When we come to his interpretation of historical Christianity, we find that in his view the life and works of Jesus fell entirely within the field of human experience.  He sees in the deification of Jesus an evidence of lack of faith in the infinitude of the individual human soul.  He sees in every gleam of human virtue not only the presence of God, but some atom of His nature.  As a preacher he had no tone of authority.  A true non-conformist himself, he had no desire to impose his views on anybody.  Religious truth, like all other truth, was to his thought an unrolling picture, not a deposit made once for all in some sacred vessel.  When people who were sure they had drained that vessel, and assimilated its contents, attacked him, he was irresponsive or impassive, and yielded to them no juicy thought; so they pronounced him dry or empty.  Yet all of Emerson’s religious teaching led straight to God,—­not to a withdrawn creator, or anthropomorphic judge or king, but to the all-informing, all-sustaining soul of the universe.

It was a prophetic quality of Emerson’s religious teaching that he sought to obliterate the distinction between secular and sacred.  For him all things were sacred, just as the universe was religious.  We see an interesting fruition of Emerson’s sowing in the nature of the means of influence, which organized churches and devout people have, in these later days, been compelled to resort to.  Thus the Catholic Church keeps its hold on its natural constituency quite as much by schools, gymnasiums, hospitals, entertainments, and social parades as it does by its rites and sacraments.  The Protestant Churches maintain in city slums “settlements,” which use the secular rather than the so-called sacred methods.  The fight against drunkenness, and the sexual vice and crimes of violence which follow in its train, is most successfully maintained by eliminating its physical causes and providing mechanical and social protections.

For Emerson inspiration meant not the rare conveyance of supernatural power to an individual, but the constant incoming into each man of the “divine soul which also inspires all men.”  He believed in the worth of the present hour:—­

  “Future or Past no richer secret folds,
  O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds.”

He believed that the spiritual force of human character imaged the divine:—­

  “The sun set, but set not his hope: 
  Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: 
  Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
  Deeper and older seemed his eye.”

Yet man is not an order of nature, but a stupendous antagonism, because he chooses and acts in his soul.  “So far as a man thinks, he is free.”  It is interesting to-day, after all the long discussion of the doctrine of evolution, to see how the much earlier conceptions of Emerson match the thoughts of the latest exponents of the philosophic results of evolution.