• 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 was interesting that Emerson should have been asked by the members of the senior class to come back to the school, from which he had graduated nine years before, to give them instruction and inspiration as they prepared to enter the service of the Church. This was not the first time that he had returned, for at least on one occasion he had come at the boys' suggestion to talk with them informally about their problems. But this was an official invitation, and Emerson was no longer in official life. For he had resigned his pulpit in the Second Church in Boston in 1832, and in due course had left the ministry. The circumstances of his action were amazing, and forecast, as was later discovered, the whole Transcendental controversy in which Emerson was so prominent. They centered, as it happened, on the problem of the communion service, though they might as well have centered, as James Elliot Cabot points out in his biography of Emerson, on the matter of "voluntary prayer as a regular part of congregational worship." The young preacher had difficulty in conforming to the usages of public prayer. "The truth is," he wrote in his Journal, while still at the Divinity School, "public prayer is rather the offspring of our notions of what ought to be than of what is." He thought that he should not offer prayer unless he felt like it—i.e., was moved by genuine inspiration on behalf of the needs of himself and of his people. He conformed to the practice as best he could, though he states that "he sometimes found himself led to say what he did not mean," and on occasion, to the surprise of the congregation, dropped the prayer from the service altogether. But there was "less of rigid form" in the Unitarian attitude toward prayer, as Mr. Cabot makes clear, and the vagaries of the minister in this matter caused no trouble. It was different, however, with the communion service. This Emerson found himself unable to regard as a sacrament established by Christ, and in his name by the Church. He was ready to conduct the service, provided the use of the elements was dropped, and the rite made one merely of commemoration. But this adjustment was unsatisfactory to the people, who felt that they had no right to tinker with the solemn ceremonial of the ages. So, with perfect good temper and deep regret on both sides, Emerson preached his famous sermon on the communion and resigned his charge. "The difference of views," writes Cabot in his biography, "was only the symptom of a deeper difference, which would in any case sooner or later have made it impossible for him to retain his office; a disagreement not so much about particular doctrines or observances as about their sanction, the authority on which all doctrines and observances rest."