man.

ist: he is an idealist, but not a consistent idealist: he is a religious mystic, but not a consistent mystic: he is an individualist, mapping his own highest inner self, or, as he would say in pantheistic phrase, mapping God. The Over-Soul comes to consciousness only in In the transfigured work of tracing on the page of literature all gleams of light in the Over-Soul in Emerson, he is consistent with himself, and in this only. A maker of maps of the paths of shootingstars is Emerson; and he is more devout than any astronomer intoxicated with the azure. Sit in the constellation Leo, if you would understand the Emersonian sky.

A brilliant and learned volume by a revered preacher of this city (REV. DR. MANNING, Half Truths and the Truth, 1872) contains the most luminous analytical proof that a pantheistic trend sets through Emerson's writings as the gulf-current through the Atlantic. But Emerson often proclaims his readiness to abandon pantheism itself, if the Over-Soul seems to command him to do so. In the whole range of his often self-destructive apothegms, I find no single sentence so descriptive of his position as a fixed individualist and a wavering pantheist as this:

"In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity; yet, when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat, in the hand of the harlot, and flee" (EMERSON, Essays, vol. i. p. 50).

Whoever would come to the point of view from which all Emerson's self-contradictions are reconciled must take his position upon the summit of individualism, and transfigure that height by the thought that there billows around it what we call God in conscience, and what Emerson calls the Over-Soul. In the loftiest zones of human experience there are influences from a Somewhat and Some-one that is in us, but not of us; and Emerson is so far pantheistic as to hold that this highest in man is not only a manifestation of God, but God, and the only God. Therefore he is always in the mount. His supreme tenet is the primacy of mind in the universe, and I had almost said the identity of the human mind with the Divine Mind. As the waves are many, and yet one with the sea, so to pantheism, finite minds and the events of the universe are many, and yet one with God. As the green billows that dash at this moment on Boston Harbor bar, and cap themselves with foam, are one with the Atlantic, so you and I, and Shakspeare, and Charlemagne, and Cæsar, and the Seven Stars, and Orion, are but so many waves in the Divine All. The ages, like the soft-hissing spray, may take this shape or that; but

"There is," says

they all come from one sea. Every wave is an inlet to the sea, and to all of the sea. Emerson, 66 one Mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same, and to all of the same" (Essay on History). "The simplest person, who in his integrity worships

Eight generations of clerical

God, becomes God." descent are behind

Emerson's unwavering reverence for the still small voice: one generation of now almost outgrown German thinkers is behind his wavering reverence for pantheism. Would he only assert, side by side with the Divine Immanence, the Divine Transcendency, we might call him a Christian mystic, where now we can only call him a teacher of transfigured pantheistic individualism. [Applause.]

Pantheism denies the personal immortality of the soul. To pantheism, death is the sinking of a wave back into the sea. We shall find, however, that Emerson, true to his central tenet of hallowed individualism, has again and again asserted the personal immortality of the soul, and never denied it in reality, though he has often done so in appearance.

When, in 1832, Mr. Emerson bade adieu to his parish in this city, he used, as on every occasion he is accustomed to use, memorable words. "I commend you," the last sentences of his letter to that parish read, "to the Divine Providence. May he multiply to your families and to your persons every genuine blessing; and whatever discipline may be appointed to you in this world, may the blessed hope of the resurrection, which he has planted in the constitution of the human soul, and confirmed and manifested by Jesus Christ, be made good to you beyond the grave! In this faith and hope I bid you farewell" (EMERSON, R. W., Letter dated Boston, Dec. 22, 1832, quoted in Frothingham's Transcendentalism in New England, 1876, p. 235). These are wholly unambiguous words.

You say that Emerson never has asserted, since 1832, the personal immortality of the soul; but what do you make of certain almost sacredly private statements of his to Fredrika Bremer? That authoress, whose works Germany gathers up in thirty-four volumes, came out of the snows of Northern Europe, and one day found Mr. Emerson walking down the avenue of pines in front of his house, through the falling snow, to greet her. Day after day they conversed on the highest themes. Months passed while Fredrika Bremer was the guest of Boston; and, toward the end of the lofty interchanges of thought between these two elect souls, there occurred what Fredrika Bremer calls a most serious season. One afternoon in Boston, with all the depth of her passionate and poetic temperament, she endeavored to convince Emerson that God is not only in all natural law, but that he transcends it all; that he demands of us perfection; and that, therefore, as Kant used to say, we must expect personal immortality or opportunity to fulfil the demand; that religion is the marriage of the soul with God; and that the idea that God is objective to us, and that our souls may come into harmony with his, a Person meeting a person, is vastly superior, as an inspiration, to any pantheistic theory that all there is of God is what is revealed to us in the insignificant scope of our faculties. She endeavored, in the name of lofty thought, to show the narrowness of pantheism at its best. The interview was serious in the last degree; and Fredrika Bremer savs that Em

erson closed it with these words, "I do not wish that people should pretend to know or believe more than they really do know and believe. The resurrection, the continuance of our being, is granted: we carry the pledge of this in our own breast. I maintain merely that we cannot say in what form or in what manner our existence will be continued " (EMERSON, "Conversation with Fredrika Bremer," Homes of the New World, vol. i. p. 223).

Transcendentalism in New England was marked by a bold assertion of the personal continuance of the soul after death. "The Dial" always assumed the fact of immortality. "The transcendentalist was an enthusiast on this article," Mr. Frothingham says; and Mr. Emerson's writings, he adds, were "redolent of the faith." Theodore Parker thought personal immortality is known to us by intuition, or as a self-evident truth, as surely as we know that a whole is greater than a part. It must be admitted that New-England transcendentalism caused in many parts of our nation a revival of interest and of faith in personal immortality. (See FROTHINGHAM, Transcendentalism, pp. 195-198.) Mr. Emerson was the leader of New-England transcendentalism.

But you say, that since 1850, Emerson has changed his opinion; and yet, if you open the last essay he has given to the world, that on "Immortality," you will read, "Every thing is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma. The implanting of a desire indicates that the gratifi