revolving through space” for a few years after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if somewhat heavy.  Webster, to be sure, was a Massachusetts man—­as were Everett and Choate—­but his triumphs were won in the wider field of national politics.  There was, however, a movement at this time, in the intellectual life of Boston and eastern Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to the finer kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation.  This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which William Ellery Channing was the principal leader.  In a community so intensely theological as New England, it was natural that any new movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches.  Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts the form of “liberal Christianity.”  Arminianism, Socinianism, and other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years.  But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of Boston and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Harvard College had been captured too.  In the controversy that ensued, and which was carried on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals, there were eminent disputants on both sides.  So far as this controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity it has no place in a history of literature.  But the issue went far beyond that.  Channing asserted the dignity of human nature against the Calvinistic doctrine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights of human reason and man’s capacity to judge of God.  “We must start in religion from our own souls,” he said.  And in his Moral Argument against Calvinism, 1820, he wrote:  “Nothing is gained to piety by degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know and judge of God all piety has its foundation.”  In opposition to Edwards’s doctrine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will.  He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, fore-ordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster.  In Channing’s view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience.  He was a passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual, not only as against political oppression, but against the tyranny of public opinion over thought and conscience:  “We were made for free action.  This alone is life, and enters into all that is good and great.”  This jealous love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote.  It led him to join the Antislavery