The present generation of scholars and ministers has been passing through an important crisis in regard to the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity.  All the features of the contest over “the higher criticism” are foretold by Emerson in “The American Scholar.”  “The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man; henceforth the chant is divine also.  The writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled the book is perfect.  Colleges are built on it; books are written on it....  Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant.”  This is exactly what has happened to Protestantism, which substituted for infallible Pope and Church an infallible Book; and this is precisely the evil from which modern scholarship is delivering the world.

In religion Emerson was only a nineteenth-century non-conformist instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one.  It was a fundamental article in his creed that, although conformity is the virtue in most request, “Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.”  In the midst of increasing luxury, and of that easygoing, unbelieving conformity which is itself a form of luxury, Boston, the birthplace of Emerson, may well remember with honor the generations of non-conformists who made her, and created the intellectual and moral climate in which Emerson grew up.  Inevitably, to conformists and to persons who still accept doctrines and opinions which he rejected, he seems presumptuous and consequential.  In recent days we have even seen the word “insolent” applied to this quietest and most retiring of seers.  But have not all prophets and ethical teachers had something of this aspect to their conservative contemporaries?  We hardly expect the messages of prophets to be welcome; they imply too much dissatisfaction with the present.

The essence of Emerson’s teaching concerning man’s nature is compressed into the famous verse:—­

  “So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
    So near is God to man,
  When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
    The youth replies, I can.”

The cynic or the fall-of-man theologian replies—­Grandeur indeed, say rather squalor and shame.  To this ancient pessimism Emerson makes answer with a hard question—­“We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean?” To this question no straight answer has been found, the common answer running in a circle.  It is hard indeed to conceive of a measure which will measure depths but not heights; and besides, every measure implies a standard.

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I have endeavored to set before you some of the practical results of Emerson’s visions and intuitions, because, though quite unfit to expound his philosophical views, I am capable of appreciating some of the many instances in which his words have come true in the practical experience of my own generation.  My own work has been a contribution to the prosaic, concrete work of building, brick by brick, the new walls of