• 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

It would be interesting to trace the course of Emerson's thought as it penetrated and interpenetrated the life of America. But one can no more do this than one can follow the reverberations of a voice as it speaks into the air. We know that this thought became a living influence in the career of Lincoln. There is documentary evidence that the Transcendental idea reached the mind of the Illinois lawyer through the sermons and speeches of Theodore Parker. But was there not a more direct contact? What lies behind the statement of William E. Barton, in his biography of Lincoln, that "Springfield (Illinois) was not without intellectual stimulus . . . . It was the period of the Lyceum lecture . . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson used to lecture in Springfield on his western trips"? Is it not certain that Lincoln heard Emerson, and drank in the flow of his spirit? More direct and evident is the influence of Emerson on Walt Whitman, the poet laureate of our democracy. It was no accident that Emerson hailed the first edition of the "Leaves of Grass," wherein he saw the lineaments of his own inner countenance. How could one miss the

Emersonian undertones and overtones in the raptures of this rude but inspired bard?

You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun,

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your Self.

The inspiration of such passages is unmistakable. The inspiration of the American idealism which they express is similarly unmistakable. Emerson is the oracle! He taught us of ourselves, explained ourselves—revealed the secret of our life we had not known. When the young man stood that July night in the Divinity School Chapel, he was addressing a small group of theologians, young and old; but his voice reached to multitudes who caught its echoes, and recognized its music as the song of their own hearts.