this jubilee of sublime emotion, ’I am Divine.  Through me God acts; through me, speaks.  Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’  But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages!  There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.  The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, ’This was Jehovah come down out of heaven.  I will kill you if you say he was a man.’  The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.  Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before.  He spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the character ascends.  But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster.  It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of historical Christianity.  It has exaggerated the personal, the positive, the ritual.  It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the Christian name.  It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us.  “To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.”  The preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies; they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and peculiarity.

Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of Christ is that the Moral Nature—­the Law of Laws—­is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in society.  “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.”—­“The soul is not preached.  The church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct.—­The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.  It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake.  The true Christianity—­a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of Man—­is lost.”

When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the “practical application,” some of his young hearers must have been startled at the style of his address.