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respond to it. The point upon which I am to speak, as I understand, is the record of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a reformer.

In viewing him thus, we may well recall Father Taylor, the famous preacher to sailors in Boston, who, when criticised by some fellow Methodists for being a friend of Emerson, inasmuch as he was a man who, they thought, must surely go to hell, replied, "It does look so; but I am sure of one thing; if Emerson goes to hell it will change the climate there and emigration will set that way." The widespread commemorations of this month show that Father Taylor, as usual, was right. They imply that Emerson was not merely a technical reformer, but stood to the world as a vital influence and represented the general attitude of reform. Above all thought rises the freedom to think; above all utterance ranks the liberty to utter. The man who first asserted that liberty at a given time, and, in asserting it, made it attractive and convincing, became the leader of his period. It was Emerson who did this for us. From the moment that his volume called Nature was published in 1836, the thraldom of Puritanism was broken and men were summoned to follow the Inner Light. William Penn and the early Friends had stretched out their hands for this attitude, but had never quite reached it, because still somewhat fettered by the tradition of Bible worship, and by a persecuting clergy of whom Wil

1 Conway: Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 66.

liam Penn complained that so far from being good Christians, they had yet to learn to be good Heathen.1 Yet Emerson described himself, speaking to his kinsman, Dr. Haskins, as "more of a Quaker than anything else." Channing did not reach this position, though he drew, as his son testifies, nearer and nearer to it as he grew older. Parker was not absolutely a leader, but rather followed Emerson and popularized him. Emerson, and he only, is the more than Luther of these modern days. We see this through a glass darkly to-day, but a hundred years hence, it will be held unquestionable.

I was but a boy of twelve when Emerson's volume, Nature, was published. But I was not too young to hear him lecture once at the Cambridge Lyceum, and I recall most definitely the impression he made on at least one of his youngest hearers. The lectures were held in an old building, preceding the present Lyceum Hall, and it was the custom of the village boys, as is still the habit in small country towns, to attend each lecture, take seats very near the front, and within fifteen minutes retire, one by one, without much mercy on the lecturer or the audience. No doubt I took my full share of this form of intellectual experiment - which in Cambridge has especial force from the fact that we retired not down the stairs, but by dropping through a mysterious hole in the slanting floor among the 1 No Cross, No Crown, ii. 76.

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upper seats; but I remember very well that on the occasion of Mr. Emerson's lecture, I was gradually deserted by my fellows and sat through the lecture alone. Being reproached afterwards by my playmates for this want of fidelity to their customs, I could only plead that "I liked to hear that man; and when asked if I understood what he said, I honestly replied "No." It now seems to me that not one of his grown-up hearers could have paid him a greater compliment. What had reached me was the personality of the man. Long after this, when I read in Lowell's words, "We do not go to hear what Emerson says, so much as to hear Emerson," I felt that this was just what I had done as a child.

It was in college that I read his books and reread them, but only came gradually to recognize him as being what he was, the most resolute reformer, not excepting Garrison, whom our nation had produced. This conviction took definite form, perhaps, at the first meeting of the Free Religious Association in 1868, when he came last among the speakers and selected for praise the last but one, who had distinctly objected to the word "Christian" as being a limitation. Mr. Emerson following, said, “I have listened with great pleasure to the lessons we have heard. To many, to those last spoken, I have found so much in common with my own thought that I have little left to say." The form of the phrase is evidently not given with precise accuracy, but I fol

low the printed report. He said later in his speech, "The child, the young student finds scope in his mathematics and chemistry or natural history, because he finds a truth larger than he is; finds himself continually instructed. But in churches, every healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself in something less; it is checked, cribbed, confined." Nothing said was on the whole so trenchant as this. The Rev. Richard Cecil said in England, about 1777, that "If one good upright man should deny Christianity, he would do the faith of England more harm than all the sneers of Voltaire or all the sentimentalism of Rousseau." In the sense in which Cecil used the words, Emerson was that man. But these words were spoken more than a century ago, at a time of sectarian narrowness which it is now hard to recall; and the very terms "faith" and "Christianity" are now habitually used in a far wider sense. To Mr. Cecil, Emerson would have seemed anti-Christian; but now a chorus of those who call themselves Christians speaks his praise. We have the striking testimony of the Rev. Dr. Haskins, his near kinsman, that Mr. Emerson preferred even to speak of the Deity as "It," and nothing more illustrates the power of his essentially reverential tone of mind than that this same kinsman, an Episcopal clergyman of unimpeached standing, was so impressed by what Emerson said that he himself went on to vindicate this pronoun "It" as being, in itself, not meaningless or even irreverent, but rather

a good selection of words, as Mr. Emerson used it, standing simply for God's omnipresence.1 We know also that while Emerson found formal prayer at stated intervals impossible to him, yet he said, "As well may the child live without its mother's milk as the soul without prayer;" while he also said, "Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the Highest Nature, thoughts desert us and we run into formalism!!" He never recognized the leadership of Jesus Christ as that of an absolutely infallible guide; yet to show that he guarded against overstatement on this ground also, we have the remarkable passage, preserved by Miss E. P. Peabody from the original manuscript of his Divinity Hall address, — a passage left out for want of time only, and warning his hearers against making even truth a fanaticism: "Too soon we shall have the puppyism of a pretension of looking down on the head of all human culture; setting up against Jesus Christ every little self magnified."8

Attempts have always been made to disparage Emerson, on the ground that he was not, even in reform, a system-maker, but was fragmentary. This trait seems to me more and more to have been one of his highest titles to immortality. System-makers are short-lived; each makes his single contribution,

1 Haskins's Emerson, p. 130.

2 E. W. Emerson in Prophets of Liberalism, p. 49.
8 Peabody, Reminiscences of Dr. Channing, p. 373.

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