THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES C^anning Ctnknax^ (Pofunte* Hcliotype, from Plaster Cast of Marble Bust by Sidney II. Mohse. THE CHANNING CENTENARY IN AMERICA, GREAT BRITAIN, AND IRELAND. 91 Ecport of fHtttins& IjcIU in Ijonar of tljr ©nr ibttntircUtI) Slnniijfrearp of tl)c ^irtlj of WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. EDITED BV RUSSELL NEVINS BELLOWS. BOSTON Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street (CHANNING building). GHO. H. KLLIS, TRINTER, 14! FRANKLIN ST., P.OSTON. 3X No power can die that ever wrought for Truth; Thereby a law of Nature it became, And lives unwithered in its sinewy youth, When he who called it forth is but a name. Therefore I cannot think thee wholly gone : The better part of thee is with us still ; Thy soul its hampering clay aside hath thrown, And only freer wrestles with the 111. Thou livest in the life of all good things; What words thou spak'st for Freedom shall not die; Thou sleepest not, for now thy Love hath wings To soar where hence thy hope could hardly fly. J. R. Lowell, 1S42. ANTKRO-sdcr CONTENTS, Preface, Introductory, ii Origin of the Channing Centenary Movement.— Account of the Celebration of the Ninety- ninth Anniversary of Dr. Channing's Birth. — Poem by Rev. John W. Chadwick.— Letters from President Charles W. Eliot, Thomas W. Higginson, James T. Fields, Henry W. Longfellow, Henry W. Bellows, Octavius B. Frothingham, William H. Fumess. — Resolu- tions of the Unitarian Society of Newport. AMERICAN CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS. The Celebration at Newport, 19-82 Fifty Thousand Dollars subscribed for a Channing Memorial Church. — The Opening Services.— Memorial Discourse by Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D.— Ceremonies at the Laying of the Corner-stone of the Memorial Church.— Letter from Dr. Channing's only Surviving Brother. — Ode by Rev. Charles T. Brooks. — Corner-stone Address by Rev. William Henry Channing. — Evening Meeting. — Letters from Rev. Dr. James Martineau, Bishop Huntington, Bishop Clark, John G. Whittier, Rev. Dr. Hitchcock, William Lloyd Garrison. — Addresses by Governor Van Zandt, Rev. Dr. Hosmer, Rev. Dr. Hale. — Poems by Mrs. Martha P. Lowe and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. — Remarks by A. Bronson Alcott, Miss Elizabeth Peabody, Revs. N. S. Folsom and Charles F. Barnard. The Celebration at Boston, 83-144 The Meeting in Arlington Street Church. — Addresses by Rev. Dr. James Free- man Clarke and Rev. Dr. C. A. Bartol. Pulpit Tributes. — " Dr. Channing a Man of Affairs," by Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale. — "Channing Unitarianism," by Rev. Minot J. Savage. — "Dr. Channing the Ideal American," by Rev. William H. Channing. The Children's Service — Remarks by William H. Baldwin, Governor John D. Long, Revs. E. E. Hale, H. Bernard Carpenter, Minot J. Savage, William P. Tilden, James Free- man Clarke, and William H. Channing. American Unitarian Association. — Addresses at the Annual Meeting by Rev. Dr. William H. Fumess, Rev. Dr. Frederic H. Hedge, and Rev. William H. Channing. 6 CHANNING CENTENARY. PAGES The Celebration at Brooklyn, I45--53 Mkktings in thk Church of the Saviour.— Remarks of Rev. Dr. A. P. Putnam, Kcv. Dr. K. A. Farley, Rev. Dr. J. B. Thomas, Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley.— Ode by Rev. John W. Chadwick.— Remarks of Mr. Oliver Johnson. — Hymn by Rev. Dr. William Newell.— Remarks of Rev. Dr. Charles H. Hall, Rev. Amory D. Mayo, Rev. H. R. Nye, Rev. Dr. Oustav Gottheil, Rev. H. W. Foote. Merting in the Academy ok Music. — Remarks of Rev. Dr. Rufus Ellis, Rev. Robert Collyer, Rev. Dr. J. M. Pullman, Mr. George William Curtis, Rev. Dr. C. N. Sims, and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The Celebration at New York, 254-261 Sermons in the Churches. — No Special Observance of the Centennial Day. — Oration by Rev. Dr. Samuel Osgood before the Historical Society. — Discourse by Rev. Dr. Gustav Gottheil in the Jewish Temple Emanu-el. The Celebration at Chicago, 262-287 Meeting in Central Music Hall. — Addresses by Judge Henry Strong, Prof. David Swing, Rev. Dr. George C. Lorimer, Rev. William R. Alger, Rev. Dr. H. W. Thomas, and Rev. Brooke Herford. The Celebration at St. Louis, 288-299 Remarks by Rev. John Snyder, Rev. John C. Learned, Rev. Dr. William G. Eliot, Judge McCrary, Rev. Joseph H. Toy, Mr. George Partridge, Rev. Samuel Young, and Rev. Dr. Boyd. The CELEBR-vnoN at St. Paul, 300-318 Memorial Service in Unity Church. — Sermon by Rev. William Channiug Gannett. The Celebration .\t Meadville, 319-324 Remarks by Mr. Harris, Prof. Frederic Huidekoper, Mr. Savage, Dr. Wilson, Rev. George Whitman, and President A. A. Livermore. The Celebration at Washington, 325-327 Remarks by Justice Miller, Hon. George B. Loring, Hon. Horace Davis, Rev. Qay MacCauley, and Mr. Robert Purvis. — Discourse and Hymn by Rev. Clay MacCauley. The Celebration at Ann Arbor 32S-332 Remarks by Rev. J. T. Sunderland, Judge Harriman, Prof. T. P. Wilson, Mr. Anthony Reynolds, Prof. B. C. Burt, Prof. Donald McLean, Judge Cooley, and Prof. V. C Vaughan. The Celebration at Madison, 333-341 Meeting in the Jewish Synagogue. — Addresses by Rev. H. M. Simmons and Prof. W. F. Allen.— Remarks by Prof. D. B. Frankenberger, Hon. H. H. Giles, and Rev. W. E. Wright. CONTENTS. 7 PAGES The Celebration at Cincinnati 342-345 Discourse by Rev. William R. Alger. — Remarks by Rev. C. W. Wendte, and Rev. J. H. Hartley. The Celebration at San Francisco, . 346-352 Discourse by Rev. Dr. Horatio Stebbins in the Unitarian Church. Other Celebrations, 353-366 Brief Mention of Meetings in Greenfield, Springfield, Watertown, Melrose, Ashby, Mass. ; Hartford, Conn.; Burlington, Vt. ; Concord, Manchester, Nashua, East Wilton, N.H. ; Belfast, Me. ; Detroit, Mich. ; Mi'waukee, Janesville, Wis. ; Keokuk, Iowa ; Shelbyville, 111. ; Canton, N. Y. ; Portland, Oregon ; Montreal, Canada. Notices of the American Press, 367-374 CELEBRATIONS IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND. The Celebration at London 377-433 Meeting in St. James' Hall. — Letters from Rev. .Stopford Brooke, George MacDonald, Emen Renan, Rev. Dr. E. A. Abbott, Rev. Dr. Stoughton, Rev. Dr. Raleigh, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, Rev. Dr. G. Vance Smith, Rev. W. H. Fremantle, Sir J. C. Law- rence and others. — Addresses by Rev. Dr. James Martineau, Rev. J. Baldwin Brown, Mr. Thomas Hughes, the Dean of Westminster, Dr. William B. Carpenter, Rev. Dr. R. Laird Collier. The Celebration at Liverpool, 434-455 Meeting in St. George's Hall.— Addresses by Mr. H. A. Bright, Rev. J. H. Thorn, Rev. Charles Beard, Rev. William Binns. The Celebration at Manchester, 456-478 Meeting in the New Town Hall. — Memorial Discourse by Rev. Charles Wicksteed. — Remarks by Alderman C. S. Grundy, Rev. William Gaskell, Rev. Charles T. Poynting, Prof. Roscoe, Mr. John Dendy, Mr. E. C. Harding. The Celebration at Belfast, 479-489 Meeting in the Music Hall. — Reading of Letters by Rev. A. Gordon. — Resolutions and Remarks by Rev. J. C. Street, Mr. John Campbell, Rev. A. Gordon, Mr. John Rogers, Gen. Richmond, Rev. C. J. M'Alester. 8 CHANNING CENTENARY. I'AGES The Celebration at Aberdeen 490-495 Meeting in the Unitarian Church. — Remarks by Mr. G. T. Walters, Mrs. Carohne A. Soule, Rev. Joseph Vickery, Mr. Robert Adams, Mr. William Lindsay. Tributes ok the European Press, 496-510 A French Catholic on Channing, 511-514 The Influence of Channing in EuRorE, S15-532 Letter from Unitarians of Hungary. — Letter from Mr. John Fretwell. PREFACE. Soon after the celebration of the Channing Centenary, I was invited by Mr. Ellis, the publisher of this volume, to prepare for the press some account of the more interesting Channing memo- rial meetings. I accepted the invitation, and began immediately to collect materials for a book. Soon afterward, it was decided to make the volume somewhat more comprehensive in its plan than had been originally intended. The additional labor made neces- sary by this decision, the press of regular work, and the absence from home during the summer season of many of those who had taken part in the celebration, occasioned unexpected delays ; and the volume now appears nearly a year after the time at first de- cided upon. While the special enthusiasm awakened by the cen- tenary celebration has long since subsided, there has always been a quiet, steady interest in the study of Dr. Channing's life and writings, and this has probably not declined within the past year. The width and depth of public interest in the centenary anniver- sary surpassed the expectation of even Dr, Channing's most faith- ful disciples and ardent friends. As the anniversary day drew nigh, news came of careful arrangements for the appropriate cele- bration of the occasion in many of the chief cities and towns not only of America, but also of Great Britain and Ireland, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, and other European countries. After the event, the notices of the press revealed the unusual com- prehensiveness and catholicity in the plan and spirit of many of the meetings, the high quality of many of the memorial addresses, and a striking array of names of well-known writers and speakers who lO CHANNING CENTENARY. had taken part in tlie proceedings. Seldom before, it seemed, had so many noted and worthy men, of widely divergent religious opinions, joined their voices in a chorus of praise at once so hearty, so generous, so discriminating. To preserve and present in a form convenient for students, whether of Dr. Channing's life, character, and teachings, or of the present tendencies of liberal religious thought, this somewhat remarkable body of testimony, is the purpose of this volume. It contains reports, more or less complete, of the principal memorial meetings held in America, Great Britain, and Ireland. To have attempted more than this would have involved largely increased expense and more labor of all sorts than the editor could well give to the work. On the other hand, a book made up exclusively of selections from the more interesting addresses would not have served to indicate either the extent or the popular character of the interest in the occasion. Such a series of reports is inevitably somewhat monotonous in character ; but the monotony lies in this instance in the common theme, and not in its treatment, which is singularly rich and varied. Many of the reports plainly bear the marks of hasty preparation for the daily press. It has not been possible in some cases to ver- ify names and dates, and no attempt has been made to correct faults of style. If this volume shall serve in any degree to keep alive or quicken the interest in the study of Dr. Channing's life and teachings which the celebration of his centenary awakened, the editor will feel amply repaid for his pains. R. N. B. New York, May, 1881. INTRODUCTORY. The movement which culminated in the very general observance of the one-hundredth birthday of William Ellery Channing first manifested itself early in the year 1879. For some time previous to this date, the appropriateness of such a celebration had been freely discussed by members of the Unitarian society in Newport, R.I., where Channing was born ; but no steps were taken toward carrying out the idea, until the Rev. M. K. Schermerhorn, minister-in-charge of the Newport society, happily conceived and successfully executed the plan of a preliminary celebration in Newport of Dr. Channing's ninety-ninth birthday. The purpose of this movement was to arouse public attention, and so secure the widest and best possible celebration of the centennial, a year afterward. The preparations for this preliminary meeting, which was decided upon only a few weeks before the time appointed, were hastily but energetically made by Mr. Scher- merhorn ; and his efforts were crowned with complete suc- cess. The best account of this meeting appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser of April 8, 1879, from which we make the following extracts: — CELEBRATION OF CHANNING'S NINETY-NINTH BIRTHDAY. Thanks to the energy and enterprise of the Rev. M. K. Schermerhorn, pastor of the Unitarian Church in this city, where the Rev. C. T. Brooks, the great scholar, preached for over a quarter of a century, the meeting 12 CHANNING CENTENARY. to-niglit, commemorating the ninety-ninth birthday of William Ellery Channing, the great apostle of Unitarianism, was a complete success The meeting \vas held in order that the movement for the centennial cele- bration — one year from to-night — in this, the birthplace of Channing, migiit be inaugurated under the most favorable auspices. A feature of the services was that all the hymns and anthems were the composition of Unitarian authors: namely, "In the Cross of Christ I glory," by Sir John Bowring; " Nearer, my God, to Thee," by Sarah F. Adams ; " The Lord will come, and not be slow," by John Milton ; " Thy Kingdom come," by Harriet Martineau ; " Star of Bethlehem," by William CuUen Bryant ; " Universal Worship," by John Pierpont ; " Old and New," by John G. Whittier; and "God of Ages and of Nations," by Samuel Long- fellow. The church was crowded, and the floral decorations were very fine, there being a large "C" and the figure "99" in one large piece. The opening prayer was offered by the Rev. A. Manchester, of Provi- dence. After singing, selections of Scripture were read and prayer of- fered by the Rev. R. R. Shippen, Secretary of the American Unitarian Association of Boston. An anthem was then sung, after which the pastor of the church made introductory remarks, giving the object of the meeting and explaining the matters connected with the centennial anniversary next year. Governor Van Zandt was then asked to preside, the invitation being read by the pastor of the church. The Governor made a few eloquent and appropriate remarks, after which a large number of letters from prominent Unitarians were read by the pastor, and a poem appropriate to the occasion was read by the Rev. C. T. Brooks, and one by John W. Chadwick, of Brooklyn, N.Y. Mr. Chad- wick's poem is as follows : — "ALWAYS YOUNG FOR LIBERTY." [Channing's Memoir, Vol. III., p. 301.] Channing, when thou wast living among men, Thy pulse, that beat not always with the strong, Full tide of health, when thou didst hear of wrong O'erthrown, of freedom won, was once again As quick and warm as in thy childhood, when Thou heard'st old ocean's mighty thunder-song Beating familiar cliffs and crags along. And thou didst glow as ardently as then. Yes, thou wast always young for liberty ; INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 And, when a hundred years have passed away, Aye, and a thousand, from thy natal day, Thy never-dying spirit still shall be As young for freedom as when here of old In her great name thou wast the boldest of the bold. John W. Chadwick. Brooklyn, April 3, 1879. A poem written by the late Judge Green of Rhode Island (author of " Old Grimes "), read on the occasion of the death of Dr. Channing, in Providence, October 12, 1842, was read by the author's son-in-law, Gov- ernor Van Zandt. THE LETTERS. Several of the letters received are appended : — Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. April 4, 1S79, My dear Sir, — My engagements will prevent me from attending the meeting in honor of William Ellery Channing at Newport on Monday evening next. His countrymen may well hold the name of Channing in remembrance. By his eloquent speech and his unanimous persuasive writings, he greatly helped to destroy African slavery and to rid Christianity of superstitions with which it had been encumbered. These were good services, which may usefully be commemorated until the evils which Channing combated no longer afflict humanity. Very truly yours, Charles W. Eliot. Cambridge, Mass., April i, 1879. Rev. M. K. SCHERMERHORN : Dear Sir, — • I thank you for the invitation to take part in the service commemorative of the Rev. Dr. Channing. It will be impossible for me to be present ; but it seems to me eminently appropriate that this anni- versary shall be celebrated in Newport, which he so loved, and which is identified with his memory. Very truly yours, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 14 CHANNING CENTENARY, 14S Charles Street, Boston, April i, 1879. Kcv. Mr. SCIIERMERHORN, NEWPORT, R.I. : Afv dear Sir,— I wish it were in my power to be present next Monday evening, and add a word or two of my testimony of admiration for the character and services of Dr. Channing. The world owes a debt of gratitude to his sacred memory; and, to those of us who knew and loved him, his name will always call up the tenderest recollections. I always think of him in Wordsworth phrase as one " Attired With sudden brightness, like a man inspired " ; and the tones of his matchless voice are as fresh in my remembrance as if I heard them yesterday. His words are, indeed, "part and parcel of mankind." I trust your meeting on the 7th will be in every way a successful one. Cordially yours, James T. Fields. Cambridge, April 2, 1879. Afy dear Sir, — I wish with all my heart I could answer your request favorably, and take some part in your celebration of the birthday of Channing. Want of time and many pressing engagements render it impossible for me to write anything which would contribute to the interest of the occasion. I can only assure you of my sympathy and of my deep and lasting reverence for his memory. Yours sincerely, Henry W. Longfellow. New York, 232 East Fifteenth Street, April 2, 1879. My dear Mr. Schermerhorn, — Every year adds to the admiration, rev- erence, and gratitude that embalm the name of Channing. He treated the greatest of human interests in the greatest manner. There is noth- ing local, sectarian, or temporary in his writings or influence. He is still before, and not behind, the age, nearly forty years after his decease. He is waiting for fit audience, and not few, from the better future of human- INTRODUCTORY. 15 ity, already adopted into the short calendar of universal saints. His religious genius shines wherever the rarest of human endowments is prized. His peculiarity was to be able to wrest the greatest of themes from the hands of the language of technical theologians, and clothe it in words intelligible to all, while fully sustaining its dignity and its sacred- ness. Only a soul intimately acquainted with God could have spoken as he speaks. He, Hke his Master, had the full confidence of his own spiritual vision. He trusted the nature his Maker had given him, and revered it as a part of his reverence for the Creator. He knew no dis- tinction between reason and revelation which could put the human mind into servitude to the written Word. But his reverence for human nature humbled while it exalted him, and was utterly remote from that vain bugbear called " the pride of reason." While he shared in reason the nature of the universal mind, he was under it, and not over it. It was not his reason he honored, but Reason herself, which was God's and man's. The perfection of his culture and style is the enamel round his thoughts. Seldom has the highest religious thought and feehng found in prose so admirable and imperishable a vehicle. Like Milton's angels, he " can only by annihilating die." His usefulness is alike conservative and progressive. He furnishes both sail and ballast to our rational Christian cause. May God multiply his followers ! Fraternally yours, H. W. Bellows. New York, April 5. My dear Sir, — On my return last evening from an absence of several days, I found your note on my table. It will not be possible for me at this juncture of time to be in Newport to add my tribute toward the debt we all owe to Dr. Channing ; and it is too late to write such a letter as would in any degree do justice either to him or to my regard for him. The cause of liberal thinking and human doing in America, and abroad, too, received from him an impulse which is far from being yet exhausted or even comprehended. He builded better than he knew. He was a seer into things invisible, — a prophet of greater times than he himself divined. He was greater than himself. He increased in spiritual pro- portions while he lived, passing his theological limitations as he ad- vanced, until now we learn that at last he was inclined to adopt Christ l6 CHANNING CENTENARY. into humanity. One would like to hear what he might have to say on the social questions that vex us. One thing seems to me certain, that his woiil would be one of hope and faith. Sincerely yours, O. B. Frothingham. Philadelphia, No. 1426 Pine Street, April 2, 1879. My dear Mr. Schertnerhorti, — I thank you for the opportunity and privilege, which your invitation gives me, of paying my tribute to the rev- erend memory of Dr. Channing. The American Unitarian Association have done no better thing than in taking especial pains to disseminate his writings. Not only nor chiefly because they help to advance the cause of simple Unitarianism, but because their readers imbibe from them, almost unconsciously, principles and modes of thinking at once profoundly religious and perfectly free. A mind that has caught the spirit that pervades his works may be safely left to itself. If we find that he is only uttering our own thoughts, we nevertheless feel the in- spiration of his convictions. He once said to me of Waldo Emerson, " I do not know that he tells me anything new, but he inspires me," which is equivalent to the acknowledgment of a greater gift than any mere mode of thought, the gift of the spirit. Mr. Carlyle somewhere says that the writings of Dugald Stewart are an excellent introduction to the study of moral and intellectual philosophy. I have always thought that Dr. Channing's writings discharge a like introductory office to the whole broad domain of religious thought. Much as he has done for our liberal form of faith, he has done far more enduring service for perfect freedom of inquiry. His favorite theme — the dignity of human nature, the priceless sanctity of the human soul — rendered him incapable of imposing any restrictions upon the mind. In his Dudleian lecture, de- livered long before the question was started by George Ripley as to the value of miracles as evidences of a visitation. Dr. Channing freely admits that sincere Christians may reject the miracles of the New Testament, — an admission I well remember, as the venerable Dr. Osgood of New York, a stout Calvinist to be sure (my pastor then), wrote on the margin of a copy of the lecture, which I loaned him, against said admission, "This I deny." When the question arose concerning the miracles (which, by the way, INTRODUCTORY. 1/ has had results), Dr. Channing offended near and valued friends by saying that no heresy disturbed him so much as the free and full discus- sion of doubts and difificulties interested him. He was a free religionist, and pre-eminently a Christian believer, also. I remember his repeating to me, with no hint of dissent, a remark of Lucretia Mott's (who had just paid him a visit, and whom, by the way, we should canonize by and by, were we Catholics). She had expressed to him the hope that the time may come when "a good man" would be higher than "a good Christian," — a hope which we all may share, if the Christian name is not held to be as broad as humanity itself. It is not because his influence closed with his brief presence on earth and he is in danger of being forgotten, but for the very opposite reason, — because he is still living and active in the world of religious thought, — that you meet to commemorate him upon the spot which he loved. How pure his style was ! As pure and fresh as the midsummer air at New- port. How chaste his fancy ! He never pauses to elaborate figures of speech : he only suggests them. He had no literary ambition. Eminent critics might find fault with him. He gave them no heed. And that voice, so exquisitely flexible, quivering to every shade of emotion ! Yes, dear friends, cherish him in special and revering remembrance. Very truly and respectfully, W. H. FURNESS. Letters, some quite long, were also read from A. Bronson Alcott, l!loyd Garrison, Dr. Hedge and Dr. Peabody of Harvard College, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, Robert Collyer, Dr. Dewey, and the Rev. E. E. Hale. Telegrams were read from George William Curtis and from President White of Cornell University. The following paper was read and adopted. It will show clearly what the Unitarians of Newport propose to do for the centennial celebration: — At a meeting of the congregation of the First Unitarian Church of Newport, R.I., held on Sunday evening, April 6, 1878, of which William A. Clarke was appointed chairman and Thomas Coggeshall secretary, after due deliberation, the following was ordered to be presented at the close of the services of the ninety-ninth birth-anniversary of William Ellery Channing, to be held on Monday evening, April i, 1879, and the approval of those present on that occa- sion solicited thereto: — First. — It was unanimously voted that we, Unitarians of Newport, R.I., ear- 2 l8 CHANNIXG CENTENARY. ncstly desiring that the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing mav be celebrated in this his native city, and in order that, for this proposed celebration, timely and fitting preparations may be made, do hereby resolve that a committee of twelve be appointed, to be known as The Chaiming Cnitenuial Committee- of Xtivport, R.I., whose business it shall be to inaugurate and carrv out such preparations as may seem to them appropriate and desirable. Second. — It was unanimously voted that this committee shall consist of the following persons: namely, the Rev. C. T. Brooks, William A. Clarke, John T. Bush, Thomas Coggeshall, F. A. Pratt, William B. Sherman, Edmund Tweedy, John G. Weaver, Mrs. A. P. Baker, Dr. A. F. Squire, Mrs. C. T. Hop- kins, Mrs. Henry C. Stevens. Third. — It was unanimously voted that the Unitarians of Newport, R.I., do hereby cordially invite the Unitarian denomination to join with us on the seventh day of April, 1880, in celebrating, in this his native city, the one hun- dredth birth-anniversary of William Ellery Channing, offering the hospitalities of our city and homes to all who may be pleased to come, and promising our hearty co-operation in the carrying out of whatever arrangement may be sug- gested to us as appropriate and wise. Fourth. — It was unanimously voted that this invitation be presented to the Unitarian public through the hands of the secretary and officers of the Amer- ican Unitarian Association, accompanied with the information that a local com- mittee of twelve has been appointed in Newport, of which the Rev. C. T. Brooks is chairman, with full power to act in co-operation with any central committee which may be appointed as a committee of the Unitarian denomina- tion at large. THE CENTENARY CELEBRATION. NEWPORT, R.I. Soon after the successful celebration of Dr. Channing's ninety-ninth birthday, the Unitarian society of Newport for- mally resolved, after due deliberation, to undertake the so- licitation of subscriptions for a Channing Memorial Church. Committees were appointed to take the matt3r in hand; and, after much hard work and a great deal of patient waiting, subscriptions amounting to nearly fifty thousand dollars were secured. Preparations were accordingly made to lay the corner-stone of the proposed edifice on the centennial day, A suitable site, on Pelham Street, opposite the Old Mill, was secured ; and the seventh day of April found every- thing in readiness for the ceremonies which had been care- fully arranged. The celebration began with a meeting on Tuesday even- ing, April 6, under the auspices of the Channing Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches. A large con- gregation filled the Unitarian church, which was beautifully dressed with plants and flowers. After an anthem by the 20 CHANNING CENTENARY. choir and the readins: of the Scriptures, the congregation sang Longfellow's hymn, " O Life that maketh all things new!" The Rev. William H. Channing, of London, offered prayer. After a second anthem by the choir, the Rev. Dr. G. W. Hosmer, of Newton, Mass., preached an eloquent sermon from the words, "All my springs are in Thee." In concluding, he said: "It is good for us to be here. Mighty influences are hanging over us like rain-clouds. We are here to-night waiting for inspiration and guidance, as the children of Israel waited at the foot of Sinai for the pattern ideals of duty and life there to be shown them. That re- vered brother, the prophet of liberal thought, the Moses of our Exodus, whose centennial birthday comes to-morrow, thirty-seven years ago went up out of our sight. He has not been forgotten. His word has gone out through the Eng- lish-speaking world ; but we who knew him need to have our memories quickened, and younger men will gladly open their minds and hearts to his influence. Indeed, how great that influence has been ! To-morrow, its story will be told. Who like him has gone up into the mount of aspiration, — the strong thinker, prayerful and tender-hearted as a little child, and so hungering and thirsting after righteousness ; and who with such consecrated purpose has hastened down with his mountain thoughts to uplift the world ! Oh, come, let us sanctify ourselves for the morrow, that the spirit of Channing, which has been as air and light and warmth to us, a greater blessing than we know how to appreciate, may more deeply inspire us and bless our children's children." Mr. Isaac Littlefield, of New Bedford, then sang, " I will lift up mine eyes." After prayer, the meeting closed with the singing of Whittier's hymn, beginning, " O pure re- formers, not in vain your trust in human kind! " The services of the centennial day opened in the opera house shortly before eleven o'clock; and all the exercises CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 21 of the day, except the formal ceremonies of laying the corner-stone, were also held there. The florists of the city contributed from their greenhouses a profusion of flowers and plants, which were artistically arranged upon the stage. The most conspicuous feature of the floral dis- play was the decoration of the reading-desk. This was completely covered with bright buds, and in front of it was an inscription in white flowers upon a bed of green, "1780 — Channing — 1880." A large-size oil painting of Dr. Channing stood at the left of the stage. The exercises were opened with singing by a double quartette. The hymn selected was one written by Theodore Parker, beginning with the words " O thou great Friend to all the sons of men." Dr. G. W. Hosmer at the close of the hymn read a short passage of Scripture. The Rev. Dr. E. E. Hale offered prayer, after which the response, " Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee," was beautifully sung by Mr. Lit- tlefield. The Rev. Dr. Bellows then began his discourse. He was pleasantly interrupted at the very beginning by the confusion attending the seating of a train-load of people who arrived from Boston ; and again, in the middle of his dis- course, he paused, and called upon the audience to rise and sing a congregational hymn written for the occasion by the Rev. Charles T. Brooks. Dr. Bellows spoke for more than two hours ; and the audience paid a great tribute to his elo- quence, and showed its deep interest in his theme, by listen- ing with close and apparently untiring attention from the beginning to the end. The opera house was filled to its utmost capacity. Probably about two thousand persons were present. 2 2 CHANNING CENTENARY, MEMORIAL DISOOUESE, By HENEY W. BELLOWS, D.D. " He was a burning and a shining light : and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light." — John v. 35. It was when John the Baptist's light was fading in the glory of the newly risen Sun of Righteousness that Jesus bore this generous testimony to his predecessor's lustre. He characterized, in words that have become immortal, the flame of that stern prophet who had heralded the way for his own appearing ; but at the same time intimated that its fires had paled, like a torch whose oil had burned low. The Sun had risen, the torch was no longer useful. We have come together to bless and praise a modern prophet, who, like many other saints who have been the burning and shining lights of their generation, was the herald of a new and brighter day. But it is not his mem- ory chiefly that we recall. It is a living light that we are to contemplate, brighter than it ever was ; it is not a torch that has gone out, but a star that shines on, guiding our present way, that we meet to rejoice in the light of. Of Channing, we do not say he was, but he is, a burning and a shining light ; and the season has not gone by, it has not even reached its meridian, when the Church and the world are willing to rejoice in his light. On this occasion, the centennial of his birth, and in the place of his birth, it falls to me to be the spokesman of the love and honor in which his life and teachings, his character and his services to the Church and the world, are held by his townsmen, and especially by those who have inherited and have sought to extend and perpetuate what was special in his theological opinions. It is true his birthplace was CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 23 not the principal seat of his life and labors ; and it is still more true that no sect or denomination has any exclusive right in his fame. He belonged to the order of Christians called Unitarians, but he belonged still more to the Church Universal ; and nothing would have grieved him more than any attempt to shut him in to any enclosure that shuts out the pure and good of any name, Catholic or Protestant, Trinitarian or Unitarian. His theological opinions, in my judgment, upon a very recent careful reconsideration of them, prove much more systematic, definite, and positive than it is common to allow ; but they are also much more comprehensive, inclusive, and inconsistent with the secta- rian spirit or form than they are sometimes assumed to be. They are profoundly conservative and profoundly radical, holding on to all that is eternal, going down to all that is eternal, and going on to all that is eternal. In the strength of his moral intuitions and convictions, and without antici- pating many results of later criticism, or using the methods which a larger learning has employed, he simply ignored and set aside all that hampered his full intellectual and moral freedom, and slowly evolved a system of religious thought, which has recommended itself more and more to spiritual minds in all branches of the Church and in all Christian countries, — a system so profound, simple, and lofty, so humane and natural, and yet so Christ-like and divine, that it lacks dogmatic and ecclesiastical features almost as much as the Sermon on the Mount or the personal teachings of the Saviour ; enters almost as little into scholastic and tech- nical questions, and avoids, by reducing to their proper in- significance, most of the sectarian disputes of the Church. Channing was a theologian, but not of the old pattern. He studied God, and reported his ways and his will after a manner that had not been recognized in former schools of theology. This indeed was his chief service, that he broke 24 CHANNING CENTENARY. with the old theological methods, and refused to settle the controversies of the Church by an appeal to Scriptures and creeds, authoritative over the mind and heart of man, and not merely authoritative within them, and by concurrence with their testimony. He was fully convinced that the pre- vailing system of dogmatic and ecclesiastical Christianity — essentially the same in the Romish and the Protestant His- torical Church — was contrary to the teaching of the spirit of Christ, contrary to the light of natural reason and con- science (which indeed has been offered as the proof of its divinity and of man's total corruption), and that the power of the gospel could be restored only by returning to Jesus' method of teaching it, a method that respected, honored, and relied upon man's essential relations to God, instituted in his rational and moral constitution. Channing recognized no theology based upon a revelation which by interpretation separated Christianity from the gen- eral history of humanity, and placed it, and must ever keep it, in antagonism to Philosophy and Life. He did not con- sider theology as the study of God, within the covers of the Bible, as if that were a book foreign to human intelligence, and altogether above and aside from it. He resisted stoutly, from the irrepressible freedom of his own soul, all compulsory allegiance to the Church, to the creeds, to the past, to Jesus, nay, to God himself, and strove to emancipate all other souls from this prostration before mere power and authority. It was not necessary to bind him with cords to the altar, if the Being worshipped there was entitled, as he thought he was, by his holiness, justice, and goodness, to the sacrifice of his heart. Freely, joyfully, humbly, and with his whole soul, he bowed before truth, worth, goodness, purity, sacredness, and in the testimonies of his own spiritual nature he saw them, to an infinite extent, in the Great Source of his own moral experiences. But not one joint would he bend before the CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 2$ threats of mere power, or the assumptions of an authority not guaranteed by his rational and moral nature. We are not left to speculate about his fundamental ideas. They are not only given with transparent simplicity and unfaltering courage, and with a reiteration that to many is wearisome in his collected writings ; but he has prefaced his own works, almost at the conclusion of his life, with a deliberate statement, in which he distinctly, and with the most solemn emphasis, calls attention to the two ideas which he wishes to be regarded as the dominant notes and the master-keys of his whole system of religious and politi- cal thinking and feeling. One is unqualified reverence for human nature ; the other, boundless faith in freedom. They are easily interchangeable, and become in his writings one and the same. Human nature is worthy of unspeakable, immeasurable reverence, because God informs it, because it reveals God, because reason is the intellectual life of God and man, and conscience the moral life of God, which he dignified man by inviting him to share. Man knows God only because he is made in his rational and moral image. God is as much dependent upon our moral and rational powers for worship, communion, and filial love, as we are dependent on his holiness and loveliness and paternal char- acter for an object which is truly adorable. And our intel- lectual and moral powers owe their worth, their development, and their glory to freedom. This is God's own everlasting glory and life, — freedom. Were he not free in his holiness, his goodness, his thoughts, he could not command the love and reverence of free beings ; and were they not free to offer him a voluntary, a rational, moral homage, their wor- ship would be mechanical and worthless. Civilization is nothing but the triumph of freedom, and that is the victory of Reason and Conscience. Unreason — the fruit of self- will, ignorance, passion, prejudice — shows itself in barbar. 26 CHANNING CENTENARY. isms of a more or less atrocious kind ; and society, even now, in its least deplorable forms, is irrational and barbaric. It is not yet based upon, and is not characteristically con- ducted in, reverence for Reason, but rests still on force, on cupidity, on fear. Governments are not strong where they should be strong, in their reliance on what is true and right, but in their appeal to party passion, the love of power, and national animosities. Mankind do not glory in their nat- ure as rational and moral, but in its external circumstances. They build up artificial distinctions of condition and caste ; they glory in luxury and ostentation ; they belittle them- selves with costume and equipage and titles and state. And if Reason, in the occasional form of triumphant logic or vigorous literature, obtains respect, it is often in disre- gard of the only element that makes Reason wholly worthy of reverence, — its subordination to Conscience. Can that state of society be regarded as in any but an inchoate con- dition, in which the quality that aloHe makes God godlike or venerable is made secondary and subordinate, and that by an immense and all-characterizing step, to what is con- venient, pleasant, favorable to immediate interests, or flatter- ing to mean and interested desires .-* Where is the city or community in which the right and the good are enshrined in the inmost heart ; governing respect and affection, de- ciding social station, making and executing the laws ? If God be moral perfection, must he not expect and demand that the race made in his image should be aiming steadily to make justice and goodness prevail and reflect his holi- ness .-* But this justice and goodness cannot be forced. They perish, and discharge themselves of their essence when in bondage or under force. Hence in Channing's eyes any state of commotion, revolution, or contention was preferable to intellectual formalism and compulsory decorum. No atheistic or infidel opinions were so much to be dreaded CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 2/ as a compulsory formalism of creed. That was the smother- ing of the rational and moral nature. Free, it might wander, but it would learn by its wanderings, and at any rate keep itself alive by its motion, and might some day return. But slavery of the will was moral death. The exalted view of human nature, which Channing had, was not only not opposed to, but it grew out of his sublime sense of the greatness and glory of God. Man learned God's being and his moral and rational attributes from the constitu- tion of his own soul, not from external nature. This was the chief glory of man's own spirit, that it revealed an Infinite Spirit ! Self-reverence was only the reflection of the awe which God's holiness or moral grandeur kindled in a being who found himself capable of recognizing the Divine exist- ence and character, by the mysterious power of reason and conscience, which at once made him a partaker in the Divine nature, and were the only instruments of his faith and wor- ship. That mind is one and tJie same essence in God, aftgels, and men, is a fundamental postulate with him. That the finite mind is of the nature and essence of the Infinite mind, he everywhere assumes as the very first condition of all knowl- edge of God or intercourse with him. The later or more modern difficulties, which have arisen from the recognition of the limitation of the finite as vitiating all assumed knowl- edge of the Infinite, he not only does not recognize, but his faith, his character, his service to humanity, are due to the utter freedom of his soul from this most fatal and ultimate form of scepticism. That the finite was cut off from the Infi- nite by its conditions was to him a proposition as meaningless as that the bay was cut off from the ocean, or could have no communication with the ocean, because it was a bay and not the ocean itself. The human soul was open to God, who flowed into it in man's rational and moral nature ; and more and more, as the moral and rational nature grew, expanded, and 28 CHANNING CENTENARY. became capable of receiving it. There was no pantheism in this sentiment of God's presence in man, for that involves a notion against which Channing's whole nature revolted, — the notion that man loses himself by admitting God into his soul. According to him, man is freer, the more nearly he approaches, the more truly he is possessed by, the Infinite Freedom. It is only in freedom, in the exercise of an unen- slaved will, that man can form any true conception of God, who is freedom itself. But it is the glory of God that his freedom is the freedom of his own zvill ; and zvill exists, and can exist, only in a person. God is a Person, and as a per- son cannot be confused or confounded with other persons. Man is a person, — tending, however, by his weakness of will, to degenerate into a thing. This indeed is the radical evil of sin. It tends to fall, nay, it is itself a fall from that sense of moral freedom without which moral obedience cannot be rendered. The more man becomes like his Maker, the more truly he is a Person ; and God's personality lies in essence, in the fact that his truth and goodness are always matters of choice, while his choice is always truth and goodness. Noth- ing could have been more dreadful to Channing than the idea of a God who was only the name for inexorable laws, infinite but blind forces, without self-consciousness, without freedom, without feeling, and that men were free only by feigning freedom, or ignoring the bonds that hold them fast in a fatal necessity. Channing's sense of God's goodness and holiness were so utterly dependent on his sense of his freedom that it became impossible for him to think God pleased with any bondage in his children, or any dominion of fear in their worship and service. As God was free, so his children, to know and love and worship him, must be free also, — free to think, free to act, free to worship. This made him the life-long foe of all systems of government in state or church, whose essence CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 29 was conformity, the suppression of free thought, free wor- ship, free will. He dreaded the effort to overawe the indi- vidual soul by the weight and pressure of numbers ; to con- fine the present within the limits of the past ; to quote stale precedents against fresh inspirations ; to discourage new hopes by instancing old failures ; to limit and stereotype the creeds. He had a boundless faith in God's great and good intentions toward the human race ; the infinite love of an Infinite Person — owing his own rational and moral glory to his character and his freedom — toward his human offspring, who were to be made great and glorious after his own pat- tern, by becoming continually more free and more reverent of others' freedom ; more just, and loving more to be just ; more obedient, and more willing in their obedience ; more his children, and more themselves at the same time. This is the key to the ideality, the moral enthusiasm, the hopeful- ness of Channing's faith. No one had a keener, deeper sense of individual or social imperfection, folly, and sin than he. His censures, his groans, his yearnings over the inade- quate attainments, the low standards, the dull feelings of his fellow-creatures ; his inexorable determination to accept no excuses or apologies in place of repentance and newness of life ; his severe demands on himself ; his tonic remon- strances with the shortcomings of his best friends ; his jealousy of any praise of himself or his doings ; his arraign- ment of immoral but commanding characters worshipped by the world about him ; of the shallow respectability that mis- took itself for morality ; of the traditional acquiescence that called itself faith ; of the love of freedom that coexisted with the allowance of domestic slavery in his own country ; of the business cupidity that covered itself with the name of enterprise and public spirit ; of the faith in free thought that allowed the prejudices or even the just prepossessions of numbers to persecute individual peculiarity or even eccen- 30 CHANNING CENTENARY. tricity of opinion, — all this habitual censoriousness or exact- ingness was nothing but the reverse side of the immense confidence he had in human possibilities, based upon the relations man bore, in his very nature, to a God vi^hose pow- ers, whose love, whose benignity toward man were bounded only by his Divine purpose of keeping man's manhood in him, and never allowing him, either as a race or an indi- vidual, to be content or satisfied in any state of life or happi- ness short of the truly human. Men sometimes talk of Channing's ignorance of the neces- sary conditions of human life ; of his secluded separateness from the world ; of his imperfect acquaintance with the pres- sure of material necessities, the spring of animal passions and appetites ; the necessary preoccupation of the masses of men and women with immediate things. He seems almost like an anchorite, a hermit, a pillar-saint, in the fewness of his wants, the wonder he expresses at the low pleasures men find so attractive, and in the monotonous concentration of his thoughts upon the moral and the spiritual. But the truth is, it was not that Channing did not see all this ; but that, seeing it, he saw what is still more real and vastly more powerful and inviting : he saw God, and saw man's likeness to him, and his capacity for realizing it, and saw that men mostly did 7iot see it, and that it was his office and privilege to draw their attention to it with all urgency. Nobody ever lived since Jesus who recognized the evil in men and the world with a deeper, tenderer sorrow, and still retained so perfect a possession and enjoyment of his own faith and hope for man and society, in God and his gracious purposes. There is no despondency in his complaints, no disrespect in his upbraidings, nay, no impatience in his enthusiasm. He had more than the optimist's content. His confidence is not in powers he does not know, in a God he blindly trusts, in purposes he cannot sympathize with ! He CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 3 1 has grasped the nature of the Divine method, apprehends its implements, uses them, and knows their temper and edge. It is because mind is at work, and is a Divine instrument ; because truth and justice exist in perfection in God, and are revealed in man's conscience ; because love is almighty, and has its delegates in human hearts, — that he expects results from civilization, and a stage of progress that will make our present state appear barbarous ; and that he appeals so urgently, so boldly, so pleadingly, to men to keep the weapons of the Divine armory open to their use, and make successful war on the lusts, the ignorance, the moral sloth, the dull content that belate the spring of heaven on earth, and perpetuate the winter of human discontent. If other human spirits had seen the vision of God's powers and prom- ises in the human soul and its latent capacities, as Channing saw them, he would never have seemed visionary and extrav- agant. It was the glory of this burning and shining light, that the fogs of our fleshly and self-indulgent civilization — built on the urgency of what is animal and superficial — did not quench its own exalted beams. Channing was an ideal- ist in essence. The ideal was for him the only real, and he treated it as such. So did his Master before him ; so have all the prophets, and so must all those do who have the heavenly vision of God in their eyes. It is not they who are fanatics and dreamers, but we who are asleep, or with only one eye yet open. They see and know what man is, and can prove himself to be, if he will — because he is the child of God by a real spiritual generation, and has his Father's attri- butes at his command; can claim and exercise his moral freedom and his rational nature. They see and know that it is nothing new and strange that is wanted to regenerate the world ; only more of a kind they already have and know ; more of the truly human yet divine sentiment of justice and love. Given a million hearts and minds, a million wills like J- CHANNING CENTENARY, Channing's, — nay, like any humble, loving, holy follower of Jesus, — and instantly an unspeakable regeneration — a de- scent of the kingdom of God — appears! Things become easy, that were before impossible. War, that we cannot kill by force, dies of shame. Selfishness, that we regard as indigenous and indestructible, turns into justice, mercy, and the enjoyment of others' happiness as the truest extension of our own, and disappears from the world, just as it disap- pears in every truly regenerate household. All that has ever been realized in any one man is possible in families ; all that has ever triumphed in families may triumph in communities. Every true community predicts the universal emancipation of the race ; and the race, glorified out of its own nature, — which is the gift of God, — foretells more and larger and nobler measures of perfectness in the boundless worlds and times yet to be inherited. With these exalted views of God's freedom, justice, and goodness, as the source and perpetual inspiration and inex- haustible fountain of human powers and hopes, no wonder that Channing had the profoundest and most cheerful faith in the earthly and the celestial destiny of humanity. There was no caprice in the purposes, no limitation in the love, no uncertainty in the direction of the Divine Mind. And equally there was no incapacity to receive God's truth, no constitutional antagonism to it, no essential alienation, no hopeless break with God in human nature, — which was indissolubly connected with and an echo or image of the Divine nature. The clear and full declaration, or rather illumination, of the essential relations of God and man in Christianity, as founded in the oneness of mind and the sovereignty of moral truth, made the gospel of Christ the joy and confidence of Channing's heart, and secured it the allegiance and devotion CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 33 of his life. Because Jesus in his own life and character, and by his precepts and parables, made God's truth to be justice and holiness directed by Fatherly love, and man's life to be obedience to truth and duty, which he was not only capable of rendering, but capable of enjoying, and finding to be his chief and permanent bliss ; because Jesus made God's Fatherhood and man's sonship correlative, transcendent truths, and illustrated them in his own person and character, Channing fastened his faith and affections upon Christianity as the divinest method of advancing the kingdom of God on earth, and the salvation of man for time and eternity. As he understood or interpreted it, it was in exact accordance with what the highest human thought and feeling would wish it to be and expect it to be. It met and satisfied his intellect and his conscience. It presented God in the most holy, just, and merciful character. It honored humanity by exhibiting it in the perfect sinlessness and disinterested love and self-sacrifice of Jesus. Its respect for human freedom was complete ; its method, not force, but persuasion, ex- ample, and light. It made certain the imi mortality for which humanity had only hoped, and by this as.urance gave to man that dignity which only a nature destined to a much fuller unfolding than was yet possible on earth could pos- sess. It blended morality and piety for the first time in an indissoluble unity. It rebuked worldliness, and humbled the pride of wealth and station, and the worse pride of intellect and self-will. It abased the high and exalted the lowly. It made men brothers by a tie stronger than blood, whether of race or of family. It discountenanced war and violence. It founded its hopes on the triumphs of mind and heart, of moral truth and love, and not on the schools of science and philosophy, not on the sword nor the power of artificial organization. It was the noblest and most exalted honor 34 CHANMNG CENTENARY. ever paid to humanity that God in Christ addressed not its fears, not its passions, not its dogmatic hopes, not its national prejudices, but its highest and holiest powers, its reason and its conscience — what is universal, uniting, and elevating — what is godlike and divine — and not what is attractive to self-interest, gratifying to self-importance, flat- tering to selfish hopes. Christian to the core, Channing had absolutely nothing of the Churchman in him, — less, possi- bly, than would have been wise, — for he held the Church responsible for a great dogmatic and ecclesiastical system, which had buried the simplicity of Christ's gospel beneath a mass of opinions and customs revolting to his mind and heart. His Christianity was essentially that which fell only from Christ's lips, and was illustrated in his life, before the Apostle to the Gentiles had given it the dogmatic shape of his ingenious intellect, or the powers of the world had seized it, to forge from it a new instrument of political order and ambition. But, simple and profoundly rational as Channing's ideas of Christianity were, they were central and commanding, and they were historical and supernatural. For him Jesus was no mythic growth of marvel-loving times ; he was no uncom- missioned, self-appointed prophet, owing his authority to his greater wisdom and insight. Channing fully believed him to be sent, in the ordinary sense of the Church, from heaven — from God's immediate presence. He believed him to have been pre-existent. He thought him to owe his sinless- ness not simply to his nature, but to his special and personal relations to God, — relations which we do not yet fully enjoy. He did not regard him chiefly as an example for us, in his own temptations and trials, because we could not understand his resources nor enter into his experience. But it would not be just to call him an Arian without explanation, for he CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 35 did not think Christ's nature different from ours, but only the same in a higher stage of development ; nor had he any perception or recognition of what has been called the double nature of Christ, — the divine and the human. He knew but one form of spiritual nature, — God's own. It was mind, and mind was rational and moral. It might have, it did have, different stages of development. It was eternally perfect in God. It was eternally capable of development in his chil- dren. God's glory was eternally to give, and man's eternally to receive it. Jesus Christ had, according to his view, a created existence ; but it was older than man's. He brought his moral and spiritual perfections with him. He did not grow into them as we grow, nor were they limited by what hinders us. I am bound, in simplicity, to say that I do not share these views of Christ's pre-existence ; nor is the moral and spiritual exaltation of Jesus in my view dependent upon the place or the date of his first creation ; nor do I think that Channing, judging by the views his disciples have since attained, would have continued in them, if he had lived to our day. His own spiritual philosophy ought, it seems to me, to have made him, of all men, readiest to believe that a being made in the Divine image might, occasionally at least, live in the Divine likeness free from sin ; nor can I see what should prevent us from believing that spiritual or moral genius, like intellectual, may be exceptional, without being abnormal. We do not think Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Mi- chael Angelo, Shakespeare, pre-existed, because their genius is unparalleled : why Jesus } Genius, poetic, artistic, execu- tive, is always unaccountable and always exceptional ; but it is never other or more than human. I hope and trust that other sinless beings have lived besides Jesus. Beings, at any rate, there have been in whom no sin appeared ; and I should hold it a great deduction from my reverence for 36 CHANNING CENTENARY. Christ and luimanity if I were compelled to leave Jesus out of the ranks of our common manhood. But let us not forget that Channing's views about the pre- existence and the miraculous, in which he was a firm be- liever, and the difference between the origin of Christianity and other religions, only emphasize the pure rationality and ethical and spiritual quality of his characteristic views. " Be- lieving in the miracles, he neither magnified them nor rested in them. Believing in the pre-existence, it was not this that gave Christianity its dignity and importance in his eyes, and he did not require these opinions from others as a test of their faith. They were not of the essence of his own faith. It was not the mysterious nor the abnormal nor the irrational ; not the ontological and metaphysical, nor the supernatural, that he valued. It was what was rational, in- telligible, rulable, imitable. He accepted certain views which we might reject, as being to him most in accord with the record. He held the record in a more literal respect than modern scholars of his general views. But I feel bound to say that none of his views brought him any nearer to the orthodoxy of the visible church than it did Parker or Martineau ; and that those who use him to disfavor free in- quiry or to buoy up sinking dogmas, or to stop theological progress cannot be careful students of his life and writings, and do not illustrate his freedom. He had no such views of the difiference between the truly human and the truly divine as would have made even interesting to him the ordinary empty questions as to how far the same mind can partake of the divine and the human. That question was settled in his fundamental theory of the identity of mind. There was no difference, except in degree of development, between Jesus and other men, as the only difference in nature between God and man is that God is eternally father, and man eternally his CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT, 37 child, by rational and moral generation, or identity of nature and derivation of essence. Channing never permitted theo- retical differences to diminish or weaken the significance of moral and spiritual agreements. There is no evidence that he valued anybody more for sharing his views, or depreciated anybody for opposing or denying them, if in a good spirit. If he had a choice, it was for the society of those who had some new or divergent view to present. He had a wondrous confidence in the power of truth to protect itself ; in the safety of free discussion ; and in the possible importance of the new light which even very young and unrecognized spir- its might at any time shed upon questions regarded by most as closed and settled. Like the mothers in Israel, who re- garded every son as the possible Messiah, Channing hailed every independent and earnest mind as the possible opener of some new and wide door into the kingdom of God. He was equally tolerant of others' opinions, and cautious and docile in his own. He thought that new truth was yet to break out of God's Word, and that with new truth would come new means of advancing the delayed triumphs of the gospel, which were identical with the progress of true civili- zation. It is easy to see why, with these views, Channing should be claimed both by conservatives and by radicals in the lib- eral ranks, andwhy even enlightened and spiritual believers of the so-called orthodox faiths should be able to cull from his writings passages which savor of the old system. He was no destructive, no despiser of the past ; and he retained and breathed all that was sacred and divine in the piety that had been associated with the old opinions. Now and then, it is true, as in his famous Baltimore sermon, and in his equally great New York sermon, he made the strongest, most direct, and most damaging assaults upon the Trinitarian and Cal- 38 CHANNING CENTENARY. vinistic systems of opinion, — assaults which, for courage, explicitness, and even for offensiveness to the feelings and prejudices of the Christian world, have never been exceeded. But controversy of a textual or ecclesiastical kind was his strange work. He dreaded its effects upon himself and others, and only engaged in it when driven by the stress of his position or by his noble necessity to vindicate the free- dom of opinion and the claims to respect of his own be- leaguered company of fellow-believers. Controversy bears no greater proportion to the affirmative part of his writings than Jesus' own contradiction of Jewish and Pharisaic errors does to his positive teaching of religious truth. And there- fore as Jesus has continued to be honored, loved, and quoted by rationalists and supernaturalists, by Catholics and Protest- ants, by churchmen and anti-churchmen, by Calvinists and Arminians and Pelagians, because the bulk of his teaching is universal, uncontroversial, and of that spirit and temper which time does not stale, nor place color, nor other differ- ences affect ; so Channing has been placed, by a wide con- sent, in the calendar of the Universal Church, — the ortho- dox Christian world condoning his denial of several of its most generally received opinions, in recollection of the glo- rious testimony he bore in his writings and his life to the beauty of holiness, the might of divine truth, and the transcendent importance of the Christian life. None have been able to escape the power of his spirituality, the earnest- ness of his faith, the purity and elevation of his character. It has deodorized his dogmatic offenses, and made his con- troversial writings forgotten or forgiven by all except those who have nothing to forgive or forget, still thinking them the necessary and invaluable expression of theological con- viction, on which his own vital faith and his lofty personal character rested, and in which the Christian world will finally unite and agree. CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 39 I have already given more time than I intended to the con- sideration of Channing as a theologian and the essence of his opinions. Let us now turn to the contemplation of his gen- ius and character, or the measure of the man himself. In some respects, his views, as already set forth, are them- selves the best description of the genius and character of the man. Considering the date of his settlement in the Chris- tian ministry and the prevailing opinions of his contempora- ries, the depth and breadth of his opinions, the freedom of his intellect, and the unconventional, undogmatic, and unec- clesiastical character of his thoughts are the indications of a mind of the first order, — possessing an authority in the clearness, soberness, and calmness of its own vision and its own convictions, that liberates it from local, accidental, and merely custom-made bonds. Rarely has any religious thinker appeared who was less obviously the child of his time and circumstances, whether in his opinions, 'his spirit, or his ca- reer. He called no man master. The religious views he held were not in accord with those of his kindred ; he was not the disciple of the great men nearest to him in his youth, like Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Stiles, whom he greatly honored. He was not the echo and representative of the prevailing moderation, and compromised or emasculated orthodoxy, the Arianism or obscurantism of the growing liberalism of his region and time. He was utterly out of sympathy with Priestley and Belsham, though appreciative of the merits of Price, and probably more indebted to Butler than to any single mind. He honored Buckminster, but did not partake the scholastic or highly literary spirit, which in his time was giving to Boston the name of the modern Athens, and was arraying the liberal pulpit in the silken robes of academic culture, — the generation of mellifluous pulpit oratory, mild and correct, which Kirkland illustrated and Everett carried to its culminating perfection. 40 CHANNING CENTENARY. He was not the close friend and companion of the able and cultivated men who made Boston the seat and centre of conservatism in everything except theology, — in classicism, in oratory, in rhetoric, in taste, in manners, — and in theol- ogy, the seat of a cautious, ethical, or secularized divinity, — lukewarm and inoffensive, difficult to define and impossible to propagate. Himself exquisitely refined, sensitive to beauty and sublimity in nature and literature ; fond of good letters, read in poetry, with a taste for the classics and for the fine arts ; the first scholar in his class, and at eighteen the chosen writer of the address with which the students hailed Presi- dent Adams in his stiff resistance to French policy ; with early promise of high success in the legal profession, for which his friends and classmates predestined him, or else for a great political career, — he never was the echo or the mouthpiece of the special tendencies or predilections of his day and generation, or of the city where he spent his life. And it was because his impulse came from a higher source than any local or temporary stream. So far as he was not the child of God, he must be pronounced the son of his own genius, and not of his time and parentage and neighborhood, his sect or his party. And his genius was one of intense self-possession, — making his own thoughts more engrossing and commanding than any thoughts he found in books, or any influences that were about him. He found within him- self ideas, feelings, faculties, that fastened his attention upon themselves, not as being Jiis in the egotistic sense, but as being wonderful suggestions and keys, the sublime represen- tatives of what he shared with humanity and with God. What he was and saw and felt in his own nature gave him his inspiration, his mission, and his special career. There was nothing indirectly derived, second-hand, or traditional, and merely bred of local contagion, in his views or in his CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 4I methods. He was an original force, commanded by his vision and conviction, and from a height which no fortresses of venerable custom or of elegant prejudice overlooked, much less overawed. More individual than if his individuality had not lacked all egotism and all eccentricity, all caprice and self-allowance, he had little power of co-operation, little faith in organization, and little dependence on others' sympathy and applause, and as little susceptibility to censure. The most sanctified of his clerical contemporaries, he was the least professional in his temper and spirit ; the most Christian in his heart and life, the least ecclesiastical. He loved Boston best of all the world, — if Newport may not to-day claim the warmest place in his heart, — yet he was not a Bostonian in the most characteristic sense of that term. He did not share its distrust for genius untrained in academic lore ; its bated breath for new men not baptized into Harvardian waters ; its impatience with strength, if it were shaggy and rugged ; its marvellous solidity of social conformity, and the breeding in and in of its tastes and convictions. Respecta- bility, good family, self-consistency, decorum, moderation, the lares around that honored hearth, were not his household gods. Far be it from me to disparage the noble self-suffi- ciency and compact perfectness of the place of my own birth and breeding. But, however much it may have been or may still be deplored, it is due to the right measurement of Chan- ning to say that he was not the typical Bostonian of his day or of any day, and that what he did in and for Boston was usually against the grain of its characteristic and governing tastes and wishes. He gave his genius to Boston and man- kind. He did not shape it to suit Boston or his generation, but to satisfy his nature and conscience, and to honor God and his service among men. The same may be said of his great though younger con- 42 CHANNING CENTENARY. temporaries, Emerson, Parker, Garrison. It was a fortunate thing for Channing that he was driven to Virginia, the old heart of the countsy, to earn his independence, and there to settle his opinions and his profession. There, in comparative solitude, and beyond the reach of local influences, and even natal bonds, he found himself (not that he had ever wan- dered), because there, with his manhood just attained, con- curred the first great struggle of his mind and heart with its own questions, in a meditative separation from all that could have biased him or warped him from being other or less than himself. True, in that protracted season of profound reverie and meditation, in which his soul was feathering and taking wing and direction, he lost his bodily health permanently. He was adding to his conscientious labor, as a tutor and teacher, the tasks of a profound self-questioner and inquirer of the Spirit of God. He found his soul, and saw the great lines that marked its significance, and indicated his sources of power and usefulness, and fixed his calling and self-dedica- tion to God and Christ and humanity ; he lost his health, and that finally. It is important to connect the two facts. They are curiously illustrative of the disrespect in which he held all endeavors to associate matter and mind in any close mu- tual dependency ; and he was himself the minimum of body and the maximum of mind. But it is well to remember that Channing had been athletic, joyous, springy, and gay, manly and bold to a fault in physical courage in his boyhood and college days ; that there was never any other asceticism or melancholy or other worldliness about him than necessarily belong to invalids who have to study their health continually; and that, if his poor physique compelled him to live a good deal in solitude, to avoid too much exertion in any form, and to fix his mind upon his special pursuit, it never took any robustness from his courage, dignity from his manhood, CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 43 sympathy from his love of children, the open air, nature, and womanhood. There is no ill health in his lusty hopes of humanity, in his unvaletudinarian admiration for those who could defy and resist wrong and oppression, blind custom, or tyrannical use and wont. His love of the beaches of your island in the time of storms, where he said he felt his soul expand and take on the power of the elemental strife, should teach us how little the softness of his tissue or the worn fibres of his muscles communicated their weakness to the cords of his intellectual or his moral nature. In fact, his soul would have animated a giant, and set forth a Viking, in its magnificent courage and sweep of life. I am struck with nothing more than the comprehensive grasp of his thoughts. They bind God and man together, the past and the future ; and, high and holy as they are wide and deep, they are never filmy and airy ; always solid, ready to bear the tread of the strongest reason ; full of sense, if full of light ; enthusiastic, but never eccentric, never wild. His feet are steady on the ground, if his eye and arm are reaching for the skies. He had been addicted to reverie, as all ideal natures are, in his earlier manhood ; but the mist quickly consolidated into a cloud, out of which shot bolts of prodigious force and directness. His greatest, most distinctive gift — his instru- ment and his method alike — was the power of an almost unequalled concentration of attention upon his own thoughts and inward experiences, afterwards enlarged into the faculty of fixing his mind, with an absorbing exclusion of other themes, upon any subject he chose to meditate and examine. He brooded, with a patience that Nature does not equal in her winged kind, over the seminal suggestions he found in the sacred nest of his own soul. Other men have had his thoughts; nay, happily, they are so native to humanity that 44 CIIANNING CENTENARY. they must always lack originality. It was what they grew to, under his prolonged, persistent meditation, that made them new, and other, and more fruitful than they have proved in kindred minds lacking his unwearied and fixed power and habit of contemplation. This, too, is the source of the monotony of which some complain in his writings. There is not room enough in the mind for the concurrent and full expansion of many ideas, as important and sublime as those that occupied his great soul. A few master-thoughts — the greatest that can em- ploy the human soul — had early fastened his attention; they never ceased to yield new fruits to meditation.* He never got to the end of them, or was fully content with the expression he gave them. He returns to them again and again. He applies them. They are always as useful as they are engaging, always as much the ground of his action as of his feeling. They are thoughts of God, of man, of freedom, of holiness, of public justice, of the elevation of the humble, of the enrichment of the poor ! They are not thoughts to amuse, to please, to dazzle ; thoughts for a culti- vated class or a fastidious appetite ; thoughts whose aim is to show off the thinker's skill or taste or originality ; they are not clothed in rhetoric, nor made to suit the love of variety. They can hardly be said to be chosen thoughts ; but rather thoughts so self-urged and spontaneous that they seem the special hardy natives of the soil, too vigorous and too exhausting of the sap to allow any lesser thoughts, or • Mr. Browning, in his " Paracelsus," describes this experience : — " So that, when quailing at the mighty range Of secret truths which yearn for birth, I haste To contemplate undazzled some one truth, Its bearings and effects alone — at once What was a speck expands into a star. Asking a life to pass exploring thus." CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 45 any variety of thoughts, to spring up in the neighborhood. The solemn pause and measured formality with which in his writings he announces his passing from one to another thought exhibits and illustrates the awe with which he was himself overcome in the presence of his convictions. They hardly seemed his own, and he introduced them as if he were presenting the lofty ambassadors of some sacred power, for the obeisance of the company met to receive them. It is the greatness and glory of only the rarest souls to be thus filled with a few themes, that claim and crowd all the room our nature has, — thoughts so exalted, so peerless, and so self-sustained that they neither allow nor require any train- bearers or attendants. Channing did not lack native versa- tility, aptness for many things, taste and capacity for litera- ture, philosophy, science, art, poetry, practical affairs, politics, statesmanship, natural history, society; that he was capable of wit, satire, humor, is evident enough to those who make a study of his biography — almost an autobiography — by the hand of his favorite nephew. It was no lack of nice obser- vation, of practical interest in daily life, of sympathy with common things, of physical sensibility or even manly pas- sion, that made him such a uniform or one-keyed organ of a few great thoughts. It is as plain as light that he was no mystic, no mere temperamental saint, no vestal in disguise — not even a man to whom evil was unknown, and the world naturally repulsive, and therefore carefully veiled from sight. He had none of the scholar's learned ignorance, the saint's pious inhumanity, the devotee's upturned eyeballs. There was in the odor of his sanctity no savor of any ecclesiastical herbs, no artificial, sickly perfume of funeral tuberoses, rosemary, and myrrh. His seriousness was habitual, and caused by the essential solemnity of his thoughts. He did not often smile, and seldom laughed ; but it was not from 46 CHANNING CENTENARY. want of cheerfulness or incapacity for humor, but only from the prepossession of his mind by grave and intensely inter- esting themes. He thought himself one of the happiest of men, and his chiklren testify to the vivacity and cheerful- ness of his domestic life. But he was made happy and happier, every year he lived, by his greater realization of our wonderful nature, and its relations to its generous and glorious Source, his high and cheerful views of human prog- ress on earth, and its sublime destiny beyond the skies. It was a grand peculiarity of this great man so to have reconciled his ideas with his immediate life and duty that his life was his religion, and his religion his life. He did not wear his faith and piety as a professional robe ; it was his home attire and his working-dress. He did not keep his thoughts for meditation, except as far as meditation is itself life and action, but for use and application. He could not be caught in undress. He was the same exalted person, at home and abroad, in ordinary conversation and in the pul- pit. Indeed, Dr. Dewey — whose testimony comes nearer to that of a peer, though his is a different variety of the order of greatness, than that of any close witness of Chan- ning — has told me that his talk was greater, and more exhaustive and exhausting, than his writings or his preach- ing ; upon the same themes, just as lofty and just as grave, but more prolonged and more glowing. In short, the nearer you got to this burning and shining light, the more you found it to be not painted flame, but real fire ; not light only, but heat. It went far to consume Channing himself, who lay a live coal upon the altar ; and it was apt to scorch and shrivel even the stoutest souls that stood near it while it steadily burnt, not out, but on. It was the utter genuine- ness of his faith, the power it had over himself, that made it so effectual over others, and gives it such might to-day. CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 47 Of his preaching, I was myself the glad and fortunate beneficiary, and am among the not too many living witnesses to its transcendent power. There is no spot in Boston so sacred to me as the profaned site of the old Federal Street Church ; for thither, a youth of twenty-one, I was wont to repair (and it was a walk of several miles) every other Sun- day morning, for two critical years of my life and theological studies, to hear Channing preach ! There were excellent preachers to be heard much nearer home ; but there was that in Channing's mind and soul, in his voice, manner, and look, that separated him from them, as the prophet is sepa- rated from the priest. Indeed, he did 7iot preach, in the ordi- nary sense of the word. Gowned as he was, and obedient to all the decorums of the pulpit, it was not the preacher, but the apostle, you saw and heard. Even in the pulpit, he lived the things he saw and said. The greatness of human nature shone in his beautiful brow, sculptured with thought, and lighted from within ; his eye, so full and blue, was lus- trous with a vision of God, and seemed almost an open door into the shining presence. His voice, sweet, round, un- strained, full, though low, lingered as if with awed delay upon the words that articulated his dearest thoughts, and trembled with an ever-restrained but most contagious emo- tion. He was intensely present in his thoughts, as if just born from his soul, and dressed from his lips, although he usually (always in my experience) spoke from a manuscript. But, while his individuality was inexi^ressibly commanding, it gave no suggestion of the love of personal influence. He used the word '' I " with the freedom of the master, but it conveyed the sense, " not I, but the Father in me ; not I, but the truth I speak ; and not you, but the nature you represent ; not you, but humanity and God in you and in us ! " He rose slowly, read a hymn, and began his dis- 48 CIIANNING CENTENARY, course (for seldom in my clay was he able to spare much of his strength for the preliminary services, conducted by his colleague) on a plane so level to the feet of the simplest of his hearers that few noticed the difificulty of the slow but steady ascent he always made, carrying his rapt hearers with him by the power of his thought, the calm insistance of his conviction, and the solemn earnestness of his spirit, until they found themselves standing at a height from which visions of divine things, in their true proportions and real perspective, became easy and spontaneous. There was no muscular strain or contortion in his limbs or face or voice ; no excitement of a fleshly origin ; no false fervor or false emphasis ; no loss of perfect dignity and self-possession. And there was little in the words themselves to fix atten- tion, except their purity and grace. It was the subject that came forward and remained in the memory. He left you not thinking of him, nor of his rhetoric. He had no start- ling figures, no brilliant fancies, no sharp points ; little for admiration or praise ; everything for reflection, for inspira- tion, and for illumination. There was one other peculiarity in his preaching. He preached only on great themes, and this made his sermons always timely, for great subjects 'are ever in order. So profoundly helpful, so inspiring was his preaching, that I, for one, lived on it, from fortnight to fort- night, and went to it every time, with the expectation and the experience of receiving the bread of heaven on which I was to live and grow, until the manna fell again ; and men of all ages had much the same feeling. When, for the first time, I saw Channing out of the pulpit, I was as much surprised at his diminutive form as if, expect- ing a giant, I had met a dwarf ! He had seemed to me a large and tall man in his pulpit ; but I soon found that, slight and low as his frame was, nearness and familiarity CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 49 took nothing from its dignity, and suggested nothing fragile or weak. Indeed, his attenuated and lowly figure really increased the sense of his moral majesty and intellectual eminence. His presence was more awful, simple and gentle as he was, than that of any human being I ever saw. It forbade familiarity, silenced garrulity, checked ease, and had something of the effect of a supernatural visitor ; awfng levity, and making even common speech, or speech at all, difficult. He was so unconscious of this effect, so -little willing to produce it, so anxious to make others free and communicative, that it became pathetic to witness the paral- ysis of tongue and motion that usually fell on those whom he in vain tried to set at liberty from his overpowering per- sonality. Doubtless there were familiar and domestic friends, and perhaps m^n who had grown up with him, that escaped this awe, and overcame this distance ; and children did not seem to feel it ; but just in proportion to the sense and sensibility of young men and women was it irresistible. I have said that Channing was not the kind of preacher Boston usually made and welcomed. Fortunately he did not settle, of choice, in a congregation most characteristic of Boston, — not in Brattle Street, where he was called, but in Federal Street, then comparatively inconspicuous, — and so he made, by degrees, out of a less fixed and wool-dyed class of citizens, a congregastles of truth and mercy to all men. And although he was precluded, by his want of health, from active missionary or active })ublic labors, and lived a peculiarly set- tled and uniform life, his mind, his heart travelled widely, and his pen was a missionary and a public servant that recog- nized the claims of the whole world. Few men, in this country or any other, have been as univer- sal in their survey, their aims, their breadth of view, and the comprehensiveness of their purposes as Channing. With the tastes and habits of a recluse, he was mentally a cosmopolite and a publicist. The least of a partisan and a politician, he had all the feelings and all the capacity of a statesman. Limited by his physical fragility to a narrow walk of personal observation and intercourse, he went in spirit and by the aid of his intellectual and moral sympathies into the homes and shops and fields, and felt the closest and warmest interest in the trials, sorrows, wrongs, and exposures of the common people, and especially those most overlooked. Tuckerman, his most intimate friend, the apostle to the poor of Boston, found in no one so patient and so helpful a supporter and admirer as Channing, who envied his skill, his success, and his delight in this gracious service. His advice and his en- couragement to the laboring classes, which reached many countries, drew forth expressions of gratitude that gave Chan- ning more satisfaction than he could receive from the admira- tion of literary critics, or the crowds of cultivated people that hung on his lips. The ministry to the poor in Boston owed most of its permanent interest to his direction and encouf- agement. He was profoundly concerned for the elevation, the happiness, the substantial good of the humbler ranks of people. It was not a professiopal, technical interest of the ordinary ministerial kind, lest their souls should be lost, but CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 53 a sad sense of what they were losing in not knowing, serving, and loving God. There were none of the materials for a fanatic in Chan- ning ; and yet fanatics have seldom gone as far in their mad- ness or narrowness of view as Channing went in his sobriety and comprehensiveness. He hoped and expected more of all men than perfectionists, socialists, and idealogists have looked for and demanded ; but he had the most practical sense of the difficulties in the way. He had the patience of God and geologic time with the slowness of the advance. Nobody could have told him much about the obstructions and trying conditions, under the sense of which most men give up the problem. He was hopeful in full view of all obstacles, and active and earnest in spite of his knowledge how long and how much action and effort would be required for an indefi- nite time to come. His course in regard to the anti-slavery movement is per- haps the best illustration of his character as an humanitarian and a citizen. By position, by taste, and by associates, he was one of the men likely to feel most what was called the violence, the narrowness, and the vulgarity of that movement, as it first presented itself in Massachusetts. Its starters and supporters outraged the taste, the ethics, the customs of the best people. It looked wild, fierce, revolutionary, impious, much as the earliest pretentions of Christianity must have seemed to devout and influential Jews in the Holy City. As a rule, Christian ministers gave a wide berth to its advocates. Channing regarded it doubtless with distaste, and turned a cold shoulder upon its first apostles, from genuine doubts of its being in right hands, or advocated in a legal and Christian way. In this, he only exhibited the uniform caution of his conscientious mind, which never allowed itself to be swept off the base of its own solid judgment. It was always his judgment — which was his conscience — that had to be set 54 CIIANNING CENTENARY. on fire, not his feelings, and it did not catch prematurely ; and when it did, it burnt with a flame that could not be quenched. When Channing began — and it was far earlier than any of the sober and weighty minds about him — to see and feel what was involved in the anti-slavery cause ; what this fierce indignation was, — the cry of outraged justice and down- trampled humanity ; what a holy sense of wrong done to the human soul lay at the bottom of the wrath that made relig ious, social, and political conventionalities, so far as they condoned or supported slavery, objects of anger and deri- sion, — he transferred his sympathies from the conservative and popular side of Boston taste and feeling to the radical, the unpopular, the odious side of the anti-slavery reformers. I do not think he counted the cost of this, or of any course he ever took ; but he knew as well as any man the way in which it would be received by his friends and lovers. His difficulties were never those of the politician, the sectarian, or the time-server. His slowness was always his desire to be right with God and his conscience ; his quickness, the zeal he had in the service of truth and duty, the moment he knew them. What services he rendered to the anti-slavery cause ; what he did to clarify, exalt, and make possible the views that afterwards became acceptable and potent, — the world knows, and abolitionists concede. But he never would or could join any organization that compromised his least conviction, or controlled his own sense of a Divine policy. He spoke for himself ; he stood for himself. He had neither the concurrence of the conservatives nor the radicals. He offended the abolitionists ; he disgusted the W^higs ; he pleased only God and his own conscience, and served the great cause of freedom with transcendent power, because his devotion to it was neither fanatical, partial, nor local ; and what he wrote on anti-slavery is true for all time. His anti- CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 55 slavery was a logical and moral consequent of his reverence for human nature. Channing's course in regard to the trial of Abner Knee- land for atheism was an equal illustration of his faith in the self-protecting power of the truth, and the safety of freedom of opinion and expression. It required immense moral courage to head the petition which he also wrote for his release from prison and punishment. But in the commu- nity, in all the world, where public opinion is most worth attending to, because rarely impulsive or extravagant, Chan- ning had, many times in his life, to confront it with protests or resistance, which left him open to all sorts of suspicion in the very places where his reputation was most valuable, — his piety, his faith, and his scrupulosity. He kept the company of publicans and sinners; like his Master, he could not judge those universally condemned. His moral courage — because it had no conceit, no superficial passion, no partisan fire in it — was truly sublime. His only cowardice was the rare and honorable fear of being left alone with an accusing conscience. And here, to draw these dim outlines of Channing's views and character to a period, let me crown all by saying that self-reverence was, after all, his most characteristic and his central grace and quality. No praise, no sympathy, no con- currence was essential to his peace ; but the approval of his own soul he must have at all hazards and at every sacrifice. He guarded himself at every door from what might betray his purity of motive, his rectitude of will, his moral freedom. To be and not to seem ; to be himself what he demanded and urged others to become; to be just, charitable, hopeful, submissive ; to be like Jesus, and like what he believed God to be, in spirit and in truth, — this was the never-failing pur- pose and plan of his life. Nothing could he do that compro- mised this holy necessity of being true to God and himself. 56 CHANNINC CENTENARY. \W c»)uld not i;'<) one step over the limits his fastidious purity prescribed, nor one step back from the path where his conscience beckoned him on, to disaffront his best friends or to disabuse his most powerful censors. And with all his publicity, and his wide sphere of fame and influence, he lived with God almost as in the seclusion of a hermit's cell : as free from worldly ambition as if he were the lowliest of his kind ; as womanly in his purity as if not the most manly of men ; as childlike as if he had not the experience, the wisdom, the strength of the ripest maturity, and the duties and opportunities of a statesman, a great citizen, a leader of his time, and the foremost in the ranks of liberal spirits. I have not attempted a biography of Channing, nor fol- lowed his life in detail, nor quoted his words. No later work of that sort can supersede the precious autobiography which his nephew has .skilfully extracted from his journals, letters, and sermons. It is too serious, too spiritual, too much in essence and too little in detail, too bulky and yel too monotonous, to be easy or popular reading, though a dozen American and perhaps as many English editions of it have been circulated. But it is immortal in its substance, and can never cease to be new and fresh in its influence, as human souls rise to the level where its sublime simplicity and searching spirituality become visible. It is a work to be put upon the shelf or table of the private closet, in the small class of permanent devotional helps, into no page of which can any docile heart dip without finding a baptism of the Holy Spirit. Would it were read and studied more ! I can name no work which ministers of religion, and especially our own, could consult and feed upon with more profit to their souls and the souls of those they teach. It is encourag- ing to know that Channing's works and his memoir have, if not the immense circulation they merit, a wide, a constant. CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 57 an increasing currency among all sects, and especially among the ministers of all sects ; that they are translated into the chief tongues of the world, and are revered and honored by all who are capable of appreciating their calm, deep, un- partisan, permanent, and changeless truth and piety. I should not have presumed, however, to make this dis- course so long and full, had I not a painful feeling that Channing, after all the exaltation connected with his name and the settled canonization of his character, is really, to a marked degree, neglected and unread and unappreciated among those who owe him most, and who should be best acquainted with his writings, his views, and his character- istics. I often hear men, who owe no small part of their own liberty and spiritual life to his inspiration, say they do not, nay, cannot read him ; and then I feel somewhat the same regret and surprise with which I hear others say they cannot enjoy the Bible. I confess that Channing saturated his more docile hearers and disciples, in his lifetime, with his views and his temper, and that some of them have that surcharged filiality, which sometimes makes children find the best fathers less stimulating society than much less able and worthy men, not so familiar and congenital. But I am confident that this influence has at length become a forgetfulness and an ignorance of the man and his opinions, and has passed over from those who once knew him well, and have neglected the care of his memory, to a generation that did not know him, and do not seem to care to know him, since those who did seem so lukewarm, or so careless, to preserve his present fame and influence. If I do not, in the strength of my reverence and gratitude, overstate this neglect, it is a deplorable one. For nothing can be less true than any notion that Channing was overrated by his immediate contemporaries, his fellow-ministers, his towns- men, or his disciples. The reverse of this is nearer the 58 CIIANNING CENTENARY. tiulh. Nor is he duly estimated, great as his fame is to- day. His is still the morning-star, and is climbini; the sky. He has not been outshone ; he has not been superseded. No great spiritual light, of a strictly human kind, ever had greater, denser fogs of prejudice to encounter, or could oppose to them a milder flame. Still, his star is one held baleful by millions of good Christians. His light waits a purer air, a clearer and more rational sky, a freer humanity, to show its full glory. But it is steady, and its oil does not fail, nor its beams flicker. Long after names more popular and commanding have faded out of human memory, his name will be reviving with new splendor. There is in him and his works little to decay, little to correct or change ; and there is nothing to excuse or to explain away. His lan- guage has no false rhetoric, no pretence, no tiresome tricks or shallow music. He was an artist, but one who never left the mark of his tools on his work. Perhaps he fed the mid- night lamp with oil, but it never spilt upon his page or scented his ink. He touched nothing trivial, local, or pass- ing ; his themes are always great, his treatment always majestic. He has not mixed the temporary and the per- manent, feet of clay with thighs of brass and head of gold. He is always high, always in earnest, always careful, clean, and precise, self-consistent, and full of reverence for truth, for God, for man, and for himself. Those who think such a soul and such a thinker and spiritual force can pass by, can be repeated and improved upon, superseded and displaced, outgrown and out-shined, are dull observers of the permanent place which such rare spirits hold in the uncrowded meridian, where their stars shine together forever. Religious genius is God's rarest in- spiration and least common gift in any transcendent form. If we haunt and search the remotest antiquity to find and to sit at the feet of poets, artists, sages, and hang our fresh- CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 59 est wreaths upon the spectral brows of shades whose per- sonal history is unknown, when will the day come that St. Augustine, Borromeo, a Kempis, Fenelon, and Guion, Bos- suet, Taylor, and Butler, and Channing are to be esteemed less than ever fresh fonts of Divine inspiration ? Channing belongs to the Church Universal, and for all time. But he had an American birthplace, near the sea that unites all, and in a place that is more and more frequented and cosmo- politan. It is fit that on this spot his eternal memory should have its monument. Catholic, and all the more Catholic, because Unitarian, he must always wear the unity of God, not in its vulgar sense, but in its spiritual significance, as the central jewel in his coronet of shining doctrines. He suffered for his testimony to this concealed, neglected, or per- verted " Simplicity of Christ," and his disciples and fellow- Christians would be ungrateful to forget that they owe him special devotion, and the devotion of publishing and pro- claiming him, all the more because his fidelity to them cost him dear, and took him out of the general ranks of Christen- dom to be their conscript soldier. He was a cosmopolite, but he was none the less a thorough American ; and the genius of America possessed him, — the hopefulness, the progressiveness, the freshness, the courage and unconven- tionality of the new hemisphere. He belonged in a new world, a democratic State, a country with an ample horizon. He was born by the sea, he died in the mountains. He was bred in the country, he lived in the city ; he passed away in a place that knew him not, in the heart of the most Ameri- can of American States, and on a journey. These things are typical. He belonged in no one place ; and his spirit and influence are national, and still on a journey. The sea and the mountains claim him. Places he knew not have a sacred interest in his history. I believe the nation will some day, remembering his physical birth in Rhode Island, 60 CHANNING CENTENARY. his spiritual birth in \'ir^inia, his life-work in Massachusetts, his death in Vermont, his rehitions to the most sig'nihcant reformation and revolution in reliji^ious life, because a thor- ough reversal of base in the whole order of theology, place his monument in the Capitol, as the only place central enough to express his national significance. But it will not be until his name and place as the greatest of American prophets is fully recognized. And that will come when the candid study of his works and his life shall show, with uni- versal consent, that, although a generation or two in advance of his time, he proclaimed and illustrated the kind of relig- ion, the form of Christianity, which is alone adapted to a universal spread, and destined to become a universal leaven and the true Bread of Life to the American people ; and that what is permanently their faith is sure at last to be the faith of the whole world. So high, so wide, so deep is the claim of William Ellery Channing, After the Rev. Nathaniel Adams had pronounced the ben- ediction, the audience was dismissed ; and, by invitation of the committee on hospitality of the Newport parish, the vis- itors from out of town went to the Aquidneck House, where a bountiful collation was served. THE OOENEK-STONE CEREMONIES. The hour for the ceremonies of laying the corner-stone of the Memorial Church quickly came, and found a crowd of from fifteen hundred to two thousand persons, who had gathered to see what might be seen, shivering beneath the clouded sky in the chilling wind that whistled through the leafless trees. The inspiration was in the occasion, and not in the surroundings. There was no disposition either on the part of the spectators or of the participants to prolong the exercises here. CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 6 1 The services were conducted by Rev. Mr. Schermerhorn, pastor of the church. He first introduced Rev. John C. Kimball, of Hartford, a former pastor of the Unitarian church, who offered prayer. Mr. Schermerhorn then made the pleasing announcement that the minimum amount for the expense of building the church, J§ 50,000, had been fully subscribed, a telegram just received from the Rev. Dr. Put- nam, of Brooklyn, making up the sum to that desirable figure. The church could thus be proceeded with imme- diately, and begin its career with no debt to hamper it. Mr. Schermerhorn then read the contents of the sealed box placed within the corner-stone. The articles were the following : Dr. Bellows' memorial address ; Rev. C. T. Brooks' poem ; a programme of the day's services ; an ac- count of the first meeting of the Unitarian Society of New- port, in 1835 ; a full list of the forty original corporators of the church ; the Christian Register of April 3, the Newport Mercury of March 13, March 27, and April 3, the Newport News of April 6, and the Newport Journal of April 3 ; the list of the contributors to the memorial fund, five hundred and sixty-eight in number ; a set of ancient coins left by one of the incorporators who died a few months since, making the request that the coins be put in the corner-stone with his name; a new silver dollar of year 1880, presented by Jos. J. Read ; the Hartford Times, containing a sermon by Rev. John C. Kimball; a copy of the Bible, presented by John T. Bush ; a copy of the " Reminiscences of Channing," by Miss E. P. Peabody ; a copy of the Unitarian Review for April, 1880; and the Providence yijz^r;?^/ of April 7. When the box had been placed in the stone, Mr. W. F. Channing, of Providence, a son of the great divine, lovingly laid a bunch of roses on the top. The Rev. W. H. Channing, of London, a nephew of Dr. Channing, with uplifted eyes and standing upon the corner-stone, said, " I pronounce this 62 CHANNING CENTENARY. corner-stone, hrnily and squarely laid, placed on the rock of ages, Christ Jesus, in the full fellowship of the Son and in the blessing of God." The benediction was pronounced by the Rev. R. R. Shippen, Secretary of the American Unita- rian Association. The poem written by the Rev. C. T. Brooks and the Rev. William H. Channing's address, which, if the day had been warm and pleasant, would have been delivered at the site of the church, were delivered in the opera house, where a large audience assembled at about half-past three. After singing by the choir, Mr. Brooks read the following note from the Rev. George Gibbs Channing, the only surviving brother of Dr. Channing : — Milton, Mass., April 7, 1880. I long to be in Newport on this sacred anniversary, but my great age of ninety years prevents me from being present in the body. I send to the survivors of my early friends and fellow-townsmen, and to their children, my heartfelt benedictions. George Gibbs Channing. Mr. Brooks then proceeded to read the following ode, writ- ten by him for the occasion : — ODE AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER-STONE OF THE MEMORIAL CHURCH. Auspicious day ! What throngs from far and near, With grateful heart, on Memory's altar here. Love's offering lay ! Thy voiceful morn Calls back long-vanished days, And opens to the soul's prophetic gaze Ages unborn. This day shall be. While years and ages run, And Truth's bright torch is passed from sire to son, A way-mark of the free. CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 63 A hundred years, By thought evoked, return ; And the long-buried past, from Memory's urn, Transfigured, reappears. With reverent feet. We climb the historic hill. All else how changed! — yet earth, sky, ocean, still Our vision greet. In these fair skies. Illumined by a spirit's glow. The forms of them whose relics sleep below In glory rise. On this green slope. They, musing, stood, and to the skies. In many a holy hour, upraised their eyes In yearning hope. On this fair hill, " P'or Christ and Peace " they built in faith sublime In Christ and Peace, far from the storms of time. Their souls live still. In heaven's pure height, Those noble men, — the reverent, brave, and free, — Still young for Virtue, Truth, and Liberty, Walk in God's light. Pure as the sky. Unfettered as the wind and wave, They live in Him to whom their lives they gave, — Their King on high. Amid that band. One form, with meek yet manly mien, I see, majestic and serene, In saintly beauty stand. To heaven's broad light. His infant vision opened here. And with a deeper rapture, year by year. He hailed the radiant sight. His eye could see, In earth's and heaven's expanse. His heart could ftel, in Nature's kindling glance. The Father of the free. 64 ClIAXNING CKNTENARY. How (litl his heart rejoice, " In solitude, when man is least alone," To feel Christ's word attuned to unison With Nature's voice ! Henceforth, his thought No chain of sect or school could bar or bind ; Belittling creeds, before his free-born mind, Shrank into naught. His God was Love ; His creed, the Master's footsteps to pursue ; His the warm heart, — the clear-eyed vision, too, — John's eagle and Christ's dove. So lived and taught The sainted man, — the upright, true, and free, — Whom we to-day remember tenderly With reverent thought. And in the Trust In which he lived and died — In which for evermore abide The spirits of the just — And to the Truth For which he lived and wrought. And whence his heavenward-yearning spirit caught . The quenchless fire of youth. This corner-stone. In Faith, Hope, Love, we lay, And for Christ's peace and God's pure blessing pray To rest thereon. Rise, hallowed walls I Look forth o'er land and sea, And welcome all to Peace and Liberty Whom Christ's free spirit calls I From thy rock-base, Laid by Almighty Power, Lift high thy well-knit frame, majestic tower, In strength and grace ! While on thy spire The morning sunbeams play. And linger there the smiles of dying day With cheerful fire, CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 65 Men's thoughts shall climb, As by a heavenward-pointing finger led, To that bright realm where dwell the immortal dead In peace sublime. There 'mid the band Of blessed ones who have, through death, gone in To the Lord's joy, made strong by Him to win The immortal land, C banning shines now In glory far above all earthly fame, With that ineffable and holy Name Writ on his brow : That name which none Can read but they who, through the holy strife Of truth and patient faith, a place have won In the Lamb's Book of Life. The reading of the ode was followed immediately by an ADDKESS BY REV, WILLIAM H, CHANNING. This morning, amid the sunrise brightening to full noon, in the presence of the all-good, all-true, all-beautiful, all- blessed, all-beneficent, all-perfect Father, we beheld to- gether the light of life which irradiated Channing, as mir- rored back in crystal splendor from our dear, beloved friend, Henry W. Bellows. And now this afternoon, amid his townsfolk and his fellow-countrymen, amid Christians of the same communion and of all communions in the Church Universal, amid a great cloud of witnesses unseen to us, we have laid the corner-stone of the temple that is to be. I stand here to render back a grateful tribute, in the name of the family whose head the illustrious Channing was in his generation, commissioned by my venerable uncle to speak for him and them, as the son of the eldest son. And now, dear fellow-children in the great family of God, allow me to lay before you what is the significance of the corner- stones of this temple. The classic ancients were wont, 5 66 CHANNING CENTENARY. when they would sketch the rerfect Life, to speak of a " Four-square Man," meanin<;- thereby a person in whose character and life the four cardinal virtues of Temper- ance, Fortitude, Wisdom, and Justice were duly balanced. And the Christian Fathers reared upon these foundations the four theological virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, and Holiness. Let us, too, plant on the rock of Eternal Right our Four Corner-stones, and upbuild our Four Walls of Channing's Living Temple. There are four corner-stones. Let me name them. The name of the first is Confidence in the infinite love of the heavenly Father. If there was one grand central reality of which Channing was the prophet and the representative, it is this assurance that the Giver of all Good is the Father of all spirits throughout the universe of spirits. It was in the confidence of this inner relationship with the Father that he looked without a cloud of fear into the sunlit presence of the Father's face, assured that all the love of all earthly parents combined is dim, cold, lifeless, in contrast with the infinite love of the Father of all. It was in this spirit Channing lived, and shed abroad the lustre of the Father's love. The second stone is Filial Love, and stands for the name of the beloved Son of God. If you would see the secret of Channing's power, find it there. From first to last, he placed his hand in the hand of the beloved Brother, of the Friend of friends, of that glorified and transfigured son of man made Son of God. He recognized as coming from an immortal centre this life of God in Christ, which made Jesus not an excep- tion to the race, but the very type of the race. The third corner-stone, as the completion of these two, is the grand Family of the Children of God. Channing taught not only that man upon this earth is one, but that the race here below is one with the race above, with the Father over all. You have not read aright his doctrine, unless you see that CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 6^ he had such a consciousness of the all-pervading and all- inspiring love of the Father, that he believed the progress and advance of angels in the highest hierarchy are felt by the youngest child on earth. He interprets by that the rights of the slave, he comes down from his place of privi- lege and power to speak his grandest words to the child of the hard-working mechanic. The fourth corner-stone is the Beautiful Beneficence which unites the reconciled race of man universal around our globe in the free-will co-opera- tion of mutual service and interfluent good-will and joy. Here are the four corner-stones. Now on them let us rear the four walls of this temple, corresponding to these corner-stones. And the first wall, corresponding to the love of the Father, is harmonious Equity of well-ordered rela- tions according to God's law throughout the universe. There is the first fair wall of the temple. And, next, let me ask you to look at the second wall of this temple, which corresponds to the second corner-stone, the love of the child for the parent. And the name of that wall is Brotherly Kindness,- recognizing as of kith and kin every single human being. And then the third wall, which corresponds to the family on earth and the family in heaven, is Hu- manity, made one in organized society. How little justice has been done to the statesmanship of Channing ! He be- lieved in the words lisped in the simple childish prayer, "That thy will may be done on earth as it is done in heaven." He believed in the possibility, he believed in the certainty, of a new era of heavenly humanity. No young man whom I have ever known was so enthusiastic in his ideal, so poetic in his imagination, so filled full with the courage of an immortal and universal hope as was William Ellery Channing. Year by year of his progress, he was growing deeper, higher, firmer, broader. The fourth wall is just the name that was given to the last volume of sermons 68 CHANMNG CENTENARY. published from his manuscripts. It is the Perfect Life. If you ever read his early writings, if you ever study what was his aim from the time he entered into the ministry, you will find that, as far back as the very first sermon he preached, he says that Love is the law of universal order, and that the end for man in life is perfect harmony by perfect love. And, from that time forward, it was his end, his aim, his thirst, his aspiration. Dr. Channing believed in a perfect life for you and nie. With the saints of all ages, he sought to know the length and breadth, and depth and height, of that love of God in Christ, which passeth knowledge, that he might be filled with the fulness of God. And this Per- fect Life was the P"ourth Wall of his temple. We have laid the corner-stones and reared the walls, and now come ye and enter in. And there, in the front of that impartial equity of God's own righteousness, is the lowly porch of humility. Of all human beings whom I have ever known, — and God has been rich to me in bounties in bring- ing me into union with many angels in the flesh, — I have never seen Channing's peer in simplicity and humility. The portal through which Channing entered into the inner pres- ence of the P"ather was this lowly porch through which we must all enter. P'rom the time I first knew him as a little child, — and I crept among his books when I was an infant, — onward to the last hour when he spoke into my ear his closing words, " I have received many messages from the Spirit," — never once in all those years did I ever see an act, did I ever hear a word, did I ever behold a look, that was not according to his ideal of the perfect life. When I came to study his manuscripts, tear-stained and soiled, I found his own confessions before his P""ather of his shortcoming. I call upon all who witnessed his daily life in the exquisite sweetness of his home and in every relationship of duty in which he stood to the country, was he not faultless, spot- CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 69 less, peerless ? I have known many grand spirits in my own land and abroad ; but here I say it, as before the angels, never yet upon the earth have I met the peer of William Ellery Channing. He was humility itself. Yet how grand was his dignity ! Only through his own confes- sions in his own private manuscripts am I conscious that he ever was touched with sin and knew struggle and warfare with evil. The pavement of his temple is the co-ordinated strength of mutual help in all the lowliest services of life. He comprehended what is the blending of majesty and mercy, and carried out in every hour of every day the law of the Master : he is greatest who is most the servant of all. At the end of the temple are the altars, and they are three in number. The first is purity, the second is self-sac- rifice, and the third the open tomb, the up-springing aspira- tion toward God. And now let us crown the temple with the dome, the dome of perennial inspiration, the dome of the inflowing holiness of God, the dome of the Father coming down to dwell in the tabernacle of the family of the children of God on earth, made one with the children of God in heaven. We have laid our corner-stone, we have reared our walls, we have pictured the altars, we have spanned the dome. Dear brethren, dear sisters, in the name of my beloved uncle, accept his benediction, his God- speed, and good cheer. Farewell, dear fellow-mortals on earth, dear fellow-immortals in Christ : — " Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll. Leave thy low-vaulted past : Let each new temple, nobler than the last. Lift thee toward heaven with a dome more vast ; Till thou at length art free. Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea." The afternoon exercises closed with singing and the benediction, pronounced by Rev. Dr. Hosmer, of Newton. /O CHANNING CENTENARY. Many of the visitors from out of town returned home by the afternoon trains ; but their departure produced no visi- • ble effect upon the attendance at THE EVENING MEETING, also held at the Opera House, which was crowded by an audience principally made up of citizens of Newport, many of whom had been unable to attend the morning and after- noon meetings. Governor Van Zandt presided, and was surrounded on the platform by many men and women of distinction. After devotional exercises, conducted by Revs. Charles A. Humphreys and R. R. Shippen, Mr. Littlefield, whose rich solos were a feature of the whole proceedings, sang again the hymn "Nearer, my God, to Thee." Mr. Schermerhorn then announced the receipt of letters from many distinguished persons. Time would suffice only for the reading of a few. Those selected and read were sent by the late William Lloyd Garrison, John G. Whittier, Henry W. Longfellow, E. G. Robinson, President of Brown University, Bishop Clark, of Rhode Island, Bishop Hunt- ington, of Syracuse, N.Y., George W. Curtis, editor of Harper s Weekly, Mrs. Mary Livermore, Rev. Phillips Brooks, Prof. Roswell D. Hitchcock, of the Union Theo- logical Seminary, New York, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dean Stanley, and James Martineau. Among the letters received and not read were those from Dr. C. A. Bartol, Henry P. Kidder, Rev. Dr. J. W. Thompson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Boston, Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard College, Rev. Thomas Hill, ex-President of Harvard, Dr. A. P. Peabody, and Dr. F. H. Hedge, also of Harvard College, Rev. Dr. W. H. Furness, of Philadelphia, and Prof. J. L. Diman, of Brown University. We give here in full the letters of Dr. Martineau, Bishop CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. ^1 Huntington, Bishop Clark, John G. Whittier, Rev. Dr. Hitchcock, and William Lloyd Garrison : — From JAMES MARTINEAU. 5 Gordon Street, London, W.C, March 20, 1880. My dear Mr. Schermerkorn, — If Rhode Island were only as many miles away as it is degrees of longitude, I should assuredly ask permis- sion to join the Newport commemoration on the 7th of April. It would be a pure joy to me to unite in the chorus of grateful reverence wliich will there and then harmonize all spirits. Happily, the feeling which creates this celebration transcends all local limits, and will find voice for itself here as well as in Channing's land ; so that, in thinking of your festival of thanksgiving, we shall feel, not as exiles from you, but as brethren stirred by the same affection and bending in the same homage. You ask me for a word of testimony to the influence of Channing's life and writings. You could appeal to no more willing witness. I can never forget my first introduction to his name. I was a school-boy of sixteen when, in 1821, my master, the late Dr. Lant Carpenter, received from Boston a copy of the Dudleian Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity, and both read it to his pupils in private, and, after a preface of enthusiastic commendation, preached it to his congregation on the following Sunday. It laid a powerful hold on me, and seemed to find something in me that had never been reached before. This was but the beginning of an experience which was repeated and enlarged as, one after another, his great sermons and essays came over and burned their way into new seats of thought and affection. Nor was the impres- sion due to my temporary susceptibility of youthful zeal. On the con- trary, when his later writings defined his attitude toward the great social, moral, and constitutional questions of the time, — slavery, freedom of discussion, of association, war, temperance, sect, organization,— they appeared to me so strong in their justice, so calm in their wisdom, so considerate in their charity, as to lift him above the whole region of prejudice, passion, and fear, and to express not less the statesman's mind than the prophet's soul. And so, till he was taken home in 1842, my heart followed him with ever-deepening veneration, and recognized in him the commanding power of spiritual religion to harmonize the intensest faculties and glorify the frailest Hfe. But, when I would give account to others of this subduing influence, it seems to evade all words. Like every form of living beauty, it can be seized by no analysis ; for it is more than all its parts, and, lay them 72 CHANNING CKNTENARV. out as you will, it is not there. In truth, Channing's greatness was of a kind that has nothing complex in it; that, instead of being elaborated by constant additions, is rather disengaged by freeing its first element from all adhesions that hide and hinder it. Its very essence lay in its simplicity; and, just as all books upon the character of Christ do but spoil the gospel and wipe out the image which they pretend to delineate, so will the secret of Channing be better known from any page of his own than from volumes of critical appreciation. One thought, possess- ing his whole nature and showing to him the whole field of being, con- stitutes the focus of his power ; namely, the vision of moral perfection as the reality of God, the possibility for man, the standard of right, the acme of beauty, the end of society, the pledge of immortality, the essence and the blessedness of heaven. Every feeling in himself that fell short of this he rebuked and disciplined with profound humility and aspiration. Every traditional doctrine at variance with this he relent- lessly cut off, and gained a purified theology. Every institution that treated this with insult or despair he indignantly denounced, and so became an emancipator of the body and the soul, a champion of all spiritual culture, a proclaimer of the " honor due to all men." Every conception of human greatness and glory that contradicted this, and made an idol of dazzling ambition and unscrupulous artifice and suc- cessful force, he exposed as a blind revolt against the supremacy of God. This light of righteousness was to him the whole inner mean- ing of the universe, bathing the heavens in eternal splendor, and ever struggling to conquer the shadows of our earthly lot. He turned it as his test on all that came before him for judgment. Whatever was congenial with it no disguise could withhold from his love ; and all that repelled it shrank from his pure and piercing look. Christianity itself had its authority for him chiefly from the same source : its persua- sion lay in the disinterestedness and holiness of Christ, in that life of filial surrender, of gentlest compassion, of unshrinking sacrifice which revealed what our nature would be under the transfiguring power of a divine faith. This identification of religion with goodness, and its cog- nate truth and beauty, is the real source, I take it, of Channing's influ- ence on his age. His words were no echoes of old voices, no repeti- tions of things learned by rote : they made no circuits through texts and creeds, but spoke straight to the living though sleeping contents of men's conscience and affections, asking there for no consent which could not be honestly refused, and kindling a sympathy which it was a joy to yield. He rebuked no sin but that which already disturbed the heart's true rest ; he set up no authority which was not inwardly felt ere CELEBRATION AT NEWPORT. 73 it was outwardly claimed ; he offered no salvation that dispensed with the free exercise of spiritual power, in surrender, if not in victory ; he promised the earth no golden age of which the elements were not con- sciously stirring in the human soul, and the dawn already climbing the horizon with foregleams of the perfect day. To his pleadings and ap- peals, every one has within him an irresistible witness and response, fur- nished not by any temporary mood or accidental conviction, but by the very make of his nature, the primary self-knowledge of his reason, his affections, and his will. Hence, it is that his writings pass from lan- guage to language, and in the transition lose nothing essential to their power, and, though special and occasional in their origin, are not hin- dered in their influence from becoming universal. And for the same reason he speaks with a persuasion that cannot easily be antiquated. The constancy with which, in every argument, he starts from first principles of reason and right, and recurs to them at each completed stage of his advance, elevates his biographical estimates, his historical criticisms, and even his political papers, into philosophical and ethical dignity, and will retain for them a place in literature when the persons and the crises they discuss have been forgotten. At last, no doubt, as the past recedes from view, and its problems vanish before some new strife of thought, and the tides in the affairs of men have altered the curves and shifted the landmarks on all their coasts, it will become too difficult to extract the permanent from the transient in his page ; and he must share the general fate which quenches the voices of the dead in the acclaim that gathers around living genius. But it will not be so till the truth in which and for which he lived has passed into many another soul and made it an organ of the Holy Ghost. And so, even if, as the centuries lapse, he should be heard of no more, his words will yet not be made void, but still water the roots of future good, and accomplish that whereto he sent it. That your commemoration and ours may so quicken his Christ-like spirit in us as to consecrate us anew to disinterested service in the love of God is the heartfelt prayer of Your faithful friend and brother, James Martineau. From Bishop HUNTINGTON. Syracuse, N.Y., March 6, 1880. My dear Mk. Schermerhorn, — I thank you for the kindness and courtesy of your note of invitation. Any tribute from me to the memory 74 CHANNING CENTENARY. or character of Dr. Cliannin