“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 shirt-sleeves will surely claim.  Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:—­

“Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from the dead, to swell their number.”

The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson’s writings and life is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and critics.  The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by three considerable Memoirs.  Mr. George Willis Cooke’s elaborate work is remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson’s teachings.  Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Emerson at Home and Abroad” is a lively picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him.  Mr. Alexander Ireland’s “Biographical Sketch” brings together, from a great variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of Emerson’s history and the comments of those whose opinions were best worth reproducing.  I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.