on the Latest Form of Infidelity, said:  “Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its miraculous character be denied. . . .  There can be no intuition, no direct perception, of the truth of Christianity.”  And in a pamphlet supporting the same side of the question he added:  “It is not an intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our own immortality, . . . or of any other fact of religion.”  Ripley and Parker replied in Emerson’s defense; but Emerson himself would never be drawn into controversy.  He said that he could not argue.  He announced truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the disputant.  In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and descended from eight generations of clergymen, had resigned the pastorate of the Second Church of Boston because he could not conscientiously administer the sacrament of the communion—­which he regarded as a mere act of commemoration—­in the sense in which it was understood by his parishioners.  Thenceforth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of “lay preacher,” he never assumed the pastorate of a church.  The representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes.  Parker was a man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal following.  The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after him, “Parkerites.”  Many of the Unitarian churches refused to “fellowship” with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a “boisterous assembly” which came to hear Parker preach irreligion.

It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism.  The impulse came from Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated German thought in England.  In Channing’s Remarks on a National Literature, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on British literature.  And in fact German literature began, not long after, to be eagerly studied in New England.  Emerson published an American edition of Carlyle’s Miscellanies, including his essays on German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830.  In 1838 Ripley began to publish Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, which extended to fourteen volumes.  In his work of translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected, he was helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had more or less connection with the transcendental movement.