and public influence was this great personal achievement, this attuning
of his own soul to noblest harmonies.

Thousands of ministers and spiritually-minded laymen of many
denominations have travelled since Channing's death the road he laid
out, and so have been delivered from the inhuman doctrines of the fall
of man, the wrath of God, vicarious atonement, everlasting hell for the
majority, and the rescue of a predestined few. They should all join in
giving heartfelt praise and thanks to Channing, who thought out clearly,
and preached with fervid reiteration, the doctrines which have delivered
them from a painful bondage.

Another remarkable quality of Channing's teachings is their
universality. Men of learning and spirituality in all the civilized
nations have welcomed his words, and found in them teachings of enduring
and expansive influence. Many Biblical scholars, in the technical sense,
have arrived eighty years later at Channing's conclusions about the
essential features of Christianity, although Channing was no scholar in
the modern sense; while they go far beyond him in treating the Bible as
a collection of purely human writings and in rejecting the so-called
supernatural quality of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Indeed,
many Biblical scholars belonging to-day to evangelical sects have
arrived not only at Channing's position, but also at Emerson's.

Just how much Channing's published works have had to do with this quiet
but fateful revolution no man can tell. The most eminent to-day of
American Presbyterian divines preached an excellent sermon in the
Harvard College Chapel one Sunday evening not many years ago, and asked
me, as we walked away together, how I liked it. I replied: "Very much;
it was all straight out of Channing." "That is strange," he said, "for