Chapter II: • Liberalism and Calvinism

The first stirrings of new life were felt within the church, the repository of such learning as Harvard College disseminated through the Massachusetts villages. For two hundred years the dogmas of Calvin had lain as a heavy weight on the mind of New England. Revolutions had taken place in English and continental theology, but New England Calvinism had kept closely within the narrow confines of its creed, annually turning over the exhausted soil and reaping an ever scantier harvest. Since the days of Edwards there had been abundant speculation and much exercise in syllogisms, but no scrutiny of major premises. Such an examination was long overdue, with the romantic revolution under way in France, and new theories of human nature and the relation of man to society and the state, spreading widely. But unfortunately the odium which New England conservatism quickly fastened upon the French school frightened the orthodox. The stigma of atheism was put upon every harmless bantling of the numerous French brood, and in the terror of reaction the pulpit, following the lead of the reactionary pew, aroused itself to cleanse the church of every innovation. English Arianism, even worse things, it was discovered, had stolen into Congregational pulpits during the relaxed period of the Revolution; a dangerous spirit of liberalism had spread silently through the tidewater churches, capturing the strongholds of Boston orthodoxy.

By the year 1800 it was high time for the old Congregationalism of Jonathan Edwards to take counsel with itself. “Let us guard against the insidious encroachments of _innovation_--that evil and beguiling spirit which is now stalking to and fro in the earth, seeking whom it may devour,” exclaimed Jedidiah Morse, the arch reactionary, in the days when French ideas were knocking at the doors of New England. And by innovation the doughty Jedidiah meant any idea that had been stumbled on, new since the days of the great Edwards. To go back to the pure Edwardean doctrine, to purge the church of incipient Arminianism and Arianism and Socinianism--together with such other innovations as might show their faces anywhere--became thenceforth the chief business of the devout New England of 1800. To timid souls the ideas of their grandfathers seemed far safer than the ideas of their fathers; and so theology followed politics in turning its back upon the freer, more generous world that beckoned.

Nevertheless French liberalism slowly won its victories. It needs high walls to keep out ideas. Excluded from the drawing-rooms and counting-houses, ostracized in society and politics, romantic philosophy slipped quietly into Boston by the door of theology, and took lodgings in the homes of the first families. To those who enjoy the little ironies of history, the easy subjugation of respectable Boston by that very Jacobinical heresy against which Boston was so bitter is too amusing to be overlooked. Changing its name and arraying itself in garments cut after the best Yankee fashion, the gospel of Jean Jacques presently walked the streets of Boston and spoke from its most respectable pulpits, under the guise of Unitarianism. The heretical doctrines of the excellence of human nature and the perfectibility of man were preached to Federalist congregations so persuasively that instead of repudiating them and asserting the total depravity of their neighbors, simple-minded merchants approved the doctrines and cheerfully paid their pew-rent. It was a respectable and bloodless revolution. Under its discreet disguise Unitarianism accomplished for New England what Jeffersonianism had accomplished for the South and West--the wide dissemination of eighteenth-century French liberalism. It opened the New England mind to fresh ideas. Out of Unitarianism was to come the intellectual renaissance, with its transcendental philosophies and social reforms, its enlarged conception of democracy and its Utopian dreams, which made New England count so effectively in the developments of the half century.

The twenty-five years between 1790 and 1815 were the nascent period of Unitarianism, when it was reëxamining the old Calvinist dogmas in the light of the new liberalism, weighing the doctrines of election and reprobation in the scale with the doctrines of God’s beneficence and man’s excellence, and coming definitely to reject them as blasphemy against God and defamation of human nature. And it was during these critical years that the upholders of the traditional orthodoxy were most actively concerned to provide a defense for the sacred dogmas of their grandfathers. The liberal advance produced a conservative reaction, and the lines of battle were sharply drawn. The capture of Harvard College by the Unitarians in 1805, and the founding of Andover Theological Seminary by the Calvinists in 1808, were dramatic events in a long intellectual and legal struggle that aroused much bitterness and bequeathed to the churches a rich legacy of unchristian animosities. Good men on both sides--to recall a contemporary witticism--were quite too ready “to fight for the glory of God as if the very devil were in them.”

The traditional Calvinism defended itself with spirit, asserting so vehemently that it was still a living faith, that the corpse was not yet an authentic corpse, that it succeeded at least in postponing its own burial. It was deeply entrenched in the inertia of custom, but intellectually it was in really desperate straits. It was slowly disintegrating from dry-rot with which both minister and theology were stricken. With its major premises tacitly denied by Yankee experience, it was unfortunate in being defended by as humorless and ungainly a breed of theologians as ever quarreled over the loving-kindness of God. Clinging to the defenses which Jonathan Edwards had erected against the incursion of old-world ideas, it declaimed its dogmas and damned the human race with tedious iteration. Over-threshed straw makes poor fodder, and after a two-hour battle with potential infidelities, many a good minister descended from his pulpit lamenting that his exhortations had been wasted on “a sermon-proof, gospel-glutted generation.” Yet he went faithfully back to his study to consume the day in argument with a suppositious Arminian, and in spinning cobweb systems between the worm-eaten rafters, quite oblivious to the common-sense world without his walls. The difficulties in which those old Calvinists found themselves very likely seemed tragic to them; but to later generations, endowed with some saving grace of humor, the situation was not without its spice. The good men were undeniably caught in a distressing dilemma. They were laboring prodigiously both to sit tight in the old dogma of determinism and yet wriggle out; to maintain election and reprobation and yet insert somehow the thin edge of personal responsibility; to prove to the satisfaction of the pew that man is both bound and free. It was a hard necessity to be under, to damn man by predestination, and “yet worry out enough freedom for him to be decently damned on,” as a late critic has remarked;[440] to send him to hell by divine decree, yet prove that he went of his own accord. Yet they must do that impossible thing if they were to justify their theology to common-sense congregations that were drifting into indifference.

The whole thing was monstrously unreal and it resulted in hatching such a brood of tenuous subtleties as we have difficulty in comprehending today. Theological fame in Massachusetts came to be measured by the skill with which the logician made out to stand on both sides of the fence at the same time. Had it not been for Jonathan Edwards New England Congregationalism would have drifted comfortably with the tide of liberalism; but his uncompromising spirit held it anchored. This masterly spinner of theological systems bequeathed to his successors an unfinished work; but he had clearly envisaged the problem and suggested a line of attack. In his great inquiry into the nature of will he had hoped to provide an infallible means of reconciling the irreconcilable by arguing that the will is dependent on desire. The natural man, according to the Edwardean logic, is free to serve God as the highest good if he desires, but he lacks the desire unless God reveals himself as that highest good, and such revelation rests with God’s pleasure. “Moral responsibility lies in the choice, not in the cause of the choice.”[441] With this distinction suggested between natural and moral freedom, Calvinistic speculation went on hopefully till it attained its culminating triumph in Nathaniel Walker’s ingenious doctrine of certainty with power to the contrary. Walker was a pupil of Timothy Dwight’s, and one of the foundation professors of the new Yale Divinity School, established to combat Unitarian heresies. A tremendous rattling of the bones of the Connecticut churches followed his pronouncement that man’s acts are not necessitated by a rigid law of cause and effect, but that his choices are so connected with antecedent conditions of soul and environment, that to God’s perception it is certain what they will be, although he possesses full power of contrary choice.[442]

As we contemplate those old theological abstractions, dead now as Lot’s wife, the universe of our fathers shrinks to a petty compass, not much larger than the snug little state of Connecticut, curiously egocentric, curiously anthropomorphic. Obviously such grotesqueries could not endure indefinitely. Presently there must appear the common-sense housewife with her broom, and the dusty cobwebs would disappear. English Arianism, emerging out of English Presbyterianism, and long under suspicion of the New England fathers, first opened the windows and let a little fresh air into the New England churches. But back of Arianism was the total body of eighteenth-century rationalism, with its theology rooted in new political and social philosophies, and its doctrines derived from conceptions of God and man hostile to Calvinistic determinism. There could be no reconciling them. Calvinism must extirpate English rationalism or be disintegrated by it.

But rationalism refused to be extirpated. Here and there in Massachusetts pulpits appeared a new order of preachers, young men who had broken with the old dogmas and were plainly bitten with the English distemper. Of these the most notable was Jonathan Mayhew, from 1747 to 1766 pastor of the West Church, and the freest-spoken minister in Boston. Mayhew was a thoroughgoing liberal, not to say radical, an intimate friend of Otis and John Adams, and chief clerical leader of the opposition to the English ministry. He had broken through the narrow parochialism of Boston; he corresponded with the intellectual leaders of English dissent, and while still a young man was on the highroad to Arianism. He seems to have been a brilliant fellow, bold and frank in speech, with great and popular powers as a preacher, and his early death alone prevented him from anticipating some of the work of Channing.[443] A like fate abruptly terminated the work of another able young man, Lemuel Briant, pastor of the Braintree church from 1745 to his death in 1753. Briant was John Adams’s pastor and, like Mayhew, an Arian, with a ready wit that his adversaries must have found disconcerting. “I have always tho’t,” he remarked apropos of the familiar dilemma, “that so far as any Man is pure (let it be in a greater or lesser Degree) he is not filthy.”[444] But the coming on of the Revolutionary disputes and the disturbance of war put a stop to the normal development of the movement; and the general reaction following the treaty of peace gave encouragement to the Calvinistic reaction and temporarily strengthened the Edwardean school. Nevertheless the liberal doctrines of Mayhew and Briant, falling in with the French philosophy, prepared the way for the conscious Unitarian revolt at the end of the century.

That revolt was fundamentally ethical rather than theological, and the name Unitarian, which the liberal movement accepted somewhat reluctantly from its opponents, very inadequately describes its special genius. The term derives from the middle eighteenth century, before religious thought had come under the influence of the new social philosophy; and it suggests a primary theological bias in a movement that was far more significantly ethical and social. The early liberals, forerunners of Unitarianism, were theologians given to probing in rationalistic spirit, the mystery of the Godhood. Now, denial of the Trinity has been common to all Unitarians, although individually they might profess an Arian or a Socinian interpretation of the nature and rôle of Jesus; but what is more important, they have been from the first close Scripturists, disliking exact theological systems and setting biblical authority above human. By the time the name had come to be generally accepted--about the year 1815--it had already lost much of its earlier significance, for emphasis had shifted from the mystery of the Godhood to the problem of the relations existing between the children and the Father. On the one hand supernaturalism tended to disappear in morality, and on the other religion tended to seek an authoritative basis in idealistic philosophy and justify itself by intuitionism. “The soul,” argued Channing, in his exposition of a later Unitarian theology, “is the spring of our knowledge of God.” “Here is our primitive teacher and light.” “The only God, whom our thoughts can rest on, and our hearts can cling to, is the God whose image dwells in our own Souls” (_Works_, Vol. VI, Introductory Remarks, p. 21). Unitarianism, in other words, reversed the thought process of Calvinism. Instead of debasing man to a mean creature, subject to a God of wrath, it professed to discover a loving Father in the human heart of love. Here was a revolution indeed, a revolution in which were the seeds of transcendentalism, of social Utopias, of pretty much the entire intellectual awakening of New England. The old Calvinism had no weapons to meet such an attack; the new creed lay outside its realm of thought. What that creed finally came to be, under Channing’s influence, is thus stated by a recent historian:

Man is God’s child, made in His image and object of His love; his
reason and conscience are divine witnesses to truth and light, and
when governed by them he walks in the ways of God, safe in his
Father’s love and care. The God in whom their opponents believed--a
God of election and reprobation, capable of dooming an entire
race because its ancestors disobeyed a God of arbitrary will and
discriminating grace--seemed to them simply an immoral being and
they frankly said so. (Fenn, _Religious History of New England,
etc._, p. 125.)

In its noblest expression Unitarianism became essentially a humanistic religion, rational, ethical, individual, yet with deep and warm social sympathies. In Channing’s excellent phrase, it discovered the apotheosis of religion in “the adoration of goodness.” It issued in conduct because it developed character. The highest testimony to the excellence of the faith is the noble company of men and women who subscribed to its creed. And yet after all, Unitarianism was rather an attitude of mind than a creed. It was the recovery of the original principle of New England Separatism, lost during the long years of orthodox conformity--the principle of the open mind and free inquiry. Let each devout soul, each group of fellow believers, Unitarianism announced, seek the truth where it may be found; let each give to it such outward form as best reveals its divine nature; not seeking to impose a particular interpretation upon others, but each taking upon himself full responsibility for his spiritual welfare. Authority it regarded as the prop of the weak; dogma, as the body of a faith that is dead. As free souls, mature and self-reliant, the Unitarians would be their own authority, would fashion their own creed. The Scriptures lie open and the heedful eye will discover God’s revelation in their pages. The deeper spirit of Unitarianism is not inadequately embodied in the text, “Search the Scriptures, for they are they which testify of me.” No abler or more devout Scripturists ever preached in America than the Unitarian ministers, and if bolder souls like Theodore Parker went further than others, if their free handling of old interpretations gave offense to the timid, that fact provided no sanction to coerce or stifle free inquiry. Toleration of differences, respect for devout free thought--this return to the position of Roger Williams two centuries before was the vital principle of Unitarianism. Like him, the Unitarian was a seeker, open-minded and free. Others might be intolerant, others might regard themselves as the sole custodians of truth, but not he.

But if the Unitarians who followed Channing were liberals in religion, they were conservatives in well-nigh everything else. Amongst the laity the adoration of goodness was sufficiently tempered by Yankee thrift to keep it from interfering seriously with the practical business of getting on in the world; and in consequence the new faith gathered its supporters from amongst the prosperous rather than the needy, from Federalists rather than Democrats. The commercial dominated the intellectual and emotional in their prim and somewhat cold congregations. “The Unitarians,” it was commonly said, “were the cult of the arrived.” As successful men, these Boston merchants and manufacturers did not believe that they were the sons of Adam, children of iniquity. They thought better of themselves and of God than Calvinism permitted them to think; “one who was born in Boston,” the current jest put it, “had no need to be born again.” Generous in all approved philanthropies these Unitarian laymen might be, but emotionally religious they were temperamentally incapable of being. Until the infusion of the rich sap of transcendentalism, that gave it new life and brought it to bloom, Unitarianism was in grave danger of dying at the root. But with the spread of the philosophy of intuitionalism, the negative individualism of Unitarianism became positive, broke with the respectable conservatism of commercial congregations, and overflowed in a rich and generous faith. Authority, dogma, creed, were swept away by this new faith in an indwelling divinity, with its intuitive sanctions, and Unitarianism merged in the larger movement of the renaissance.

II • William Ellery Channing

To the austerely spiritual Channing the guiding principle of Unitarianism was identical with the spirit of primitive New England separatism--the principle of freedom in religious matters, the individual speaking his mind frankly, shepherd and flock feeding as they would, without fear and without coercion. The soul is responsible to itself and its own conscience; there are no orthodoxies and no heterodoxies, but a duty is laid upon the individual to seek truth with an open mind and be steadfast in its service. It was this spirit of open-minded liberalism that led him along the path of unmilitant individualism, seeking freedom only to the end of righteousness, and counting righteousness the fine flower of freedom; desiring peace and universal fellowship; loath to found a sect; yet driven by those who denied freedom to themselves as well as others to become the champion and leader of a great schism that sundered the traditional unity of Congregationalism, and erected a new faith on the altars of the old.

Channing’s heritage was drawn from the deepest wells of New England idealism; and filtered through his finely ethical mind it emerged pure and limpid, the living waters of the new faith. His noble preëminence was due to the simple spirituality of his nature. Intellectually, he was neither great nor original. In scholarship he was distinctly inferior to academic theologians like Andrews Norton and to omnivorous students like Theodore Parker. Almost wholly introspective he was influenced slowly by world-currents of thought, and such alien ideas as found lodgment in his mind took on a native form and color from his own convictions. Nevertheless though his meditations revolved about the pole-star of his own experience, his theology cautiously took shape under the pressure of two ideas that came to him from the latter years of the eighteenth century--the ideas of God’s beneficence and of man’s excellence. Once lodged in his mind, those ideas led to quite revolutionary consequences, not only in their disintegrating effect upon the Calvinistic dogmas in which he had been reared, but in the generous romanticism which they bequeathed to Unitarian theology. His intellectual development was late and halting, yet that he liberated himself at all was remarkable considering the world that bred him--Newport, frequented by wealthy planters and enriched by the slave trade, Cambridge and Boston then in the stagnancy of Federalist complacency. Of the same generation with Robert Treat Paine and Josiah Quincy, only a few years older than Rufus Choate and Edward Everett, as a boy sitting under the preaching of Samuel Hopkins--the rugged expounder of the Hopkinsian doctrine of willing to be damned for the glory of God, a doctrine so repugnant to the major tenets of Channing’s theology--he belonged by temperament and training to the parochial world that accounted Fisher Ames a great orator, and looked with suspicion on the new century that was crowding in on its comfortable preserves.

From the deep New England ruts Channing pulled himself with incredible difficulty. His frequent reactions almost kept pace with his progress. For years he oscillated between freedom and dogma, now dominated by the Hopkinsian influence and thrown back upon a morbid Calvinism by ill health; then resolutely casting off the evil spell; until the year 1815, when the conservative wing declaring war upon the liberals, he was drawn into the controversy and took upon himself the burden of defending the liberal cause. He was then thirty-five, but it was not till four years later, in the celebrated Baltimore sermon at the ordination of Jared Sparks, that he offered a definitive statement of the new theology. The sermon brought him wide fame and fastened upon him the leadership of the Unitarian movement. Comment upon the new doctrines was widespread, and the circulation of the sermon in pamphlet form, according to a late biographer, “was not exceeded by any American publication until in 1830 Webster made his memorable reply to Hayne” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing_, p. 147). The creative influence of that sermon in clarifying certain doctrines of Unitarianism and integrating the society should not blind us to the fact that it embodies only a portion of Channing’s theology--the idea of God’s beneficence. It is a reasoned attack upon Trinitarian Calvinism, upon those dogmas which reveal--in Channing’s expressive phrase--“how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity”; but it takes no account of the idea which later he came to place first--the idea of man’s excellence.

Finer than the Baltimore sermon in its restrained eloquence--an eloquence that burns with an intensity rare in Channing--and in its dramatic exposition of the doctrine of the atonement, is the sermon entitled _Unitarian Christianity most Favourable to Piety_, delivered in 1826 at the dedication of the second Unitarian church in New York City. In this sermon Channing made use of a daring comparison which startled his friends and gave mortal offense to orthodox Calvinists. It is probably the most dramatic passage to be found in his writings, and it so well exemplifies the temper of the controversy that it deserves quotation. After discussing the Edwardean philosophy of infinite punishment and the nature of atonement, he proceeded:

Let me, then, set it before you, in new terms, and by a new
illustration; and if in so doing, I may wound the feelings of some
who hear me, I beg them to believe, that I do it with pain, and
from no impulse but a desire to serve the cause of truth.--Suppose,
then, that a teacher should come among you, and should tell
you, that the Creator, in order to pardon his own children, had
erected a gallows in the centre of the universe, and had publicly
executed upon it, in room of the offenders, an Infinite Being, the
partaker of his own Supreme Divinity; suppose him to declare, that
this execution was appointed, as a most conspicuous and terrible
manifestation of God’s justice, and of the infinite woe denounced
by his law; and suppose him to add, that all beings in heaven and
earth are required to fix their eyes on this fearful sight, as the
most powerful enforcement of obedience and virtue. Would you not
tell him, that he calumniated his Maker? Would you not say to him,
that this central gallows threw gloom over the universe; that the
spirit of a government, whose very acts of pardon were written in
such blood, was terror, not paternal love; and that the obedience
which needed to be upheld by this horrid spectacle, was nothing
worth? Would you not say to him, that even you, in this infancy and
imperfection of your being, were capable of being wrought upon by
nobler motives, and of hating sin through more generous views; and
that much more the angels, those pure flames of love, need not the
gallows and an executed God to confirm their loyalty? You would all
so feel, at such teaching as I have supposed; and yet how does this
differ from the popular doctrine of atonement? (_Works_, Vol. III,
pp. 197-198.)

In seeking an explanation of Channing’s break with New England orthodoxy--a breach that widened greatly with years, coming to embrace politics and economics as well as theology, alienating many of his own congregation and bringing acute grief to him--one can scarcely over-emphasize the influence of his Virginia experience. During the twenty-one months that he spent on the southern plantation, painfully isolated and lonely, he grappled seriously with a body of thought from which the environment of his youth had pretty much shut him away. Virginia in 1798 was ardently Jeffersonian, and French romantic philosophy was a commonplace in Virginia libraries. While Channing never went over wholly to Jeffersonianism, but retained certain Federalist prejudices after the old foundations had turned to quicksand under his feet, he there began a long process of speculative brooding that was to carry him far from the political principles of Boston. French revolutionary thought provided his chief intellectual stimulus during the critical Virginia period. Rousseau he read with profound interest, together with Godwin’s _Political Justice_ and Mary Wollstonecraft’s _Rights of Woman_. The Physiocratic economics that sanctioned the agrarian bias of Jeffersonian democracy seems to have made no appeal to a mind primarily ethical in outlook, yet he went so far as to dabble in communistic theory, and for a time contemplated joining a communistic community. From France, moreover, he derived the idea of the excellence of human nature and the perfectibility of man, ideas which became the mainspring of his later thinking, creatively determining both his theology and his social philosophy, and transforming his whole intellectual world.

In July, 1800, eight months before it took formal possession of the White House, “French infidel philosophy” made its appearance in New England in the person of a slight, health-broken youth, who returned to his quiet theological studies, quite unmindful of the gunpowder he had brought back in his intellectual luggage. It was long before a spark was to strike home, but the powder was there and would do its work eventually. In passing through Channing’s mind, the contributions of French romanticism merged with the native heritage of New England idealism, and supplemented by contributions from English Arian thought, slowly assumed definite form that came to issue in three dominating ideas, namely: God is love, man is potentially noble, religion is an excellent life. Enveloping these master ideas, in which they were carried as in a medium, was a pervasive ethical spirit that colored all his thinking and eventually took form in that striking phrase into which all of Channing is compressed, “the adoration of goodness--this is religion.” This constituted his reply to the Edwardean theology that debased man to the sole end of exalting a monstrous God--the doctrine of “sweetness and light” was set over against the dogmas of reprobation and election.

With his profound sense of justice, Channing could not follow “the adoration of goodness” into an aloof and mystical pietism. The temptation was strong, for his finely aristocratic and hesitant nature prompted him to stand apart from all turmoil and partisan struggle. He disliked controversy and distrusted all dogmatists. The world of economics and politics was exceedingly distasteful to him; he would gladly stop his ears against the clamor of organized groups and strident parties. The Abolitionists, with whose purpose he deeply sympathized, seemed to him intolerant and their tactics vulgar. There is a measure of justice in Garrison’s comment after Channing’s death: “His nerves were delicately strung. The sound of a ram’s horn was painfully distressing to him. He was firmly persuaded that nothing but a silver trumpet was needed to cause the walls of Jericho to fall; and he did his best upon his own.”[445] And yet, however unwillingly, he was drawn inevitably into an agitation that touched both his religion and his humanity; and between 1835 and 1837 he issued three notable contributions to the controversy: _Slavery_, a reply to the Southern apologists; _The Abolitionists_, an open letter to James Birney, whose Abolition press had been wrecked by an Ohio mob; and a noble appeal to Henry Clay against the annexation of Texas. In the latter year he spoke in Faneuil Hall at a turbulent meeting called to protest against the murder of Lovejoy, the meeting at which Wendell Phillips made his dramatic first appearance on the Abolition platform.

The point of view from which Channing approached the problem of slavery is clearly set forth in his _Introductory Remarks_, written in 1841 for a collected edition of his works, and which constitutes his _apologia pro vita sua_.[446] In this extraordinarily lucid and just statement he reduces the master passions of his life to two--respect for human nature, and reverence for human liberty--passions which were inseparable in all his thinking. Of the first he says, “The following writings will be found to be distinguished by nothing more than by the high estimate which they express of human nature. A respect for the human soul breathes through them.” This attitude he elaborates at length:

An enlightened, disinterested human being, morally strong, and
exerting a wide influence by the power of virtue, is the clearest
reflection of the divine splendour on earth.... The glory of the
Maker lies in his work.... Those men glorify God most, who look
with keen eye and loving heart on his works, who catch in all some
glimpses of beauty and power, who have a spiritual sense for good
in its dimmest manifestations, and who can so interpret the world,
that it becomes a bright witness to the Divinity.

I have also felt and continually insisted, that a new reverence for
man was essential to the cause of social reform.... There can be no
spirit of brotherhood, no true peace, any farther than men come to
understand their affinity with and relation to God and the infinite
purpose for which he gave them life. As yet these ideas are treated
as a kind of spiritual romance.... The reception of this plainest
truth of Christianity would revolutionize society, and create
relations among men not dreamed of at the present day.... Men would
know the import of the word Brother, as yet nothing but a word to
multitudes. None of us can conceive the change of manners, the
new courtesy and sweetness, the mutual kindness, deference and
sympathy, the life and efforts for social melioration, which are
to spring up, in proportion as man shall penetrate beneath the body
to the spirit, and shall learn what the lowest human being is.

Out of this reverence for human nature flowed his “reverence for Liberty, for human rights; a sentiment which has grown with my growth, which is striking deeper root in my age, which seems to me a chief element of true love for mankind, and which alone fits a man for intercourse with his fellow-creatures.”

It is because I have learned the essential equality of men before
the common Father, that I cannot endure to see one man establishing
his arbitrary will over another by fraud, or force, or wealth,
or rank, or superstitious claims. It is because the human being
has moral powers, because he carries a law in his own breast
and was made to govern himself, that I cannot endure to see him
taken out of his own hands and fashioned into a tool by another’s
avarice or pride. It is because I see in him a great nature, the
divine image, and vast capacities, that I demand for him means of
self-development, spheres for free action--that I call society not
to fetter, but to aid his growth.

In such humanitarian idealism did French romantic philosophy come to flower in the generous mind of this son of New England. He was no longer narrowly Unitarian; he had become a social revolutionary with Utopian dreams. The minister’s wealthy parishioners might worship the common Father complacently under the shadow of slavery, black or white, but the minister could not; he had caught a glimpse of the Promised Land and would lead his flock towards it. Unhappily, the vast abyss of negro slavery lay between, and Channing considered it with growing concern. In his examination of the problem he was broadly philosophical rather than narrowly partisan. He rested his case against slavery on an ethical adaptation of the natural-rights theory.[447] Since man is both rational and moral, he argued, he cannot be deprived by law or custom of the essential prerogatives of personality. The inalienable rights of man are in essence no other than the rights of personality--the right to exercise his reason, to seek light of his conscience, to enjoy the fruits of his labor, to enter into domestic relations, in short to be free to live as a man in a state of civilization. To treat man as property is the grossest denial and violation of that which by its nature is inviolable and inalienable. Channing pushed his argument further and asserted that the institution of slavery was not only irrational and immoral, but a fundamental denial of democracy. It must end in perverting the political state to its own evil. The southern conception of a Greek democracy resting on black slavery he looked upon as the final prostitution of the democratic ideal. “Those who tell us that slavery is a necessary condition of a republic, do not justify the former, but pronounce a sentence of reprobation on the latter.” For those text-mongerers who professed to justify slavery by Scripture, he had only scorn. By such methods polygamy might as readily be justified.

Inquiry into the nature and scope of individual rights brought Channing face to face with the problem of the political state and the duties of citizenship. Here his break with Boston Federalism was final and complete. He judged men and institutions by ethical standards; State Street judged them by economic standards. By his own path he went back to the eighteenth century, and interpreting the functions and province of government in the light of Godwin’s _Political Justice_, he arrived at the conception of a constantly diminishing political state that should eventually disappear. The dogma of political sovereignty he denied: “The state is equally restrained with individuals by the Moral Law” (“Slavery,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 37). The expediency of some restraint upon individual action he accepted, but with the proviso that it be exercised only to the end of the common well-being. “The authority of the state to impose laws on its members I cheerfully allow; but this has limits, which are found to be more and more narrow in proportion to the progress of moral science” (_ibid._, p. 38). “That government is most perfect, in which Policy is most entirely subjected to Justice, or in which the supreme and constant aim is to secure the rights of every human being” (_ibid._, p. 38). To such a government loyalty will be given gladly; but in the event that expediency should prevail over justice, and the state should prostitute its power by exploiting one class for the benefit of another, then must loyalty be transferred from the state to the higher law. “Justice is a greater good than property, not greater in degree, but in kind.” “The good of the individual is more important than the outward prosperity of the State” (_ibid._, pp. 40, 44). In such doctrines Channing paid his respects to the political philosophy of Webster.

The final outcome of his political thinking was a close approximation to the position of Jefferson. His distrust of power grew more apprehensive as he reflected on the common abuse of power, and the cheap and paltry appeals by which the unthinking are swayed. Before the organized power of the mass, the individual is helpless. In the _Introductory Remarks_ he went further than he had done in earlier writings in analysis of the state, and such a passage as this might have been penned by John Taylor of Caroline County. It is pure Jeffersonianism.

So fearful is the principle of which I have spoken, that I
have thought it right to recommend restrictions on power and
a simplicity in government beyond what most approve. Power, I
apprehend, should not be suffered to run into great masses. No more
of it should be confided to rulers than is absolutely necessary
to repress crime and preserve public order. A purer age may
warrant larger trusts; but the less of government now the better,
if society be kept in peace. There should exist, if possible, no
office to madden ambition.... One of the tremendous evils of the
world, is the monstrous accumulation of power in a few hands....
Is any man pure enough to be trusted with it? Ought such a prize
as this to be held out to ambition? Can we wonder at the shameless
profligacy, intrigue, and the base sacrifices of public interests
by which it is sought, and, when gained, held fast? Undoubtedly,
great social changes are required to heal this evil, to diminish
this accumulation of power. National spirit, which is virtual
hostility to all countries but our own, must yield to a growing
humanity, to a new knowledge of the spirit of Christ. Another
important step is, a better comprehension by communities that
government is at best a rude machinery, which can accomplish but
very limited good, and which, when strained to accomplish what
individuals should do for themselves, is sure to be perverted by
selfishness to narrow purposes, or to defeat through ignorance its
own ends. Man is too ignorant to govern much, to form vast plans
for states and empires. Human policy has almost always been in
conflict with the great laws of social well-being, and the less we
rely on it the better. The less of power given to man over man the
better. (_Works_, Vol. VI, pp. 26-27.)

Channing had evidently read his _Political Justice_ to good effect, for the spirit of eighteenth-century liberalism had passed into his thought and given shape to his political philosophy. In his hatred of war, his pacifism, his humanitarian concern, his social-mindedness, his repudiation of all coercive centralizing power, he proved himself a child of Godwin. He would have no tyranny, whether by the organized state or by the unorganized mass. He extended to all men the right of free thought and free speech. In no other cause did he speak more vehemently than in defense of this democratic right. When the Abolitionists were mobbed and their presses broken he rejoiced in their refusal to be silenced. “From my heart I thank them,” he wrote. “I am myself their debtor. I am not sure, that I should this moment write in safety, had they shrunk from the conflict, had they shut their lips, imposed silence on their presses, and hid themselves before their ferocious assailants.... I thank the Abolitionists, that in this evil day, they were true to the rights which the multitude were ready to betray.” Then follows a passage that is perennially true, considering how hardly won and easily lost is the right of free speech:

Of all powers, the last to be entrusted to the multitude of men,
is that of determining what questions shall be discussed. The
greatest truths are often the most unpopular and exasperating; and
were they to be denied discussion, till the many should be ready to
accept them, they would never establish themselves in the general
mind. The progress of society depends on nothing more, than on the
exposure of time-honored abuses, which cannot be touched without
offending multitudes, than on the promulgation of principles,
which are in advance of public sentiment and practice, and which
are constantly at war with the habits, prejudices, and immediate
interests of large classes of the community. Of consequence, the
multitude, if once allowed to dictate or proscribe subjects of
discussion, would strike society with spiritual blindness, and
death. The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first
offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and
would rejoice to crush. The right of free discussion is therefore
to be guarded by the friends of mankind, with peculiar jealousy.
It is at once the most sacred, and the most endangered of all our
rights. He who would rob his neighbor of it, should have a mark
set on him as the worst enemy of freedom. (“The Abolitionists,” in
_Works_, Vol. II, p. 161.)

High-minded and generous was this child of Puritan idealism who had gone to school to French infidel philosophy--never untrue to the principle of free inquiry which in demanding for himself he willingly granted others. He calmly accepted the fact of disintegration which is implicit in all liberalism--the denial of traditional authority and ancient custom--partly because he believed the old ways were bad, but in part also because he held strongly to his faith in human nature. Despite failure and discouragement he clung to his cardinal belief--“My one sublime idea, which has given me unity of mind, the greatness, the divinity of the soul.” He broke the more willingly with an ungenerous past because he envisaged a nobler future. An intuitive individualist, he was a forerunner of transcendental individualism, and he found himself in hearty accord with Emerson’s doctrines in the Divinity School address. With the later rationalistic phase of Unitarianism which began with Theodore Parker’s memorable South Boston sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity_, in May, 1841, he found himself only partly in intellectual sympathy. He remained a supernaturalist after the younger generation had rejected supernaturalism; but his sturdy adherence to the principle of liberalism would not suffer him to join in the Unitarian hue and cry raised against the young radical. Unitarianism turned orthodox, and bent on erecting new dogmas, seemed to him treasonable to every liberal hope. “As to Mr. Parker,” he wrote, “I wish him to preach what he thoroughly believes and feels. I trust the account you received of attempts to _put him down_ was in the main a fiction. Let the full heart pour itself forth!” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing_, p. 357.) Sixteen months after he penned those words Channing was dead, but the spirit of his life was embodied in the great ferment that was rising about him when he died. “Let the full heart pour itself forth”--to many sober Bostonians it seemed that New England had taken that injunction quite too literally and was pouring forth disturbant and gusty heresies, but Channing would scarcely have disapproved.

Footnotes

[440] See Fenn, _Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel Lectures_, p. 130.

[441] See Williston Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States_, p. 283.

[442] _Ibid._, p. 356.

[443] _Ibid._, pp. 276-277.

[444] _Ibid._, p. 272.

[445] Compare a fuller estimate in Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. III, pp. 239-242.

[446] In the Glasgow edition of 1844 it prefaces the sixth volume.

[447] For a brief discussion, see Merriam, _American Political Theories_, pp. 217-221.