whole farm was

1 After the death of Miss Sarah Gibhs it was sold to Mr.

374 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

called, so dominant was its garden cultivation.
Channing was never so poetic in his sensibility and
his expression as in that pleasant haunt. His
annual migrations thither began with his married
life, and his absence from the city was much
lengthened out after the division of his work with
Mr. Gannett. Only the French Revolution of 1830
drew him back to the city in early September, that
he might pour out his soul in sympathy with the
revolutionists. The household was made up more
numerously and variously than promised well for
Channing's peace of mind. Miss Gibbs owned the
farm and ran it ; her mother was the presiding
genius of its hospitality, and the house was always
kept well fiUed with guests. A family of six, with
their own purse and table, did the domestic work,
ruling inviolate an independent realm. But this
populous aggregation did not trouble Channing in
the least. He particularly enjoyed the expansive
hospitality of the house ; the children it included
most of all. Miss Gibbs was such a devout Episco-
palian that she would never go to hear Channing
when he preached in the vicinity, but their mutual
respect and affection easily stood the strain of her
rigidity. Moreover, she had confidence in his
moral judgment, and when her haymakers, for whom
she had provided good coffee, struck for rum, she

Perry Belmont ; by him to Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt. Mr. Alfred
Vanderbilt, the present owner, is contemplating alterations so
elaborate that the original house will be quite hopelessly ob-
scured.

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 375

went to her brother-in-law and said, " What should
you do, William, if the hay were yours ? " "I
think I should hold out, Sarah," he replied, and she
did so at some loss, through damage to her crop.

Channing among his trees and flowers was capar
ble of a sensuous joy of which he had no call to be
ashamed. He said, " I sometimes think that I
have a peculiar enjoyment of a fine atmosphere.
It is to me a spiritual pleasure rather than physi-
cal, and seems to be not unworthy of our future
existence." Again, he wrote, " What a blessing
such a day as this ! So much a creature of the
senses am I still, that I can find on such a morn-
ing that it is easier to hope in God, and to antici-
pate a boundless good for my race." " How can I
convey to you the music of the trees this moment
in my ear, made by a fresh south wind after a
shower last night? And yet this is one of my
events." " I almost wonder at myself, when I
think of the pleasure the dawn gives me after
having witnessed it so many years. This blessed
light of heaven, how dear it is to me ! and this
earth which I have trodden so long, with what af-
fection I look on it ! I have but a moment ago
cast my eyes on the lawn in front of my house, and
the sight of it, gemmed with dew and heightened
by the shadows of the trees which fall upon it,
awakened emotions more vivid, perhaps, than those
I felt in youth." He questioned the wisdom of the
ancients in speaking of their Mother Earth. " She
is so fresh, youthful, living, and rejoicing ! " But

376 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

then so fruitful, too, and so exuberant. So keen
was Channing's sensibility to natural beauty that
sometimes it was more than he could bear ; even the
sight of a beautiful flower, as I have already quoted,
giving him bodily pain. Again, the natural beauty
bred in him a kind of ecstasy which dissolved the
substance of the world into a clear transparency ;
" Do you understand me, when I say that this solid
earth and all that it contains seem to me more and
more evanescent at the very moment that they re-
veal to me the Everlasting? " But for the most
part the beauty aU around him at Oakland quieted
his fluttering pulse and gave him calm and poise.
From his long retreats, he went back to the city
with a de\vy freshness on his mind, and with the
salt air reminiscent in the tang of many a bracing
thought.

He was an early riser at Oakland, and the late
sleepers were often wakened by his quick step along
the garden walks, as he sallied out before break-
fast, under his broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, to
taste the sweetness of the morning air. Little
went on in tree or shrub or flowering plant of
which he was not weU aware. His morning greet-
ing was a benediction upon each in turn, received
after the night's separation as new gifts from God.
His simple breakfast eaten, he went off to his study
for an hour's meditation, and from this came back
to lead the family in their morning prayers. We
have no happier glimpse of him than as engaged
in these, the Bible open on his knees, some child

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 377

beside him whose little hand he guided, as he read,
across the page. Strong men stood in awe of him,
but little children ran into his arms. " Oh, this is
heaven! " said one whom his "benignant gentleness "
had completely won, and another in a competitive
examination as to what heaven would be like,
said, " Newport and all the folks." The prayers
were no conventional exercises of devotion. The
Bible reading habitually invited some brief com-
ment, expressed in (Parker's the phrase) " words
so deep that a child could understand them." He
was never more a child himself than when going
down with all that he could muster to the beach,
there to catch the sharp buffet of the big waves
rolling in. Any roughness that he could bear was
a delight to him, compensating him a little for
that scant hundred pounds which was his ordinary
weight. He liked to ride in a rough farm wagon
and be well shaken up. Happy the child or grown
person whom he invited to accompany him in his
quaint old " one-horse shay." One of my people
remembers meeting him on one of these excursions
wearing a green veil, — to keep the dust out of his
throat. He was driving alone when he met Eliza-
beth Buffum,^ then a little girl and most unhappy
because she had not been able to withstand the en-
ticement of a ripe peach which had tempted her
over a garden wall. Channing took her into his
chaise, received her pitiful confession, and induced

1 Best remembered as Elizabeth Buffum Chace, a woman good
to know, faithful in antislavery and in all good reforms.

378 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

her to go with him and make it to the owner of the
peach-tree. Her daughter, who tells me this, does
not tell me whether the pangs of remorse antici-
pated the eating of the fruit or followed that in
due course. All that is pleasantest in our knowledge
of Channing's early life comes to us from the talk
with which he entertained a favored guest as he
drove with her from Portsmouth to Newport and
along other beautiful Rhode Island ^ ways.

Within a mile of the homestead there was a lit-
tle " Christian " church ^ upon a seaward hill, which
was open to preachers of aU sects, but to no one
but Channing when he was staying at Oakland. It
was so voted every year. Fishermen and farmers
made up the congregation, in which Channing took
sincere delight. The preaching here was extempore
and of a simplicity which we are told was very
beautiful, but there is no record of it remaining.
It troubled Channing that it drew fashionable peo-
ple from Newport to overhear it. Simple as it
was, some of the ruder sort could not endure the
strain, and would go out, take a turn round the
meeting house, and come back refreshed and ready

^ " My residence," he wrote to Miss Baillie, " is in the very
centre of this beautiful island, five miles from the town [New-
port]. ... In natural beauty my island does not seem to me
inferior to your Isle of Wight. In cultivation it will bear no com-
parison. . . . Here I spend four or five months annually, enjoying
my tranquillity almost too much ; almost reproaching myself for
being so happy, when I am doing so little for the happiness of
others."

2 Still occupied by a " Christian " Society, the most thriving on
the island outside of Newport.

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 379

for a little more instruction in righteousness. Sun-
day morning often found Channing in the Newport
church after its dedication to Unitarian uses, in
1835. When the covenant was submitted to his
approval, he objected to the expression, " believing
in one God, the Father," fearing, says Mr. Brooks,
that the anti-Trinitarian phrase " might, by any
soul, be felt to carry with it a rigid and frigid ex-
clusiveness, and set orthodoxy of opinion above the
filial and fraternal spirit." Once a year, at least,
Channing preached for his young friend, and once
he turned to good account the stamping of the
horses, outside. Speaking of the indifference of
the wealthy to the moral evil in the community, he
said, " They are as indifferent to it as the very
animals that stand waiting for them at the church
door." He not only gave Mr. Brooks the charge
at his ordination, the same as that to John S.
D wight (see " Works "), but he officiated at his
marriage. Carefully bestowed in the bridegroom's
pocket was a wedding ring, but on the way to
church Channing inquired if that symbol might
not be dispensed with. Mr. Brooks immediately
assented. The lady was not consulted, any more
than the notorious Frenchwoman as to whether
she would be born. She told me that her good
opinion of Dr. Channing was sensibly diminished
by that summary treatment of her wishes as a
negligible quantity.

There are those who have the gift of making
friends, but no corresponding power of keeping

380 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

them. Channing reversed this order. His friends,
in any intimate sense, were few, but their friend-
ship was of long continuance, only death severing
the bond. We have apparently exhausted the list
when we have named Jonathan Phillips and Joseph
Tuckerman : adding Charles Follen from a date
not long subsequent to his arrival in this country.
And Phillips and Tuckerman were Channing's
college mates, and his friendship with them began
under the coUege elms. " Know him ? " said Dr.
Tuckerman. " He, Mr. PhiUips, and I are like
three spirits in one." They were three little men,
and in conversation their thin voices were high-
pitched, and they often talked with so much ear-
nestness and vehemence that to those in an adjoin-
ing room they seemed to be quarrelling. And, in-
deed, their talk was no " mush of concession." Dr.
Tuckerman sometimes got out of patience with Dr.
Channing for thinking so much of his preaching,
and saving himself for it, and Dr. Channing, as we
have seen, challenged Dr. Tuckerman's effusiveness
and demanded proof that he was not pitying away
poor people's self-reliance. The friendship of these
men was based upon a common interest in great
moral and social questions. We find no element
of cordiality in their relations. Dr. Channing's
letters to Dr. Tuckerman are careful disquisitions ;
they have nothing of the freedom, spontaneity, and
variety which assure to personal correspondence its
interest and charm. Channing's admiration for
Mr. Phillips was very great ; he thought him " a

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 381

remarkable man." " He is one of the intuitive men
whom I take delight in much more than in the
merely logical." Mr. Phillips's estimate of Chan-
ning was one of Emerson's favorite examples of
what understatement could effect. Speaking of
Channing in a circle of his admirers, Mr. Phillips
said, " I have known him long, I have studied his
character, and I believe him capable of virtue."
In his college days, Phillips was sceptical and athe-
istic. Later, by way of Bacon, he came round
to Christianity, joined Channing's church, and
became one of his deacons. His early influence
on Channing was depressing. " His was an imagi-
nation that hung the whole universe in crape."
There were recurrent periods of pessimistic gloom,
with threatenings of mental aberration. His spe-
cial care for Dr. Channing was to preserve him
from the ecclesiastical temper. Paradoxical as it
may seem, he sometimes found Dr. Channing hy-
perclerical, and would say to him, " You know,
you are a clergyman." Miss Peabody recollected
Channing as once replying with some sharpness,
" Yes, I know it, and always remember the dis-
advantage."

Channing's friendship with Dr. Pollen dated
from 1827, when Miss Cabot, the noble woman
whom Dr. Pollen married, brought him to one of
Channing's conversational meetings. The subject
was the death of Jesus, and Dr. Pollen took part
in the discussion. Silence followed his remarks,
until Channing rose abruptly, and with unconscious

382 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

eagerness pulled out his watch. Upon this hint,
the company broke up, and Channing, making a
push for Dr. Follen, seized his hand, and said,
" Sir, we must know each other better." The
friendship thus begun grew warmer till the tragic
end. It was through Follen that Channing made
his closest approaches to the Abolitionists, with
whom FoUen identified himself, holding their doc-
trines with some personal modifications. I have
seemed to find in Channing' s later thought more
of FoUen's than of any other personal influence.
Those tendencies in his preaching which were de-
plored as transcendental were quite surely, in some
measure, developments of germs which fell into
his own from Follen's fruitful mind.

Channing's literary friendships were without
any sentimental implication whatsoever. His let-
ters to the Misses Koscoe, to Miss Martineau, to
Miss Baillie, to Mrs. Hemans, to Miss Aikin, and
other English friends, have, as a rule, no personal
warmth. They are serene and delicate disclosures
of his thought upon the great social and religious
themes which were never absent from his mind.
But to Miss Martineau, soon after her return to
England, he wrote, in answer to a letter from her
that touched him with its peculiar kindness, " I
thank you for this expression of your heart. With-
out the least tendency to distrust, without the least
dejection at the idea of neglect, with entire grati-
tude for my lot, 1 still feel that I have not the
power which so many others have of awakening

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 383

love, except in a very narrow circle. I knew that
I enjoyed your esteem, but I expected to fade with
my native land, not from your thought, but from
your heart. Your letter satisfies me that I have
one more friend in England." It is a pathetic,
almost tragical appearance that Channing presents
to us, — isolated at once by his own diffidence,
" this tyrant which has palsied and unmanned me
often enough," and by the awe which he inspired
by his impressive moral elevation. Both feared
and fearful, it is not strange that once we find him
crying out upon his lonely Kfe with passionate re-
gret.

He enjoyed much companionship for which
" friendship " would be too large a designation.
Such was his relation with Lydia Maria Child,
with Dorothea Dix, and with Elizabeth Peabody.
From him, but more from his impassioned col-
league. Dr. Gannett, Miss Dix took gratefully
that sacred fire with which she sought to illumi-
nate the darkness of disordered minds. Miss Pea-
body's relation to Channing remains somewhat
enigmatical when we arrive at her last page. Clearly
she was most serviceable to him, but sometimes
superserviceable. She copied forty of his sermons,
he, meantime, translating Plato's dialogues to her
out of a French version into his own lucidity of
phrase. He doubted her ability to copy, and at
the same time attend to his translation. No won-
der, but she convinced him she was equal to the
test. But if Channing' s patience with her chirp

384 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

and twitter was so complete as we are permitted to
infer from her report, it must have been a virtue
of peculiar strength. A few times it failed him,
when she brought to him the gossip of the town :
once that Garrison had said that he was " living in
luxury on the price of human blood," and again that
he was penurious and had accepted her service with-
out proper recognition and reward. In regard to
the former item, Channing asked, " Have you any
authority but rumor for saying that Garrison made
the gross charge against me ? To rumor I give no
weight. I do not believe that he said this." ^ Re-
garding the second charge, Channing wrote, " Is
it not possible that you talked confusedly of your
circumstances and your copying for me, so that
some one's stupidity misconstrued your language
into an imputation on my honor ? . . . But can-
not you avoid talking about me ? . . . Miss Mar-
tineau was not so much to blame. I find by her
letter to me that there is a very strong and wide
impression of my personal meanness in the expend-
iture of money. There is, indeed, no point of
character on which I should not sooner have ex-
pected an attack. . . . Money has always seemed
to me what it is, and so little value have I attached

1 Miss Peabody adds, " I think it appeared in the Liberator."
If so, it has escaped the patient scrutiny of Mr. W. P. Garrison.
The charg-e was based on the fact that Channing's father-in-law,
Mr. Gibbs, of Newport, owned a distillery, and sold his rum
(Channing' is speaking) " to a firm supposed to be engaged in the
slave-trade." The rumor, probably, intended that the rum was
exchanged for slaves according to the custom of the time.

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 385

to it, that I cannot ascribe to myself any merit or
virtue for giving it away. My principle is to spend
my whole income, without reserving anything. For
me to accumulate would be morally wrong." We
have, in another letter, the means of adjusting this
statement with Channing's relation to his wife's
property. That he always considered exclusively
her own, and congratulated himself on his freedom
from her financial cares. But to save nothing was
her rule as well as his. The injurious report seems
to have arisen in the spite of some person whose
vanity he had offended.

The last years of Channing's life were enriched
by a correspondence with Joseph Blanco White, a
man of profound religious nature and of a religious
experience so wide that it included Rolnan Catholi-
cism and an anti-supernatural Christianity within
its two extremes. His best title ^ to fame is his
great sonnet " To Night," one of the most perfect
sonnets in English literature, though written by a
man of Spanish birth and education. His " Life,"
edited by J. H. Thom, mainly autobiographical, is
one of the most significant disclosures of religious
experience ^ ever given to the world. White's pro-

^ Another is his leading part as a friend and aider of Dr.
Thomas Arnold and a founder of the Broad Church School in
the English Church. See passim, R. W. Church's Oxford Move-
ment.

2 Published in 1845. It was Lucretia Mott's most precious
book, and as such, she held it in her hand when having her por-
trait painted. She gave me her copy a few years before her
death, when the book had become extremely rare. I have no
possession that I value more.

386 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

longed sickness and suffering gave ample scope to
Channing's sjrmpatliy. In one of his earlier let-
ters lie writes, " So long as we can tliink clearly,
we can carry on the great work of life, we can
turn suffering to a glorious account, we can gather
from new triumphs over the body a new conscious-
ness of the divinity of the spirit." In a later one,
" Your experience differs from mine, for I have
had little acute pain. I do not know that I ever
suggested to you a fancy that has sometimes come
into my head. I have thought that, by analyzing
a pain, I have been able to find an element of
pleasure in it. I have thought, too, that, by look-
ing a pain fuUy in the face and comprehending it,
I have diminished its intensity. Distinct percep-
tion, instead of aggravating, decreases evil. . . .
The power of distinct knowledge in giving courage
I have never seen insisted on, and yet it is a part
of my experience." In the same letter there is a
good criticism of Don Quixote. He venerates the
knight too much to laugh at him, and wonders if
Cervantes, beginning with a lower conception, did
not find a higher stealing on him as he went along.
After the death of White, Channing wrote an
English friend, "Perhaps you hardly knew how
dear he was to me. I had never seen him, but the
imagination and the heart had woven a tie as strong
as real intercourse produces." The " Life " of
Blanco White is much fuller than the Channing
" Memoirs " in its revelation of the mutual regards
of these truth-loving souls. It has the advantage

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 387

of producing both sides of the correspondence.
This was Channing's closest contact with a non-
miraculous Christianity. He held fast the integ-
rity of his own position, saying, " I need miracles
less now than formerly ; but could I have got
where I am, had not miracles entered into the past
history of the world ? " (" Yes, indeed ! " writes
Lucretia Mott in the margin.) Throughout the
correspondence White impresses us as the acuter
intellect, but not as the more open mind. Chan-
ning's final impression of White appears in a letter
to Mr. Thom, White's most intimate Unitarian
friend and biographer : —

I have sometimes observed on the beach, which I
am in the habit of visiting, a solemn, unceasing under-
tone, quite distinct from the clashings of the separate,
successive waves ; and so in certain minds I observe a
deep undertone of truth, even where they express par-
ticular views which seem to me discordant or false. I
had always this feeling about Mr. White. I could not
always agree with him, but I felt that he never lost his
grasp of the greatest truths.

In general, Channing's correspondence with Eng-
lish Unitarians must have done much to modify
his impression of their character. They were the
people who knew and honored Garrison, and they
brought to Channing a sympathy with his anti-
slavery sentiments which shamed the apathy of
his Boston parishioners and friends, and atoned for
certain theological defects. If the Priestley tradi-
tion was materialistic and necessarian on the intel-

388 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

lectual side, on the moral side it always made for
political and religious liberty and for humane sym-
pathies with the victims of injustice and oppres-
sion ; and these things counted as the " weightier
matters " in the scales of Channing's habitual dis-
crimination.

At this stage of my attention to the personal
aspect of Channing's life, a generalized conception
of the man may not be out of place. What are
the conspicuous physical and intellectual and moral
notes that constitute the impression which we have
so far received? First, an iU-constituted body.
Certainly that ; and, while we must concede some
gracious quality to his defect, — the delicacy and
refinement that are the pallid flowers of such an
organization, — he was condemned by it to a clois-
tered virtue, lacking the red blood that would have
carried him out into the big world and have given
color to his style, concreteness to his illustrations,
experience to his abstract morality, greater effec-
tiveness to his social and public influence. It is
hard to strike the balance, but it is permitted us
to believe that without being differently made, just
with his natural health unspoiled, he would have
been — I play with Matthew Arnold's phrase —
a not less beautiful but more effectual angel, bear-
ing upon his luminous wings a fuller message to
mankind.

InteUectuaUy, Channing has enjoyed the emi-
nence which, like that of an isolated mountain, is
relative to the low-lying plain. His measure was

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 389

taken at a time when Boston was emerging from
an intellectual mediocrity to which Fisher Ames
bulked as another Burke or Cicero or Demosthenes,
while denominational pride did much to aggravate
the miscalculation and to pass it on. But, com-
pared with the great intellects of the centuries, his
intellectual ability makes as modest an appearance
as his intellectual acquirements compared with
those of the great scholars. We have only to com-
pare him with Martineau, to find him vastly over-
topped. He had moral, not intellectual, imagina-
tion, and his reputation for poetical sensibility and
expression reflects the meagreness of American
poetry in his time. The passages in his works that
were esteemed poetical by his contemporaries now
affect us as rhetorical. His strength as a writer
was quite independent of those curious felicities of
style which make a picture for the eye, a tremor
for the heart. On the other hand, his was a re-
markable sanity of mind, incapable, for example, of
those vagaries which disfigured the more powerful
intellect of Priestley with incidents that were gro-
tesque.i

He gave to Christian supernaturalism so rational
an interpretation that for as many as believed with
him it lost all its grossness. He had a genius for
prolonged and serious meditation, and this it was
that gave to his thought a personal quality, a real-

^ Such as his predicting the second coming of Jesus within
twenty years, and his finding prophecies of Nelson and Napoleon
in the Old Testament !

390 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

ity, tliat is not to be escaped . Much in the body
of his speculative opinion we can parallel in the
writings of his contemporaries and near predeces-
sors; but before he called it his, and passed it on
as such, he brought to it the broodmg tests of many
silent hours. He made it his own by the serious-
ness and intensity of his appropriation. This in-
tellectual virtue was at the bottom of that oracular
manner in which many found the pride of intel-
lectual superiority.^ It will not do to say that his
persistent " I " meant nothing more than that he
was speaking for himself and relieving others of
responsibility. It also meant that he was speaking
from the depth of personal conviction ; that with a
great price he had bought this freedom from the
bondage of contemporary sect and creed.

But Channing's preeminence in his own genera-
tion, and his abiding claim upon our admiration
and our reverence are far less intellectual than
moral and spiritual. It is in fact the moral temper
of his mind, its openness to fresh conviction, that
is its most impressive trait. The moral uses of
the intellect were to him subjects of his constant
interest. That miserable antithesis of intellect and
virtue, in which weak-minded persons frequently
indulge, had for him no attraction. It was signifi-
cant that " mind " was his inclusive word, taking
up intellect and conscience into its capacious

1 While yet it would have been strange had not the immense
homage paid to him as a great spiritual director infected his self-
consciousness to an appreciable degree.

THE PERSONAL ASPECT 391

breadth. Intellect and morals existed for him only
in an indissoluble unity. But spirituality was his
most characteristic note. He was not under the
law, but under grace. He was in love with good-
ness, enamoured of perfection. He was a man of
the beatitudes, so many of them found abundant
illustration in the habits of his life. The blessing
of the peacemakers was upon him ; the blessing of
the pure in heart. But his peculiar blessing was
that of those who hunger and thirst after right-
eousness. If Channing did not do this, no man
ever did. And, according to the promise, he was
filled.

This brings us to the most interesting and sug-
gestive criticism ever made on Channing, that of
the anonymous critic who said, " He was kept from
the highest goodness by his love of rectitude." This
meant, perhaps, that morbid introspection of his
conduct checked his spontaneity ; that he wasted
in trying to he good the strength which had been
spent to better advantage in trying to do good. It
is doubtful if this criticism ever fairly applied to
Channing. In his most introspective period, he
brought his being good to the test of doing good
with unswerving resolution. But if the meaning
was that Channing's passion for the perfect form
of social rectitude kept him back from that " high-
est goodness " which is coextensive with the best
practicable course of action, the criticism may,
perhaps, be accepted as a valid one. The indicated
fault is not, however, one from which society or the

392 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

individual suffers mucli. They suffer every day
an hundred times as much from a too easy accept-
ance of an imperfect form of action as the best to
which they can attain. They make the practicable
the excuse for avoidable misdoing, the grave of the
ideal.

CHAPTER XIII

THE LAST STAGE

Channing's mother had died May 25, 1834, the
period of her widowhood having extended over
more than forty years. She was buried in the
Cambridge churchyard by her mother's side, — the
mother who had died so young. Channing's life
had been closely interknit with his mother's. Al-
ways, when returning from Newport, he went
straight to her for a long talk, and thereafter
counted that day almost as bad as lost that did not
find him at her side. The day after her death,
writing to a friend, he cried out : " Who can be
to me what she has been? To whom can I be
what I have been to her ? " He could think of her
last years with great pleasure and thankfulness.
" Her character seemed to improve, which is not
the ordinary experience of age : " he must be the
moral judge even in his filial sorrow. " She ex-
tended, instead of narrowing, her interests, and
found an increasing happiness in her social affec-
tions." Her conversational vivacity attracted many
friends, "yet it never seemed to enter her mind
that she was capable of giving pleasure. She
ascribed to the pure good wiU of others what was

394 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

chiefly owing to herself. I look on her last days
as her best days. . . . The winter of her age
seemed warmed and brightened with the fervor
of youthful feeling."

It was, perhaps, Channing's sense that, by the
death of his mother, he had become the head of the
family, which instigated him soon after that event
to establish himself in his own house, a new and
spacious one,i on land which the Gibbs mansion
had to spare. In June, 1835, we find him writing
to a friend : —

So you are building a house. By what sympathy is
it that we are both carrying on the same work at once ?
I hope, however, your practical wisdom has kept you
from my error. My house threatens to swell beyond
my means, so that I cannot think of it with a perfectly
quiet conscience. This is the only point in which I am
in danger of extravagance. I spend nothing on luxu-
ries, amusements, shows. My food is the simplest ; my
clothes sometimes call for rebuke from affectionate
friends, not for their want of neatness, but for their
venerable age. But one indulgence I want, — a good
house, open to the sun and air, with apartments large
enough for breathing freely, and commanding some-
thing of earth and sky. A friend of mine repeated to
me the saying of a child, — " Mother, the country has
more sky than the town." Now I want sky, and my
house, though in a city, gives me a fine sweep of pro-
spect, and an air almost as free as the country.

1 No. 83 Mt. Vernon Street. Quite recently, Mr. William H.
Baldwin occupied it for some years, and few could have enjoyed
that privilege with more reverent appreciation. Mr. Baldwin's
service in the Young Men's Christian Union has been exactly in
the line of one of Channing's dearest hopes.

THE LAST STAGE 395

Given " a good house " and ample sky, and he
could say, " I wish more and more a simple, unos-
tentatious way of living. . . . My aim is to spend
nothing on myself which health and usefulness
do not require. . . . Were I entering on life,
instead of approaching its end, with my present
views and feelings, and with no ties, I should
strive for a condition which, without severing me
from society, would leave me more free to act from
my own spirit, to follow faithfully and uncompro-
misingly the highest manifestations of virtue made
to my mind. ... I cannot wear costly garments
when I see such a man as Allston scarcely able to
live. What a disgrace it is to Boston that the
greatest genius of this country in his department
should be in want ! Millions are spent on decorar
tion every year, but nothing is given to him. I
would have our private dwellings simple, but our
public edifices magnificent models of taste, and
ornaments to the city. I would have a public
gallery freely open. We should not keep pictures
at home, or more than one, perhaps, and the rest
should be for the community. . . . The way to be
comfortable here is to live simply." He deprecated
expensive furniture as of the least possible value,
but several articles of his that I have seen are
very beautiful, and would be highly appreciated
by those in search of " heirlooms, but not of their
own family." It is evident that his simple tastes
were sometimes inhibited by a higher power.
Boston had grown (1835) to be a city of 77,000

396 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

inhabitants, yet some people were not satisfied.
They wanted a railroad to connect the city with
the West, and double the population. " "What
good is to come from this great accumulation of
people I do not see." " But if I did not love and
honor Boston, I would say nothing of its defects.
... I would leave it for no other place under
heaven." The pessimists, despairing of progTess,
were, he said, its greatest bane.

Exhilarated by his morning bath, he often had
some early hours of glowing mental satisfaction.
His first business was to write down the good
thoughts that had come to him in his sleepless
hours ; the next to read a chapter or two of the
New Testament in the original Greek ; these things
before breakfast, after which he led the morning
devotions, in no perfunctory manner, and then
went to his study. Jonathan Edwards, on his
meditative walks, used to pin pieces of white paper
to his clothes to keep his better thoughts in mind.
He must have come home looking like a feathered
creature. Channing was content to interleave his
books with slips of paper, on which, reading with
pen in hand, he wrote the criticisms and sugges-
tions proper to the book under his eye. These slips
were afterward assorted and labelled with much
care. He waited patiently for his better hours of
final composition, and did not force his mood. " I
have great faith," he said, " in inspiration ; but it
is a fruit and reward of faithful toil, not a chance
influence entirely out of our power." Once he

THE LAST STAGE 397

had written anything, and more especially when
he had printed it, he dismissed it from his thoughts,
comparing himself to the bird that no longer cares
for her offspring when they have taken flight.

Noon found the morning's joyful vigor spent,
and then he welcomed Jonathan Phillips for a walk
along the Common's pleasant edge ; before coming
home browsing awhile in the Athenaeum over the
foreign papers and reviews, and visiting parishion-
ers, especially such as were in poverty or any per-
sonal distress. After dinner, he took to the sofa and
invited sleep, but often found the goddess invita.
At sunset, he betook himself to some upper chamber,
where he could look out over Charles River's broad
expanse, and the wide sweep of the hills to which
he had lifted up his eyes under Judge Dana's
willows in his college days. In the spring and
autumn, his habit was to share this quiet hour
with others, but in the winter twilights he liked
best to be alone, — " alone with the Alone." Of
the employment of his evening hours, enough has
been said already. Miss Peabody's " Reminis-
cences " gives the best account of it.

In many ways the later years of Channing's life
were years of widening sympathies, of a " less min-
isterial and more manly" habit of thought and
speech, of wistful eagerness to come in contact
with a more various activity, intellectual, social,
and political. Hence the " Self-Culture " lec-
ture in the Franklin course in 1838, and the dou-
ble lecture, " On the Elevation of the Laboring

398 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Classes " in 1840, tlie two best expressions of his
mind in its reaction on the social problems of his
time. His lecture on "War," in 1838, goes to
the same account, and his several later ventures
into the antislavery field. The year 1841 was not
a fruitful one for him in a general way. He suf-
fered, in Newport, from a protracted and severe
illness. He was conspicuously absent, as we have
seen, from the ministrations of the Federal Street
church. He added nothing to his antislavery file.
But the month of May that year justified for him
the high confidence of Emerson in May's rejuve-
nating power. It took him to Philadelphia, where,
for some weeks apparently, he was the guest of
Dr. Furness, and where he delivered two of his
most notable addresses, " The Present Age," May
11, before the Mercantile Library Company, and
" The Church," Sunday, May 30, before Dr. Fur-
ness's people. We have some particulars which
concern the former from Dr. Furness's own hand.
Having seldom spoken in other places than churches,
Channing was not much used to applause, and Dr.
Furness, being afraid that it would disconcert him,
warned him of what he might expect. " Oh," said
he, afterward, when Dr. Furness referred to it as
genuine and hearty, " it did me good." Midway
of the address, without the least embarrassment, he
said that he would sit down and rest awhile. He
did so, and presently resumed his course without
having lost his grip. When he spoke of Franklin's
kite, says Dr. Furness, " We all saw it floating,

THE LAST STAGE 399

white, afar off in the darkness." What Channing
said (misquoted by Dr. Furness) was, that " the
kite which brought lightning from heaven, will be
seen sailing in the clouds by remote posterity, when
the city where Franklin dwelt may be known only
by its ruins." If this allusion flattered local pride,
there were other passages that had a quite different
effect. Philadelphia was not then the stronghold
of protectionism which it is now, but "the Ameri-
can system " was even then no " infant industry."
The applause which did Channing good could
hardly have responded to his exclamation, " Free
trade ! this is the plain duty and plain interest of
the human race." He went on, " To level all bar-
riers to free exchange ; to cut up the system of
restriction root and branch ; to open every port on
earth to every product, — this is the office of en-
lightened humanity. To this a free nation should
especially pledge itself. Freedom of the seas ;
freedom of harbors ; an intercourse of nations, free
as the winds, — this is not a dream of philan-
thropists. We are tending towards it, and let us
hasten it." Channing's prophetic soul brooding on
things to come was nowhere else so little justified
by the event as here. If his economics opened a
great gulf between him and the Whiggism, once
Federalism, of 1841, his reflections on the French
Revolution showed how much he had unlearned of
the anti-Gallican Federalism of his younger days.
He could now see that the horrors of the Revolu-
tion were effects of crimes more monstrous than

400 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

themselves, " a corruption of the great, too deep to
be purged away except by destruction." And he
thought the fable was for us. He had no fears
from popular excesses. " Communities fall by the
vices of the prosperous ranks." And the pluto-
cratic feudalism to which we are now tending with
a vast and apparently irresistible momentum af-
fords a pregnant comment on his words.

Those who would know what kind of an expan-
sionist Channing was should read this Philadelphia
address. It is a lofty celebration of the increasing
universality of thought and life, a plea for more
expansive sympathies. The spirit of the great ser-
mon on the Church, which was delivered a few
weeks later in the same city, was the same spirit.
In the Church as it had been, he found " the very
stronghold of the lusts and vices which Chris-
tianity most abhors." " The church which opens on
heaven is that, and that only, in which the spirit
of heaven dwells." "Purity of heart and life,
Christ's spirit of love towards God and man ; this
is all in aU. This is the only essential thing." In
its main effect the sermon was a clear vision of the
Church Universal, not as travestied by Rome or
Geneva, but as existing in the common hopes and
aspirations of all generous and holy souls.

There is one grand, all-comprehending Church, and,
if I am a Christian, I belong to it, and no man can shut
me out of it. You may exclude me from your Roman
Church, your Episcopal Church, and your Calvinistic
Church, on account of supposed defects in my creed or

THE LAST STAGE 401

my sect, and I am content to be excluded. But I will
not be severed from the great body of Christ. Who
shall sunder me from such men as F^nelon, and Pascal,
and Borromeo, from Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Tay-
lor, and John Howard ? Who can rupture the spiritual
bond between these men and myself ? Do I not hold
them dear ? Does not their spirit, flowing out through
their writings and lives, penetrate my soul ? Are they
not a portion of my being ? . . . And is it in the power
of synod, or conclave, or of all the ecclesiastical com-
binations on earth, to part me from them ? . . . A pure
mind is free of the universe. It belongs to the church,
the family of the pure, in all worlds. Virtue is no local
thing. It is honorable for its own independent, everlast-
ing beauty. This is the bond of the universal church.
No man can be excommunicated from it but by himself,
by the death of goodness in his own breast.

He pleaded for the extension of preaching to
the characterization of great men, and not merely
Bible men. " Goodness owes nothing to the cir-
cumstance of its being recorded in a sacred book,
nor loses its claim to grateful, reverent communica-
tion because not blazoned there." But from every
excursion he came back to his central theme. We
may join particular churches, provided we do it
without severing ourselves in the least from the
church universal. " On this point we cannot be
too earnest. We must shun the spirit of sectarian-
ism as from hell. We must shudder at the thought
of shutting up God in any denomination. We
must think no man the better for belonging to our
communion ; no man the worse for belonging to an-

402 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

other. We must look with undiminished joy on
goodness, though it shine forth from the most ad-
verse sect."

There was earnest deprecation of the use of any
symbol, baptism or the Lord's Supper, as a bond
of fellowship. When speaking of baptism he ap-
proximated the harshness of Theodore Parker's
description of the eucharistic elements as " baker's
bread and grocer's wine." He said, " That the
Infinite Father, who is ever present to the human
soul, to whom it is unspeakably dear, who has
created it for communion with him, who desires
and delights to impart to it his grace, that he
should ordain sea-bathing as a condition or means
of spiritual communication, is so improbable that I
must insist on the strongest testimony to its truth."
The sacramental theory of religion, which at this
time was enjoying a revival in England, that of
the Tractarian Movement, was of all theories the
most repellent to Channing. There was no place
for a priesthood in his church universal. " The
surest device for making the mind a coward and a
slave is a widespread and closely cemented church,
the powers of which are concentrated in the hands
of a ' sacred order.' "

In the mean time Channing's formal connection
. with the Federal Street Society had suffered grad-
ual attenuation, until at last there was very little
of it left. If, before his entrance on his antislav-
ery career, he could groan in spirit that there was
" no general response " in the society to his senti-

THE LAST STAGE 403

ments, "general indifference rather," this feeling
must have been much intensified as time went on,
and the "general indifference " took on the positive
lines of specialized depreciation and distrust. But
the sphere of the preacher's influence is to so great
an extent the sphere of silence that Channing's
moral idealism had no doubt much freer course
and much more practical response among his peo-
ple than he dared believe, and the degree to which
his antislavery and reformatory spirit detached
from him their sympathies has probably been as
much exaggerated in some quarters as it has been
obscured in others. Yet more than once we find
him smarting under a lash whose swish has a fa-
miliar sound. " People bear patiently what it is
understood they will not practice. But if the
preacher ' come down,' as it is called, from these
heights, and assail in sober earnest deep-rooted
abuses, respectable vices, inhuman institutions or
arrangements, and unjust means of gain, which
interest, pride, and habit have made dear and
next to universal, the people who exact from him
official holiness are shocked, offended. ' He for-
gets his sphere.' "

Successive reductions of Dr. Channing's salary,
at his own request, had, I think, little or no rela-
tion to criticisms of this kind, more or less com-
mon, but were dictated by his actual and conscious
abridgment of his preaching and parochial work.
As early as 1825 he wished to surrender a quar-
ter of his salary, which at the maximum was 12000,

404 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

but his wish was overruled. In 1827 he speaks
of it as il600, and wishes to have it reduced to
$1200. In 1829 a further reduction of $200 was
granted ; in 1830 another to the same amount. In
1832 he proposed to rehnquish the remaining part,
and was prevailed upon to withdraw his proposal,
but the next year he insisted on a reduction to
$600. In 1838, when Dr. Gannett's health seemed
to require a colleague or assistant. Dr. Channing
again urged the immediate and unconditional abo-
lition of his salary, but, Dr. Gannett's health im-
proving, there was no disturbance of the status
quo. In 1840, however, he succeeded in having
his own way, and, possibly, the entire cessation of
his preaching in 1841 may have borne some rela-
tion to the complete severance of the pecuniary
bond. The correspondence touching this gener-
ous rivalry is printed in the " Memoir," and it
abounds in expressions of mutual kindness and
consideration. Channing could write in 1840, " It
is, indeed, a gratifying consideration, that our long
union has not been disturbed by a word of conten-
tion." I have been plausibly assured that Chan-
ning received at least one letter from the clerk of
the society, critical of his antislavery course, that
w*as remarkable for its discourtesy, but if such
a letter was written, it was strictly personal,^ —

1 His personal relations with the clerk of the society, Mr. George
S. Hillard, were particularly friendly in 1842, when his antislav-
ery zeal was burning with its purest flame, Mr. Hillard assisting
him, with Charles Sumner, in the reading of his " Creole " proofs.

THE LAST STAGE 405

the records of the society, which I have carefully
examined, preserving no sign of it. Those lament-
able incidents, the refusal of the church to him
for the Antislavery Society and for the Follen
Memorial service, were, let us trust, the most fla-
grant instances of Channing's inability to enamour
his parishioners with his own conception of social
righteousness. But more and more as he went on,
he looked away from them, and such as they, to
" the less prosperous classes " for the signs of a
new day. " The prosperous and distinguished of
this world," he said, " given as they generally are
to epicurean indulgence and vain show, are among
the last to comprehend the worth of a human
being, to penetrate the evils of society, or to impart
to it a fresh impulse."

The last four years of Channing's life were illus-
trated by as many conspicuous antislavery docu-
ments: three of them published in printed form,
one, and the last, by his living voice ; and this was
printed some time after its dehvery, by some local
printer of Berkshire County. Bare mention has
been made already of these four expressions of his
antislavery mind, but they deserve fuller apprecia-
tion. Henry Clay's speech of February 7, 1839,
was his bid for the presidency, then approaching
the conclusion of Van Buren's term. " That is
property which the law declares to he property " was
its most piercing note. It defended slavery in the
District of Columbia, opposed antislavery petitions
touching that matter, affirmed the inviolable per-

406 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANJSTING

manence of slavery in the slave States, and de-
manded immunity for it from Northern criticism
and rebuke. Channing, in a letter to Jonathan
Phillips, took direct issue with Clay on all these
grounds. He refused to believe that slavery was
a permanent institution ; he opposed its existence
in the District of Columbia, and defended the right
of petition against that existence ; also the right
of the North to criticise and condemn the institu-
tion as existing in the slave States. With some
criticism of the Abolitionists, he had much praise
for them, and particular denunciation for the burn-
ing of their Pennsylvania Hall and other acts of
interference with their liberty of speech. As for
the colonizationists, " who dream of removing slav-
ery by the process of draining it off to another
country," he called the process " about as reason-
able as draining the Atlantic." It is, he said, a doc-
trine "that does only harm among ourselves. It
has confirmed the prejudice to which slavery owes
much of its strength, that the colored man cannot
live and prosper on these shores." Encouraging
the peculiar industry of the slave-breeding States,
it had " done much to harden the slaveholder in
his purpose of holding fast his victim, and thus
increased the necessity of more earnest remon-
strance against slavery. . . . What avails our
liberty of speech if, on a grave question of duty,
we must hold our peace ? " The complicity of the
North was set forth in unsparing terms. " As our
merchants and manufacturers cast their eyes south-

THE LAST STAGE 407

ward, what do they see ? Cotton, cotton, nothing
but cotton. This fills the whole southern horizon.
What care they for the poor human tools by whom
it is reared ? . . . What change do they desire in
a system so gainful? Men call it in vague lan-
guage an evil, just as they call religion good ; in
both cases giving assent to a lifeless form of words,
which they forget while they utter them, and have
no power over their lives."

Strong as the letter was, it did not satisfy Gar-
rison. Falstaff's bread to Falstaff's sack was not
less than Channing's criticism of the Abolitionists
in proportion to his condemnation of slavery, but
to Garrison's sensibility the proportions were re-
versed. Especially did one ill-considered sentence
give Garrison his opportunity : " To me the slave-
holder is very much of an abstraction." It was
characteristic and unfortunate. If, however, Chan-
ning did not come up to Garrison's standard, his
antislavery thinking was much more radical than
that of the political Eepublicans of 1856-60.
These made no demand for the abolition of slavery
in the District, nor any for the repeal of the Fugitive
Slave Law. If Mr. Blaine can be trusted on this
point, they occupied in 1860 the ground of the
compromises of 1850. But Channing's demand
was incessant for abolition in the District, for
the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law (which was
much aggravated in 1850), and he preferred dis-
union to the annexation of Texas in the interest
of slavery.

408 WILLIAM ELLERr CHANNING

While demurring at tlie organized abolitionism
of wliich Garrison was the head and front, Chan-
ning had more liking for that than for the politi-
cal abolitionism which developed into the Liberty
Party, with such gradual recession as he antici-
pated from the loftiest ideals. He was very much
impressed by the interest awakened in his " Eman-
cipation," his antislavery publication for the year
1840. " The Abolitionists have given me a cor-
dial welcome, and it delights me to see how a great
common object establishes in an hour a confidence
and friendship which years are sometimes necessary
to produce." He is referring to his visit to Phila-
delphia in 1841, and he goes on, " I cannot tell
you the hospitalities which my Abolition labors
win for me, nor was I aware of the extent of their
influence." The " Emancipation," a pamphlet of
eighty-nine pages, brought him a precious letter
from Clarkson with a lock of his hair, — a generous
token from one past eighty years of age. The
pamphlet was ostensibly a review of the condition
of the West Indies at a time when the emancipa-
tion there had shown to some extent what it was
likely to effect. It was based upon certain open
letters to Henry Clay, written by Joseph John
Gurney, an English orthodox Quaker, with a good
antislavery record in England, but in America,
like Kossuth, Father Mathew, and some other per-
sons of importance, careful in his avoidance of the
Garrisonians. Commending much in Gurney's
letters, and in their application to American condi-

THE LAST STAGE 409

tions, Channing denounced their emphasis on the
economic success of emancipation : " This concern
for property, this unconcern for human nature,
is a sign of the little progress made even here by
free principles, and of men's ignorance of the
great end of social union. ... A better age will
look with wonder and scorn on the misdirected in-
dustry of the present times. The only sure sign
of public prosperity is that the mass of the peo-
ple are steadily multiplying the comforts of life
and the means of improvement. . . . My maxim
is, ' Anything but slavery ! Poverty sooner than
slavery.' "

Touching the relation of Christianity to the
slave power, Channing's denunciation of the Amer-
ican churches was quite as stern as James G.
Birney's, which pilloried them as " the bulwark of
slavery." And slavery was not the only evil power
that crooked the hinges of the churchmen's knees
that thrift might follow fawning. " What wrong
or abuse is there which the bulk of the people may
think essential to their prosperity and may defend
with outcry and menace, before which the Chris-
tianity of this age will not bow ? " Remarkably
at variance with some of our more recent thinking
is Channing's good opinion of the negro race:
" The history of West Indian emancipation teaches
us that we are holding in bondage one of the best
races of the human family." He hesitated to de-
cide " to which of the races in the Southern States
Christianity was most adapted and in which its

410 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

noblest disciples were most likely to be reared."
In conclusion he renewed the contention of his re-
cent letter to Jonathan PhiUips with regard to the
duties of the Free States. He demanded an
amendment to the Constitution that would liber-
ate the North from its " covenant with death and
agreement with hell." If he did not use Garri-
son's favorite Scripture, he dipped his pen in no
rosewater ink. And with the pamphlet, as a whole,
Garrison was apparently weU pleased. " Their
strength," said Channing of the Abolitionists,
" has always lain in the simplicity of their religious
trust, in their confidence in Christian truth. For-
merly the hope sometimes crossed my mind that,
by enlarging their views and purifying their spirit,
they would gradually become a religious commu-
nity, founded on the recognition of Jesus Christ as
having lived and died to unite to himself and to
baptize with his spirit every human soul, and on
the recognition of the brotherhood of all God's
human family. ... I thought I saw in the prin-
ciples with which the Abolitionists started, a
struggling of the human mind toward this Chris-
tian union." This is the best word that Channing
ever said for Garrison, for it was in the Garrisonian
simphcity that he found this promise ; it was the
development of political Abolitionism that made
him fear for this promise — that it would not be
kept.i

^ See, in this connection, Joseph Henry Allen's "A Nine-
teenth-Century Religion," page 197 of his Positive Beligion.

THE LAST STAGE 411

The same year that found Channing busy with
his " Emancipation," was marked by the most
painful and discouraging event of his whole life,
and possibly this gave to the sword of his spirit a
keener edge in the " Emancipation " book. In the
antislavery letter of 1839, Channing had said, fol-
lowing a glowing tribute to Gerrit Smith as a leader
of the Abolitionists, " In their ranks may also be
found our common friend, that geniune man, that
heroic spirit, whose love of freedom unites, in rare
harmony, the old Roman force with Christian love ;
in whom we see the rash enthusiasm of his youth
tempered into a most sweet and winning virtue."
FoUen, the object of this praise, left New York
for Boston, January 13, 1840, on the Sound
steamer Lexington ; and on her way to Stoning-
ton the steamer took fire, and, of her 164 pas-
sengers and crew, but four were saved. FoUen
was not likely to be one of the saved, and he was
not. The Massachusetts Antislavery Society re-
quested the use of the Federal Street church for a
commemoration service, at which Samuel J. May
was to make the appropriate address. Channing
heartily seconded the request, but it was denied by
the church officers. It was perfectly weU known
that FoUen was one of Channing's dearest friends,
but great public considerations triumphed over the
personal appeal. William Henry Channing says
in the " Memoir," " This manifestation of a want
of high sentiment in the congregation, to which for
so many years he had officiated as pastor, made

412 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

him question the usefulness of his whole ministry.
To what end had he poured out his soul, if such
conduct was a practical embodiment of the prin-
ciples and precepts which he had so earnestly in-
culcated." Channing could not, however, be pre-
vented from delivering a discourse of his own on
Follen's character, let who would hear it or forbear.
But that, including the FoUen sermon, he preached
at Federal Street only four times that year, and
not once the next, may, without violence, perhaps,
be taken as a sign of his instinctive withdrawal
from a ministry to which such an incident was pos-
sible.^ That "great refusal" had gone nigh to
break his heart.

About this time, or soon after, Channing was
busy with the preparation of a complete edition of
his works, which was published in 1841 in five
volumes, which included the contents of the two
earlier volumes. A sixth, containing the later anti-
slavery writings, and some others, was added in
1843. Had not an impulse of personal kindness
come to the aid of Channing's too deliberate voli-
tion, this act of self-assertion would probably
have been impossible for him. But he seemed
able to do something for the prospects of his
brother George, just then making some publishing

^ There is no conflict between this surmise and that above,
touching the complete severance of the pecuniary bond between
Channing and the Federal Street church. This severance fol-
lowed closely on the Follen incident. The post hoc was, perhaps,
not a premier hoc ; it is more likely that it was, at least in some
degree.

THE LAST STAGE 413

connection, by giving him the copyright of the
edition, and this, accordingly, he did; but with
the understanding that, in a few years, the books
should be much reduced in price, and put within
the reach of those " less prosperous people " to
whom Channing gave the first place in his
thoughts.^

The last year of Channing's life was the only
one marked by two elaborate additions to the list
of his antislavery writings. These were the double
pamphlet, " The Duty of the Free States " and the
Lenox Address. The former was inspired by the
case of the Creole, a brig sailing from Hampton
Roads to New Orleans with a cargo of 135 slaves
in November, 1841. On November 7, the slaves
took possession of the vessel, killing their owner and
severely wounding the captain of the brig and
others, officers and men. The brig was taken into
the British port of Nassau, in the island of New
Providence. Mr. Webster, then Tyler's Secretary

1 The Rev. Herman Snow, Harvard Divinity School, 1843,
sends me a manuscript account of his adventures with the
cheaper edition, $2,50 for the six volumes (originally $6.00) in
1848. He travelled widely in New England and penetrated east-
ern New York. Though sickness hampered him and abridged
his round, in the course of eight months he placed nearly five
thousand volumes of Channing's writings, together with the just
published Memoir. The story is a very interesting and instruc-
tive one. Mr. Snow's modesty as a book agent was such as to
bring a blush to the brazen cheek of the book agent as developed
in these later times, but his success was not impaired by it. His
manuscript is to be a permanent possession of the Divinity School
Library. — In 1854 the Association reported that 100,000 copies
of the Works had been sold !

414 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

of State, demanded from England the restitution of
the slaves, but not, of course, as slaves, — as muti-
neers and murderers. Hence Channing's pamphlet,
one of the strongest that he ever wrote. Charles
Sumner was back from his long European journey,
and a great intimacy had sprung up between him
and Channing, who read to him and his son Wil-
liam F. Channing and George S. Hillard the manu-
script before its publication. We find Sumner and
Hillard — a strange conjunction, in view of their
divergence further on — reading the proofs of the
pamphlet after Dr. Channing had left Boston and
gone to Pennsylvania for a bit of travel. In the
first part of the pamphlet Channing reviewed
Webster's position with severe discrimination. It
signified, he said, that the United States is bound
to extend the shield of its protection over slavery
abroad as well as at home. In the second part, he
returned to the duty of the Free States to free
themselves from all complicity with slavery, with-
drawing from the Union should Texas be annexed.
September 4, little dreaming that Channing had
not then a month to live, Sumner, with the Creole
pamphlet in his mind, wrote to his brother
George : —

Who excels, who equals, Webster in intellect ? I mean
in the mere dead weight of intellect. With the moral
elevation of Channing, he would become a prophet.
Webster wants sympathy with the mass, — with human-
ity, with truth. If this had been living within him, he
never could have written his Creole letter. Without

THE LAST STAGE 415

Webster's massive argumentation, Channing sways the
world with a stronger influence. Thanks to God, who
has made the hearts of men to respond to what is ele-
vated, noble, true ! Whose position would you prefer,

— that of Webster or Channing ? I know the latter
intimately ; and my admiration for him grows con-
stantly. When I was younger than I am now, I was
presumptuous enough to question his power. ... I am
glad that I am wise enough to see him in a different
light. His moral nature is powerful, and he writes
under the strong instincts which this supplies ; and the
appeal is felt by the world.

On his sixty-second birthday, as already noted,
Channing preached for the last time in the Fed-
eral Street church. The text was from 2 Cor.
iv. 18, and the subject was his " one sublime idea

— the greatness of the soul," the subject of all his
preaching to an unparalleled degree. He had long
been desiring to visit the interior of Pennsylvania,
especially the banks of the Juniata and the valley
of Wyoming. He started prematurely, found the
roads impassable, was obliged to take to the canal
boats for night travel, broke down, and for nearly
a month was a prisoner at a hotel in Wilkesbarre.
The beauty of the Susquehanna made his con-
valescence a sufficient compensation and delight.
Writing of this to Harriet Martineau, he turns
from it to the circulation of his books among the
laboring classes, and says, " To me, this is fame.''''
" A thousand times better than fame ! " he had
once said of a workingman's letter. Early in July
he reached Lenox, and remained there two months,

416 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

making excursions to Stockbridge and the Bashpish
Falls. Established at the Lenox inn, he was in
constant communication with the Sedgwicks, peo-
ple of fine intelligence and culture and pronounced
ideality. He was never happier, nor diffused more
happiness. The Sedgwicks did not find the man
and friend obscured by the prophet and the saint.
The unconventional atmosphere exactly suited him.
Asked what period of life he thought happiest, he
answered, " About sixty." " Our cup of outward
good," he wrote, "seems overflowing, and I re-
ceive it thankfully, not forgetting how soon it may
pass from us." He enjoyed the wildness of the
Berkshire Hills, but also the agricultural softening
of the valleys, time wearing out the wi'inkles of the
ancient mother, so that she was growing younger
all the time. Some personal notes must here be
reproduced. " I have kept up by books my ac-
quaintance with all classes ; but real life is the
best book. At the end of life, I see that I have
lived too much by myself. I wish you more cour-
age, cordiality, and real union with your race. . . .
I sometimes feel as if I had never known anything
of human nature until lately, — but so it will be
forever. . . . My reserve is not to be broken down
in these latter years of my life, but I think the ice
melts. ... I should incline much, if I were in
better health, to break every chain, and harden
myself for a life of wider experience and more
earnest struggle." Curiosity mingled with his de-
light in natural things. He wi'ote, " Amidst such

THE LAST STAGE 417

Elysian beauty, the chains which the spirit wears
are broken, and it goes forth to blend with and en-
joy the universe ;" and also wondering "whether
light may not be a more important physical agent
than it has been considered, — whether the various
rays may not prevail in different proportions at
different times, and whether the preponderance of
one — say the red or violet — may not exert unsus-
pected influence on vegetable and animal nature."
There surely he was on the track of secrets that
Tyndall and Helmholtz and other eager huntsmen
have run down.

And so, always learning, ever more hopeful,
simple, brave, he came to August 1, 1842, and to
the last public utterance of his life. He spoke
uninvited, finding the Berkshire people forgetful of
the slave, and resolved to stir up their pure minds.
The mountains, sacred to liberty, were his inspira-
tion. There could not be a lovelier spot than that
where stands the meeting-house in which he spoke.
Fanny Kemble was of this opinion, and wished to
be buried in the churchyard, where the dead neigh-
bor the living congregation as with conscious joy.
One perfect day I went on pilgi-image to this sacred
place, walking more than thirty miles across coun-
try, and coming to my goal just as the shadows of
the hills were lengthening down the valley and the
night was setting in. I have never felt so near to
Channing as I did then and there. The first of
August proved to be one of the finest days imagi-
nable. The clear air helped, but the speaker had

418 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

not strength to read all that he had written. Nev-
ertheless, he spoke for an hour and a quarter, and
he ended with the apostrophe, the prayer, that many
of us know so well, —

O come, thou kingdom of heaven, for which we daily
pray! Come, Friend and Saviour of the race, who
didst shed thy blood on the cross to reconcile man to
man and earth to heaven ! Come, Father Almighty, and
crown with thine omnipotence the humble strivings of
thy children to subvert oppression and wrong, to spread
light and freedom and peace and joy, the truth and
spirit of thy Son, through the whole earth !

The words could not have been more of the
essence of his life if they had been deliberately
chosen as his last. The day was the eighth anni-
versary of the beginning of the West Indian Eman-
cipation, the fourth anniversary of the rounded
completion of that great event. It was Chan-
ning's purpose to hold up that act of sovereign
justice as an object lesson to his countrymen.
And this he did with a persuasiveness that must
have won the most reluctant minds. All of his
other great antislavery utterances had been printed,
not spoken. If this had less than the best of those
of solid argument, it had more than any of them
of emotional ardor, of complete abandonment to
the spirit of the solemn theme. He had never
spoken to his fellow men more powerfully than in
this Sermon on the Mount, and for his public
work we could not imagine or desire a better end.

The address taxed Channing's strength so much

THE LAST STAGE 419

that for some days after it he was a broken wave,
but, rallying once more, the remaining* weeks of
August proved full of peace and pleasantness, and
early in September he set out for home, taking the
longest way round, through the Green Mountains.
1 have walked much of that country through, and
know how beautiful are the scenes that greeted
him and his companions as they drove along, Grey-
lock besetting them before, and then behind, hke
a great mountain god. But the Berkshire air had
brought him poison on its wings, and, arrived at
Bennington, he found that he could not go on. The
trouble was a typhoid fever, and the wonder is
that one so frail held out so long against it — for
twenty-six days, durmg which hope and fear alter-
nated in their hearts who watched beside his bed.
The Walloomsac inn, where he was lying, was for-
tunately a pleasant one. From its eastern front
one looked across the village green and the East
Bennington valley to the Green Mountain wall.
Perhaps some other genius of the place than John
Stark, whose monument is near the inn, would
have been more congenial to Channing. Probably
he did not know that next door but one was the
office of the " Journal of the Times," where Gar-
rison did good editorial work and Lundy foimd
him out. His consideration for others never failed.
His gratitude for every service rendered him put
others in his debt. To Mr. Hicks, his landlord,
and to the housemaid, he was as courteous as if
they had been king and queen. His presence made

420 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

a stillness round about, even a company of soldiers
on the green, and at the inn table, hushing their
customary noise.

His mind did not wander, but was excited over-
much. He begged his friends to talk of common
things, and charm away " these crowds of images,
these visions of immensity, and rushing thoughts."
He had many that were calm and sweet. " We
must beware," he said, "of overexcited feeling, of
vague sentiment, of mingling our theoretical views
or our favorite imaginations with the truth. We
need to feel the reality ^^'' — this with great earnest-
ness, — ••' the REALITY of the spiritual life." No-
thing pleased him more than to hear of the quiet
courage of certain people who had made great sac-
rifices in the antislavery cause. Often he seemed
praying in his sleep, his lips murmuring, " Heav-
enly Father ! " Sleeping a little after a restless
night, he said, " I do not know that my heart was
ever so overflowed by a grateful sense of the good-
ness of God." Thursday night, September 29,
was wholly sleepless, but he had great enjoyment
of his thoughts. The next night, when Webster
was swaying a great multitude in Faneuil Hall,
defending his retention of his place in Tyler's cabi-
net, Channing, ignorant of all that, felt that his end
was near. He wished he might get home " to die ; "
then added quickly, " But it will all be well ; it is
all well." Sunday, October 2, he wished all his
friends to go to church, but permitted them to stay
with him, and asked one of them to read from

THE LAST STAGE 421

the New Testament — the Sermon on the Mount.
At the end of the Lord's Prayer, he said, " That
will do now," and that Scripture reading was the
last. His voice sank, but his last audible words
had still the pattern of his soul. They were, " I
have received many messages from the spirit."

They turned him in his bed that he might look
upon the eastern hills, on which, and on the sky
above them, the reflected sunset light was warm
and beautiful. Through the parted curtains and a
clambering vine, it stole in upon his face. None
knew just when he passed, but he died looking
eastward, as if expectant of another dawn.

The body was taken to Boston, and the echoes
of Webster's great defiant speech were quenched
by the deep toll of Channing's funeral bells, those
of the Roman Catholic cathedral with the rest, for
it was remembered that, when the good Bishop
Cheverus died, Channing had done him honor above
all. He lay before the pulpit from which he had
delivered his great message, his face but little
paler than in life, the brown hair straying in the
remembered way across the marble brow. Dr. Gan-
nett's sermon was a cordial tribute, perfectly simple
and sincere ; but few of those who heard it under-
stood what a great man was dead.

CHAPTER XIV

AS DYING AND BEHOLD !

There was no lack of the proverbial readiness
to build tbe prophet's sepulchre and decorate it
with unstinting hand. We have no means of
knowing how many sermons in praise of Channing
were occasioned by his death. Of those published,
Dr. Gannett bound up a collection in a big volume
which lies here on my desk. It is fuller than an-
other collection entrusted to my care, and if not
complete, is, I imagine, nearly so.^ Either collection

^ The American sermons are by E. S. Gannett, Funeral Ad-
dress, October 7, 1842; E. S. Gannett, Sermon in Federal Street
church, October 9 ; George E. Ellis ; Theodore Parker ; Edward
B. Hall ; Henry W. Bellows ; Frederic H. Hedge ; Orville Dewey ;
James Freeman Clarke ; Henry Bacon (Universalist) ; John Pier-
pont ; Cyrus A. Bartol ; Charles T. Brooks ; James H. Perkins.
The last two are in newspaper form, the others in pamphlet.
Dewey's sermon, from which I have quoted freely, was the most
elaborate and the fullest in its reminiscences of personal traits.
Hedge's critical instinct did not forsake him, and he said, "His
■was not what one would call an original mind. . . . He did not
see further than other men, but he saw more distinctly, with a
more careful discrimination, and a more intense appreciation of
the object. . . . Originality was not his gift, but effective utter-
ance was." In the English collection there are thirteen sermons,
with important extracts from others, by J. J. Tayler and James
Martineau. Such well-known Unitarian names as Hutton, Madge,
Armstrong, Tagart, Gordon, Drummond, and Carpenter appear ;

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 423

makes it plain that Channing's reputation was quite
as distinguislied in the mother country as in this.
Dr. Ellis, in his sermon, anticipated a fuller recog-
nition of Channing's antislavery and reformatory
zeal in England than in America, and his anticipa-
tion was made good in the event : naturally, for it
is always easier to recognize and applaud the re-
former at long range than close at hand. Here,
some of the eulogists slurred Channing's reforma-
tory spirit as of little consequence. Others, who
could not do this, damned it with faint or ill-pro-
portioned praise, some using Channing's antislav-
ery temper as a background against which to bring
out that of the Abolitionists in harsh relief. But
Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, and John
Pierpont gave due prominence to that part of Chan-
ning's work which meant most to him in his ma-
turest years.

The poets brought their pebbles to his cairn.
Bryant, an earnest Unitarian, did not, except pos-
sibly a hymn sung at the memorial service in New
York, nor Emerson ; nor Holmes, whose Unitarian
consciousness intensified as his moral earnestness
increased. Longfellow's tribute, though written
after Channing's death, was written without know-
several of which are worn in our own g-eneration by those whom
we delight to honor. The most notable of the English sermons
is Mr. Aspland's, for the reason that it is supplemented with
a series of well-chosen extracts from Channing's writings, with
notes explanatory and critical, one of these quoting extensively
from Harriet Martineau's strictures on Channing's depreciation of
Priestley.

424 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING '

ledge of that event, on the Atlantic, as a prelude
to his " Antislavery Poems." " Well done ! " he
sang, —

Well done ! thy words are great and bold ;

At times they seem to me
Like Luther's, in the days of old,

Half-battles for the free.

Go on, until this land revokes

The old and chartered Lie,
The feudal curse whose whips and yokes

Insult humanity.

Lowell's contribution was a very noble " Elegy on
the death of Dr. Channing," its crowning stanza
bright with a prophecy that still awaits its hour, —

From off the starry mountain peaks of song,
Thy spirit shows me, in the coming time,

An earth unwithered by the foot of wrong,
A race revering its own soul sublime.

But all these were to the Unitarian manner born
and bred. The fitness of things required that the
most admirable poetical appreciation should come
from Whittier, a Quaker poet, and yet the one of
all our major choir who has embodied the most of
Channing' s humane and liberal spirit in his vari-
ous song. One stanza took its color from the
Lenox Address : —

How echoes yet each western hill

And vale with Channing's dying word I

How are the hearts of freemen still
By that great warning stirred !

Another stanza touched that reward of Channing's
work which was the most to him of all : —

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 425

Swart smiters of the g-Iowing- steel,
Dark feeders of the forge's flame,

Pale watchers at the loom and wheel,
Repeat his honored name.

The publication of the " Memoir " in 1848 was
a happy circumstance for Channing's memory and
fame. The best that I can hope for this book of
mine is that it will send many to that fountain-
head. It would be quite impossible for me to
exaggerate my sense of its sufficiency, though some
details of its arrangement are almost as bad as
possible.! Precious as Channing's collected writ-
ings are, it has seemed to me that the " Memoir "
is even more precious. I have never tired of
commending it to my younger fellow ministers as
an indispensable aid to intellectual freedom and to
spiritual growth. The nephew's appreciation of
the uncle leaves nothing to desire, but it is the
mass of Channing's self-expression that constitutes
the value of the " Memoir " to a preeminent de-
gree. It is a painful thought that this mass, which
has been my envy and despair, has had a deterrent
influence on many readers. Great has been their
reward who have not halted on the threshold, but,
entering the house, have penetrated every room,
enjoyed each wide outlook, and bowed themselves
at every secret shrine.

1 The lack of an index to the original three volumes made con-
fusion worse confounded, but this defect has been remedied to
admiration in the one-volume " Centenary Edition " of the Unita-
rian Association. This, with the one-volume (indexed) edition of
Channing's works, published by the Association in 1875, has had
wide circulation. The Works can be had for the asking by set-
tled ministers of any denomination.

426 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Stuart of Andover was not the only antagonist
of Channing who in this revelation of his deeper
mind found unexpected veins of spiritual and moral
gold. But from all the more elaborate reviews of
the " Memoir " two stand out with special promi-
nence, — Garrison's and Martineau's. Garrison's
appeared in " The Liberator," xviii. 82, and is re-
produced in the " Story " of Garrison's life told
by his sons, iii. 239-242. Not every particular
will satisfy Channing's most or least intelligent
admirers, but, all things considered, there are few
testimonies to his moral worth that deserve more
careful attention. At the risk of doing Garrison
injustice, I take a few sentences where I should
like to take the whole : —

My impressions of Dr. Channing were that he was
somewhat cold in temperament, timid in spirit, and
oracular in feeling. But these have been greatly, if not
entirely, removed by a perusal of this memoir. I see
him now in a new phase — in a better light. He cer-
tainly had no ardor of soul, but a mild and steady
warmth of character appears to have been natural to
him. I do not now think that he was timid in a con-
demnatory sense; but his circumspection was almost
excessive, his veneration large, and distrust of himself,
rather than a fear of others, led him to appear to shrink
from an uncompromising application of the principles
he cherished. In the theological arena he exhibited
more courage than elsewhere ; yet, even there, he was
far from being boldly aggressive, for controversy was
not to his taste. In striving to be catholic and mag-
nanimous, he was led to apologize for those who de-

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 427

served severe condemnation. He was ever reluctant to
believe that men sin wilfully, and, therefore, preferred
to attack sin in the abstract than to deal with it person-
ally. ... In a pioneering sense, Dr. Channingwas not
a reformer; sympathetically, and through a conscien-
tious conviction, he was. ... It is equally interesting
and cheering to perceive his growing interest in reform
and reformers. His voice of rebuke to a guilty nation
was growing stronger, and his "all-hail" to the true-
hearted more emphatic continually. . . . His preemi-
nence was not intellectual — for he had not an extraor-
dinary intellect — but moral, religious, humane, in the
largest and best use of those terms. He was utterly
divorced from bigotry and sectarism. He believed in
eternal progress, and therefore never stood still, but
went onward — if not rapidly, without faltering. He
changed his views and positions from time to time, but
only to advance, never to retreat. Theologically he is
to be regarded as a prodigy on the score of independent
investigation and free utterance. In this field, his
labors cannot be overestimated.

Generous allowance is made for the fact that he
was a clergyman, " an office which it is scarcely
possible for any man to fill without loss of inde-
pendence," that he moved in a wealthy and aristo-
cratic circle, " the last to sympathize with outcast
humanity," and that he was allied with the Unita-
rians, who were "deeply afflicted and mortified
with his Abolition tendencies." Then comes the
pathetic personal note : —

Much to my regret, I had no personal acquaintance
with this remarkable man, though I longed for at least
a single interview. As he never expressed a wish to

428 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

converse with me, I did not feel free to intrude myself
upon his notice. For twelve years he saw me struggling
against all that was evil in the land, — in a cause worthy
of universal acclaim, — with fidelity and an unfaltering
spirit, but during all that time he never conveyed to
me, directly or indirectly, a word of cheer or a whisper
of encouragement. Consequently, we never met for an
interchange of sentiments. Had we done so, though
there is no probability that we should have seen eye to
eye in all things, we might have been mutually bene-
fited. I am sure that he misjudged my spirit, as well
as misapprehended the philosophy of the antislavery
reform ; and I now think that I did not fully appre-
ciate the difficulties of his situation or the peculiarities
of his mind.

Martineau's review of the " Memoir " appeared
in the "Westminster Review" of January, 1849,
and it is reproduced in the first volume of his
" Essays, Reviews, and Addresses." The article
abounds in admirable judgments upon special
aspects of Channing's thought and life. There is
wonder that such speculations as those of Hume
and Berkeley should have overpassed him like a
summer cloud, without his special wonder. " The
truth is," he says, " that the intensity of the moral
sentiment within him absorbed everything into
itself ; made his reflective activity whoUy predomi-
nant over the apprehensive, and determined it in
one invariable direction. He meditated, where
others would have learned ; and the materials of
his knowledge disappeared as fast as they were
given, in the larger generalizations of his faith.

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 429

His mind thus grew, while his attainments made
no show, and, while he missed the praise of learn-
ing, he won an affluence of wisdom." The key-
note of the whole of Dr. Channing's character is
found in " his sense of the inherent greatness of
man," which " remained the immovable centre of
his reverence and trust. It was, in fact, his natural
creed. A mind distinguished for purity and quick-
ness of moral apprehension cannot but believe at
least in the occasional realities of the excellence
and beauty it discerns ; and this will rise into the
belief in their universal possibility, if there be
also remarkable strength of will and habitual self-
conquest. It is difficult for genius, it is impossible
for goodness, to suppose others incapable of seeing
its visions^ and outstripping its achievements."
Martineau finds " Channing's love of indeterminate
and widely suggestive language an inseparable part
of his religion " and a sign of his fundamental dif-
ference from the schools of Calvin and Priestley,
with their fondness for a highly elaborated and
closely connected system. At this point, Martineau
speaks with much earnestness and a strong personal
inflection, for no one else did so much as Channing
to free him from Priestley's necessarian and mate-
rialistic bonds. The introduction to Channing's
collected works might well have been the inspira-
tion of Martineau's subsequent prolonged endeavor
to save human freedom from submergence in mat-
ter or in God, and God and matter from submerg-
ence in an idealism which allows reality to nothing

430 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

but the ideas of the human mind. Martineau's
comparison of Channing and Priestley is done in
his most characteristic manner. He finds them
representing " views of religion as fundamentally
opposed as any which can arise within the limits
of a common Theism." ^ " Neither of them suc-
ceeds in reconciling with each other the deductions
separately drawn from the objective and subjective
point of view, and bridging over the chasm between
the Causal and the Moral God." He finds Chan-
ning less coherent and complete than Priestley,
but Priestley's coherency and completeness at the
expense of a responsible morality. But Marti-
neau's idea that Channing looked on Calvin with
" milder antipathy " than on Priestley, is not justi-
fied by the habitual stress of Channing's utterance.
Systems of theology did not present themselves to
him as they did to Martineau, panoplied in the
completeness of their philosophical implications.
What was most obvious impressed him most ; and
Calvin's God and man, both totally depraved, ex-
cited in him a much more positive antipathy than
Priestley's materialistic psychology and necessarian
ethics, obscured by their obvious appearance of

^ Was theirs " a common Theism " ? Priestley was a Christian
Deist; and Channing, if not a Christian Theist, approximated
that standing. He kept up some formal connection with the
Paley-ontologists, but essentially was less implicated in their
" natural theology " than was Theodore Parker. If he went to
Nature, she always sent him back to his own soul. The heavens
declared to him the glory of God, mainly because they declared
to him the glory of Newton and Laplace.

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 431

infinite goodness in God and natural capacity for
goodness in mankind.

The year 1848 was a year of such political activ-
ity that the Channing " Memoir " must have been
quite overlooked, had it not contained so much
that was pertinent to the political situation. But
Lowell's " Biglow Papers," published the same
year, might well have drawn from it their vital
juices, their passionate reprobation of both war
and slavery. In 1850 came the compromises of
Clay, and found Webster sharing with Douglas the
brunt of their support. It is easy to imagine with
what noble indignation Channing would have repu-
diated them, and with what ignoble indignation the
respectability of Boston would have repudiated
him for his offence ; with what mental agony he
would have seen Sims and Burns sent back into
slavery by a Boston court, the court-house hung
in chains; and how sincerely he would have re-
joiced in those signs of awakening conscience in
the city of his loving hope when the Missouri Com-
promise was broken down and, four years later,
the Dred Scott decision made the slave-owner wel-
come to take his property with him wherever he
might choose to go. Doubtless, the great war
would have put upon Channing' s peace principles
a severe strain, but it must be remembered that he
had said, clenching his tiny fist, " There are times
when we must fight," and would he not have con-
ceived that one of these had come at length ? If
not, he would still have cried with Garrison, whose

432 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

peace principles were more absolute, " God help
the righteous side ! " He would have rejoiced in
every Northern victory, most of aU in tbjose of
September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, — the
emancipation proclamations of those dates. The
war over, he would have hesitated at "manhood
suffrage " as an immediate gift to the late slaves,
while looking steadily to it as an ideal end. Only
with sorrowful deprecation could he have seen them
flung into the pohtical arena, and there, dazed by
the light of their new freedom, made the sport
of those who goaded them to wild excess. But
what we hardly can imagine is the piteous shame
with which he would have regarded the race preju-
dice and hatred which have trailed the land with
blood and fire, while the political partizans, having
no further use for the negro, have looked on com-
placently. On the other hand, he would have,
could he revisit us, the encouragement of such
noble and effective work as that done at Hampton
and Tuskegee, and other similar places in the
South.

It is a conviction not to be escaped that along
the line of this development, and especially through-
out the antislavery debate, the influence of Chan-
ning was a potent one for the purification of
political ideals and for the breaking of every yoke
that pressed a human being down. As Spenser
is the poets' poet, so Channing was the reformers'
reformer. His writings and the tradition of his
character were unfailing springs of social aspira-

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 433

tion. If, since Charming died, philanthropy has
had freer expansion in Boston than in any other
city, if there the treatment of the poor, the blind,
the insane, the criminal, has excited the most care-
ful thought and attracted the most faithful service,
if for educational light and leading Boston has
been preeminent during this period, may it not be
said, while every other valid claim is cheerfully al-
lowed, that no other personal influence has been
comparable with that which flowed from Channing's
mind and heart ?

On theological and religious lines his influence
was less apparent in the earlier stages of his post-
humous fame than on those obviously social and
philanthropic. The controversy excited by Theo-
dore Parker's South Boston Sermon and his " Dis-
course on Matters pertaining to Religion " jangled
the bells of Channing's funeral solemnity and made
a painful discord in the Unitarian ranks for many
years. Here a sense of having shirked or faltered,
there a fear of catching Parker's taint infected the
Unitarian consciousness with a certain torpor of
timidity and shame. '' It is almost a fact," says
William C. Gannett, " that there is no Unitarian
history from 1845 to 1865." But this inclusion
wrongs the years of Dr. Gannett's presidency of
the Association, 1847-1851, and those of Free-
man Clarke's ascendency, 1861-1865. Dr. Clarke
might well speak of the denomination, as he found
it in 1859, as "a discouraged denomination." It
had been given over to that "Unitarian ortho-

434 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

do^y," the growth of which Channing had de-
plored in his last years, and, in ironical defiance of
his spirit, those of the conservative party called
themselves " Channing Unitarians," making his
doctrinal positions, more or less accurately under-
stood, ends beyond which there must be no advance.
Nevertheless when the National Conference was
organized in 1865, in response to Dr. Bellows's
impassioned plea for a new comprehension of
Unitarian principles and ideals, an elaborate creed,
which was earnestly recommended to the Con-
ference, was rejected by an overwhelming vote ; and
from that time onward, with some variable winds,
the course has been pretty steadily towards Chan-
ning's spirit, rather than to his doctrine, as the
mark of our high calling.

In the mean time there was widening appreciation
of Channing out of Unitarian bounds and in Eu-
ropean countries. Renan's remarkable essay was
inspired by his desire to check an enthusiasm for
Channing in France which to Kenan's critical
temper appeared overstrained, but his protest was
one of the most significant tributes paid to Chan-
ning's historical importance and the universality of
his moral influence. The most active spirit in the
French movement back to Channing was M. La-
boulaye, and, apparently, it was the " Memoir " that
gave the first impulse to his admiration. He went on
for many years translating and recommending Chan-
ning's " Works," and they prepared him for that
intelligent sympathy with America which possessed

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 435

him wholly when he, too, wrote of " The Uprising
of a Great People " ^ in a manner peculiarly grate-
ful to the American heart when there was a fear-
ful dearth of European sympathy with our North-
ern States. He said, " If Channing were but one
sectary more in the religious Babel, I should not
have called attention to him ; " but he was " a
good man who, aU his life, consumed by one senti-
ment and idea, sought truth and justice with all the
forces of his intellect and loved God and man with
all the strength of his heart." Renan's qualifications
did not prevent others from following Laboulaye.
M. de Remusat furnished an elaborate preface to
an excellent book of four hundred pages upon
Channing' s life and work, hailing him as a prophet
who belonged to no one sect or communion, but
only to the universal church of Christ. But this
was Protestant commendation. So was not that
of M. LavoUee, whose " Channing : sa Vie et sa
Doctrine " was the enthusiastic tribute of a Roman
Catholic scholar, his book of such literary distinc-
tion as to be crowned by the Academy of Moral
and Political Sciences.^ He found Channing's most
distinctive character in his universal love and fra-
ternity, and after this in his confidence and —

1 The title of Count Gasparin's book, the spirit of which was
precisely Laboulaye's.

2 M. Jules Simon, president of the society, said, " It is as the
adviser of the people that Channing has attained to an unpre-
cedented sublimity and efficacy. . . . Time cannot weaken the
force of his apostolic teachings, which deserve the attention of all
nations."

436 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

audacity ! He asked, " How can any one help lov-
ing, in Channing, the defender of all the oppressed,
the advocate of all the miserable, the truly Chris-
tian apostle, consecrating his energies and his life
to the emancipation of the negro, to the spread of
popular education ? How can any one help par-
doning in him, after so many noble efforts, an excess
of optimism and of confidence carried, perhaps,
to the verge of illusion ? " He compares Channing
with Fenelon and says, " Both have vowed to Jesus
a love equally lively and profound, but while the
one adores and prays, the other contemplates and
reveres." ^

In Germany Channing's works were translated
as early as 1850 and made a wide and deep im-
pression, which found in Baron Bunsen, a devout
Trinitarian, its most significant illustration. In
his " God in History," he hailed Channing as " a
grand Christian saint and man of God, — nay also
as a prophet of the Christian consciousness regard-
ing the future, destined to exert an increasing in-
fluence." He said, " If such a man, whose whole
life and conversation, in the sight of all his fellow
citizens, stand in absolute correspondence with the
earnestness of his Christian language, and are with-
out a spot, be not a prophet of God's presence in

^ Some of the more recent studies of Fenelon — Bruneti6re's,
Crousl^'s, and St. Cyres' — make for the persuasion that Chan-
ning, though " hardly Christian " measured by M. LavoU^e's theo-
logical standards, was of a more consistent saintliness than the
ecclesiastical courtier who pacified the Huguenots of Saintonges
by a policy of " wholesale dissimulation, bribery, and espionage."

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 437

humanity, I know of none such." In England
Channing has had much cordial recognition, and
that increasingly. This has sometimes had the
connotation of a claim upon his sympathy with
orthodox opinion, but oftener it has been inspired
by a perception of a spirit in him that transcends
all sectarian differences. It was not Channing's
approximation to an orthodox Christology that de-
lighted Frederick Robertson, but his enthusiasm
for the moral worth of Jesus. It was because
Channing was one of the pioneers of spiritual free-
dom that Dean Stanley, when here in America,
reverently visited his grave with Phillips Brooks.

The centennial of Channing's birth, April 7,
1880, was signalized by a public recognition of
his character and influence which extended far be-
yond the boundaries of the Unitarian denomina-
tion. While the local celebrations, here and abroad,
were conducted by Unitarians, t^ere were many
cordial responses to the invitations extended to
evangehcal leaders, and on the part of these there
was ample acknowledgment of Channing's histori-
cal significance, his softening of the harsher creeds,
his superiority to sectarian narrowness, his philan-
thropic spirit, and of the impetus given by him to
social improvement and reform. In Brooklyn,
Henry Ward Beecher's clearest note was that of
rejoicing over the improvement of Channing's views
on those of Lyman Beecher. There was no juster
word than that of the Jewish Rabbi, Dr. Gustav
Gottheil, my honored friend, who said : —

438 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

The impression I have gathered from Dr. Chaimiiig's
writings is that his theory of Christianity cannot be sub-
stantiated by the literary and historical proofs on which
he relied ; but it participated in his own deeply moral
nature, his own great mind, his deep and loving heart ;
he roams, as it were, in the ancient halls, calling to his
aid all the spirits which he thought would minister to
the ideal which alone could satisfy his own spiritual
needs and those of his generation. . . . Though he al-
ways meant to speak as a disciple, he, in truth, spoke as
a master. You feel when you read him that he was
much bolder than he knew, and that all his thoughts
have the force and freshness of a spontaneous mind,
and do not state what he found in the book, but in his
own reason and conscience.

The centennial marked among Unitarians a nota-
ble decline of the attempt to make Channing's
theology the standard of Unitarian theological pro-
priety, a notable appeal to his free spirit for its
encouragement and justification of a radical intel-
lectual transformation. All of the men who had
known Channing well had not yet gone over to the
majority, and from Dewey, Furness, Bellows, Bar-
tol, and others, there was much tranquil recollec-
tion of the impression made by his living presence
on their lives.^ The seventy-fifth anniversary of

1 Incidental to the centennial celebration was the laying of
the corner-stone of the beautiful Channing Memorial Church in
Newport, with a sernaon equal to the day by Dr. Bellows, escap-
ing wholly from the bounds of Channing's doctrine into the free-
dom of his spirit. The city of his birth also commemorates him,
since 1893, with a statue, the work of W. Clarke Noble, and the
gift of William G. Weld of Boston. The centennial of Channing's

AS DYING AND BEHOLD ! 439

the original meeting of the American Unitarian
Association was celebrated in Boston with great
pomp and circumstance. A significant feature was
the equal honor paid to Channing, Parker, Emer-
son, and Martineau, by men carefully chosen, each
for his special task, while delegates from every
part of Europe and from Asia added their voices
to the domestic " tumult of acclaim." The inter-
pretation of Channing fell to William C. Gannett,
and to say that it was conceived in perfect sym-
pathy with Channing' s spirit is its sufficient praise.
The keynote was struck in the title, " Channing
an Apostle of the Spiritual Life." Channing's
great emphases were driven home, mainly in his
own words, — the superiority of character to sect or
creed ; goodness, alike in man and God, the supreme
object of admiration and desire. " To-day's New
Orthodoxy," he said, " is a belated Unitarianism.
Largely in doctrine, completely in spirit, in prin-
ciples, in characteristic emphases and tendencies,
it is ' Unitarianism with the copyright run out.' "
But there was no pleased anticipation of a Uni-
tarian development that would sweep the broken
ranks of Orthodoxy into its wide array ; rather a
prophecy of an inclusion that would transcend the
differences which have hitherto prevailed, of a
more perfect union than that which, for a century

entrance on his work in Boston will see his statue by Herbert
Adams, a work of great dignity and refinement and an inspired
interpretation, set up in Boston in the Public Garden, facing the
Arlington Street Church, Channing's in the straight line of de-
scent.

440 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

before the outbreak of 1815, mocked witb its
formal unity the contradictory elements that were
striving against each other in the agitated bosom
of the time.

There could be no clearer sign of the extent to
which that which was prophecy in Channing is ful-
filment now, than Harnack's '' What is Chris-
tianity ? " Here is a book, up to the level of which
have come hundreds of preachers in the various
orthodox churches and thousands of the laity, so
that if we speak of " Liberal Christianity," we
are bound to recognize that only the smaller part
of it is coterminous with the Unitarian develop-
ment, or with this and the Universalist together.
Comparing Channing with Harnack, what do we
find? That they are perfectly agreed in their
opinion of the essential qualities of Christianity,
the main teachings of Jesus : the heavenly king-
dom upon earth ; the Fatherhood of God ; the in-
finite value of the human soul ; the higher right-
eousness and the commandment of love. In many
particulars we find the "progressive orthodoxy"
of Harnack far in advance of the positions to which
Channing had arrived. The Bible, which was for
Channing a book plenarily, though not verbally
inspired, is for Harnack a collection of simply and
entirely human writings. The virgin-birth of Jesus,
at which Channing did not hesitate, has for Har-
nack no credibility ; and the resurrection of Jesus,
of wliich Channing had never a doubt, is for Har-
nack incapable of proof. " Either," he says, " we

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 441

must decide to rest our belief on a foundation un-
stable and exposed to fresh doubts, or else we must
abandon this foundation altogether with its mirac-
ulous appeal to our senses." Miracles in general
were a great deal to Channing. He did not, with
Andrews Norton and some others, think it crimi-
nal to accept the teachings of Jesus on their in-
trinsic merits and not because of his miraculous
credentials, but hardly could he conceive of Chris-
tian belief and character without miraculous aid.
Harnack's view reproduces that of Theodore Parker.
It is, in Harnack's words, " The question of miracles
is of relative indifference compared with every-
thing else which is to be found in the gospels."
The doctrine of Christ's double nature is as intol-
erable to Harnack as it was to Channing, but his
escape from it is by a much straighter path than
Channing's Arianism, or the Socinianism of Priest-
ley and others. His view is purely humanitarian.
Channing, indeed, would have been much shocked
at his pathetic plea for our genial tolerance of the
intellectual mistakes of Jesus in the matter of
demoniacal possession and a personal devil.

It is easy to make too much of any personal
example. Turn we, then, to the hundreds of books
emanating from preachers and professors who are
in good and regular standing in orthodox churches
and theological schools, books written by such men
as Abbott, Gordon, Harris, Paine, Van Dyke,
whose average constructions are much more at
variance with the traditional standards than were

442 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

those of Dr. Channing. Turn we to the many
thousands who confidently reject the doctrine of
eternal punishment, where Channing made only a
faint demur. Turn we to the Presbyterian Gen-
eral Assembly (1902), presided over by Henry C.
Van Dyke, to whom Calvin's God is " a nightmare
horror of monstrosity, infinitely worse than no
God at all." " To worship such a God," he says,
"is to worship an omnipotent devil." Similarly
thought the Assembly, and made such changes in
the Westminster Confession as would, if made in
1815 by the New England Congregationalists, have
made their segregation into two mutually distrust-
ful and oppugnant bodies almost or quite impossible.
When we consider how frail the formal recession
from their traditional symbols by ecclesiastical
bodies generally is compared with the large utter-
ance of men's personal talk, we may begin to
understand how extended and how general the
departure in the unbroken orthodox communions
is from those conceptions of religion which were
intolerable for Channing's mind and heart.

What Channing's part has been in this amelio-
ration of dogma only the most foolhardy will pre-
sume to say. To overrate it is an easy matter,
such immense cooperation has it had from the sci-
entific and other intellectual forces of the period.
Moreover, many of the theological and critical
positions taken up so cheerfully by liberal Ortho-
doxy are far in advance of those to which Chan-
ning attained with much hesitation and anxiety.

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 443

Here, certainly, he has not been the forerunner.
On critical lines there has been obvious gain on
his naive subordination of the irrational and dis-
suasive parts of the Bible to those which were for
him rational and engaging. On theological, and
more especially Christological, lines, the gain has
been less obvious. The Christology of Fairbairn
or Gordon, for example, has less intellectual serious-
ness and logical coherency than the inherited creed ;
less than the Arian mechanism with which Chan-
ning set out or the Socinian story-book contrivance,
— a titular sonship bestowed on the good human
Jesus as a reward of merit ; far less than the hu-
manitarian conception to which he finally arrived.
But none of these considerations touches the
heart of Channing's prophetical relation to the
generations that have intervened between his time
and ours and to those which are now pressing for-
ward into life. To his contemporaries he was a
distinguished theologian; seen from our present
vantage, his theology is the least part of him. Our
present orthodoxy might have adopted much more
of his opinion, or have advanced much more
from his positions, and his main significance would
not be seriously changed. For this inhered in
his moral inversion of the Copernican astronomy.
This world was central to his religious aspiration.
He preached the kingdom of heaven upon earth.
Not to save men's souls for heaven or from hell
was the conscious purpose of his ministry, once he
had come into clear self-consciousness, but to save

444 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

men in their physical, intellectual, moral, and
spiritual entirety, from foolish wasting of their
powers, and for the upbuilding on the earth of a
divine society. Nothing has been more character-
istic of the last half century of religious thought
than the shifting of its centre of gravity from
another world to this. Theology has come to
sociology as John the Baptist came to Jesus in the
New Testament legend, saying, " Thou must in-
crease and I must decrease ; " and such has been
the working out. No one pretends that aU this
has been an effect of which Channing was the
cause, but Channing's anticipation of it all was
wonderful. The new social enthusiasm was all
there in his brooding mind and yearning heart.
All that we have seen of this has been the progres-
sive realization of his hope and dream.

Moreover, he has been the critic equally with
the prophet of the new social spirit. He was not
of those who believe that the kingdom of heaven
comes entirely without observation. He fancied
great improvements possible in the social organiza-
tion. Perhaps he looked with a too sanguine hope
to such experiments as those at Mendon and Red
Bank and Brook Farm. But he never made the
mistake which is so common, — he never imagined
that an ideal society could be constructed out of
bad men or men indifferently good. He knew
that, given the most perfect social organization,
vdth men as they are now, the joint result would
not be anything deserving thanks and praise. He

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 445

would make the perfected individual the corner-
stone of the divine society. Only as men are
clean, healthy, intelligent, educated, virtuous, can
they, in their combination and cohesion, shape that
better social state which is the desired of all na-
tions.

But the main significance of Channing was not
exhausted by his translation of the great salvation
out of the language and spirit of other-worldli-
ness into the language and spirit of social regen-
eration. Equally inherent in it was his extremely
practical doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. What
made this doctrine a reality for Channing, when
for many others it was a mere form of words, was
his vital appropriation of its corollary — the Bro-
therhood of Man. Here was the religious sanction
of his social spirit. All his social aspirations, —
for improving the condition of the poor ; for ele-
vating the laboring classes ; for universal educa-
tion ; for the emancipation of the slave ; for the
wiser treatment of criminals ; for the cure of in-
temperance ; for the abatement of money-worship
and the partisan spirit, — all his aspirations di-
rected to these ends went back into his conscious-
ness of human brotherhood, and fed their roots
upon his " one sublime idea " of the greatness of
the human soul. This greatness was a possibility
that must not be jeopardized by ignorance and sin ;
this brotherhood a pledge of mutual reverence and
forbearance, and of helpfulness in every strait.

It must be confessed that Channing's vision was

446 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

not so prophetic on this line as on that of social
regeneration inhibiting the traditional scheme of
other-world salvation. The right of the strong
nations to subject the weak to their good pleasure ;
the conviction that " the black, brown, yellow, and
dirty-white people will have togo^^ and with these
the population of the slums ; a certain hard com-
placency in the presence of infernal cruelty whether
at home or in our insular possessions ; the flouting
of our traditional ideals of popular rights as senti-
mental constructions for which we have no longer
any use, — these are so many aspects of our time
that do not so much indicate our response to
Channing's spirit as the need of our return to him
for guidance in the doubtful way. Never at any
time have we been more plainly called to hold
up our social, political, and individual life to the
searching light of his clear eyes than in this imme-
diate present, when a certain scepticism of human
brotherhood has not only entered into minds natu-
rally inclined to such scepticism, but has infected
many whom we imagined born for other things.

There is encouragement for us when we turn
from this aspect of contemporary life to that pre-
sented by its intellectual conditions. The ethics
of intellect is much better understood and much
more happily exemplified than it was in Chan-
ning's time. We are far enough from realizing
that spiritual freedom, the high thought of which
enraptured Channing's soul, and became psalm and
prophecy upon his lips, but we cannot read his

AS DYING AND BEHOLD! 447

strong denunciations of contemporary bigotry and
persecution, or his passionate indictments of the
sectarian spirit, without being assured that we
have made some advance in these particulars ; yes,
a good deal. There is much more freedom of theo-
logical opinion than there was formerl}^, much less
disposition to measure men's characters by theo-
logical standards ; though it must, perhaps, be
granted that the more genial temper has the de-
fect of its quality, — a slackened earnestness ; a
sentiment of indifference in the presence of reli-
gious ideas and ideals.

In no respect was Channing more prophetic of
the changes that have been developed since his
death than in the decay of the sectarian spirit.
Could he return to us, he would not appreciate as
would Benjamin Franklin our steam engines and
telegraphs ; he would be painfully suspicious of
our enormous wealth, and even more so of our
great fleet of warships and the strengthening of
our military arm ; but he would be delighted with
our Church of the Divine Amenities, the kindly
sympathies of so many preachers and laymen of
the different sects, the cooperation of these sects on
many lines of social help, the exchange of pulpits
across sectarian lines of demarcation, our parlia-
ments of religion, and our congresses which bring
together, for the friendly interchange of opinion
and comparison of purpose. Christians of every
name, and with these the Jew, the Buddhist, the
Brahmin, the Mohammedan, —

448 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Self -reverent each and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities.

And should he, remaining with us for a little
time, come, on a day, somewhere, upon

A temple, neither Pagod, Mosque, nor Church,
But loftier, simpler, always open-door'd
To every breath from heaven, and Truth and Peace
And Love and Justice came and dwelt therein, —

he would go in and feel as much at home as any
one of the more recent times, so open was his
mind, so given to hospitality, such joy had he in
finding the good man wearing the Presbyterian
blue, the Quaker drab, or some other color that he
could not quite approve.

It is impossible for any one to study Channing
long and carefully and not feel that if, from any
height, he sees and knows the present order of the
world, he finds the realization of his hopes far less
in the spread of those particular opinions which
received his intellectual assent than in the soften-
ing of sectarian animosities, the diminution of sec-
tarian zeal, the kinder mutual regards of different
bodies of believers, the enlarging sympathy of the
world's great religions, and the labors of those
men who are doing what they can to lessen party
spirit, to improve social conditions, and to uphold,
in spite of proud contempt and rancorous opposi-
tion, the things that make for peace.

INDEX

INDEX

Abbot, Rev. Abiel, n., 117.

Abbott, Dr. Lyman, 441.

Adams, Charles Francis, n., 1; n., 37;
n., 103, 104 ; n., 293.

Adams, Henry, "History of the
United States," n., 66; 69; quoted,
90; 190.

Adams, Herbert, statue of Channing,
n., 439.

Adams, John, President of the United
States, 37, 38; 105.

Adams, Rev. John Coleman, address
on Ballou, n.. 111.

Adams, John Quincy, 190; estimate of
the " Slavery " pamphlet, 276, 277.

Adams, Samuel, death of, 69.

Aikenhead, young martyr, 95.

Aikin, Dr. John, 207.

Aikin, Miss Lucy, corresjMJnds with
Channing, 206, 207; 382.

Alcott, Bronson, 312; interesting to
Channing, 323.

Alcott, Louisa M., " Transcendental
Wild Oats," n., 323.

AUen, Dr. A. V. G., " Jonathan Ed-
wards," n., 57.

Allen, Dr. Joseph Henry, " Unitarian-
ism since the Reformation," u., 96,
n., 105; "Nineteenth Century Re-
ligion," n., 410.

Allston, Washington, 12; 25; college
mate of Channing, n., 29; describes
Channing, 33; 34; marries Chan-
ning's sister, 170; Coleridge writes,
174; 196; 217; portrait of Chan-
ning, 359; 395.

American Unitarian Association or-
ganized, 179; Aaron Bancroft first
president of, 181; Channing makes
report of, 182; n., 215; seventy-
fifth anniversary of, 438, 439.

Ames, Fisher, 59; described, 68;

member of the Essex "Junto," 69;

151; 389.
Amiel, 80.

Angelo, Michael, 150.
Antram, Mary, maiden name of John

Channing' s wife, 7.
Appleton, Nathaniel, opinions of, 98,

99.
Appleton, Thomas G., 362.
Aristotle, quoted, 83.
Armstrong, Rev. Mr., eulogy on the

death of Channing, n., 422.
Armstrong, Rev. Richard A., his

" Man's knowledge of God," 255.
Arnold, Matthew, criticism upon Mil-
ton's poetry, 197; "Literature and

Dogma," 226; 388.
Austen, Jane, 208.
Austin, James T., 260; attacks the

"Slavery" pamphlet, 277, 278;

flouts Channing's resolutions at

FaneuilHall, 285, n., 286; 296; 345;

346.

Bacon, Henry, funeral address, n.,
422.

Bacon, Lord, 9; 381.

Baillie, Joanna, 208 ; Channing writes,
n., 378, 382.

Baldwin, William H., n., 3»4.

BaUou, Rev. Adin, founder of Hope-
dale, 322; 352.

Ballou, Rev. Hosea, 78; 110, 111, 112;
Channing draws nearer to, 254.

Bancroft, Aaron, first president of
the American Unitarian Associa-
tion, 181.

Bancroft, George, 68; story about,
n., 277.

Barbauld, Mrs., 207.

452

INDEX

Bartlett, Rev. John, minister in Mar-

blehead, Mass., n., 158.
Bartol, Dr. Cyrus A., " Radical Prob-
lems," n., 310; funeral address,
n., 422.
Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, at Chan-

ning's centennial, 437.
Beecher, Dr. Lyman, characterizes

Boston society, 223; 437.
Belknap, Rev. Jeremy, founder of the
Massachusetts Historical Society,
68; minister of Federal Street, 107,
108; preaches installation sermon
for Dr. Morse, n., 127.
Bellamy, quoted, 104.
BeUows, Dr. Henry W., eulogy on
C banning, n., 422; National Confer-
ence organized, 434; sermon at lay-
ing of corner-stone of Channing
Memorial Church, 438.
Belmont, Perry, buys C banning' s Oak-
land " garden," n., 374.
Belsham, Rev. Thomas, 95; letter
from Buckminster, n., 119; Life of
Theophilus Lindsey, 128, 129, 130;
131; 132; replies to Channing's ser-
mon, n., 178; 230; 341.
Berkeley, Channing studies, 42; 428.
Bimey, James G., suffers from mob,
280; presidential candidate, 281;
quoted, 409.
Birrell, Sir Augustine, life of Hazlitt,

n., 107.
Blaine, James G., at Concord Centen-
nial, n., 30, 31; 407.
Bonet-Maury, "Early Sources of Eng-
lish Unitarian Christianity," 92, n.,
96.
Borromeo, 401.
BoBSuet, 68.
Boswell, 354.

Bourg, Baron de, journal of, 4, 5.
Bowditch, Dr. Henry I., n., 273.
Bowditch, Nathaniel, starts " Practi-
cal Navigator," 68.
Briant, Lemuel, an early Unitarian,

103; 104; 105; 109.
Brooks, Rev. Charles T., "A Centen-
nial Memory," n., 7; n., 12, 34, 63;
Channing's charge at his installa-
tion, n., 325; 379; eulogy on Chan-
ning, n., 422.
Brooks, Peter C, portrait of a lay-
man, 297.

Brooks, Phillips, 44; visits Channing's

grave with Dean Stanley, 437.
Brougham, Lord, criticises Channing,

202, 204, 205, 206.
Brown, Charles Brockden, 196.
Browning, Robert, quoted, n., 18 ;

quoted, 246.
Brownson, Orestes A., 321; Chan-
ning's "Likeness to God" appeals

to him, 350.
Brunetiere, study of F^nelon, n., 436.
Bryant, William CuUen, 196; writes

hymn for memorial service, 423.
Buckminster, Dr. Joseph, father of

Joseph Stevens, quoted, 91 ; 100.
Buckminster, Rev. Joseph Stevens,

college mate of Channing, n., 29;

67; comes to Brattle Street, 72;

account of, 88, 89, 90, 91; quoted,

n., 119; Andrews Norton's opinion

of, 148; 328.
Bunsen, Baron, eulogizes Channing,

436.
Buren, Martin Van, 405.
Burke, Edmund, n., 41; 42; 68.
Burns, Anthony, returned to slavery,

431.
Burns, Robert, 68.

Burr, President, father of Aaron, 104.
Bushuell,Dr. Horace, 79; 97; method

compared with Channing's, 237;

307.
Butler, Bishop, 50; 60.
Byron, Lord, 209.

Cabot, Miss Eliza Lee, marries Dr.
FoUen, 381.

Cabot, George, 59; president of Hart-
ford Convention, 69; 190.

Calvin, John, 93, 430; 442.

Campbell, 60.

Carlyle, Thomas, 33; 173; 174; 207.

Carpenter, Dr. Lant, Channing writes
to, 342.

Carpenter, Rev. Mr., eulogy on Chan-
ning, n., 422.

Chace, Elizabeth Buffum, Channing
meets in her childhood, 377, 378.

Chaloner, Mary, marries John Chan-
ning, Dr. Channing's grandfather,
6.

Channing, Ann, dies, 170.

Channing, Edward, Harvard profes-
sor, son of Ellery, n., 6.

INDEX

453

Channing, Edward Tjorel, Chan-
ning's brother, n., 5; n., 9.

Channing, Elizabeth P., daughter of
Rev. George Channing, n., 6;
" Kindling Thoughts," n., 368.

Channing, Eva, daughter of William
Francis, and granddaughter of Dr.
Channing, n., 5.

Channing, Francis, Channing's bro-
ther, n., 5; quoted, 49; goes to Cam-
bridge, 55 ; walks with his brother,
62; encourages his brother, 71; 84.

Channing, George, brother of Chan-
ning, 462.

Channing, Henry, uncle of Dr. Chan-
ning, 26; 64; 71.

Channing, John, father of John, great-
grandfather of Channing, 6, 7.

Channing, Jolrn, father of William,
grandfather of Dr. Channing, 6.

Channing, Lucy, Channing's mother,
n., 5.

Channing, Mary, Dr. Channing's
daughter, n., 344.

Channing, Mrs. Ruth, Channing's
wife ; with him in Europe, 173 ; n.,
212 ; accompanies her husband to
St. Croix, 364 ; 367.

Channing, Walter, Channing's bro-
ther, n., 5.

Channing, William, Channing's father,
n. 5 ; son of John, 6 ; birth and ac-
count of, 7, 8, 9.

Channing, Dr. William EUery, place
of birth, 1; early associations with
Newport, 2, 3, 4; date of birth and
baptism, 5 ; ancestry, 6-13 ; early
life, 14-20 ; 'WTites of Stiles, 18, 20,
21; recollections of Dr. Hopkins,
21-23; youthful traits, 25-27; en-
ters Harvard, 28-31; work at Har-
vard, 32; health in college, 33;
portrait by Malbone, 34; club life
at Harvard, 34, '35; impressions of
college life, 35; relations to free
thought and politics, 37; address
on behalf of Harvard students, 38 ;
commencement oration, 39 ; writing
of his college years, 39, 40; influ-
ence of Hutcheson, 41; attracted
to Ferguson, 41; reads and stud-
ies Locke, etc., 42; interest in
Shakespeare, 43; goes to Virginia,
44; convictions on slavery, 45; po-

litical environment, 46; reads the
radical socialists, 47 ; writes of social
reform, 48, 49 ; religious experience,
50, 51 ; physical misery and method
of living, 52, 53; returns to New-
port, 54, 55; in Redwood Library, 5G ;
influence of Hopkins, 57; preaches
for, 58; returns to Cambridge, 58,
59; thoughts on different writers,
60, 61; physical weakness, 61; 62;
unites with the church, 62 ; draws up
articles of belief, 62, 63; first ser-
mon, 63, 64; accepts a call to Fed-
eral Street, 64; ordination, 64; con-
duct of service, 65; name of church
building, 65; social status of Boston,
66, 67; intellectual and political, 67-
69 ; makes home with Stephen Hig-
ginson, Jr., 70; gloom settles upon
him, 70; troubled with " subjects,"
71 ; writes his uncle, 71 ; manner
of preaching, 72 ; physical delicacy,
73; thought considered Calvinistic,
74 ; sermon preached at Rev. John
Codman's ordination, 74, 75 ; bur-
den of his early preaching, 75, n.,
75; 76; reprehension of New Eng-
land Calvinism, 78; fore-feeling of
Bushnell, 79; Arian conception of
Jesus, 80, 81 ; anti-war sermon, 1812,
82; idea of perfection, 82, 83; in-
vites mother to Boston, 84; man-
agement of home afl'airs, 84-86;
his Federalism, 86; for freedom of
speech in war time, 87, compared
with Buckminster, 89-91; 92; 94;
95; 97; representative personal ex-
perience of, 99; criticised by Haz-
litt, 107 ; thought anticipated by
Ballon, 110; writes for the " Pano-
plist," 117 ; preaches Mr. Codman's
ordination sermon, 118; 121; Cal-
vinistic in thought, 122; devout bib-
licism, 123; sympathy with Buck-
minster ana Thacher, 123; opinions
and disposition contrasted, 124, 125;
urges Worcester to edit the " Chris-
tian Disciple," 126; rare sense of
importance of free inquiry, 127,
roused by Evarts's review in " Pano-
plist," 130 ; writes letter to his
friend Thacher, 131 ; difference from
Belsham, 132; the *' silent brother-
hood," 133, 134; exclusive policy,

451

INDEX

134, 135; replies to Worcester's let-
ters, 135, 136; 137; writes on the
system of exclusion, 138-140; moral
argument against Calvinism, 140-
143; Baltimore Sermon, 144-147;
149; 150; strikes seldom but hard,
151; Woods and Stuart controver-
sies, 153, 154; " Dedham decision,"
155; Election Sermon, etc., 150, 157;
institutes the Berry Street Confer-
ence, 158, 159, 160; delivers the
Dudleiau Lecture, 160 ; Election
Sermon on spiritual freedom, 163-
167; Discourses, Reviews, and Mis-
cellanies, 167, 168, 169; personal
environment, 169, 170, 171; to Eu-
rope, 172 ; meets Coleridge and
Wordsworth, 173, 174, 175; returns
from Europe, 175; Mr. Gannett be-
comes his colleague, 176 ; the two
men compared, 176, 177; preaches
Mr. Gannett's ordination sermon,
177, 178; approves the Unitarian
name, 179; his part in forming the
Unitarian Association, 180; relations
to Association, 181-183 ; effect of
European trip, 184; gradual changes
of thought, 185-187; lack of per-
sonal element in letters, 188; ser-
mon on Napoleon, 188, 189; contrast
of social temper and doctrine, 189,
190; writes article "The Union,"
190-192; views of tariff, 192; Sun-
day mail service, 193; slight refer-
ence to political events, 193-195;
man of letters, 195, 196; essay on
Milton, 197, 198; criticised by Henry
Tuckerman, 198, 199; self-conscious-
ness, 199, 200; the preacher essay-
ist, 201; criticised by Hazlitt and
Brougham, 202-204; general read-
ing, 207-210; personal appearance
and pulpit manners, 211-213 ; effect
of preaching on health, 214; his
printed works, 215, 216; second vol-
ume of sermons, 1832, 217 ; unity of
thought, 217, 218; conception of
Jesus, 219; views of Christianity,
220-222; sermons on " Christian
Evidences," 222, 223; his method
scriptural, 225, 226 ; vice of this
method, 227; preacher of a New
Testament unity, 228 ; views of
Christ's nature, 229 ; escape from |

Arianism, 230 ; sermons on Christ,
231-237; larger and more personal
opinions, 238, n., 239; concerning
piety and morality, 240, 241; reli-
gious principle in human nature,
241, 242; mystery of life, 243 ; views
of human nature, 244-247 ; greatness
of the soul, 248-250; the future
life, 250-252; idea of sin, 252-254;
thought of God, 255-258; impres-
sions of slavery in Virginia, 259-261 ;
impressions at St. Croix, 261, 262;
takes the "Liberator," 263; be-
tween two fires, 203; criticised by
Mrs. Chapman, 2Gi, 265; Harriet
Martineau's conception of, 265, 266;
Lydia Maria Child criticises, 267,
268; rebuked by Samuel J. May,
268, 269, 270; preaches on the " New
York riots," 271; deprecates anti-
Abolition meeting, 272; writes " Sla-
very " pamphlet, 273, 274, 275; criti-
cised by Garrison and others, 276,
277; first appearance at "Anti-
slavery Society," 278, 279; hospi-
tality to Miss Martineau, 280 ; writes
letter to J. G. Birney, 280, 281;
writes letter to Henry Clay, 282,
283, 284; Faneuil Hall refused for
Lovejoy meeting, 284; prepares re-
solutions for Faneuil Hall meeting,
285, 286; views compared with Gar-
rison's, 287; personal relations with
Garrison, 287,288; meets Garrison,
289; writes open letter criticising
Henry Clay, 290 ; courage on anti-
slavery lines and work, 291-295 ;
calls meeting to establish " Exami-
ner," n., 296; working with Uni-
tarian laymen, 297; engagement in
social problems, 298 ; opinion of war,
299, 300, 301; prophecies of thoughts
and things, 302; address on temper-
ance, 302, 303, 304, 305; neighbor-
hood guilds, etc., 305, 306, 307 ; in-
terest in education, 307, 308, 309;
leading spirit in benevolent enter-
prises, 310; sympathy with Horace
Mann, 311 ; breadth of view in social
matters, 312, 313 ; lectures on Self-
Culture and the Elevation of the
Laboring Classes, 314-316; looks for
social improvement to lower classes,
317-321 ; attracted by different

INDEX

455

forms of cooperation, 322, 323; in-
terest in ministry at large, 323, 324;
a shrewd escape, 325 ; interest in the
Benevolent Fraternity of Churches,
326, 327; intellectual virtue, 328,
329, 330 ; sermon on Self-Denial,
331, 332 ; article on creeds, 333, 334;
antisectarian, 335 ; 33G ; as Uni-
tarian, 337 ; criticises Unitarianism,
338, 339 ; distrusts sectarian bonds,
340-343; opposes Lord's Supper as
test of fellowship, 344; concerning
Abner Kneeland, 345, 346 ; concern-
ing Dr. Noyes, 347 ; relations with
John Pierpont, 348; relations with
younger men, 349; 350; interest in
Orestes Brownson, 351; concerning
miracles, 351 ; Brook Farm, 352; re-
lations with Emerson, 353, 354; ap-
proves James Freeman Clarke's new
church, 355; friendship with Theo-
dore Parker, 355, 356; criticism of
Parker's views of Jesus, 357; open-
mindedness, 358 ; portraits by AU-
ston and Gambardella, 359 ; his deli-
cate frame and physical infirmities,
360-362; infrequent appearance in
pulpit, 362; pastoral work, 363 ; self-
control, 364 ; domestic transmigra-
tions, 365 ; life at Berry Street par-
sonage, 366; anecdote of Dr. Tucker-
man, 367 ; different opinions regard-
ing his conversational powers, 368;
Dr. Dewey's recollections of, 369,
370, 371 ; evenings devoted to light
literature, 371,372; domestic happi-
ness, 372, 373; his Oakland "gar-
den," 373, 374; enjoyment of nature,
375, 376; children's love for, 377;
preaching at Oakland, 378; associa-
tion with Charles T. Brooks, 379;
his principal friends, 380 ; relations
to Jonathan Phillips, 381 ; friendship
with Dr. Follen, 381, 382; literary
friendships, 382 ; his isolation, 383;
Miss Peabody's relation to, 383, 384;
ideas of money, 384, 385; corre-
spondence with Blanco White, 385,
386, 387 ; generalized conception of,
388, 389, 390, 391, 392; mother dies,
393; builds new house, 394; ideas on
simple living, 395 ; manner of spend-
ing day, 396, 397; lectures in Phila-
delphia, 398; lecture on the "Pre-

sent Age," 399; sermon on the
church, 400-402 ; relation to Federal
Street Church, 402-405; antislavery
work, 405; letter to Jonathan Phil-
lips criticising Clay, 406, 407 ; does
not satisfy Garrison, 407; "Eman-
cipation" pamphlet, 408-410; the
Follen incident, 412 ; publication of
works, 412 ; writes " The Duty of
the Free States," 413; friendship
with Sumner, 414; preaches for the
last time in Federal Street, 415; goes
to Lenox, 416; last public utterance :
the Lenox address, 417, 418; arrives
at Bennington, 419; last days and
the end, 420, 421; sermons occa-
sioned by his death, 422,423; poets'
contribution, 423, 424 ; memoir pub-
lished, 425, 426; reviewed by Garri-
son, 426, 427, 428; Martineau's re-
view, 428, 429, 430; "Memoir"
pertinent to the political situation,
431, 432; his effect on philanthropy,
433; effect on theology and religion,
433-435; foreign view of, 436, 437;
centennial of birth, 437, 438; honor
paid to, at Seventy-fifth Anniversary
of the Unitarian Association, 439;
comparison with Harnack, 440,441;
compared with the progressive or-
thodox, 441, 442; prophetical rela-
tion to the generations that followed
him, 443-448.

Channing, William Ellery, " Ellery
Channing," son of Walter Chan-
ning; nephew of Channing, n., 5 ;
n.,6.

Channing, William Francis, second
son of Channing, n., 5; birth, 171;
inventor and sociologist, 171 ; Whit-
tier's autograph letter to, n., 293;
414.

Channing, William Henry, son of
Francis and nephew and biographer
of Channing, n., 5 ; describes Chan-
ning's wife, 12; 40; n., 61; O. B.
Frothingham's memoir of, n., 67 ;
149 ; father dies, 170 ; criticism of
the "F^nelon" article, 200; 213;
edits " The Perfect Life," 216, n.,
224; debt to Miss Peabody, 354;
account of life at Berry St. parson-
age, 366 ; quoted on the Follen in-
cident, 411, 412.

456

INDEX

Chapman, Mrs. Maria W., criticises
Channing, 264, 265, 266 ; opinion of
the "Annexation of Texas " letter,
282; n., 285; 288; invites Chan-
ning to meet Garrison, 289 ; hears
Channing with Garrison, n., 290;
Whittier's letter concerning, n.,
293.

Chauncy, Dr. Charles, critic of the
Great Awakening, 78 ; 104 ; 109.

Cheever, Rev. Dr., 156, 157.

Chesterfield, Lord, 129.

Cheverus, Bishop, 421.

Child, Lydia Maria, sketched by Low-
ell, 266 ; publishes her " Appeal,"
267; relations with Channing, 288;
n., 293; 383.

" Christian Examiner," 126 ; first pub-
lished, 179; Channing writes for,
195; 197; 201 ; Channing's articles
cause censure, 202; 206; "Liber-
ator" printed from "Examiner"
type, 263 ; James T. Austin writes
for, 277; 296; 308; Dr. Noyes re-
views Hengstenberg, 346, n., 347 ;
Parker reviews Strauss's life of
Jesus, 355.

"Christian Register," founding of,
179.

Clarke, Dr. James Freeman, 106 ; life
in Kentucky, n., 267 ; starts new
society, 354; encouraged by Chan-
ning, 355; n., 422, 423; president
of Unitarian Association, 433.

Clarke, Dr. Samuel, 61 ; 94 ; 95 ; 96 ;
condemned by Channing, 98, n., 143.

Clarkson, Thomas, 408.

Clay, Henry, open letter from Chan-
ning, 282; criticised by Channing,
290; speech of Feb. 7, 1839, 405;
406; letters from Joseph J. Gur-
ney, 408; compromises of, 431.

Cobbett, William, pamphleteer, 282.

Codman, Capt. John, 74; on his fa-
ther's ordination, 75.

Codman, Dr. John, warning from
Channing, 75; 77; settled by the
Dorchester Society, 118, 119.

Coleridge, Samuel T., Channing
meets, 173, 174; quoted, 201; 207;
Channing pleased with his prose,
209; 253.

CoUyer, Robert, 211.

Cone, Dr. Orello, 109.

Conference, Berry Street, organized,
158 ; forms American Unitarian As-
sociation, 179, 180.

Cooke, George Willis, n., 181.

Cooke, Parsons, 167.

Cooper, James Fenimore, 196.

Cooper, Rev. Samuel, minister of
Brattle Street, 105.

Cotton, Dr. Charles, n., 217.

Cousin, 351.

Coverdale, 94.

Curtis, George William, appreciation
of old Newport, 3; Blaine incident,
n., 30.

Dall, Mrs. Caroline H., n., 212.
Dana, Francis, father of Richard

Henry Dana, n., 28; 397.
Dana, Richard Henry, n., 28; 196.
Defoe, Daniel, pamphleteer, 282.
Degerando, 210.
De Quincey, n., 37.
De R^musat writes preface to book on

Channing, 435.
De Stael, Madame, 67; 207.
Dewey, Dr. Orville, n., 133; 160;

Channing's assistant, 175, 176;

quoted, 213; selects sermons of Dr.

Channing for publication, n., 217;

Channing writes to, 312 ; quoted,

360; 362; personal recollections of

Channing, 369, 370, 371; eulogy on

Channing, n., 422.
" Dial," The, 351, 352.
Dickens, Charles, 372.
Dix, Dorothea, accompanies Dr. and

Mrs. Channing to St. Croix, 364;

teaches Channing's children, 373;

Channing's companionship with, 383.
Doddridge, Dr., life of, 108.
Douglas, Stephen A., 431.
Drummond, Rev. Mr., eulogy on

Channing, n., 422.
Dwight, John S., Channing gives him

charge at installation in Northamp-
ton, n., 325; 379.
Dwight, Theodore, quoted, 86.
Dwight, Timothy, 86.
Dyer, Mary, 97.

Eckley, Rev. Dr., minister of the Old

South, 105; 117.
Edgeworth, Maria, 208.
Edwards, Jonathan, 21; 57; 61; 74;

INDEX

457

strongest protagonist of Orthodoxy,
94: ; grandson of Solomon Stoddard,
97; writes "Freedom of the Will,"
98; quoted, 100; 104; 109; 131; n.,
178; 196; habit on meditative walks,
396.

Edwards, Luther, n., 130.

Eliot, Dr. Samuel A., n,, 181.

EUery, Lucy, Dr. Channing's mother,
7; description of, 12, 13; n., 29.

EUery, William, Channing's grand-
father, 9; account of, 10-12; 43;
49.

Ellis, Rev. George E., eulogy on
Channing, n., 422, 423.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 25 ;
33; quoted, 73; 89; quoted, 100;
110, 111 ; n., 154 ; quoted, n. 160 ;
164 ; quoted, 173 ; 179 ; missionary
of the Association, 181 ; 182 ; 216 ;
impressed by the Dudleian Lecture,
220 ; quoted, 239 ; grateful to Chan-
ning, 249 ; 343 ; relations with
Channing, 353, 354; 398; honor
paid to, at the Seventy-fifth Anni-
versary of the Unitarian Associa-
tion, 439.

Emlyn, 94 ; 96 ; 103.

Emmons, Nathaniel, quoted, 119.

Erasmus, 93.

Evarts, Jeremiah, editor of " Pano-
plist," 130 ; the " silent brother-
hood," 133.

Everett, Edward, n., 31 ; succeeds
Buckminster, at Brattle St., 90.

Farel, William, 93.

Farley, Rev. Frederick A., n., 108; or-
dination of, 240; Channing's remark

about war, 300.
Farmer, on miracles, 60.
Farrar, Prof., n., 296.
F«5nelon, n., 59 ; 76 ; 97 ; 200 ; 201 ;

u., 202; 207; 307; 331; 401; n.,

436.
Ferguson, Adam, 41 ; 42, 48; 59 ; 77;

186; 298.
Fisher, Prof. George P., criticises

Channing's doctrine of sin, n.,

252.
Fisher, Judson, n., 238, 239,
Fish, Rev. W. H., visits Channing at

Newport, 322.
Fiske, Johc, n., 1 ; 68.

Follen, Dr. Charles, friend of Chan-
ning, n., 270, 271; 288; 294; n.,
325 ; 353 ; effect of news of death
on Channing, 364 ; 380 ; Chan-
ning's friendship for, 381, 382 ; 405 ;
death of, 411, 412.

Fox, Rev. Thomas B., n., 31.

Franklin, Benjamin, 20; 42; 196;
349 ; 399 ; 447.

Freeman, Dr. James, receives lay or-
dination at King's Chapel, 106;
close alliance with Socinians, 107 ;
n., 129; 136; n., 203.

Froissart, 172.

Frothingham, Rev. Octavius Brooks,
biographer of W. H. Channing, u.,
5 ; n. 67 ; " Boston Unitarianism,"
90 ; n., 128 ; portrait of his grand-
father, 297; opinion about Chan-
ning, 337.

Fuller, Margaret, n., 6.

Fumess, Dr. William Henry, n., 60;
76 ; 195 ; installed minister at Phil-
adelphia, n., 211 ; quoted, 212; im-
pressed by the Dudleian Lecture,
220 ; denunciation of his " Notes on
the Gospels," 343 ; attraction of
Channing to, 351 ; account of Chan-
ning's preaching, 364 ; entertains
Channing, 398, 399.

Gambardella, portrait of Channing,
359.

Gannett, Dr. Ezra Stiles, a character-
ization of, 36 ; n., 60 ; 73 ; life, by
W. C. Gannett, n., 80; n., 105; n.,
133 ; becomes Channing's colleague,
176, 177; leader in the Unitarian
Association, 180, 181 ; on Chan-
ning's sermon " The Character of
Christ," 232 ; deprecates particular
thoughts of Channing, 244 ; 249 ;
328; manuscript record of his
preaching, n., 362, n., 363; 374;
383 ; failure of health, 404 ; funeral
address on Dr. Channing, n., 422.

Gannett, Rev. William C, n., 21 ; 80 ;
105; n., 133; sermon of, 137; n.,
238, 239 ; quoted, n., 241 ; quoted,
433 ; on Channing at seventy-fifth
anniversary of the Unitarian Asso-
ciation, 439.

Garrison, William Lloyd, 254 ; appre-
ciation of Channing, 265, 266;

458

INDEX

"Thoughts on Colonization," 267;
starts the "Liberator," 262, 263;
aided by Mrs. Chapman, n., 264;
New York riots oppose, 270 ; Boston
mob, 272; objections to " Slavery "
pamphlet, 276 ; opposition to Lib-
erty Party, 281, 282, 283 ; on Cban-
ning resolutions at Faneuil Hall
meeting, 285 ; views compared with
Channing's, 287 ; personal relations
with Channing, 287, 288 ; meets

i Channing, 289; 311; reported re-
mark on Channing, 384, 387 ; not
satisfied with Channing's letter on
Henry Clay, 407 ; 408 ; well pleased
with "Emancipation" pamphlet,
410 ; review of the " Memoir," 426,
427, 428 ; quoted, 432.

Garrison, F. J., n., 276.

Gasparin, Count, n., 435.

Gerando, Baron de, Channing sends
his book to, 342.

Gerry, Elbridge, quoted, 46; n. 277.

Gibbon, Edward, n., 37; 61.

Gibbs, James, architect, 72.

Gibbs, Mr., Channing's father-in-law,
259; n.,384.

Gibbs, Mrs., Channing's mother-in-
law, 176; 365.

Gibbs, Ruth, Channing's wife : maiden
name of, 169.

Gibbs, Sarah, Channing's sister-in-
law, n., 373, 374.

Gilbert, Prof., 229.

Gilder, Rachel De, 19.

Giles, Henry, 338.

GiUett, E. H., 75; n., 105; n., 117.

Gladstone, William E., 204, 205.

Godwin, William, 47.

Goethe, 207; 371.

Gordon, Rev. George A., 441; 443.

Gordon, Rev. Mr., sermon on Chan-
ning's death, n., 422.

Gorton, Samuell, first settler of War-
wick, R. I., 1, n., 1; 2.

Gottheil, Dr. Gustav, estimate of
Channing, 437, 438.

Greenwood, Dr. F. W. P., 328.

Gurney, Joseph John, letters to Henry
Clay, 408.

Hale, Dr. Edward Everett, n., 277;

369.
Hale, Nathan, 296.

Hall, Dr. Edward B., eulogy on

Channing, n., 422.
Hallett, B. F., presents Channing's
resolutions at Faneuil Hall meeting,
285.
Hamilton, Alexander, n., 29.
Hamack, Prof. A., 175; 238; com-
pared with Channing, 440, 441.
Harris, Dr. George, 441.
Hartley, 61 .

Hazlitt, Rev. William, father of Wil-
liam Hazlitt, 106; 107.
Hazlitt, William, n., 107, 200; criti-
cises Channing, 202, 203.
Hedge, Dr. Frederic H., Blaine inci-
dent, 30, 31 ; quoted, 70; Channing's
confidence in, 351; on Channing's
conversation, 368; sermon on death
of Channing, n., 422.
Hedge, Levi, professor at Harvard, 30.
Helmholtz, Prof., 417.
Hemans, Mrs. Felicia, 208; 382.
Henry VIII., 92.
Herbert, George, quoted, 239.
Herford, Rev. Brooke, n., 96.
Hicks, Mr., landlord at Bennington,

419.
Higginson, Stephen, n., 67; member

of the Essex Junto, 69.
Higginson, Col. T. W., "Oldport

Days," 3; 33 ; n., 70; n., 290.
Hill, Octavia, 305.

Hillard, George S., supports Faneuil
Hall resolutions, 285; 414; relations
with Channing, n., 404.
Hoar, Hon. George F., 277.
HoUey, Myron, Channing preaches

for, n., 331.
HoUey, Sallie, n., 331.
Holmes, Dr. Abiel, father of Oliver
Wendell, 62; takes part in Chan-
ning's ordination, 64.
Holmes, Dr. 0. W., quoted, 119; 423.
Hopkins, Dr. Samuel, Channing's re-
collections, 21,22; 56; influence on
Channing, 57; traits of character,
57, 58, 59; 89; 100; 105; 109; 122;
124; 131.
Hopkins, Stephen, 11.
Howard, John, 401.
Howells, William Dean, 208.
Hume, David, 42; 428.
Hutcheson, Francis, 40; 41; 42;n.,43;
48; 57; 59; 60; 77; 169; 210.

INDEX

Hutchinson, Anne, 2; 96.
Hutton, Rev. J. H., eulogy on Chan-
ning, n., 422.

Irving, Washington, 196.

James, Prof. William, n., 152.

Janes, Lewis G., 1; monograph of

SamueU Gorton, n., 1.
Jefferson, Thomas, 46; President of

the United States. 66; ideas of the

clergy, 69.
Johnson, Dr., n., 41; quoted, 73.
Johnson, Oliver, n., 277; n., 286.
Joubert, 80.
Jouffroy, 42; 351.
Judson, 113.

Kant, Immanuel, n., 43.

Keats, John, 209.

Keble, John, quoted, 79.

Kemble, Fannie, 417.

Kirkland, Dr., president of Harvard,
72; quoted, 185.

Kneeland, Abner, n., 260; 330; in-
dicted for blasphemy, 345, 346;
356.

Kossuth, Louis, 408.

Kuenen, Prof. Abraham, 347.

Laboulaye, Edouard, translates Chan-
ning, 434, 435.

Lafayette, on his way to America, 5;
n., 31.

Lamb, Charles, reply to Coleridge,
201; 206.

Lamson, Alvan, the "Dedham deci-
sion," 155.

Lanfrey, 201.

Laplace, n., 430.

Lardner, Dr., 60; 96; n., 143.

Lavoll^e, M., pays the tribute of a
Roman Catholic to Channing, 435,
436.

Law, William, 61.

Legate, Bartholomew, 94.

Leighton, Archbishop, 401.

Lessing, 144; 313.

" Liberator," the, first number of,
262; publishes Channing's letter to
J. G. Birney, 281; Channing writes
a letter to, 287; n., 384.

Lincoln, Abraham, 295; 302.

Lindley, 96.

Lindsay, Theophilus, takes the Unita-
rian name, 106; 128; n., 129.

Locke, John, 42; 61; 94; 95; 96;
n., 143; 218.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, n., 192.

Longfellow, Henry W., tribute to
Channing, 423, 424.

Lopez, Newport foreign trader, 4.

Loring, Ellis Gray, opinion of the
"Slavery" pamphlet, 276; 288;
291; n., 285; concerning Abner
Kneeland, 346.

Lovejoy, Elijah P., shot and killed,
284; n., 260; 287.

Lowell, Dr. Charles, college mate of
Channing, n., 29; 328.

Lowell, James Russell, n., 29; 151;
185; 288; elegy on the death of
Channing, 424; "Biglow Papers,"
431.

Lowell, John, writes Unitarian pam-
phlet, 150, 151; n., 190.

Lowell, John, Jr., founder of the
Lowell Institute, 151; 305.

Lowth, 61.

Lundy, Benjamin, 419.

Luther, Martin, 70; 93.

Lyman, Theodore, mayor of Boston,
272.

Lytton, Sir E. Bulwer, 372.

Macaulay, T. B., 195; essay on Mil-
ton, 197; 204.

Madge, Rev. Dr., eulogy on Chan-
ning, n., 422.

Madison, James, n., 29.

Malbone, miniature painter, 34.

Mann, Horace, 308; Channing's rela-
tion to, 311.

Marat, 46.

Marshall, Chief Justice, n., 29; 44;
46.

Martineau, Harriet, criticises Chan-
ning, n., 178; 264; opinion of Chan-
ning, 265, 266; 279; enjoys Chan-
ning's hospitality, 280; 289; 382;
384; Channing writes to, 415.

Martineau, Dr. James, 4; n., 43; 93;
n., 96; article on Channing, 131;
a defence of Unitarianism, 338;
Channing writes to, 339; position
as a Unitarian, 341; 351; Channing
compared with, 389; honor paid to,
at the seventy-fifth anniversary of

460

INDEX

the Unitarian Association, 439; eu-
logy on Channing, n., 422; "Me-
moir " reviewed by, 428-430.

Mather, Cotton, quoted, 98.

Mathew, Father, 408.

May, Rev. Samuel, proposes disunion
resolution, n., 283.

May, Rev. Samuel J., visits and criti-
cises Channing, 268-270; invited by
Channing to preach, 270; 271; n.,
276; 288; non-resistant tract, 300;
329; 411.

Mayhew, Jonathan, 103; 104; mover
in the political revolution, 105;
143.

McConnell, Dr. S. D., n., 107.

Mills, missionary, 113.

Milton, John, 94; 95; 100; 179; 195;
197; 198; 200; n., 202; 205.

Mirabeau, n., 43.

Mitford, Miss, 372.

Montaigne, 89.

Montesquieu, 41.

"Monthly Anthology," conducted by
S. C. Thacher, n., 88; 89; 117; 126.

Morse, Jedidiah, publishes his geo-
graphy, 68; preaches Election Ser-
mon, 70; collaborates with Dr.
Belknap, 108; 109; starts the "Pan-
oplist," 117; takes part in Codman's
ordination, 118; attacks Belsham's
lif e of Lindsey, 127-129; 130; 131;
132; the "silent brotherhood,"
133; 135; 151.

Morse, S. F. B., inventor of the elec-
tric telegraph, 128.

Motley, J. L., 68.

Murray, Rev. John, 78; 108, 109;

quoted, 110; 111; 112.
Murray, Mrs., wife of the Universal-
ist founder, 110.

Napoleon, 173; 174; 179; Channing
writes of, 188, 189; 195; 200; 201;
202, 203; 389.

Nelson, 389.

NeweU, missionary, 113.

Newman, Francis W., 255.

Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), 255.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 94 ; 95 ; 96 ; n.,
143; n., 430.

Nichols, Ichabod, 328.

Noble, W. Clarke, his statue of Chan-
ning, n., 438.

Norton, Mr. Andrews, 67; quoted,
72; 126; quoted, 148; controversy
with Prof. Stuart, 151-154; 180; n.,
296, 328; 353.

Noyes, Rev. Charles, n., 75.

Noyes, Dr. George R., n., 75 ; writes
"Examiner" article, 346; profes-
sor in Divinity School, 347 ; regard-
ing Channing's conversation, 368.

Osgood, Dr., of Medford, takes part

in Channing's ordination, 64 ; 127.
Osgood, Lucy, n., 127.
Otis, Harrison Gray, 288.
Owen, Robert, 350.

Paine, Prof. Levi Leonard, n., 136;

441.
Paine, Thomas, his " Age of Reason,**
36; 37; 60; publishes "Age of
Reason," 112; 282; 345.
Paley, 60; 256.
"Panoplist," the, starts, 117; 126;

n.,128; 130.
Park, Prof. E. A. at Andover, 57 ;

121.
Parker, Rev. Theodore, 63; n., 145;
187 ; 207 ; 240; 241 ; 257; 261 ; 278;
282 ; 332 ; 337 ; ^3 ; 353 ; friendship
with Channing, 355-358 ; quoted,
377 ; 402 ; eulogy on Channing, 422,
423; 430; South Boston Sermon,
etc., 433; honor paid to, at sev-
enty-fifth anniversary of the Unita-
rian Association, 439.
Parkman, Dr. Francis, 366.
Parkman, Francis, historian, 68.
Pascal, 401.
Pattison, Mark, 197.
Paulsen, Friederich, 83.
Peabody, Dr. A. P., n., 59; quoted,

105 ; 328 ; 329.
Peabody, Elizabeth P., 17; Channing
quoted, 42; n., 158 ; "Reminiscen-
ces," 207, 208 ; n., 210 ; n., 263 ; n.,
286 ; n., 344 ; concerning Emerson's
Divinity School Address, 353, 354 ;
365; account of Channing's talk,
369 ; reading with Channing, 371 ;
teaches Channing's children, 373 ;
380; relations to Channing, 383,
384; n., 384; 397.
Peabody, Dr. Ephraim, 328.
Peabody, Dr. Francis G., quoted, 326.

INDEX

461

Pearson, Prof., Harvard College, 30.

Peirce, Rev. Cyrus P., 309.

Perkins, James H., eulogy on Chan-
ning, n., 422.

Phillips, Jonathan, classmate of Chan-
ning, n., 29; 37; 64; presides at
Lovejoy meeting, 285 ; C banning
writes open letter, 290; 323; 324;
342; 370; 380; estimate of Chan-
nicg, 380 ; with Channing, 397 ; 406 ;
410.

Phillips, Wendell, judgment of Dr.
Gannett's preaching, 176, 177; n.,
273; speech at Lovejoy meeting,
286 ; 294.

Pickering, Timothy, 68 ; member of
Essex Junto, 69 ; n., 190.

Pierce, Edward L,, 210; n., 286; 293.

Pierce, Dr. John, tutor at Harvard,
30; n., 31; 33.

Pierpont, Rev. John, declares for the
Unitarian name, 179 ; 196 ; 311 ; re-
lations with Channing, 347, 348;
eulogy on Channing, n., 422, 423.

Plutarch, 89.

Popkin, Prof., Harvard College, 30.

Porter, Dr., of Roxbury, 118.

Porter, professor at Andover, 121.

Prescott, William H., 68.

Price, Dr. Richard, n., 41 ; 42 ; n.,
43; 50; 60; 77; 95; 96; 128.

Priestley, Dr. Joseph, 42 ; 60; 95; 96;
gives works to Harvard, 107 ; 128 ;
131; n., 143; n., 178; 230; 341;
387; 389; 430,441.

Pynchon, William, statue erected to,
96 ; book burned, 96.

Quincy, Josiah, n., 180.

Randolph, David Meade, Channing

teaches children of, in Virginia, 44 ;

45.
Raphael, 150.
Reed, David, first editor of the

" Christian Register," 179, 180.
"Register, Christian," first number

pubUshed, 179; n., 181.
Reid, Thomas, 42.
Remington, Ann, maiden name of

William EUery's wife, 10 ; 28.
Renan, quoted, 47 ; quoted, 205, 206 ;

216 ; quoted, n., 216 ; 434.
Rhodes, J. F., 68.

Rich, Caleb, a Baptist Calvinist, 110.

Richter, 207; 371.

Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 311.

Ripley, George, 352.

Robertson, Frederick W., 437.

Robespierre, 46.

Robinson, John, quoted, 117.

Rochambeau, Count de, letters of, 5 ;
25.

Rogers, Mr., Channing'a school-
teacher, 15; 24; 34; 40.

Roscoe, the Misses, 382.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 47.

Rowntree, B. S., n., 318.

Ruskin, John, 171.

Russell, Prof. W. C, nephew of Chan-
ning, n., 6.

Sainte-Beuve, 200.

Salter, Rev. William M., quoted, 314.

Scherer, Edmond, 197.

SchiUer, 207; 371.

Scott, Sir Walter, 208 ; 372.

Sedgwicks, the, Chauning's Lenox
friends, 416.

Seeley, J. R., 197.

Senancour, 80.

Servetus, Michael, 92; 93.

Sewall, Samuel E., 284.

Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony
Cooper), n., 43.

Shakespeare, Channing's acquaint-
ance with, 43; 139; 201.

Shaw, Lemuel, classmate of Chan-
ning, n., 29; corresponds with
Channing, 49.

SheUey, 209; 214; 371.

Sherman, John, n., 117.

Sherman, Gen. W. T., 299,

Sigoumey, Jane, marries Rev. Fred-
erick A. Farley, n., 108.

Sims, Thomas, returned to slavery,
431.

Simon, M. Jules, quoted, n., 435.

Smith, Adam, 48.

Smith, Gerrit, 411.

Snow, Rev. Herman, engages in sale
of Channing's works, n., 413.

Socini (the brothers), 92.

Southey, 209.

Sparks, Rev. Jared, ordination of,
144, 145.

Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 192; 198;
n., 236.

462

INDEX

Spenser, 432,

Sprague, Dr. W. B., life of Jedidiah
Morse, n., 127; 323.

Stanley, Dean, visits Channing's
grave, 437.

Stark, John, 419.

Starkweather, Ezra, n., 130.

St. Cyres, n., 436.

St. Gaudens, Augustus, 96.

Stephen, Fitz- James, 150, 151.

Stephen, Sir Leslie, n.,41; n., 43; 96.

Stetson, Grace EUery Channing,
daughter of "William Francis and
granddaughter of Channing, n.,
5 ; n., 145; publishes Channing's
" Note Book," 216.

Stiles, Dr. Ezra, visits at Newport,
n., 5; minister at Newport, 8;
Channing describes, 18; 20; 109;
176.

Stiles, Rev. Isaac, father of Ezra
Stiles, n., 21.

Stoddard, Solomon, grandfather of
Jonathan Edwards, 97.

Story, Judge Joseph, classmate of
Channing, 29, 31; writes of Chan-
ning, 82; impression of college life,
35; quoted, 37; 38; quoted, n., 38;
n., 59.

Story, William Wetmore, n., 29.

Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher, " Minis-
ter's Wooing," 21.

Strauss, 355.

Streeter, Adam, 109.

Stuart, Prof. Moses, 121 ; contro-
versy with Andrews Norton, 151-
154; 156; attacks Channing in a
pamphlet, 166, 167; 426.

Sumner, Charles, n., 210; 286; 293;
n., 404; intimacy with Chaiming,
414.

Sydney Smith, 35.

Tagart, eulogy on Channing, n., 422.

Talleyrand, quoted, 340.

Tappan, Dr., professor at Harvard,
36 ; 59 ; preaches Channing's ordi-
nation sermon, 64.

Tayler, J. J., eulogy on Channing,
n., 422.

Taylor, Father, 310,

Taylor, Henry, n., 96.

Taylor, Dr. John, 96.

Taylor, Jeremy, 401.

Tennent, 367, 368.

Thacher, Dr. Peter, 64.

Thacher, Rev. S. C, minister of New
South, 72; 88; characterized by W.
C. Gannett, n., 88; 91; quoted, 121;
131.

Thackeray, William Makepeace,
quoted, 45.

Thom, J. H., 338.

Thoreau, Henry, n., 5.

Ticknor, George, impressions of young
Channing, 64, 65.

Tiffany, Dr. C. C, n., 107.

Tocqueville, de, 165.

Toynbee, Arthur, 305.

Tuckerman, Henry T., criticises Chan-
ning, 198, 199.

Tuckerman, Dr. Joseph, classmate of
Channing, n., 29; gives Channing
right hand of fellowship, 64 ; the
ministry at large, 323, 324 ; sermon
preached at ordination of Barnard
and Gray, 325 ; 326 ; n., 363 ; 366 ;
anecdote, 367 ; 380.

Tyler, John, 420.

Tyndale, William, 94.

Tyndall, Prof. John, 172 ; 417.

Vanderbilt, Alfred, n., 374.

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, n., 374.

Van Dyke, Rev. Henry, 441 ; quoted,

442.
Voltaire, 282 ; 346.

Walker, Dr. James, 138; leader in
Unitarian organization, 180 ; 328 ;
n., 348.

Walker, Prof. Williston, n., 22; n.,
105; n. 112; n., 117.

Ware, Rev. Henry, Jr., 152 ; quoted,
177 ; leader in the new Unitarian
organization, 180 ; n., 323 ; 328;
353 ; 370.

Ware, Dr. Henry, Sr., made professor
in Harvard, 117; controversy with
Prof. Woods, 151, 153.

Washington, George, visit to New-
port, 18 ; 37.

Watson, bishop of Llandaff, his ' Apo-
logy for the Bible," 36; 37 ; 61.

Watts, Dr. Isaac, 96; life of, 108 ; n.,
108.

Webber, professor at Harvard, 30.

Webster, Daniel, reply to Hayne, 147 ;

INDEX

463

adopts protection, 192, 260; 285;

288; conduct of Creole case, 413,

414 ; 415 ; speech in Faneuil Hall,

420, 421 ; 431.
Weld, Theodore D., n., 2G7.
Weld, William G., gives a statue of

Channing, n., 438.
Wellington, Duke of, 293.
Wells, William, Jr., n., 129.
Wesley, John, n., 41 ; n., 96.
Whiston, 96 ; 98.
White, Bishop, 107.
White, Daniel Appleton, n., 59.
White, Joseph Blanco, corresponds

with Channing, n., 329, 385-387.
Whitman, Bernard, 156, 157 ; replies

to Prof. Stuart, 167.
Whitney, Eli, inventor of cotton-gin,

45.
Whittemore, Dr. Thomas, n., 127.
Whittier, John G., 185 ; 267 ; quoted,

n., 293 ; writes poem on Channing,

424, 425.
Wiclif, John, 94.
Wightman, Edward, 94.

Willard, Sidney, President, n., 29 ;
31 ; n., 37 ; 59.

WUliams, Rev. Mr., 98.

Williams, Roger, doctrine of *' soul
liberty," 1.

Winchester, Elhanan, 109; 110; 111.

WoUstonecraft, Mary, 47.

Woodberry, Prof. G. E., n., 79 ; 370.

Woods, Prof. Leonard, college mate
of Channing, n., 29 ; 120 ; 121 ;
controversy with Prof. Ware, 151-
153.

Worcester, Rev. Noah, 126 ; 135 ;
secretary of the Peace Society, 299.

Worcester, Dr. Samuel, dismissed
from Fitchburg, 117 ; attacks Chan-
ning's letters, 135, 136; 140; n.,
143; 150.

Wordsworth, William, American re-
print, 68; 171; 172; Channing
meets, 173-175 ; Channing's favorite
poet, 209; 371.

Wren, Sir Christopher, 72.

Wright, Frances, 350.

ElectrotyPed and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.

Date Due

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