operative only at the beginning of the chain of events and now remote
from man and the world, but present and immediate, exhibiting his divine
purposes in all the beings created by him. Christianity, in the view of
this school, was the means by which God had been pleased to make known
the grand consummation of this life in a perfected life to come; Jesus,
the Messiah, was the chosen revealer of the divine will, and his
resurrection was the supreme and necessary guarantee that his message
was true. Martineau, like the rest of his generation, was brought up in
this necessarianism; but its tendency, as he reviewed and tested it, was
to do violence to certain irrepressible factors of the spiritual life.
It is only fair to say, there was even in this Priestleyan school room
for a mystical mood; but on the whole it appeared dry and intellectual,
lacking the warm and operative forces of a deeper devotion.

It is interesting to find that Martineau himself confessed that the
freshening touch upon his own inner life came in a closer contact with
evangelical piety. His mind was to the end of his many years readily
responsive to congenial impulses, let them come whence they would, and
no small part of his service to Unitarianism consists in the 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