William Ellery Channing Quotes

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.

We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.

We do, then, with all earnestness, though without reproaching our brethren, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity. "To us," as to the Apostle and the primitive Christians, "there is one God, even the Father." With Jesus, we worship the Father, as the only living and true God. We are astonished, that any man can read the New Testament, and avoid the conviction, that the Father alone is God.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

Likeness to God is the supreme gift. He can communicate nothing so precious, glorious, blessed, as himself. To hold intellectual and moral affinity with the Supreme Being, to partake his spirit, to be his children by derivations of kindred excellence, to bear a growing conformity to the perfection which we adore, this is a felicity which obscures and annihilates all other good.It is only in proportion to this likeness, that we can enjoy either God or the universe.

I see the marks of God in the heavens and the earth, but how much more in a liberal intellect, in magnanimity, in unconquerable rectitude, in a philanthropy which forgives every wrong, and which never despairs of the cause of Christ and human virtue. I do and I must reverence human nature... I thank God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race.