• 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 comment brought interesting rejoinder from William Ellery Channing. The great man did not take part in the public controversy which raged between the old and the new Unitarianism. He did not even record in any private letters or papers his reaction upon the Divinity School address. In all probability we would not know what he was thinking, had it not been for the merciless Miss Elizabeth Peabody who, in these last years of Channing's life, plied him so assiduously with questions, and preserved so carefully his slightest statement. Thus we find in Miss Peabody's memoranda the report that she had asked him about Emerson's utterance, and that Channing had replied that he "found himself in essential agreement with the address, but deprecated its indifference to miracles and other facts of the New Testament narration." He went on to say that he thought Henry Ware was fighting a shadow when contending against Emerson's denial of the personality of God. He found personality in the address! Then came a statement characteristic of Channing, who cherished a certain sense of propriety and caution along with his superb courage—who was alienated all his life from the Abolitionists because their fierce and inconsiderate utterances, in all times and places, offended even his forthright antislavery sentiments. He thought, wrote Miss Peabody in her notes, that, considering on what basis the Divinity School was founded, Mr. Emerson would have been more courteous if he had given the address elsewhere!

Whether courteous or not, the Divinity School Address became the sensation of the hour, and remains to this day the most important religious utterance in the history of the American people. Designed as a study of preaching for preachers, it was too profound in spiritual insight, too vast in ways of thought and vision, to be held within the confines of homiletics, and thus now ranks with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Washington's Farewell Address, Webster's Reply to Hayne, Lincoln's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses, Woodrow Wilson's "Peace Without Victory" Speech, as among the great documents of our nation's life—an important chapter of the literature which this country has contributed to mankind. Its beauty alone would guarantee its immortality. There are sentences, indeed whole passages, as noble as Plato, as familiar as Shakespeare, which have long since become a permanent part of the language of our race. But more important than the style is the content. The Divinity School Address completed spiritually and intellectually what the Declaration of Independence had begun politically. It liberated a people inwardly as they had already been liberated outwardly. For Unitarians in particular, for Christians in general, for Americans as a whole, it marked the end of a period of gestation, and thus the birth of a new consciousness of thought and life.