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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
William Ellery Channing was an American Schleiermacher, standing at the turning point from the Enlightenment to Transcendentalism, and, like Schleiermacher, he has been treated by historians as the initiator of a movement. He is understood in terms of what followed him. According to Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, he represents the budding of New England. I wish to reverse the perspective and to present Channing as the culmination of the American Enlightenment. In the Revolutionary generation three distinct systems of thought, three historically separate faiths were flourishing; for want of better terms I shall call them rationalism, pietism, and republicanism. Channing, as I shall attempt to show, inherited each of these faiths, understood the issues at stake, felt the struggle intimately, and attempted to formulate a synthesis of all three. His humanitarianism may therefore fittingly be studied as the summation of the ideals of the American Enlightenment. If I had time, I would follow up the negative side of the argument and show that Channing participated only slightly in the thought of the coming generation, the generation from 1830 to 1860, and that he was, on the whole, not willingly a prophet of Transcendentalism. In his last years, when he saw dimly what was to come, he was repelled by much of it and looked back almost wistfully to the faith of his fathers.
2 Channing, William Henry: Memoir of William Ellery Channing with Extracts from his Correspondence and Manuscripts (Boston, 1848), I, 189.Google Scholar Subsequent references unless otherwise stated are to this Memoir.
3 Memoir, II, 284.Google Scholar
4 I shall use pietism as a synonym for Edwardeanism and the New Light movement. To justify this in detail would take me too far afield and would require me to draw liberally on unpublished researches on Jonathan Edwards by W. J. B. Edgar. In general, however, the similarity and direct relation between European pietism and the American New Lights is evident enough without further exposition.
5 Memoir, I, 137.Google Scholar Of. the remark of the Hon. D. A. White of Salem, who was in the class above Channing at college and knew him well. “About the time he commenced preaching, he spoke of Dr. Hopkins with warm esteem, both as a friend and a theologian, dwelling with particular emphasis on the strong feature of benevolence which marked both his character and his divinity, and observing very pointedly, that ‘those who were called Hopkinsians … appeared to know little of him or of his true theological views’” (I, 161).Google Scholar
6 Memoir, I, 161.Google Scholar
7 See also Memoir, I, 33.Google Scholar
8 Memoir, I, 142.Google Scholar
9 See “Review (by Horace Holley) of A Contrast between Calvinism and Hopkinsianism, by the Rev. Ezra Stiles Ely,” in The General Repository and Review, III, 04 1813.Google Scholar
10 Channing was in the habit of identifying his Rhode Island environment, which except for his earliest years was only his summer home, with the love of nature. And the communion with nature he identified, for obvious reasons which were not philosophical, with freedom. It is easy to exaggerate this element in Channing's sentiments. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, for example, writes: “Channing was a lover of lakes and mountains. He had studied their contours under various skies; he knew all the effects of atmosphere, of mist and cloud and dry and watery sunlight. The grandeur of New Hampshire, the gentle, pastoral beauty of Vermont had swayed and attuned his feelings. He could form a friendship with a mountain; and he knew the interminable depths of the virgin forests as well as he knew the ocean, beside whose crashing waves he had leaped for joy. These temperamental sympathies had drawn him to the new German Naturphilosophie.” (The Flowering of New England, 104.)Google Scholar Is there really any evidence that his love of scenery had anything to do with his Naturphilosophie? Cf. Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer's Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D. D. (Boston, 1880), 61.Google Scholar
11 His letters to Jedediah Morse certainly do not minee words. He was accustomed to address them to “The Rev'd Jedediah Morse, Bishop of the Church, Charlestown.” And the following excerpts express his sentiments. “New London, April 8, 1795 … Laus Deo, France triumphs and Holland is delivered. The present day is so loaded with momentous events, that my heart exults in having a portion of time at the close of the 18th century … Upon theological subjects as far as relates to the government of the church, we are entirely dissonant. Yes, my dear Sir, I assure you that it was with astonishment I read the following paragraph in your last—‘We are now too independent—much more so than the churches were in purer ages of Christianity.’ What you mean by purer ages of Christianity, I do not know … Permit me to observe that you have lived among Presbyterians, until you have become accustomed to their government; but with me it is clearly altogether of human invention … November 12, 1796 … I now ask, who has authorized a church or a body of churches to divest themselves of that power which was given them separately, by the Head of the church? Though I ask the question, it is only that you may be led to consider the ground upon which you are about to step: for I assure you that I am confident, the question can not be fairly answered by the advocate for a coalition of churches to possess authority paramount to the individual churches.—But I must stop my pen, regretting that I have expended so much time and ink to no purpose: for, honestly, my friend, I do not expect to convince you of mistake. You have mounted your hobby-horse and you may e'en ride on; but I do not say as a man said in another case—ride on to the D---1. …”
12 “It is a commonplace that the America of the nineteenth century was culturally dependent upon England. It is more accurate to say that it was culturally allied with Scotland.” (Charvat, William: The Origins of American Critical Thought (University of Pennsylvania, 1936), 29.)Google Scholar This is certainly still more true of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Even German philosophy entered New England (and England, for that matter) largely via Scotland. Thomas Brown, for example, wrote a review of Kant, 's philosophy in the Edinburgh Review for 1803Google Scholar, which was long before George Ticknor and his friends were induced to go to Germany by reading Madame de Staël.
13 In his Lectures on Moral Philosophy Witherspoon, said: “An author of New England says moral philosophy is just reducing infidelity to a system” (p. 367).Google Scholar
14 See Band, Benjamin: “Philosophical Instruction in Harvard University,” Harvard Graduates Magazine (09 1928), 37.Google Scholar
15 See Christie, Francis Albert: “The Beginnings of Arminianism in New England,” Papers of the American Society of Church History, second series III (1912), 157.Google Scholar
16 Sermon on the Annual Vast in Massachusetts, April 5, 1798 (Boston, 1798), 13.Google Scholar
17 See his sermon “On Christian Zeal,” in Sermons on Important Subjects (Boston, 1807), 15.Google Scholar
18 See his sermons “On the Love of Our Neighbor” and “On Christian Charity,” pp. 55–87Google Scholar in Sermons on Important Subjects.
19 Memoir, I, 63–64.Google Scholar
20 Ferguson, Adam was professor of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1764Google Scholar to 1785. He was inspired directly and chiefly by Montesquieu. His chief work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, was published at Edinburgh in 1767Google Scholar; the seventh edition in Boston, 1809; the eighth in Philadelphia, 1819. This is an index of its extreme popularity in America. The following quotations are from the seventh edition.
21 Ferguson, , An Essay, 1, 2, 5, 10, 12, 28.Google Scholar
22 Ferguson, , An Essay, 32.Google Scholar
23 “If we would find the causes of final corruption, we must examine those revolutions of state that remove, or withhold, the objects of every ingenious study or liberal pursuit; that deprive the citizen of occasions to act as a member of a public; that crush his spirit; that debase his sentiments, and disqualify his mind for affairs” (Ferguson, , An Essay, 353).Google Scholar
In the perfect state “the productions of ingenuity are brought to the market; and men are willing to pay for whatever has a tendency to inform or amuse. By this means the idle, as well as the busy, contribute to forward the progress of arts, and bestow on polished nations that air of superior ingenuity, under which they appear to have gained the ends that were pursued by the savage in the forest, knowledge, order, and wealth” (300–301).
“It is wisely ordered for man, as a rational being, that the employment of reason is necessary to his preservation; … and it is fortunate for nations, that, in order to be powerful and safe, they must strive to maintain the courage, and cultivate the virtues, of their people” (101). “We may hope to instil into the breasts of private men sentiments of candour towards their fellow creatures, and a disposition to humanity and justice. But it is vain to expect that we can give to the multitude of a people a sense of union among themselves, without admitting hostility to those who oppose them. Could we at once, in the ease of any nation, extinguish the emulation which is excited from abroad, we should probably break or weaken the bands of society at home, and close the busiest scenes of national occupations and virtues” (41).
“But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve” (381).
24 Peabody, , Reminiscences, 308.Google Scholar
25 The Evidence For a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind With the Means and Duty of Promoting It (London, 1787), 11, 16.Google Scholar
26 Cf. his Platonic theory of knowledge, based largely on Cudworth, , in Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (1769).Google ScholarPrice, 's Dissertations on Matter and SpiritGoogle Scholar were translated into both French and German and were said to have made a great impression especially on German thought.
27 Memoir, I, 86–87.Google Scholar
28 I, 89.
29 I, 98–99.
30 I, 100.
31 I, 101–102.
32 I, 102.
33 I, 106.
34 I, 107–108.
35 I, 111.
36 I, 113–114.
37 I, 115.
38 I. 126–127.
39 I, 116.
40 Memoir, II, 403–404.Google Scholar
41 He wrote: “I fear it has been the influence of many speculations of ingenious men on the Divine character to divest God of that paternal tenderness which is of all views most suited to touch the heart. I fear we have learnt insensibly to view him as possessing only a general benevolence” (Memoir, I, 253).Google Scholar “I felt, I saw, that God is most willing to impart his ‘Holy Spirit,’ his strength and light, to every man who labors in earnest to overcome evil, to press forward to that perfection which is the only heaven” (Memoir, I, 345).Google Scholar
42 “It seems to me that the signa of the times point to a, great approaching modification of society, which will be founded on and will express the essential truth, that the chief end of the social state is the elevation of all its members as intelligent and moral beings, and under which every man will be expected to contribute to this object according to his ability. The present selfish, dissocial system must give way to Christianity, and I earnestly wish that we may bear our full part in effecting this best of all revolutions” (Memoir, III, 38).Google Scholar
43 Memoir, II, 249.Google Scholar
44 As late as 1820 we find him still glorifying civil liberty. “I am almost tempte to say that this is the only political blessing, and the only good gift which law and order can confer on a country” (Memoir, II, 81).Google Scholar In 1822, on the other hand, he writes: “Does a government advance liberty simply by establishing equal laws? The very protection of property may crush a large mass of the community. … Is it not the true end of government, to aim at securing for all the widest field of useful action? This is to establish liberty. How far more important is this than to protect any single class!” (II, 226–227). And from this economic conception of liberty it was only a short step in his mind to the moral conception of “self-culture” and the “elevation of the laboring classes” by “moral” means. By 1828 he is writing: “Can legislation do much towards reforming men? Has not the power of government in this as in every thing, been overrated? Can associations do much? Is it not by individual interest, by unaffected individual friendship, by teaching from the lips of philanthropy …” etc. (III. 26).
45 Memoir, III, 308.Google Scholar
46 Peabody, , Reminiscences, 196.Google Scholar That Channing identified benevolence with duty in practice as well as in theory is reflected in the advice he gave to friends from time to time. Almost invariably he cautioned them against assuming extraordinary obligations or romantic responsibilities. Cf. Peabody, , op. cit., 317.Google Scholar
47 Parker, 's sermon, , Of Piety and the Relatfon Thereof to Manly LifeGoogle Scholar, should be read in this connection. Superficially its doctrine appears to be identical with Channing's conception of piety, but by carrying Channing's own principles to their logical conclusion, he strikes Channing at a very tender point. The man whose piety is perfectly “natural,” argues Parker, “does not sigh and weep” and forever make “a fuss about his soul; he lives right on.” For Parker piety culminates in external morality; for Channing the inner life of feeling, the fuss about the soul, is essential. Here, I suspect, is another outcropping of a deep dif ference between “naturalistic Christians” and “Mediatorialists.” There is a real difference betwen Parker's “manliness” and Channing's humanitarianism.
48 Peabody, , Reminiscences, 420.Google Scholar
49 Ibid., 417.
50 Peabody, , op. cit. 423, 424, 430, 432.Google Scholar
51 Cf. Ibid., 203.
52 Memoir, II, 92.Google Scholar Though Miss Peabody's interpretation of Charming's relation to Transcendentalism is biased and exaggerates Channing's “Mediatorialism,” the quotations here given are from Channing's letters to her, not from her notes and memories. Reference to his late sermons and other writings would confirm the above account and testify to his emphasis on the person and resurrection of Christ.
