There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches.  If De Tocqueville’s account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached acceptably in some of our pulpits.  In fact, the good Vicar might have been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians.

At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University at Cambridge.  President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature, followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office.  James Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in Boston.  I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches.  A Cambridge graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose by higher motives.  It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which their light could shine before men.

Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher.  It is hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned professions.  His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways.  His brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the profession of Law.  It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less exercised with the same questionings.  He has said, speaking of his instructors:  “If they had examined me, they probably would not have let me preach at all.”  His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which accounted for his being excused from examination.  In 1826, after three years’ study, he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers.  His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida.  During this absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places.  On his return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in Concord, and in Boston.  His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a settled Minister in Boston.