REMARKS AT THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze,The bald antiquity of China praise;—

I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze,

The bald antiquity of China praise;—

but later he learned to revere the wisdom of Asia. About the time when theDialappeared, many sentences of Chinese wisdom are found in his journal, and also in the magazine among the “Ethnical Scriptures.”

In the spring of 1867, a call for a public meeting was issued by Octavius B. Frothingham, William J. Potter and Rowland Connor “to consider the conditions, wants and progress of Free Religion in America.” The response was so large as to surprise the committee, and Horticultural Hall was completely filled on May 30. Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham presided. The committee had invited as speakers the Rev. H. Blanchard of Brooklyn from the Universalists, Lucretia Mott from the Society of Friends, Robert Dale Owen from the Spiritualists, the Rev. John Weiss from the Left Wing of the Unitarians, Oliver Johnson from the Progressive Friends, Francis E. Abbot, editor of theIndex; and also David A. Wasson, Colonel T. W. Higginson and Mr. Emerson. The meeting was very successful and the Free Religious Association was founded.

Mr. Emerson’s genial and affirmative attitude at this meeting was helpful and important. He wished the new movement to be neither aggressive towards the beliefs of others, nor merely a religion of works, purely beneficently utilitarian. Doubtless there were many young and active radicals strong for destructive criticism. Mr. Emerson wished to see that in their zeal to destroy the dry husk of religion they should not bruise the white flower within. His counsel to young men was, “Omit all negative propositions. It will save ninety-nine one hundredths of your labor, and increase the value of your work in the same measure.”

Page 479, note 1.In the journal of 1837 he said, “Why rake up old manuscripts to find therein a man’s soul? You do not look for conversation in a corpse.” And elsewhere, “In religion the sentiment is all, the ritual or ceremony indifferent.”

Page 486, note 1.Mrs. Julia Ward Howe writes of Mr. Emerson,—

“He knew from the first the victory of good over evil; and when he told me, to my childish amazement, that the angel must always be stronger than the demon, he gave utterance to a thought most familiar to him, though at the time new to me.”[L]

Page 488, note 1.In the essay on Character (Lectures and Biographical Sketches), he says, “The establishment of Christianity in the world does not rest on any miracle but the miracle of being the broadest and most humane doctrine.”

“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.”—“Address in Divinity College,”Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 490, note 1.Mr. Emerson’s doctrine was not to attack beliefs, but give better: “True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate.” In a letter to one of his best friends who had joined the Church of Rome he said, perhapsin 1858: “To old eyes how supremely unimportant the form under which we celebrate the justice, love and truth, the attributes of the deity and the soul!”

Page 491, note 1.Dr. Holmes, in his tribute to his friend, after his death, read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, said:—

“What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for, unclassified, half unwelcome newcomer, who had been for a while potted, as it were, in our Unitarian cold greenhouse, but had taken to growing so fast that he was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the hail-storms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.”

The Town of Concord, in the year 1782, chose a committee of ten leading citizens to give instructions to its selectmen. The third of the seventeen articles proposed by them read thus: “That care be taken of the Books of Marters and other bookes, and that they be kept from abusive usage, and not lent to persons more than one month at one time.” This indicates the root of a town library. A constitution of a Library Company, dated 1784, is extant. In 1806 a Social Library was incorporated, which was merged in the Town Library in 1851. The books were kept in a room in the Town House which was open for borrowers on Saturdays.

William Munroe, son of a Concord tradesman who vied with the Thoreaus in the manufacture of lead pencils, after leaving the Concord schools went into business, and later into the manufacture of silk. His intelligence and force of character secured prosperity. He loved Concord, and, to use his own words, “desired to testify my regard to my native town by doing something to promote the education and intelligence, and thus the welfare and prosperity of its people.” He gave to Concord a lot of land in the heart of the town and a building for a Free Public Library, which, with great care and thoroughness, he had built thereon and duly furnished; and made handsome provision for care of the land and the extension of the building later. He added a generous gift for books of reference and standard works. The town thankfully accepted the gift, placed their books in it, and chose their library committee. On a fine autumn day in 1873, the library was opened with public ceremonies. Mr. Munroe in a short and modest speech explained his purpose; Mr. H. F. Smith, on behalf of the new library committee, reported its action and the gifts which had poured in; Judge Hoar received the property on behalf of the Board of Corporation, and Mr. Emerson, but lately returned with improved health from his journey to the Nile, made the short address. Writing was now very difficult for him, but the occasion pleased and moved him, and his notes on books and on Concord, and the remembrance of his friends the Concord authors but lately gone, served him, and the day passed off well.

Page 498, note 1.The Gospel Covenant, printed in London in 1646, and quoted by Mr. Emerson in the “Historical Discourse.”

Page 499, note 1.Major Simon Willard, a Kentish merchantwas Peter Bulkeley’s strong coadjutor in the founding of Concord. He also is alluded to in the “Historical Discourse.”

Page 500, note 1.These extracts are from the diary of Miss Mary Moody Emerson.

Page 500, note 2.This letter was written not long after the death of John Thoreau, Henry’s dearly loved brother, and also of little Waldo Emerson, to whom he became greatly attached while he was a member of Mr. Emerson’s household.

Page 501, note 1.Mr. Emerson here speaks for others. He could not read Hawthorne because of the gloom of his magic mirror, but the man interested and attracted him, though even as neighbors they seldom met.

Page 506, note 1.Mr. Emerson notes that this is an allusion to the “Harmonies of Ptolemy.”

In 1863, during the dark days of the Civil War, before the tide had fully turned in the field, while disaffection showed itself in the North, and England and France threatened intervention, Mr. Emerson gave a hopeful lecture, the basis of the present discourse, on the Fortune of the Republic. After the war it was adapted to the new and happier conditions. On the 30th of March, 1878, six years after Mr. Emerson had withdrawn from literary work, and but four years before his death, he was induced to read the lecture in the Old South Church, in a course planned by the committee, to save the venerable building. The church was filled, Mr. Emerson’sdelivery was good, and he seemed to enjoy the occasion. It was probably his last speech in public, and so fitly closes the volume.

Page 513, note 1.This passage occurred in the early lecture:—

“It is the distinction of man to think, and all the few men who, since the beginning of the world, have done anything for us were men who did not follow the river, or ship the cotton, or pack the pork, but who thought for themselves. What the country wants is personalities,—grand persons,—to counteract its materialities, for it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man, corn.”

Page 519, note 1.Here followed: “What we call ‘Kentucky,’ or ‘Vallandigham,’ or ‘Fernando Wood’ is really the ignorance and nonsense in us, stolid stupidity which gives the strength to those names.... It is our own vice which takes form, or gives terror with which these persons affect us.”

Page 520, note 1.This refers to a young Massachusetts scholar, of promise and beauty, whom Mr. Emerson had been pleased with, as a fellow voyager. He soon was corrupted by politics. Coming up, at a reception, to shake hands with Mr. Emerson he was thus greeted: “If what I hear of your recent action be true, I must shake hands with you under protest.” Soon after, this aspirant for power attended the dinner given to Brooks after his cowardly assault on Sumner; but the moment the Emancipation Proclamation had been approved by the people, he became an ornamental figurehead at Republican and reform gatherings.

Page 520, note 2.From the last scene ofCynthia’s Revels, by Ben Jonson.

Page 521, note 1.“The one serious and formidable thing in Nature is a will.”—“Fate,”Conduct of Life, p. 30.

See also “Aristocracy,” inLectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 50.

Page 524, note 1.Ben Jonson,The Golden Age Restored.

Page 526, note 1.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh.“Nature,” II.,Poems.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh.

“Nature,” II.,Poems.

See also the “Song of Nature,” in thePoems.

Page 526, note 2.In the earlier lecture was this passage:—

“The roots of our success are in our poverty, our Calvinism, our thrifty habitual industry,—in our snow and east wind, and farm-life and sea-life....

“There is in this country this immense difference from Europe, that, whereas all their systems of government and society are historical, our politics are almost ideal. We wish to treat man as man, without regard to rank, wealth, race, color, or caste,—simply as human souls. We lie near to Nature, we are pensioners on Nature, draw on inexhaustible resources, and we interfere the least possible with individual freedom.”

Page 527, note 1.In the “Historical Discourse” in this volume, Mr. Emerson tells of the evolution of the town-meeting of New England and its working excellence, and of the latter also in “Social Aims” and “Eloquence,” inLetters and Social Aims.

Page 540, note 1.

For you can teach the lightning speech,And round the globe your voices reach.“Boston,”Poems.

For you can teach the lightning speech,And round the globe your voices reach.

For you can teach the lightning speech,

And round the globe your voices reach.

“Boston,”Poems.

Page 541, note 1.

I will divide my goods;Call in the wretch and slave:None shall rule but the humble,And none but Toil shall have.“Boston Hymn,”Poems.

I will divide my goods;Call in the wretch and slave:None shall rule but the humble,And none but Toil shall have.

I will divide my goods;

Call in the wretch and slave:

None shall rule but the humble,

And none but Toil shall have.

“Boston Hymn,”Poems.

Page 544, note 1.The following passages came from the earlier lecture:—

“I must be permitted to read a quotation from De Tocqueville, whose censure is more valuable, as it comes from one obviously very partial to the American character and institutions:—

“‘I know no country in which there is so little true independence of opinion and freedom of discussion as in America’ (vol. i., p. 259).”

“I am far from thinking it late. I don’t despond at all whilst I hear the verdicts of European juries against us—Renan says this; Arnold says that. That does not touch us.

“’Tis doubtful whether London, whether Paris can answer the questions which now rise in the human mind. But the humanity of all nations is now in the American Union. Europe, England is historical still. Our politics, our social frame are almost ideal. We have got suppled into a state of melioration. When I see the emigrants landing at New York, I say, There they go—to school.

“In estimating nations, potentiality must be considered as well as power; not what to-day’s actual performance is, but what promise is in the mind which a crisis will bring out.”

“The war has established a chronic hope, for a chronic despair. It is not a question whether we shall be a nation, oronly a multitude of people. No, that has been conspicuously decided already; but whether we shall be the new nation, guide and lawgiver of all nations, as having clearly chosen and firmly held the simplest and best rule of political society.

“Culture, be sure, is in some sort the very enemy of nationality and makes us citizens of the world; and yet it is essential that it should have the flavor of the soil in which it grew, and combine this with universal sympathies. Thus in this country are new traits and distinctions not known to former history. Colonies of an old country, but in new and commanding conditions. Colonies of a small and crowded island, but planted on a continent and therefore working it in small settlements, where each man must count for ten, and is put to his mettle to come up to the need....

“Pray leave these English to form their opinions. ’Tis a matter of absolute insignificance what those opinions are. They will fast enough run to change and retract them on their knees when they know who you are....

“I turn with pleasure to the good omen in the distinguished reception given in London to Mr. Beecher. It was already prepared by the advocacy of Cobden, Bright and Forster, Mill, Newman, Cairnes and Hughes, and by the intelligent Americans already sent to England by our Government to communicate with intelligent men in the English Government and out of it. But Mr. Beecher owed his welcome to himself. He fought his way to his reward. It is one of the memorable exhibitions of the force of eloquence,—his evening at Exeter Hall. The consciousness of power shown in his broad good sense, in his jocular humor and entire presence of mind, the surrender of the English audience on recognizing the true master. He steers the Behemoth, sits astride him, strokes his fur, tickles his ear, and rides where he will. And I likethe well-timed compliment there paid to our fellow citizen when the stormy audience reminds him to tell England that Wendell Phillips is the first orator of the world. One orator had a right to speak of the other,—Byron’s thunderstorm, where

“‘Jura answers from his misty shroudBack to the joyous Alps who call to him aloud.’

“‘Jura answers from his misty shroud

Back to the joyous Alps who call to him aloud.’

“The young men in America to-day take little thought of what men in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the welfare of a people,—which way does it look?If to any other people, it is not well with them. If occupied in its own affairs, and thoughts, and men, with a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other people,—as the Jews, as the Greeks, as the Persians, as the Romans, the Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times have done,—they are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction they are executing excellent work. Amidst the calamities that war has brought on our Country, this one benefit has accrued,—that our eyes are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward. We have come to feel that

“‘By ourselves our safety must be bought;’

to know the vast resources of the continent; the good will that is in the people; their conviction of the great moral advantages of freedom, social equality, education and religious culture, and their determination to hold these fast, and by these hold fast the Country, and penetrate every square inch of it with this American civilization....

“Americans—not girded by the iron belt of condition, not taught by society and institutions to magnify trifles, notvictims of technical logic, but docile to the logic of events; not, like English, worshippers of fate; with no hereditary upper house, but with legal, popular assemblies, which constitute a perpetual insurrection, and by making it perpetual save us from revolutions.”

FOOTNOTES[A]Mr. Emerson believed the “not” had been accidentally omitted, and it can hardly be questioned that he was right in his supposition.[B]Vol. ii., pp. 424-433.[C]The Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1885.[D]Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. i., pp. 260, 261.[E]Epistle of Paul to Philemon, i. 16, 17.[F]See the report of this speech in Redpath’sLife of Captain John Brown. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860.[G]“Review of Holmes’s Life of Emerson,”North American Review, February, 1885.[H]Richard Henry Dana; a Biography.By Charles Francis Adams. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890. In chapter viii. of this book is a very remarkable account of John Brown and his family at their home at North Elba in 1849, when Mr. Dana and a friend, lost in the Adirondac woods, chanced to come out upon the Brown clearing and were kindly received and aided.[I]While waiting for the services to begin, Mr. Sears wrote some verses. The following lines, which Mrs. Emerson saw him write, were a prophecy literally fulfilled within three years by the Union armies singing the John Brown song:—“But not a pit six feet by twoCan hold a man like thee;John Brown shall tramp the shaking earthFrom Blue Ridge to the sea.”[J]In the very interesting workThe Influence of Emerson, published in Boston in 1903, by the American Unitarian Association.[K]Seenote 3 to page 63of the “Historical Discourse.”[L]“Emerson’s Relation to Society,” inThe Genius and Character of Emerson, Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1885.

FOOTNOTES

[A]Mr. Emerson believed the “not” had been accidentally omitted, and it can hardly be questioned that he was right in his supposition.

[B]Vol. ii., pp. 424-433.

[C]The Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1885.

[D]Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. i., pp. 260, 261.

[E]Epistle of Paul to Philemon, i. 16, 17.

[F]See the report of this speech in Redpath’sLife of Captain John Brown. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860.

[G]“Review of Holmes’s Life of Emerson,”North American Review, February, 1885.

[H]Richard Henry Dana; a Biography.By Charles Francis Adams. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890. In chapter viii. of this book is a very remarkable account of John Brown and his family at their home at North Elba in 1849, when Mr. Dana and a friend, lost in the Adirondac woods, chanced to come out upon the Brown clearing and were kindly received and aided.

[I]While waiting for the services to begin, Mr. Sears wrote some verses. The following lines, which Mrs. Emerson saw him write, were a prophecy literally fulfilled within three years by the Union armies singing the John Brown song:—“But not a pit six feet by twoCan hold a man like thee;John Brown shall tramp the shaking earthFrom Blue Ridge to the sea.”

“But not a pit six feet by twoCan hold a man like thee;John Brown shall tramp the shaking earthFrom Blue Ridge to the sea.”

“But not a pit six feet by two

Can hold a man like thee;

John Brown shall tramp the shaking earth

From Blue Ridge to the sea.”

[J]In the very interesting workThe Influence of Emerson, published in Boston in 1903, by the American Unitarian Association.

[K]Seenote 3 to page 63of the “Historical Discourse.”

[L]“Emerson’s Relation to Society,” inThe Genius and Character of Emerson, Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1885.

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