and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue.  These are marks of a divine origin and pledges of a celestial inheritance.”  “Perfection is man’s proper and natural goal.”  What an immense distance between these doctrines of Channing’s maturity and the Calvinism of his youth!  He was a meditative, reflecting man, who read much, but took selected thoughts of others into the very substance and fibre of his being, and made them his own.  The foundation of his professional power 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 I have never read Channing.”  It is great testimony to the pervasive quality of a prophet’s teachings when they become within fifty years a component of the intellectual atmosphere of the new times.  At a dinner of Harvard graduates I once complained that, although I heard in the College Chapel a great variety of preachers connected with many different denominations, the preaching was, after all, rather monotonous, because they all preached Channing.  Phillips Brooks spoke after me and said:  “The President is right in thinking our present preaching monotonous, and the reason he gives for this monotony is correct; we all do preach Channing.”