agination, recognizing greatness under lowliest disguises, and
spreading sweet sanctions around every charity of social life, and with
his longings to see reverence, loyalty, courtesy, and contentment
established on the earth, he most closely sympathized. From this time he
began to engage more actively in political and philanthropic
movements."[238]

Channing believed that orthodoxy was incalculably mischievous in its
estimate of Deity and of human depravity. "God, we are told," says he,
"must not be limited; nor are his rights to be restrained by any rights
in his creatures. These are made to minister to their Maker's glory, not
to glorify themselves. They wholly depend on him, and have no power
which they can call their own. His sovereignty, awful and omnipotent, is
not to be kept in check, or turned from its purposes, by any claims of
his subjects. Man's place is the dust. The entire prostration of his
faculties is the true homage he is to offer to God. He is not to exalt
his reason or his sense of right against the decrees of the Almighty.
He has but one lesson to learn, that he is nothing, that God is All in
All. Such is the common language of theology."[239]

Against these views he asserts man's free agency and moral dignity. His
creed is the greatness of Human Nature; such greatness as is seen in the
"intellectual energy which discerns absolute, universal truth in the
idea of God, in freedom of will and moral power, in disinterestedness
and self-sacrifice, in the boundlessness of love, in aspirations after
perfection, in desires and affections which time and space cannot
confine, and the world cannot fill. The soul, viewed in these lights,
should fill us with awe. It is an immortal germ, which may be said to
contain now within itself what endless ages are to unfold. It is truly
an image of the infinity of God, and no words can do justice to its
grandeur."[240] Instead of looking without for a basis of religion, we
must commence at home, within ourselves. "We must start in religion from
our own souls, for in them is the fountain of all divine truth. An
outward revelation is only possible and intelligible on the ground of
conceptions and principles previously furnished by the soul. Here is our
primitive teacher and light. Let us not disparage it. There are, indeed,
philosophical schools of the present day, which tell us that we are to
start in all our speculations from the Absolute, the Infinite. But we
rise to th