Chadwick's William Ellery Channing

THOSE who revere the memory of Channing owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Chadwick. “ The Star of the American Church,” as Emerson called the great preacher, now shines clearly and humanly for the ordinary reader, to whom he was practically inaccessible in the three volumes of the Memoir by his nephew, or in the abridged but bulky one-volumed edition of the same, issued as a Centenary Memorial in 1880 by the American Unitarian Association. If Mr. Chadwick would now prepare a volume of some of the great addresses of Channing that are still of contemporary interest and value — such as Self-Culture, On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes, On Preaching the Gospel to the Poor, The Present Age, Spiritual Freedom, and perhaps War, Temperance, and Education — he would do still more toward bringing Channing within reach of the present generation, which needs him so much, and might thus be tempted to read him at first hand.

Channing’s main significance is intellectual, spiritual, yet Mr. Chadwick gives us full details of his life and personality. It is interesting to hear that he had vigorous health and sometimes abandoned himself to unrestrained hilarity as a college boy. Austerities at Richmond, Va., whither he went afterward as a tutor, — austerities partly forced by poverty, and partly his own choice, — lowered his animal spirits and broke his constitution. A certain amount of irritability he seems to have inherited from his mother, and Mr. Chadwick thinks that he was making public confession when in his preaching he wrote of the wretchedness caused by fretfulness and anger in social intercourse. He was an unsociable man when he began his ministry, — annoyed rather than pleased by visitors, declining, if possible, all invitations; and long afterwards Emerson spoke of his cold temperament as making him the most unprofitable companion. His conversation wanted ease and freedom, — this and his letters also easily slid into the sermon tone. Mr. Chadwick “wonders ” whether with his self-absorption he did not fall at times into some inconsiderateness to others, — to his young colleague, Mr. Gannett, for instance, who would go to church on Sunday morning, without knowing till he got there whether he was to preach or not. His “self-tending” (which was necessary, since the most he could hope for was “ to keep a sound mind in a weak body ”) sometimes went to an amusing extreme. “Why do you not go out, sir, and take a walk ? ” said a parishioner who found him miserable and depressed. Channing pointed a tragic finger to the vane of Park Street Church and said, “ Do you see that ? ” “Yes,” answered the parishioner, “I see it, and it has been stuck fast and pointing northeast for a fortnight. ” Then Channing sallied out to find the warm south wind turning the Common green. Another incident shows that Channing was capable of a little humor (as well as tartness) himself. We owe the story to Mr. Chadwick, who says he had never seen it in print: —

“ Dr. Tuckerman, on one of his frequent visits, enquired for Mrs. Channing, and was informed that she had gone to Newport to open the house for the summer. ' Alone ? ’ asked Dr. Tuckerman. Dr. Channing assented, and Dr. Tuckerman, responding, said,

' Do I understand you to say that Mrs. Channing has gone into the country alone to open the house for the summer? ’ ' That is what I said, Dr.

Tuckerman.’ ‘Well, Dr. Channing,’ said his friend, ‘you wall permit me to say that I should not think of asking Mrs. Tuckerman to go into the country alone to open the house for the summer.’ Then Dr. Channing laughed his small, dry laugh and ’Very likely, Dr. Tuckerman; and, if you should, most probably she would not go.’ ” These are human touches, but, they are not at all inconsistent with Channing’s spiritual greatness, with a rare inner conscientiousness and self-control (for, according to Mr. Chadwick, he made a good fight with his native irritability and sharpness of speech and manner and came off more than conqueror), with a courage which was all the greater because it was reflective and not headlong, and even with a certain sweetness which made little children run into his arms, though strong men stood in awe of him. There was something quite wonderful about his eye and voice ; Emerson says that his discourses lose their best in losing them. If the discourses affect us by their elevation, their noble ardor, their spiritual passion, as we read them, what must it have been to hear them!

There are two notes in Dr. Channing’s preaching — and preaching comes pretty near being the word for almost everything he said and wrote — that give it lasting significance and distinction. The first is the spirit of intellectual freedom, the idea of the rights of the mind; the second, social idealism. To both, his new biographer does full justice. Dr. Channing’s specific theological opinions, aside from his general spiritual philosophy, are not perhaps of particular interest to the present day. Many shared them in his own time, or were even more conservative than he, or, if we like the other tendency better, more radical; but this fact has not served to give them immortality or even remembrance. It was not his opinions, but the spirit in which he held them, and in which he maintained the right of others to hold different opinions; it was his magnificent assertion of the ethics of the intellect, and his own free and open mind, that in part give him his unique place in American religious history: —

“ I am surer that my rational nature is from God than that any book is the expression of his will.”

“ I owe the little that I am to the conscientiousness with which I have listened to objections springing up in my own mind to what I have inclined and sometimes thirsted to believe, and I have attained through this to a serenity of faith that once seemed denied in the present state.”

It is sentences like these, along with his vindication of the right of men like Theodore Parker and Abner Kneeland to say what they thought, though it grieved or shocked him, that mark the real greatness of the man. Mr. Chadwick does indeed tell us, as he was in duty bound, the story of the evolution of Channing’s opinions; he is at much pains, and does the work with scholarly exactness; it is interesting, too, as a matter of not very ancient history. But Mr. Chadwick himself says, “Channing’s intellectual virtue was the most characteristic aspect of his life; ” the present writer would only correct this by saying, “ one of the two most characteristic aspects of his life.”

Social idealism is indeed implicit in Christianity, but it has been a more or less elusive quantity since the definite relegation of the triumph of the social ideal to another world, that began, we may roughly say, with St. Augustine. Secular writers like Hutcheson, Ferguson, and Rousseau seem to have awakened it in Channing, though once aroused it easily blended with the traditional Christian conceptions of the Kingdom of Heaven, the original human and social significance of which scholars are now at last making us realize. Those who wish to understand this root-motive of Channing’s life (and to see an impressive and indeed touching statement of it) should read the letter written to his friend, William S. Shaw, in his twentieth year, from Richmond, quoted by Mr. Chadwick.² In it he launches “ into speculations on the possible condition of mankind in the progress of their improvement, ” and he finds “ avarice the great bar to all my schemes.” He thinks communism is the only corrective, and his views of human nature are such that he believes in the possibility of communism. He grants that man is gelfish, but he holds that benevolence, sympathy, humanity are also natural, and that by education they instead of selfishness might become man’s principle of action. We may set down his communism as a bit of youthful naïveté, but we must remember that it was not a forced or political but a voluntary scheme he believed in, that he counted entirely on education and religious enthusiasm to accomplish it, that then and always he distrusted associations not springing from inner conviction and spiritual affinity, becoming indeed as extreme an individualist as Emerson was. Moreover, if man is capable of the disinterested affection in which Hutcheson had taught him to believe, — and the hour in which the conviction was borne in upon him and the clump of willows under which he was walking, book in hand, were ever afterwards sacred in his memory, — one weighty practical objection to community of property vanishes. Such disinterestedness, too, was a large part of the meaning of that dignity of human nature, that greatness of the soul, which to some is Channing’s characteristic doctrine, and rightly from one point of view, since it is the common root from which his emphasis of the rights of reason and his social idealism alike sprang. Man is so great that he can transcend his prejudices and lay hold of absolute Divine truth, and so great that he can transcend his selfishness and live in universal love. It is a noble conception, covering many sins or errors of practical calculation. Nothing ever came of the twenty-year-old proposal of an educational propaganda to convince mankind that they are parts of a great whole, bound to labor for the good of the whole, but the light of the early dream never forsook him. In the next to the last year of his life he wrote to the head of the Mendon “Community ” that he had long “ dreamed of an association in which the members, instead of preying on one another and seeking to put one another down, after the fashion of this world, should live together as brothers, seeking one another’s elevation and spiritual growth.” He made earnest practical suggestions; he had his fears, but also his hopes, — he wrote Miss Peabody a little later he “never hoped so strongly and so patiently.” “ I should die in greater peace, ” he declared, “could I see in any quarter the promise of a happier organization of society.” In this, as in the impassioned prayer closing the Lenox address of a year later, we see him as Matthew Arnold says of Marcus Aurelius, stretching out his arms for something beyond, — tendentemque manus ripœ ulterioris amore.

Practically Channing gave the greater part of his life, aside from his unwilling excursions into the field of theological controversy, to the propagation of those idealistic social principles which were connected in his youthful mind with communism and yet are detachable from it (as a definite, formulated scheme). If his early preaching was cast in a somewhat conventional mould, this leaven was still there. The ideal of love and brotherhood was at a great distance from the actual world, but under its influence he opposed slavery and war; he reasoned about intemperance, — “ one cause,” he said, “ of the commonness of intemperance in the present state of things is the heavy burden of care and toil which is laid on a large multitude of men; ” he called for improvements in education, knowing that the preparation for all social change was there. The industrial world itself seemed far removed from the fraternal spirit, — it was broken up into classes warring with one another; “rich and poor,” he said, “ seem to be more and more oppressed with incessant toil, exhausting forethought, anxious struggles, feverish competition ; ” and again, “ Business is war, a conflict of skill, management, and, too often, fraud ; to snatch the prey from our neighbor is the end of all this stir.” According to Mr. Chadwick, he “ distrusted absolutely the competitive system of trade, and doubted a man’s ability to engage in it without loss of personal integrity.” This may be too strong a statement, for Channing once said, “ Commerce is a noble calling; ” but it is not far from the truth. His general view of our civilization was that it is on a low level; “ our whole civilization,” he wrote in 1841 to Sismondi, “ is so tainted by selfishness, mercenariness, and sensuality, that I sometimes fear that it must be swept away to prepare for something better, ” “ The present selfish, dissocial system, ” he declared, “ must give way,” — it “ cannot last forever.” He turned longing, believing eyes to a new order, wherein “ new ties ” should take “the place of those which have hitherto connected the human race.” He triumphantly expected it, saying, “ A better day is coming, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” It is the old Christian attitude over again, with its disdain of the world that now is and its joyful awaiting of a world that is to come. The ideal in the mind shall at last find a corresponding reality, — or, as an Oxford scholar, memorable for this sentence, if for no other, put it, “Conscience and the present constitution of things are not corresponding terms; it is conscience and the issue of things which go together.”

One who challenges his age cannot expect to be altogether popular. Whittier speaks of Channing as having “the proudest reputation, in letters and theology, of his day.” But when he came out flat-footedly against slavery, after his visit to the West Indies in 1830, the love of his people for him began to wax cold, — or, asks Mr. Chadwick, was the beginning still further back, in the assaults he had made upon the love of gain, a Northern as much as a Southern fault? When he headed the petition for the Faneuil Hall meeting, which became famous through Wendell Phillips’s speech, and himself spoke there in a similar vein, more parishioners and friends fell away. “ His well-bred parishioners, ‘gentlemen of property and standing, ’ often passed him on the street,” says Mr. Chadwick, “without a sign of recognition or the most indifferent. ” Theodore Parker did not perhaps greatly exaggerate when he gave it as his opinion that at this time a man with Channing’s liberal opinions and reformatory spirit, unknown to fame, “ could not find a place for the sole of his foot in Boston, though half a dozen pulpits were vacant.” But had not Channing spoken of Christianity as “ so at war with the present condition of society that it cannot be spoken and acted out without giving great offense ” ? If one wishes to be popular, he must say fine things, but not bring them home. “ People bear patiently, ” to quote Channing again, “what it is understood they will not practice. But if the preacher ‘ come down, ’ as it is called, from these heights, and assail in sober earnest deep-rooted abuses, respectable vices, inhuman institutions or arrangements, and unjust means of gain, which interest, pride, and habit have made dear and next to universal, the people who exact from him official holiness are shocked, offended. ' He forgets his sphere,’ ” It is related of Dr. James Walker that he kept so close to “ personal religion ” that he did not permit himself to vote !

I have been so interested in making this slight and no doubt partial portrayal of Channing that I have done no adequate justice to the merits of Mr. Chadwick’s book. In it the reader will find an ample and all-round portrait. It is written with Mr. Chadwick’s wellknown facility and felicity of phrase. One sees the poet in many a metaphor; I could only wish that he had felt free to insert his own perfect sonnet suggested by Channing’s exclamation, “Always young for liberty ” (after the Paris Revolution of 1830, which Channing hailed with delight, as contrasted with young Harvard’s deadness to the event, and in answer to a young Harvard friend, who had said, “ You seem to be the only young man I know ”). One is pleased, too, at the personal touches and reminiscences, which give a delightful air of ease and freedom to the narrative. Mr. Chadwick does not conceal his own feelings and preferences. He loves the things one ought to love in these distracted days; he, too, is young for liberty and right and a higher issue of things than our present “ plutocratic feudalism. ” It is good to have the oldtime heroes and authors of our liberties, such as Parker and Channing, brought before us by a sympathetic hand like his. Every man of generous mind will thank him.

William Mackintire Salter.