William Ellery Channing 1780 – 1842

William Ellery Channing was an American Unitarian minister, theologian, and one of the most influential moral voices of the early American republic. From his pulpit at the Federal Street Church in Boston he articulated the central principles of nineteenth-century American Unitarianism in his celebrated Baltimore Sermon of 1819 and shaped the religious imagination of Emerson, Thoreau, and the wider Transcendentalist movement. His writings on the dignity of human nature, on the duties of the religious imagination, and on the abolition of slavery made him one of the early conscience figures of American public life.