• 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

By John Haynes Holmes, D.D. Minister of the Community Church, New York, N. Y.
DELIVERED AS THE WARE LECTURE ON MAY 25, 1938, IN COMMEMORATION OF THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS MEMORABLE ADDRESS. THE WARE LECTURES WERE ESTABLISHED IN HONOR OF THE DISTINGUISHED SERVICES OF THREE GENERATIONS OF THE WARE FAMILY TO THE CAUSE OF PURE CHRISTIANITY.
No. 349 Published for Free Distribution, Publications Department, American Unitarian Association, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts

Harvard Divinity Hall

It had been a beautiful summer that year of 1838. The spring had come early, and given a strong start to all the verdure of New England, so rich when the sun is warm and the rains are plentiful. The sun this season had been warm, even on occasion to torrid heat; but the blazing days had been interspersed with rains which had kept the fields fresh and verdant. The wide meadowlands up beyond Cambridge and into Lexington and Concord had never seemed so green, nor so "spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers." The air had been full of birds since April, and now was sweet with the breath of the new hay, mingled with the balm of the ancient pines. The nights were cool, like a bath in the river after the heat of the day, and the stars were preparing their full glory for the skies of August. This was July, the very heart of the waxing summer, and "the mystery of nature was never displayed more happily."

At the Divinity School in Cambridge the prospect was lovely beyond compare. The Hall, where the students lived, was in the open fields, some distance from the college, which was hidden away behind the great elms which lined the streets and crowded the yard. On the knoll beyond, lost in a clump of trees, was the dignified home of Professor Andrews Norton, now retired. It was as quiet here as in the farming districts out in the country, and students, like Theodore Parker a few years before, who had come from the farms, must have felt at home. Some of them, not yet taught to find God in nature as well as in the parchment scriptures of an ancient time, were probably oblivious of the beauties of the outer scene, even in midsummer—like St. Bernard who had traveled all day along the shores of Geneva, and when asked about the lake, looked up and inquired, "What lake?" But in this month of July, 1838, it is a fair guess that all the students were oblivious, at least indifferent, for they were thinking of other things. On the 15th the seniors were to graduate, and they had asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, of Concord, to give the address of the occasion. This promised excitement. Emerson, young as he was, had a reputation, and his utterance might be as notable, and upsetting, as his Phi Beta Kappa oration at the college the year before. What wonder that the students, especially the graduates, did not ponder much upon the sky outside Divinity Hall, but rather upon the chapel inside where Emerson was to speak!