years; perhaps not one. Nay, there are not twenty who are well known in America, now even, out of their denomination they, perhaps, known by the unlucky accident of some petty controversy, rather than by any real eminence of character and work. Who of them is otherwise known to Europe, or even to England? But Dr. Channing is well known in Germany and France; his writings more broadly spread in England than in his native land; his power widens continually, and deepens too. His eminence came from no extraordinary intellectual gifts born with him. Truly his was a mind of a high order. Yet it is not difficult to find men of far more native intellectual force, both here and everywhere; and throughout all his life, in all his writings, you see the trace of intellectual deficiencies-his deficiencies as a writer, as a scholar, and still more as an original and philosophical thinker. Nor did it come any more from his superior opportunities for education. True, those were the best the country afforded at that time, though far inferior in many respects to what is now abundantly enjoyed with no corresponding result. In his early culture there were marked deficiencies the results of which appear in his writings, even to the last, leading him to falter in his analysis, leaving him uncertain as to his conclusion, and timid in applying his ideas to practice. His was not the intellect to forego careful and laborious and early training; not an intellect to cultivate itself, browsing to the full in scanty pastures, where weaker natures perish for lack of tender grass and careful housing from the cold. His signal success came from no remarkable opportunity for the use of his gifts and attainments. He was one minister of the forty thousand. His own pulpit was only higher than others, his audience larger and more influential, because he made it so. His clerical brothers in his last years hindered more than they helped him; his own parish gave him no remarkable aid, and in his best years showed themselves incapable of receiving his highest instructions and in the latter part of his life proved quite unworthy of so great a man. - He had none of the qualities which commonly attract men at first sight. He was little of stature, and not very well favored; his bodily presence was weak; his voice feeble, his tone and manner not such as strike the many. Beauty is the most popular and attractive of all things a presence that never tires. Dr. Channing was but slightly favored by the Graces; his gestures, intonations, and general manner would have been displeasing in another. He had nothing which at first sight either awes or attracts the careless world. He had no tricks and made no compromises. He never flattered men's pride nor their idleness-incarnating the popular religion; he did not storm or dazzle; he had not the hardy intellect which attracts men with only active minds, nor the cowardly conservatism which flatters Propriety to sleep in her pew; he never thundered and lightened- but only shone with calm and tranquil though varying light. He had not the social charm which fascinates and attaches men; though genial, hospitable, and inviting, yet few came very near him. He was not eminently original, either in thought or in the form thereof; not rich in ideas. It is true, he had great powers of speech, yet he had not that masterly genius for eloquence, which now stoops down to the ground and moulds the very earth into arguments, till it seems as if the stones and trees were ordained his colleagues to preach with him, obedient to his Orphic enchantment; not that genius which reaches up to the Heavens, pressing sun and moon and each particular star into the service of his thought; which proves by a diagram, illustrates by a picture, making the unwilling listeners feel that he had bribed the universe to plead his cause; — not that rare poetic power, which is born Genius and bred Art, which teems with sentiments and ideas, clothes and adorns them with language gathered from letters, nature, art, and common life, grouping his family of thoughts as Raphael in a picture paints the Madonna, Joseph, Baby, Ass, Angel, Palm-tree, those incongruous things of earth and Heaven, all unified and made harmonious by that one enchanting soul. He had not that intellectual, wealthy eloquence, beautiful as roses yet strong as steel. Nor had he the homely force of Luther, who in the language of the farm, the shop, the boat, the street, or nursery, told the high truths that Reason or Religion taught, and took possession of his audience by a storm of speech, then poured upon them all the riches of his brave plebeian soul, baptizing every head anew-a man who with the people seemed more mob than they, and when with kings the most imperial man. He had not the blunt terse style of Latimer, nor his beautiful homeliness of speech, which is more attractive than all rhetoric. He had not the cool clear analysis of Dr. Barrow, his prodigious learning, his close logic, his masculine sense; nor the graceful imagery, the unbounded imagination of Jeremy Taylor," the Shakspeare of divines," nor his winsome way of talk about piety, elevating the commonest events of life to classic dignity. He had not the hardheaded intellect of Dr. South, his skilful analysis, his conquering wit, his intellectual wealth:-no, he had not the power of condensing his thoughts into the energetic language of Webster never a word wrong or too much—or of marshalling his forces in such magnificently stern array; no, he had not the exquisite rythmic speech of Emerson, that wonderful artist in words, who unites manly strength with the rare beauty of a woman's mind. His His eminence came from no such gifts or graces. power came mainly from the predominating strength of the Moral and Religious element in him. He loved God with his mind, his conscience, his affections, and his soul. He had Goodness and Piety, both in the heroic degree. His intellectual power seemed little, not when compared with that of other men, but when measured by his own religious power. Loving Man and God, he loved Truth and Justice. He would not exaggerate; he would not undervalue what he saw and knew so was not violent, was not carried away by his subject. He was commonly his own master. He said nothing for effect; he never flattered the prejudice of his audience; respecting them, he put his high thought into simple speech, caught their attention, and gradually drew them up to his own elevation. He was ruled by conscience to a remarkable degree; almost demonized by conscience-for during a part of his life the moral element seems despotic, ruling at the expense of intellect and of natural joy. But that period passed by, and her rule became peaceful and harmonious. He loved Nature, the sea, the sky, and found new charms in the sweet face of Earth and Heaven as the years went by him, all his life. He had a keen sense of Beauty-beauty in Nature, in art, in speech, in manners, in man and woman's face. He loved science, he loved letters, and he loved art; but all of these affections were overmastered by his love of Man and God, means to that end, or little flowers that bordered the pathway where Goodness and Piety walked hand in hand. This supremacy of the moral and religious element was the secret of his strength, and it gave him a peculiar power over men, one which neither Luther nor Latimer ever had, -no, nor Barrow, nor Taylor, nor South, nor Webster, nor Émerson. - He had a large talent for Religion, and so was fitted to become an exponent of the higher aspirations of mankind in his day and in times to come. He asked for Truth, for Religion. He was always a seeker, his whole life "a process of conversion." Timid and self-distrustful, slow of inquiry and cautious to a fault, always calculating the effect before fraternizing with a cause, he had the most unflinching confidence in Justice and in Truth,-in Man's power to perceive and receive both. Loving Man and God, he loved Freedom in all its legitimate forms, and so became a champion in all the combats of the day where Rights were called in question. He hated the chains of old bondage, and moved early in the Unitarian Reformation; but when the Unitarian party became a sect, and narrow like the rest when it also came to stand in the way of mankind, he became "little of a Unitarian," and cared no more for that sect than for the Trinitarians. He could not be blind to the existence of Religion in all sects, and did not quarrel with other men's Goodness and Piety, because he could not accept their theology. He was not born or bred for a Sectarian; such as were he did not hate, but pity. He engaged in the various reforms of the day, - he labored for the cause of Peace, for Temperance, for the Improvement of Prisons, for the Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt, for Education; for the General Welfare of men by elevating the most exposed classes of society. He was an eminent advocate for the Abolition of Slavery. We do not mean to say that he committed no errors, that he never faltered. He had his imperfections and weaknesses, which we shall presently consider; sometimes he was overtimid, and seems to have allowed meaner men to prevail over him with their counsels, their littleness, and their fears. A sick body often enfeebled his mind and sometimes his courage. So he never stood in the foremost rank of any reform, speculative or practical. This is partly owing to the causes just hinted at; in part, also, to his want of originality. He was, we think, the fairest model of a good minister known to the public or his age. He preached what he knew, and he lived what he preached. He had a profound confidence in God; not in God merely as an abstraction — the abstract Power, Wisdom, and Love-but as that abstraction becomes concrete through Providence, and reveals itself in the course of nature, men, nations, and the world. He had also, and accordingly, a profound respect for Man and profound confidence in Man; not for great men, rich men, and cultivated men alone, but for Man as Man, for all men: he did not despise the proud, the ignorant, the wicked. He had a deep reverence for God and for Man; this gave him eloquence when he spoke-gave him his name amongst men, and gave him his power. A good deal of his earlier preaching, it is said, related to abstract matters to ideas, to sentiments, to modes of mind. Men complained that he did not touch the ground. He spoke of God, of the soul, the dignity of Human Nature; of love to God, to men; of justice, charity, of freedom, and holiness of heart; he spoke of sin, of fear, of alienation from God. Years ago we remember to have heard murmurs at his abstract style of thought and speech it went over men's heads, said some. But his abstractions he translated into the most concrete forms. Respect for God became obedience to His laws; faith in God was faith in keeping them; Human Nature was so great and so dignified, the very noblest work of God,and therefore Society must respect that dignity and conform to that nature: there must be no Intemperance and men who grow rich by poisoning their brothers must renounce their wicked craft; there must be no War, for its glory is human shame, and its soldiers only butchers of men; there must be Education for all for Human Nature is a thing too divine for men to leave in ignorance, and therefore in vice, and crime, and sin; there must be no pauperism, no want-but Society must be so reconstructed that Christianity becomes a fact, and there are no idle men who steal their living out of the world, none overburdened with excessive toil, no riot, no waste, no idleness, and so no want; there must be no oppression of class by class-but the strong are to help the weak, the educated to instruct the rude; there must be no Slaveryfor that is the consummation of all wrongs against the dignity of Human Nature. So his word became incarnate, and the most abstract preacher in the land, the most mystical in his piety, and, as it seemed at first, the furthest removed from practice, comes down to actual sins and toils for human needs. Then came the same grumblers, murmuring to another tune, and said "When Dr. Channing used to preach about God and the soul, about holiness and sin, we liked him that was Christianity. But now he is always insisting on some reform; talking about Intemperance, and War, and Slavery, or telling us that we must remove the evils of Society and educate all men: we wish Dr. Channing would preach the Gospel." Thus rea |