William Ellery Channing was the most prominent preacher and theologian in the early Unitarian movement in New England. He was one of the founders of the Unitarian denomination and was a major intellectual influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendentalist movement. His theory of self-culture, the belief that the religious life was centered on the cultivation and growth of the individual's inherent spiritual potentiality, was a central premise of early Unitarian theology and had an important formative impact on the thinking of Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, James Freeman Clarke, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker. Without becoming a Transcendentalist himself, Channing nevertheless stood as one of the most potent influences on the movement, delineating many of Emerson's key ideas and setting an example in both pulpit eloquence and literary enterprise. Channing's sermons and essays--which combined logical trenchancy, oratorical...