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reasonable to understand this crisis or know how to meet it. He was trampled upon by his congregation, and knew not how to save himself.
Dr. Channing's coldness toward Abolition might be shown by his words to Daniel Webster in 1828, deprecating any agitation of the slavery question; by his studied avoidance of Garrison in social life; by his inability, even in the Essay on Slavery, to see the importance of the Abolition movement;--or in a hundred other ways.
On the other hand, Dr. Channing's services to the Antislavery cause could be illustrated by this same essay, and by the esteem and love which many leading Anti-slavery people always bore him. Let us, however, go to the bottom of the whole matter.
On January 13th, 1840, Dr. Charles Follen, a German enthusiast and one of the few highly educated men among the Abolitionists, was burned alive in the ill-fated steamer Lexington, while on a journey from New York to Boston.
Follen was a young doctor of laws and a teacher at the University of Jena, who had been prosecuted for his liberal opinions by the reactionary governments of Prussia and Austria in 1824.
He had fled to Switzerland and thence to the
Boston, the. Atlantic Monthly. Press, 1921.
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