[Editorial Note: Among the many eminent Americans Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont met during their tour of the United States was the Rev. William Ellery Channing. Tocqueville described him in his diary as "the most celebrated preacher and most remarkable author of the present time in America (in the serious style)."]

'We spoke to Mr. Channing of Unitarianism,' Tocqueville's account pursued, 'and we told him that many people belonging to other Protestant sects had spoken to us of it with disfavour.

'The question between us, said Mr. Channing, is whether the 17th century can return, or whether it is past without return. They opened the road, and have the pretension to stop precisely at the point where the first innovator himself stopped. We, we claim to go ahead, we maintain that if human reason is steadily perfecting itself, what it believed in a century still gross and corrupted cannot altogether suit the enlightened in which we live.

'But are you not afraid, I said to him frankly, that by virtue of purifying Christianism you will end by making the substance disappear? I am frightened, I confess, at the distance that the human spirit has travelled since Catholicism; I am afraid that it will finally arrive at natural religion.

'I think that such a result, returned Mr. Channing, is little to be feared. The human spirit has need of a positive religion, and why should it ever abandon the Christian religion? Its proofs fear nothing from the most serious examination of reason.

'Permit me an objection, said I. It applies not only to Unitarianism but to all the Protestant sects, and even has a great bearing on the political world: Do you not think that human nature is so constituted that, whatever the improvements in education and the state of society, there will always be found a great mass of men who are incapable from the nature of their position of setting their reason to work on theoretical and abstract questions, and who, if they do not have a dogmatic faith, will not exactly believe in anything?

'Mr. Channing replied: The objection that you have just made is in fact the most serious of all those that can be raised against the principle of Protestantism. I do not believe, however, that it is without answer. 1. In the first place, I think that for every man who has an upright heart, religious questions are not as difficult as you seem to believe, and that God has put their solution within the reach of every man. Secondly, it seems to me that Catholicism does not remove the difficulty; I admit that once one has admitted the dogma of the infallibility of the Church, the rest becomes easy, but to admit this first point, you have to make an appeal to reason. (This argument appears to me more specious than solid; but as we had but a limited time, I envisaged the question from another angle and resumed: )

'It seems to me that Catholicism had established the government of the skillful or aristocracy in Religion, and that you have introduced Democracy. Now, I confess to you, the possibility of governing religious society, like political society, by the means of Democratie does not seem to me yet proven by experience.

'Mr. Channing replied: I think that you mustn't push the comparison between the two societies too far. For my part, I believe every man in a position to understand religious truths, and I don't believe every man able to understand political questions. When I see submitted to the judgment of the people the question of the tariff, for example, dividing as it does the greatest economists, it seems to me that they would do as well to take for judge my son over there (pointing to a child of ten). No. I cannot believe that civil society is made to be guided directly by the always comparatively ignorant masses; I think that we go too far.'

-- Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, by George Wilson Pierson. Pages 422-3.