• 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

For Emerson believed in the soul as the fount of all knowledge and the source of all wisdom. There was no inspiration apart from the soul, no revelation not read upon its living pages. And by the soul Emerson meant not merely the saints and seers embalmed in tradition and sanctified by faith. He meant the new-born soul, alive today upon this earth, instinct with the divine mystery of the Whole. This soul is as near to God, Emerson contended, as any savior of an ancient day. It may find God and reveal God as truly as Jesus found and revealed him in his time, and for our time more immediately and truly. The soul must ever begin over again the work of religion. It must write its own Bible, conceive its own Savior, build its own Church, and enact its own laws. For the soul is God, or at least is in God as a part of his divine reality. Emerson was never very clear, perhaps, as to where God ended and the soul began. There was reason for the dreadful charge—if it was so dreadful!—that Emerson was a pantheist He was no theologian of the Aquinas, or even the Pauline, type. He simply saw in man the divinest thing in the world. God was undoubtedly more than man—the oversoul that brooded upon the race as the firmament of heaven upon the sea! But it is in man, as in nature also, that we find God, and can commune with God. Religion therefore is no ancient thing of mysterious origin and miraculous validity. It is nothing old, or traditional, or handed down—a relic to be attested by musty documents and questionable records. Like each new summer in the earth, religion is born anew in each new soul, as fresh as the morning, as lovely as the rose, as authoritative as a sunset or a mountain. Why look elsewhere for what is in ourselves? Bibles, saviors, holy lands and sacred altars, these are all superstitions and myths, the impedimenta of decaying Churches and dying faiths. If religion is to survive, it must be born again today, within ourselves. For we are the custodians of the spirit, and all the witnesses God has.