Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among his pupils was Mr. John Holmes.  His impressions seem to be very much like those of Judge Abbott.

My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus:—­

“Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre.  Rather stern in his very infrequent rebukes.  Not inclined to win boys by a surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice.  Every inch a king in his dominion.  Looking back, he seems to me rather like a captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny, but not amused with its incongruities.  He once recommended the use of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items.”

In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the ministry.  He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled as one of its regular students.

The teachings of that day were such as would now be called “old-fashioned Unitarianism.”  But no creed can be held to be a finality.  From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of a canal to the ocean level.  It is impossible for human nature to remain permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism.  If the gates are not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to Arianism.  From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer, and the subsidence more rapid.  And from Unitarianism to Christian Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church.

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.