he broader
sympathies which he generated in its circles. To Channing, also, he
expressed gratitude for helping to wake in him a new sense of the
meaning of life and religion. It was Channing's characteristic to insist
on the significance of personality. The worth, the depth, and also the
rights of the Human made so vivid an appeal to his mind as to react on
his conceptions of the Divine. Within, a few years after the _Rationale_
was published, Martineau is found making an obvious change of base. He
has realized that the externally communicated religion of the old
school, however sublime in its proportions, fails to meet the needs or,
indeed, to fit the facts of the inner life. Man's personality rises, in
his thought, into touch with God's; the revelation from without can only
be recognized as such by the aid of a revelation within; a real
activity, a genuine moral choice, and a resulting character, the marks
of a truly living Soul, these are indispensable to an adequate view of
the religious life. But all this involves two significant positions,
each far asunder from those hitherto put forth--there must be Freedom,
at least in the moral world; and the Divine assurances of moral values
and of loving aid to win them are no longer confined to an outer record.
Such a record may yield invaluable service as a heightener and
interpreter of individual experience; to the last we find Martineau
attaching a profound and quite special significance to the revelation in
Jesus of the life of sonship to God, and retaining tenaciously the
Christian attitude in preference to one of simple theism. But his system
is based on the internal; all the rest, the Church, the Bible, Nature,
however august and charged with meaning, is supplementary to that.

In the American field, under the influence of Emerson and the German
philosophy, what is called 'Transcendentalism' flourished midway in the
century, and there as well as in England its extravagances were
deplored. Martineau himself, while approaching so nearly to the egoistic
centre, was safeguarded from all such vagaries by an all-pervading sense
of duty. In his volumes of sermon the _Endeavours after the Christian
Life_, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, which remain among the
choicest of their kind in our language, his austerity of moral tone is
only relieved by an elevation of poetic mysticism till then unknown in
Unitarian literature. It was, indeed, his conviction that the body wou