The direct influence of Channing’s writings has been vast, for they are read in English in all parts of the world, and have been translated into many languages.  Thirty years ago I spent a long day in showing Don Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, some of the interesting things in the laboratories and collections of Harvard University.  He was the most assiduous visitor that I ever conducted through the University buildings, intelligently interested in a great variety of objects and ideas.  Late in the afternoon he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness:  “Now I will visit the tomb of Channing.”  We drove to Mount Auburn, and found the monument erected by the Federal Street Church.  The Emperor copied with his own hand George Ticknor’s inscriptions on the stone, and made me verify his copies.  Then, with his great weight and height, he leaped into the air, and snatched a leaf from the maple which overhung the tomb.  “I am going to put that leaf,” he said, “into my best edition of Channing.  I have read all his published works,—­some of them many times over.  He was a very great man.”  The Emperor of Brazil was a Roman Catholic.

Channing’s philanthropy was a legitimate outcome of his view of religion.  For him practical religion was character-building by the individual human being.  But character-building in any large group or mass of human beings means social reform; therefore Channing was a preacher and active promoter of social regeneration in this world.  He depicted the hideous evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, and war.  He advocated and supported every well-directed effort to improve public education, the administration of charity, and the treatment of criminals, and to lift up the laboring classes.  He denounced the bitter sectarian and partisan spirit of his day.  He refused entire sympathy to the abolitionists, because of the ferocity and violence of their habitual language and the injustice of their indiscriminate attacks.  He distrusted money worship, wealth, and luxury.

These sentiments and actions grew straight out of his religious conceptions, and were their legitimate fruit.  All his social aspirations and hopes were rooted in his fundamental conception of the fatherhood of God, and its corollary the brotherhood of men.  It was his lofty idea of the infinite worth of human nature and of the inherent greatness of the human soul, in contrast with the then prevailing doctrines of human vileness and impotency, which made him resent with such indignation the wrongs of slavery, intemperance, and war, and urge with such ardor every effort to deliver men from poverty and ignorance, and to make them gentler and juster to one another.