preaching is a thing of the past, other influences having taken its
place. But Boston knows better; for she had two great preachers in the
nineteenth century, and is sure that an immense and enduring force was
theirs, and through them, hers. Channing and Brooks! Men very unlike in
body and mind, but preachers of like tendency and influence from their
common love of freedom and faith in mankind. This city has learned by
rich experience that preaching becomes the 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