ABSTRACT
Channing's tender social conscience sprang directly from his humanitarian religion. From the hardness of the old religion came the hardness of the social conscience. The golden age of New England was quite as much the golden age of the New England conscience as of the New England mind. With the awakening interest in social problems the conscience of New England could not longer remain indifferent to slavery. The old Puritan conscience might be tender, but it refused pretty steadily to take on any larger job than Sabbath-keeping and dogma-saving. It was inquisitorial rather than humanitarian, and the sins which it hunted down were theological rather than social. The fame of transcendentalism has too much obscured the contemporary movement of perfectionism, a movement which marked the extreme expression of the new conscience, the most revolutionary of its aspirations, the apotheosis of ethical radicalism. Of all the transcendentalists William Henry Channing was clearly the most confirmed associationist.
