THE HISTORY made in America during the first half of the nineteenth century was profoundly influenced by Channing’s intellectual fearlessness. He was an individualist of the type of Pym and Hampden, who put the man above the state, the church, the world—above everything but God, by whom according to this mode of thought, the state, the church, and the world were made that man might develop higher individuality and truer consciousness of having a soul of his own. In support of this fundamental tenet of his theology and of his politics, Channing wrote and spoke with a courage which, on occasion, was not without fierce menace to obstruction. In 1803 he became pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, and his work there made him one of the chief founders of American Unitarianism. His collected works published after his death include a number of highly meritorious essays on literary and social topics.