ons is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man. Of
this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding. It was early and
deliberately adopted by him as a fundamental faith. It remained the
immovable centre of his reverence and trust amid all the inroads of
doubt and sorrow. Political interest was as natural to Channing's
earlier manhood as it had been to Fichte in the emergency of the
Fatherland. Similarly, in the later years of his life, when evils
connected with slavery had made themselves felt, his participation in
the abolitionist agitation showed the same enthusiasm and practical
bent. He had his dream of communism, his perception of the evils of our
industrial system, his contempt for charity in place of economic remedy.
All was for man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is
endowed with knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it,
was a fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's assertion of free-will.
The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory. In
the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of God. Its
suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare
themselves to be God's law. God, concurring with our highest nature,
present in its action, can be thought of only after the pattern which he
gives us in ourselves. Whatever revelation God makes of himself, he must
deal with us as with free beings living under natural laws. Revelation
must be merely supplementary to those laws. Everything arbitrary and
magical, everything which despairs of us or insults us as moral agents,
everything which does not address itself to us through reason and
conscience, must be excluded from the intercourse between God and man.
What the doctrines of salvation and atonement, of the person of Christ
and of the influence of the Holy Spirit, as construed from this centre
would be, may without difficulty be surmised. The whole of Channing's
teaching is bathed in an atmosphere of the reverent love of God which is
the very source of his enthusiasm for man.

BUSHNELL

A very different man was Horace Bushnell, born in the year of Channing's
licensure, 1802. He was not bred under the influence of the strict
Calvinism of his day. His father was an Arminian. Edwards had made
Arminians detested in New England. His mother had been reared in the
Episcopal Church. She was of Huguenot origin. When about seventeen,
while tending a carding-machine, he wrote a paper in