A little city, an isolated society, a country
village! Yet through books, and through intercourse with intelligent
persons, he was really "set in a large place." The proof of this
largeness, and of the keenness of his mental and moral vision, is that,
in regard to some of the chief concerns of mankind, he was a seer and a
fore-seer. This prophetic quality of his I hope to demonstrate to-night
in three great fields of thought--education, social organization, and
religion.

Although a prophet and inspirer of reform, Emerson was not a reformer.
He was but a halting supporter of the reforms of his day; and the eager
experimenters and combatants in actual reforms found him a disappointing
sort of sympathizer. His visions were far-reaching, his doctrines often
radical, and his exhortations fervid; but when it came to action,
particularly to habitual action, he was surprisingly conservative. With
an exquisite candor, and a gentle resolution of rarest quality he broke
his strong ties to the Second Church of Boston before he was thirty
years old, abandoning the profession for which he had been trained, and
which, in many of its aspects, he honored and enjoyed; yet he attended
church on Sundays all his life with uncommon regularity. He refused to
conduct public prayer, and had many things to say against it; but when
he was an Overseer of Harvard College, he twice voted to maintain the
traditional policy of compelling all the students to attend morning
prayers, in spite of the fact that a large majority of the Faculty
urgently advocated abandoning that policy. He manifested a good deal of
theoretical sympathy with the community experiments at Brook Farm and
Fruitlands; but he declined to take part in them himself. He was
intimate with many of the leading abolitionists; but no one has
described more vividly their grave intellectual and social defects. He
laid down principles which, when applied, would inevitably lead to
progress and reform; but he took little part in the imperfect
step-by-step process of actual reforming. He probably would have been an
ineffective worker in any field of reform; and, at any rate, strenuous
labor on applications of his philosophy would have prevented him from
maintaining the flow of his philosophic and prophetic visions. The work
of giving practical effect to his thought was left for other men to
do,--indeed for generations of other serviceable men, who, filled with
his ideals, will slowly work them