• Preface
• 
  Emerson’s Address
• The Divinity School Address
• Moral Sentiment
• Religious Sentiment
• The Christian Church
• The First Defect: Jesus as God
• The Second Defect: Revelation has Ended
• True Christianity
• 
  The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address
• The Enduring Significance
• This Invitation Was Official
• A Whispering Campaign
• Thunder In The Air
• Miracles
• Dead God–Dead Preaching
• Infidelity In Christian Name!
• Ware Qualifies His Qualifications
• Channing’s Approval Was Silent
• Shackled Unitarianism
• A New Orthodoxy
• Man The Divine
• Clearing The Road To Mysticism
• Watering Our Neighbors’ Gardens
• Emerson’s Unrecorded Influence
• Emerson In Dilution
• Our Early Secular Thought
• Lincoln And Whitman
• No Final Word
• Our Times Await A Tougher Emerson

The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address

By John Haynes Holmes

This was the man, an ex-pastor after only three years, who was invited on this July day of 1838 to bid Godspeed to the graduates of the Divinity School on their entrance into the profession. There had been loud whispers, when Emerson left the Second Church and went to Europe, and then retired to Concord, that he was mentally deranged. A milder judgment was that of certain of his brother ministers that he had gone "Quakerish." Emerson had not helped matters any by publishing in 1836 his little book on "Nature," of which but five hundred copies were sold in twelve years, and few people, even trained critics and philosophers, could make any sense. In the next year his Phi Beta Kappa oration in August and his lectures on "Human Culture" in December had stirred enthusiastic approval in literary and social circles, but profound dissent in the religious world. It is at this time that Emerson, now fully aware of his heresies, seems to have reconciled himself definitely and finally to the abandonment of whatever expectation he may have had of continued contact with the Church. Yet here he was, only a year later, summoned to the seat of the oracle in the Delphic temple of Unitarian orthodoxy! What wonder that eager minds, like Theodore Parker, who trudged the country roads from West Roxbury on that July afternoon, to sit at the feet of the Concord prophet, were certain that it was to be a day of earthquake, wind, and fire, and that God would be in them all!