iety. "Men have come to speak
of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its
fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the
assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is
closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing
him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our
theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like
Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."

When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the
"practical application," some of his young hearers must have been
startled at the style of his address.

"Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it
first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that
you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the
immeasurable mind."

Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of
Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and
secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but
with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed
an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed
as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was
assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom
generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity,
rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same
divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with
whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words
carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the
spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must
have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses
they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one
having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"

Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its
doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ
of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly