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.”