us,' says Lowell, 'from the body of
this death.' He pointed from the record of miracles past to an
ever-present miracle. To the illumination of 'reason,' which Unitarians
had followed so loyally--within the proviso of a special revelation--he
brought the light of a mystic intuition. Some of his elders judged it to
be 'false fire' perilously akin to the 'enthusiasm' which their
predecessors had so often condemned. In daring simplicity he urged that
there had been 'noxious exaggeration about the _person_ of Jesus.' 'The
soul knows no persons.' The divine is always latent in the human.
Revelation is not ended--as if God were dead!

The shock to the old-fashioned minds was immense. Long and far-sounding
debate followed, though Emerson, with provoking self-possession,
declined to argue. He simply 'announced.' This oracular attitude
certainly affected some of the younger men greatly, but fortunately for
the success of the new gospel one of these younger men translated the
oracular into a more popular and reasoned form. Three years after
Emerson's Address, _Theodore Parker_ (1810-60) completed the Unitarian
trilogy by a sermon on _The Transient and the Permanent in Theology_. It
may be said to have done for Emerson's message the kind of service
rendered by Huxley to Darwin's. Parker at once became a marked man; most
Unitarian pulpits were closed against him, but a large hall accommodated
the vast crowds that came to hear him. It is doubtful if such numerous
congregations ever listened to a Unitarian before or since. He continued
an arduous work for some fifteen years, but it wore him out before his
time. He was an erudite scholar and a prolific writer. Discarding the
claims of Christianity to be the only 'divine revelation,' he based his
clear and always optimistic theism on the broad facts of human
experience. Ardently interested in social and political questions, he
poured satire without stint on the religious defenders of slavery, and
himself dared all risks along with the foremost abolitionists. Such a
man could not but count for much; and though his radical views in
theology greatly disturbed for many years the conservatives in the
body--for Unitarianism itself had by this time a well-defined
conservative type--they could not fail to permeate the minds of the
masses.

Of Emerson's own life-work this is hardly the place to speak at large,
but in connection with the development of that 'Religion of the Spirit'
in which Dr