“Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,—­cela porte malheur.”

(Don’t let us abuse Nicolas,—­it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him, and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy, sprinkled him with rose-water.  His position in our Puritan New England was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland.  The dour Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven’s gate, until he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and find his perch on “the big ha’ bible,” if he would,—­and as he did.  So did the music of Emerson’s words and life steal into the hearts of our stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers.  When a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs as in former generations.  We do, however, wish to know what are the convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep and anxious and devout religious scepticism.

It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his ideas about the Deity.  He begged for a day to consider the question, but when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the end of these, four days.  In short, the more he thought about it, the more he found himself perplexed.

The name most frequently applied to Emerson’s form of belief is Pantheism.  How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief in the omnipresence of the Deity?

Theodore Parker explained Emerson’s position, as he understood it, in an article in the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review.”  I borrow this quotation from Mr. Cooke:—­

“He has an absolute confidence in God.  He has been foolishly accused of Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it.  He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates at Andover or Cambridge.”

We read in his Essay, “Self-Reliance “:  “This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.  Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms.”