Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ellery Channing

Channing writes like a man watching the modern world seal itself indoors. The sentence moves with the steady logic of a sermon, but its real force is diagnostic: isolation is not merely sad, it is lethal. He stacks the severed connections - nature, revelation, God, the self - as if they were arteries. Cut them, and the mind does not simply get bored or distracted; it "loses its life". The body analogy is doing more than providing a handy metaphor. Air and light are not luxuries; they are conditions. Channing wants spiritual and moral openness to feel equally non-negotiable.

The subtext is a warning aimed at a culture he sensed was becoming over-civilized, over-institutional, and intellectually self-satisfied. Early 19th-century America was thick with revival religion, industrial acceleration, and political confidence, but also with a creeping sense that faith could harden into routine and reason could turn arid. As a leading Unitarian voice, Channing threads a careful needle: he refuses a cramped, fear-based piety, yet he also refuses a purely self-enclosed rationalism. "Free communication" is the key phrase. Truth, for him, is relational - something you participate in, not something you lock in a cabinet.

Even "with itself" is a quiet jab. A mind can be alienated from God and still think it is doing fine; it can be alienated from its own depths and call that productivity. Channing frames that as a kind of spiritual hypoxia: you can stand upright for a while, then you droop.