_INTRODUCTORY NOTE_
_William Ellery Channing, the chief apostle of New England
Unitarianism, was born at Newport, Rhode Island, April 7, 1780. He
graduated from Harvard in 1798, and five years later became minister of
the Federal Street Church in Boston, where he remained for thirty-seven
years. He died October 2, 1842._
_Channing was still a child when, in 1785, King's Chapel in Boston, in
revising its liturgy, eliminated the doctrine of the Trinity. For the
next fifty years the movement went on, separating the Congregational
churches in New England into Trinitarian and Unitarian. A sermon
preached by Channing in Baltimore in 1819, at the ordination of Jared
Sparks, is generally regarded as the formulation of the Unitarian
creed, and throughout his life Channing continued a leader in the
denomination._
_To the tolerance, the culture, and the high civic and private virtue
that characterised the typical Unitarian of that time, Channing added
an emotional and spiritual quality, and an interest in philosophy, that
make him not merely the greatest of the Unitarian leaders, but in
important respects the first of the Transcendentalists. "The
Calvinists," it has been said, "believed that human nature is totally
depraved; the Unitarians denied this, their denial carrying with it the
positive implication that human nature is essentially good; the
Transcendentalists believed that human nature is divine" (Goddard).
Judged by this test, Channing belongs to the third group, for it is in
his passionate faith in the divinity of human nature, apparent in the
following lectures "On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes," as in
his writing and preaching in general, that one finds the characteristic
mark of his spirit and the main secret of his power._