party. The son of a mechanic, he fought his way through
difficulties to a liberal education, and was thirty years old before his
very great abilities attracted general attention. A greedy gormandizer
of books in many languages, he had little of the dainty scholarship so
much prized at the neighboring university. But the results of his vast
reading were stored in a quick and tenacious memory as ready rhetorical
material wherewith to convince or astonish. Paradox was a passion with
him, that was stimulated by complaints, and even by deprecations, to the
point of irreverence. He liked to "make people's flesh crawl." Even in
his advocacy of social and public reforms, which was strenuous and
sincere, he delighted so to urge his cause as to inflame prejudice and
opposition against it. With this temper it is not strange that when he
came to enunciate his departure from some of the accepted tenets of his
brethren, who were habitually reverent in their discipleship toward
Jesus Christ, he should do this in a way to offend and shock. The
immediate reaction of the Unitarian clergy from the statements of his
sermon, in 1841, on "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity,"
in which the supernatural was boldly discarded from his belief, was so
general and so earnest as to give occasion to Channing's exclamation,
"Now we have a Unitarian orthodoxy!" Channing did not live to see the
characteristic tenets of the heresiarch to whom he hesitated to give the
name of Christian not only widely accepted in the Unitarian churches,
but some of them freely discussed as open questions among some orthodox
scholars.

* * * * *

Two very great events in this period of schism may be dispatched with a
brevity out of all proportion to their importance, on account of the
simplicity of motive and action by which they are characterized.

In the year 1844 the slavery agitation in the Methodist Episcopal Church
culminated, not in the rupture of the church, but in the
well-considered, deliberate division of it between North and South. The
history of the slavery question among the Methodists was a typical one.
From the beginning the Methodist Society had been committed by its
founder and his early successors to the strictest (not the strongest)
position on this question. Not only was the system of slavery denounced
as iniquitous, but the attempt was made to enforce the rigid rule that
persons involved under this system i