mentality? What other authority to oppose to their authority, unless it be that which speaks from the depths of personal conscience? Emerson, like all men of the same stamp, could not be made to comprehend that the source from which previous revelations had issued could be dried up, and that it had gushed forth only at a certain moment, and at a certain point of space, to seal itself up for ever. He could not comprehend the necessity of a special favour, and still less of an intermediary between man and God. Every intermediary must appear to him not only useless, but fatally mischievous, an obstacle interposing itself between the light and the eye. God reveals himself to us only through ourselves when we are face to face with him, and place ourselves in the very centre of the current which proceeds from him to us. The Divine presence never makes itself felt in the midst of the crowd of teachers. It is necessary "to have broken our god of tradition, and have ceased from our god of rhetoric, in order that God may fire our heart with his presence. "'* If man (6 know what the great God speaketh, he must go into his closet and shut the door, as Jesus said. † . . . He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men's devotions. ‡ . . . When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say? . . . The faith that stands * Essays, etc., by Emerson, p. 154. + Ibid., P. 155. § Ibid. would ... ... on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.* The relations of the soul to the Divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.† When the mind is simple and receives a Divine wisdom, then old things pass away,-means, texts, teachers, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.‡ If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you back to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation, in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of soul. . . . Where the soul is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming. . Man is timid and apologetic. He is not upright. Man dares not say, 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today." § The love of truth is not to be met with in religious Essays, etc., by Emerson. † Ibid., p. 35. minds only, I mean in minds in which the religious feeling exceeds the ordinary proportions: it is the common inheritance of human nature, as it is one of its greatest glories. But I know not if this passion do not burn in the former with a brighter glow, if the possession of the truth, or that which they take for the truth, does not fill them with a more penetrating and a profounder joy than it does other men. Not only is their conviction so firm as to be incapable of being shaken,-for what room can there be for doubt in him who believes himself to be in direct communication with the very source of truth ?-but as they feel it flow downwards into them, as they receive the influx of its divine stream, as they undergo, as it were, the immediate impression and touch of him who is truth itself, and who inspires truth, they must, as soon as they are first conscious of it, be, like the Pythoness on her tripod, in a state of indescribable rapture and transport, rejoieing even in the violence with which it affects them; and their language must bear the impress of these extraordinary influences. "Cui talia fanti Ante fores, subito non vultus, non color unus, Ne mortale sonans; afflata est numine quando Be this as it may, Emerson is one of those rare men who ars animated with an ardent passion for truth. According . to him, man is born for truth, cannot do without it, cannot detach himself from it without the death of his true life. It is therefore his duty to seek it without pause and without repose, and to sacrifice everything for it. As to Emerson himself, we feel, when reading him, that he is convinced of his possessing the truth, or rather that he is possessed by it, and we see enthusiasm pouring forth its tide into his style as into his soul. "Truth is our element of life. Man must worship truth, forego all things for that and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure and thought is thereby augumented. . God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please: you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates ever. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,-most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates, will keep himself aloof from all moorings and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being. The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes, to find the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat more great and blessed in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man, unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the great deep have ingress to, and egress from, my soul." * Never did man speak with more enthusiasm for truth, and with more of the love that is its due. We feel that Emerson is profoundly convinced, and that for him the revelation of truth is, as he himself elsewhere says, the highest event in nature. It is easy to collect from what precedes that the philosophical and religious movement of which Emerson is the embodiment, constitutes a genuine reaction against Calvinism. Independently of his startingpoint, almost all the principles of Emerson are the antitheses of those of the Puritans. While according to Calvin there is nothing but sin and forfeiture in humanity, Emerson sees in man the masterpiece of creation, a privileged being, summoned to the happiest destiny. Calvin divides men into two categories essentially distinct, the elect and the reprobate; the former incapable of sin, the latter carried away by every passing gust of sin; the former destined to eternal happiness, the latter, without the power of saving themselves, condemned throughout all eternity, and composing the immense majority. Emerson opens up the same career to all, and represents salvation * Essays, etc., by Emerson, pp. 177-179. |