tihvary of t:he theological ^tminaty 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 •a^D* 
 
 BX 9869 .C4 B8 
 
 Brooks, Charles Timothy, 
 
 1813-1883. 
 William Ellery Channing 
 
W^-:^K. 
 
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WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
William Ellery Channing: '^ 
 
 >. 
 
 ^Gli 
 
 a Centennial iWemorp. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES T. BROOKS. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1880. 
 
Copyright, 1880, 
 By Roberts Brothers. 
 
 University Press: 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
The path of the just is as the dawning lights that 
 shineth more and more unto the perfect day. 
 
 Great peace hat/e they that love Thy laiv^ and nothing 
 shall offend them. 
 
 Thou shall keep them secretly in a pavilion from the 
 strife of tongues. 
 
 Behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace. 
 
I 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 HAVE tried to write this little book in 
 the spirit of simplicity, truthfulness, 
 and even-handed justice which so strik- 
 ingly characterized its illustrious subject. 
 
 The want of a popular life of Channing 
 in one handy volume has long been felt, 
 and oftener expressed, by those, not only 
 in his own but in other denominations, 
 who have known the man only or chiefly 
 through his writings. As one contribution 
 toward the supply of that want, this com- 
 pend is offered to the public. 
 
 Although so short and succinct an ac- 
 count of so full and rich a life may well 
 seem, and must needs be, in some respects 
 a meagre outline, still this small volume 
 professes not to be a mere dry summary, 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 for it aims to let the reader, so far as possi- 
 ble, see and hear the man himself, as he is 
 imaged in his own words, especially in sig- 
 nificant passages from his familiar corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 Some reminiscences of Channing will 
 be found in these pages which have not 
 appeared elsewhere. The whole account 
 of his relation to the Unitarian Church in 
 Newport will, in particular, be new, and it 
 is hoped, interesting to most readers. One 
 other feature of this book, which, perhaps, 
 will not be unacceptable, is its bringing 
 together some of the significant expres- 
 sions and echoes from different denomina- 
 tions and foreign nations of Channing's 
 world-wide influence. 
 
 The following account of Dr. Chan- 
 ning's life and writings makes no pre- 
 tension (it need hardly be said) to any 
 philosophic novelty, to giving any new 
 estimate of his position, services, or char- 
 acter. Of course most of the external 
 facts herein related will be found scat- 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 9 
 
 tered through the pages of William Henry 
 Channing's three rich and eloquent bio- 
 graphical volumes. These have thus far 
 been the source from which all brief bi- 
 ographies of their subject have drawn 
 almost all their material. Indeed they are 
 a precious mine of spiritual gems, — a field 
 and sky of large and lofty thought and 
 kindling sentiment which it would be hard 
 to match in the whole range of religious 
 literature. But to the student of Dr. 
 Channing's life the work has this inconven- 
 ience, that the unfortunate plan the author 
 has perhaps almost necessarily adopted, of 
 crowding his pages with extracts from ser- 
 mons and letters, arranged according to 
 subjects instead of chronological order, 
 prevents the reader from getting (what is 
 so very important a business of the biog- 
 rapher to furnish or to further) a view of 
 the gradual growth of the man's mind and 
 the formation of his opinions. 
 
 Mr. Channing mtimates that he has left 
 unused many more of those documents 
 
10 PREFACE. 
 
 illustrative of his uncle's inner and out- 
 ward life, which he has so largely drawn 
 from in his Memoir. While grateful for 
 what has been printed from those private 
 papers, of meditations, confessions, and 
 studies, we only wish we might some day 
 have the whole of what would surely prove 
 such bright and honorable illustrations of 
 a spirit yearning for perfection. 
 
 It is earnestly to be hoped that the 
 world may one day have a chronologically 
 arranged collection of Dr. Channing's or- 
 dinary sermons of the earlier periods of his 
 ministry. Or, if that is no longer possible, 
 may we not hope, at least, to see a com- 
 plete and chronological arrangement of his 
 familiar correspondence ? For one of the 
 most instructive and inspiring traits of his 
 history is the mingled freedom and rever- 
 ence with which he " followed after " truth. 
 Well might he too have adopted those 
 words of Sir William Jones, so touchingly 
 appropriated by another and still living 
 venerable teacher of our liberal faith, in 
 
PREFACE. II 
 
 the preface to his Divinity School Lec- 
 tures : — 
 
 " Before thy mystic altar, heavenly Truth, 
 I kneel in manhood, as I knelt in youth ; 
 So let me kneel, till this dull frame decay. 
 And life's last shade be brightened by thy ray." 
 
 That the prayer of this last line may be 
 fulfilled to the beloved and revered sur- 
 vivor of the generation of Channing and 
 Ware and Norton is the fervent wish of 
 the grateful pupil who dedicates to him 
 this book. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Thoughts at the C?losing of the Centenary. — 
 A hundred years have gone — say, rather, have 
 come, with their vast accessions of hght and 
 quickening — since that life began on earth of 
 which it is the purpose of these pages to repeat 
 the leading facts, and emphasize some of the 
 principal lessons. It may well be questioned 
 whether these hundred years — or, indeed, any 
 hundred years since the Master left the earth — 
 have bequeathed to the world a more pure and 
 perfect example of the combination of qualities 
 that entitles its possessor to be called *' a man 
 of the Beatitudes." 
 
 Difficxilty of the Biographer's Task. — But the 
 
 clearness and completeness of a character by no 
 
14 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 means make it the easier to portray. There 
 are two different kinds of men that, for opposite 
 reasons, are continually tempting age after age 
 to do its best to analyze and characterize 
 them: the one is the class to which such men 
 as Cromwell belong, eluding our grasp by a 
 certain obscurity of life or language ; the other 
 includes men like Washington, the very round- 
 ness and transparency of whose being make 
 them the despair of the biographical portrait- 
 painter, who would avoid common-place, and 
 do justice to the individuaHty of his subject. 
 
 Channing an Inspiring Theme. — In this latter 
 class we place Channing. His is one of those 
 natures which it is easier to discern than to 
 describe. And it is one which discloses new 
 beauty and value as it is approached from new 
 directions. Channing, like his great Master, is 
 a "■ prophet of the soul," whose word has had 
 new meanings and applications for each new 
 generation, and will have for generations to 
 come. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 15 
 
 And hence it is that this closing year of the 
 century since his birth has aheady stirred up so 
 many minds, not only within but without the 
 pale of his own denomination, to try to express 
 their idea and impression of his genius, his 
 work, and his worth ; and the approaching cen- 
 tenary will awaken in many more hearts, espe- 
 cially of such as have personally known this 
 wise and saintly man, an earnest desire to ex- 
 press their grateful and reverent sense of his 
 rare service to truth and humanity, and add 
 their offerings of love and veneration to the 
 wreath which a generation has been intwining 
 around his memory. 
 
 The fast-dwindling number whose privilege it 
 was to enjoy the personal acquaintance of this 
 heavenly-minded man will naturally yearn to 
 transmit to the coming generation something of 
 the impression left upon them by the look and 
 voice which make the printed pages to them a 
 mirror not only of the spiritual form, but of 
 the remembered face of him who, while it was 
 only a written page, bent thoughtfully over it. 
 
l6 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Discouragement and Encouragement in attempt- 
 ing a Fresh Biography. — It is with a mingled 
 feeling of satisfaction and misgiving that the 
 present writer has let himself be persuaded to 
 set his hand to the work of putting into the 
 shape of a biographic sketch his knowledge, 
 thoughts, and reminiscences of a master so be- 
 loved and revered. 
 
 On the one hand, to have lived more than 
 half one's life in the place of Channing's birth ; 
 to have walked for forty years the streets with 
 which his youthful steps were familiar, and daily 
 looked upon the house in which he first saw the 
 light; to have roamed the shores along which 
 he so loved to wander; to have stood for more 
 than a generation in the pulpit he dedicated; 
 to have seen and heard, during the last five 
 years of his life, the prophet in his own home 
 and country; and to have dwelt ever since 
 amidst scenes made even more lovely by the 
 lingering hght of his remembered countenance, 
 — all this experience may well seem to make 
 it not only one's right, but duty, to add his 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 17 
 
 testimony to the already vast accumulation 
 of tributes which this centennial hour will 
 crown. 
 
 And yet when one thinks how many elo- 
 quent, just, and worthy tributes to Channing's 
 memory; how many luminous expositions of 
 the spirit and significance of his life, from so 
 many different points of view and in both 
 hemispheres, have already, since his transla- 
 tion, been given to the world ; and how thor- 
 oughly and transparently he has painted in 
 his writings his own spiritual likeness, — all 
 this may well make the most enthusiastic disci- 
 ple hesitate to add another word to the many 
 that have been so well and worthily spoken on 
 the fruitful theme. 
 
 Nevertheless it is an encouragement, again, 
 to the most diffident disciple, in contributing his 
 mite in this case, to observe how even one acute 
 and enlarged mind after another still labors, at 
 this advanced day, to effect, by a renewed esti- 
 mate, a more complete appreciation of Chan- 
 ning's work, not only in its relation to the 
 2 
 
1 8 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 period in which he lived, but in its bearing 
 upon some of the most serious problems of the 
 present day and hour. 
 
 Channing's Autobiography, — Channing, we 
 have said, has in a sense written his own life. 
 This is eminently true of him, as it is of many 
 another great man, of Wordsworth for example. 
 His works (well may such writings be so named) 
 are his life's work. And if we could have all 
 his writings in our hands, in chronological order, 
 — sermons, essays, letters, journals, — and //*we 
 would read, study, and inwardly digest all this 
 material, then we should be very near to having 
 a full picture of the life of the man; I say, 
 very near, for there would still be needed, to 
 complete it, one thing if not two things, more : 
 first, a record of his conversation, his private 
 walk and talk; and secondly, — a very impor- 
 tant part, in one sense, of a man's real life, — 
 a gathering up of the reproductions of himself 
 in the souls with which he has had personal 
 communion. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 19 
 
 At all events, if a man's life includes that 
 which he lives on earth after he has left it (and 
 it is hard to avoid making it do so), then, cer- 
 tainly, it ought not to seem strange that some 
 men's biographies should be many times rewrit- 
 ten, and that we should be in the way to get 
 repeated accessions to our perfect understand- 
 ing of them, by looking at them in the mirrors 
 of different minds. 
 
 What it is to write a Life. — Properly to write 
 the life of any man is a twofold task. It is not 
 only to tell the story of what he was and did, 
 enjoyed and suffered, in the outer world, but to 
 trace, so far as it can be gathered from his 
 words and deeds, and his whole *' conversation 
 in the world," the history of the inner man. 
 This is eminently true if the subject of the biog- 
 raphy was a man of thought, and his life was 
 a life of study ; and pre-eminently is it so when 
 we have to do with one of those spiritual and 
 saintly men whose life was " hid with Christ in 
 God," whose " conversation " was " in heaven " 
 
20 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 even while they walked on the earth. And in this 
 last case the very transparency of the character 
 may make it all the harder to describe, individ- 
 ualize, and differentiate; what we feel ever so 
 strongly and distinctly, we may find it almost 
 impossible to express even to our own satisfac- 
 tion. Moreover, it is one thing to tell what a 
 man was, and another thing to trace out how 
 he came to be what he was ; in other words, to 
 tell how in his person the universal became 
 individual. 
 
 In Channing's Case, a threefold Task. — All this 
 is strikingly verified in the case of a man like 
 Dr. Channing, who was at once so universal 
 and so individual, so profound.and so simple, so 
 clear and so full, with a self so marked and 
 peculiar, and at the same time so large and 
 comprehensive. Every new attempt from year 
 to year to set forth the meaning and merit of 
 his word and work adds a new illustration both 
 of the attractiveness of the theme and of the 
 difficulty of the task. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 21 
 
 But indeed, in one sense, what we have called 
 a twofold task might in a case like this be said 
 to be threefold. For the Hfe of a Channing 
 ends not, even on earth, with his departure from 
 this world. And whoso would write his life has 
 to follow and keep up with a presence and an 
 influence still living and growing in the world of 
 thought, in human souls and society. 
 
 Channing's Earthly Immortality. — It is one mark 
 of a great soul that, like the heavenly luminaries 
 which keep along with the traveller in his nightly 
 journeying, it moves on abreast and even ahead 
 of the advancing generations, an ever-present 
 incitement and guidance. Even so the pure 
 flame of Channing's spirit still accompanies us, 
 as the years roll on, — an angehc presence with 
 quickening and regulating power, a burning 
 and a shining light. 
 
 Channing's Life speaks Cheer to Young and Old. 
 — In undertaking to tell over again the story 
 of Dr. Channing's life, a special object has been 
 
22 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 to make a book that should interest and instruct 
 the young people, but not them alone. Both 
 to young and old that life is full of invaluable 
 lessons, — to the young as illustrating a boy- 
 hood and youth lovely and truly venerable ; to 
 the elders as a rare example of one who grew 
 younger as he grew older, — '' always young for 
 liberty," as he once said in manhood; always 
 young for Nature, as he often said, and was 
 constantly showing without saying it, in the very 
 latest years of life, when he looked on the face 
 of the great Mother and leaned on her bosom 
 with a childlike devotion; always young for 
 Truth, and in her service nobly verifying those 
 words of the Prophet : " The youths shall faint 
 and be weary, and the young men shall utterly 
 fail; but they that wait upon the Lord shall 
 renew their strength ; they shall mount up with 
 wings as eagles; they shall run and not be 
 weary, and they shall walk and not faint." How 
 wonderfully does this unquenchable ardor of 
 aspiration after truth and perfectness shine out 
 in the copious correspondence that so largely 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 23 
 
 occupied the last decade of his outwardly failing 
 but inwardly brightening and broadening life ! 
 The life of Channing is eminently fitted to edify 
 the young in manly virtue by its winning ex- 
 hibition of the harmony of true manliness and 
 true godhness, and it is equally fitted to help 
 the old renew their youth at the fountain of 
 inspiration which for ever springs up for them 
 who dwell in the mount of faith. 
 
 Channing's Life not merely a past Subject. — 
 Channing has long since gone up from that 
 mount of faith into the heaven of the open 
 vision, and one who sits down to recall and 
 record the impression of what he was in the 
 days of his earthly pilgrimage, can hardly write 
 of the life he then lived without seeing it trans- 
 figured through the glow of the large and lofty 
 life to which he has ascended ; and, while look- 
 ing out upon the beauteous Hght and landscape 
 from which he drew so much inspiration, can 
 hardly feel it an exaggeration to say, — 
 
24 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 *' He is made one with Nature ; there is heard 
 His voice in all her music . . . 
 He is a presence to be felt and known, 
 Spreading itself where'er that Power may move 
 Which has withdrawn his being to its own ; 
 Which wields the world with never-wearied love, 
 Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above." 
 
 " He is a portion of the loveliness 
 Which once he made more lovely." 
 
 In a word, when we speak of the life of such 
 a man, — a true man of God, one eminently full 
 of the Spirit, — we cannot feel that we are 
 speaking merely of a thing of the past. Well 
 has it been said of this man : ^ " Several lives 
 are given to him." Indeed, besides the eternal 
 life in heaven on which we feel that he has 
 entered, he lives here on earth a continued life 
 in every heart which his word has quickened. 
 And no one can truly write his life except so 
 far as that life is written and reproduced by the 
 Spirit (the source of all life) in his own heart. 
 
 And so we are tempted, " forgetting the 
 things which are behind," to go on and on, 
 
 1 In Dr. Hall's eulogy, referring to an expression once 
 used by Dr. Channing, "that he needed several lives to do 
 what he felt he had to do." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 25 
 
 meditating the continued and growing life of 
 Channing in the progress of the truths, the 
 principles, the spirit he was seeking to write 
 out and work out, more and more fervently, as 
 he approached the close of his earthly exist- 
 ence; and even the hundredth anniversary of 
 his birth into this world sends our thoughts 
 upward and onward to that second and higher 
 birth of his spirit into the heavenly state of a 
 still more exalted and enlarged work for God 
 and humanity. Still, it is profoundly true that 
 the actions and events of the past had in them 
 a living soul, by which they still live and are 
 ever renewing their life in the memory of men ; 
 and so, even at this distance of time, as the 
 days which are said — by an almost impossible 
 figure — to have " joined the past eternity " move 
 along with us in our pilgrimage, it is a good 
 thing for us to recur to the train of events, 
 external and internal, by which the soul of 
 Channing was educated to that holy ministry 
 which it still exercises in the minds and hearts 
 of men, — that living picture, which, however 
 
26 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 familiar, will be always fresh and beautiful to 
 those certainly who love to contemplate "the 
 life of God in the soul of man." 
 
 The purpose and plan of this little book is, first, 
 to trace the principal steps and stages of Chan- 
 ning's outward and inward life by the help of 
 pubHc record and personal reminiscence, and 
 after that to present some reflections on the 
 meaning that life has for us to-day, some of the 
 great lessons it utters to the present and coming 
 generations. 
 
 Channing fortunate in his Birthplace. — William 
 Ellery Channing was born at Newport, in (and 
 on) Rhode Island, the 7th of April, 1780. 
 We pause here to note that this very first cir- 
 cumstance of his earthly life, the place of his 
 nativity, has a providential significance. We 
 are sometimes told, when we make account of 
 a great man's place of 'birth, he happened to be 
 born there. But the dweller on Rhode Island, 
 as he remembers Channing, may be pardoned 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 27 
 
 if, at the same time, he calls to mind those 
 words of the Psalmist: *' Of Zion it shall be 
 said. This and that man was born in her: . . . 
 The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the 
 people, that this man was born there." What 
 some might lightly call the accident of Chan- 
 ning's having been born on a certain beautiful 
 spot, a thoughtful soul, weaned from the idol- 
 atry of chance, will recognize as the appoint- 
 ment of Divine Providence. And surely, if 
 Channing himself repeatedly, both in private 
 and in public, thanked God that this beatitiftd 
 island was the place of his birth ; if he himself 
 said, " I must bless God for the place of my 
 nativity," and, in so saying, confessed not 
 merely his joy in nature, but the spiritual edi- 
 fication and education he had received there, as 
 when he expressly and emphatically declares, 
 " No spot on earth has helped to form me so 
 much as that beach; " and when he again and 
 again, in after years, thankfully acknowledges 
 the influence of his seaside meditations and 
 communings in breathing through his soul the 
 
28: WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 spirit of liberty and liberality, — is it not natural 
 that we, too, should feel a certain enthusiasm in 
 associating with his name the region he so fer- 
 vently and fondly commemorates? as the writer 
 of this book was moved to do on the Hundredth 
 Anniversary of the Redwood Library in the 
 following lines : — 
 
 Hail, island-home of Peace and Liberty ! 
 Hail, breezy cliff, gray rock, majestic sea ! 
 Here man should walk with heavenward-lifted eye, 
 Free as the winds and open as the sky ! 
 O thou who here hast had thy childhood's home, 
 And ye who one brief hour of summer roam 
 These winding shores to breathe the bracing breeze, 
 And feel the freedom of the skies and seas, 
 Think what exalted sainted minds once found 
 The sod, the sand ye tread on, holy ground I 
 Think how an Allston's soul-enkindled eye 
 Drank in the glories of our sunset sky I 
 Think how a Berkeley's genius haunts the air, 
 And makes our crags and waters doubly fair I 
 Think how a Channing, musing by the sea, 
 Burned with the quenchless love of liberty ! 
 What work God witnessed, and that lonely shore, 
 Wrought in him midst the elemental roar ! 
 How did that spot his youthful heart inform, 
 Dear in the sunshine, dearer in the storm! 
 " The Father reigneth, let the earth rejoice 
 And tremble ! " there he lifted up his voice 
 In praise amid the tempest — softened, there. 
 By Nature's beauty, rose the lowly prayer. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 29 
 
 There, as, in reverential sympathy, 
 He watched the heavings of the giant sea, 
 Stirred by the Power that ruled that glorious din, 
 Woke the dread consciousness of power within. 
 
 Appearance of Newport Forty Years ago. — 
 When the present writer first entered Newport 
 (nearly forty-five years ago) there still lin- 
 gered an air and aspect about the ancient and 
 dreamy town which recalled far more readily 
 than to the visitor in these days of improve- 
 ment the look it wore to the eyes of the boy 
 Channing at the end of the last century. The 
 old stone mill may be said to have still stood 
 almost on the outskirts of the town, with 
 hardly any thing except a farm-house or two 
 to break the sweep of open fields between 
 that old landmark and the " Boat-house- 
 gully" at the southern extremity of the island. 
 The old wooden steps led down into " Con- 
 rad's Cave." The Redwood Library consisted 
 as yet only of the small, graceful, and finely 
 preserved building which now forms its front. 
 A venerable high brick-wall enclosed the 
 " Jews' Burying-ground." The now smooth 
 
30 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and comparatively stately Bull Street was then 
 the lonely and grassy Bull's Lane, and was 
 dominated by an old, dark, deserted distillery, 
 one of the leading institutions of the olden 
 time. At its upper end was an old, aban- 
 doned ropewalk, and another at the end of 
 Catharine Street, where it sloped beach-ward ; 
 and still another ran along the side of the old 
 burying-ground on (the appropriately named) 
 Farewell Street. The old Governor Coddington 
 House was still standing in Marlboro' Street. 
 The old Liberty Tree (a sycamore) with the 
 names of the burners of the " Gaspee " on a 
 copper plate, half overgrown by its clasping 
 bark, was still standing in front of the house of 
 Ellery the Signer. At the head of Long Wharf 
 was seen a row of high, dingy old stores, the 
 rear of which hung directly over the water, with 
 the outstanding beam by which cargoes were 
 hoisted in the days when Newport did not yet 
 fear the rivalry of New York. In the neighbor- 
 hood of the " Cove " and along the " Point " 
 were still visible the foundation-posts of old 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 31 
 
 distilleries, and in the main street the old pave- 
 ment (laid at the expense of ** one moiety" of 
 the import duties on slaves) showed frequent 
 blades of grass growing between the stones, and 
 along the middle was a row of the broadest 
 paving-stones, said to have been intended for 
 the convenience of foot-passengers, and some- 
 what sunken, also, for the convenience of run- 
 ning waters. At the point where one turns 
 from Long Wharf to Washington Street, stood 
 the aged Washington Tavern, with the scarcely- 
 recognizable portrait of the Father of his Coun- 
 try swinging over its door, recalling the day 
 when he himself came up the wharf side by 
 side with Rochambeau ; and across the inner 
 harbor, where Goat Island now displays its 
 lovely row of • cottages and all the appurte- 
 nances of a naval station, a solitary old barrack 
 kept alive the memory of the " Last War," and 
 an aged veteran pensioner every spring paraded 
 the streets of the town with a drum strapped to 
 his shoulders, on which he beat the call to town- 
 meeting for the annual election. 
 
32 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Add to all this the daily presence in the 
 streets of sundry nonagenarians, white-skinned 
 and dark-skinned, and fancy could, without a 
 violent effort, rehabilitate the old town and 
 look upon it with the youthful Channing's eyes. 
 There was still, in its old Puritan severity of form, 
 the Stiles Meeting-house of his childhood, and 
 there was the old vane surmounting its spire, 
 with the prophetic " W E " standing out against 
 the sky, suggesting to the fancy of one beholder, 
 at least, the missing letter *' C " of the name of 
 the boy who used to stand in one of the pews 
 below, and once, when a man, stood in the 
 pulpit, and whose name has since been set 
 high in the sky of memory. And there stood, 
 scarcely changed, the old Channing homestead, 
 midway on the diagonal between the two par- 
 sonages, that of good old Parson Wheaton of 
 Trinity Church, on the street above, and that 
 of Dr. Hopkins on the street below. 
 
 "What remains unchanged To-day. — And, after 
 all, however great the changes that have 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 33 
 
 taken place in the old town itself since Chan- 
 ning's youthful feet roamed its streets and his 
 eyes looked upon its then ancient and storied 
 houses, of which only here and there one re- 
 mains with nearly its old look, — Old Trin- 
 ity, for instance, with its tall and graceful 
 spire ; the old State House at the head of the 
 parade, and the Town Hall at the foot of it; 
 the headquarters of Washington ; the home of 
 Malbone, the painter; the chamber in which 
 Washington led the ball with " pretty Polly 
 Lawton ; " the old Sabbatarian meeting-house 
 in Barney Street, where Callender delivered 
 the first Century Sermon; the Jewish Syna- 
 gogue; the Redwood Library; and the crown- 
 ing relic, the old mill, — yet the same features of 
 the face of nature which caught and charmed 
 the eyes of the boy Channing meet ours to-day. 
 There are sky and sea, beach and bay, bold 
 cliff and spray- wreathed headland, outrunning 
 ledge of rock and lovely sweep and swell of 
 inland landscape ; there are Purgatory and Para- 
 dise, and the Glen and the Green End road, 
 3 
 
34 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and Honeyman's Hill and Quaker's Hill (from 
 which Channing often sat, in his old chaise, 
 gazing up the bay), and near and far the many 
 lovely islands ; there is the '* Whetstone," and 
 Sachuest and Seconnet; there are Rose Island 
 and Conanicut, — the everlasting murmur of the 
 ocean and the everlasting rampart of the rocks. 
 
 The Channing Homestead. — The visitor to 
 Newport, — a pilgrim, it may well be, from a far- 
 off land, — among the relics of olden times which 
 grace this ancient town, will seek, sooner than 
 almost any other, the house in which Channing 
 was born. If he comes up Mary Street (or 
 Mary's latte^ as it used to be called), when he 
 reaches the old Trinity School-house at the 
 corner of School Street, he will see facing him, 
 on the opposite corner, a square wooden house 
 of two stories, only with a third smaller one 
 seemingly about to grow up out of the roof, 
 over the street-door of which is the modest sign, 
 "Children's Home." In this still well-pre- 
 served dwelling the child Channing first saw 
 

 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 35 
 
 the light, first greeted and was greeted by that 
 heavenly friend and minister, which, to his latest 
 moment, was to be one of the peculiar joys of 
 his life. On the next street below, in a diagonal 
 direction, then separated only by a garden, was 
 the gambrel-roofed parsonage of Dr. Hopkins ; 
 so that the young Channing could easily see (as 
 he says he did early one winter-morning) the 
 light beaming from the window of the little ten- 
 by-twelve study-chamber, where the old man 
 sat working at a sermon, or perhaps adding 
 some new link to the chain of his iron logic; 
 or where, as Professor Park says, in his memoir 
 of Hopkins, '*we can almost see him bending 
 over his familiar desk, and listening to the roar 
 of the ocean, and writing such words as these : 
 'The weak Christian, in the midst of strong 
 temptations and potent enemies constantly seek- 
 ing and exerting all their power and cunning to 
 destroy him, is preserved and upheld through a 
 course of trial by the mighty, omnipotent hand 
 of the Redeemer ; and the little spark of holiness 
 implanted in the believer's heart is continued 
 
S6 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 alive and burning, while there is so much, both 
 within and without, tending to extinguish it; 
 which is really more of a constant miracle and 
 manifestation of the power of Christ than it 
 would be to preserve a little spark of fire for a 
 course of years in the midst of the sea, while 
 the mighty waves are fiercely dashing against 
 it and upon it, attempting to overwhelm and 
 extinguish it.' " 
 
 If the street on which the Channing family 
 lived had been continued southward across 
 Church Street (where it now ends), it would 
 open directly upon what was then the Hopkins 
 Meeting-house, visible across the fields from the 
 parsonage, in which the young man, on the 
 completion of his preparatory studies, preached 
 his first sermon, and which, a generation later, 
 when it was remodelled and newly clothed upon, 
 as the temple of a more rational worship, he was 
 the organ of dedicating to the Father in " a 
 service of gratitude and joy." 
 
 It is not easy to avoid anticipating ourselves 
 in this attractive, though oft-repeated story. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 37 
 
 One can hardly resist the temptation of letting 
 his thoughts run onward from the beginnings 
 to the future of such a history, when that future 
 has long been an illustrious past. But let us 
 still, for a time, transport ourselves back to the 
 morning of that Hfe-day we have begun to 
 describe. 
 
 The Period of Channing's Birth. — What has 
 been said of the position of the house in which 
 Channing was born in relation to the house and 
 meeting-house of Dr. Hopkins, as it calls up the 
 image of this veteran soldier of the cross, and the 
 persistent and manifold warfare he had to wage 
 with the world around him, leads us naturally, 
 after having spoken of the place, to speak of the 
 period, in which Channing, the candid eulogist 
 of the old champion of Calvinism, was born, and 
 the influences, social, political, and theological, 
 amidst which he spent his early years. Thus 
 we shall see what a large and well-furnished 
 school -ground Providence had prepared for 
 the education of this pupil to the peculiar 
 
38 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 service his after-life was to perform for his 
 brethren. 
 
 Newport after the Revolution. — It is common 
 to call the actual fighting-days of the Revolution 
 ** the times that tried men's souls." But often 
 the times that follow such terrible struggles try 
 the souls of men in a still stricter and more 
 searching sense of the language, by testing the 
 strength of moral principle and the depth and 
 reality and practical worth of religious convic- 
 tion. The war had so terribly scathed and shat- 
 tered old Newport in its out\vard condition, that 
 when Dr. Hopkins came back to the place (in 
 the very spring of Channing's birth) after its 
 three years' occupation by the enemy, he found 
 the wealthier half of the population gone, several 
 hundred houses (his own among them) burned 
 to the ground, and his meeting-house so much 
 burned as to be unfit for occupation. But the 
 moral and spiritual distraction and desolation 
 that prevailed tried the old man more sorely 
 than any of these external grievances. Scepti- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 39 
 
 cism and sensuality, indifference and intemper- 
 ance, held wide sway; the curse of slavery was 
 on these lovely shores, for Newport was for 
 some time yet "the slave-market of America; " 
 and the Christianity which should have made a 
 combined head against these evils was a kingdom 
 divided against itself. There were Quakers, 
 Baptists, Free-Will Baptists, Seventh-Day Bap- 
 tists, Moravians, Methodists, Jews, Episcopalians, 
 Universalists, and Individualists of the oddest 
 and extremest kinds. But the most comprehen- 
 sive statement of the situation would be to call 
 the threefold enemy of true religion which then, 
 as now, held the field, superstition, sensuality, 
 and indifference. And if the good Dr. Hopkins 
 could have supposed that his mode of presenting 
 the gospel only aggravated the indifference or 
 scepticism or rationalism which surrounded him 
 like an atmosphere, he would doubtless have 
 set it down to the credit of his doctrine and to 
 the condemnation of the depraved nature which 
 rose against it. It has been said of him, by one 
 of his eulogists, that when he entered the pulpit 
 
40 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 "sinners trembled and good men rejoiced." But 
 there can be little doubt that among the (so- 
 called) sinners were some who were ready to 
 rejoice, could they have had set before them the 
 simple, reasonable, practical ^^j/^/, — what could, 
 without a gross misnomer, be called good news 
 from Heaven. 
 
 In the midst of all these influences, however, 
 a child was growing up, whom Divine Providence 
 was training to proclaim and illustrate this true 
 evangel in its purity and with power; to set 
 before his fellow-men the gospel of Christ in 
 such a fair and lovely light that calm reason 
 need not be ashamed of it. And yeti if Rhode 
 Island was the //^^^, no less was Hopkins him- 
 self the person, to whose influence this child, 
 when he grew to manhood, avowed himself more 
 indebted than to any other, after that of his 
 revered parents, and whom he indeed regarded 
 as a spiritual father. 
 
 But whatever outward influences may have 
 helped form, educate, and develop Channing's 
 nature, still, as has often been said of him, and 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 4 1 
 
 by him, the most important part of his cul- 
 ture was internal, and came from the reaction 
 of his native energies and propensions upon 
 the appeals which the world and nature and 
 life around him made to his soul. 
 
 Channing's Parentage and Ancestry. — And this, 
 again, naturally leads us, from speaking of the 
 place and period of Channing's birth, to say- 
 something of his parents and progenitors. Both 
 on his father's and on his mother's side he came 
 of a choice ancestry. From his maternal grand- 
 father, William EUery, the Signer, as well as 
 from his paternal grandmother, Mary Chaloner, 
 well remembered a generation ago in her first 
 widowhood, " behind the counter of her little 
 shop, dressed with great precision, busily knit- 
 ting and receiving her customers or visitors 
 with an air of formal courtesy that awed the 
 young and commanded general respect," — 
 from such grandparents as these — the plain, 
 sensible patriot, patriarch, and philosopher; the 
 "high-spirited and ardent, yet religious and 
 
42 • WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 conscientious," active and methodical, matron 
 — the child Channing might well have in- 
 herited some of the most marked qualities of 
 his nature. But his parents themselves were 
 bothpersons of strong sense and fine character. 
 His father, William Channing, was an eminent 
 Newport lawyer, a true gentleman, affable and 
 affectionate, faithful in business, and friendly 
 to all men; marked, as his distinguished son 
 has written of him, by ** the benignity of his 
 countenance and voice," and " the delight of 
 the circle in which he moved." His mother, 
 Lucy EUery, is described by her nephew as 
 ** small in person, but erect in bearing and 
 elastic in movement; and strongly marked fea- 
 tures, with a singularly bright and penetrating 
 eye, gave her an air of self-reliance and command. 
 Her manner was generally benignant, often 
 tenderly affectionate, and marked by the digni- 
 fied courtesy of the old school ; but if pretension 
 and fraud, in any of their manifold disguises, 
 crossed her path, she became chillingly re- 
 served and blunt to the verge of severity." 
 
The Mother of Chanmng. 
 After a Painting by Washington Allston. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 43 
 
 The likeness which, through the kindness of 
 Dr. WiUiam F. Channing, her grandson, enriches 
 this book, tells the whole story about her. And 
 every one who looks at it is struck at once with 
 the resemblance to her distinguished son. It is 
 almost as if he were disguising himself in his 
 mother's dress. 
 
 It has been said that great men generally 
 inherit more from mother than father. Dr. 
 Channing seems to have been no exception to 
 this rule, though the best traits of both parents, 
 as well as of their parents, appear to have been 
 happily blended in his honest and earnest, careful 
 and conscientious, tender and truthful, in a word, 
 manly and godly, character. Both from his 
 own mother and his father's mother, however, 
 he seems to have derived his most individual 
 traits. 
 
 Channing might almost have appropriated the 
 words with which Marcus AureHus opens his 
 personal introduction to his ** Moral Maxims : " — 
 
 ''From my grandfather ... I learned good 
 morals, and the government of my temper. 
 
44 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ** From the reputation and remembrance of 
 my father, modesty and a manly character. 
 
 " From my mother, piety and beneficence, 
 and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but 
 even from evil thoughts;' and further, simplicity 
 in my way of living, far removed from the habits 
 of the rich." 
 
 Channing as a Child. — It is pleasant to imagine 
 — it would be pleasanter if for the moment a 
 miracle could be wrought, and the hand of Time 
 put back, and with our present knowledge of the 
 man he was to be, we could see with our eyes 
 the boy Channing, as the memory of a venerable 
 worshipper in the old meeting-house has pictured 
 him to us, standing up by his mother on the 
 pew-seat, in his blue jacket and white trousers, 
 with his fine waving hair, looking round on the 
 people. Could we realize the personal iden- 
 tity of the child with the man of sixty, looking 
 round with his placid, paternal smile on the 
 farmer-folk in the httle meeting-house at Ports- 
 mouth? 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 45 
 
 As a child he was marked by rare thought- 
 fulness and tenderness. So far was he from the 
 cruelty to animals so often witnessed in children 
 (by many ascribed to inborn depravity, but 
 more probably owing to an insensibility arising 
 from ignorance or thoughtlessness), that he felt 
 a keen pang of grief and resentment at the 
 suffering of the smallest creature ; knowing that 
 
 " The poor beetle that we tread upon, 
 In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great 
 As when a giant dies." 
 
 Upon this trait one of his French biographers 
 remarks : *' He who sheds these tears over the 
 destruction of a bird's-nest will not cease to 
 groan over the evils which burden humanity, 
 and to feel therfi as so many wounds inflicted 
 upon his heart." But there were, as we shall 
 see (or, rather, as the world has seen), other and 
 mightier elements that entered into the compo- 
 sition of the philanthropy of the mature man. 
 
 His Boyhood. — The boy William was distin- 
 guished among his fellows by a rare union of 
 
46 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 energy and exuberance of spirits, daring and de- 
 cision of purpose, with a tender, thoughtful con- 
 scientiousness and saintly purity. It is not easy 
 for us — who knew Dr. Channing only in the 
 last five or ten years of his life, as a pale, delicate 
 shred of a body, "• hardly enough to anchor his 
 soul among us," reminding one of those aged 
 olive-trees on the hills of Tivoli, clinging to the 
 earth by so attenuated a sliver of trunk as to 
 make them seem at a little distance suspended 
 in the air — to think of him as a vigorous, 
 agile, athletic youth ; a racer, wrestler, climber, 
 whom it was necessary sometimes to hold back 
 by force from break-neck adventures ; hilarious 
 at times in his gayety, and boisterous in his 
 laughter ('' les eclats stridents de ce rire franc et 
 sonore," a French biographer says) ; the cham- 
 pion of his compank>ns in many a strait against 
 injustice and oppression ; acting the David 
 against a Goliath of a builly ; enacting in a fig- 
 ure that 
 
 ** Village Hampden, who, with dauntless breast, 
 The little tyrant of his fields withstood." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 47 
 
 But so it was, before the spirit had yet grown 
 too strong for the flesh. Yet this same high- 
 spirited boy was so genuinely religious that 
 Washington Allston said of him, *' though he 
 was several months my junior, ... I always 
 looked up to him, even in boyhood, with re- 
 spect." Indeed, he acquired among his play- 
 fellows the title of ''the little minister." It 
 was not merely from the fact of his doing so 
 simply and solemnly what children so very 
 often and early find a peculiar charm in doing 
 (for childhood is just what it was in the days 
 of Jesus), namely, playing the preacher. This, 
 indeed, little William, it is said, would go 
 through with singular unction; for want of 
 bell, summoning his congregation to worship 
 by the extemporized gong of a warming-pan, 
 and delivering sermons (perhaps not written 
 by him), one of which was long remembered 
 for its text, the cry of the child brought in 
 from the field with a sunstroke, — " My head ! 
 my head ! " But not in such set and solemn 
 way alone did the boy Channing justify the 
 
48 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ministerial title so early attached to him. 
 He was a real minister in deed as well as 
 word; "the little peacemaker" his companions 
 also called him, and '' little King Pepin" (as he 
 was long after said to have been born for a 
 mediator in the Church) ; and he was by his 
 example a preacher of magnanimity, purity, and 
 righteousness. Beauty of person he is said to 
 have had, and he joined to it the beauty of 
 holiness. '' He is described," says W. H. Chan- 
 ning, " as having been small and delicate, yet 
 muscular and active, with a very erect person, 
 quick movement, a countenance that, while 
 sedate, was cheerful, and a singularly sweet 
 smile, which he never lost through life." 
 
 His three Schools. — Thus, already, in his ten- 
 der years was this thoughtful and truthful boy 
 learning in the school of Providence, — in its 
 three apartments of home, the world, and the 
 chamber of his own soul, — learning and even 
 teaching that simple and genuine religion of 
 which he was one day to be so eminent a pubHc 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 49 
 
 teacher, and which was then so sadly maltreated 
 and misrepresented, between a narrow pietism 
 on the one hand and a settled unconcern, if not 
 positive ridicule, on the other. Religion, as 
 represented in .its professors around him, was 
 mostly either a creed or a ceremony or a sen- 
 sation. His sensitive conscience, — the voice of 
 God within him, — kept alive by home influence, 
 and especially by the enforcement and example 
 of that truth-telling and truth-exacting mother, 
 made him keenly sensible of the truth that 
 religion, if any thing, must be the law of the 
 heart and the controlling principle of the whole 
 life. From the natural guardians of his youth, 
 and even from that (doctrinally) stern old 
 Calvinist, who was the first pastor of the family 
 he ever knew, he had learned the lesson, which 
 his inborn disposition found congenial, of the 
 worthlessness of mere profession and pretension ; 
 and his native chivalry combined with his con- 
 scientiousness to make him hate all shams, as 
 much as did the good old Dr. Hopkins him- 
 self. 
 
50 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Early Spiritual Influences. — We must remember 
 that when, after the Revolution, or, more exactly, 
 at the close of the British occupation of New- 
 port, which had broken up the churches, in the 
 spring of 1780 they were opened again, as Dr. 
 Stiles did not return to his people, they wor- 
 shipped with Dr. Hopkins's till young Chan- 
 ning was six years old. It conjures up an odd 
 picture to think of the future Dr. Channing 
 reciting out of the Westminster Catechism 
 to Dr. Hopkins ! Grace was given the child to 
 reject the indigestible shell of Calvinistic irra- 
 tionalities and inconsistencies, and take only 
 (what indeed, after all, the noble-souled old 
 warrior valued more than all) the kernel of 
 reverence for truth and honest conviction. 
 
 The incident that first, or most decidedly, 
 startled and shocked his tender mind with a 
 sense of the hollowness of the reigning religion, 
 was his going with his father to hear a revi- 
 valist — a preacher of terror — whose doctrines 
 seemed to darken the very atmosphere and 
 spread over the earth the shadow of impending 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 51 
 
 judgment; but to the amazement of the sim- 
 ple-hearted boy, the father, instead of evin- 
 cing any practical concern at such appalling 
 news from the other world, beyond remarking 
 to a neighbor on leaving church, " Sound doc- 
 trine, sir ! " rode home whistling, and on enter- 
 ing the house, comfortably ensconced himself 
 before the fire and began reading a newspaper ! 
 Well might the boy have had a feeling which, 
 translated into maturer thought, would have 
 said : " If so good a man as my father can be 
 so beguiled as to let this hollow bluster pass 
 for sound and wholesome religion, how deep- 
 rooted and how baneful must be the perversion 
 of religion which exerts such an influence ! " 
 *' He felt," says his nephew, who gives the story 
 in its full details on his eloquent pages, — " he 
 felt that he had been trifled with, that the 
 preacher had deceived him ; and from that time 
 he became inclined to distrust every thing ora- 
 torical, and to measure exactly the meaning of 
 words; he had received a profound lesson on 
 the worth of sincerity." And how well he had 
 
52 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 learned and how deeply he prized this lesson, 
 how vital an element of religion itself he felt 
 the quality of simplicity and sincerity to be, 
 shines out in all his later words and ways, not 
 only in his repeated advice to young preachers, 
 but in his own preaching, correspondence, and 
 conversation, and, when (which was rarely) he 
 entered into such, his controversies. 
 
 So passed Channing's boyhood. " The clew 
 of our destiny," it has been beautifully said, " lies 
 at the cradle-foot. Self-love would willingly 
 seek it anywhere else ; but there, — whether our 
 manhood press the green savanna or tread the 
 marble hall, — there will the backward glance 
 of the inquiring spirit be ever sure to find it." 
 Only in this case the a-adle-foot must be inter- 
 preted in a larger than the literal sense. To the 
 starry-roofed cradle of Mother Nature also we 
 must turn our thoughts, when we seek the in- 
 fluences which conspired to mould Channing's 
 impressible soul. In the sacred school of a 
 strict and yet tender domestic discipHne ; in the 
 wholesome school of " plain living and high 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 53 
 
 thinking ; " in the large school of the street, 
 the shop, the wharf, and the playground ; in the 
 school of deferential intercourse with Puritani- 
 cal, but kindly and godly elders ; finally, in the 
 school of solitary communion with the Omni- 
 present under the sky and on the seashore; 
 and above all and in all, in the school of his 
 own self-communing thoughts, as a child of that 
 Infinite Father, — so did the child and the 
 boy receive his training for the great work 
 which God had marked out for him ; and 
 though some undiscerning pedant of a school- 
 master might, at one time, set him down for a 
 dunce in a certain branch of required study, he 
 was destined to exemplify the distinction of the 
 poet: — 
 
 " Knowledge dwells 
 In heads replete with thoughts of other men ; 
 Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own.'** 
 
 Channing himself has somewhere said that in 
 his childish years he had nothing of the boy 
 about him except the love of play. It has 
 been asserted, but apparently without good au- 
 thority, that his fondness for lonely rambles and 
 
54 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 musings gained him with his fellows the title of 
 ''William the Silent." But even at this early 
 period we can discern in him the predominance 
 of that self-communion, self-study, and self- 
 reverence, which, enlarged and elevated by the 
 passionate love of nature and the vision of God 
 in nature, formed so marked a trait of his 
 character in maturer years, keeping his soul 
 serene and steadfast amidst all earthly trials and 
 perplexities, yet not in cold isolation, but in 
 spiritual communion with the brethren through 
 very communion with the Father. Thus was 
 the child father of the man ; the child's soul the 
 nursery of that true independence which means 
 dependence upon God, that individuality which 
 respects itself, its own nature, as a trust from 
 God, to be guarded and used for his glory and 
 the good of his children. 
 
 The Future Man and Minister. — Rarely do we 
 meet an instance in which the outer and inner 
 worlds of childhood exhibit so broadly and 
 palpably the working of the elements that are 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 55 
 
 to make up the history and character of the 
 mature man. In the grave, sensitive, inquiring, 
 reverent soul of the child, how clearly we see 
 the future champion of that true religion which 
 consists in the sincere search and reverence for 
 truth and goodness as the very essence of 
 God! 
 
 Singularly fitted were the circumstances of 
 Channing's boyhood to educate in him the 
 power to discern between the substance of 
 religion and the shadow, — the shadow, as it 
 frowned in the imposing creeds of a confused 
 and crabbed theology; the substance, as it re- 
 vealed itself in the homely and honest qualities 
 of the lowly and dutiful, and even as it gleamed 
 out here and there in heavenly contrast with 
 the harsh features of a tyrannical orthodoxy. 
 In the honest and blunt kindliness of old Hop- 
 kins, even in the very sternness of his well-meant 
 though crudely expressed theology, and more 
 in the noble unselfishness of his fight with 
 slavery; in the very strictness of that Parson 
 Thurston who, in his secular employment of 
 
56 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 cooper, refused to make casks for the trans- 
 portation of rum to buy slaves with, — even 
 here the boy Channing had deepened in him 
 the conviction that integrity was the essence of 
 rehgion. By his own testimony, too, he learned 
 the same lesson of the colored people, the 
 domestics, and the neighbors of the family ; of 
 old Newport Gardner, Hopkins's faithful body- 
 servant, and Duchess Ouamino, of whom George 
 Channing in a private letter says : " The most 
 truthful worshipper in Dr. Patten's church went 
 by the name of Duchess ; a colored woman of 
 royal appearance. At her death my brother, 
 William E. Channing, wrote the following epi- 
 taph, visible to-day on her tombstone in the 
 common burial-ground in Newport: — 
 
 £n fHemors of 
 DUCHESS QUAMINO, 
 
 A FREE BLACK OF DISTINGUISHED EXCELLENCE, 
 
 INTELLIGENT, INDUSTRIOUS, AFFECTIONATE, HONEST, 
 
 AND OF EXEMPLARY PIETY. 
 
 Blest be thy slumbers in this house of clay, 
 And bright thy rising to eternal day ! 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 57 
 
 I used to visit her, when a boy, and read to 
 her. Her title but feebly portrayed her regal 
 excellence to us children." 
 
 The resting-place of this queenly personage 
 cannot be said, however, to have any regal dis- 
 tinction, unless it be that of marked seclusion ; 
 for a reverent seeker, after long exploration one 
 June morning, found the gravestone in the deep 
 grass at the most remote corner of the old 
 burial-ground, apart even from the graves of her 
 own people. 
 
 Schooling and Training for College. — After re- 
 ceiving instruction from four successive school- 
 ma'ams (whoever has seen or heard described 
 one such, knows them all), William was sent to 
 the famous Master Rogers, under whose eye 
 and hand so many eminent men from different 
 parts of our country have in turn passed. 
 Among his schoolmates were Malbone and 
 Washington Allston, the latter of whom char- 
 acterizes him in a letter to William H. Chan- 
 ning, as " an open, brave, and generous boy." 
 
58 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 "And I well remember," adds Allston (remind- 
 ing us that in this quality of inspiring reverence, 
 also, the child v^diS father of the mail), '* though 
 he was several months my junior (a matter of 
 some importance among children), that I al- 
 ways looked up to him, even in boyhood, with 
 respect." 
 
 At the age of twelve he was transferred to the 
 care of his uncle, Henry Channing, then pastor 
 in New London, to be fitted for college. From 
 that pleasant home, where he soon endeared 
 himself to his kinsfolk by his studious, affec- 
 tionate, and respectful demeanor, he was sud- 
 denly recalled for a time, in a little more than a 
 year, by the death of his father, who was taken 
 away in the very bloom of life, and in the 
 height of his activity and usefulness. The es- 
 teem in which he was held by the community 
 and the sorrow for his death are expressed in 
 the inscription (probably written by his son 
 William) on the tablet over his grave, which 
 faces the sky on the hill-top of the old New- 
 port burial-ground: 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 59 
 
 En iJEemorg of 
 WILLIAM CHANNING, 
 
 WHO DIED SEPT. 21, 1 793- 
 
 AGED 42. 
 
 HE WAS EMINENT IN THE PROFESSION OF THE LAW ; 
 
 BENEVOLENT IN HIS INTERCOURSE WITH MANKIND ; 
 
 FAITHFUL IN FRIENDSHIP; 
 
 AN EXAMPLE OF THOSE VIRTUES WHICH ENDEAR 
 DOMESTIC LIFE, 
 
 AND A ZEALOUS SUPPORTER OF THE PEACE AND ORDER 
 
 OF SOCIETY, 
 
 AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF RELIGION. 
 
 TAKEN FROM HIS FAMILY AND NUMEROUS CONNECTIONS 
 IN THE MIDST OF USEFULNESS, 
 
 HE HAS LEFT, TO SOOTHE THEIR SORROWS, 
 
 THE MEMORY OF HIS VIRTUES, 
 
 AND THE SUPPORTING HOPE OF HIS ACCEPTANCE WITH GOD 
 
 THROUGH THE MERITS OF THE REDEEMER. 
 
 The death of such a father — It need hardly be 
 said — threw a heavy shadow over the Channing 
 household. A great light, as well as a strong 
 staff, v^as gone. The anxious mother was left 
 with a family of nine children. William, the 
 oldest but one, felt, with his keenly sensitive 
 nature, a peculiar load of responsibility suddenly 
 laid upon his soul. He must now be both son 
 
6o WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and husband to that stricken mother, and gird 
 himself up to be a father to the family. He 
 seemed to have leaped from boyhood to man- 
 hood. " Little minister " he was now indeed to 
 be in an emphatic sense. From this moment 
 his resolution was taken to gain as soon as pos- 
 sible some position where he could give his re- 
 vered mother a home free from care. But for 
 him the way to such an end lay through high 
 culture, and he went back to the sunny home of 
 his genial uncle to complete his college prep- 
 aration, and in the autumn of 1794 he entered 
 Harvard, being then In the middle of his fif- 
 teenth year. 
 
 Cambridge in 1794. — Harvard College had 
 then only one hundred and seventy-three stu- 
 dents. At a time when there were not so 
 many in all the College as there are now In 
 one class, there was probably more intercourse 
 among the young men, irrespective of class 
 lines, than now exists among members of the 
 same class; though the modern extension of 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 6 1 
 
 the elective system in study, doubtless, does 
 a great deal toward making college attach- 
 ments independent of class relations. At all 
 events, there is probably a far less strong, or at 
 least peculiar, bond of union among the under- 
 graduates generally than there was a hundred 
 or fifty years ago, when the College was com- 
 paratively a cloistral seclusion, and not so much 
 in the glare of the world. 
 
 Channing's Classmates. — Among Channing's 
 classmates were Joseph Tuckerman, Joseph 
 Story, and Sidney Willard, the son of the Presi- 
 dent, well remembered by all graduates of half 
 a century ago as that amiable Latin Professor, so 
 tenderly pictured in a college poem of William 
 Simmons called " The Last Latin Recitation," 
 one clause of which runs: — 
 
 " In professorial eye methinks there glimmers 
 A something moist." 
 
 This kindly old man, in his " Memories of 
 Youth and Manhood," gives careful sketches 
 
62 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 of the traits and fortunes of all his class. Of 
 Channing he says : ** In mathematics he prob- 
 ably had his superiors; but in rhetoric and 
 written composition, in the languages, in ethi- 
 cal and intellectual science and metaphysics, he 
 was unsurpassed by any, and in some of these 
 eminent above all." Judge Story undoubtedly 
 was in error in pronouncing that he had no 
 relish for mathematics or metaphysics. It was 
 not that he loved natural and intellectual phi- 
 losophy less, but moral science, history, and 
 general literature more. Both classmates, how- 
 ever, agree that " his command of pure English, 
 and intelligible, accurate, and fluent expression 
 of the author's thoughts in his translations of 
 passages assigned to him in Latin and Greek, 
 and his natural and graceful address in recita- 
 tions of the English studies, translating in a 
 manner the thoughts of the authors which he 
 had made his own, into language of his own, 
 were so remarkable that he was acknowledged 
 without rivalship, and consequently without 
 envy, to be chief." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 63 
 
 His College Mates. — In glancing over the lists 
 of the classes in the Triennial Catalogue, from 
 1795 to 1 801, one can readily imagine that Chan- 
 ning may have found as much congenial com- 
 panionship out of his class as in it. Among 
 the names of his college mates we find Theo- 
 dore Dehon, afterwards the eloquent Rector in 
 Channing's native town for two years ; James 
 Jackson, the wise and beloved Professor, so 
 well remembered by many living graduates for 
 his lectures on the laws of health ("Breakfast 
 heartily, dine sparingly, sup lightly, sleep sound- 
 ly," he used to say, and '' Never go to bed angry " 
 was his version of '' Let not the sun go down 
 upon your wrath"); James Kendall, afterwards 
 at Plymouth, the venerable '' Kendall Green," 
 as one playfully called him; John Pickering, 
 the philologist; Leonard Woods (President 
 Woods of Brunswick) ; John Collins Warren 
 and Daniel Appleton White; Washington All- 
 ston, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, Timothy 
 Flint, Charles Lowell, and Lemuel Shaw. 
 
 With such spirits as these we can safely 
 
64 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNIJSTG. 
 
 suppose young Charming seeking and finding, 
 with some for a shorter and others for a longer 
 portion of his college life, congenial companion- 
 ship. 
 
 Among his classmates, as has been said, were 
 Judge Story and Dr. Tuckerman. His college 
 companions unite in their testimony to the 
 charm which the mingled animation and dig- 
 nity of his demeanor gave him for his fellow- 
 students ; to the equal heartiness with which he 
 entered into the sports and studies of the place ; 
 his superiority in general literature, composition, 
 and criticism ; his love for history and philoso- 
 phy, and the chaste eloquence of his style. 
 Judge Story speaks enthusiastically of the ** mel- 
 lifluous " tones of his voice, using the same 
 expression which Dr. Channing tells us was 
 applied to his father's style and manner by 
 Judge Dawes. Young Channing was a general 
 favorite, and naturally a member of all the lead- 
 ing societies, not only the Institute of 1770, the 
 Adelphi, and the Phi Beta, but the Hasty Pud- 
 ding Club, and even into the Porcellian he was 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHA AWING. 6$ 
 
 elected, which was a rival and at times almost a 
 foe of the Hasty Pudding, the one representing 
 an aristocratic and the other a democratic ele- 
 ment, but of the former he could not have con- 
 tinued long a member. 
 
 His Favorite Studies. — The study that became 
 more and more a favorite passion with young 
 Channing, as his college life went, on, was that of 
 moral philosophy. The reading of the Stoics 
 no doubt revived and reinforced the impressions 
 of the majesty and might of human virtue, of 
 disinterested rectitude, and the sense of the dig- 
 nity and divinity of all goodness, which as a 
 boy he had received from the old Stoic of his 
 native town. Hutcheson and Ferguson were 
 the two English writers who did most to stir up 
 in his soul that sense of the grandeur of man's 
 nature and destiny which was to be the guiding 
 and inspiring genius of his hfe. In Ferguson's 
 *' History of Civil Society," one chapter which 
 perhaps especially attracted and impressed him 
 was the one on " Moral Sentiment," in which 
 5 
 
66 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 the author so vigorously combats the Utilitarian 
 doctrine in morality, and in which occurs this 
 striking illustration : " The foreigner, who be- 
 lieved that Othello, on the stage, was enraged 
 for the loss of his handkerchief, was not more 
 mistaken than the reasoner who imputes any 
 of the more vehement passions of men to the 
 impressions of mere profit or loss." 
 
 To Hutcheson's "System of Moral Philoso- 
 phy" young Channing, we may well suppose, 
 was drawn, not merely by the presentiment of 
 finding his instinctive sentiments echoed and 
 enforced, but also by the lovely character and 
 spirit of the cheerful, serene, and benevolent 
 author, so happily reflected in the sentiments 
 and style of his treatise. That glowing image 
 of the loveliness of virtue, the majesty of recti- 
 tude, and the beauty of holiness, which he caught 
 from a glance of its pages, charmed his eye and 
 kindled his soul. " The place and the hour" 
 (in which he read the memorable passages in 
 Hutcheson, e. g. the chapter headed " Some 
 affections truly disinterested ") " were," says 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 6/ 
 
 his nephew, " always sacred in his memory, 
 and he frequently referred to them with grate- 
 ful awe. It seemed to him that he then passed 
 through a new spiritual birth, and entered upon 
 the day of eternal peace and joy." '^ In his 
 junior year," says the same biographer, '' he had 
 already become a moral and social reformer." 
 
 But he had also begun to be a Transcenden- 
 talist. He gained, as he himself says, from his 
 philosophical reading of this period, ** the doc- 
 trine of ideas, and during my life," he adds, " I 
 •have written the words Love, Right, &c. with a 
 capital.'* 
 
 His Interest in Politics. — Not philosophy alone, 
 but politics also (an important part of true phi- 
 losophy), engaged Channing's ardent attention, 
 and both studies derived an added attraction 
 from the stir which the position of France was 
 then creating throughout the world and especially 
 in America. As an antidote to Paine's " Age of 
 Reason," the College Faculty had put into the 
 hands of every student Watson's '' Apology for 
 
68 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 the Bible ; " and as a talisman against the dem- 
 ocratic despotism of French Jacobinism, they 
 needed nothing better than the cockade, which 
 like a visible watchword cried, " Adams and 
 Liberty." In his senior year Channing drew 
 up an address of admiration and allegiance to 
 President John Adams, which was signed by 
 one hundred and seventy students (nearly the 
 whole number then in college) ; and at his grad- 
 uation, when the first part, an English oration, 
 was assigned him, taking for his theme '* The 
 Present Age," he did not omit the part of Hamlet 
 from the play of '* Hamlet," though the Faculty 
 had forbidden all political discussion. How he 
 could have handled the Age without touching 
 politics pretty strongly, is hard to see. After 
 a somewhat obstinate contest between the stu- 
 dents and the government, they finally yielded, 
 at least so far, it would seem, as not to prohibit 
 political allusions ; for after an animated and 
 expHcit freeing of his mind on the whole subject, 
 he exclaimed, with a significant glance toward 
 the Faculty, " But that I am forbid, I could a 
 tale unfold, would harrow up your souls ! " 
 

 '.ST' y 
 
 Channinc. the Young Student. 
 After a Sketch by Malbone. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 6g 
 
 It was probably about the time of his return 
 home from Cambridge after his graduation, or 
 possibly during some one of the vacations a Httle 
 earher, that the pencil sketch was taken by his 
 friend Malbone, which, by the kindness of his 
 son WiUiam, is here given. It shows the femi- 
 nine tenderness, together with the manly frank- 
 ness and generosity, and at the same time the 
 moral dignity, sensibility, and courage, which 
 have been described as among his marked 
 characteristics. 
 
 What shall be his Profession. — And now came 
 the choice of a profession. It is noteworthy 
 that even up to his senior year the " little minis- 
 ter " had not thought specially or decidedly of 
 divinity. Indeed, he had declared that he had 
 " no inclination " for either of the three profes- 
 sions. And when he did begin to meditate 
 choosincr one amongr them, medicine seemed to 
 be the one he most seriously contemplated. 
 But as Jean Paul says of Herder and Schiller, 
 " Both intended in their youth to be surgeons, 
 
'JO WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 but Providence said, ' There are deeper wounds 
 than bodily ones,' and both became writers," so 
 we may say of Channing, who became eminently 
 a writer, though pre-eminently more. And as 
 to law, which his classmates supposed he would 
 choose as the profession for which he was so 
 peculiarly qualified, there was a higher than any 
 earthly cause, which claimed his powers and his 
 passion, — the great strife between man and his 
 Maker. 
 
 Tutorship at Richmond. — Meanwhile, almost 
 as soon as he left college, Channing, anxious 
 to gain the means of pursuing his theological 
 studies, eagerly accepted an invitation from a 
 Mr. Randolph of Richmond to go home with 
 him and be tutor to his son. 
 
 Southern Life. — Mr. Randolph was United 
 States Marshal for Virginia, and his house was 
 a centre of elegant hospitality, and Channing's 
 letters glow with enthusiasm in describing his 
 local and social position, — the glorious nature 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. J I 
 
 around him, and the charming ease and freedom 
 of the people's manners. " Could I only take 
 from the Virginians," he writes, " their sensuality 
 and their slaves, I should think them the greatest 
 people in the world." Still, in the Randolph 
 family and elsewhere, he heard slavery freely 
 lamented and condemned. 
 
 Letters to Friends. — In his letters of this period 
 we find frequent expressions of opinion on social 
 and political topics, not surpassed in soundness 
 by the convictions of his mature manhood. 
 " The influence of slavery on the whites is almost 
 as fatal as on the blacks themselves." *' I wish 
 to see patriotism exalted into a moral principle, 
 not a branch of avarice. I wish to see govern- 
 ment administered with a view of enlightening 
 the mind and dignifying the heart." *' A soldier 
 by profession is too apt to forget that he is a 
 citizen!' 
 
 Self-Culture. — We find him at this time assid- 
 uously cultivating that fairness of mind, that 
 passion for even-handed justice, that sense of 
 
72 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 the importance of deliberation and discrimina- 
 tion, as elements of a determined and decided 
 character, — that moderation, in short, in the best 
 and true sense of the word, namely, self-regulated 
 action, which was a more and more marked 
 quality of his spirit to the last. He writes to 
 a classmate, '' You do not know what an enthu- 
 siast I have grown for liberty !' He himself 
 underscores the word ; he had discovered that 
 there were other liberties than freedom from 
 the tyranny of French Jacobins or the Corsican 
 usurper. 
 
 Results of his Richmond Life. — The twenty 
 months Channing spent at Richmond — his 
 Thebaid Lavollaie calls them — were probably 
 more fruitful in consequences to his whole being, 
 physical, mental, moral, and spiritual, than any 
 other equal part of his life. In the first place, 
 they undoubtedly sowed the seeds of that inva- 
 lidism which had so much to do with the tone 
 and direction of his mind and his whole inner 
 and outer life in after years. For the sake of 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 73 
 
 improving himself as much as possible without 
 neglecting his pupils, he stole from Nature hours 
 needed for sleep, studying often till daybreak; 
 in order to harden himself and keep the body 
 under, " he accustomed himself to sleep on the 
 bare floor, and would spring up at any hour of 
 waking to walk about in the cold." On the same 
 principle he practised a low diet, and, in order 
 to save all he could for his mother, he stinted 
 himself in clothing, so much so as not only to 
 expose himself to the cold, but to deprive him- 
 self at times of cheerful society. No wonder 
 that under this heroic treatment, this low living 
 and hard study, having no relaxation save in 
 lonely rambles and musings, he fell into a morbid, 
 sentimental enthusiasm ; that mushig, as he him- 
 self tells us, wore away his body and his mind; 
 that "the imagination threatened to inflame 
 the passions," and that his "whole life" there was 
 " a struggle with his feelings." " Fortunately," 
 says Lavollaie, "Channing was mastered by 
 t\vo strong reins, — the taste for study, and the 
 sense of duty, vivified by the love of God." 
 
74 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Struggle and Triumph. — Manly, indeed, the 
 struggle was, and successful ; although at first, 
 from the stagnation of dreamy reverie, it trans- 
 ported him beyond what his friends thought 
 the bounds of good judgment. It was natural 
 enough that such a sudden waking as he himself 
 describes should somewhat dazzle his eyes. The 
 cool reception a poem of sentiment which he had 
 wept over met from a lady to whom he showed 
 it, and whom he knew to be a person of true 
 benevolence and active sympathy, led him in- 
 stantly to reflect '' that there was no moral 
 merit in possessing feeling," and he writes to 
 his friend this confession : '' It is true that I sit 
 in my study and shed tears over human misery. 
 I weep over a novel. I weep over a tale of 
 human woe. But do I ever relieve the dis- 
 tressed? Have I lightened the load of afflic- 
 tion? My cheeks reddened at the question; 
 a cloud of error burst from my mind. I found 
 that virtue did not consist in feeling, but in 
 acting from a sense of duty'' 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 75 
 
 Enthusiasm. — The visions of the perfectibiHty 
 of man and of society which from this time 
 animated his bosom, drew from his friends on 
 all sides the most earnest cautions and remon- 
 strances. And well might it seem to them — 
 for example, his brother Francis, the lawyer, 
 and his cool and considerate Grandfather Ellery 
 — that he meditated a communistic revolution. 
 Indeed, some of his language has a ring like 
 that of Shelley himself, and especially when he 
 winds up his delineation of the perfect society : 
 "We should sleep securely; we should live long 
 and happily ; and perhaps, like old Enoch, when 
 the time came, be translated to heaven." 
 
 Christian Aspiration. — But, after all, Channing, 
 in principle and purpose, in idea and imagina- 
 tion, was right, and he knew he was right. 
 Christ had come to organize the kingdom of 
 Heaven on earth. Man was by nature capable 
 of becoming a subject of that kingdom. '' Is 
 there a man so hard of heart," he asks, " that 
 you cannot find in him some string to vibrate 
 
'je WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 to the touch of humanity? . . . Oh no ! he bears 
 a spark of divinity in his bosom, and it is Pro- 
 methean fire that animates his clay." 
 
 New Birth. — Channing himself, indeed, as- 
 cribes to this period '* the change of heart which 
 is necessary to constitute a Christian." In one of 
 his letters he says, "" I have now solemnly given 
 myself up to God." And the *' act of self-con- 
 secration" has been sacredly preserved, but, in 
 the words of his nephew, " is of too personal a 
 character to publish." " This paper," he adds, 
 " marks the transition point in the development 
 of his character. The day-dreams of boyhood, 
 the hopes of youth, the longings and aspirations 
 of eighteen years, hke morning clouds, condense 
 and fall in a refreshing rain of penitence." 
 But this figure would be hardly complete if we 
 failed to add that these rains, after fulfilling 
 their office of quickening all human and Chris- 
 tian graces of this earthly life, reascended to 
 heaven as clouds again, to catch the light of 
 the sun of perfection and kindle the soul of 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 77 
 
 the heaven-seeking pilgrim with new visions 
 of the perfect day. 
 
 It will be remembered that there had been, 
 before this, an hour in his college hfe also, from 
 which young Channing dated " a new spiritual 
 birth." And at a later period, in reply to an 
 Orthodox friend's question, he said the whole 
 of his life had been a process of conversion; 
 to which the other rejoined that then he must 
 have been born regenerate^ for he was certainly 
 now a child of God. To which Channing would 
 surely have replied, had the conversation contin- 
 ued, that of course he, like every other man, was 
 born a child of God. But the simple statement 
 of the case doubtless is, that Channing was not 
 only born again this once, but born again and 
 again, as every thoughtful mind and tender 
 heart will be in this world of ever new mani- 
 festations of divine truth and trials of human 
 character. 
 
 His Theological Attitude. — In his theology 
 Channing had not as yet extricated his mind 
 
78 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 from the errors of the old system, the doctrine 
 of ** the vicarious character of Christ," and the 
 necessity of " relying on his merits for pardon 
 and acceptance with God." It is curious in this 
 respect to compare Channing's development with 
 the reverse process in Chalmers, who actually 
 wrote in one of his early diaries : " May I dread 
 to think that any thing but goodness can rec- 
 ommend me to the Almighty ! " 
 
 Channing must have been yet in his emo- 
 tional and sentimental period when he could read 
 to a friend with tearful admiration the account 
 Edwards gives of his conversion. How differ- 
 ent is all that rapture of sweet contemplation in 
 view of a divine glory in which holiness seems 
 to be the only element, and humanity is left out 
 of sight, from that adoring sense of the moral 
 perfection of the righteous and loving Father, 
 the very source and soul and sum of disinterest- 
 edness, which in Channing's mature thought 
 was God's highest glory, and which, indeed, 
 was felt to be such in that hour of his college 
 experience, regarded by himself as the first 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 79 
 
 memorable awaking of his soul to true religion. 
 At Richmond, indeed, we find him, during a 
 violent transition from one morbid mood to 
 another, confessing the " depravity and rotten- 
 ness " of his heart; but this language seems to 
 have been a remnant of the traditional mysti- 
 cism which clung to him from his early training, 
 and as it meets us on the first pages of the 
 book of his life, it stands in dark relief, like 
 those dismal stanzas of young Bryant's, which 
 the zeal of elder orthodox friends prefixed to 
 that serene and trustful poem, the ''Thanatopsis," 
 the last of which is, — 
 
 " This bitter cup at first was given 
 When angry justice frowned severe ; 
 And 't is the eternal doom of Heaven 
 That man should view the grave with fear." 
 
 Happily Bryant outgrew such erroneous im- 
 aginings, and so did Channing, and this was no 
 small part of his real conversion. 
 
 These remnants of the old superstition will, 
 however, fall away in good time. Meanwhile it 
 is clear that the impression he had received in 
 
80 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 his very boyhood at Newport of the hollowness 
 of the popular rehgion was confirmed in these 
 years of his opening manhood by his Richmond 
 experience. More and more his eyes were 
 opened to the wrong done to humanity by the 
 substitution of the husks of form and formula 
 for the living bread from Heaven, the living 
 Christ, the true gospel, the good news of the 
 fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. 
 To a lively and thorough conviction of this real 
 Christianity and its saving power he had now 
 come through great tribulation. 
 
 His Return Home. — In the summer of 1800, 
 after a miserable and sickening voyage, he 
 returned to his home in Newport, changed from 
 a buoyant and vigorous youth to " a thin and 
 pallid invalid." Henceforth the only elasticity 
 left him — but what a treasure! — was that of 
 a spirit eagerly and ardently devoted to truth 
 and freedom and humanity, of a hope no pains 
 and infirmities of the flesh could extinguish, an 
 aspiration which cheered advancing age with a 
 growing presentiment of eternal youth. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 8 1 
 
 Communion with Nature. — At home again, in 
 the absence of his elder brother, who had re- 
 moved to Cambridge, WiUiam became head of 
 the household. During the year and a half he 
 spent here, pursuing his theological studies, 
 he battled bravely with the tendency to exces- 
 sive seriousness and severity, partly inherited, 
 and partly aggravated by his late trials and by 
 the responsibility of his present position; and 
 now again he found in his favorite communion 
 with nature one of the greatest helps toward 
 the recovery of a cheerful faith and a complete 
 self-mastery. 
 
 Tribute to the Beach. — At this time it was 
 that he found that natural oratory which he 
 describes in his Dedication Sermon, the beach, 
 of which he says: *' There I lifted up my voice 
 in praise amidst the tempest. There, softened 
 by beauty, I poured out my thanksgiving and 
 contrite confessions. There, in reverential sym- 
 pathy with the mighty power around me, I be- 
 came conscious of power within." 
 
82 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Of course the generally so fair and discrimi- 
 nating Professor Fisher, in his recent paper on 
 Dr. Channing in the International Review, does 
 not forget this piece of Channing's autobiogra- 
 phy, though he mentions only^ in referring to his 
 communion with nature, an earlier confession, 
 and says, '* He would stand upon the beach at 
 Newport, and in a high Byronic mood, long to 
 rush to the embrace of the waters, whose tumultu- 
 ous heavings harmonized with the mood of his 
 own spirit ; " and adds the remark, *' It is hard to 
 believe that these maudlin tempers could ever 
 have belonged to a man of Channing's sterHng 
 sincerity." 
 
 The passage to which the reviewer refers is in 
 a letter written just after Channing's graduation, 
 in which he says : " Sometimes I compare my 
 fortune to the billows before me. I extend my 
 arms towards them, I run to meet them, and wish 
 myself buried beneath their waters. Sometimes 
 my whole soul ascends to the God of nature, 
 and in such a temple I cannot but be devout." 
 
 It was only two or three years after this that 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 83 
 
 he found in the same mighty ocean not an ag- 
 gravation, but an alleviation of inward restless- 
 ness, even a sense of deep central peace. As 
 he himself, in a letter of the year 1821, referring 
 to this very time of his preparation for the min- 
 istry, writes : ** Then I spent almost whole days 
 on the seashore, where the majesty and power of 
 Nature, absorbing, exalting, and transporting me 
 beyond myself, ministered most happily to the 
 diseased soidy 
 
 Life in the Library. — A second agent in his 
 education to the ministry was the Redwood 
 Library, then in a somewhat deserted, as well 
 as disorderly and disfigured condition, from 
 having been used as a barrack by the British, 
 and where his new pastor, Dr. Patten, Dr. Stiles's 
 successor, was now librarian. 
 
 Channing and Hopkins. — A third, and, accord- 
 ing to his own account, very important element 
 in Channing's preparation for his great office, 
 was his intercourse with Dr. Hopkins. It was 
 during this preparatory period of study, but 
 
84 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 whether in the Newport or the Cambridge resi- 
 dence is not certain, he once, as he tells us, 
 preached for Dr. Hopkins, who rewarded his 
 effort with an approving smile, remarking, in 
 his usual quaint way, that the hat was not yet 
 finished {mtdimng the science of religion), and 
 expressing the hope that he would live to com- 
 plete it. Channing might well have reflected 
 that Hopkins's head required a peculiar shape of 
 theological hat, and so indeed did every man's. 
 Referring to this occasion, the present writer 
 once read some lines at a gathering of the 
 Channing Conference, which he ventures here 
 to reprint : — 
 
 Would I could sing in fitting phrase 
 A song of the past and the future days, — 
 Could sing how this hill-top is to me 
 A hall of the fathers by the sea ; 
 Could sing the renown of saint and sage, 
 Who have left the deathless heritage 
 Of a memory bright and pure and fair, 
 That lights the sky and embalms the air, 
 A spirit that breathes its blessing round, 
 And makes this hill a holy ground. 
 
 And chiefly, on my musing eyes, 
 Two forms in memory's light arise : 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 85 
 
 A stern old man and a manly youth, — 
 
 One in the burning love of truth, 
 
 One in the spirit that yearned to free 
 
 The soul from sin's captivity. 
 
 At the sacred desk I see them stand, 
 
 The youth and the veteran, hand in hand. 
 
 And now the elder has gone his way, 
 
 Dawns on his eyes the heavenly day ; 
 
 The thoughtful youth, to manhood grown. 
 
 Has sent through the land and the world a tono 
 
 That thrills with a power of voice and pen 
 
 To be felt more and more in the souls of men. 
 
 And he too follows to the land 
 
 Where dwell the spirits' immortal band ; 
 
 And the youth and the sire there once more 
 
 Join hands in a world where all doubt is o'er, 
 
 "Where darkness and discord for ever cease, 
 
 And hearts are united in Christ and peace. 
 
 " For Christ and Peace " — oh, not alone 
 Are the words inscribed on yon corner-stone ; 
 Immortal spirits gather here. 
 And whisper them in the musing ear ; 
 The breezes catch them and never cease 
 The sweet refrain: For Christ and Peace. 
 
 Return to Cambridge. — In 1801 Channing ac- 
 cepted the place of Regent (or General Proctor, 
 as the officer might have b^en entitled at a later 
 day), an office which, requiring only a general 
 superintendence of his hall and of the students 
 
S6 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 who roomed there, gave him time and means to 
 continue advantageously his professional studies. 
 He now began the habit, which he never relin- 
 quished, of reading with a pen in his hand. He 
 remembered, probably. Bacon's dictum : '* Read- 
 ing makes a full man, writmg mi exact man, and 
 speaking a ready man." He had already for 
 some time been in the habit of committing to 
 paper rules for his guidance in the formation 
 of opinion, as well as of character. (Are they 
 never to be given entire to the world?) "It is 
 easy to read," he finds, " but hard to think." '* I 
 wish," he writes, " to have a few important truths 
 impressed deeply on my mind, rather than to 
 be lost in that chaos of universal knowledge 
 which has hitherto distracted me. — Let me learn 
 to be silent on subjects where I am ignorant. — 
 Every sect has its cant, and there is danger of 
 being blindly led by it." 
 
 Church Membership. — While at Cambridge 
 Channing became a member of Dr. Holmes's 
 church. His friends could not tell at that time 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 8/ 
 
 whether he would come out a Hopkinsian or a 
 moderate Calvinist, and it is curious that the 
 only question put to him when he presented his 
 sermon as a candidate was, whether he believed 
 God to be the author of sin. His answer is not 
 transmitted to us. • In addition to the favorite 
 writers in philosophy already mentioned, he 
 now read, with deep admiration of their piety, 
 Law and Edwards. But from the contradictions 
 of the Orthodox theology his good sense and 
 his natural religion^ his passion for accuracy of 
 thought and for unity in his inner being, kept 
 him clear. 
 
 His first Sermon (excepting perhaps those he 
 gave at Newport for Dr. Hopkins and Dr. 
 Patten) was preached at Medford, October 24, 
 1802, and the text was, " Silver and gold have I 
 none, but such as I have give I thee." A noble 
 and felicitous inauguration of a ministry which 
 was to *' give " to many souls the power Peter's 
 word of faith was to give the lame body, — to 
 " rise up and walk." 
 
88 . WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 His brother George, in his " Early Recollec- 
 tions," writes : *' Shortly after the late Dr. Chan- 
 ning received ecclesiastical authority to preach 
 as a candidate, being on a visit to Newport, he 
 was invited to deliver the [preparatory] lecture 
 [in Dr. Patten's church]. It was soon noised 
 about ; and, being a great favorite in the town, 
 an audience greeted him such as had never 
 before assembled on a similar occasion ; and 
 they listened with evident interest to the ser- 
 mon, said to be his first, from the text. Acts 
 iii. 6," the same which is named as his first 
 when preached at Medford. 
 
 It is with a peculiar reverence one takes into 
 his hands the venerable and time-colored manu- 
 script of Dr. Channing's first sermon, evidently 
 retouched once and again by his careful hand 
 and pruned by his severe taste, and showing 
 already many of the traits of his mature thought 
 and sentiment and style. According to the 
 record on the first page, it was first preached in 
 1802 at Federal Street, in 1803 at Waltham, in 
 May of that year at Dr. Howard's West Boston 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 89 
 
 Church, the same month at Lancaster, in April, 
 1804, again at Federal Street from Galatians 
 vi. 10, *' As we have therefore opportunity, let 
 us do good unto all men" (omitting "■ especially 
 them that are of the household of the faith," — 
 his breadth of liberality and humanity already 
 showing itself), — in May of that year at Med- 
 ford, and in 1808 again at Federal Street. 
 
 This sermon, beginning in what would now 
 be thought a commonplace way, as it goes on 
 becomes singularly impressive by what might 
 be called its annulative force, the steady and 
 onward swell of the tide of pure and natural 
 and healthful thought and feeling that pulses 
 through its pages. It illustrates a piece of 
 advice which its author once gave a young 
 sermon-writer, — to write with fervor and fluency 
 and correct with coolness. These pages show 
 extreme fastidiousness, and illustrate the labor 
 by which Channing achieved his pure style; 
 for instance, having first written, " The most 
 hardened acknowledge the majesty of virtue, 
 and are awed in Jier presence^' he afterward 
 strikes out the Italic clause. 
 
90 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Here are some short specimens which remind 
 one of the author's matured style and sentiment : 
 "Now all Christian morals may be reduced to 
 one word, love. God is love. Christ is love. 
 The gospel is an exhibition of love, and its end 
 is to transform men into love. The blood 
 of Christ was shed to make this native plant 
 of heaven flourish on earth. ... Ill humor is 
 the source of many of the miseries of Hfe. All 
 the tyrants and heroic murderers who ever lived 
 have never produced, in all their wars and 
 ravages, as much wretchedness as the slow 
 poison of fretfulness and the sudden bursts of 
 anger in social intercourse. . . . 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. Men generally 
 need sympathy more than silver and gold." 
 
 A classmate records in his journal hearing 
 Channing give this sermon at Medford in 
 October, 1802. Accordingly the impression it 
 made led, doubtless, to its being repeated there 
 a year or two after. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 91 
 
 Called to Federal Street. — The impression he 
 made both by his matter and his manner was 
 such that two Boston societies, the one in Brattle 
 Street and the one in Federal Street, simultane- 
 ously, in December, invited him to the pastorate. 
 After considerable hesitation he decided for 
 Federal Street, as being the "■ more humble 
 sphere," and on the 12th of February, 1803, he 
 formally signified to that church his acceptance 
 of their call. 
 
 Old Mr. Ellery's Account of Him. — This seems 
 a fitting place to insert a passage from a letter 
 (never before printed) from William Ellery, the 
 Signer, to his son then at school in Wickford. 
 He says: ''Your cousin [properly half-nephew?] 
 William Channing is here. He has preached 
 in our [Patten's] and Mr. Hopkins's Meeting 
 to universal satisfaction. You cannot conceive 
 what satisfaction it gives me to see my grandson 
 walking in the truth with so much steadiness, 
 and with so much eloquence and wisdom dis- 
 pensing the light of the gospel. If he lives, he 
 
92 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 will be a burning and a shining light He is 
 called to settle at Boston, and will accept the 
 call." 
 
 For many years after his settlement Mr. 
 Channing continued to correspond with his 
 Grandfather Ellery, who, a French biographer 
 of Channing says, " was less accessible to enthu- 
 siasm and illusion, less an innovator in religion, 
 but animated in an equal degree with a large 
 spirit of tolerance and love of liberty." Many 
 of the old man's letters to his grandson on re- 
 ligious doctrines are preserved in his family. 
 Some specimens are given in William H. Chan- 
 ning's Memoir. 
 
 The Federal Street Church. — The Federal Street 
 congregation consisted originally of a company 
 of Scotch Presbyterians from the North of 
 Ireland, who worshipped in a barn in Long 
 Lane (as the street was then called) from 1729 
 to 1744, when they built a wooden meeting- 
 house, a copy of the engraving of which is here 
 given; and, the convention having been held 
 
The Old Federal Street Meeting-house in which Channing was 
 ordained. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 93 
 
 there in 1788, at which Massachusetts accepted 
 the Constitution, gave rise to the name of 
 Federal Street. In this meeting-house Chan- 
 ning was ordained and continued to preach 
 till the new brick one took its place in 1809. 
 Douglass, in his " Summary," gives a singular 
 inscription taken from some part or record of 
 the old church, which runs as follows (appar- 
 ently it should be Latin verse) : — 
 
 *' Hujus fundamen saxum. Domus ilia manebit. 
 Labilis, e contra, si sit arena, peribit. 
 Gloria Christi lex nostra suprema. 
 Desiderio, J. M., hujus Ecclesiae 
 Christique, Pastor." 
 
 " The foundation of this is rock. This house will abide. 
 On the contrary, if loose sand, it will perish. 
 The glory of Christ our highest law. 
 By desire, J. M., Pastor of this Church and of Christ." ' 
 
 The Ordination took place on Wednesday, 
 June I, 1803. The services were: Prayer by 
 Rev. Dr. Holmes; sermon by Rev. Dr. (then 
 Prof.) Tappan of Cambridge; consecrating 
 prayer by Rev. Dr. Osgood; charge by Rev. 
 Henry Channing; right hand of fellowship by 
 Dr. Tuckerman. 
 
94 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 George Ticknor, then a boy, has recorded 
 his reminiscences of the occasion, especially of 
 the impressive presence of the " pale, spiritual- 
 looking young man," and the ''trembling voice 
 and devout air " with which he recited the last 
 stanza of the closing hymn : — 
 
 " My tongue repeats her vows. 
 Peace to this sacred house ! 
 For here my friends and brethren dwell." 
 
 This peculiar and indescribable charm in his 
 reading of hymns, which so affected the boyish 
 hearer of one of his first pulpit utterances, was 
 a universally marked characteristic of him to 
 the last. Referring to his preaching in Provi- 
 dence just a year before the Sunday of his 
 death, Dr. Hall said : " His first accents went to 
 our hearts, and his first hymn seemed to us a 
 service." 
 
 First Months of his Ministry. — For a few months 
 after his settlement Mr. Channing boarded with 
 a parishioner. In these first months he had to 
 go through a hard struggle with the depressing 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 95 ^ 
 
 influences of impaired health and the sense of 
 professional responsibility. The question, Who 
 is sufficient for these things? had with him so 
 oppressive an emphasis that at times he was 
 almost ready to resign his office. With the 
 exception of his beloved brother Francis, who 
 was a guardian angel to him at this time, he 
 opened his mind to no one around him. His 
 only other counsellors were himself and his 
 Maker. Indeed, for some time, much of the 
 sadness of his Richmond life seemed to be re- 
 newed. He shunned society, begrudging even 
 to the family in which he lived the moments 
 snatched from his studies and musings for his 
 short and scanty meals. He dwelt mostly in 
 the mount of meditation and communion with 
 himself and with God. He felt that what he 
 would teach and persuade others to be he must 
 first become himself; and he sought and strug- 
 gled and prayed for peace and purity and 
 perfectness in the solitude of his own thoughts. 
 Perhaps it would have been better, at least 
 happier, for him at this time, if, instead of seek- 
 
96 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ing God so exclusively in solitude, he had dwelt 
 more on that great thought of St. John, " God 
 is love. ... If we love one another, God dwelleth 
 in us and his love is perfected in us." But it is 
 with great diffidence we venture to make such 
 a suggestion. Through such a season even of 
 morbid self-inspection the Father of lights was 
 leading this son of his toward the strength of 
 self-mastery and the blessedness of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Appearance in Society. — When he did appear 
 in society it was with an abstracted air. No 
 one felt this more keenly than himself, and in 
 his diary he writes : '* Let it be my rule never 
 to carry a subject with me into society." 
 
 Brings his Mother and Family to Boston. — He 
 
 had for some time had a standing agreement 
 with his brother Francis, that one or the other 
 of them should remain single ten years at least, 
 for the sake of helping support their mother; 
 and now, having the advantage over his brother 
 of a fixed income, he wrote to his mother that 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 97 
 
 the society had provided a parsonage, but he 
 had no one to keep it for him, and added, with 
 a pardonable half-truth, that he needed sorely 
 her comfort and counsel and care. Thus he 
 soon had the whole family under his own roof. 
 At the same time he actually managed to pass 
 himself off as a boarder with his mother ! He 
 took the smallest room in the house for his 
 study, and slept in an attic-chamber, which he 
 shared with one of his brothers, to whom he 
 said one morning after a cold night : " If my 
 bed were my country, I should be somewhat 
 like Bonaparte [still dwelling on his favorite 
 theme]. I have no control except over the part 
 I occupy; the instant I move, frost takes pos- 
 session." In one of his journals of this date is 
 a striking passage, which those who knew him 
 familiarly in his later years will feel had come 
 to be fulfilled in his own person : " In the 
 morning when I see any of my friends after the 
 night's separation, let me receive them as new 
 gifts from God, as raised from the dead." Many 
 of us who visited him in his last years will recall 
 7 
 
98 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 that beautiful and radiant greeting, as of one 
 coming out of communion with Him, of whom 
 the hymn so sweetly says : — 
 
 "His morning smiles bless all the day." 
 
 And yet, at the period of which we are now 
 speaking, according to his biographer's account, 
 his habitual soberness and almost sombreness 
 of manner presented a striking contrast to the 
 prevaiHng tone of the family, — the mother's 
 sharp-witted, plain-spoken honesty, and '* the 
 hilarity of the younger brothers and sisters." 
 
 Sedate amidst Household Hilarity. — Those of 
 us who remember the Channing brothers in their 
 ripe manhood. Dr. Walter and Professor Ed- 
 ward, and the venerable and vigorous nonage- 
 narian of Milton, still living, can easily imagine 
 what pronounced, not to say boisterous, speci- 
 mens of outspoken merriment they may well 
 have been in their boyhood's home at Newport. 
 Still, with all his seriousness and sadness, he was 
 sweet and kindly; but how, unless more than 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 99 
 
 mortal, could one, weighed down with chronic 
 debility, keenly sensitive to the wants and woes 
 of a world groaning for the peace-giving light 
 of the gospel, yet feeling as keenly his physi- 
 cal inadequacy to the accomphshment of the 
 task to which his own ideal of the ministry 
 called him, — how could he, though ever so 
 well convinced (in the words of the saintly 
 Abbot) that " cheerfulness of manners is not 
 merely an amiable grace, but a Christian duty," 
 be otherwise than sober and sedate? And yet, 
 after all, may we not well believe that his 
 *' strength," too, '* was made perfect in weak- 
 ness," and that what he may have lost in one 
 kind of power may have been more than com- 
 pensated by a deeper energy of the spirit? 
 
 His own Idea of Happiness. — And indeed, in 
 one of his letters of this first decade of his 
 ministry, he gives an admirably discriminating 
 definition of happiness. He describes true hap- 
 piness as " the uniform serenity of a well-gov- 
 erned mind, of disciphned affections, of a heart 
 
100 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 steadily devoted to objects which reason and 
 religion recommend. According to my tame 
 imagination, Happiness is a very demure lady, 
 almost as prim as the wives of the Pilgrims of 
 New England. She smiles indeed, most benig- 
 nantly, but very seldom laughs ; she may sigh, 
 but very seldom sobs ; the tear may start in 
 her eye, the tear of gratitude and of sympathy, 
 but it seldom streams down the cheek. Her 
 step is sometimes quickened, but she does not 
 waste her spirits and strength in violent and 
 unnatural efforts. She cultivates judgment more 
 than fancy. She employs imagination, not to 
 dress up airy fictions, not to throw a false, 
 short-lived lustre over the surrounding scenery, 
 but to array in splendor distant objects, which 
 reason assures her are most glorious and excel- 
 lent, but which, from their distance, are apt to 
 fade away before the eye, and to lose their 
 power over the heart." 
 
 Did not Channing himself sit for this picture? 
 It certainly is, in many respects, a striking rep- 
 resentation of his own habitual state, as well as 
 of his pulpit style. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 10 1 
 
 And it is interesting at this point to recall 
 the fact that Bryant (between whom and Chan- 
 ning a striking parallel might be run) pubhshed 
 not long after this, in the North American, an 
 essay on the " Happy Temperament," " which " 
 (says Curtis, in his fine oration on the poet) *' is 
 singularly interesting as the work of a poet 
 whose strain is sometimes called remote from 
 human sympathy, and a man who was so often 
 thought to be cold and austere." 
 
 Channing as Preacher and Pastor. — Coming now 
 to speak of him as the regular minister of a con- 
 gregation, while thankful for the copious extracts 
 from his sermons and papers which his biogra- 
 pher has given us, we cannot but regret that we 
 could not have been favored with a complete 
 and chronological series of his pulpit produc- 
 tions, especially as we are expressly assured 
 that " his discourses were his best diary," and 
 that *' extracts from his sermons will afford us 
 the surest guidance " to his " spiritual develop- 
 ment," inasmuch as ** their topics and the treat- 
 
102 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 ment of them were transcribed from the records 
 in his heart; and his reproofs and appeals to 
 his people were but the outward symbol of his 
 own private struggles." 
 
 He has described Himself. — If, however, the 
 specimens his nephew has given us are an aver- 
 age of his pulpit work, then, though indeed it 
 may not be easy for us to realize to ourselves, 
 except from our own remembrance of the man 
 and his manner, the profound impression such 
 (in the best sense) homely preaching is said to 
 have created, yet, with this aid of memory, we 
 can well understand how Henry Ware should 
 have called his brother Channing's sermon at 
 the ordination of John Codman a description 
 of his own ministry. For instance, he says 
 there : " In preaching, his heart should disclose 
 itself in his sentiments, manner, and style. 
 Whilst unfolding the divine perfections, he 
 should let men see that they are perfections he 
 himself loves and adores. In enjoining a Chris- 
 tian temper, he should urge it as one who has felt 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 103 
 
 its beauty and power. When describing the 
 promises of the gospel, he should speak with 
 the animation of a holy hope. . . . Let me here 
 mention that it is highly important that his 
 manner be earnest." And here he elaborates a 
 distinction, to which he again and again recurred 
 in charges to young ministers : " By this I do 
 not mean a noisy, tumultuous manner. I do not 
 mean that a minister must have lungs of iron 
 and a voice of thunder. Noise and earnestness 
 are very different things. ... In the still, small 
 voice we may discern the language of the 
 heart. . . . This expression of the heart is the 
 perfection of ministerial eloquence." 
 
 And this was Channing's. And yet, strangely 
 enough, he enters in his diary such self-accusa- 
 tions as these : '^ I am sensible of a want of ten- 
 derness in my preaching. I want to preach 
 striking, rather than melting sermons." The 
 truthfulness he had inherited from his mother 
 shows itself in all his discourse. He charges 
 his brother minister not to try to show feeling 
 when he has it not. Better seem cold where 
 
104 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 one is so. He wishes he had the modesty of 
 statement for which Butler (and we may add 
 Paley) is so remarkable. " Some people," he 
 says, " rather than lose a good metaphor, or a 
 fine sentence, are often tempted to assert what 
 is not altogether accurate ; and they have their 
 reward. They astonish, but do not convince. 
 They strike, but do not keep their hold of the 
 mind. May you and I love Truth better than 
 Rhetoric ! " 
 
 Characteristics of his Early Sermons. — In look- 
 ing over the hundred pages of pulpit discourse 
 opened before us in William Channing's first 
 volume, we are struck with the absence, not of 
 the sensational element merely, of any thing like 
 impassioned and startling appeals, but of all 
 ornament, of any thing indicating literary fancy. 
 There is not a quotation from any book, ex- 
 cept the Bible. There is nowhere any heat, 
 but only a quiet glow of faith and hope and 
 love, — love of God, of truth, and of human 
 souls. No lightning-flashes, but over all the 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 1 05 
 
 broad and blessed sunlight of a holy and hu- 
 mane spirit. 
 
 Through the kindness of his son, a few ex- 
 tracts are here given from his first (and un- 
 printed) Thanksgiving sermon, from i Tim. 
 vi. 17: "Infinite majesty arrayed in the mild 
 lustre ^of benevolence. . . . The ridiis of hu- 
 man nattcre exhibit nothing more mournful than 
 a soul rich in experience of divine mercy, yet 
 unimpressed with the kindness of that Being 
 from whom all its blessings are derived. . . . 
 True gratitude is not a selfish affection. It 
 does not confine itself to the blessings which an 
 individual receives. It rejoices in all the good 
 which it sees God communicate. . . . There is 
 nothing in us to recommend us to God. Sin- 
 ners as we are, we are vile in his sight. Our 
 sins cry to God for unmingled vengeance. We 
 see blessings descending from infinite heights 
 on beings who have fallen an infinite depth. 
 . . . God increases in good. His system is a 
 swelling one. All evil will terminate in good, 
 and all good will lead to greater. . . . God, 
 
I06 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 as it were, deprives his own benevolence 
 of the gratification of relieving them [hu- 
 man sufferings], that he may grant you an 
 opportunity of partaking his love and sharing 
 his blessings." 
 
 Thus far only negatively Anti-Orthodox. — In 
 
 these sermons of the first decade, before the 
 breaking out of the Unitarian controversy, 
 Channing appears chiefly in the three characters 
 of the moral and spiritual preacher, the faithful 
 pastor, and the patriotic citizen. In theology, 
 so far as denominational distinctions are con- 
 cerned, his views seem to have been (to use 
 his biographer's image) somewhat in a *' morning 
 fog." Probably he would have been counted 
 among the moderate Orthodox^ that is, in regard 
 to his ideas of the nature and work of Christ 
 and the process of salvation. Thus he says: 
 " A change of heart is the object of the gospel. 
 . . . Every man must be new-born, have a new 
 heart." He will have " meetings to pray for 
 the Spirit. . . . Let my visits be ministerial and 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANGING. \OJ 
 
 serious." " When we look at the incarnate 
 Saviour," he says in a sermon, ** we see man as 
 he was before the fall." 
 
 Arian and yet Humanitarian. — And yet, though 
 an Arian, in his idea of Jesus as having come 
 into this world from a higher state of being, he 
 was, in the best sense of the word, a Humani- 
 tarian, and grew more and more such with 
 advancing years. Thus he says, in the very 
 sermon just quoted : " The incarnation declares 
 man to be an important being in the creation 
 of God. It declares that the human soul is a 
 germ in which are wrapt up noble powers, — 
 an inextinguishable flame, which will grow 
 bright and clear with truth and goodness." And 
 it must be remembered that even in the days 
 of his study for the ministry, he had stumbled 
 at the doctrine of the Trinity, and of prayer to 
 Jesus ; and in these first ten years of his preach- 
 ing his theological tendencies showed them- 
 selves plainly enough, were it only in his nega- 
 tive attitude with regard to the peculiarities of 
 
I08 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Calvinism, and his positive emphasizing of the 
 spirit and precepts of Christ as the saving power 
 of the gospel. 
 
 His very first sermon struck the key-note 
 of his system of religion. It was a mem- 
 orable thought for that day: ''We glorify 
 God when by imitation we display his char- 
 acter." 
 
 His Anti-Calvinism grows more pronounced. — 
 But here and there come out positive expres- 
 sions of repugnance to the Calvinistic system. 
 He insists upon the figurative nature of the lan- 
 guage about Christ's having '^purchased the 
 Church with his own blood," and makes the 
 striking remark : " Christians themselves are 
 said to be bought, and not their salvation." He 
 pronounces Christ's Church to be " those who 
 truly imbibe his spirit^ no matter by what name 
 they are called." In one of his letters to his 
 Grandfather Ellery, with whom he kept up for 
 several years a close correspondence on theol- 
 ogy, he says : " You complain that our standard 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 09 
 
 is not particular enough. But this is the distin- 
 guishing feature of our system of HberaHty." In 
 this letter (1807) he contents himself with say- 
 ing : " I am by no means ready to say that no 
 man can be a Christian who does not believe in 
 the total depravity of human nature. A man 
 may doubt on that subject, yet hate sin." He 
 insists on the distinction between the saving 
 truth and men's ideas of that truth, — between 
 propositions (as we might say) and dispositions^ 
 as essential quahfications for heaven. But in 
 1812 he expresses his horror of Calvinism (that 
 "vulgaire et efifrayante" doctrine, as a French 
 biographer quotes him) in the strongest terms, 
 saying, if it is indeed true, '' then existence is 
 a curse and the Creator is — O my merciful 
 Father, I cannot speak of Thee in the language 
 which this system would suggest ! " 
 
 Dr. FurnesS, in his short but comprehensive 
 *' Life of Channing," published in William Ware's 
 collection, speaking of the early years of his 
 ministry, says : '* There is much that awakens 
 in the reader a melancholy that amounts to pain. 
 
no WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 His ill-health, his profound sensibility, the dim- 
 ness of his views, if we may so speak, in regard 
 to the Orthodox doctrines of the day, give us 
 the impression of a very sad and struggling 
 soul, a saint walking in darkness. Although 
 tender and gentle, yet Dr. Channing was then 
 far from being a cheerful man. He never seems 
 to have unbent. We have no record of seasons 
 of exhilaration and triumph. He was apparently 
 one of those on whom falls the second bene- 
 diction of Jesus. He was of those that mourn. 
 Under that beatitude is he to be ranked." 
 
 Both Mystic and Rationalist. — There is much 
 truth in this, though somewhat strongly put. 
 Undoubtedly Channing was at this time a good 
 deal of a Mystic, as well as Rationalist : we can- 
 not say, more of the former than of the latter; 
 though if a Mystic means one who recognizes 
 and reverences a background of mystery to 
 every truth, we may say that he grew more 
 rather than less a Mystic, as he emerged more 
 and more into the light of the glorious gospel. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. \\\ 
 
 At the same time the importance of the prac- 
 tical as well as rational elements of religion 
 never took a lower place, but rather a higher, in 
 his growing thought. He certainly would not 
 have scouted, as many too hastily have, the 
 dictum of James Foster, that " where the mys- 
 tery begins, religion ends," if religion means 
 there, not reverence, but service. For one great 
 idea with him at this time was, that men should 
 leave mysteries with God, and unite their strength 
 upon the plain ground of the pure and philan- 
 thropic precepts. Until the famous attack upon 
 the Liberal preachers in the " Panoplist " of 
 June, 1815, opened the Unitarian controversy, 
 Channing seems to have held the ground that 
 the articles in which Christians agree are more 
 important than those in which they differ, — a 
 position which perhaps it was safe enough to 
 assume so long as, by keeping unreasonable and 
 pernicious dogmas in the background, men 
 virtually confessed that the wholesome ones 
 were the essentials, and left it to be hoped that 
 the old errors would drop and die. And it is 
 
112 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 admirable to see, in the sermons of the ante- 
 controversial period, how in elaborating his 
 favorite thought that ** Christianity is a temper 
 and a spirit rather than a doctrine, it is the 
 life of God in the soul of man," he nevertheless 
 runs his plough under the very roots of the 
 doctrines which dishonor God. And in the 
 same direction his noble papers in the " Chris- 
 tian Disciple," beginning in 1813, also point, in 
 which he summons men to use reason as a 
 religious faculty, and to make religion a reason- 
 able service ; and exposes the sophistry of those 
 who would persuade men to take their faith 
 from either the lear7zed or \h.Q pious. 
 
 The "Christian Disciple." — The object of the 
 periodical just referred to, the *' Christian Disci- 
 ple," is happily described in the words of Chan- 
 ning's classmate, Sidney Willard : *' The object 
 of its projectors was to publish an Evangelical 
 work, in the true sense of the term, and not as 
 claimed by a sect, and no otherwise controver- 
 sial than it might be made so by the assaults of 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 13 
 
 those who claimed for themselves the possession 
 of the whole gospel truth '^ 
 
 Opening of the Unitarian Controversy. — Mean- 
 while the war had begun, as, indeed, we can 
 hardly see how it could longer have been staved 
 off, when there were men like Channing about, 
 uttering such insinuations of the immorality of 
 the Calvinistic dogmas of total depravity and 
 purchased pardon, and contending that " the 
 great controversies in the Church may be re- 
 solved into one question, — Is GOD, INDEED, 
 PERFECTLY GOOD ? To my mind, most of the 
 prevalent theories of religion rest on the suppo- 
 sition that he is not good, that his government 
 is dreadfully severe, and that it is the greatest 
 of evils to receive existence from his hand." 
 
 He places more Emphasis, as yet, on " Liberal " 
 than on "Unitarian." — And yet SO averse was 
 he to a breach in the Congregational body 
 that his defence of the Liberal party against the 
 charges of the " Panoplist " takes almost an 
 8 
 
114 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 apologetic tone. The dread of controversial 
 bidlyiiig (as he calls it) at first almost repels 
 him to the opposite extreme. In his several 
 letters to Dr. Worcester he labors to show that 
 " the differences between Trinitarians and Uni- 
 tarians are very often verbal," the former, for 
 instance, maintaining that Jesus was personally 
 united with God, and the latter that he was 
 intimately united ; though he also insists that, 
 "would Trinitarians tell us what they mean, 
 their system would generally be found little else 
 than a mystical form of the Unitarian doctrine." 
 But every effort which such a mind as Chan- 
 ning's made to dispel the storm only hastened 
 it ; and indeed it was needed to clear the misty 
 atmosphere. . 
 
 He still prefers the high and broad spiritual and 
 practical Ground. — Meanwhile, how little to his 
 taste theological controversy was, is shown by 
 the fact mentioned by his nephew, that among 
 all the sermons of this period not a single con- 
 troversial one is to be found. The chief effect 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. I15 
 
 on him of the intellectual stir of the times seems 
 to have been to give a fresh vivacity and vigor 
 to the tone and style in which he put forth his 
 great spiritual and practical ideas of God and 
 man and Christ ; whose " gospel " (as he ex- 
 presses it) *' may be said to be a revelation of 
 man to himself !' The only disputed doctrine 
 on which he dwells much is one which he re- 
 'garded as rich in spiritual and practical lessons, 
 the pre-existence of Jesus. Several eloquent 
 pages are devoted to showing how this would 
 account for the awe he inspired, and how it 
 exalts our sense of his disinterestedness and 
 self-sacrifice. 
 
 But it is when he contemplates the coming 
 of this holy Mediator in the spread of his pure 
 and peaceful principles through the hearts and 
 homes, the souls and societies of men, that he 
 breaks forth into the highest strains of his 
 eloquence, transporting our thoughts onward 
 to that last swan-song of his life. 
 
 "At the thought of this reign of benevo- 
 lence," he exclaims in 18 16, *' the whole earth 
 
Il6 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 seems to me to burst forth into rejoicing. I 
 see the arts and civilization spreading gladness 
 over deserted regions and clothing the wilder- 
 ness with beauty. Nations united in a league 
 of philanthropy advance with constantly accel- 
 erating steps in knowledge and power. I see 
 stupendous plans accomplished, oceans united, 
 distant regions connected, and every climate 
 contributing its productions and treasures to 
 the improvement and happiness of the race. 
 In private life I see every labor lightened by 
 mutual confidence and aid. Indigence is un- 
 known. Sickness and pain are mitigated, and 
 almost disarmed by the disinterestedness of 
 those who suffer and by the sympathy which 
 suffering awakens. Every blessing is heightened 
 and diffused by participation. Every family, 
 united, peaceful, and knowing no contention 
 but for pre-eminence in doing good, is a con- 
 secrated and happy retreat, the image of heaven. 
 The necessary ills of life shrink into nothing. 
 The human countenance puts on a new and 
 brighter expression. Human nature, with its 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C BANNING. 117 
 
 selfishness, loses its base deformity, and is 
 clothed with the glory of God, whose designs 
 it embraces, with whose spirit it is imbued." 
 
 Well does Dr. Furness say : " It was not by 
 doctrinal preaching, but by the precepts of the 
 New Testament, that a great change in opinion 
 was wrought in New England. It was practical 
 preaching that worked a doctrinal change." 
 
 Channing's Idea of God's TVord. — We find 
 Channing himself complaining, toward the close 
 of this second period of his ministry, that Uni- 
 tarianism " has suffered from a too exclusive 
 application of its advocates to Biblical criticism 
 and theological controversy; from a too partial 
 culture of the mind." From this one-sided- 
 ness, however, he himself, by his early educa- 
 tion, as well as natural openness of mind and 
 sensitiveness of spirit to the stir of that mem- 
 orable age of the world, was happily saved. 
 The progress of philosophy had not, indeed, as 
 yet widened the great issue in the religious con- 
 troversy, from the question what God's Word 
 
Il8 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 says, to the question of these latter days, 
 where that Word is to be sought. Practically, 
 however. Charming himself was already, for one, 
 answering, Not in Scripture alone, but in Rea- 
 son and Nature. It is remarkable, indeed, that 
 one who from his earliest years was so imbued 
 with the love of nature in his discourses has so 
 little to say, philosophically or practically, of 
 that expression of the mind of God. But the 
 truth is, he is so full of nature's influence that, 
 like Jesus himself, he speaks out of it rather 
 than about it, 
 
 Channing's Patriotic Efforts. — In 1 8 12, Chan- 
 ning, after some hesitation, decHned the Profes- 
 sorship of Sacred Literature at Cambridge, 
 afterward accepted by Mr. Norton ; his thoughts 
 were beginning to be turned into various direc- 
 tions of public activity by the critical condition 
 of the country. Already in iSiowe find him, 
 in a Fast Day sermon, straining every nerve to 
 awaken the people to the dangers to which they, 
 no less than Europe, are exposed by the am- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 119 
 
 bition of Bonaparte; in 18 12 he blushes ^ he 
 mourns, to see his '' country taking part with the 
 oppressor against that nation which has alone 
 arrested his proud career of victory, . . . hnking 
 itself with the acknowledged enemy of man- 
 kind; " in 1 8 14, on the expectation of a land- 
 ing of the British on our shores, he preaches, 
 in kindling tones, the duty of manly self-de- 
 fence; and the same year, a little later, at the 
 "solemn festival" of thanksgiving for the over- 
 throw of Bonaparte, he rises to such a pitch 
 of enthusiasm as he exclaims, '' The oppressor 
 is fallen and the world is free," that the audience 
 in the Stone Chapel break out into cheers. The 
 whole paragraph, which the reader, doubtless, will 
 be glad to see, is as follows : '' At the moment of 
 its greatest glory, when its foundations seemed 
 to the gloomy eye of fear firm as the hills, 
 and its proud towers had pierced the skies, 
 the lightnings of heaven smote it and it fell ! 
 Most holy, most merciful God ! thine was the 
 work, thine be the glory ! Who will not re- 
 joice? Who will not catch and repeat the 
 
120 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 acclamation which flies through so many re- 
 gions, — the oppressor is fallen, and the world 
 is free ! " 
 
 On the same occasion Dr. James Freeman of 
 King's Chapel '' read selections which he had 
 made from the Scriptures, so appropriate," says 
 Samuel J. May, " that it seemed as if he had 
 culled the history of the modern usurper from 
 the pages of the Bible. When he came to the 
 end, I well remember, he raised himself to his 
 utmost height, stretched out his arms, as if in 
 a majestic transport, his face perfectly radiant 
 with emotion, his eyes flashing unwonted fire, 
 and shouted at the top of his voice, — ' Babylon 
 the great has fallen ! Babylon the great has 
 fallen ! Hallelujah ! Praise ye the Lord ! ' and 
 then burst into tears. The whole audience was 
 carried away with the emotion. Many who 
 were sitting sprang to their feet, and the loudest 
 applause was hardly suppressed." 
 
 In 1816 Dr. Channing preached the great ser- 
 mon on War which led to the formation of the 
 Massachusetts Peace Society. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 12 1 
 
 More Bold in his Unitarian Affirmations. — Mean- 
 while, in 18 13, he had been chosen into the Corpo- 
 ration of Harvard College, and was also an active 
 member of the Bible Society; at the same time, 
 loyal to his Unitarian principles, he delivered, in 
 1 8 19, the mighty blows at Trinitarianism and 
 Calvinism in his Baltimore sermon at the ordi- 
 nation of Jared Sparks, — a sermon which set 
 many an Orthodox minister to thinking, and 
 turned, we are told, several Methodist preachers 
 to a Liberal faith ; and the next year he followed 
 up this onslaught with the famous paper on 
 the '' Moral Argument against Calvinism." 
 
 Philanthropic Labors. — All this time he had 
 been more and more assiduous in his pastoral 
 duties and private studies, opening his mind to 
 the new Hghts of philosophy and inspirations of 
 poetry that came from England and from Ger- 
 many, educating himself to be more and more 
 completely a teacher of his people and a spirit- 
 ual benefactor to his fellow-men. In the educa- 
 tion of the young and of poor children, in the 
 
122 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 training of the citizen, we find him foremost in 
 word and work. In an address of 1817, before a 
 society for educating indigent boys, are many 
 forcible and striking thoughts. He says : " The 
 higher classes of society have a tendency to intel- 
 lectual imbecility, and need to be replenished 
 from the lower." Again, ** that men will labor less 
 because improved in understanding" seems to 
 him " an erroneous notion. The great motives 
 to steady labor lie in a perception of the future 
 consequences of actions, and require a mind of 
 some comprehension, foresight, and calculation 
 to feel their force ; and hence we may expect 
 the steadiest labor from men whose faculties 
 have been enlarged by education. That this is 
 precisely the fact history and observation prove. 
 Slaves and savages, who receive no education, 
 are proverbially indolent. The hardest laborers 
 in this country are the husbandmen of New 
 England, — a class of men who have been formed 
 under institutions peculiarly fitted to expand 
 and invigorate the understanding." 
 
 In 1 8 18 the famous Berry Street Vestry was 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 23 
 
 built through his influence, for the Sunday 
 school and social meetings of the church ; and 
 there, in May, 1820, he opened the well-known 
 Berry Street Conference of Liberal Ministers. 
 He was all the while equally attentive to the in- 
 terests of the University, meditating and advis- 
 ing upon the best methods of study and of 
 discipline. In 182 1 he gave his great Dudleian 
 Lecture there on the *' Evidences of Revealed 
 Religion," — the one which contains that strik- 
 ing and significant thought, that " all minds are 
 of one family," — only another form of his great 
 central doctrine of the worth of human nature. 
 
 Events in his Domestic Life. — This variety of 
 occupation in secular and social (all of them to 
 him, indeed, religious) matters could not fail to 
 give to his pulpit utterances even an increasingly 
 vigorous and manly character, while there must 
 have been infused into them a new tenderness 
 and reach of sympathy by the profound do- 
 mestic experiences of joy and sorrow through 
 which, during these years, he had been called to 
 
124 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 pass. In 1 8 lO his beloved brother Francis had 
 died on a voyage undertaken for his health; 
 in 1 815 came the sad news of the death of his 
 sister Ann, the wife of Washington Allston. 
 Meanwhile, in 18 14, on the 21st of July, he had 
 been married, by Rev. Dr. Gardner, at the house 
 of his mother-in-law, to his cousin, Ruth Gibbs, 
 : — an event which brought him a threefold 
 blessing, pecuHarly and providentially seasona- 
 ble just then to his condition and calling: in the 
 first place, he had found a thoughtful, amiable, 
 placid helpmeet and companion; secondly, one 
 who brought with her a property which set his 
 mind free from anxiety about earthly prospects ; 
 and, lastly, this union led to his subsequent 
 enjoyment of that summer retreat on Rhode 
 Island which ministered so graciously to his 
 soul and body, and from which, in the last ten 
 or twelve years of his life, went forth a good 
 proportion of his finest utterances on the great 
 themes of the day. In 18 16 was born his first 
 child, a daughter, who lived but a day; in 1818 
 a second daughter came to take the place of the 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 125 
 
 lost one ; and a few years after, two sons were 
 born, one of whom died in infancy; the other, 
 born in 1820, still lives. Their mother, it may 
 as appropriately be mentioned here as elsewhere, 
 lived to a serene and hale old age, retaining to 
 the last a certain youthfulness in her venerable 
 beauty, and in her charming sympathy with the 
 growing life around her, and was spared to grace 
 the circle of her kindred to the age of ninety. 
 
 Devotion to his Mother. — And here, too, may 
 be said what remains to be told in this brief 
 story, of Dr. Channing's mother. Soon after 
 his settlement, he had, as has already been men- 
 tioned, coaxed her by an innocent half-guile, to 
 come and keep his house in Boston, and gradu- 
 ally gathered the whole family under his roof. 
 But after his marriage he procured for her a 
 separate house ; still, however, seeing her daily 
 and almost as much as if they had continued 
 within the same walls, and cherishing for her, 
 through the remaining years of her life, the love 
 and veneration of a dutiful and affectionate child. 
 
126 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 She was ever in his earhest morning and his 
 latest evening thoughts. What changes had 
 she Hved to see in the history of her house- 
 hold ! Truly her children had risen up to call 
 her blessed ! She lived into the culminating 
 years of her most distinguished son's fame as a 
 preacher and an author, and on the 25th of May, 
 1834, at the age of eighty- two, she passed on, 
 " full of years and honors, after a favored life, 
 a venerable age, and a larger experience of 
 happiness than falls to the lot of most human 
 beings." " A mother's love," Dr. Channing 
 had long before written, " is, in some views, 
 more touching than any other. It has more of 
 the immutableness of the Divine goodness." 
 
 His feelings and reflections amidst all these 
 domestic experiences colored all his sermons 
 and services, and gave them the quality of per- 
 sonal communications to his people. The 
 meaning of marriage, birth, death, was from 
 time to time recognized in the most tender 
 and home-coming manner in his pulpit utter- 
 ances. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 127 
 
 Journey for Health through New England. — But 
 the manifold intellectual efforts and emotional 
 excitements of this period had proved too great 
 a strain upon his frail frame. In the summer of 
 1 82 1, in hopes of recruiting his health, he made 
 a journey through the north of New England, 
 during which his love of nature found some of 
 its finest expressions. Looking at the moun- 
 tains, he says : ** My mind seems to enlarge, to 
 swell with these majestic forms, which claim 
 kindred with the skies." The " loveliness and 
 tenderness of beauty . . . exhausted us," he says, 
 but the '' grandeur " of nature " gave an exult- 
 ing, triumphant feeling." And at home in Oak- 
 land, reviewing the journey, he writes: "This 
 magnificent creation has been to me, even from 
 my boyhood, a principal source of happiness; 
 but I never entered into its spirit, felt its power 
 and glories, as on this journey." Thence he 
 turns to a description of his new home (''which 
 I am weak enough to think the best home on 
 earth"): '* I was powerfully reminded of the 
 early years of my life, when these shores were 
 
128 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 my favorite and almost constant haunts. Then, 
 before I knew you, I had not ' found rest to my 
 soul,' for I was very much a stranger to true 
 religion. My spirit, consumed with passionate 
 fires, thirsted for some unknown good, and my 
 body pined away to a shadow under the work- 
 ings of a troubled mind. [Then follows the 
 sentence already quoted on page 83, sub- 
 stantially anticipating that eloquent tribute to 
 the Newport Beach in his Dedication Ser- 
 mon.] . . . Thanks to God, those days of 
 tumult are past, and an existence, the begin- 
 ning of which is still a mystery to me, and 
 which was wrapt in many clouds, has opened 
 into blessings which I would not have dared to 
 anticipate." 
 
 Voyage to Europe. — But the spring of 1 822 
 found him so much exhausted that he was 
 persuaded to try a voyage to Europe, Orville 
 Dewey being engaged to supply his place. His 
 reflections at sea are beautifully expressive of 
 his spirit. The sea-bird cradled in the tempest 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 129 
 
 should be an enviable sight, he thinks, to souls 
 *'torn with passion or remorse." He sees no 
 ''rage" in the ocean, but only "spirit, eager- 
 ness." He cannot call it ''old ocean." *' Its crest 
 of foam is not hoariness, but the breaking forth 
 of life. Ocean is perpetual youth." The waves 
 "do not seem to rise by a foreign impulse, 
 but spontaneously, exultingly." Again, "they 
 seemed, as they rolled in regular intervals to- 
 wards us, like the gentle heaving of a sleeping in- 
 fant's breath. I did not feel as if the ocean was 
 exhausted by its late efforts, but as if, having 
 accomplished its manifestations of awe-inspiring 
 might, it was now executing a more benignant 
 ministry, speaking of the mercy and the blissful 
 rest of God " 
 
 Naturally one of his first visits in Europe 
 was to Windermere and to Wordsworth; with 
 both his spirit must have felt a rare harmony. 
 Both the philosophic poet and the poetic phi- 
 losopher, Wordsworth and Coleridge, he saw 
 and admired, and was admired by them in 
 turn. 
 
 9 
 
130 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Sad News received abroad. — But this absence 
 from home was, after all, an exile, and was made 
 emphatically such by two heavy afflictions, the 
 tidings of which reached him at Rome, — the 
 death of an infant son, and that of Barbara, 
 the wife of his brother Walter. In his outpour- 
 ings of sorrow for the loss of his child occurs 
 this beautiful passage : " When I think of my 
 child, of its beauty and sweetness, of the ten- 
 derness he awakened, of the spirit which God 
 had breathed into him, and which had begun 
 to develop itself, I cannot doubt that he was 
 the care of God in death as in life. He was 
 made for God; had he lived, my chief duty 
 would have been to direct him to that Infinite 
 good, — and has he not now gone to Him from 
 whom he came? " 
 
 Several of his letters from abroad constitute 
 a fine treatise on the early training of children. 
 He dwells particularly on his favorite tr^it of 
 truth. " It is better," he says (repeating the 
 very counsel he gives the preacher), ''that they 
 should seem cold than be insincere. . . . Children 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 131 
 
 must never be deceived. . . . The best way of 
 teaching children love is by example." 
 
 Return to his Pulpit. — Dr. Channing stood 
 again in his pulpit in August, 1823. His spirit 
 had been greatly refreshed by his tour, but so 
 little was he physically recruited that after once 
 pubHcly greeting his people, and giving an 
 account of himself, he retired to his island 
 home, and from there wrote to his society, ask- 
 ing an assistant in the place of Mr. Dewey, who 
 had been called to New Bedford. The society 
 immediately voted to give him a colleague, and 
 Ezra Stiles Gannett was ordained to that office 
 in the spring of 1824. 
 
 Fortunate in his Colleague. — Great was the 
 relief Dr. Channing gained from this arrange- 
 ment, by the help of which he was enabled, 
 notwithstanding his permanent infirmity, to pro- 
 duce sermons and essays which make the next 
 ten years the culminating period of his literary 
 life. 
 
132 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 A Sunday Morning in Federal Street. — Here is 
 a glimpse of the man on a Sunday, engaged in 
 what Dewey has called '* the greatest action of his 
 life." We borrow a passage or two from Wil- 
 liam Channing's glowing, but not in the least 
 exaggerated description : *' There is no excite- 
 ment in the audience, but deep, calm expecta- 
 tion. With a somewhat rapid and an elastic 
 step, a person small in stature, thin and pale, 
 and carefully enveloped, ascends the pulpit- 
 stair. It is he. For a moment he deliberately 
 and benignantly surveys the large congregation, 
 as if drinking in the influence of so many human 
 beings; and then, laying aside his outer gar- 
 ments and putting on the black silk gown, he 
 selects the hymn and passage from Scripture, 
 and, taking his seat, awaits in quiet contem- 
 plation the time for commencing the service. 
 What impresses us now in his appearance is its 
 exceeding delicacy, refinement, and spiritualized 
 beauty. In the hollow eye, the sunken cheeks, 
 and the deep lines around the mouth, the 
 chronic debility of many years has left an in- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 33 
 
 efifaceable impress. But on the polished brow, 
 with its rounded temples, shadowed by one fall- 
 ing lock, and on the beaming countenance, 
 there hovers a serenity which seems to brighten 
 the whole head with a halo." One more elo- 
 quent passage we quote upon the preacher's 
 manner : " There are no expletives, no fulmina- 
 tions, no fanatical outpourings. But the small 
 figure dilates, — the luminous gray eye now 
 flashes with indignation, now softens in pity, — 
 and the outstretched arm and clenched hand are 
 lifted in sign of protest and warning, as the 
 wrongs which man inflicts on man are presented 
 with brief, but glowing outlines. . . . Sin and 
 degradation are made to appear unspeakably 
 mournful when measured by the majestic in- 
 nate powers, the celestial destiny appointed to 
 the most debased; every spirit becomes ven- 
 erable to us, as heir of God and co-heir of 
 Christ, as the once lost but now found, the 
 prodigal yet dearly loved child of the Heavenly 
 Father." 
 
134 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Channing an Author. — It was now that Dr. 
 Channing established his Hterary fame, and be- 
 came, as he says, by accident an author. The 
 papers which first made him widely known to 
 the general public as a writer, independently of 
 his theological position, date from this period. 
 Not that he ever forgot or lost sight of his 
 Unitarian mission and allegiance in the most 
 secular of his works. Upon his Unitm'ian con- 
 victions (in the best and full sense of the 
 word) they were all grounded, out of it they 
 all grew. 
 
 The Liberal Preachers and Organs in Boston and 
 elsewhere. — Unitarianism had now gained a local 
 habitation and a name. Boston and Cambridge 
 were Unitarian. What had been whispered in the 
 ear was now proclaimed from the house-tops, — 
 from the bells in the steeples. The new doctrine 
 (new because a revival of the old) had its 
 organs, its mouthpieces, its living expounders 
 and examples. " The times," says Channing 
 himself in reverting to that period, " demanded 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 135 
 
 that a voice of strength and courage should be 
 Hfted up, and I rejoice that I was found among 
 those by whom it was uttered, and sent far and 
 wide." There were Ware and Norton at Cam- 
 bridge, Buckminster, Channing, and Thacher in 
 Boston, Dewey at New Bedford, Bancroft at 
 Worcester, Sparks in Baltimore, and Furness in 
 Philadelphia, — a noble company! 
 
 In the charge to his colleague in 1809, Dr. 
 Freeman said, in King's Chapel : ** The young 
 ministers with whom you will have the longest 
 intercourse are not only adorned with brilliant 
 talents, but blessed with candid hearts. I advise 
 you to cultivate their friendship. Conversation 
 with them will be the source of mutual improve- 
 ment. Their learning, taste, and eloquence will 
 excite your emulation ; and as I am persuaded 
 that both you and they have honorable minds, 
 you will never be jealous of each other's success. 
 From the combined efforts of you and them, I 
 expect to see the new era of preaching which 
 has already commenced become still more 
 splendid, — an era in which the ministers of this 
 
136 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 town will rival the solidity of the English and 
 the eloquence of the French divines." 
 
 The "Examiner" Articles. — Meanwhile the Uni- 
 tarian banner had been hung out: the "Chris- 
 tian Register" had been established in 1821; 
 the " Christian Disciple " was succeeded by the 
 "Christian Examiner" in 1825, and in the last- 
 named periodical appeared in quick succession 
 the celebrated articles (which it sounds strange 
 to hear William Channing call "h\sty effusions") 
 on Milton (1826); on Bonaparte (1827-28); 
 and on Fenelon (1829), — in all of which his 
 reverence for humanity, his conviction of the 
 sacredness of human hfe and the divinity of 
 the human soul, and of the rights and duties 
 of human reason, are affirmed and reaffirmed. 
 In the paper on Fenelon, in which, as his 
 nephew says, with " countless little strokes and 
 touches ... he sketched his own likeness with 
 a fidelity which no second hand will ever rival, 
 and the almost angelic idea of piety there given 
 was an unconscious portrait of the beauty of 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 137 
 
 his own holiness," at the same time, with faithful 
 discrimination, he exposes the saintly man's 
 error and delusion respecting the self-sacrifice 
 required of Christians, — eloquently maintaining 
 that so far from sacrificing reason to faith, we 
 are divinely required to reverence reason as an 
 inner revelation of God, as the image of God in 
 the soul. And in a note in his handwriting 
 found between the leaves of a volume of Fene- 
 lon. Dr. Channing, after quoting the words we 
 are to give tip all to God, says : '' But God is the 
 Ideal, the Perfect, and the spring of Perfection ; 
 his will is Himself, and this will is our Perfec- 
 tion ; " and further on, in rebuke of the narrow 
 notions respecting God's glory, he says : " His 
 will is entirely disinterested, without the least 
 self-reference. In sacrificing our wills to his, 
 we choose the perfection of all souls, as He 
 chooses it, for their own sakes." 
 
 Channing's Great Sermons. — The ten years 
 following and including the ordination of his 
 colleague were also the birthtime of those 
 
138 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 great occasional sermons in which Dr. Chan- 
 ning's master-ideas found their finest and most 
 forcible expression, — the idea of the modern 
 ministry, set forth at the ordination of Mr. Gan- 
 nett in 1824, as demanding an enlightened, ear- 
 nest, inquiring, and reforming spirit; the idea of 
 the peculiar and superior tendency of the Unita- 
 rian faith to produce piety in its true subjects, 
 preached at the New York dedication in 1826 
 (the occasion made so memorable, and to the 
 Orthodox so offensive by the startling and ter- 
 rific image of the *' Central Gallows."); the 
 idea of power in the preacher, discoursed upon 
 at the dedication of Divinity Hall the same 
 year; the idea of likeness to God, presented at 
 Mr. Farley's ordination, closing with the noble 
 paragraph : *' It may be said that I dream, that 
 I people the world with the creatures of my 
 lonely imagination ; " that of the purpose of 
 Christ's religion to produce a healthful and 
 manly virtue, urged at Mr. Motte's ordination, 
 — both in 1828; and the idea of human free- 
 dom, so eloquently expounded in the Election 
 Sermon of 1830. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 139 
 
 Journey for Health to the "West Indies, 1830. — 
 
 This was the year in which Garrison was pre- 
 paring to strike his first blow at American 
 slavery, and this was the year in which Chan- 
 ning started for the West Indies, to recruit the 
 strength which he was, on his return, to devote 
 so largely to the very cause of human rights 
 and human freedom which the " Liberator," in 
 a less quiet, but not more sincere and steadfast 
 way, was spending his marvellous energies, 
 and to see with his own eyes more fully what 
 he had early felt at Richmond, the magnitude of 
 the evil which was eating at the heart of the 
 republic. 
 
 Gradual Withdrawal from Parish to Public 
 Labors. — Channing had come to feel that he 
 could no longer fairly combine an honest and 
 hearty discharge of pulpit and parish duties 
 with the fulfilment of that larger mission of 
 humanity to which his observation and studies 
 and sympathies all plainly pointed out that 
 Divine Providence was urging him; and so, 
 
140 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 gradually, year by year, he sought to loosen, 
 by insisting on successive reductions of his 
 salary, the metallic bonds (so to speak) which 
 held him to his pulpit. But it was not till after 
 more than ten years of friendly strife between 
 pastor and people (not indeed till his earthly 
 service was wellnigh ended) that he could suc- 
 ceed in securing any thing like the release he 
 contemplated. For the last ten years of his life 
 he used to go down early in the summer to his 
 island retreat, returning late in autumn to give 
 his annual message from the Spirit to his Bos- 
 ton people, and occasionally a set sermon, but 
 for the most part saving his strength to devote 
 it to the great public causes of enlightenment 
 and emancipation which now claimed his best 
 powers. 
 
 Influence on the Philanthropic Specialists of the 
 Day. — Henceforth all the leaders in the various 
 departments of the service of humanity found 
 in him a wise and wary, but firm and fervent 
 friend and counsellor. Joseph Tuckerman, 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 41 
 
 Horace Mann, Charles Follen, Harriet Marti- 
 neau, Samuel J. May, Bronson Alcott, — all 
 looked to Channing as one of whose final and 
 full sympathy they were certain, because they 
 felt sure that he was governed by a spirit of 
 even-handed justice, and that that justice was 
 but another name for humanity. They felt that 
 the more slowly and carefully he might come to 
 the support of their objects, that support would 
 be all the more precious because all the more 
 profound. His was that " charity " which " re- 
 joiceth in the truth." 
 
 Mrs. Chapman's Calumny refuted. — It would be 
 hard to find, in the literature of misrepresen- 
 tation, a more glaring instance of what may 
 be called flouting facts in the face than that 
 exhibited by Mrs. Chapman, in her biography 
 of Harriet Martineau, when she comes to speak 
 of Dr. Channing's part in the antislavery con- 
 flict of New England. It was not strange that 
 during the heat of the contest men in the van- 
 guard and forlorn hope of the abolition party, 
 
142 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 almost compelled to see only one object, and to 
 feel that all who were not with them were against 
 them, should, in their impatience with the giant 
 iniquity of the land, fail to do justice to good 
 men who, feeling the evil as much as they did, 
 could not act with them in their precise way ; and 
 therefore we are not astonished that even Chan- 
 ning should, at that day, have been regarded 
 by many as a hindrance and a hurt to the cause 
 of emancipation : but that now, at a distance of 
 nearly half a century from the struggle, when 
 we can look back upon it with comparative 
 calmness, especially when we have Channing's 
 entire earthly record closed to contemplate, 
 any one should be able to sit down and coolly 
 pen such a tissue of falsifications as is con- 
 tained in the following paragraph would seem 
 almost inconceivable : — 
 
 " 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. With benevolent intentions, 
 he could not greatly help the nineteenth cen- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 43 
 
 tury, for he knew very little about it, or, indeed, 
 of any other. He had neither insight, courage, 
 nor firmness. In his own church had sprung 
 up a vigorous opposition to slavery, which he 
 innocently, in so far as ignorantly, used the 
 little strength 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, 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 
 associations; 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 gentleman and 
 scholar, Judge Story their representative gentle- 
 man, jurist, and companion in social life, and 
 Daniel Webster their representative statesman 
 and advocate, looking after their business inter- 
 
144 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ests in Congress." — Memorials of Harriet Mar- 
 tineaic, Vol. II. p. 272. 
 
 Could any thing well be further from the 
 truth than this picture of one whose whole life, 
 and pre-eminently his bearing through those 
 last ten years of his life which covered the 
 beginnings of the antislavery movement in New 
 England, shows him to have been so true a fol- 
 lower of that very Jesus, whom the Abolition- 
 ists themselves appealed to, who was at once the 
 Lion of the tribe of Judah, and the Lamb of 
 God, and who enjoined upon his disciples to be 
 wise as serpents and harmless as doves? What 
 a far-fetched idea to seek for the origin of Chan- 
 ning's determination to fight against slavery in 
 the example of Brougham and of England ! 
 What an inversion of the truth to represent him 
 as holding back his own parishioners from ex- 
 cessive zeal in the cause of the slave ! What a 
 gratuitous insinuation, of such a soul's having 
 been held back from the path of truth and duty 
 by the fear of man, the love of popularity, or 
 the overawing power of this world in any form ! 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 45 
 
 And what a dulness or wilfulness it implies, not 
 to recognize the rare greatness of the man, who, 
 with such a native craving for the calm atmos- 
 phere of meditation, deliberately at the com- 
 mand of conviction sacrificed his ease and 
 comfort to the turmoil of social and political 
 conflict, — the greatness of the man, who, with all 
 his deep and long and patient thought, suffered 
 himself to learn and to be led along, with the 
 meekness of a little child, by Divine Providence, 
 even though its instruments were men whose 
 ways and manners often shocked his taste and 
 his sense of Christian justice. 
 
 But the best comment on Mrs. Chapman's 
 aspersions will be a simple sketch of Dr. Chan- 
 ning's relation to the antislavery movement in 
 Boston. 
 
 Channing and Antislavery. — It was during 
 his sojourn in the West Indies that Dr. Chan- 
 ning drew up the first sketch of his book 
 on Slavery, which finally came out in 1835. 
 The interval was spent in watching the public 
 
146 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 mind, in testing his own qualifications and voca- 
 tion with regard to the subject, in writing and 
 in communicating his thoughts upon it, and, as 
 his biographer intimates, in waiting for the tem- 
 pest to subside, before he should call men to 
 listen to the " still, small voice." But when, 
 soon after his brother May's memorable reproof 
 of his silence, which he confessed had lasted too 
 long, Dr. Channing had pubHshed his book on 
 Slavery, and had gone so far as to invite Mr. 
 May to his pulpit, he became more and more, 
 in the eyes of his people, identified with the 
 Abolitionists ; though he still stood in a some- 
 what judicial attitude between them and their 
 persecutors, insomuch that even after his bold 
 stand at the indignation meeting upon the 
 Lovejoy murder, he wrote a long letter to the 
 ** Liberator, " cautioning the friends of the slave 
 against the war-spirit, while acknowledging the 
 justice of their cause. Still, in regard to the 
 right of petition, the right of free speech, 
 the wickedness of the mob-system, Channing 
 was firm and unflinching, and throughout the 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 147 
 
 remainder of his life to its very close, the wrong 
 done by slavery to humanity, and the faith that 
 it must sooner or later yield to the triumph of 
 the gospel, were the thoughts ever nearest to 
 his heart. 
 
 What a contrast and corrective to the tirade 
 we quoted from Mrs. Chapman is the generous 
 confession of Mrs. Child : " At first I thought 
 him timid and even slightly time-serving; but 
 I soon discovered that I formed this estimate 
 from ignorance of his character. 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." 
 
 And here again comes into view the parallel 
 in history and character already intimated be- 
 tween Channing and Bryant, who became slowly 
 and cautiously at last so stanch and strenuous 
 a champion of antislavery, and of whom Curtis 
 says : " Bryant seemed to the ardent leaders of 
 that ^reat agitation, as the multitude of editors 
 
148 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and politicians seemed to them, indifferent and 
 hesitating, too cold and reluctant for their own 
 generous warmth and zeal." 
 
 In 1837 came his letter to Henry Clay against 
 the annexation of Texas ; in 1839, " Remarks on 
 the Slavery Question," in answer to a speech of 
 Mr. Clay's ; in 1840, a pamphlet on " Emancipa- 
 tion in the West Indies;" in 1842, one on the 
 ** Duty of the Free States," suggested by the 
 case of the Creole ; and finally, in August of the 
 same year, his dying bequest (as we may call 
 it), in the address at Lenox, in which, one is 
 almost tempted to say, the style is even more 
 spirited and sententious, the eloquence more an 
 " action" (according to the demand of Demos- 
 thenes), than in any performance of his most 
 vigorous days. In calling it the Swan-song of 
 his earthly life, one must not forget that it shows 
 the eye and the wing of the eagle. 
 
 Read a few pages, beginning, *' Men of Berk- 
 shire, whose nerves and souls the mountain air 
 has braced, ... I feel as if this feeble voice 
 which now addresses you must find an echo 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 149 
 
 amidst these forest-crowned heights," — in which 
 he goes on to resent the idea of the danger 
 of emancipation, exclaiming: "Chains are not 
 the necessary bonds of society; oppression is 
 not the rock on which states rest. . . . Oh ! 
 do not imagine that God has laid on any one 
 the necessity of doing wrong. . . . Better that 
 the globe should be tenanted by brutes, than 
 by brutalized men," — read these passages, and 
 then the indignant rebuke of the crocodilian 
 tenderness which has no tears for any victims 
 but the imaginary ones of Emancipation, and 
 you will feel that the orator has regained all 
 the fire of his best youthful days. 
 
 Philanthropic Addresses continued. — Had these 
 labors in behalf of freedom and justice been his 
 only ones in this closing decade, it might well 
 have seemed to us that they would have been 
 more than his delicate frame could have borne 
 without being shattered ; all the while, however, 
 not from the author's desk only, but from the 
 lecture-desk and the sacred desk, he was, from 
 
150 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 time to time, pouring forth elaborate and elo- 
 quent arguments and appeals on peace, temper- 
 ance, self-culture, the elevation of the laboring 
 classes, the ministry to the poor, the claims of 
 the prisoner; and from this period, also, date 
 several of his most thrilling pulpit discourses, — 
 the Dedication Sermon at Newport in 1836; the 
 one on the Sunday school, first given there, 
 in 1837; the funeral discourses on Dr. Follen, in 
 1840, and on Dr. Tuckerman in 1841 ; and the 
 same year the great and catholic discourse at 
 Philadelphia on the Church. 
 
 But this general catalogue of Dr. Channing's 
 productions is given chiefly for the purpose 
 of reminding our readers what a marvellous 
 amount of mental work, for one in his state of 
 health, he accomplished. It shows the power 
 of a pure and lofty purpose to economize and 
 extend even one's physical abilities ; it illustrates 
 how a good man's strength may be " made per- 
 fect in weakness," — how, where ** the spirit is 
 willing " and wise, the very weakness of the flesh 
 may be made mighty. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 151 
 
 Letters of the Closing Decade. — And yet, after 
 all this, much of the best part of the work of 
 Channing's mind and heart and soul in these 
 years of his comparative release from profes- 
 sional service remains to be spoken of. The 
 amount of truth, wisdom, pure and ennobling 
 influence that went forth from his beautiful and 
 tranquil island home, who can estimate, who 
 can intimate in any worthy manner? In no 
 part of his life, one may venture to say, do we 
 catch more inspiring glimpses — breathings — 
 of his humane, heavenly catholicity than from 
 the letters, conversations, and memories of this 
 afternoon, this eventide of his days. 
 
 The beautiful sentiment he had uttered in 
 1830, "always young for Liberty," was the 
 virtual expression of all his following years. 
 In these last ten years of his life, and especially 
 in the last five, that spirit of liberty and hu- 
 manity which had in politics broken out in the 
 form of abolitionism, almost at the same time 
 in religion appeared even in the pulpit, where 
 it received the names, by turn, of Transcenden- 
 
152 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 talism, Rationalism, and Radicalism. Upon the 
 sharp struggle this caused in societies and souls 
 Dr. Channing looked forth from the '' loop- 
 holes of retreat " no uninterested spectator ; in 
 the spirit and in living words he leaped forth 
 into the battle; and in no part of his Hfe or 
 writings do we find more condensed expressions 
 of thought at once free and reverent, of a wis- 
 dom fitted at once "■ to quicken and restrain," 
 than in the easy and yet thoughtful letters of 
 this period. 
 
 Yearnings for higher, broader, and freer Concep- 
 tions of Christianity. — He had long felt a grow- 
 ing conviction of the need of new and nobler 
 conceptions and administrations of Christianity. 
 In 1827 we find him writing to his friend Tucker- 
 man from his island retreat: "The effect of the 
 quiet thought to which I give myself here is to 
 make me more sensible to the thick darkness 
 which overspreads the Christian world. . . . The 
 false theology which has prevailed for ages is 
 burying us still in night. But the corruptions 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 153 
 
 which we are trying to expose in the popular 
 system are perhaps but superficial compared 
 with those which remain unrecognized, and 
 which we all inherit. The true reformation, I 
 apprehend, is yet to come." And in the same 
 year, in one of his annual addresses to his peo- 
 ple, he had declared that his " love of freedom " 
 had " grown with the growth of his mind," and 
 that to stimulate free thinking, in the true sense 
 of the phrase, had been the highest aim of his 
 ministry. And in the same discourse he re- 
 iterates his sense of the value of what we may 
 call open-air Religiojt, his obligation to nature 
 as " a powerful teacher of liberal feeHngs " and 
 one that does much to counteract the illiberal 
 preaching which passes for Christianity. In 
 1828 he asks Mr. Dewey, '' Cannot this subject 
 [religion] be taken out of the hands of minis- 
 ters ? " In 183 1 he writes to Degerando : *' What 
 is here called Unitarianism, a very inadequate 
 name, is characterized by nothing more than by 
 the spirit of freedom and individuality." To 
 Joanna Baillie, the same year, he writes : " For 
 
154 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 years I have felt a decreased interest in settling 
 the precise rank of Jesus Christ. The power of 
 his character seems to me to lie in his spotless 
 purity, his moral perfectio7t, and not in the 
 time during which he has existed. I have 
 attached less importance to this point from 
 having learned that all minds are of one family^ 
 that the human and the angelic nature are 
 essentially one." The same year he tells Henry 
 Ware, Jr., that he differs from him in his *' de- 
 sire to imbue the theological students with 
 a professional spirit." In 1832, writing to Sis- 
 mondi, he doubts whether the " purified Chris- 
 tianity " he anticipates " is to rise in the form 
 of a sect or party," and thinks " the age of 
 symbols " is " passing away." The same year» 
 to Emily Taylor, he explains his calling '* the 
 soul divine," as meaning that the yearning 
 toward God is " the very essence of human na- 
 ture." In 1833 he writes to William Burns on 
 his favorite subject, and says, " I have seldom, 
 perhaps never, met a human being who seemed 
 to me conscious of what was in him." In 1835 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 155 
 
 he expresses to Sismondi his idea of '* a purer 
 church and a spiritual philosophy. ... By a 
 purer church I mean a community, no matter 
 how small, in which there would be a direct 
 manifestation of the peculiar power of Chris- 
 tianity to purify and ennoble human nature." 
 And now we come upon the series of letters 
 to Blanco White, in which the union of ten- 
 derness and truthfulness is very beautiful. In 
 1838 he writes to him that he feels as if his 
 whole life had been but a preparation for a work 
 he has yet to do, and which he may need 
 another life to accomplish. 
 
 Dr. Gannett's Criticisms. — It may be men- 
 tioned here in this chronological, if not logi- 
 cal connection, that, under date of Dec. 22, 
 1839, his more conservative colleague, referring 
 in his diary to Dr. Channing's morning ser- 
 mon says, " I did not like the sermon." One 
 is startled at first, for the critic's sake, to hear 
 of any one's dislikiftg a sermon of Channing's. 
 But presently he is for a moment startled even 
 
156 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 for the great preacher's sake, when he learns 
 what the doctrine was which created such 
 uneasiness, and which made Gannett fear Dr. 
 Channing's leaning toward the new Transcen- 
 dentalism, namely, that the law of rectitude is 
 an absolute one, to which God himself yields 
 obedience (*' voluntarily subjects himself"), and 
 not simply an expression of God's own will. 
 
 And again, Jan. 5, 1840, Dr. Gannett de- 
 murs at another of Dr. Channing's teachings, 
 that the best of Christianity is a republication of 
 the religion of reason and nature. " Even the 
 character of Christ and the character of God, 
 Dr. Channing thought, were excellent and glo- 
 rious rather for what they had in common with 
 other good beings, than for any attribute which 
 they alone possessed." 
 
 Letters to Blanco "White. — In 1 839 Channing 
 writes : " I would that I could look to Unita- 
 rianism with more hope. . . . You seem to me 
 to make religion too exclusively a product of 
 the reason. ... I consider religion as founded 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 57 
 
 in the joint operation of all our powers, as re- 
 vealed by the reason, the imagination, and the 
 moral sentiments." He also differs from him 
 in making a higher account of historical Chris- 
 tianity. He admits, " I need miracles less now 
 than formerly. But," he adds, '* could I have 
 got where I am, had not miracles entered into the 
 past history of the world? " He also says: " I 
 have no sympathy with those who disparage the 
 natural^ In a letter to Miss Peabody, of July 
 18, 1840, he is grieved to find her '' talking so 
 lightly of daring to be decidedly wrong ^' and 
 speaks of ^' that tmgiiardedness which, though 
 so beautiful to some, to me is a moral defect." 
 Under the same date he refers to a " touching 
 sermon " which he had heard the day before 
 from Frederick Eustis, in the Newport church, 
 on the loneliness of Jesus Christ, and adds : 
 " I claim little resemblance to my divine Friend 
 and Saviour, but I seem doomed to drink of 
 this cup with him to the last." Coming from 
 one so little given to morbid expressions, what 
 a significant glimpse this gives us of Dr. Chan- 
 
158 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ning's feeling of the peculiarity of his position 
 between the so-called Conservatives and the so- 
 called Radicals ! In 184 1 he writes to Professor 
 George Bush : "• I have little or no interest in 
 Unitarians as a sect. I have hardly any thing 
 to do with them. I can endure no sectarian 
 bonds." And to another correspondent: ** I 
 am little of a Unitarian, have little sympathy 
 with the system of Priestley and Belsham, 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." 
 
 Persistent Misrepresentations of Dr. Channing's 
 Relation to Unitarianism. — One would think this 
 was plain enough, and yet a recent lecturer 
 (Juhus Ward) has contrived so to misrepresent 
 the following letter to Mr. Martineau, dated 
 Sept. 10, 1 841, as to make it imply a confes- 
 sion on Dr. Channing's part that his system is 
 vitally defective ! Here is what he really says : 
 " Old Unitarianism must undergo important 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 59 
 
 modifications or developments. . . . It cannot 
 quicken and regenerate the world. ... It pledged 
 itself to progress, as its life and end; but it has 
 gradually grown stationary, and now we have 
 a Unitarian Orthodoxy!' Was this Channing's 
 system? Was this '* Channing Unitarianism " ? 
 A month or two after he writes : '* That any 
 existing sect should put down all others would 
 be but a secondary good." 
 
 Besides, a few years before he had written to 
 Sismondi, in the same strain about Protestant- 
 ism generally^ declaring his conviction that 
 " a purer, higher form of Christianity [than 
 that] is needed, such as will approve itself to 
 men of profound thinking and feeling, as the 
 real spring and most efficacious mstrument of 
 moral elevation, moral power, and disinterested 
 love." " No religion," he says in another let- 
 ter, *' can now prevail, which is not plainly seen 
 to minister to our noblest sentiments and pow- 
 ers ; and unless Christianity fulfils this condition, 
 I cannot wish it success." And again, several 
 years later : " One higher, clearer view of relig- 
 
l6o WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ion rising on a single mind encourages me more 
 than the organization of millions to repeat what 
 has been repeated for ages with little effect. 
 The individual here is mightier than the world, 
 and I have the satisfaction of seeing aspirations 
 after this purer truth." 
 
 Apropos of the once common insinuation that 
 Dr. Channing at some time renounced Unitari- 
 anism, admirably does Dr. Bellows say in his 
 recent commemorative sermon at the Church of 
 the Messiah, just before remarking that '' it was 
 Channing's piety that made him a Unitarian, 
 and his Unitarianism sustained and expressed 
 his piety," — '' No wonder that a saint so pure 
 and lofty should be coveted by the communions 
 that in his lifetime called him an infidel. Now 
 that his name and praise have been acknowl- 
 edged by the greatest and best Christians of all 
 modes of opinion, it is natural to desire to 
 prove, or at any rate to insinuate, that he derived 
 his piety from the opinions he spent his life in 
 refuting, and not from those he took up the 
 cross of public odium to maintain." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. l6l 
 
 Some time in the year 1841 Dr. Charming 
 heard of the death of his valued correspondent, 
 Blanco White, and after expressing his venera- 
 tio7tfor the rare heroism with which he sought 
 /r^////, he adds the following beautiful thought: 
 ■" I have sometimes observed on the beach 
 which I am in the habit of visiting, a solemn 
 unceasing undertone, quite distinct from the 
 dashings of the separate successive waves ; and 
 so, in certain minds, I observe a deep undertone 
 of truth, even when they express particular 
 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." 
 And so, too, he felt in regard to another great 
 soul, Theodore Parker, for whose spirit he ex- 
 pressed his admiration, while decidedly dissent- 
 ing from some of his doctrines, in a letter to 
 Miss Peabody, the same summer of 1841. He 
 writes from Lenox, July 13, 1842: "I hke 
 much the Transcendental tendencies of our 
 family." In a letter to Miss Aikin about this 
 II 
 
1 62 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 period he says : *' I can forgive your friend 
 every thing but the ascription of a priestly 
 spirit to me." 
 
 Thus did this open-minded and open-hearted 
 man maintain his position and posture of free- 
 dom, reverence, and charity, amidst the doubts 
 and discords that prevailed around him in his 
 last years. He feared not to " prove all things," 
 but he loved best to prove what was " good " and 
 to prove it by holding fast to ity remembering 
 that it is by being " not conformed to this 
 world, but transformed by the renewing of the 
 mind," a man should " prove what is that good 
 and acceptable and perfect will of God." 
 
 Influence of Nature on Channing's Religion and 
 Theology. — As has been already repeatedly said 
 in these pages, it was greatly owing to his com- 
 muning with God in nature — to his cultivation, 
 in other words, of natural religion — that Chan- 
 ning, as he himself has often said, was enabled 
 to keep fresh and strong and clear, and even 
 more and more so as he advanced in age, his 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 63 
 
 faith and hope and charity; and never were 
 his expressions of his indebtedness to nature 
 more ardent than in the very last summer he 
 spent on earth. July 14, 1842, he writes to 
 Miss Martineau, in language reminding one 
 both of Wordsworth and of Byron : " Nature 
 has been, and is, my true, dear friend. She is 
 more than a pleasure, even a deep, substantial, 
 elevating joy. . . . Nature does not alienate me 
 from society, but reconciles me to it. In her 
 order and beauty I see types and promises of 
 a higher social state." A month later he writes, 
 as he looks on the face of the country : '' Time 
 wears out the wrinkles on Mother Earth's brow. 
 The world grows younger with age'' Thus 
 does he fulfil in himself the words of a kindred 
 spirit, — 
 
 " And I could wish my days on earth to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety." 
 
 Charming and the Newport Church. — But we 
 have now reached a period of Dr. Channing's 
 life which, for the present narrator, has a pe- 
 culiar personal interest. Now the biographer 
 
1 64 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 has the privilege of the reminiscent. Would he 
 could have been such by an earlier and more 
 intimate companionship ! 
 
 The last seven years of the life of Channing 
 were the first seven of the Unitarian Church in 
 Newport, the first meeting for forming the so- 
 ciety having been held at the house of Dr. 
 Channing's uncle, William Ellery, son of the 
 Signer. And here we pause for a moment to 
 make two remarks. The first is this: if Dr. 
 Channing had been the denominational leader 
 he has often been vaguely represented to have 
 been, would this movement in his native town 
 have begun at so late a moment? He had, 
 indeed, some years before preached in the meet- 
 ing-house of his boyhood (on the reasonable- 
 ness of Christianity, from the text " I am not 
 ashamed of the Gospel of Christ"), but there is 
 no account of his ever having made any special 
 effort to start a Unitarian organization. Indeed, 
 so little was he of a sectarian, so far from it, 
 that when a church was gathered, and the sim- 
 ple and scriptural covenant was submitted for 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 65 
 
 his approval, the only thing he demurred at was 
 the expression "beheving in One God, the 
 . Father." He dreaded so to have any thing 
 that might suggest a sectarian animus or atti- 
 tude in close connection with a sacrament which 
 had been so beset and cursed with the hedge- 
 thorns of dogmatic and controversial intoler- 
 ance, that he shrank even from the putting 
 forward of monotheism in a way that might, by 
 any soul, be felt to carry with it a rigid and 
 frigid exclusiveness, and set orthodoxy of opin- 
 ion above the filial and fraternal spirit. 
 
 But, on the other hand (and this is our second 
 remark), if Dr. Channing had felt that waning of 
 faith which has sometimes, and even to this day, 
 been insinuated, in the distinguishing doctrines 
 of Unitarianism, could he have preached at the 
 dedication of the new society's house of worship 
 that noble sermon entitled " The Worship of the 
 Father a Service of Gratitude and Joy " ? Grati- 
 tude and joy, — the words characterize his own 
 service on that occasion. 
 
l66 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 His Dedication Sermon at Newport. — There had 
 been some fear that Dr. Channing's health might 
 not be equal to the task, and Dr. Hall had been 
 invited as his substitute. The event showed 
 that the absence of Dr. Channing would not 
 have been unmitigated disappointment. The 
 sermon of Dr. Hall was given in the evening of 
 the day of dedication, and (the text being 
 "Jesus Christ the chief corner-stone") was made 
 singularly appropriate and impressive by his 
 use of the old inscription which still remains 
 scratched on one of the foundation-stones of 
 the northwest corner of the building, — " For 
 Christ and Peace. 1729." 
 
 His Colleague in the old Hopkins Meeting-house. — 
 It may be of interest to mention here, in connec- 
 tion with this old meeting-house and the history 
 of the new society, that one of the first to fill 
 the old pulpit, after it became the property of 
 the new parish, was Dr. Channing's colleague. 
 The history of the Unitarian Church in Newport 
 says, on the 3d of December, 1835, " occurred 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 6/ 
 
 the best-remembered event of that period, the 
 preaching of that 'son of thunder* (and one 
 might add of lightning), Ezra Stiles Gannett, 
 in the old Hopkins meeting-house. ... In the 
 evening, when he put forth his astonishing ex- 
 temporaneous power, he moved back and forth 
 in that old pulpit, and ' lashed himself,' as one 
 expressed it, ' to the fury of a caged lion,' — 
 a singular image, one might deem it, to describe 
 a man .rejoicing in the liberty wherewith Christ 
 makes the believer free ; but here was one who, 
 like Paul, felt for those in bonds, as bound with 
 them," to say nothing of the local confinement 
 of the old-fashioned preaching-box. 
 
 Channing's Charge to the first Minister of the 
 Newport Church. — The next expression of Dr. 
 Channing's interest in the new church was his 
 giving the charge at the ordination of its first 
 minister, by whom his look and tone and 
 weighty words will not soon be forgotten, par- 
 ticularly one simple passage. It has often been 
 remarked, in commenting on sensational and 
 
1 68 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 violent preaching, that it is not the thimder that 
 strikes, but the lightning. The one may strike 
 the ear, but the other strikes the vital part. Dr. 
 Channing, however, reminded us that there was 
 a still more efficient agency than lightning, 
 namely, light, and when, after remarking that 
 it was light which wakes us in the morning, he 
 exclaimed, " My brother, help men to see ! " 
 although that brother has succeeded but feebly 
 in fulfilling the injunction, the impression then 
 communicated of its importance has never 
 faded from his memory. This same charge was 
 repeated at the ordination of John S. Dwight, a 
 classmate of the present writer, at Northampton, 
 and is so printed in Channing's works. 
 
 During the summers of these last years 
 Dr. Channing often appeared in the Unita- 
 rian Church as a worshipper, and several 
 times, perhaps once in each summer until 
 the last, as the preacher. It was here he first 
 preached his great sermon on the Sunday 
 school. Many there are who well remember 
 the slight, fragile form, almost buried under the 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 69 
 
 broad, flapping brim of the leghorn hat, that 
 stepped out of the commodious old country- 
 chaise at the church door, and still more vividly 
 do they remember how, as he rose in the pulpit, 
 that form dilated with the opening of those lumi- 
 nous eyes, and the sense of his slenderness of 
 frame was lost in that of the moral greatness 
 of the truth of which he became the organ. 
 
 And this calls to mind an expressive inci- 
 dent, not unlike that anecdote of the Ken- 
 tuckian mentioned by William Channing. Dr. 
 Channing was calling one day on a lady in 
 Newport, and as he entered the gate, the well- 
 remembered Italian exile and teacher, Signor 
 Foresti, a man of large stature and Italian impet- 
 uosity, was just leaving the steps. As he was 
 politely making way for the stranger to pass in, 
 he heard the hostess say, *' How do you do. 
 Dr. Channing?" Turning back suddenly, he 
 spread out his arms, as if half in amazement 
 and half for an embrace, exclaiming, '' What ! 
 the gr-r-eat Doctor-r Channing? " and the object 
 of his admiration barely escaped the threatened 
 hug. 
 
I/O WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 As a hearer, Dr. Channing was patient, atten- 
 tive, and encouraging. No doubt he remem- 
 bered often the words of holy Herbert: — 
 
 " If all want sense, 
 God takes a text, and preacheth Pa-ti-ence." 
 
 An instance comes to mind here, which happily 
 illustrates, by the way, his characteristic dread 
 of exerting an influence that might hamper the 
 freedom of a brother's thought. One Sunday 
 the young preacher had ventured some specula- 
 tions on the question whether and how far the 
 assurance Jesus had of the truth of his convic- 
 tions differed, whether in kind or only in de- 
 gree, from that of other men. After service, in 
 commenting privately on the sermon. Dr. Chan- 
 ning said very quietly, " I was much interested 
 in your train of thought; " then, after a pause, " I 
 have made up my own mind on that subject; " 
 then relapsed into silence. One would have 
 given more than a penny to have heard what it 
 was. Would it, perhaps, have been what he ex- 
 pressed to a friend in one of those last years:- 
 *' Of the formation of Christ's mind we know 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 171 
 
 nothing, and the secrecy in which his spiritual 
 history is veiled is no small presumption against 
 its applicableness to ourselves. Infinite wisdom 
 has infinite modes of disciplining and unfolding 
 the spirit. His great end of revealing to us the 
 Perfect is equally answered, be his spiritual his- 
 tory what it may. All spirits, however un- 
 folded, are essentially one." 
 
 Reminiscences of his Preaching at Newport. — 
 
 In the course of those last four or five summers 
 Dr. Channing preached in the Newport church, 
 on the same spot and within the same frame- 
 work of building where as a young man he had 
 once preached for Dr. Hopkins, several sermons 
 which in matter and manner were a considerable 
 contrast to the ones that in old times used to 
 be heard (or scarcely heard) within those walls. 
 And yet the old Calvinist would hardly have felt 
 them to be wanting in vital piety, as they 
 breathed, at one time, the prayer, " Deliver us 
 from evil ; " at another, urged the necessity of 
 living to the spirit, and not the flesh, supremely; 
 
1/2 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and at another, dwelt upon the worth of a hu- 
 man soul : though Hopkins's old audience would 
 have started from their slumber could they have 
 heard the thrilling tone in which, one Sunday 
 afternoon, when the impatient horses of the 
 fashionable hearers were pawing and stamping 
 in the street, Dr. Channing, insisting upon the 
 existence and nearness of evil from which we 
 too needed deliverance, and of people's insen- 
 sibility to it, exclaimed, " They are as indifferent 
 to it as the very animals that stand waiting for 
 them at the church door ! " 
 
 Channing's Pulpit Manner anticipated in a Biogra- 
 phy of Edwards. — But would not Hopkins, per- 
 haps, have recognized in Channing's usual man- 
 ner something that reminded him of his beloved 
 Edwards ? Of the latter his old biographer says : 
 *' His excellency as a preacher was very much 
 the effect of his great acquaintance with his own 
 heart, his inward sense and high relish of divine 
 truths, and experimental religion. . . . His ap- 
 pearance in the pulpit was graceful, and his de- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 173 
 
 livery easy, natural, and very solemn. He had 
 not a strong, loud voice; but appeared with 
 such gravity and solemnity, and spoke with such 
 distinctness, clearness, and precision, his words 
 were so full of ideas, set in such plain and strik- 
 ing light, that few speakers have been able so 
 to command the attention of an audience. His 
 words often discovered a great degree of in- 
 ward fervor, without much noise or gesture, 
 and fell with great weight on the minds of his 
 hearers." 
 
 Alleged Coldness of Channing and Bryant — 
 The same superficial criticism which has been 
 so often passed upon the poetry of Bryant is 
 also frequently made upon the preaching of 
 Channing, who as a preacher may be likened, 
 in many of his best characteristics, to Bryant as 
 a poet. The charge is that of being coldly cor- 
 rect, and wanting in fire and impulse. But 
 Dewey well says : " Such was his self-control 
 that I thought at first it was coldness ; the quiet 
 and subdued tones of his voice fell on my ear 
 
174 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 almost like tones of apathy. But I soon learned 
 to correct that error. I soon perceived that he 
 was accustomed to put a strong guard upon 
 his feelings precisely because they needed that 
 guard." Channing had, indeed, a holy horror of 
 exaggeration. " This is an age," he somewhere 
 says, *' of swelling words." His pulpit manner 
 was quiet, unadorned, and with little gesture, but 
 that the more effective, enforced chiefly by the 
 expression of the singularly luminous eye and 
 transparent face, and depending mainly for its 
 effect upon the intrinsic majesty of the spoken 
 truth. Never was there a more felicitous de- 
 scription of his power than in that stanza of 
 Albert G. Greene's hymn read at the Memorial 
 Service in Providence : — 
 
 " How calmly he uttered his beautiful thought ; 
 How meekly he bore all the honors it brought ; 
 How bravely he spoke to oppression and wrong ; 
 In that calmness, that meekness, that courage, how strong ! " 
 
 And equally happy, in the same direction, that 
 stanza in John Chadwick's poem at Dr. Fur- 
 ness's Semi-Centennial : — 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 75 
 
 " Tdl us, for thou didst know and love him well, 
 Of Channing's face, — of those dilating eyes, 
 That seemed to catch, while he was with us here, 
 
 Glimpses of things beyond the upper skies; 
 Tell us of that weak voice, which was so strong 
 To cleave asunder every form of wrong." 
 
 Channing's Traits as seen in the latest Bust of 
 him. — As the writer of these pages sat not long 
 since, in a meeting of ministers, fronting Sidney- 
 Morse's bust of Channing, the original seemed 
 to Hve again, and breathe, and speak; and it 
 seemed, too, as if one could read in the head 
 and face, thus glorified in the marble, the men- 
 tal, moral, and spiritual traits of the original. 
 There was the look of wonder, inquiry, and rev- 
 erence in the eyes ; the eagerness to know new 
 truth, the openness to receive it, and the firm 
 determination to do the right it dictated with 
 divine authority, while in the vertical lines which, 
 like reins, enclosed the mouth, were expressed 
 carefulness as to the tone and manner of utter- 
 ing the truth, a sense of responsibility for speech, 
 and a respect for the opinions and convictions of 
 others. 
 
176 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 The same reverence for truth and truthful- 
 ness which marked his manner of uttering his 
 thoughts, guarded and guided, restrained and 
 inspired Channing in the formation of his opin- 
 ions. When Robinson bade farewell to the 
 Pilgrims on the shore of Holland, he prophesied 
 that there was more light yet to break forth out 
 of the Word of God, and charged them to follow 
 him no farther than they felt that he followed 
 Christ. Channing pushed the principle farther 
 than Robinson 'himself, perhaps, would then 
 have been ready to follow it. Channing felt 
 that new light was yet to break forth not only 
 from the Word of God, as Robinson seems to 
 have meant it, namely, the written Word, but 
 new light from the inner heavens in regard to 
 the question where as well as what is God's 
 Word ; in other words, that on the great themes 
 of theology and humanity new light was to 
 come from the works of God. Far was it from 
 him to imagine that the " Word of God " was 
 " bound " even between the covers of the most 
 sacred volume. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 177 
 
 Growing more Catholic with Age. — Thus, as 
 he advanced in years, Channing grew in catho- 
 licity. And so, if he once said that he was less 
 and less of a Unitarian, he meant that he was 
 more and more a Christian, in fact, more and 
 more a man, which was earlier and greater than 
 either. An English Churchman once said: 
 " Christian is my name. Catholic my surname ; " 
 meaning that he was not a Roman, but a 
 Christian Catholic. Channing would have said 
 that he was a human Catholic. He would have 
 amended the Churchman's description, and 
 said: "Christian is my first name. Catholic is 
 my middle name, man is my surname," — lay- 
 ing the chief emphasis on the manhood and 
 the humanity. 
 
 Channing has somewhere said, and in various 
 forms has repeated the thought, that " the ulti- 
 mate reliance of every human being is and must 
 be on his own mind." He writes to Blanco 
 White that " the claim of infallibility in a 
 church must be sustained by infallible reason- 
 ing." Channing abhorred the self-sufficiency 
 12 
 
178 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 which says, virtually at least, " You think you 
 are right; we know that we are," and which puts 
 toleratio7t (that is, condescension) in the place 
 of charity. 
 
 Channing at Home in his last Tears. — In pass- 
 ing from the public to the more private life of 
 Dr. Channing, who could venture the attempt 
 even to supplement that closing and charming 
 chapter of the Memoir entitled '/ Home Life," 
 and particularly the pages headed " A Day at 
 Newport," '' A Sunday at Newport," and " Last 
 Days"? 
 
 A Glimpse of him at Oakland. — But even here 
 a few words of reminiscence may be pardoned 
 one who was not seldom a visitor there. 
 
 To those of us who shared the privilege of 
 seeing Dr. Channing in his last years at that 
 lovely island home (of which the kindness of 
 his daughter gives the reader a glimpse), it 
 seemed like conversing with a survivor of the 
 Apostles, — one, however, in whom a Paul and 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 79 
 
 a John were blended, but who had more of the 
 later than the earher Peter. 
 
 How perfectly in keeping was the whole air 
 of that tranquil retreat — "the soft and soul-like 
 sound " of the breeze among the branches, and 
 all the music, silent and audible, of animate and 
 inanimate nature — with the spirit of the man who 
 made the place an object of sacred pilgrimage 
 to visitors from the farthest corner of the land 
 and from across the sea ! It was with some 
 reluctance that we young men ventured to in- 
 trude upon his retirement, for we felt how he 
 must have to economize hfs time and strength 
 for the work which we knew he still had before 
 him ; and this feeling revived as a kind of com- 
 punction when, after his death, his papers re- 
 vealed what a vast work he had laid out for 
 himself. We were consoled, however, by re- 
 flecting that these interruptions of solitary study 
 were perhaps, after all, good for him, though 
 possibly they only continued his studies in 
 another form. For he would sit for the most 
 part in the seat of the inquirer and learner, — 
 
l80 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 a sore trial, at times, to our modesty, though 
 we remembered that a wise man knows how to 
 extract wisdom from folly itself. Sometimes, 
 though seldom, where he found an appreciative 
 audience, he would indulge in a monologue 
 which, but for its clearness and lucidity, we 
 might call Coleridgean ; and once, when he had 
 taken us up a sunny track, he suddenly left us 
 in mid-height, to go and rest for half an hour 
 (leaving us half-amused and half-awed, so that 
 we could scarcely speak to each other), and 
 then returned and resumed his quiet talk, and 
 kept his way upward till we reached the clouds, 
 and came back to earth. 
 
 Then he would do what he loved best, namely, 
 invite us out, and introduce us to his beloved and 
 revered mother. Nature. And as we walked or 
 sat on the circular seat round the great beech- 
 tree (" a mother surrounded by her children," 
 as he once said to us), there *' under the shade 
 of the broad-spreading beech-tree " the Muses 
 we meditated were more likely to be those of 
 theology and humanity. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. iSl 
 
 Sometimes at least, in his way of telling an 
 anecdote, he would show gleamings of a latent 
 humor, as when he described how, in the midst 
 of the appalling denunciations of a certain revi- 
 valist (perhaps Tennant) in the neighborhood, 
 the milder brother whose pulpit he was occupy- 
 ing, and who sat below facing the audience, 
 slowly rose and, looking up at the speaker, ex- 
 claimed, " Brother Tennant ! Brother Tennant ! 
 Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no physi- 
 cian there? " 
 
 And when this saintly man himself had occa- 
 sion to admonish a brother privately, it was 
 more like a benediction than an admonition, 
 more like a heahng than a wound. 
 
 His closing Days not a Decline, but an Ascen- 
 sion. — With such a man the decline of life is 
 not a going down into the dark valley, so much 
 as a climbing of the serene, sunny mountain. 
 Read his later and familiar letters (so much of. 
 them, at least, as his nephew has given us in his 
 third volume), and see how beautifully and cor- 
 
1 82 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 dially he expresses his growing love of nature, 
 his welcome of spring, his fine feeling of atmos- 
 pheric suggestions. This is to him *' a spiritual 
 pleasure, rather than a physical," and seems 
 to him ** not unworthy our future existence." 
 Twice he expresses and emphasizes with strong 
 sympathy the idea of Henry More, that the air 
 breathing upon him was the very influence of 
 the Holy Spirit. " How can I convey to you," 
 he writes to a friend, '* 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^ Again he says : " I certainly 
 do not love nature less, but more, as the time 
 approaches for leaving it. Is not this a sign 
 that I shall not leave it, that I am preparing 
 to enjoy it in higher forms?" And again: ** I 
 almost wonder at myself when I think of the 
 pleasure which the dawn gives me, after having 
 witnessed it so many years." 
 
 And so to the last. The new day, the new 
 year, the return of spring, the breaking forth of 
 new light in the world of thought, the laugh and 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 1 83 
 
 leap of childhood, — all are to him presenti- 
 ments of immortality. 
 
 His Sunday Talks to the Farmers. — For several 
 summers of the last years of his life, Dr. Chan- 
 ning often spoke, of a Sunday afternoon, at the 
 little Christian Church in Portsmouth, a few- 
 steps from his home. It was not so much a 
 preaching as a familiar talk, and in the very last 
 years he would speak sitting. On these occa- 
 sions he could hardly help being a Httle dis- 
 turbed by the numbers of summer visitors from 
 Newport ; many of whom, to be sure, had no 
 other opportunity of hearing the remarkable 
 man. Still this throng of curious people must 
 have seemed scarcely congenial to his purpose 
 and wishes, being, in a sense, spectators of a 
 process^ instead of humble auditors and seekers. 
 A lady of Newport, who was then a mere child, 
 remembers being taken by her parents in the 
 family chaise to one of those meetings, and her 
 most vivid recollection (as would naturally 
 be the case with a child) is his not having 
 
1 84 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 taken any text, but simply looking round upon 
 the farmer folk and beginning in his low, sweet 
 voice : " This is a beautiful world ! " It must 
 have reminded her of St. John coming in to 
 his " little children " at Ephesus. 
 
 His last Journeyings. — The last year or two of 
 his life, too feeble for concentrated mental ef- 
 fort, Dr. Channing would spend in journeying 
 to see his scattered friends in city and country 
 (with whom he had kept up a lively correspond- 
 ence), and to look largely upon the face of the 
 great mother, Nature, his nursing-mother and 
 life-long friend and intimate. It was only a lit- 
 tle more than a year before his death, in 1 841, 
 that he visited Philadelphia and gave his great 
 sermon on the Church. The next spring he 
 went up to Berkshire ; it seemed as if he were 
 called by the voice of the Spirit to " go up 
 higher;" having opened his eyes upon the 
 ocean, he was to close them upon the moun- 
 tains, those ** near neighbors " of the skies. 
 
 Those last excursions were full of serene hap- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 85 
 
 piness. *' Amidst such truly elysian beauty," 
 he writes, " the chains which the spirit wears 
 are broken, and it goes forth to blend with and 
 to enjoy the universe. ... Is there not a day 
 of release at hand? " Yes, there was. 
 
 Meanwhile he was fulfilling the beautiful pre- 
 diction of the Prophet: ''They that wait upon 
 the Lord shall renew their strength." Eight 
 years before, when his mother died, he had 
 written that *' the winter of her age [she was 
 eighty-two years old] seemed warmed and 
 brightened with the fervor of youthful feeling." 
 And now he too seemed to be growing younger 
 as he approached the eternal world. It was 
 as if the air of heaven, breathing through the 
 trees of life and from the river of life, wafted 
 an immortal freshness to his brow. More and 
 more he saw God and felt his presence in Na- 
 ture. Time wrote no wrinkles on her azure 
 brow. 
 
 The Last of Earth, the First of Heaven. — And so, 
 
 as his days wore on to their earthly close, Chan- 
 
1 86 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ning went onward from strength to strength, 
 from breadth to breadth, from height to height, 
 onward and upward, till the day when, with his 
 dying vision resting upon the hills, which were 
 to him the hills of God, — " up to the hills " to 
 which his eyes had ever been Hfted, " the eter- 
 nal hills beyond the skies," — with the words of 
 the mountain-sermon in his ear, and love to 
 God and man in his heart, — in the calm even- 
 ing of a peaceful Sunday, his spirit ascended 
 into heaven. 
 
 Among his last words, beside the touching 
 ones his nephew records, were these, on over- 
 hearing some talk about arrangements for the 
 night: "You need not be anxious concerning 
 to-night. It will be very peaceful and quiet with 
 me." And so it was. 
 
 Theodore Parker finely and truly said : " He 
 turned his face toward that sinking orb, and he 
 and the sun went away together. Each, as the 
 other, left the smile of his departure spread on 
 all around, — the sun on the clouds; he on the 
 heart." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 8/ 
 
 And still on those hills, and on the hearts 
 of all who in imagination go back and watch 
 through those farewell hours, the light of his 
 memory lingers with blessed and immortal radi- 
 ance. And ever since he went up, thoughtful 
 souls, of every name, have vied with each other 
 in a growing appreciation of the wondrously 
 balanced traits of his character. 
 
 Tributes to his Memory. — In his own denomi- 
 nation, it need not be said, the finest minds and 
 the noblest souls, not only when the tidings of 
 his death first reached them, but often ever 
 since, whenever some anniversary or " other 
 occasion called him vividly to remembrance, 
 have labored (if such a genial effort can be 
 called labor) to supplement each other's trib- 
 utes to the quality of his spirit and his work. 
 It would be a gratifying task to enumerate and 
 analyze the leading sermons which the death of 
 Channing called forth from such men as Mar- 
 tineau, and our own Gannett, Dewey, Hall, 
 Bellows, Clarke, Ellis, Parker, and others. They 
 
1 88 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 ought to be printed together ; they would form 
 one of the best exponents of what, for the want 
 of a better name, we call Liberal Christianity, 
 beside helping, each in its way, to the presenta- 
 tion of a complete estimate of the character 
 which has so impressed each one of them. 
 
 Parker's "Humble Tribute." — Perhaps the most 
 remarkable discourse which the occasion elic- 
 ited was that fervent, impromptu outpouring 
 (outburst, one might almost say) of reverent 
 and loving admiration, — Theodore Parker's 
 " Humble Tribute." Justly discriminative in its 
 philosophical estimate, it is at the same time an 
 overflowing attestation of personal gratitude to a 
 spiritual benefactor and father. He affirms that 
 '* Dr. Channing has done more than any other of 
 the Christian writers to make religion beautiful 
 and winning. . . . No one of our century, in Eng- 
 land or America, has done so much as he, to set 
 forth the greatness of man's nature, the love- 
 liness of Jesus, and the goodness of God. In 
 this respect he is the father of us all. ... It 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 189 
 
 is not easy to find a writer since the days 
 of Johrr the EvangeHst, on whom piety is so 
 universal, so lovely, and, above all, so attractive. 
 It has all the strength of St. Augustine without 
 his extravagant asceticism, all the sweetness of 
 Kempis or Hugh de St. Victor or Bohme or 
 Law without their dreamy mysticism and aque- 
 ous sentimentality." He was " a fountain of 
 healing water, fed by five perennial springs; 
 his moral fidelity, his pious heart, his love of 
 man, his forgetfulness of self, and the careful 
 cultivation of his gifts, — these were the secret 
 of his eloquence and power. . . . Each year 
 brought him new wisdom and new power of 
 speech. He was a rare example of a man, after 
 half a century of life, growing yearly more elo- 
 quent. The cause is plain. The eloquence 
 that comes of tropes and figures and brilliant 
 thought may fade with the fading sense; but 
 the eloquence that comes of a moral purpose, 
 of a religious trust, deepens with that zeal, and 
 grows brighter as that faith rises higher and 
 more high. . . . Each season the flowers and 
 
1 90 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 the stars had a new beauty in his eyes. Nature 
 and man grew yearly in his esteem." As to his 
 liberahsm, " this must be said of Dr. Channing, 
 that, if he was slow in coming to the principles 
 and method of a. liberal theology, he never for- 
 sook them, but went farther than his former 
 friends, to some conclusions logically unavoida- 
 ble, but now vehemently denied." 
 
 But beyond the bounds of his own and any 
 sect or land, the name and memory of Chan- 
 ning have found a cordial, Christian, and human 
 recognition. 
 
 Rare Episcopal Testimony. — An Episcopal 
 clergyman only recently, in acknowledging the 
 gift of a copy of Channing's works, wrote to 
 the Secretary of the Unitarian Association : " I 
 have the honor to belong to an association of 
 Episcopal clergymen of thoughtful ' and broad 
 sympathies. ... At the last meeting it was re- 
 solved to recognize the Centennial of Channing, 
 and pay honor to his memory, by having a pa- 
 per prepared by some member who would treat 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 191 
 
 the subject in a loving and reverent and sympa- 
 thetic spirit, to be read at a future meeting, 
 which should be devoted to the consideration of 
 his work in the world, especially of Christian 
 thought and activity. On me was put the honor 
 of appointment to this pleasant task. 
 
 " I have related this fact, since it cannot fail to 
 have a special interest for those who are in the 
 direct line of Apostolic succession from this 
 ApostoHc man." 
 
 A glo"wring Methodist Eulogium. — And, a few 
 years after Channing's death, a distinguished 
 Methodist brother, in one of the most magnan- 
 imous and intelligent tributes to his memory 
 (though finding Channing '' such an anomaly 
 among Unitarians as Fenelon was among Ro- 
 manists," too pious for a Unitarian and not 
 enough so for a Methodist), went even so far as 
 to say : " Such a man as Dr. Channing must have 
 stood majestically in advance of his age, when- 
 ever and wherever he had lived. He lived, ac- 
 cording to the sense of the present generation, at 
 
192 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 least, in the best age of the world, and yet was 
 far in front of it; if it reaches his radiant posi- 
 tion in two centuries, the signs of the times are 
 certainly quite illusive." So wrote Dr. Abel 
 Stevens in the " Methodist Quarterly " of Jan- 
 uary, 1849, and closes his paper with these still 
 stronger words : '' As the visitor wanders among 
 the shaded aisles of the western part of Mount 
 Auburn, he sees a massive monument of marble 
 designed by Allston, the poet-painter. Gener- 
 ous and brave men from whatever clime resort 
 to it, and go from it more generous and brave ; 
 for there reposes the great and good man whom 
 we have commemorated. The early beams, in- 
 tercepted by neighboring heights, fall not on the 
 spot; but the light of high noon, and the later 
 and benigner rays of the day, play through the 
 foliage in dazzling gleams on the marble, — a 
 fitting emblem of his fame ; for when the later 
 and better light which is yet to bless our deso- 
 late race shall come, it will fall with bright 
 illustration on the character of this rare man, 
 and on the great aims of his hfe." Is not 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 193 
 
 this a Liberal Christian indeed, who can write 
 thus? 
 
 Echoes from Europe. — But indeed, in all na- 
 tions as well as denominations of the civilized 
 world, the name of Channing is a household 
 word, a watchword of freedom, of justice, and of 
 humanity. On the other side of the ocean the 
 celebrated French Protestant, M. de Remusat, 
 wrote of him : — 
 
 " It was not the Federal Street Society alone, 
 that wept the loss of an eloquent and pious 
 pastor; it was not the city of Boston alone, 
 that regretted one of its noblest ornaments ; all 
 America deplored the death of a generous and 
 enlightened citizen; and when, on passing out 
 from the sacred enclosure, they heard, all at 
 once, the funeral bell of the Catholic cathedral 
 toll in honor of him who had so well understood 
 and loved their bishop, Cheverus, every one felt 
 that Channing was of no sect, of no one com- 
 munion, but that his most ardent wish was 
 realized, and that he belonged only to the uni- 
 versal Church of Christ." 
 13 
 
194 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 Frederick Robertson's enthusiastic expres- 
 sions may not be known to some of our readers. 
 *' I should be very glad," he says, *' if half of 
 those who recognize the hereditary claims of the 
 Son of God to worship, bowed down before his 
 moral dignity with an adoration half as pro- 
 found or a love half as enthusiastic as Dr. 
 Channing's. I wish I, a Trinitarian, loved and 
 adored him any thing near the way in which 
 that Unitarian felt. . . . Pray do not give up 
 * Channing's Life ' [by his nephew], nor read it 
 by starts, but consecutively, and, if possible, 
 regularly every day, at a fixed hour." 
 
 So it may be said of Channing, his words 
 have gone out through the world, and his 
 thought to the ends of the earth. In England, 
 in France, in Italy, in Germany, in Hungary, 
 he is domesticated ; in many a foreign tongue 
 his writings are translated, and thousands of dif- 
 fering creeds honor his rational religion, his 
 enlightened piety, and his wise philanthropy. 
 He is preached in pulpits where he could not 
 have preached in his lifetime. The incident is 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 95 
 
 familiar to all, of Sydney Smith's saying at the 
 close of a Sunday's sermon, *' Do not imagine 
 that this sermon is mine, — I cannot do such 
 things, — it is by an American, Dr. Channing." 
 The writer of this book, happening some 
 years ago to be in Calcutta and to attend ser- 
 vice at the English Church, which was glory- 
 ing in the ministrations of an eloquent young 
 preacher, was struck with the familiar sound of 
 certain portions of the sermon; and when the 
 preacher came to a climax with the words 
 almost literally repeated, " There are times 
 when to be still demands immeasurably higher 
 strength than to act," the mystery was cleared 
 up ; and upon a subsequent introduction to the 
 preacher, his American hearer having suggested 
 the striking coincidence with Channing, the 
 reply was, " No wonder my discourse should 
 smack of Channing; he is always lying by me 
 on my tabje ; in fact, he is my Vade Meciimr 
 
 French Admirers of Channing. — Some twenty- 
 five years ago that great friend of America, 
 
196 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 Laboulaye, passing along the Quai Voltaire, 
 picked up a volume of Channing, and presently 
 was running hither and thither to his friends, 
 crying, " I have discovered a great man ! " 
 And forthwith he began, and for several years 
 continued, translating and publishing, with bio- 
 graphic and analytical prefaces, several of Chan- 
 ning's leading lectures in the cause of human- 
 ity; and several years ago he collected these 
 into a volume, to which he prefixed a short 
 but exceedingly appreciative sketch of Chan- 
 ning's life, which ought to be translated into 
 English. He says : '* In the history of religion, 
 I believe Unitarianism destined to take a promi- 
 nent place, for it is the last term of free inquiry, 
 and (to speak my whole thought) to it belongs 
 the future of Protestantism." He speaks of Uni- 
 tarianism as a system which presents " Chris- 
 tianity as the perfection of philosophy, and 
 revelation the perfection of reason." And he 
 quotes a comparison of Channing's, that " both 
 are the same light, with the difference of dawn 
 and noonday." '' To found an immutable church 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 97 
 
 on the principle of free inquiry, of individual 
 sovereignty, is," he says, ** a problem as im- 
 possible as to establish an unchangeable gov- 
 ernment on universal suffrage. ... If Chan- 
 ning had been but one sectary more in the 
 religious Babel, one would not have called at- 
 tention to him." But he welcomes in him the 
 " Christian Rationalist," — one who rises above 
 mere philosophy in recognizing that immense 
 event, " the regeneration of the human race by 
 the word of a man," and who stands apart 
 from the mere Orthodox in recognizing that 
 " God has set the principle of union not in the 
 mind, but in the heart of man." And he con- 
 cludes with commending to his countrymen the 
 study of that " good man, who all his Hfe, con- 
 sumed by one sentiment and one idea, sought 
 truth and justice with all the forces of his in- 
 tellect, and loved God and man with all the 
 strength of his heart." 
 
 Thus far Mr. Laboulaye ; and now, within a 
 year or two, a French Catholic, M. Lavollee, 
 has written an enthusiastic book, " crowned by 
 
198 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences," 
 entitled '' Channing: His Life and his Doctrine," 
 in which occur these remarkable paragraphs: 
 " In whatever he says or writes he is always 
 the apostle of universal love and fraternity; 
 this is his first and most distinctive charac- 
 ter. He has another, and that is a youthful 
 confidence and daring {atidace) which age can 
 never chill. In every circumstance and on all 
 questions he pushes to the extreme his efforts 
 as well as his hopes. In the pursuit of this end 
 he shows himself animated by a faith equal to 
 that which fired the Apostles and the first 
 Christians. He never lets himself be stopped 
 by any obstacle ; he never doubts of success in 
 the most difficult enterprises. He applies to 
 Christian propagandism the truly American 
 maxim which his compatriots take for their 
 guide in their commercial enterprises as in 
 their political campaigns: ^ Go ahead, fear 
 nothing, help yourself (^En avant, ne crains 
 rien, aide-tot toi-meme)^ One would think he 
 might have given Channing the credit at least 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 1 99 
 
 of modifying the absoluteness of the motto with 
 that other very important clause : '' First, be 
 sure you 're right," though, to be sure, some one 
 has said there is this difference between English 
 and American railroad conductors, — the former 
 cry, '' All right, go ahead ! " and the latter, ** Go 
 ahead, all right ! " 
 
 But the writer, after a few paragraphs, pro- 
 ceeds : " How is it possible not to admire in 
 the works of Channing, by the side of his dog- 
 matic errors, the sublime moral portrait which 
 he draws of Jesus Christ, and the profound 
 sentiment of veneration, gratitude, and love 
 which animates, so to speak, every line of 
 these inspired pages? How can one help 
 loving, in Channing, the defender of all the 
 oppressed, the advocate of all the miserable, 
 the truly Christian apostle, consecrating his 
 energies and his life to the cause of the eman- 
 cipation of the negro, to the spread of popular 
 education, to the moral amelioration of working- 
 men? How can one help pardoning in him, 
 after so many noble efforts, an excess of opti- 
 
200 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 mism and of confidence, carried perhaps to the 
 very verge of illusion?" And then follows 
 this extraordinary parallel : '' It is in these no- 
 ble qualities, in his love of Christ, his human- 
 ity, his invincible hope, finally and especially 
 in his infinite faith in the Divine compassion, 
 that Channing resembles his constant model, 
 Fenelon; but, side by side with these points 
 of approximation in character and doctrine, 
 there exist numerous differences between the 
 Catholic Archbishop of Cambrai and the Uni- 
 tarian pastor of Boston, between the prelate 
 of the seventeenth century and the minister of 
 the nineteenth. If both equally reprove war 
 and slavery, they have neither the same way 
 of viewing nor of combating them. The one 
 invokes only the precepts of the divine law; 
 the other prefers to base himself on those in- 
 alienable rights which are essential to the very 
 nature of man. Both have vowed to Jesus 
 Christ a love equally lively and profound, but 
 while the one adores and prays, the other con- 
 templates and reveres. In their lives, in their 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 201 
 
 characters, the contrast still holds. F^nelon is 
 the more ardent, Channing the more practical ; 
 the one is a poet, the other a controversialist, 
 [singular perversion of the fact!] Fenelon is 
 a writer of the first order, Channing is rather a 
 thinker; Fenelon is a century at least in advance 
 of his contemporaries, Channing inherits and 
 profits by all the ideas put in circulation by 
 the eighteenth century and by the Revolution ; 
 Fenelon takes faith as the rule of his reason, 
 Channing attributes to reason an absolute and 
 unhmited supremacy; Fenelon is a theologian 
 and a Catholic, Channing is pre-eminently a 
 moralist and hardly Christian. 
 
 ** From this point of view," the writer goes 
 on, *' we may find some analogy between Chan- 
 ning and his illustrious compatriot, Benjamin 
 Franklin. With both, the same respect for the 
 moral laws, the same affectionate interest in the 
 laboring classes, the same desire to elevate them 
 in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world 
 by instruction and education, the same practical 
 counsels given in the same spirit of paternal 
 
202 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 solicitude. Franklin, however, resembles Chan- 
 ning still less than Fenelon does. He is utili- 
 tarian and cold, while Channing is ardent and 
 enthusiastic ; he deduces his moral precepts 
 from the lessons of experience, while Channing 
 represents them as flowing from the nature of 
 man and from the will of God ; he assigns as 
 the supreme object of our efforts happiness, 
 while Channing is constantly sounding in our 
 ears the great word Duty. Channing would be 
 a stoic if he were not a Christian [an apparent 
 contradiction, this last acknowledgment, to the 
 end of the previous paragraph] ; Franklin, if he 
 were not, above all, of his own time and country, 
 would follow Cicero and Plato in the gardens of 
 Academus. 
 
 " Neither Fenelon nor Franklin carries so far 
 as Channing his faith in the doctrines of hu- 
 manity." 
 
 A {^\N specimens may be given of this writer's 
 strictures on Channing's heresies: — 
 
 " A similar want of logic is seen in the idea he 
 forms of the nature of Jesus Christ. Who is this 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 203 
 
 incomprehensible Being, who is not God, but 
 who has the divine perfection, who is not man, 
 but who is clothed in a human body? Is not 
 here a mystery even more incomprehensible 
 than that of the Catholic Trinity? Arius made 
 the Word the creature of God th^ Father, but 
 he recognized its divinity ; the Free-thinkers will 
 not see in Jesus any thing but an inspired man ; 
 to the Jews he is an impostor; with the Catho- 
 lics he is God himself, descended to the earth 
 and invested with our humanity. These all 
 are logical; Channing alone is not, with that 
 strange conception of a Son of God who finds 
 himself, in some sort, placed between heaven 
 and earth, and whom one can liken to nothing 
 but the demigods of Paganism. . . . Another 
 example of Channing's contradictions : he 
 considers the passage of Jesus Christ over the 
 earth as the most admirable lesson ever given 
 to man ; he recognizes in all his words, in all 
 his works, the divine imprint, and yet he refuses 
 to see a God in the Crucified of Calvary. But 
 has he comprehended what becomes then of that 
 
204 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 scene of sorrows, of cruelties, of defeats, and of 
 treason, which begins at the Garden of Olives 
 and ends at Golgotha? If the Passion is not an 
 expiation, it is one of the most hideous, the 
 most revolting, the most criminal spectacles 
 that were ever offered to the eyes of men. If 
 Christ is not the divine ransom of humanity, 
 his cross is the most odious of gibbets, his 
 death is the most bloody outrage upon Divine 
 justice. How was it possible for a soul so pure, 
 so sweet, so full of love as that of Channing 
 to give birth to an idea so monstrous?" 
 
 The reference here is to the famous illustra- 
 tion of the '' Central Gallows " in the sermon at 
 Mr. Sparks's ordination, but it is curious to see 
 how the critic unconsciously, himself enforces 
 Dr. Channing's own argument. Well has it 
 been said by an English critic in a late Review : 
 " If they [the Liberals] regard the sufferer as a 
 God-like man rather than a man-like God, it is 
 not they who make the sacrifice less awful to 
 the human imagination, or the submission less 
 sublime." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING, 205 
 
 Here is another of the same writer's strictures : 
 " Logically applied, free inquiry issues in the 
 negation of the supernatural in the absolute 
 reign of reason. Thus we see many Protestants 
 arrive insensibly at rationalism, and Protestant- 
 ism, as a whole, degenerate, by little and little, 
 into philosophism. When it attempts to stop 
 on that fatal slope, to formulate a body of doc- 
 trines, to fix in some sort a minimum of beliefs, 
 it is unfaithful to its principle ; it deviates toward 
 the idea of collective revelation, of doctrinal 
 instruction and authority ; it is not slow in arriv- 
 ing at full Catholicism." 
 
 Renan says of Channing: " Those who appre- 
 ciate a religion according to its simplicity and 
 its degree of transparency ought to be charmed 
 with this one. Certain it is, that, if the modern 
 mind is right in craving a religion which, without 
 excluding the supernatural, diminishes the dose 
 as much as possible, the religion of Channing is 
 the purest and most perfect which has hitherto 
 appeared. . . . His theology is, at bottom, all 
 that theology can be in the nineteenth century 
 
206 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and in America, — plain, simple, honest, prac- 
 tical ; a theology a la Franklin, without great 
 metaphysical reach or transcendental scope. 
 . . . On this point Channing never arrived at 
 a perfectly clear formula of his own thought. 
 ... If not the founder, Channing is certainly 
 the saint of the Unitarians. . . . The true mis- 
 sion of Channing was clearly all moral. He 
 was a Vincent de Paul minus the devotion, a 
 Cheverus minus the sacerdotal unction. He 
 was not a genuine rationalist, for what sort 
 of a rationalist is he who admits miracles, 
 prophecies, a revelation? But then he was not 
 a man of faith, for faith demands the impos- 
 sible ; it is not satisfied except at that price. . . . 
 If the problem of the world could have been 
 resolved by rectitude of heart, simplicity and 
 moderation of spirit, Channing would have 
 resolved it. . . . The least inconvenience of 
 Channing's world would be that it would die 
 of ennui. Genius would be useless ; grand art 
 impossible." 
 
 It is evident that a Renan could not under- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 20/ 
 
 stand a Channing. Perhaps it would be too 
 much to say that a French nature could not. 
 What can be more superficial than the idea that 
 Channing rejects or slights the mysterious ele- 
 ment because he discards contradictions and 
 mathematical impossibilities as fatal alike to 
 reason and to faith? 
 
 I have translated this remarkable mdange of 
 half-truth and untruth from a writer who, on 
 the whole, is enthusiastically eulogistic of Chan- 
 ning, because it answers well enough, making 
 allowance for French idiosyncrasies, to certain 
 superficial and perverse misrepresentations of 
 Channing's position and principles even in his 
 own country. 
 
 For example, when Channing's rationalism is 
 reprobated, as if it were something opposite to 
 reverence and religiousness, how strangely and 
 superficially do his critics ignore the patent fact 
 that he religiously reveres human reason as the 
 very image of God in man, the inspiration of 
 the Almighty, who giveth man understanding; 
 and that his grand aim is to persuade or pro- 
 
208 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 voke his fellow-men to feel that reason in- 
 volves a religious responsibility, and that even 
 an Apostle exhorts men to be ready to give a 
 reason for the hope that is in them. 
 
 But to say that, in thus honoring reason, 
 Channing sets it above faith or in the place 
 of faith, the wondering and adoring sentiment 
 of the soul, is grossly to misread his pages. 
 He rejoices in extending the bounds of light, 
 feeling that God is Light, but beyond and be- 
 hind all he recognizes that mystery, infinite 
 to created beings, before which faith waits in 
 reverent trust. 
 
 Channing Unitarianism. — It has been the fash- 
 ion in some quarters to affix to the name of 
 Channing a variety of disparaging epithets, — 
 the very variety of which, when they are rightly 
 considered, would seem to redound to the 
 credit of his breadth of nature. He has been 
 called a mystic and a rationaHst, a radical, an 
 individualist, an egotist, an optimist, a Chan- 
 ning Unitarian. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 209 
 
 If to be a Unitarian means to believe in the 
 one, sole, supreme, self-existent God the Father; 
 if it means, in the words of the Elder Coquerel, 
 to believe that " Christ is above all, and God 
 above Christ; " if it means to acknowledge the 
 same kind of unity between the Son and the 
 Father as between the Father and the whole 
 family of his true children in heaven and earth ; 
 if it means to hold to the oneness of true re- 
 ligion and true morality; if it means to have 
 faith in the Father as one and unchangeable in 
 his fatherly disposition and designs through 
 all eternity, — then was Channing a stanch, 
 decided, pronounced Unitarian to the last. 
 " Christ," says a critic already quoted. Pro- 
 fessor Fisher of New Haven, '* was really, if not 
 theoretically, more to him than a teacher and 
 an example." Of course he was, as he is to 
 every true Christian ; not, however, in his na- 
 ture more than a human being, but simply 
 an immortal, ever-present friend and inspiring 
 companion, elder brother of the race, and cap- 
 tain of our salvation, captain of the great army 
 14 
 
2IO WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 of martyrs. But if they who have departed 
 from certain of Channing's opinions, who have 
 become more humanitarian, more of restora- 
 tionists, more of naturaHsts than he, as regards 
 speculative doctrine, are set down as recreant 
 to Channing Unitarianism, the reproach shows 
 a grievous failure to perceive what were the 
 Unitarian principles dearest to Channing's 
 heart. 
 
 Channing's Independence needed To-day. — In 
 writing the life of a man like Channing, such as 
 these pages have presented him, it is impossi- 
 ble, consistently with the spirit and scope of this 
 biography, to avoid asking now, Would this 
 man, were he living among us to-day, be any less 
 independent, any less free, or any less fervent 
 than he was in the last years of his life on 
 earth? Would he not have had to bear, and 
 would he not have borne with growing patience 
 and cheerfulness, his share of the opprobrium 
 which, in an age fond of nicknames as an easy 
 way of characterizing and classifying men, has 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 211 
 
 to be borne by every man who follows the 
 religion of reason, and accepts whatever seems 
 to him good in all sects and systems? Would 
 he not be reproached to-day at once as a time- 
 server and as a free-thinker, as a conservative 
 and as a radical? Channing, rightly under- 
 stood, is, indeed, a name for both the rationalist 
 and the religionist to conjure by. Indeed, when 
 we consider how Jesus and John have been in all 
 these centuries claimed as authority, with equal 
 confidence, by Trinitarians and Unitarians, by 
 Naturalists and SupernaturaHsts, by Arians and 
 Humanitarians, the fact that Channing is ap- 
 pealed to by such opposite schools of opinion 
 as each one's peculiar patron saint, should be 
 set down as a strong indication that his is the 
 way of truth. 
 
 Channing and Creed-making. — When, a few 
 years ago, that memorable crisis came in the 
 history of our Unitarian fellowship, at which it 
 was thought by some to be high time that we 
 should take a new departure, — that we should 
 
212 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 give up the good old plan of le7igthenmg the 
 cords of fellowship, and so sU'engtheniitg the 
 stakes of faith, — that we should put ourselves 
 into tmiform, so as to know ourselves and 
 make ourselves known, — in other words, and 
 without a figure, that we should, at our Na- 
 tional Conference, adopt a creed and make our- 
 selves more distinctively and decidedly a sect, 
 — who can doubt, if Channing had been still 
 amongst us, what would have been his mind and 
 word in the matter, — what he would have 
 thought and said, who so often and so earnestly, 
 in his last years and in the growing light of the 
 eternal life, emphasized the superiority of the in- 
 ward and spiritual drawing to any outward and 
 formal bindings as means and motive of Chris- 
 tian union ; arguing that though in this way the 
 benefit of authority might be lost, and the unity 
 of the sect threatened, still no unity was '' of any 
 worth, except the attraction subsisting among 
 those who hold, not nominally but really, not 
 in words but with profound conviction and love, 
 the same great truths." 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 213 
 
 "William Ware's Estimate. — In the November 
 number of the ** Christian Examiner" for 1842, 
 the month after his death, appeared a glowing 
 eulogy on Dr. Channing, undoubtedly from the 
 pen of the editor, William Ware, a man utterly 
 free from extravagance, who, after dwelling at 
 some length on the peculiar value of Channing's 
 work and life as an exposition of the heart and 
 soul of the Unitarian gospel, goes on to say, **He 
 was most wanted after the controversy had sub- 
 sided," and adds : '* It was like the Israelites going 
 out of the bondage of Egypt ; they were going to 
 a fairer, freer land, flowing with milk and honey, 
 — but what a waste wilderness between ! . . . He 
 took up the Liberal creed, if creed it can be 
 called, which has no more the form and syste- 
 matic method of a creed than the Gospel of John 
 has, or the teachings of Christ, — but such as it 
 was he took it into the embrace of his clear, ca- 
 pacious intellect, his elevated, ardent soul ; he 
 fixed upon it the heaven-beaming glance of his 
 spirit's eye, and with his vigorous pen and his 
 simple but glowing eloquence he made it a 
 
214 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 creed indeed — no, not a creed, but a religion, 
 all one with the very Gospel of Christ." He 
 " did more ... to reproduce the original, un- 
 mixed Christianity on the earth, the knowledge 
 and conception of what it really is, than any 
 other man since the Apostles' days. Those 
 simple doctrines of Christ, hard to be recog- 
 nized as doctrines, they were so simple, he made 
 them doctrines, as Christ did, the doctrines, the 
 essential ones, the gospel." 
 
 Is not this a just estimate of Channing's work 
 and spirit, and, thus described, is there any less 
 use for ''Channing Unitarianism " (not to say 
 less need of it) than there ever was? 
 
 Channing's Literary Merits and Style. — It has 
 been already said that Channing became an 
 author by accident; he himself said so. He 
 never cared to think of himself as a litterateur; 
 and yet it is noteworthy that his sermons had 
 a leading part with those of his great contem- 
 poraries, Buckminster and the rest, in giving 
 the sermon a place here in literature, as literary 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 21$ 
 
 production, and not mere sectarian, theologi- 
 cal, political, or historical matter, — a place, in 
 short, m polite literature, and among the /minan- 
 ities. Channing himself, indeed, repeatedly dis- 
 claims paying any special attention to mere 
 style. In his letters to Miss Aikin he expresses 
 his admiration for that of Goldsmith, and his 
 own inability to approach him. Even the ** rare 
 grace" of Addison he pronounces "beyond his 
 reach ; " but he seems almost to envy Gold- 
 smith, who, he says, "■ unites with Addison's 
 wonderful ease and nature a sweetness all his 
 
 own. Such writers as Addison and Goldsmith," 
 
 » 
 
 he adds, " make me feel my own great defects. 
 The eloquent style, as it is called, I might make 
 some approach to. But the spontaneous grace 
 of these writers is beyond mc." May we not 
 add, that it was aside from his sphere? 
 
 The style of Channing is plain, pure, and 
 perspicuous. It has the transparency of a clear, 
 calm autumn afternoon, when no haze dims the 
 serenity of the atmosphere. Sometimes, though 
 more rarely, it has the sober splendor of those 
 
2l6 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 after-summer hours, when a mingled mellow- 
 ness and brilliancy charm the beholder. But, 
 withal, it is marked by a self-contained quiet- 
 ness and even flow. It has an ease which never 
 degenerates into that inflated and turgid manner 
 which sometimes impairs the style of his class- 
 mate, Judge Story. It has a certain chaste ele- 
 gance, but is remarkably free from ornament; 
 deals very sparingly in figures, and scarcely uses 
 one, excepting where the figure is not mere or- 
 nament but argument ; resembling, so far, more 
 the style of Webster than that of Everett. 
 
 In his remarks on Milton's prose, Channing 
 says : " The best style is not that which puts 
 the reader the most easily and in the shortest 
 time in possession of a writer's naked thoughts, 
 but that which is the truest image of a great 
 intellect, which conveys fully and carries far- 
 thest into other souls the conceptions and 
 feelings of a profound and lofty spirit. . . . 
 A full mind will naturally overflow in long sen- 
 tences. . . . We delight in long sentences in 
 which a great truth, instead of being broken up 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 21/ 
 
 into numerous periods, is spread out in its full 
 proportions, is irradiated with a variety of illus- 
 tration and imagery, is set forth in a splen- 
 did affluence of language, and flows, like a full 
 stream, with a majestic harmony which fills at 
 once the ear and soul." 
 
 It is remarkable that while thus eulogizing Mil- 
 ton's grand, swelling, sonorous periods, he him- 
 self is fond, in his own case, of short sentences ; 
 and yet it is not that he loves to condense his 
 thought into pithy, epigrammatic, sparkling 
 utterances. Very few such, comparatively, oc- 
 cur in his pages. But he is fond of turning 
 a thought round and round, that, like a precious 
 stone, it may send forth a new light from every 
 side ; changing the figure suddenly, one might 
 say that he is not long-breathed. But be the 
 explanation what it may, we find it to be a 
 characteristic of Channing's writing, that it is 
 broken up into short sentences, and that we 
 are constantly stopped by a period where we 
 should expect only a semicolon. This reitera- 
 tion is remarkable. 
 
2l8 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 The comparison of Channing's clearness of 
 style to that of a cloudless atmosphere suggests 
 the remark that, like the air, it is colorless until 
 you look through a long field of it. Channing 
 himself somewhere lays down the rule that the 
 preacher's style should be free from that poetic 
 coloring which would distract the hearer from 
 the moral and practical point and purpose. 
 Perhaps the severity of his requirements in this 
 direction is somewhat too narrow. It would 
 have been hard to apply his rule to such men 
 as Father Taylor or Jeremy Taylor. ** The 
 style is the man!' Channing's was true to his 
 own thought and temperament. 
 
 It has been often remarked how very rarely 
 Channing quotes from others, and, on the other 
 hand, how few single sentences there are in his 
 works that are quotable, and have become ** fa- 
 miliar quotations." A few such there are, — 
 such as, "All minds are of one family;" 
 " There are times when to be still demands 
 immeasurably hjghe r strength than to act;" 
 "The ultimate rehance of every human being 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 219 
 
 is and must be on his own mind;" " Honor^ 
 >,(^ all men, fear no m an;J* " All glory is of the 
 soul;" "To be universally intelligible is not 
 the highest merit, " — but, generally, Channing 
 is better remembered by whole paragraphs than 
 by separate sentences. 
 
 The poetic, the imaginative element was, in 
 Channing's style, as has been said already, kept 
 under severe subjection and subordination to 
 the practical purposes of his writing. Still, at 
 times his thought would rise into a strain of 
 richly colored and euphonious diction, of which 
 here are two examples. In the article on Fene- 
 lon, speaking of the peace of God, the peace of 
 reHgion, he says : '' It is more than silence after 
 storms. It is as the concord of all melodious 
 sounds. Has the reader never known a season 
 when, in the fullest flow of thought and feeling, 
 in the universal action of the soul, an inward 
 calm, profound as midnight silence, yet bright 
 as the still summer noon, full of joy, but un- 
 broken by one throb of tumultuous passion, has 
 been breathed through his spirit, and given him 
 
220 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 a glimpse and presage of the serenity of a hap- 
 pier world? Of this character is the peace of 
 religion." 
 
 Again, toward the close of his letter to 
 Mr. Clay on the annexation of Texas, he has 
 this beautiful thought: ''I have prepared this 
 letter, not amidst the goadings, irritations, and 
 feverish tumults of a crowded city, but in the 
 stillness of retirement, amid scenes of peace and 
 beauty. Hardly an hour has passed, in which 
 I have not sought rehef from the exhaustion of 
 writing, by walking abroad amidst God's works, 
 which seldom fail to breathe tranquillity, and 
 which, by their harmony and beneficence, con- 
 tinually cheer me, as emblems and prophecies 
 of a more harmonious and blessed state of hu- 
 man affairs than has yet been known." 
 
 If there is little of epistolary and conversa- 
 tional freedom and familiarity in Channing's 
 pulpit style, in his letters he certainly escapes 
 the stately manner. After all, we must own that 
 his style was best suited to his theme and treat- 
 ment. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 221 
 
 Under the title " Channing " In Charles 
 Knight's Encyclopaedia, some writer ventures 
 a judgment and a prediction which, it is safe 
 to say, unless the concurrent voice of cultured 
 and Christian people strangely misleads us, are 
 destined not to be sustained by the voice, or 
 rather the silence, of time. He says : " Chan- 
 ning is one of the most striking writers America 
 has produced; and his works, beside their at- 
 tractions of style, are all animated by a pure 
 and lofty moral spirit. His eloquence, however, 
 though often imposing, has not much nature 
 or real fire ; its splendor is mostly verbal ; the 
 thoughts are true and just, rather than new or 
 profound ; it is exciting on a first perusal, but 
 will hardly bear a second. Nothing that he has 
 written, therefore, has much chance of long re- 
 taining its reputation ; there is too little in it of 
 the spirit of life; too little of any thing that 
 can be called its own, and that is not to be 
 found elsewhere. Both in its rhetorical char- 
 acter, however, and in its strain of sentiment 
 it was well calculated to produce an immediate 
 
222 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 effect." This we may venture to call a literary 
 curiosity. 
 
 Careful Method in Composition. — But Chan- 
 ning's great aim, so far as the form of expres- 
 sion is concerned, was truth to his convictions, 
 to himself. His nephew gives a detailed ac- 
 count of his method of composition, — the 
 extreme care and thoroughness with which he 
 went about his mental work. The pigeon-holes 
 of his desk were left full of those little square 
 folded leaves, containing the first jottings-down 
 of the thoughts which he was afterward to fill 
 out and write out and expand. One such lili- 
 putian sheet is here copied literally. ''God 
 is working all around us — perpetually, infi- 
 nitely — We think we ascribe to him labor in 
 supposing every motion in the boundless uni- 
 verse willed by him — But how easy are infinite 
 operations to omnipotence. Millions of motions 
 demand no more labor than one — 
 
 *' One distinction between human and divine 
 power : that the works of the former go on by 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 223 
 
 interrupted labor and come to their end — In 
 God's we see perpetual action — The plant 
 grows every moment without a pause — There 
 is no rest in nature. The plant, indeed, fully 
 develops itself, but not to stand still, like a 
 human machine — It begins immediately to 
 decay — A new series of changes immediately 
 commences — The Divine Artificer has no need 
 of keeping his works — They are poured forth 
 in infinite profusion — 
 
 "Another distinction is: Man works on 
 masses — with coarse tools — never penetrates 
 to the elements — Nature accomplishes its pur- 
 poses by minutest and most delicate opera- 
 tions — No coarse machinery clothes a tree with 
 verdure with a few strokes. Every leaf is dis- 
 tinctly elaborated, pencilled, by the gradual 
 influence of countless and invisible particles. 
 
 " May we not suppose the Infinite Artificer 
 finding a pure delight in every product of 
 skill — as we do — Is not intelligence in action, 
 reahzing its ideas, producing effects by hap- 
 piest combinations, a happy intelligence — Is 
 
224 WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 
 
 not the Divine mind every moment enjoying its 
 numberless works of power — 
 
 ** Is [not] God every moment woi'kmg before 
 us, as truly as a man — In the expansion of 
 every flower is not God as plainly manifest as 
 we see human agency in a growing painting or 
 machine — How near — 
 
 ** In manufactories what a din — how offen- 
 sive the smell — Enter a field, the divine lab- 
 oratory. We boast of a thousand spindles — 
 How much more complicated, exquisite appa- 
 ratus in every blade of grass — Each grows 
 separate. 
 
 " Is dissolution allowed, to call forth this per- 
 petual energy in renovation — 
 
 "Winter — what occasion it gives for new 
 manifestations of power — and skill — The safe- 
 ty of animals and plants — " 
 
 Specimens of the Sententious from Channing's 
 Letters. — Dr. Miles, in his little volume of 
 " Thoughts from Channing," says : " There is 
 probably no other author of the age from whose 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 22$ 
 
 works a greater number of striking detached 
 thoughts may be gathered." But this can hard- 
 ly be true, if he means thoughts expressed 
 in single sentences, and unless he applies the 
 remark to paragraphs and pages. Otherwise 
 what Dr. Bellows said of Channing is surely 
 nearer the truth, that "there are few great 
 writers from whom so few splendid passages 
 could be selected." The very quality of Dr. 
 Channing's style, indeed, makes this to be so. 
 
 If, however. Dr. Miles had applied his remark 
 to Channing's correspondence, it could have 
 been more plausibly sustained ; and a collection 
 similar to his made from Dr. Channing's let- 
 ters and private papers would be a pithy and 
 precious remembrancer and companion. Here 
 are a few, for example : *' Once reverie was the 
 hectic of my life ; now meditation has become 
 the life of my soul." " To speak on interesting 
 subjects is the ground of sincerity." " Let me 
 first feel the force of truth myself, and then im- 
 press it on others." " In conversation let me 
 draw persons from evil-speaking and contention, 
 
% 
 
 226 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 and painful or injurious subjects, by catching 
 some thought suggested, and making it the 
 ground of remark." " Great objects m ake great 
 minds." y ^ wise man seeks t o^^ine in him- 
 self; a fool, to outshin e others/V '(The wise 
 man considers what he wantsj^th e fool, what ) 
 he abounds in." } " -^^^ ^^ot thoughts voluntary ? 
 Do they not originate in active principles?" 
 " In connecting with a thing all that belongs to 
 itvjt become acqtiainted v^\\h it." " All objects 
 may be viewed as expressions of goodness." 
 \ h *' He is miserable_who makes pleasure his busi- 
 ness.'; ^Letme_never talk of my zeal for 
 Csouls, exc ept with God !^ *' Children should never 
 be deceived. ... It is better to let them cry 
 than to give them a lesson in manoeuvring." 
 *' They very slowly learn that others feel as 
 'keenly as themselves." VC" We waste th e present 
 for a fut ure which never comes."^ **"I smile when 
 I hear poetry called light reading^ " The hig h- 
 X est genius, I believe, is a self-guidijig, calm, 
 comprehensive power. It creates in the spirit 
 of the Author of the Universe, in the spirit of 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 22/ 
 
 order. It worships truth and beauty." * *_The 
 / massof pe ople, who never think, underst and 
 J little the trials of a superior mind which 
 / must think/*/ " The greatest minds admit no 
 biography. They are determined from within." 
 ** Christianity ... a religion of benignant as- 
 pect, of a liberal spirit, of lofty purposes, given 
 to free and enlarge the intellect, to form a 
 higher order of character, a filial and elevat- 
 ing and unbounded charity, — and to indue 
 the will with invincible strength in well-doing." 
 " I have seldom, perhaps never, met a human 
 being who seemed to me conscious of what 
 was in him." '' The common mode of speaking 
 of prayer, as if it were mere asking, or did 
 not include moral effort, seems to me very 
 pernicious." *' One of the beauties of Christ's 
 character is his superiority to his miracles." 
 V " There is something more terrible than slavery, 
 V _and that is the spirit that enslaves." ' '' Flattery / 
 
 is never so sweet as when it gives us confidence 
 in the possession of qualities in which we fail_ 
 most, or, at least, about which we doubt most. 
 
228 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 *' There is such a thing as being slaves to our 
 own past good impressions!' " The best proof 
 of a heaven to come is its dawning within us 
 now." *' I have thought that by analyzing a 
 pain, I have been able to find an element of 
 pleasure in it." " I cease to wonder that six 
 thousand years have not done more for the race, 
 when I see so clearly that a thousand years are 
 but a day to the Eternal." This reminds one 
 of Kepler. " ' Solitude is sweet,' says a French 
 but I want a friend to whom I can say 
 is sweet.' ''/^" The old adage that sails 
 
 / writer, " 1 
 V * solitude 
 
 profit nothing without ballast, we must remem- 
 ber. Unhappily some are all ballast, and go to 
 the bottom ; some of us are all sails and run 
 adrift." "We visionaries, as we are called, have 
 this privilege from living in the air, that the 
 harsh sounds from earth make only a slight im- 
 pression on the ear." *' Time wears out the 
 wrinkles on Mother Earth's brow. The world 
 grows younger with age." " I feel more a nd 
 more that love is better than thought, or, rather, 
 that thought is worth little when not steeped in 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 229 
 
 love/,^ " A good book might be written on the 
 art of suffering!' " I have great faith in inspi- 
 ration ; but it is a fruit and reward of faithful 
 toil, not a chance influence entirely out of our 
 power." " Sects are apt to hate each other in 
 proportion to their proximity. The old prov- 
 erb, that two of a trade can never agree, ap- 
 plies to religion as strongly as to common life." 
 " Do not waste your breath in wailing over the 
 times. Strive to make them better." " There 
 seems a fatality attending creeds. After bur- 
 dening Christianity with mysteries of which it 
 is as innocent as the unborn child, they have 
 generally renounced the real mystery of relig- 
 ion, that of human nature." 
 
 Truth, not Effect, Channing's Aim. — But literary 
 taste in the shaping of expression was always 
 subordinated and made subservient by Chan- 
 ning to moral purposes, and the yearning to 
 benefit humanity. Of course he would be re- 
 proached by those who did not know his physi- 
 cal condition and his inner aims and aspirations, 
 
( 
 
 230. WILLIAM ELLERY CIIANNING. 
 
 as a self-indulgent dilettante and sentimental- 
 ist, or dreamer and visionary; but "in truth," 
 as Dr. Bartol finely says, " infirmity, seclusion, 
 tender cherishing, and susceptibility to external 
 influences only disguised in him, to most, the 
 all-daring courage, all-enduring patience, of the 
 martyr." 
 
 "Was Channing Self-indulgent? — Channing is a 
 noble example of the power of patient self- 
 study and self-discipHne to make a man an effi - 
 cient servant of truth and benefactor of his race. 
 He has been reproached with individualism. 
 What is so stigmatized was really the wise, rev- 
 erent, and spiritual economy of an invalid, who 
 would save his strength to devote it in the way 
 he best could to the cause of truth, virtue, and 
 humanity. What Mr. Calvert finely says of 
 Socrates may be applied to Channing: ''Self- 
 centred, not self-seeking." Channing's love of 
 nature was no mere sensuous or selfish enjoy- 
 ment. It seems almost as if he himself were 
 speaking through his brother Gannett, when 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 23 I 
 
 the latter, writing in 1834, during a wedding 
 journey, says : " There is a spirituaHty in this 
 beauty of the material world which I cannot 
 resist. It addresses the spiritual in man. It 
 awakens in him the consciousness of a nature 
 born to enjoy the lovely. This nature cannot 
 be doomed to decay. My faith in immortality 
 has gained strength amidst God's glorious works." 
 How singularly in Channing's style and spirit is 
 this ! He himself somewhere says : " I some- 
 times think that I have a peculiar enjoyment of a 
 fine atmosphere. It is to me a spiritual pleasure , 
 rather than physical, and seems to me not un- 
 worthy our future existence." And he, too, 
 could say, '* I love not man the less " for these 
 interviews with nature. *' If I have gone to 
 solitudes," he somewhere says, indeed, " it was 
 not to sigh among shades, but to use my little 
 power as well as I could. To me the country is 
 the best article in the materia medical And 
 again he says : " I have never found that my 
 lonely way of life has alienated me from my 
 race. On the contrary, I think that to me it 
 
232 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 has been the spring or nutriment of philan- 
 thropy." 
 
 Channing's Individualism. — Independently, how- 
 ever, of his feeling the necessity of solitude 
 and nature for their sanitary influences and 
 for studies which required intense and concen- 
 trated meditation, Channing, no doubt, would 
 have adopted his secluded mode of life, his 
 individualism, as it is sometimes disparagingly 
 designated, on prmcipley that is, because he felt 
 that for the very reason of being but a part of 
 a great human and divine whole, every man 
 should strive to make himself 2, perfect part; in 
 other words, to perfect himself in the way that 
 his knowledge of his peculiar aptitudes and abil- 
 ities taught him would be for him the best. 
 In the case of a Channing, individualism meant 
 not indifference, but independence. And not 
 inappropriate to his monument would be the 
 words Robert Burns wrote to be inscribed on 
 an altar to Independence : — 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING, 233 
 
 " Thou of an independent mind, 
 "With soul resolved, with soul resigned; 
 Prepared power's proudest frown to brave, 
 Who wilt not be — nor have — aslave ; 
 Virtue alone who dost revere ; 
 Thine own reproach alone dost fear; — 
 Approach this shrine and worship here." 
 
 His Natural Religion. — Channing was un- 
 doubtedly and emphatically, in a certain sense, 
 the disciple and the earnest advocate of a Nat- 
 ural Religion. It was part of his evening wor- 
 ship to stand at his window and watch the 
 sunset sky over the Brighton hills. Not that 
 he worshipped Nature in the pagan or pan- 
 theistic sense, but that he loved to join with 
 Nature in the worship she silently pays to the 
 Maker and Father of all things. Rather let us 
 say, he saw, in the tender and majestic proces- 
 sion of Nature's shows, signallings and saluta- 
 tions from the great Unseen hidden behind 
 them, and with Him throuerh faith held sweet 
 inward communion. To him the song of the 
 bird, the music of the wind in the branches, 
 "the breezy call of incense-breathing morn," 
 
234 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 all were voices of the Spirit talking with the 
 spirit in man. The streaming of the northern 
 lights was to him a lovely apparition, and the 
 surf-drum on the seashore and the leap of the 
 maned billows woke in him a child's delight 
 and awe. The freedom and familiarity which 
 he rarely, if ever, manifested with human beings, 
 he indulged with these unconscious creatures of 
 God. With them the bounds of his natural 
 reserve gave way; and this rapture in the 
 companionship of the creation and the Creator 
 grew with him to the last. As Theodore Parker 
 so beautifully says : " He found God every- 
 where, not only in the church, but wherever his 
 foot trod ; in the sounds of ocean, where God 
 holds in the waters with a leash of sand ; in 
 the bloom of the crocus beside his doorstep 
 in winter; in the ribs and veins of a leaf; in 
 the sounds of nature, so full of poetry, — the 
 grass, the leaves, the drowsy beetle, the con- 
 tented kine; in the summer wind, that came 
 to the window at nightfall and played in the 
 ringlets of his children's hair ; in the Hght that 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 235 
 
 . mantles o'er the western sky, as the sun goes 
 down; in the fires that shine there, beautiful 
 creatures, all night long ; in the star that antici- 
 pates the day, which looked gently through his 
 window, consoling him for the loss of sleep. 
 There was no * trail of the serpent ' over all 
 this. Nature, too, was to him a rehgion, pure 
 and undefiled." 
 
 Charge of Sentimentalism. — Channing has 
 been often spoken of disparagingly as a senti- 
 mentalist and an optimist, as one who wilfully 
 or in innocent ignorance looked only on the 
 pleasant side of life and human nature and the 
 Divine character, — as one who in his light 
 barque kept near shore and never ventured into 
 the deep waters. " He had never," says one of 
 his latest critics, " experienced in himself any 
 flagrant outbreaking of sin ; he had never wres- 
 tled in mortal agony with any sensual propen- 
 sity." Well, had Jesus himself? But did he 
 not suffer with as well as for sinners? And 
 how shall we say, then, that any being cannot 
 
236 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 sorrow for sin without having experienced the 
 agony of remorse? Can any one have read 
 Channing's sermon on the Evil of Sin, who calls 
 him superficial in his dealing with human life? 
 The deep waters of thought are precisely those 
 on which Channing did stretch his sail, in the 
 assured confidence that God's infinite and pater- 
 nal providence extended everywhere, and that 
 no error of mind or of will could carry a child 
 of his beyond the reach of his love, his pity, 
 or his care. And in all conceivable cases he 
 felt sure that the Father's chastisements would 
 have a corrective design. If this was optimism, 
 it was the optimism of Paul. 
 
 The German poet Riickert has beautifully 
 expressed the same thought in his " Strung 
 Pearls " as rendered by Dr. Frothingham : — 
 
 " The father feels the blow, when he corrects his son ; 
 But when thy heart is loose, rigor 's a kindness done. 
 
 From the sun's searching power can vagrant planets rove ? 
 How then can wandering man fall wholly from God's love ? " 
 
 Channing was a Self-made Man. — This does 
 not mean that he was not acted upon by out- 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 237 
 
 ward influences. In that sense no man ever 
 was or could be self-made. The meaning is, 
 that in his case the reaction from within met 
 and equalled the action from without. The 
 native power and propension of the soul guided 
 the stream of influence coming in upon it to 
 congenial issues. Herein lay the originality of 
 the man, — not in utter independence of foreign 
 supplies, but in the conversion of them to uses 
 of his own, — the only originality possible to 
 man in this world. 
 
 Channing's Use of the Word " I." — Much ac- 
 count has been made of what is called egotism 
 in Channing. But how superficially and with 
 what want of discrimination this charge is often 
 made against such men ! The first person sin- 
 gular may express far more modesty than the 
 first person plural. Nothing is more arrogantly 
 egotistic, often, than the critic's *' we ; " nothing 
 more unassuming than the *' I " of the truth- 
 seeking and truth-speaking man. Channing's 
 so-called egotism was simply individuality and 
 
238 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 independence. He had caught his egotism from 
 communion with Jesus, or rather from the spirit 
 that dwelt in them both. When he writes in the 
 preface to his first pubhshed volume, '' The times 
 demanded that a voice of strength and courage 
 should be lifted up, and I rejoice that I was 
 found among those by whom it was uttered and 
 sent far and wide," it was in no spirit of boast- 
 ing that he said this ; he was thinking simply of 
 the strength of faith and truth, and rejoicing 
 before God that grace had been given him to 
 be one of the instruments of clearing away the 
 mist of sophistry from the eyes of men. 
 
 One reason, too, of Channing's frequent use 
 of " I," undoubtedly, was his wishing to have it 
 fully understood that in his expression of opinion 
 he spoke for himself only and not for any party. 
 
 Was Channing a Great Man? — A great deal is 
 always vaguely said upon a question like this. 
 Great in what faculty, what quality? one might 
 rejoin. Great in degree or in kind? one might 
 again ask, if the question refers to greatness in 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 239 
 
 general. And again, is the word " greatness " 
 used here in a positive or only a comparative 
 sense? In a letter to Lucy Aikin, near the cen- 
 tenary of Washington's birth, Channing himself 
 writes: ''Washington is the most remarkable 
 man of modern times; not that he surpassed 
 all in ability, for it is a question among us yet 
 whether he can be called great in regard to 
 intellect." It is curious to reflect that a similar 
 question may arise in some minds in regard to 
 Channing himself at this hundredth anniversary 
 of his birth. It has been said that he was not 
 great, but good. Shall we content ourselves 
 with saying, then, that he was greatly good? 
 We will rather say that his was the best kind 
 of greatness. If, indeed, a man may be 
 
 *' The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind," 
 
 the kind of greatness there implied we should 
 not care to claim for Channing, nor the wisdom 
 either. But if one of the grandest kinds of 
 greatness is to be growing freer and broader, 
 loftier and more ardent in aspiration, as one 
 
240 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 grows in years, more and more like a child in 
 the presence of God and the prospect of eter- 
 nity, then we confidently pronounce Channing 
 a great man. 
 
 If greatness means completeness, so far, per- 
 haps, we may acknowledge Channing's limita- 
 tions. His biographer intimates that he may 
 have been " kept from the highest [rather the 
 broadest] goodness by his love of rectitude; " 
 but with great diffidence would we venture such 
 criticism, not knowing that what he lost in one 
 direction he may not have gained in another. 
 
 Often, indeed, would he himself tell us, in his 
 last years, that if he had his life to live over 
 again, he would mix more with men, would 
 mingle more in the stir of busy and social hfe. 
 But we say now, it is best as it was. 
 
 Those who deny or disparage Dr. Channing's 
 greatness sometimes allege his want of that hu- 
 mor which is an essential element of a large 
 and vigorous manhood. Whether on the whole, 
 with more health and humor, he would have 
 given the world an example of so large, lofty, 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 24 1 
 
 and profound a humanity, may well be doubted. 
 Better is it that we should be content and grate- 
 ful for what he was. Certain it is that he pre- 
 sents a wonderful example of a man who, in 
 spite of that want of health which almost per- 
 force keeps the humorous element in abeyance, 
 maintained a serene, cheerful, and happy tem- 
 per, that, according to the testimony of those 
 nearest him, grew more and more serene and 
 sunny as life waned. His son says : " His last 
 years were more than peaceful. They were 
 irradiated by a calm, deep joy, which it is beau- 
 tiful to remember. His mind was very active, 
 and he worked to the extent of his strength. 
 Yet in work and in enforced rest alike, was this 
 happiness conspicuous, which far exceeded sim- 
 ple content. He was one of the happiest per- 
 sons, if not the happiest, I ever knew." His son 
 also says, speaking of his father's abstinence, 
 as being far from asceticism, that "sensation 
 was the avenue to him always of the spir- 
 itual correspondences of nature. He enjoyed 
 vividly the harmonies of color, sound, form, 
 16 
 
242 WILLIAM ELIERY CHANNING. 
 
 and all the beauties of nature ; yet they always 
 carried to him their inmost spiritual meaning." 
 
 So far as health of body is necessary to make 
 a whole man, Channing, we may admit, was im- 
 perfect. " However," in one of his letters he 
 modestly says, '' it is a comfort to know, that 
 where there is a fervent heart and a strong pur- 
 pose, much may be done with a weak body." 
 And marvellous, indeed, it is that one who, as 
 his nephew asserts, never knew a day of free- 
 dom from pain, weariness, or infirmity, from the 
 beginning of his ministry, should have been 
 able to enjoy and to accomplish so much, to 
 work with so much serenity and so much suc- 
 cess, and to leave behind him such a rich be- 
 quest of calm, profound, ennobhng thoughts. 
 
 Was Channing a Philosopher ? — If to be a 
 philosopher means to be a great metaphysical 
 system-builder, then we may readily grant that 
 he was not eminently such. But if we take the 
 original sense of the term philosophy, namely, 
 love of wisdom, then surely Channing was a 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 243 
 
 philosopher indeed, for, as Coleridge said of 
 him, he had " the love of wisdom and the wis- 
 dom of love." As a man of learning he does 
 not belong to the first rank, but in the school 
 of true wisdom, in this philosophy Channing 
 was certainly a master. Whether he had a 
 philosophy or not (and perhaps, if the critic 
 cannot find one in him which he can define, it 
 is his defect, not Channing's), he certainly 
 had philosophy in the best sense, even in that 
 of St. Augustine, who somewhere says, '* If God 
 is wisdom, then the lover of God is the true 
 philosopher." 
 
 Channing's Unfinished Work on Man. — During 
 the last year of his life Channing was busy with 
 gathering up and arranging his thoughts for a 
 great work oti the nature and destiny of man. 
 He lived to finish only five chapters, which are 
 taken up with a philosophy of sensation, con- 
 ception, consciousness, and memory. These 
 chapters were carefully written out, and will 
 soon be published. They will exhibit Chan- 
 
244 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 ning in a new light, as presenting, in scientific 
 statement, moral and spiritual truths and princi- 
 ples, upon which all his preaching and his phil- 
 anthropic writings had been based. He is still 
 preaching, with a calm, philosophic clearness, 
 and with a lucid simplicity that makes his 
 thought and argument intelligible to common- 
 sense, and unencumbered by the technicalities 
 of the schools. Pre-eminent and remarkable 
 throughout the fragment is the idealism, the 
 spirituality of the doctrine. The body is the 
 occasion, not the cause, of sensation. *' It is 
 I (the soul) that see and hear." Because an 
 idea — of space, for instance — follows a sensa- 
 tion, it is not therefore the effect of it. Yet the 
 power comes from God. We must assume his 
 immediate and ever-present energy. The mil- 
 ler lifts the sluice, and the wheels begin to 
 move ; the stream that moves them is the flow 
 of Divine power. 
 
 The idea of power — of causation, for in- 
 stance — according to Channing is of spiritual 
 origin. All the ideas, in short, which have been 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 245 
 
 SO often derived from sensation, **have their 
 origin in the mind. The source is within. The 
 outward creation is revealed to us by our own 
 souls." 
 
 It is interesting to meet in these pages a per- 
 sonal reference in the illustration of the writ- 
 er's favorite theory of the spiritual and creative 
 character of sensation. " May I say that now, 
 when the creation has become a familiar sight, 
 and my eye has grown dim, the earth and the 
 heavens expand before me into new greatness. 
 It is the soul which aggrandizes nature." 
 
 The spiritual view here presented of the na- 
 ture of sensation and of the ideas to which it 
 gives occasion strikingly coincides with a train 
 of thought in Max Miiller's last lectures on the 
 origin and growth of the religious idea in man. 
 For instance, he says : " We distinguish be- 
 tween sense and reason, though even these two 
 are, in the highest sense, different functions 
 only of the same conscious self." Again, refer- 
 ring to the transcendental idea of infinity, he 
 says : " Our very idea of a limit implies the idea 
 
246 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 of a beyond, and thus forces the idea of the infi- 
 nite upon us, whether we Hke it or not." 
 
 In the ideas of this philosophic bequest of 
 Channing's, there may be no novelty now 
 (Lavollaye remarks " the naivete of some of his 
 doctrines, which he thinks new, and which could 
 not pass for discoveries except in America"), 
 but in the spirit and style of the presentation 
 there is something fresh, individual, and singu- 
 larly attractive. How refreshing it is, too, what 
 a presentiment of immortality it gives us, to find 
 one who with such a fervent spirit in such a frail 
 frame has devoted the years of his manhood to 
 the labors of the pulpit and the great moral, 
 social, and political questions and crises of the 
 hour, sitting down in his last days in the chair of 
 science, and with youthful ardor addressing him- 
 self to the examination, in the light of reason 
 and philosophy, of the questions, what man is 
 made of, and what he is made for; to the task 
 of resuming and reinforcing by scientific induc- 
 tions, the great doctrine of the dignity and the 
 divinity of our origin, nature, and destiny ! 
 
Wi' 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 247 
 
 In Christ's Church, Oxford, there is a memo- 
 rial tablet to Bishop Berkeley, bearing an in- 
 scription which might with equal felicity be 
 transferred to Channing : — 
 
 " Si Christianas fueris, 
 Si amans patriae, 
 Utroque nomine gloriari potes 
 Berkleium vixisse." 
 
 "If thou art a Christian ; 
 If a lover of thy country ; 
 Under both names thou canst glory 
 That Channing has lived." 
 
 And here this most inadequate tribute to the 
 memory of our spiritual friend and father shall 
 close. And how can we close more fitly than 
 in the words he himself wrote after the death 
 of his friends Follen and Tuckerman : '^ But we 
 will not say we have lost such friends. They 
 live within us in sweet and tender remem- 
 brances. They live around us in the fruits of 
 th-eir holy labors. They live above us, and call 
 us, in the tones of a friendship which heaven 
 has refined, to strengthen our union with them 
 by sharing their progress in truth and virtue." 
 
248 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 
 
 Lines read in the U7titarian Church at Newport on the Ninety- 
 ninth Anniversary of Channing^s Birth. 
 
 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Born in Newport, April 7, 1780. 
 
 A century's close is drawing nigh, 
 The hundredth year has now begun, 
 
 Since, in the softening April sky. 
 The lustre of the vernal sun, 
 
 Sending his radiant beams abroad, 
 
 To bid a new creation rise, 
 Fell, like the loving look of God, 
 
 Upon a new-born infant's eyes. 
 
 We stand amid the scenes to-day, 
 
 Where Channing's wondering childhood saw 
 
 The signs of God's mysterious way. 
 And learned to love his holy law. 
 
 Here first his heart drank in the light 
 
 Of God's benign and tender face. 
 And glowed with rapture at the sight 
 
 Of Nature's loveliness and grace. 
 
 Here first he breathed the ocean air. 
 
 The headland cliff exultant trod, 
 And felt a spirit everywhere, 
 
 And saw the step of Nature's God. 
 
 And as he trod the sounding shore, 
 And gazed on ocean's billowy roll, 
 
 The music of that deep-toned roar 
 
 With awe and transport thrilled his soul. 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 249 
 
 His bosom, heaving with the sea, 
 
 Exulted in the glorious din ; 
 The elemental energy 
 
 Woke answering energy within. 
 
 In many a lone and holy hour 
 
 Of rapturous self-communion there, 
 He felt within the peace and power 
 
 That issue from the fount of prayer. 
 
 And in the broad blue sky above, 
 
 In the large look of Nature, then, 
 He felt the greatness of God's love 
 
 Rebuke the narrow creeds of men. 
 
 Communing there with Nature's word, 
 
 Beside the vast and solemn sea, 
 With awe profound his spirit heard 
 
 The holy hymn of Liberty, 
 
 That mighty ocean still rolls on, 
 
 Still sounds that deep, mysterious roar ; 
 
 But he long since from earth has gone, 
 He walks another brighter shore. 
 
 He breathes the air of purer skies ; 
 
 A generation now has passed 
 Since peacefully his failing eyes 
 
 On autumn's glory looked their last. 
 
 His voice has gone o'er all the earth. 
 
 While — O strange ways of earthly fame I — 
 
 Here, in the place that gave him birth, 
 Are those who never heard his name. 
 
250 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Men come from foreign lands to seek 
 The shrines that grace this ancient town ; 
 
 With reverent love his name they speak, * 
 
 Attesting his world-wide renown. 
 
 They wander on from street to street, 
 
 And marvel, as they gaze around, 
 No monumental stone to meet, — 
 
 No hill-top with his image crowned. 
 
 And, with full heart, we too reply : 
 
 " Ask ye a monument ? Look round I " ^ 
 
 Here, while we name him, he is nigh, 
 He makes this hill a holy ground. 
 
 These walls his kindling voice have heard, — 
 Once, in the bloom and fire of youth, 
 
 And when, in later years, his word 
 Wore the calm majesty of truth. 
 
 I see him now, — his pale cheek seems 
 Transparent to the soul's warm light, 
 
 And the clear eye, dilating, beams 
 As if his faith were turned to sight. 
 
 , And many a soul that felt the thrill 
 
 That look through heart and conscience sent 
 Burns with the flame it kindled still. 
 And is his living monument. 
 
 But chiefly on the glowing page 
 
 His mind a monument hath wrought. 
 
 That shall endure from age to age. 
 Lit with the sunny beam of thought. 
 
 * An allusion to the epitaph on Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Church, 
 London : " Si monumentum requiris, circumspice ! " 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY C MANNING. 2$ I 
 
 There, with immortal fervor warm, 
 
 Shall rise an image of the man. 
 That shall express the spirit's form 
 
 As neither stone nor canvas can. 
 
 Though the frail form, in years long gone, 
 
 Faded and fled from mortal sight, 
 And darkness veiled the eyes that shone 
 
 Illumined by the soul's pure light, 
 
 That light still lives, that life breathes power, 
 
 The age still feels its holy thrill ; 
 That voice is heard in trial's hour. 
 
 To nerve the weak and wavering will. 
 
 While the great truths and precepts, taught 
 
 By Jesus, human souls engage ; 
 While the deep problems of man's thought 
 
 Still stir and agitate the age, — 
 
 No time shall come, when Channing's name 
 Shall grow less bright on Freedom's scroll. 
 
 Or cease to light the holy flame 
 Of faith and virtue in the soul. 
 
 And surely here, where field and shore 
 
 Seem waiting still his step to hear. 
 And, musing where the breakers roar, 
 
 We feel his spirit breathing near, — 
 
 Here, where the broad and chainless sea. 
 
 The blue sky bending from above, 
 Confirm the gospel, large and free. 
 
 He preached, of God's impartial love, — 
 
252 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 
 
 Shall pious hands, in coming days, 
 And grateful hearts from far and near, 
 
 Some not unfit memorial raise, 
 To thoughtful souls for ever dear j 
 
 Where children's children, year by year, 
 The voice of praise and prayer shall swell, 
 
 And feel the Father's presence near. 
 In whom the saints for ever dwell. 
 
 C. T. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbot, J. E., 99. 
 
 Abolitionists, letter to, 146. 
 
 Adams, President John, address to, by the Harvard students, (&. 
 
 Allston, 28 ; on Channing, 47, 58. 
 
 Anti-Calvinism, 108. 
 
 Antislavery conflict, 145. 
 
 Arianism of Channing, 107. 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, his tribute to his ancestors, 43. 
 
 Autobiography, Channing's and Wordsworth's, 18. 
 
 Bacon's saying, 86. 
 
 Bartol on Channing, 230. 
 
 Beach at Newport, 27. 
 
 Bellows, Dr., on Channing's piety, 160. 
 
 Berkeley, 28 ; his epitaph, 247. 
 
 Berry Street Vestry, 122; Conference, 123. 
 
 Biography, its difficulties, 13. 
 
 Blanco White, letters to, 155, 156; his death, 161. 
 
 Bonaparte, 97, 118, 119. 
 
 Bryant and Channing, parallels between, 79, loi, 147, 173. 
 
 Callender, the meeting-house in which he gave his Century 
 
 Lecture, 33. 
 Cambridge in 1794, 60. 
 Catholicity of Channing, 177. 
 Centenary reflections, 13. 
 Chadwick's tribute, 175. 
 
254 INDEX. 
 
 Chalmers, 78. 
 
 Chaloner, Mary, Channing's paternal grandmother, 41. 
 
 Channing, Rev. George, *' Early Recollections," 88. 
 
 Channing, Henry, 58. 
 
 Channing, W. E., his birth, 26; the homestead, 34; the period 
 of his birth, ■};] ; his parentage and ancestry, 41 ; his father 
 and mother, 42; as a child, 44 ; his boyhood, 45 ; the " Little 
 Preacher," 47 ; and " Peacemaker," 48 ; his three schools, 
 48 ; early spiritual influences, 50 ; the future man and min- 
 ister, 54 ; schooling and fitting for college, 57 ; death of his 
 father, 58 ; enters Harvard, 60 ; his classmates, 61 ; his 
 college mates, 63 ; favorite studies, 65 ; influence of Hutch- 
 eson, 66 ; interest in politics, 67 ; his Commencement 
 oration, 68 ; choice of profession, 69 ; tutor at Richmond, 
 70 ; results of his residence there, 72 ; struggle and triumph, 
 74; new birth, 76; theological attitude, 77; return home, 
 80 ; tribute to the beach at Newport, 81 ; preaches for 
 Hopkins, 83 ; returns to Cambridge, 85 ; church member, 
 86 ; sermon at Medford, 87 ; called to Federal Street, 91 \ 
 ordained, 93 ; first months of his ministry, 94 ; in a lively 
 house, 98; as preacher and pastor, loi ; early sermons, 
 104; opening of the Unitarian controversy, iii; writes for 
 the " Christian Disciple," 112; corresponds with Dr. Worces- 
 ter, 114; patriotic sermons, 118; pronounced Unitarian- 
 ism, 121; Dudleian Lecture, 123; his marriage, 124; his 
 children, 124, 125; devotion to his mother, 125; her death, 
 126; journey through New England, 127; Oakland, 127 ; 
 visit to Europe, 128; news of the death of a child, 130; in 
 his pulpit again, 131 ; receives a colleague, 131 ; a Sunday in 
 Federal Street, 132; authorship, 134; liberal preachers of 
 that day, 134 ; " Examiner " articles, 136 ; great sermons, 137 ; 
 journey to West Indies, 139; antislavery conflict, 141 ; book 
 on slavery, 145; Lenox address, 148; philanthropic addresses, 
 149; sermons of last decade, 150; letters of last decade, 
 151 ; his Natural Religion, 162 ; Newport Church, 163 ; dedi- 
 cation, 166; charge, 167; sermons at Newport, 168, 171; 
 Oakland, 178; closing days, 181; Sunday talks to the 
 
INDEX. 255 
 
 farmers, 183; last journeyings, 184; last of earth, first of 
 heaven, 185; his style, 214; care in composition, 222 ; his 
 unfinished work on Man, 243. 
 
 Channing, William, epitaph on him, 59, 
 
 Channing, W. H., his memoir of his micle, 9, 
 
 Chapman, Mrs., her aspersions, 141. 
 
 Cheverus, Archbishop, 193. 
 
 Child, Mrs., her tribute, 147. 
 
 "Christian Disciple," II2. 
 
 Codman, John, 102. 
 
 Coleridge, 129. 
 
 Controversial bullying, 114. 
 
 Coquerel, 209. 
 
 Corner-stone of Dr. Hopkins's church, 166. 
 
 Creeds, 211. 
 
 Dedication sermon at Newport, 166. 
 
 Dehon, Theodore, 63. 
 
 Dewey, at Federal Street, 128, 131 ; on Channing, 132, 173. 
 
 Divinity Hall, dedication of, 138. 
 
 Duchess Quamino, her epitaph, 56. 
 
 Dudleian Lecture, 123. 
 
 Edwards, his conversion, 78; pulpit manner, 172. 
 
 Egotism (alleged) of Channing, 237. 
 
 Ellery "the Signer," his house, 30; grandfather of Channing, 
 
 41 ; letter about his grandson, 91 ; correspondence with 
 
 him, 92. 
 Episcopal tribute, 190. 
 European fame of Channing, 193, 
 
 Fast Day sermon in 1810, 119. 
 
 Federal Street Church, 92. 
 
 Fenelon, Channing's paper on, 136; and Channing, 2CO. 
 
 Ferguson's " Civil Society," 65. 
 
 First sermon of Channing (in MS.), 89. 
 
 Fisher, Professor, 82, 209. 
 
256 INDEX. 
 
 Foresti, Signer, his idea of Channing, 169. 
 
 Foster, James, iii. 
 
 France, its influence on Channing's contemporaries, 67. 
 
 Franklin, 201. 
 
 Freeman, Dr., at King's Chapel on the "solemn festival," 120; 
 
 charge, 135. 
 French characterizations of Channing, 45, 46; admiration of 
 
 him, 195. 
 Furness, his Life of Channing, 109, 117. 
 
 Gannett, Ezra Stiles, colleague to Channing, 131 ; his 
 criticisms on Channing, 155; his preaching in the old 
 Hopkins pulpit, 167 ; his tribute to nature, 231. 
 
 Garrison, 139. 
 
 Greatness, 238. 
 
 Greene, Albert G., his Hymn on Channing, 174. 
 
 Hall, E. B., on Channing's earthly immortality, 24 ; on his 
 
 reading of hymns, 94; sermon on the dedication evening at 
 
 Newport, 166. 
 Happiness, Channing's portrait of, 99. 
 Harvard College in 1784-88, 60. 
 Hopkins, Dr., his parsonage, 35; at his desk, 35; his old 
 
 meeting-house, 36 ; influence on Channing, 40, 50, 55 ; verses 
 
 on the two men, 84. 
 Humanitarianism of Channing, 107. 
 Hutcheson's " Moral Philosophy," 66. 
 
 Immortality, Channing's earthly, 21. 
 Independence, 210. 
 Individualism, 232. 
 
 Jackson, Dr. James, 63. 
 
 Jean Paul on the literary profession, 69. 
 
 Kendall, Dr., 63. 
 
 Knight's Encyclopaedia, a prediction in, 221. 
 
INDEX. 257 
 
 Laboulaye, 196. 
 
 Last words, 186. 
 
 Lavollaie, 72, 73, 197. ' 
 
 Lenox, address at, 148. 
 
 Lessons from Channing's Life, 21. 
 
 Liberty tree at Newport, 30. 
 
 Long Lane, 92. 
 
 Lucy Ellery C banning, her character and likeness, 42, 43. 
 
 Malbone, 57 ; his sketch of young Channing, 69. 
 
 May, Samuel J., his reproof of Channing's slowness, 146. 
 
 Methodist eulogium, 191. 
 
 Milton's prose, Channing on, 216. 
 
 More, Henry, 182. 
 
 Morse's bust of Channing, 175. 
 
 Mysticism, no. 
 
 New birth, ']^. 
 
 Newport, forty years ago, 29 ; after the Revolution, 38 ; Unita- 
 rian Church founded there, 163. 
 Newport Gardner, 56. 
 Ninety-ninth anniversary of Channing's birth, poem on, 248. 
 
 Oakland, life at, 178. 
 
 " PANOPLIST," III. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, on Channing's death, 186; his "Humble 
 
 Tribute," 188. 
 Patriotic efforts, 118. 
 Patten, Dr., 83. 
 
 Peace Society, the Massachusetts, 120. 
 Philosophy of Channing, 242. 
 Preacher, the, Channing's ideal of, 102. 
 Pre-existence of Jesus, 115. 
 
 Quaker's Hill, 34. 
 
 17 
 
258 INDEX. 
 
 Rationalism of Channing, reverent, 207. 
 
 Redwood Library, centenary poem, 28; Channing's study, 83. 
 
 Regent at Cambridge, 85. 
 
 Remusat, 193. 
 
 Renan, 205. 
 
 Revolution, the American, its effect on Newport, 38. 
 
 Richmond, 70. 
 
 Robertson, F. W., 194. 
 
 Rogers, Master, 57. 
 
 Sectarianism, Channing's dread of, 164. 
 
 Self-made men, 236. 
 
 Sententious passages from Channing, 224. 
 
 Sentimentalism, 74, 235. 
 
 Shelley's words applied to Channing, 24. 
 
 Simmons, W. H., "The Last Latin Recitation," 61. 
 
 Slavery, Newport's early relation to, 39 ; Channing's first sight 
 
 and impression of, 71. 
 Stevens, Dr. Abel, 192. 
 Stiles Meeting-house, 32. 
 
 Stone Chapel, Channing's great sermon there, 119. 
 Story, Judge, 61, 64. 
 Style, Channing's, 214. 
 Sydney Smith, 195. 
 
 Thanksgiving sermon, Channing's first, 105 ; at the " solemn 
 
 festival" in 1814, 119. 
 " Thebaid " of Channing at Richmond, 72. 
 Thurston, Parson, the Cooper, 55. 
 Ticknor, George, at Channing's ordination, 94. 
 Tuckerman, Joseph, 61, 64. 
 
 Unitarian controversy begins, iii, 113. 
 " Unitarian Orthodoxy," 159. 
 Unitarianism, Channing, 208. 
 
 Virginians, Channing's opinion of, 71. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 259 
 
 Ward, Julius, his misrepresentations, 158. 
 Ware, William, on Channing, 213. 
 Washington Tavern, Newport, 31. 
 
 Willard, Sidney, 61 ; his " Memories," 61 ; account of " Chris- 
 tian Disciple," 112. 
 Worcester, Dr., letters to, 114. 
 Word of God, Channing's idea of, 117. 
 
 YouTHFULNESS, perpetual, of Channing, 21. 
 
 University Press, Cambridge : John Wilson & Son. 
 
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