und for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding
themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception
which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands,
dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim
insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness,
and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness
and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope,
that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the
spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the
spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this
Emerson was great.'

Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England churches. He
inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue,
sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his
ideals was modified by the glow of transcendentalism which passed over
parts of New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century,
but the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced
them and lived them, was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and
beautified by the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in
1821, despising school teaching, stirred by the passion for spiritual
leadership, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its
satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to
prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became associate
minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He arrived at the
conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Jesus to be a
permanent sacrament. He found his congregation, not unnaturally,
reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired from the pastoral
office. He was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His task
was to befriend and guide the inner life of man. The influences of this
period in his life have been enumerated as the liberating philosophy of
Coleridge, the mystical vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of
Wordsworth, the stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the
graduating class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an
impassioned protest against what he called the defects of historical
Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus,
its failure to explore t