Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in Schleiermacher and in Campbell.  The typical figure here, the protagonist of the movement, is William Ellery Channing.  It may be doubted whether there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology, than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth century.  There had been indeed a marked decline in religious life.  The history of the Great Awakening shows that.  Remonstrances against the Great Awakening show also how men’s minds were moving away from the theory of the universe which the theology of that movement implied.  One cannot say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme.  Interestingly enough, it was in Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he associated until the time of his licensure to preach in 1802.  Many thought that Channing would stand with the most stringent of the orthodox.  Deism and rationalism had made themselves felt in America after the Revolution.  Channing, during his years in Harvard College, can hardly have failed to come into contact with the criticism of religion from this side.  There is no such clear influence of current rationalism upon Channing as, for example, upon Schleiermacher.  Yet here in the West, which most Europeans thought of as a wilderness, circumstances brought about the launching of this man upon the career of a liberal religious thinker, when as yet Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the position of the Discourses, when Erskine had not yet written a line and Campbell was still a child.  Channing became minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston in 1803.  The appointment of Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard College took place in 1805.  That appointment was the first clear indication of the liberal party’s strength.  Channing’s Baltimore Address was delivered in 1819.  He died in 1847.

In the schism among the Congregational Churches in New England, which before 1819 apparently had come to be regarded by both parties as remediless, Channing took the side of the opposition to Calvinistic orthodoxy.  He developed qualities as controversialist and leader which the gentler aspect of his early years had hardly led men to suspect.  This American liberal movement had been referred to by Belsham as related to English Unitarianism.  After 1815, in this country, by its opponents at least, the movement was consistently called Unitarian.  Channing did with zeal contend against the traditional doctrine of the atonement and of the trinity.  On the other hand, he saw in Christ the perfect revelation of God to humanity and at the same time the ideal of humanity.  He believed in Jesus’ sinlessness and in his miracles, especially in his resurrection.  The keynote of