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.
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