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 be recognized as such by the aid of a revelation within; a real activity, a genuine moral choice, and a resulting character, the marks of a truly living Soul, these are indispensable to an adequate view of the religious life.  But all this involves two significant positions, each far asunder from those hitherto put forth—­there must be Freedom, at least in the moral world; and the Divine assurances of moral values and of loving aid to win them are no longer confined to an outer record.  Such a record may yield invaluable service as a heightener and interpreter of individual experience; to the last we find Martineau attaching a profound and quite special significance to the revelation in Jesus of the life of sonship to God, and retaining tenaciously the Christian attitude in preference to one of simple theism.  But his system is based on the internal; all the rest, the Church, the Bible, Nature, however august and charged with meaning, is supplementary to that.

In the American field, under the influence of Emerson and the German philosophy, what is called ‘Transcendentalism’ flourished midway in the century, and there as well as in England its extravagances were deplored.  Martineau himself, while approaching so nearly to the egoistic centre, was safeguarded from all such vagaries by an all-pervading sense of duty.  In his volumes of sermon the Endeavours after the Christian Life, and Hours of Thought on Sacred Things, which remain among the choicest of their kind in our language, his austerity of moral tone is only relieved by an elevation of poetic mysticism till then unknown in Unitarian literature.  It was, indeed, his conviction that the body would not write poetry for a generation or two, so dry and prosaic did he find it; but at that very time his own efforts in hymnody on one side and on the other his lyric prose, almost too richly