• 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

But there was no confining this stream to Unitarianism. It could not, and indeed should not, be captured in any well in any man's backyard, nor yet in a cistern for the storage of waters for the use of any single community. It must flow freely, like a coursing river that bathes a landscape and gives multitudes to drink. The influence of Emerson, in other words, spread far beyond the bounds of the sect in which he had been born and reared. It entered the whole body of Protestantism in America—first in New England, then in the Middle States and the Middle West, where Emerson lectured, more slowly in portions of the country where the prophet was not seen. "It is attested," writes Edwin D. Mead, in his "The Influence of Emerson,” “by the greater liberality in every church in the land that stands on the line of railroad."