" "The poet
chanting was felt to be a divine man; henceforth the chant is divine
also. The writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled
the book is perfect. Colleges are built on it; books are written on
it.... Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant." This
is exactly what has happened to Protestantism, which substituted for
infallible Pope and Church an infallible Book; and this is precisely the
evil from which modern scholarship is delivering the world.
In religion Emerson was only a nineteenth-century non-conformist
instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. It was a fundamental
article in his creed that, although conformity is the virtue in most
request, "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." In the midst
of increasing luxury, and of that easygoing, unbelieving conformity
which is itself a form of luxury, Boston, the birthplace of Emerson, may
well remember with honor the generations of non-conformists who made
her, and created the intellectual and moral climate in which Emerson
grew up. Inevitably, to conformists and to persons who still accept
doctrines and opinions which he rejected, he seems presumptuous and
consequential. In recent days we have even seen the word "insolent"
applied to this quietest and most retiring of seers. But have not all
prophets and ethical teachers had something of this aspect to their
conservative contemporaries? We hardly expect the messages of prophets
to be welcome; they imply too much dissatisfaction with the present.
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