little
bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long
as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully
treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that.

Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of
Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical.

Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in
Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has
written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the
New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with
the following sentence:--

"Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one
of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole,
tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a
great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest
of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'"

"But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says
Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed
through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial
atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all
the churches equally.'"

What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity?
The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what
has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of
"fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same
Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him.
The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if
he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations
ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later
he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was
called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished
to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into
pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.

It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the
self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the
Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness
of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shir