RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. MANY happy coincidences suggest themselves as we meet at this time and in this place to commemorate the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the descendant of no less than eight generations of Puritan ministers, and his father's name is on yonder tablet as the fourteenth minister of this ancient church. On a spring evening a hundred years ago this devout and gracious William Emerson wrote in his diary,-" May 25, 1803, this day, whilst I was at dinner at Governor Strong's, my son Ralph Waldo was born." Little did the father realize that this entry marked the most important incident of his twelve years of ministry, or that a century later the twenty-fifth day of May would be observed throughout this and other lands as the hundredth birthday of the most distinguished representative of American literature. In this church, then, with its noble covenant of 1630, still in force, where all that is temporary in religion is omitted and all that is permanent is expressed, in the piety of the parsonage and in its straitened circumstances after his father's death, in the discipline of the Latin School, amid all the traditions of Puritan simplicity and of Thursday lectures, the boy's inclination to plain living and high thinking was set. "What a debt is ours," he wrote thirty years later, "to that old religion which in the childhood of most of us dwelt like a Sabbath morning in the country of New England, teaching private self-denial and sorrow!" With a peculiar fitness and timeliness this church of his childhood speaks the first of the many words of commemoration which will be heard in this centennial year. The influence of Emerson has experienced all possible vicissitudes. First came a period of friendly perplexity or embarrassed hostility, when those who felt called to attack his teaching found themselves disarmed by his gracious and unresisting temper. "I esteem it," wrote the saintly Henry Ware, Jr., "particularly unhappy to be thus brought into a sort of public opposition to you; for I have a thousand feelings which draw me toward you. On this account I look with no little sorrow to the course which your mind is taking." The judgment of other contemporaries was less merciful. Professor Alexander, of Princeton, wrote of the Divinity School Address: "We want words with which to ex ... press our sense of the nonsense and impiety which pervade it. It is a rhapsody, obviously in imitation of Thomas Carlyle, . . . but without his genius." The Christian Examiner regarded the Address as being "neither good divinity nor good sense and the Daily Advertiser, in an article attributed to Professor Andrews Norton, remarked: "Silly women and silly young men, it is to be feared, have been drawn away from their Christian faith, if not divorced from all that can properly be called religion." It is interesting to consider what further emphasis Professor Norton, the representative theologian of the Harvard Divinity School, might have added to his words of rebuke if he had been assured that even the least of his successors in the faculty of that school should devote a Thursday lecture in the First Church of Boston to a eulogy of Emerson! The impression made on the Methodist sailor-prophet, Father Taylor, was more confused, but more typical of the general feeling. "Mr. Emerson," said Taylor to Governor Andrew, "is one of the sweetest creatures that God ever made. He must go to heaven when he dies; for, if he went to hell, the devil would not know what to do with him. But he knows no more of the religion of the New Testament than Balaam's ass did of the principles of the Hebrew grammar." Controversy, however, whether reluctantly proposed or indignantly sought by Emerson's contemporaries, was impossible to him. To attack him was like smiting a feather pillow, which yielded softly and presently took its old shape. No rejoinder or self-defence could be extorted from him. "I could not," he wrote to Henry Ware, "give account of myself if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the arguments you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask how I dare to say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men." What could the theological rationalists do with an adversary who retreated behind the defence of helplessness! So fought they as men beating the air. Their contention was with an atmosphere, which could not be argued against, but which must be either excluded or breathed. Even the satisfaction which might be derived from the sense of persecution was banished from Emerson's serene and sagacious mood. "Let me never fall," he wrote in his journal," into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. . . . A few sour faces, a few biting paragraphs, are but a cheap expiation for all these shortcomings of mine." Such a temper of detachment, tranquillity, and patient confidence could not but hasten the second phase of Emerson's influence, the period of imitation. That efflorescence of romanticism and naturalism which appeared in New England about 1840, and which appropriated to itself— with questionable accuracy the title of Transcendentalism, was a very varied growth. Sometimes, as in Emerson, it was a genuine application of the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Sometimes it was, as Mr. Frothingham, in his History of Transcendentalism, has remarked, little more than that a "feeling was abroad that all things must be new in a new world." Orestes Brownson wrote in 1840, "All are able to detect the supernatural because all have the supernatural in themselves." Margaret Fuller published The Dial from 1840-44; and the "Orphic Sayings" of Alcott bewildered or amused, as the temper of the reader might receive them. The Scriptures of other religions, Chinese, Buddhist, Persian, were for the first time accessible, and enlarged the horizon of religious sympathy and unity. "Tell me, brothers," wrote one of the poets of Transcendentalism, Christopher Cranch, "Tell me, brothers, what are we, Of Deity." |