The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably of our time also, I
fancy, could make very little of Emerson's religion. It was the
religion of the spirit and not of the utilitarian and matter-of-fact
understanding. It identified man with God and made all nature
symbolical of the spirit. He was never tired of repeating that all
true prayers answered themselves--the spirit which the act of prayer
begets in one's self is the answer. Your prayer for humility, for
charity, for courage, begets these emotions in the mind. The devout
asking comes from a perception of their value. Hence the only real
prayers are for spiritual good. We converse with spiritual and
invisible things only through the medium of our own hearts. The
preliminary attitude of mind that moves us to face in this direction
is the blessing. The soldier who, on the eve of battle, prays for
courage, has already got what he asks for. Prayer for visible,
material good is infidelity to the moral law. God is within you, more
your better self than you are. Many prayers are a rattling of empty
husks. Emerson says the wise man in the storm prays God, not for
safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
Although Emerson broke away from all religious forms, yet was there
something back of them that he always respected, as do we all. He
relates that one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his chamber
after midnight, claiming a share in it. "But after his lamp had smoked
the chamber full, and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the
man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, and made in low
whispers a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed
between us. I fretted no more, but respected and liked him."
Contrasting his own case with that of so many young men who owed their
religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public
institutions, he says: "How much happier was my star which rained on
me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious
sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and
derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly
lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was
itself a culture, an education."