Ware, Jr., a sermon in the college chapel on the
personality of God, which he sent with a friendly note to Mr. Emerson.
The gay and Skimpolesque reply of the sage is an illustration of that
flippancy with which he chose to toy in a literary way with momentous
questions, and which was so exasperating to the earnest men of positive
religious convictions with whom he had been associated in the Christian
ministry.

"It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge
should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have
always been, from my incapacity of methodical writing, 'a
chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail, lucky
when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near
enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the
notice of masters of literature and religion.... I could not
possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you so cruelly hint
at on which any doctrine of mine stands, for I do not know
what arguments mean in reference to any expression of thought.
I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I
dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal
men. I do not even see that either of these questions admits
of an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my
affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance
of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed
duties of such a personage who is to make good his thesis
against all comers. I certainly shall do no such thing."

The issue was joined and the controversy began. Professor Andrews Norton
in a pamphlet denounced "the latest form of infidelity," and the Rev.
George Ripley replied in a volume, to which Professor Norton issued a
rejoinder. But there was not substance enough of religious dogma and
sentiment in the transcendentalist philosophers to give them any
permanent standing in the church. They went into various walks of
secular literature, and have powerfully influenced the course of
opinions; but they came to be no longer recognizable as a religious or
theological party.

Among the minor combatants in the conflict between the Unitarians and
the pantheists was a young man whose name was destined to become
conspicuous, not within the Unitarian fellowship, but on the outskirts
of it. Theodore Parker was a man of a different type from the men about
him of either