as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are
that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of
the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom."

Dr. Holmes called this speech of Emerson's our "intellectual
Declaration of Independence," and indeed it was. "The Phi Beta Kappa
speech," says Mr. Lowell, "was an event without any former parallel in
our literary annals,--a scene always to be treasured in the memory for
its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless
aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of
approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"

The authorities of the Divinity School can hardly have been very careful
readers of Nature and The American Scholar, or they would not have
invited Emerson, in 1838, to deliver the address to the graduating
class. This was Emerson's second opportunity to apply his beliefs
directly to society. A few lines out of the famous address are enough to
show that he saw in the church of his day signs of the same decadence
that he saw in the letters: "The prayers and even the dogmas of our
church are like the zodiac of Denderah and the astronomical monuments of
the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and
business of the people. They mark the height to which the waters once
rose.... It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like
Christ's in the infinitude of man--is lost. None believeth in the soul
of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man
goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding
the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be
blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not
that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world."

It is almost misleading to speak of the lofty utterances of these early
addresses as attacks upon society, but their reception explains them.
The element of absolute courage is the same in all natures. Emerson
himself was not unconscious of what function he was performing.

The "storm in our wash-bowl" which followed this Divinity School
address, the letters of remonstrance from friends, the advertisements by
the Di