nflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so
spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave
their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some
superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about
Boileau,--

"Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur."

(Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up
dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had
their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the
assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him,
and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy,
sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England
was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The
_dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and
they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise
above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until
he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and
find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So
did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our
stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would
have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When
a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened
persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs
as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the
convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about
which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep
and anxious and devout religious scepticism.

It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by
Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his
ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but
when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the
end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the
more he found himself perplexed.

The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is
Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can
tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief
in the omnipresence of the Deity?

Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood