Chapter XI: Thou Shalt Not Preach

“_‘A new commandment,’ said the smiling Muse, ‘I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach.’_”

In one sense Emerson was always a preacher. His main interest was in the moral law and in the development of character. When he left the pulpit for the lecture platform he was only changing one congregation for another. In the Unitarian ministry to which he belonged, the sermon and the essay were not always clearly differentiated.

But in another sense Emerson obeyed the prohibition of the smiling muse. He had no genius for exhortation, nor had he any desire to enforce his precepts upon unwilling minds. He lacked the fervor of the true evangelist, and could not cry, “Turn ye! turn ye! why will ye die?” He could not enforce the gospel of liberalism as did his friend, Theodore Parker. His attitude was like that of the man of science to the subject of his investigation. “Here is the truth as I see it. Now investigate it for yourselves and see what you think of it.”

In the Divinity School address, Emerson startled his hearers by a bold prophecy.

“I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the soul of these Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spake oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and the Greek scriptures contain immortal sentences that have been the 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 these shining laws that he shall see them come round full circle; 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 Joy.”

“Virtue is vitiated,” said Emerson, “by too much will. He who aims at progress should aim at an infinite not at a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-slavery, Non-Resistance, no Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor, bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end.... The soul can be appeased not by a deed, but by a tendency.”

The born preacher appeals to the will and seeks to change its direction. He pleads and threatens. He is instant in season and out of season. Only on a few great occasions did Emerson adopt that tone. The greatest truths seemed to him to be self-evidencing. In their presence all minds were equal. “The weight of the universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task.”

“Let us have nothing now but what is its own evidence. There is surely enough for the heart in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with half-truths and assertion and snuffle.

“There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no cooperation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the super-personal Heart,--he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers, the good Laws themselves are alive, they know if we have kept them, they animate him with the leading of great duty and an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.”

To all this the preacher might answer, “You have left out of your account something which is very important in human nature, namely, its weakness. The ordinary man lives amid the wonders of nature, but he may be very little affected by them. He needs some strong voice to urge him to open his eyes to what is around him. If it is so with the most obvious sights, is it not more so with moral and spiritual beauty? Is not the preacher needed as well as the philosopher and poet?”

No one would be more willing to acknowledge this than Emerson. His criticism of Plato would be equally true of himself.

“Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility that came from truth itself and good itself, and attempted as if on the part of the human intellect to do it adequate homage.... It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim, and therefore in expression literary. Mounting into heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul, he is literary and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from Plato that his writings have not--what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work--the vital authority which the screams of the prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion contact is necessary.... I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come to a fact in the nature of things; an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt with salt.”