premises into their conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral reductio ad absurdum and a state of opinion against which Channing rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in the carrying out of his own principles.  Thus the “Channing Unitarians,” while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came into the world.  While rejecting the doctrine of the “vicarious sacrifice” they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor, and that his supernatural nature was testified by miracles.  For Parker and Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ was a good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed him more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission.  In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha, Socrates, or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the “Ethnical Scriptures” or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were published in the transcendental organ, the Dial.  As against these new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative position.  The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous outside of eastern Massachusetts.  They had a few churches in New York and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such, was a local one.  Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy, under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut.  In the neighboring State of Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a church edifice of its own.  On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed, with justice, that their opinions had, to a great extent, modified the theology of the orthodox churches.  The writings of Horace Bushnell, of Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement; and the “progressive orthodoxy” of Andover is certainly not the Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards.  But it seemed to the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative and “cultured,” and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the Boston pulpits; while, contrariwise, the central thought of transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God, was pronounced by Dr. Channing a “crude speculation.”  This was the thought of Emerson’s address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton.  The latter, in an address before the same audience,