• 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

By now the meeting was disturbed, the early unity of the audience broken. The older men were beginning to fear the worst, as the younger men to anticipate the best. What was thus far, however, only a rift, became suddenly a yawning chasm. "Jesus Christ," said the speaker, "belonged to the true race of the prophets. . . . Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. . . . But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer. . . . Christianity became a mythus. . . . He spoke of miracles." But man's life is the miracle, and "all that man doth." We mistake this word, Miracle. "As pronounced by Christian churches, (it) gives a false impression, it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." Emerson was here touching a sensitive point. The question of miracles was in controversy. Channing believed in miracles—they were still in the tradition of a liberalism which had broken away twenty years before on the issue of the Trinity, the fall of man, and the atonement. But the younger generation were raising doubts—heresy was in the air. If the miracles were not miracles, not supernatural achievements but natural phenomena, what became of the person of Jesus and its divinity?

Emerson left his audience in the chapel in no doubt. In the full tide, now, of his prophetic utterance, he swept on to his sensational proclamation of the two defects of historical Christianity—to the one body of which, let it be remembered, the Unitarianism of that day, as of a later day also, insisted that it belonged. The first defect was its "exaggeration of the personal. . . . It has dwelt with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus." But "the soul knows no persons." Every man may "expand to the full circle of the universe," and, like Jesus, become one with God. The Nazarene was not unique. There is no reason why we should subordinate our natures to his. Jesus may provoke us, stir us, inspire us, but only to the realization within ourselves of his spirit. Then Emerson named the miracles again, and now made a direct assault by saying that "to aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." So the miracles were not only unnecessary—they were in the way. They interfered with the fulfillment of true religion, which is not a "sanctity" wrought by some divine Savior, but "a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow."