Dr. W. H. Furness writes of Emerson: “We were babies and schoolfellows together. I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ plays.... I can as little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance.” Indeed, “orating” was in Emerson’s blood. Nearly all his known ancestors and relatives seem to have been “ministers” of some denomination or other. His school-days--though he never became a scholar in any department of learning--began before he was three years old. His father complains of the baby of two years and odd months--“Ralph does not read very well yet”; and during all the rest of his youth Dr. Furness says that he grew up under “the pressure of I know not how many literary atmospheres.” Add to this the fact that his father and mother and his aunt--who was the chief guide of his nonage--were persons who seemed to think that love could only be manifested by severe duty, and rarely showed him any signs of the weaknesses of “affection,” and we have as bad a bringing-up for a moral, philosophical, and religious teacher as could well have been devised. “The natural first, and afterwards the spiritual.” Where innocent joy and personal affection have not been main factors of early experience the whole life wants the key to Christianity; and a rejection of all faith--except that in “genius,” “over-soul,” “a somewhat which makes for righteousness,” or some other such impotent abstraction--is, in our day, almost inevitable in a mind of constitutional sincerity like Emerson’s, especially when such sincerity is unaccompanied, as it was in him, by a warm and passionate nature and its intellectual correlative, a vigorous conscience. Emerson, though a good man--that is, one who lived up to his lights--had little or no conscience. He admired good, but did not love it; he denounced evil, but did not hate it, and did not even maintain that it was hateful, but only greatly inexpedient. Though Emerson could not see that a religion of which there is nothing left but an “over-soul” is much the same thing as a man of whom there is nothing left but his hat, the religious bodies to which he was for many years more or less attached were less devoid of humour, and the joke of a faith without a dogma became, in time, too much for their seriousness. Consequently they agreed amicably to part, and Emerson pursued his course; that which had hitherto been called “preaching” becoming thenceforward lecturing and “orating.”