most productive of all human
works the moment the adequate preacher appears--a noble man with a
noble message. Such was Channing.

His public work was preceded and accompanied by a great personal
achievement. All his life he grew in spirit, becoming always freer,
broader, and more sympathetic. In forty years he worked his way out of
moderate Calvinism without the Trinity into such doctrines as
these:--"The idea of God ... is the idea of our own spiritual natures
purified and enlarged to infinity." "The sense of duty is the greatest
gift of God. The idea of right is the primary and highest revelation of
God to the human mind; and all outward revelations are founded on and
addressed to it." There is "but one object of cherished and enduring
love in heaven or on earth, and that is moral goodness." "I do and I
must reverence human nature.... I honor it for its struggles against
oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many
chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and
still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are
marks of a divine origin and pledges of a celestial inheritance."
"Perfection is man's proper and natural goal." What an immense distance
between these doctrines of Channing's maturity and the Calvinism of his
youth! He was a meditative, reflecting man, who read much, but took
selected thoughts of others into the very substance and fibre of his
being, and made them his own. The foundation of his professional power
and public influence was this great personal achievement, this attuning
of his own soul to noblest harmonies.

Thousands of ministers and spiritually-minded laymen of many
denominations have travelled since Channing's death the road he laid
out, and so have been delivered from the inhuman doctrines of the fall
of man, the wrath of God, vicarious atonement, everlasting hell for the
majority, and the rescue of a predestined few. They should all join in
giving heartfelt praise and thanks to Channing, who thought out clearly,
and preached with fervid reiteration, the doctrines which have delivered
them from a painful bondage.

Another remarkable quality of Channing's teachings is their
universality. Men of learning and spirituality in all the civilized
nations have welcomed his words, and found in them teachings of enduring
and expansive influence. Many Biblical scholars, in the technical sense,
have arrived eighty years later at Channing's