• 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

There must have been a catching of the breath at the close of "Emerson's exquisite chant" (to quote O. B. Frothingham's phrase). Perhaps there was a long silence. We do not know. But we do know that when the audience dispersed, it was to divide into two groups which perhaps in the after-hour of that very evening began the controversy which raged for years. One group was composed predominantly of the older alumni of the school who within the next year formed an association to combat the heresies of the time, and more especially, says Chadwick, "to furnish counterblasts to such utterances as the graduating classes might invite." The older professors, of the college as well as of the school, sympathized with this group, more particularly the redoubtable Andrews Norton, who retired that night to his library to grumble over what he had heard, and to brood through the succeeding winter in darker gloom and outrage, until at last, on the invitation of the alumni organization, he delivered his famous lecture on "The Latest Form of Infidelity," which was his way of characterizing Emerson's address. "The latest form of infidelity," he said, "is distinguished by assuming the Christian name, while it strikes directly at the root of faith in Christianity, and indirectly of all religion, by denying the miracles attesting the divine mission of Christ. . . ." "Nothing is left," he continued, "that can be called Christianity if its miraculous character be denied. Its essence is gone; its evidence is annihilated. . . . There can be no intuition, no direct perception of the truth of Christianity, no metaphysical certainty. . . . No proof of Christ's divine commission could be afforded but through miraculous displays of God's power."

The second group which left the chapel was composed of younger men—the students of the school and recent graduates. Among these was Joseph H. Allen, nephew of Henry Ware, Jr., later distinguished as a church historian, who recorded that he "had listened with a vague but exhilarating delight" to Emerson's words. Theodore Parker's soul was mightily stirred within him, nor was there any vagueness in his delight over what he had heard. He walked back to Roxbury that night. It must have been late when he reached home, but he was too excited to go at once to bed. He had to turn to his Journal and pour out the thoughts which surged and beat upon his brain like waves upon the shore. "He surpassed himself," wrote the ardent young minister, himself only two years out of the Divinity School. "He surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in the general way. . . . So beautiful, so just, so true, and terribly sublime was his picture of the faults of the Church in its present position. My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the Church and the duties of these times." Thus, under the influence of the seer of Transcendentalism, did the soldier of the new faith gird up his loins for the battle of the spirit.