ought of the loud, surprising
laugh with which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I do not
know that he records. Its meaning to Carlyle was evidently, "Oh! what
does it all matter?" If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote
the sentence about "a maiden so pure that she exchanged glances only
with the stars," his reader, I am sure, will.

Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this which was told him by a
bishop: There was a dispute in a vestry at Providence between two hot
church-members. One said at last, "I should like to know who you
are"--

"Who I am?" cried the other,--"who I am! I am a humble Christian, you
damned old heathen, you!"

The minister whom he heard say that "nobody enjoyed religion less than
ministers, as none enjoyed food so little as cooks," must have
provoked the broadest kind of a smile.

Although one of Emerson's central themes in his Journals was his
thought about God, or his feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded
in formulating his ideas on the subject and could not say what God is
or is not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know
that I _know_ next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising
frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but
that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."

A little later he wrote: "The government of God is not a plan--that
would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."

He quotes this from Plotinus: "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be
predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all
these."

It was a bold saying of his that "God builds his temple in the heart
on the ruins of churches and religion."

"A great deal of God in the universe," he says, "but not available to
us until we can make it up into a man."

But if asked, what makes it up into a man? why does it take this form?
he would have been hard put to it for an answer.

Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around
the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in
Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression
concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can
we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast
in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our
dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete
objects and forces. How much can it serve us