• 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 contention immediately precipitated in the Unitarian world is all the proof we need of the momentous significance for Unitarians of what Emerson had said. It must be remembered that the Unitarians of a hundred years ago had never really extricated themselves from the trammels of New England orthodoxy. The authority of the reason, which they had learned to trust as an "ultimate reliance" beyond that of the Bible or the creeds, had dictated a rejection of the doctrine of the trinity on grounds of irrationality. An ethical sensibility more potent than theological dogma had led to the repudiation of such fundamentally immoral ideas as the fall of man, the sinfulness of human nature, and eternal punishment in hell. The sensuous philosophy of John Locke, which discarded the doctrine of innate ideas and its kindred beliefs, had laid the foundation of a new interpretation of man in terms of his original innocence instead of his original sin. Unitarians as a group belonged to the school of Locke, and out of his teachings, as touched by their own spiritual sentiments, wrought their great ideas of the dignity of human nature and the divinity of the soul. But this was a process of rationalization rather than of insight, least of all of inspiration. Jonathan Edwards in his mystical writings was nearer the heart of spiritual reality, in spite of his bad theology, than the freest of the later Unitarian leaders whose knowledge and cool reason tempered but did not break with the essentials of the Christian argument. The idea of revelation, in other words, however much corrected and moralized by reason, still remained for Unitarians the basis of faith.