Emerson as a Religious Influence

EMERSON was an original thinker, a writer of dignity and charm, a profoundly poetic nature, and one of the loftiest spirits of his century. As an American man of letters he is of unique and enduring significance. His perception of the living world of men is deep and abiding; his sense of the meaning of literature, its relativity to life, is clear and high; his ideals as a contributor to literature are a precious tradition, and his work remains the best that Americans possess. Emerson is, besides, a witness to the life of the spirit; he is a preacher. He surrendered his parish; he never abandoned his profession. He remained true to the hope expressed in the final sentence of the sermon in which he took leave of the ministry of the Second Church in Boston: “And whilst the recollection of its claims oppresses me with a sense of my unworthiness, yet I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change can deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its highest functions. ” Greater than Emerson the poet, than Emerson the man of letters, is Emerson the prophet. Emerson’s concern is with the problems of the spirit; his writings are essentially religious writings. It is, therefore, a just claim made for him, that his predominant influence has been a religious influence. It is the purpose of this article to consider the extent and degree of this influence in Emerson’s own country, where he is, and where he must remain, a chief, and, in some respects, unique distinction. Except in the last third of the article, where an individual estimate is hazarded, the inquiry is an historical inquiry, and the mood in which it is pursued is the “settled respect ” that all thinking men have found to be Emerson’s due.

In 1879 Emerson — then in his seventy-sixth year, and within three years of his death — delivered an address before the Divinity School in Harvard University. Forty-one years earlier he had enriched this school with the first fruits of his genius; he then gave to it his farewell blessing. He was introduced to the crowded chapel by Dr. Hedge as a man who more than any other belonging to the nineteenth century had influenced the religious life of the world. When one recalls the fact that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Goethe, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning all spoke to the nineteenth century, this claim strikes him as extravagant. To at least one listener Dr. Hedge’s compliment seemed excessive, and the manner of it a trifle loud. It provoked in one listener a revolt of judgment and of feeling; but this revolt was quenched as the listener looked at the evident effect of the compliment upon Emerson. He heard it, he endured it with a bland, a benign, a hopelessly unbelieving smile. That smile remains in memory a symbol of the purity, the elevation, and the radiant modesty of Emerson’s soul. It undid the effect of gross praise, and it won for the speaker the sympathy and the veneration of those who came to hear him. Of the lecture on that final occasion little can be said. It was in a tongue that no man could understand. There was a bird in it living enough and beautiful enough to have been a messenger from the gods. There was besides the famous quotation: “Once the church had wooden chalices and golden priests; now the church has golden chalices and wooden priests.”

The praise paid to Emerson by Dr. Hedge reappears in an aggravated form in a remark attributed to Dean Stanley, and frequently quoted by that friend of the American people, Edward Everett Hale. Dean Stanley is said to have observed when in this country that while he heard many sermons, he heard but one preacher, and that one was Emerson. This remark, assuming that it is genuine, loses something of its impressiveness when one reflects that probably Dean Stanley heard few sermons other than his own. Still this wild remark of the Dean — whether genuine or apocryphal God knoweth — expresses the mature and deliberate judgment of many good people. It may not, therefore, be altogether without interest to inquire how far this judgment is sound, and what deduction, if any, should be made from it. It is not an idle task to consider, in an objective way, and in the mood of critical homage, the limitations of the religious influence of Emerson both as to extent and as to degree, and to reach, if we can, a just estimate of the power that he has exercised over the higher life of the American people.

I.

There is in man an eager and an affectionate impulse by which more is claimed for the hero than is his due. There are schools of thought in letters, in art, in politics, in philosophy, and in religion, and the disciples in each case are forward to assert for the master not only a preponderating, but an obliterating influence. So speak the lovers of Wordsworth, the disciples of Coleridge or Mill, and the followers of Newman, or Maurice, or Martineau. So spoke in their generation the disciples of Hegel, Kant, and Hume; and in still remoter days the followers of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, in reading the essays of Jowett one would be led to think that Aristotle -was but the systematize and the pale shadow of Plato. So strong is predilection, so blinding is special affinity and aptitude, so essentially unjust to history is an exclusive hero-worship. In accounting for the ideals and the character of men one must reckon with many influences. Unshared or even unrivaled influence hardly exists. Few are the cases where one person is the intellectual or spiritual product of another. Nature takes care that the law of intellectual and spiritual consanguinity shall be respected. The elect youth in each generation pass under many teachers, and an adequate account of one’s indebtedness would lead one to follow the example of Marcus Aurelius, who discovers sixteen human sources of his spiritual possessions, and who does not forget his obligation to the gods. The tree planted by the riverside owes much to special location; and yet the whole universe is the servant of its prosperous and beautiful life.

Emerson’s influence was limited by many powerful contemporaries who owed him nothing or next to nothing. Channing does not belong in this connection. While he may fairly rank as one of the greater religious names of the nineteenth century, his work was done about the time that Emerson began seriously to engage public attention. Channing died in 1842, five years after Emerson’s oration on The American Scholar, and four years after the still more famous Address before the Divinity School. The two men belong to different generations. They stand to each other not as competitors in the field of contemporary influence, but as predecessor and successor. More and more Channing’s great influence for good is recognized among all enlightened persons. His doctrine of man has been taken up into the thought of our time as a permanent possession of faith; his sense of the place of reason in religion puts him in sympathetic touch with the leading minds in all communions to-day; his plea for liberty has been the keynote to a chorus of thinkers of many shades of belief; and his profound religiousness has done much to create those high moods of the spirit without which theology is barren and philosophy vain.

Theodore Parker was seven years younger than Emerson. The two men had much in common, yet neither learned anything essential to his thought from the other. Parker was a rough man, a spiritual Ishmaelite, whose hand was against every man save the oppressed. His was a deeply religious nature, and he had an immense following among the wilder spirits. In many ways his influence was wider, and immediately more effectual than that of Emerson. His understanding, his appreciation of evidence, his power in giving an account of his belief, and in calling to account the belief of those who differed from him, made him a vastly more formidable opponent than Emerson. Parker could not by any perversity be treated, as Emerson often was, as a moonshiner and an intellectual freak. The orthodox host trembled as Parker strode out against it, much as Israel did when Goliath issued his dread challenge; and there was no David to slay this terrible Philistine. Parker is far inferior to Emerson in elevation of spirit and in enduring power ; in wild courage, in reforming passion, and in contemporary influence he ranks above Emerson.

James Walker, teacher of philosophy in Harvard College from 1838 to 1853, and president from 1853 to 1860, was totally unlike Emerson in his intellectual and moral character. Men of such immense influence as President Eliot, James C. Carter of New York, and the late Justice Gray have confessed greater obligations to James Walker than to any other teacher of their youth. Walker was a teacher and preacher of great impressiveness, and he sent into the life of the country, and into the service of the church, hundreds of men who owed more to him than to any other influence. Here is a second and a very considerable limitation upon the religious influence of Emerson. Not a fibre in the intellectual being of Walker was changed by Emerson, or a single belief modified, or an impulse essentially increased.

Another powerful contemporary of Emerson was Edwards A. Park of Andover, one of the keenest minds, one of the greatest teachers, and an imperial personality. History is easily forgotten, and Park’s unfortunate attitude, in his later life, toward the advancing thought of the time has clouded, and almost canceled, the sense of the vast influence that once was his. It should be borne in mind that he made more preachers than any other New England teacher of any period of our history, that upon more than a thousand leaders of the people he put the stamp of his mind, that the great majority of his pupils were simply fire-proof against Emerson, and that to all save a few noble rebels among them Emerson was but an incidental influence. Edwards A. Park was born to power over young men. He controlled men, much as Webster did, by his personal presence. He was a logician, a wit, a humorist, a remarkably accomplished and powerful man. No person in any walk of life ever met Park without feeling his distinction. While all that will survive of him is the mere tradition of power, even that tradition is significant.

There was Horace Bushnell, to whom is due, more than to any other man, the credit of putting a new spirit into New England Congregationalism. Bushnell was a religious genius, of a type that gave him access to the New England mind. In him there was no serious break with the past. He was indeed a rescuer of faith from the hands of formalists, a rescuer of Christianity. But he was first, last, and all the time a Christian, and a believer in the sovereign character of Christianity. This intellectual position, together with his genius, gave him his influence ; and this combination in him of rest in the supremacy of the teaching of Jesus, and of deep, fruitful, and reforming insight, makes him, within the pale of the organized religious life of America, a greater influence than Emerson.

Passing beyond New England, there were the Hodges at Princeton. They are now wholly in the past tense, and yet they were once alive. The influence of Princeton theology may not seem to be a religious influence. Still it was so regarded by multitudes of good Americans, and as a controlling force, contemporary with Emerson, upon the higher life of the country, it should not be ignored. The influence of the Princeton Calvinism has been an enormous influence, and the multitudes to whom it ministered were as impervious to Emerson’s message as the Turk is to the gospel of Christ. Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and Judaism share with Christianity the religious control of mankind, and while the Christian must claim for his faith the highest, if not the widest influence, in the nature of the case the claim remains a disputed claim. Powerful contemporaries share with Emerson the control of the higher life of the American people. We can only prophesy whose influence is finally to be the greatest. Meanwhile justice to Emerson’s contemporaries may prepare the way for justice to him.

By far the greatest influence in creating the present mood of the religious leaders of the nation is yet to be named.

The influence of the greater universities of the country has been a preeminent influence, and Harvard University has been the unquestionable and powerful leader. Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Princeton, and other universities and colleges have followed. As the men who shared with Emerson the power that shaped the nobler spirit of the time passed off the stage, or fell behind in the march of progress, leaving him in his own unique place, there rose another, and a mightier competitor. To take a conspicuous example, the new Harvard College was lifted by its presiding genius Charles W. Eliot, during the last decade of Emerson’s life, into a comprehensive and vital expression of the higher mind and spirit of mankind. This new expression became a new discipline to American youth of the highest moment. It is strange that in accounting for the religious mood of the time this tremendous influence should lie unnoticed. It is strange that men should see in the free spirit of the typical religious teacher of to-day only an illustration of the power of Emerson. Such reasoning is simply childish in its waywardness. There are hundreds of preachers of religion to-day, men full of the creative impulse, who owe the expansion of their faith and their free spirit almost wholly to the influence of their teachers in college. In college the substance of their faith, received from pious parents, was purified, enlarged, enriched, filled with the content made possible by first hand and vital contact with the monumental minds of the race. Here we come upon the permanent creators of mind and faith, the true human home, and the really great college. The teachers who are seldom known beyond the academic circles in which they work exercise over the elect youth of the land an immeasurable influence. They lead their prophetic pupils into communion with the controlling minds in history; they make them familiar with the thinkers whose opinions are the watershed of belief and of unbelief, of optimism and of pessimism, of human heroism and of human surrender to the ills of existence. The man who more than all others changed the attitude of Scotland toward the Bible was A. B. Davidson, a quiet scholar in the Free Church College, Edinburgh, a man hardly known outside of academic circles: so potent and prevailing is the influence of the teacher of elect youth. The university is a great community of teachers of this sort, and with this unequaled opportunity. The function of the university in the higher life of the nation has not yet taken hold of the educated citizen. The new generation of scholars, thinkers, preachers, servants of religion all, in so far as they cherish lofty ideals, is a product of the university as the expression of the best that man has thought and done, as the mediator of the best that man is thinking and doing. The writer passed through Emerson’s college, and heard his name mentioned in the classroom only three times; once in connection with a questionable essay on Plato, a second time as a unique figure in American letters, a third time as a seer, and not as a philosopher. So wide is the reach, so cosmopolitan is the spirit, so immeasurable are the resources, and so countless are the examples of the great university. Men forget that the whole higher history of the race is operating upon the present mood of elect youth through the instrumentality of the living university. Men forget that the reign of the sovereign minds of mankind is thus purified, sustained, extended. Men forget that the true university is an implement in the great hand of humanity. The great world competes with Emerson through the colleges of the land; it competes with him in a signal and leading manner through his own university, in the making of men, in the creation and enrichment of the religious spirit. Emerson would be the first to confess that the great world thus mediated leaves the solitary seer far behind.

II.

There is a doctrinal uncertainty about Emerson’s writing that makes his teaching unsatisfactory to all but a significant minority among the religious people of his time. To be sure, critics of a generation ago took altogether too seriously Emerson the philosopher; they misapprehended a nature profoundly poetic, forever bent on symbolic expression, and careless of consistency. A literalist Emerson could not be, scientifically exact he could not be for any length of time; he was constantly and excessively picturesque. Much, therefore, of the objection to Emerson’s metaphysics is entirely wide of the mark. But even when considered as an imaginative writer, religious persons are never sure whether Emerson is theist or pantheist, whether religion means for him anything more than an attitude of delight in the universe and a sense of its sustaining power, while it considers men of service to its own inscrutable ends. The question is not whether this is a true conception of religion, or whether it is a true interpretation of Emerson, or whether this way of thinking and feeling should be acceptable. The question is one of fact, and it is quite certain that to those living within organized Christianity such doctrinal vagueness could not be satisfactory. Men like Schleiermacher and Goethe may see in Spinoza a God-intoxicated man, and they may rejoice in the high spirit that declares, “He who truly loves God will not ask that God shall love him in return; ” but for the great mass of mankind the Deity of Spinoza has no attractions, and the Deity of Emerson is too vague, too uncertain. The greatest fact in human existence and in human history is the fact of personality, and the deepest craving of the spirit of man is for an Infinite Being capable of communion with man, of understanding his life, of quickening his aspirations, of realizing his ideals. Emerson’s Deity is vague and uncertain in personality, and does not bow the heavens to console and comfort man.

The attitude of Emerson toward the Founder of Christianity was for two generations of religious Americans an insuperable barrier against extensive influence. Again the question is not whether this attitude was right or wrong; it is enough that it deeply offended the vast majority of the religious people of this country. It is not forgotten that Emerson said some deep and precious things about Jesus; here is one: “Europe has always owed to Oriental genius its divine impulse; what these holy bards said or sang, men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind (whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world) is proof of the settled virtue of this infusion.” This might pass for the hazy Christology of a representative of progressive orthodoxy, but elsewhere Emerson makes an interpretation of this kind impossible by remarking: “No historical person begins to content us; there are no such men as we fable, no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Cæsar, nor Angelo, nor Washington such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it is allowed by great men; there is none without his foible.” In another mood we have from Emerson this genuine appreciation of Christ: “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets; he saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived with it and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates Himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of His world.” Yet it is only in “a jubilee of sublime emotion” that Jesus can say, “I am divine. Through me God acts; through me speaks.” “Churches are not built upon his principles, but upon his tropes.” Again there is permanent wisdom in Emerson’s disregard of the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; but the meaning of the perfect humanity of Jesus Emerson does not consider. Here is another appreciation of Jesus: “Jesus always speaks from within, and in a degree that transcends all others.” To this it may be replied that the question is not whether one speaks from within or from without, but whether what he says is true. To speak from within in a sovereign way is, however, Emerson’s highest praise, and yet he offsets this praise of Jesus by a peculiarly unfortunate sentence: “ This one fact the world hates ; that the soul becomes; for that forever . . . shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”

Emerson puts Jesus on a level with other great servants of the spirit; he sees limitations in his service, he looks for the coming of another and a greater teacher. “The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences that have been bread of life to millions, but they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding, complete grace ; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with science, with beauty, and with joy.” Such being Emerson s attitude toward the Master of Christendom, it is impossible that his influence should be wide or deep, at least within the pale of organized Christianity. Emerson is foreordained to this limitation of influence by his attitude to one who stands in the thought of his disciples supreme among the sons of men, transcendent in the sublimity and beauty of his soul, and incomparable in the character of his service to mankind.

Among men who are quite ready for the sake of the spiritual force of his message to overlook this attitude of Emerson toward Jesus there is another embarrassment. There is in Emerson wonderful occasional insight into the heart of Christianity, but on the whole it is a subject upon which he bestows little thought. He is not overwhelmed with the sense of the greatness of the gospel. He is impressed by it in so far as it falls in with his own thoughts; it does not occupy the central place in his consciousness of human history; it does not stand sovereign in his veneration. All this happens because Emerson worked from within, because he knew the greater things of history only as they accorded with his own mission. Christianity is for Emerson the sense of the infinitude of man; there is little evidence that he saw in it the consciousness of the humanity of God. The “holy thoughts ” of Jesus are the whole gospel; the significance of these holy thoughts as an interpretation of the Infinite Mind is not regarded. Apostolic, patristic, mediæval, and modern Christianity Emerson looked upon as distortions of the religion of Jesus. Historical Christianity is a my thus. The sense of a monumental record in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, of a monumental religious experience, enshrining a monumental disclosure of the will of God toward men, does not exist in Emerson. Here as elsewhere he is an excessive individualist. Great and vagrant insights take the place of a varied, progressive, objective discovery of God, and of God’s world in the highest wisdom of the race. Personal and occasional inspirations obscure Emerson’s sense of the unique men of the world and their unique mission.

The grave charge is to be brought against both Carlyle and Emerson that while they were the product of Christian civilization, and drew the substance of their message from the religious faith of their people, there is no evidence that either ever seriously studied Christianity. The greatest phenomenon in human history engages but lightly the attention or the enthusiasm of either; nor does either fathom the need of the humanity that has risen on the strength of the gospel of Christ. It was the dim perception of this fact that led Lord Jeffrey to remark of Carlyle, that he went about as if he were to found a new religion. No one had done anything great for man’s soul until he came. One can hardly read the correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson without the feeling of their excessive consequentialness in the presence of the immense historic achievement of spiritual genius; in the presence of the spirit, the teaching, and the influence of Jesus. Both were essentially modest men, and yet they lived in the sense of a uniqueness and an importance which they do not possess. They are both frequently oracular when uttering with literary distinction only the commonplace moral wisdom of the Christian world. It is a valid criticism upon Carlyle and Emerson that they failed to recognize the rock whence they were hewn, and that they did not exhaust the quarry; that they were oblivious of the pit whence they were digged, and that the precious metal remained, after they were taken out, in boundless abundance.

This failure in Carlyle and Emerson to appreciate the significance of Christianity is doubtless the expression of a tendency in the Calvinism which they both inherited. The fate of the world is fixed in eternity, and the historical disclosure in time is but a comparatively unimportant detail. For Calvinism Christianity dissolves in the Deity to whom it points. This is true, but it is unavailing as excuse for men of extraordinary genius like Carlyle and Emerson. And this oversight is even more remarkable when one reflects that both these men were created and equipped out of a Christian civilization; that both drew their essential message from a nature saturated with Christianity, and that the Sermon on the Mount contains the entire ethical teaching of both and infinitely more.

That side of Christianity which deals with mankind sunk in immeasurable moral failure and woe finds no recognition in Emerson. Let one go from Emerson to Dante and one will see what is meant. There is in Emerson no Inferno, hardly even a Purgatorio; and for that reason his Paradiso is a good deal in the clouds. Dante’s greatness is that there is in him a reflection of the total spiritual life of man, — all its abysses, and all its heights, and all its ways of descent and ascent. Compared with the optimism of Browning that of Emerson is ineffectual; it is the creation of a high spirit out of its own serenity and good fortune, and in isolation from the tragedy of the world. The optimism of Browning is a discovery that light is stronger than darkness, an insight into the constitution of man as foreordained to righteousness by the purpose and discipline of the universe.

III.

The proper limitation of Emerson’s field of influence does not mean that the field is not large and that the influence is not of a high order. Emerson has been potent over three classes of men. The first is composed of men of genius, like Lowell, a small class indeed, but one great in power. The second class consists of the large body of persons who stand outside of institutional religion, who are eager followers of the modern seers, whose beliefs are formed out of contemporary opinion, and who look upon all ancient thought and faith with grave suspicion, if not with distinct distrust and aversion. To this order belonged the acute and amazingly interesting graduate of Yale College, and a Wall Street broker, who remarked to the writer that Edmund Burke and Daniel Webster were outgrown, and that their writings were not worth reading. This type of person is wholly contemporary. He adores the man who advocates revolt from the past. He will join no man in building the sepulchres of the fathers; he will follow as master any one who appears with a new programme. Over this large and interesting order of persons Emerson has had an immense influence. Indeed, they have owed to him whatever of salvation they have been able to attain. The third class is made up of men of catholic temper, who learn from the wise and good of every denomination, who take all human leaders with generosity and reserve, and who are not seriously disturbed by false doctrines, heresy, and schism in those who bring them substantial aid. Still another class should, perhaps, be designated, into which are gathered the popular imaginative or poetic minds, who do not care for definite doctrine, or who feel that definite doctrine is unattainable, who with a minimum of religious belief seek a maximum of spiritual strength, and a personal attitude toward existence brave, beneficent, serene, joyous, and fed from the sense of a mysterious but sustaining universe. For this body of our people Emerson has been an influential leader.

Emerson’s confession of the divine soul of the universe, omnipotent, selfrevealing, open to the heart of man, is a religious idea never long absent from him, and uttered by him on many occasions, in many forms, and always with the insight of a seer and the rapt speech of the lover and worshiper. He walks in a spiritual universe. Nature is a transparent veil; human society and human history are a translucent order. The Over-Soul, the divine beauty of the universe, is all and in all, and in the presence of this eternal mystery of loveliness men wake and sleep, work and play, live and die, and carry forward all human interests and industries. This pervading soul of the universe hallows the world, hallows humanity, fills nature with beauty, fills society with radiant meaning, and overwhelms all finite forms, natural and human, with infinite life, light, significance, beauty, and joy.

In Emerson the sense of the human soul is equally strong. “Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak to thee! ” might serve as a text for at least half of Emerson’s work. Man is called upon to speak face to face with God, to allow the Divine soul to awaken the dormant faculties within him, to educate his whole being in science, in duty, and in worship. The Emersonian doctrine of man is as hard to define as the Emersonian doctrine of God, but if we say that God is the Soul of the universe and that man is the soul that answers to it, that is capable of entertaining its appeals, of climbing up into truth and goodness and beauty by its inspiration, we shall not be far astray. These two visions — the vision of the Soul of the universe penetrating all, making all opaque things luminous with its presence, and the vision of man’s spirit in fellowship with the absolute Spirit, and living and growing in this total order ablaze with divinity — are surely religious, and they constitute part of the fascination which Emerson has wielded over the religious mind of many people.

Another and a yet more fundamental influence Emerson has exerted through his call to look at all reality immediately, at first hand. “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? ” Again, he says, “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” This is the great note in the first volume of his collected writings. He is pleading for the immediate vision of a divine universe; he is the inaugurator of an era of the firsthand and original treatment of all human interests. Emerson’s wholesomest influence is against the prevailing and blinding power of mere tradition. “Instead of that reliance which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth and duty, ” men are forever inclined to lean upon institutions which are to the spirit as the imperfect effect to the transcendent cause. Nothing is finer in Emerson than this war against second-hand politics, art, philosophy, and religion. It was here that he revolted from the custom of his age. According to the traditionalist the world was to be seen as other men had seen it; for vision there was substituted the record of vision, and this deadly custom had almost quenched the spirit in the Christian Church. Nowhere is Emerson’s work more beneficent than here. It is, to be sure, one-sided. History should be not the substitute for immediate vision, but the purification and enrichment of it. This we have learned since Emerson’s time. The eye of the immediate observer is conducted to reality by the vast help of history, as the eye of the astronomer is conducted to the heavenly body by the power of the telescope. This we now know. But one-sidedness is next to inevitable when a protest is to be made availing against a deadening custom, and to Emerson is due immortal thanks for his great cry in behalf of a first-hand relation to all reality, and in the name of that fruitful relation, for his hope of a new order of human society, and a higher type of letters, and of arts, and of all forms of the ideal that shall issue from a nation given to reality in the awe and joy of immediate vision. At the head of American letters Emerson must stand; his voice first called his countrymen to original work, and his Essays are still the highest fruits of this American vocation.

Among the greater religious forces of the nineteenth century Emerson must stand, not because he influenced the largest numbers, but because he gave forth one wholesome and governing idea. That governing idea, issuing its call to come face to face with all reality, has not been unavailing. Men whose religious idiom is far away from that of Emerson have heard the call, first from other and more potent thinkers, but afterwards strengthened by his clear utterance ; and they have answered it. They are struggling forward into immediate relations with humanity; they are trying to see man and all his interests, the order of the world and God, face to face; they believe that only in this immediate vision of truth can the life of men be preserved.

The best thing that Emerson has left us is his spirit, fine and high, stern and sweet. He took life in a royal way, and bore himself toward the eternal mysteries with serene courage and dauntless hope. His Essays, which are his most characteristic work, have their chief value not as revelations of the moral order of life, not as discoveries of the final meaning of things, but as disclosures of his own spirit. There is in these Essays an immense mass of truth, uttered in picturesque and memorable words; there is in them also an immense mass that is not true. The Emersonian hit and miss are upon every page, and side by side with a golden and perfect sentence one finds sonorous eccentricity. The origin of this strange compound of oracle and imposition in Emerson lies in the confessional character of his writing. He speaks from within, and his generalizations hit or miss according as his personal experience embodies a law of humanity or a mere idiosyncrasy. That Emerson speaks so often and so royally for man is his great distinction; that he speaks so frequently for the idiosyncratic, the isolated, and the vain, is his chief fault. We have a right to hold him at his best, and through the richness and majesty of the confession we are brought face to face with the confessor. There is often a provoking quality in Emerson’s writing; often a real, although a wholly unintended, injustice to those who differ from him; but in that clear, strong, and beautiful face there is nothing but honor and benignity. Professor James has defined with characteristic felicity the moral habit and the religious mood: “For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.” Religion is a state of mind “in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouth and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.” Both these moods are in Emerson. He is the cosmic patriot calling for volunteers, and he is willing to be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. No more valiant cosmic patriot ever bore arms, and his religious mood, strange as it sometimes seems, is deep, sincere, and instinct with high contagion.

Emerson will always wear a halo in the American imagination, because all unconsciously to himself he wore a halo in life. His spirit is a possession forever ; many who cannot find in him a sound or a consistent teacher venerate his strength and sincerity. For this large class he still issues his oracles, and he now issues them as inspirations and consolations and with all confusions withdrawn. He sits upon a lofty eminence, and to look toward him is to share in the infinite peace. When he died, the fittest word spoken of him was uttered by his friend and fellow townsman Judge Hoar, —a word from the venerable and venerated Hebrew Scriptures: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon her high places.”

On the whole, and in conclusion, it may be said that Emerson’s influence is like that of a mountain upon the local climate, — the clouds that gather upon it, the storms that rage round it, which find it immovable, mean the refreshment and renewal of the beautiful world in which it stands; and when it lifts its untroubled head toward heaven it is an object of wonder and love, and sheds into the air that men breathe at work and at play the invigorating tonic of its own exalted being. Such was Emerson, — a man of towering moral stature, he kept a majestic silence while the elemental sorrows that come to all swept round his stable manhood, one whose meetings with the upper world and its awful powers carried beauty and peace to the wide fields of human society, and whose lofty spirit put into the common religious atmosphere of the time a tonic and an inspiration of priceless worth and of enduring delight.

George A. Gordon.