country which is travelling at lightning speed along paths he never trod-yet historically it is certain that from 1837 onwards Emerson spoke in many

ear as did hardly any other man; that he was what Carlyle in 1841 pronounced him to be, a new era in his country's history, and that thousands of readers in both the Old World and the New never forgot to their dying day, the very place and year when first their souls vibrated to the strange charm, the infinite courage, the inbred composure, the spiritual independence of this New Englander.

I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Cæsar's hand, and Plato's brain,

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

It is five-and-thirty years since I first read these lines with a shiver of excitement.

Carlyle's famous essay on "The Signs of the Times" appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1829, the first, and not the least moving sermon preached to a wicked and adulterous generation by the most tempestuous of all its preachers. It is still worth while to take down from a dusty shelf No. 98 of the "Blue and Buff," and there to recognise amidst the deadest of all dead things, dead notices of dead books by dead authors, the fiery vocables, still glowing like live embers, of the future author of Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution.

Two years later in the same organ of respectable Whig opinion, Carlyle's second Sermon to Infidels entitled "Characteristics" made its appearance, greatly to the annoyance of the regular subscriber,

but carrying the strangest sense of impending movement and change of mental posture to many a hitherto solitary thinker. Newman, we know, read it with amazement, wondering, so akin was it to much of his own thought, from whence it proceeded, and wondering also, as well he might, whither it tended. Emerson read both "Signs of the Times" and "Characteristics" with that uplifting of the heart that proclaims an epoch.

Between the environments of these two men as yet unknown to one another-Emerson and Carlyle-how great a difference!

It is always difficult to estimate the force of religion in any community. It may easily be exaggerated. It may easily be overlooked." In Catholic Spain, in Presbyterian Scotland, in Calvinistic New England there could never have been any doubt as to what were the dominant, I will not say domineering, religious views of the community-but Human Nature (of this we may be sure), never failed to assert itself in Madrid, Edinburgh, and Boston; and Human Nature is never sectarian. Secular characters abound everywhere. Cheerfulness, worldliness, nay even Pagan indifference, break out at all times and in all places. Franklin's Autobiography is a more truly national document than Jonathan Edward's "Careful and Strict Enquiry" into the Freedom of the Will. In the chapels of the straitest sects are to be discovered elders and deacons of both degrees; deathbed deacons and deacons whose worldliness and good nature were alike incorrigible. Mrs. Stowe, that true humorist, has drawn both kinds to the very life. Still, the dominant religious views of a community

must always count for a great deal; and in New England, Calvinism, seemingly firmly built on the depravity of Human Nature, the corruption of man's heart, and with its great central doctrine, going deep down into Hell, of Original Sin, remained until after the Revolution the creed of the community, mitigated by Human Nature, with its undying delight in its own reproductiveness.

But a change took place a great change, and very quickly. To turn Calvinism into Unitarianism, to substitute William Ellery Channing for Jonathan Edwards, to see Emerson gracefully climbing the pulpit of Cotton Mather, was a rapidly-effected change, only possible, perhaps, in a new country. How did Boston come to lose its faith in the Corruption of Man's Heart?

Recent American writers have dwelt a good deal upon what they have called their "national inexperience." They are supplying the want, if it be one, very quickly. The Calvinists got rid of the Indians and the witches with that vigorous robustness of action that admits of no doubt as to God being on your side; and the ground thus cleared of God's enemies, it became possible to lead a life in New England homesteads of great simplicity and detachment, free from the pressure of the past, quit of the weight of tradition, ignorant of and therefore untroubled by authority, unfettered by any obligation to admire masterpieces, or by any school of criticism. The creed of Calvinism was no doubt there-in the background, supported by public opinion, so far as public opinion was vocal, and always well defended in church committees when new ministers were to be appointed, but not

It is

bolstered up, and buttressed and battlemented by Thrones, Cathedrals, Bishoprics, and Universities. As yet no crowded cities full of slums and ginshops yawned hell upon all beholders. Horrible, unnameable offences were not, as in the old country, part of the criminal calendar of every gaol-delivery. A belief in human goodness became quite practicable. The present professor of English at Harvard, Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his Literary History of America, happily compares the New England of the period before the Revolution to an only child gravely playing alone in a quiet nursery. indeed a happy comparison. An only child has no one to arouse angry passions by gouging out her doll's eyes or kicking over her tower of bricks. Such a lonely mortal easily begins to believe that it is all nonsense about the corruption of man's heart. Dr. Watts's Hymns and Moral Songs were written for a crowded nursery. New England was a quiet place, where the population bred up in quiet puritan habits lived quiet lives, separate and apart from great currents of thought and untrammelled speculation, pursuing its own line of development, and by the end of the eighteenth century, somehow or another, it came about that Calvinism as a system died out in the hearts of the people, and in the University itself in the very year of Emerson's birth the chief chair in Theology was bestowed upon an avowed and pronounced Unitarian.

Nowhere else has Unitarianism as a professed belief become dominant. In Boston it ruled the roost for many a day. We may here see illustrated the difference between an old country with an Established Church and a new country free to

swing as it chooses. In England there are hundreds of thousands of Unitarians who have never entered a Unitarian chapel and never mean to do so. It would be difficult to name a more emphatic Unitarian than Carlyle, yet he does not disguise from Emerson, but half released from that body, his dislike-almost contempt-for Unitarians. He writes in 1835: "To speak with perhaps ill-bred candour, I like as well to fancy you not preaching to Unitarians a gospel after their heart. I will say, farther, that you are the only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like." Schism seems a dreadful thing even to a Schismatic. It has always been very hard in England to be a Nonconformist. It has demanded an effort, and was felt to be a cutting yourself off, not from the fountains of holiness, but from the main currents of secular, national life. Hence it happens that the Church of England can still rejoice in the membership of such men as Lord Avebury and others who could be named. There was never any difficulty about being a Nonconformist in the States. Indeed, Emerson somewhere declares that whoso would be a man must be a Nonconformist.

It was therefore in the Unitarian creed that Emerson was nurtured from the beginning. He took things easily from the first. He came, however, of a race of preachers and religious professors on both the spear and the spindle side. His ancestors were grave men, accustomed to be saluted in the market-place and listened to in the meeting-house. In 1838 Emerson said:

Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us: first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world, everywhere