“I will not say,” began his Fast Day Sermon in 1810, “that the present age is as strongly marked or distinguished from all other ages as that in which Jesus Christ appeared; but with that single exception, perhaps the present age is the most eventful the world has ever known. We live in times which have no parallel in past ages; in times when the human character has almost assumed a new form; in times of peculiar calamity, of thick darkness, and almost of despair.... The danger is so vast, so awful, and so obvious, that the blindness, the indifference, which prevail argue infatuation, and give room for apprehension that nothing can rouse us to those efforts by which alone the danger can be averted. Am I asked what there is so peculiar and so tremendous in the times in which we live?... I answer: In the very heart of Europe, in the centre of the civilized world, a new power has suddenly arisen on the ruins of old institutions, peculiar in its character, and most ruinous in its influence.” While Channing felt for France the full horror of his Federalist principles, he regarded England with equivalent affection. “I feel a peculiar interest in England,” he explained in a note appended to the Fast Day Sermon; “for I believe that there Christianity is exerting its best influences on the human character; that there the perfections of human nature, wisdom, virtue, and piety are fostered by excellent institutions, and are producing the delightful fruits of domestic happiness, social order, and general prosperity.” The majority of Americans took a different view of the subject; but even those who most strongly agreed with Channing would have been first to avow that their prejudice was inveterate, and its consequences sweeping. Such a conviction admitted little room for liberalism where politics were, directly or remotely, involved. Literature bordered closely on politics, and the liberalism of Unitarian Boston was bounded even in literature by the limits of British sympathies. Buckminster’s Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1809 was as emphatic on this point as Channing’s Fast Day Sermon of 1810 was outspoken in its political antipathies. “It is our lot,” said Buckminster, “to have been born in an age of tremendous revolution, and the world is yet covered with the wrecks of its ancient glory, especially of its literary renown. The fury of that storm which rose in France is passed and spent, but its effects have been felt through the whole system of liberal education. The foul spirit of innovation and sophistry has been seen wandering in the very groves of the Lyceum, and is not yet completely exorcised, though the spell is broken.”