ose souls out of time proclaim truth, which
may be momentarily received with reverence, but is nevertheless quickly
dragged down into some savage interpretation which by and by a new
prophet will purge away. He believed that man is guided by the same
power that guides beast and flower. "The selfsame power that brought me
here brought you," he says to beautiful Rhodora. For him worship is the
attitude of those "who see that against all appearances the nature of
things works for truth and right forever." He saw good not only in what
we call beauty, grace, and light, but in what we call foul and ugly. For
him a sky-born music sounds "from all that's fair; from all that's
foul:"--

"'Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers,
Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings."

The universe was ever new and fresh in his eyes, not spent, or fallen,
or degraded, but eternally tending upward:--

"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew."

When we come to his interpretation of historical Christianity, we find
that in his view the life and works of Jesus fell entirely within the
field of human experience. He sees in the deification of Jesus an
evidence of lack of faith in the infinitude of the individual human
soul. He sees in every gleam of human virtue not only the presence of
God, but some atom of His nature. As a preacher he had no tone of
authority. A true non-conformist himself, he had no desire to impose his
views on anybody. Religious truth, like all other truth, was to his
thought an unrolling picture, not a deposit made once for all in some
sacred vessel. When people who were sure they had drained that vessel,
and assimilated its contents, attacked him, he was irresponsive or
impassive, and yielded to them no juicy thought; so they pronounced him
dry or empty. Yet all of Emerson's religious teaching led straight to
God,--not to a withdrawn creator, or anthropomorphic judge or king, but
to the all-informing, all-sustaining soul of the universe.

It was a prophetic quality of Emerson's religious teaching that he
sought to obliterate the distinction between secular and sacred. For him
all things were sacred, just as the universe was religious. We see an
interesting fruitio