ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that, William Ellery Channing develops the theme of man's 'kindred nature with God' and he attempts to reconcile his conception of the intimate relationship between man and God with ideas of the power and majesty of the divinity. In conceiving of God as 'unbounded spiritual energy' and 'Infinite Light', the chapter assumed to have an antithetical notion of human nature as bounded and finite, yet Channing plainly attempts to disturb the habits of thought on which such distinctions are founded. The chapter discusses that Channing explicitly confronts the objection that the Infinite Perfection of God makes nonsense of any 'affinity' between the human and the divine. To William Ellery Channing, who from 1819 until his death in 1842 was one of the chief spokesmen for the Unitarian Church in America, it seemed that the orthodox faith which his own age had inherited from the Puritan past taught man to glorify God by despising his own humanity.
