077. William Ellery Channing

Channing

1780-1842 Biographical Note

William Ellery Channing, the famous Unitarian divine, was born at Newport, R. I., in 1780. He took his degree at Harvard in 1798, studied theology and was ordained pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, 1803. He has been called the Apostle of Unitarianism, because he was first among the orthodox divines of New England to give Unitarianism a clear, dogmatic expression, as he did in a sermon preached at the ordination of Jared Sparks, in opposition to the current Calvinism of the day. But he hated the controversy in which the publication of his views involved him and professed in 1841, “I am little of a Unitarian and stand aloof from all but those who strive and pray for clearer light.” He had made the acquaintance of Wordsworth and Coleridge on his visit to England, and the latter justly described him as one who had “the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love.” He was a voluminous writer on theological and literary subjects and what he wrote was vigorous, of fastidious taste and fired with moral earnestness, He died in 1842.