Alexis deTocqueville caught the essence of the matter in a interview he and Gustave Beaumont had with Channing:

'But are you not afraid,' I said to him frankly, 'that by virtue of purifying Christianism you will end by making the substance disappear? I am frightened, I confess, at the distance that the human spirit has travelled since Catholicism; I am afraid that it will finally arrive at natural religion.'

'I think that such a result,' returned Mr. Channing, 'is little to be feared. The human spirit has need of a positive religion, and why should it ever abandon the Christian religion? Its proofs fear nothing from the most serious examination of reason.'

This exchange took place in the early 1830s. Twenty years later, a young Thomas Wentworth Higginson preached his inaugural sermon as pastor of Worcester's Free Church. Higginson was, like Emerson and Theodore Parker, a self-acknowledged disciple of Channing. Yet he, like them, had abandoned all belief in the "proofs" of Christianity. "Here lies the great difficulty. Let the simple truth be told. The time has come when an earnest and fearless inquirer can no more study the Bible and believe in its verbal inspiration, than he can study astronomy and believe that the sun moves around the earth." What had happened? Part of the answer lay in the new Biblical scholarship, particularly the work of Augustus Neander, author of History of the Christian Religion and Church during the first three centuries (Phil., 1843) and The Life of Jesus Christ (New York, 1848). As Higginson put it:

It is not possible that any collection of various books by various writers at various times can be assumed as a whole and so consulted, without introducing the utmost confusion into all moral questions. It has almost come to be a proverb, "You can prove anything out of Scripture." There are, all told, not less than fifty different sects in this country, each claiming to sustain itself by the Bible, to the exclusion of all others. And in all great moral questions, as War, Slavery, Temperance, Capital Punishment, it is unquestionably far easier to decide what is or is not right, than to ascertain what is or is not Scriptural.

Lucretia Mott, the noted abolitionist and woman's rights advocate, put the matter even more bluntly. Commenting on the Rev. Antoinette Brown's efforts to reconcile woman's rights with Paul's language about wives being "subject" to their husbands, she said that "it would not be profitable to consume too much time with the Bible argument." Saint Paul and the other Apostles, she suggested, might "have imbibed some of the spirit and ignorance of their age on the subject."4 Tocqueville's concern, in short, had borne fruit, at least among "advanced" thinkers, among whom Henry James, Sr. undoubtedly numbered himself. Unitarianism and its offshoot Universalism had become merely "natural." What remained was not the "substance" of Christianity but the sentiment of religion. Emerson, in his "Divinity School Address," his own valedictory to the ministry in 1838, gave early voice to this. He claimed that the ground of religion was "the intuition of the moral sentiment," an "insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul." As an "intuition," it "cannot be received at second hand. . . . It is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul."