Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lecturesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Philosophy of nature; Transcendentalism (New England)
And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched
fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The
question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project
and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith
makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to
contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the
French to the goddess of Reason,--to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and
ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new
life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once
you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The
remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and
evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can
uplift and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us;
first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns
welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of
toil, and into prison-cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile,
the dignity of spiritual being. Let us stand forevermore, a temple,
which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its
first splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of
preaching,--the speech of man to men,--essentially the most flexible of
all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits,
in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men
or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life
and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men
with new hope and new revelation?
I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls
of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their
lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew
and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of
life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary;
are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new
Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see
them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall
see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of
the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the
Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.
LITERARY ETHICS.
AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE,
JULY 24, 1838.
ORATION.
GENTLEMEN,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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