By this method of positive statement he not only saved the time usually wasted in argument, attack, reply, rejoinder, but he gave us the substance of Truth, instead of its form. Logic and metaphysic reveal no truths; they merely arrange in order what the higher faculties of the mind have made known. Hence the speedy oblivion which descends on polemics of all sorts. The great theological debaters, where are they? The books of Horsley and McGee are buried in the same grave with those of Belsham and Priestley, their old opponents. The bitter attacks on Christianity by Voltaire and Paine are inurned in the same dark and forgotten vaults with the equally bitter defenses of Christianity by its numerous champions. Argument may often be necessary, but no truth is slain by argument; no error can be kept alive by it. Emerson is an eminent example of a man who never replied to attacks, but went on his way, and saw at last all opposition hushed, all hostility at an end. He devoted his powers to giving to his readers his insights, knowing that these alone feed the soul. Thus men came to him to be fed. His sheep heard his voice. Those who felt themselves better for his instruction followed him. He collected around him thus an ever-increasing band of disciples, until in England, in Germany, in all lands where men read and think, he is looked up to as a master. Many of these disciples were persons of rare gifts and powers, like Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Hawthorne. Many others were unknown to fame, yet deeply sensible of the blessings they had received from their prophet and seer of the nineteenth century. For this was his office. He was a man who saw. He had the vision and the faculty divine. He sat near the fountain-head, and tasted the waters of Helicon in their source. His first little book, a duodecimo of less than a hundred pages, called "Nature," published in 1836, indicates all these qualities. It begins thus:-- "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticisms. The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?... The sun shines to-day also.... Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable."