Pennsylvania in his exile.  In the large, however, one may say that the New England liberal movement, which came by and by to be called Unitarian, was as truly American as was the orthodoxy to which it was opposed.  Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher.  There is no evidence that he had learned from Schleiermacher.  The liberal movement by its very impetuosity gave a new lease of life to an orthodoxy which, without that antagonism, would sooner have waned.  The great revivals, which were a benediction to the life of the country, were thought to have closer relation to the theology of those who participated in them than they had.  The breach between the liberal and conservative tendencies of religious thought in this country came at a time when the philosophical reconstruction was already well under way in Europe.  The debate continued until long after the biblical-critical movement was in progress.  The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically total ignorance of these facts.  There are traces upon both sides of that insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws.  There will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by reverent and, in their own way, learned and original men.  Yet there is a pathos about the sturdy originality of good men expended upon a problem which had been already solved.  The men in either camp proceeded from assumptions which are now impossible to the men of both.  It was not until after the Civil War that American students of theology began in numbers to study in Germany.  It is a much more recent thing that one may assume the immediate reading of foreign books, or boast of current contribution from American scholars to the labour of the world’s thought upon these themes.

We should make a great mistake if we supposed that the progress has been an unceasing forward movement.  Quite the contrary, in every aspect of it the life of the early part of the nineteenth century presents the spectacle of a great reaction.  The resurgence of old ideas and forces seems almost incredible.  In the political world we are wont to attribute this fact to the disillusionment which the French Revolution had wrought, and the suffering which the Napoleonic Empire had entailed.  The reaction in the world of thought, and particularly of religious thought, was, moreover, as marked as that in the world of deeds.  The Roman Church profited by this swing of the pendulum in the minds of men as much as did the absolute State.  Almost the first act of Pius VII. after his return to Rome in 1814, was the revival of the Society of Jesus, which had been after long agony in 1773 dissolved by the papacy itself.  ’Altar and throne’ became the watchword of an ardent attempt at restoration of all of that which millions had given their lives to do away.  All too easily, one who writes in sympathy with that which is conventionally called