Emerson has thus been to our day the prophet of God in the soul, in nature, in life. He has stood for spirit against matter. Darwin, his great peer, the serene master in the school of science, was like him in this,--that he also said what he saw and no more. He also taught what God showed to him in the outward world of sense, as Emerson what God showed in the inward world of spirit. Amid the stormy disputes of their time, each of these men went his own way, his eye single and his whole body full of light. The work of Darwin was the easier, for he floated with the current of the time, which sets at present so strongly toward the study of things seen and temporal. But the work of Emerson was more noble, for he stands for things unseen and eternal,--for a larger religion, a higher faith, a nobler worship. This strong and tender soul has done its work and gone on its way. But he will always fill a niche of the universal Church as a New England prophet. He had the purity of the New England air in his moral nature, a touch of the shrewd Yankee wit in his speech, and the long inheritance of ancestral faith incarnate and consolidated in blood and brain. But to this were added qualities which were derived from some far-off realm of human life: an Oriental cast of thought, a touch of mediæval mysticism, and a vocabulary brought from books unknown to our New England literature. No commonplaces of language are to be found in his writings, and though he read the older writers, he does not imitate them. He, also, like his humble-bee, has gathered contributions from remotest fields, and enriched our language with a new and picturesque speech all his own. Let us, then, be grateful for this best of God's gifts,--another soul sent to us filled with divine light. Thus we learn anew how full are nature and life of God:-- "Ever fresh the broad creation, A divine improvisation; From the heart of God proceeds A single will, a million deeds." One word concerning Mr. Emerson's relation to Christ and to Christianity. The distinction which he made between Jesus and other teachers was, no doubt, one of degree and not one of kind. He put no great gulf of supernatural powers, origin, or office between Christ and the ethnic prophets. But his reverence for Jesus was profound and tender. Nor did he object to the word "Christian" or to the Christian Church. In recent years, at least, he not unfrequently attended the services of the Unitarian Church in his town, and I have met him at Unitarian conventions, a benign and revered presence. In the cemetery at Bonn, on the Rhine, is the tomb of Niebuhr, the historian, a man of somewhat like type, as I judge, to our Emerson. At least, some texts on his monument would be admirably appropriate for any stone which may be placed over the remains of the American prophet and poet in the sweet valley of tombs in Concord. One of these texts was from Sirach xlvii. 14, 17: