“Yourself a new—­born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.  Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,—­are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,—­but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.”

Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of Christianity; first the Sabbath,—­hardly a Christian institution,—­and secondly the institution of preaching.  He spoke not only eloquently, but with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction.  He had sacrificed an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words.  But he was assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity, rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with whatever truth was in their messages.  He might be wrong, but his words carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the spirit of all truth was with him.  Some of his audience, at least, must have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, “he speaks ’as one having authority, and not as the Scribes.’”

Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged.  Its doctrines were repudiated in the “Christian Examiner,” the leading organ of the Unitarian denomination.  The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson’s discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of Christianity.  To this note Emerson returned the following answer:—­

“What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known opinions.  I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time, and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of dear friends and benefactors of mine.  Yet, as my conviction is perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse, and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence.  I would rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.  Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as it surely will, judge between us.  Either of us would, I doubt not, be willingly apprised of his error.  Meantime, I shall be admonished by this expression of your thought, to revise with