• 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

Of one episode of that memorable 15th of July in the Divinity Chapel we have a detailed account. After the address, probably in the chapel while the audience was dispersing, Dr. Henry Ware, Jr., had a little talk with Emerson, in which he said that he would probably assent to his unqualified statements, if he could take his own qualifications with them. The next day, troubled lest he be misunderstood, Dr. Ware wrote a letter to        in which he explained that his endorsement, even in its qualified form, applied "only to a portion and not to all" the address. With regard to some of the statements, he said, "they appear to me more than doubtful, their prevalence would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of Christianity. On this account, I look with anxiety and no little sorrow to the course which your mind has been taking." To this letter Emerson replied under date of July 28, thanking Dr. Ware for his "truth and charity," but reiterating his opinions. "As my conviction is perfect, in the substantial truth of the doctrine of this discourse," he wrote, "you will see . . . . that it must appear to me very important that it be spoken; and I thought I would not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my opposition to their supposed views out of fear of offense." What troubled Dr. Ware was Emerson's attack on the supernatural elements of Christianity, more particularly what he regarded as his depersonalizaton of God. In a sermon preached in the Divinity Chapel in the early part of the term following the delivery of Emerson's discourse, Dr. Ware spoke on "The Personality of the Deity," and joined sharp issue with his younger colleague. He was convinced that men were "suffering from want of sufficiently realizing the fact of the Divine Person," and it was this very fact which Emerson had either ignored or denied.