upon the value of a deeper knowledge of the literature of the
Continent. This was the burden of Channing's once famous article
on "A National Literature" in 1823: it was a plea for an
independent American school of writers, but these writers should
know the best that Europe had to teach.

The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of
Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and
religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It
had bred an extraordinary type of men and women, it had, helped
to lay some of the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it
was still destined to have a long life in the new West and in the
South. But in that stern section of the country where its
influence had been most marked there was now an increasingly
sharp reaction against its determinism and its pessimism. Early
in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential
churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had
accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as
Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout Eastern
Massachusetts and made its way to other States. Orthodox and
liberal Congregational churches split apart, and when Channing
preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in
1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with some
misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is
only with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet
that literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a
New England writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who
remained untouched by it.

The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has