“According to your own concession,” rejoined Dr. Samuel Worcester to Channing’s letter, “the party in whose behalf you plead generally deny the essential divinity of the Saviour, and hold him to be a being entirely ‘distinct from God,’ entirely ‘dependent,’--in other words, a mere creature.... You doubtless do not suppose that by any mere creature atonement could be made for the sins of an apostate world of sufficient merit for the pardon, sanctification, and eternal salvation of all who should trust in him; therefore if you hold to atonement in any sense, yet unquestionably not in the sense of a proper propitiatory sacrifice. Upon this denial of atonement must follow of course the denial of pardon procured by the blood of Christ, of justification through faith in him, of redemption from eternal death unto everlasting life by him. Connected, and generally if not invariably concomitant, with the denial of these doctrines is a denial of the Holy Spirit in his personal character and offices, and of the renewal of mankind unto holiness by his sovereign agency, as held by Orthodox Christians. Now, sir, are these small and trivial points of difference between you and us?” Channing protested against these inferences; but he did not deny--indeed, he affirmed--that Unitarians regarded dogma as unnecessary to salvation. “In our judgment of professed Christians,” he replied, “we are guided more by their temper and lives than by any peculiarities of opinion. We lay it down as a great and indisputable opinion, clear as the sun at noonday, that the great end for which Christian truth is revealed is the sanctification of the soul, the formation of the Christian character; and wherever we see the marks of this character displayed in a professed disciple of Jesus, we hope, and rejoice to hope, that he has received all the truth which is necessary to his salvation.” The hope might help to soothe anxiety and distress, but it defied conclusions reached by the most anxious and often renewed labors of churchmen for eighteen hundred years. Something more than a hope was necessary as the foundation of a faith.