• 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

The far-flung influence of Emerson through the whole body of American religious thought is greater far than any historian has shown. Here is a thesis subject for some ambitious and not unimaginative candidate for the Ph. D. degree! It is best indicated, perhaps, by the overflow of this influence into certain cults and creeds, apart from the main line of the traditional Christian movement, which constitute perhaps the characteristic contribution of America to the modern religious world. It is as though the established Churches, like parched and long-dried soil, had been unable to absorb quickly enough the spreading tides of the Emersonian spirit, and thus had allowed these precious waters to escape into untrodden areas of life. These cults, of which I speak, are frequently superficial, even illiterate, and invariably sentimental. They represent a dilution of the Transcendental ideal which would shock the profound Bronson Alcott if not the more placid Emerson himself. But the pure essence of Emerson, however much diluted, even tainted, is in these movements, and, in an age when so many of our churches, both liberal and orthodox, are empty, it is something to think about to see multitudes of men and women sweeping into Christian Science, New Thought, Unity, and other crowded shrines, and there finding what is to them the water of life. I cannot believe that these cults would ever have appeared, had the Protestant Churches transmitted adequately in light and power the enormous spiritual energy generated by Emerson in the Concord study and the Divinity School Chapel.

But Emerson was not merely a religious influence either in Unitarianism or in the wider ranges of Christianity. He was an American influence in the secular as well as in the sacred sense of that word. By this I mean that Emerson was the first teacher to reveal America to herself by disclosing the soul of that democracy which is her life.