Chapter IV: The Parish of Young Men

“_My parish is young men inquiring their way._”

Emerson’s parish did not include all young men. Indeed he was very ill at ease with the typical “young person.” And there are many anecdotes which indicate that the young person shared the embarrassment. The gregariousness of youth with its tumultuous mass movements were rather appalling to one of his temperament. Nor was he fitted for the difficult rôle of spiritual adviser.

Emerson’s widely scattered parish was made up of another kind of young men. They were young men who were not seeking to find out _his_ way, but their own. He encouraged them in it. That made them his debtors for life.

These parishioners of his could not possibly be gathered into one congregation. They formed no cult or party. Each was so absorbed in his own special endeavor that he had little time to make the acquaintance of his fellow parishioner, but each in the formative period of his life had received the stimulus he most needed. He had been bewildered by the conflicting counsels of his elders. Each counsellor had said, “Be like me.” Then one clear voice had suggested, “Why not be yourself?”

The suggestion was so unexpected and yet so reasonable that it was acted upon. The young man found himself, which is the one discovery that counts.

America prides itself on being the land of the free. We have had many political emancipators, but the roll of intellectual emancipators is short. Having dethroned kings, we live under the fear of public opinion. The aggregate mind tyrannizes over the individual intellect. There is a deadly average which it is not considered safe for one to pass.

To his parish of young men Emerson was always preaching that the world is in dire need of men with fresh insight who are not satisfied with things as they are. The “average man” should not be content with the average attainment. He has within him powers which rightly used could lift him far above his present condition. He is, and of right ought to be, a free and independent soul. A decent respect for the opinion of the world demands that he should declare his independence in unmistakable terms.

“What strikes us in the fine genius is that which belongs of right to every one. A man should know himself for a necessary actor. A link was wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he was hurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two else unmarriageable facts. His two parents held each of one of the wants, and the union of foreign constitutions in him enables him to do gladly and gracefully what the assembled human race could not have sufficed to do. He knows his materials; he applies himself to his work; he can not read, or think, or look, but he unites the hitherto separated strands--into a perfect cord. The thoughts he delights to utter are the reason of his incarnation. Is it for him to account himself cheap and superfluous, or to linger by the wayside for opportunities? Did he not come into being because something must be done which he and no other is and does? If only he _sees_, the world will be visible enough. He need not study where to stand, nor to put things in favorable lights; in him is the light, from him all things are illuminated to their centre. What patron shall he ask for employment and reward? Hereto was he born, to deliver the thought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to do an office which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged from rendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternity out of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and many more men than one he harbours in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the beauty of all. Is not this the theory of every man’s genius or faculty? Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper to this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?”

As for the chill wisdom of age with its timid counsels, let the young man defy it. Length of days does not bring wisdom unless it is accompanied by a power of spiritual rejuvenation, and then it becomes the wisdom of perpetual youthfulness.

“Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity, and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing, and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk down to the young. Let them, then, become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

The reader will observe that Emerson in the midst of his praise of the spirit of youth gives a sly dig at one of the foibles of his parishioners. There is a quality of bumptiousness which is often found in early life. Emerson treats it as a kind of premature senility. “Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old.” Conversely the person who cannot look up religiously to something above his present attainments had aged rapidly. A person may be a dotard while yet in the twenties. This was a sobering thought not unfrequently presented to the parish of young men.