• 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

I have been trying to find out, with some precision and on the basis of an authority which I can not claim, the nature of this wider Emersonian influence, and how it proceeded. I have in recent weeks been consulting book after book on religion in this country, history after history of American Christianity, but with no satisfactory results. Emerson is, of course, always mentioned in these works, but is invariably pocketed with the Unitarian group of preachers on the one hand and the Transcendental group of philosophers on the other, as though there were no contact between these groups and the larger Protestant world. It is never suggested that in the Divinity School Address was born a spirit of life destined to quicken and transform the whole character of religious thought upon this continent. Yet it is impossible to explain this thought, as it developed through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, without seeing Emerson at its heart. Horace Bushnell was technically no Transcendentalist but as the leaves of a budding tree feed on the atmosphere of a fresh spring morning, so Bushnell's doctrines drank in their substance from the Emersonian teachings. Henry Ward Beecher was separated in thought and spirit from his father, Lyman, by the span of what seems to be not a generation but an eon, and nothing leaps that span but the rainbow bridge of Emerson's celestial spirit. Phillips Brooks, brought up in a Boston seething with the Emerson and Parker ferment, "never showed signs that he was led their way," says Bishop Lawrence in his biography of his great predecessor. But the spirit of Brooks, the immediacy of his experience of God, and his exaltation of the life of man as even now divine, were unconsciously, if not consciously, the fruit sprung from seed scattered on every wind by Emerson. I find it significant that, in the one college which was their Alma Mater, of which they were for years twin luminaries, there should stand on one side of the yard Brooks House, and on the other side Emerson Hall, as abiding symbols of the kinship of these two radiant souls.