[218] _Page 486, note 1._ Mrs. Julia Ward Howe writes of Mr. Emerson,—
“He knew from the first the victory of good over evil; and when he told
me, to my childish amazement, that the angel must always be stronger than
the demon, he gave utterance to a thought most familiar to him, though at
the time new to me.”[L]
[219] _Page 488, note 1._ In the essay on Character (_Lectures and
Biographical Sketches_), he says, “The establishment of Christianity
in the world does not rest on any miracle but the miracle of being the
broadest and most humane doctrine.”
“The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false
impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the
falling rain.”—“Address in Divinity College,” _Nature, Addresses and
Lectures_.
[220] _Page 490, note 1._ Mr. Emerson’s doctrine was not to attack
beliefs, but give better: “True genius will not impoverish, but will
liberate.” In a letter to one of his best friends who had joined the
Church of Rome he said, perhaps in 1858: “To old eyes how supremely
unimportant the form under which we celebrate the justice, love and
truth, the attributes of the deity and the soul!”
[221] _Page 491, note 1._ Dr. Holmes, in his tribute to his friend, after
his death, read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, said:—
“What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for, unclassified,
half unwelcome newcomer, who had been for a while potted, as it were, in
our Unitarian cold greenhouse, but had taken to growing so fast that he
was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the hail-storms? Here was a
protest that outflanked the extreme left of liberalism, yet so calm and
serene that its radicalism had the accents of the gospel of peace. Here
was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their
pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.”