The Seven Seniors and Emerson's “Divinity School Address”

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Newborn Bards of the Holy Ghost: The Seven Seniors and Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”

jeremy leatham

To this holy office, you propose to devote yourself. I wish you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is the first in the world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address”

HEN Andrews Norton characterized Ralph Waldo W Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” as an “insult to religion,” he was concerned not so much about the content of the address as the circumstances in which it was given.1 For Norton, it was the wrong speech, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and to the wrong audience. The senior class of the Harvard Divinity School had invited Emerson to deliver “the customary discourse, on occasion of their entering upon the active Christian ministry,” but what they received on 15 July 1838 rocked the very foundations of conservative New England Unitarianism.2 And the reverberations continued

1Andrews Norton, “The New School in Literature and Religion,” Boston Daily Advertiser, 27 August 1838,inEmerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 35. 2George F. Simmons, H. G. O. Blake, and W. D. Wilson to Emerson, 21 March 1838,inThe Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990–95), 2:147n. Further citations will appear in the text as Letters. As used here, “conservative Unitarianism” refers to those adherents in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century who opposed the inﬂuence of German higher criticism, liberalism, and transcendentalism, often represented respectively by individuals such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Theodore Parker, and George Ripley.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 594 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY into the twentieth century, particularly as the published discourse came to be seen as a key transcendentalist document. As D. Elton Trueblood asserted in 1939, the address “marked a turning point in American life and letters.”3 Criticizing Chris- tianity for emphasizing the personality of Jesus while neglecting his teachings and also attacking the clergy for betraying their true call, Emerson brought to a head many of the religious controversies dominating New England at the time.4 How such an address had come to be given in the chapel of Harvard Divinity School, the early nineteenth-century “citadel of Unitarianism,”5 was the question that troubled Norton, a former professor at the school, now retired, and a leading ﬁg- ure in conservative Unitarianism. Whatever Emerson’s personal beliefs, Norton suggested, his assault upon the Christian establishment, targeted to students about to enter the ministry, displayed poor judgment and constituted an obvious betrayal of trust. A review of Emerson’s journals and correspondence and a careful examination of the address itself, however, demonstrate that, notwithstanding its important place in America’s intellectual, religious, and literary history, the “Divinity School Address” was prepared and delivered in good faith with the interests of its primary audience clearly in mind. Investigating the seven graduating seniors who comprised that audience provides an important historical context for the address and reveals Emerson’s deep interest in the future of the young men who had requested his attendance at an important event in their lives. Such an approach opens the way toward a reassessment of a speech that for too long has been read as a “parting shot” at the Christian ministry Emerson left rather than as an invest- ment in a new generation of preachers charged with carrying

3D. Elton Trueblood, “The Influence of Emerson’s Divinity School Address,” Harvard Theological Review 32.1 (1939): 43. 4These controversies involved the authenticity and significance of miracles, the sufficiency of social and religious institutions, and questions regarding authority, interpretation of scripture, the personality of deity, and the primacy of self. 5Stephen Railton, “‘Assume an Identity of Sentiment’: Rhetoric and Audience in Emerson’s ‘Divinity School Address,’” Prospects 9 (1984): 34.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 595 out the work he felt he could no longer in good conscience perform himself.6

Audience Most readers of the “Divinity School Address” understand that Emerson delivered the speech to the graduating students of Harvard Divinity School—some have even noted that only six of the seven students were present7—but few acknowledge his relationship with them. The seven men were Benjamin Fiske Barrett, Harrison Gray Otis Blake, Theodore Haskell Dorr, Crawford Nightingale, George Frederick Simmons, Frederick Augustus Whitney, and William Dexter Wilson.8 Records show that Emerson was acquainted with Wilson and Barrett prior to the address and that he cared about their individual develop- ment. A February 1838 letter from Wilson to Emerson notes that the two had met the previous year in Concord.9 Toward the end of that year, Emerson sent Wilson tickets to one of his lecture series, a detail he recorded in his notebook.10 Emerson also knew Barrett before the summer of 1838. Reﬂecting on his days at the Divinity School, Barrett recalled in 1890 that Emerson had recommended a book to him, which he began reading before he graduated.11

6David M. Robinson, “The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Introductory Historical Essay,” in The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Albert J. von Frank et al., 4 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989–92), 1:2. 7See, e.g., Trueblood, “Inﬂuence of Emerson’s Address,” pp. 42–43. 8To my knowledge, the only previous effort to identify by name all the members of the graduating class of 1838 in connection with the “Divinity School Address” was made by the Andover–Harvard Theological Library for a 2003 exhibit marking the two hundredth anniversary of Emerson’s birth. That project was organized by Cliff Wunderlich, whose personal correspondences made this paper possible. 9Wilson to Emerson, 26 February 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson Letters from Various Correspondents, ca. 1814–1882,MSAm1280 (3515), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 10Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960– 82), 12:265. Further citations will appear in the text as JMN. 11Benjamin Fisk Barrett: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: Swedenborg Publishing Association, 1890), pp. 54–55. The autobiography employs the alternate spelling of “Fiske” throughout.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 596 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Additional evidence suggests that Emerson might have known other members of the graduating class. Writing to Margaret Fuller on 12 October 1838, he mentions that he had received “a letter from Simmons & his mates written by S.”—a 19 July thank you note signed by Simmons, Blake, and Wilson (Letters, 2:169). That Emerson could identify Simmons as the note’s author seems to indicate prior correspondence between the two, or at least prior acquaintance. If he did know both Wilson and Simmons, it seems reasonable that he would have met Blake, the other member of this circle of friends. In any case, his use of the casual term “mates” hints at a familiarity among and with the students that likely elicited the formal circumstances of the Harvard speaking venue. Regardless of which students Emerson knew individually and to what degree, he thought about them collectively. On 1 April 1838, just a few weeks after he had received the seniors’ invitation to deliver the graduation address, they asked to meet with him. In his journal he writes, “The Divinity School youths wished to talk with me concerning theism. I went rather heavyhearted for I always find that my views chill or shock people at the first opening. But the conversation went well & I came away cheered” (JMN, 5:471). Unlike the address he would deliver that summer, this encounter was an infor- mal “conversation,” which would have allowed him to interact with the students on a more intimate level. For example, he joked about the dull preaching found in the Unitarian Asso- ciation, and “they all smiled” (JMN, 5:471). Though he does not specify which students were present or how many were seniors, the entry reveals a positive relationship with the general student body. His anxieties having been calmed during the course of the engagement, Emerson must have returned home to Concord that day with greater confidence that Har- vard’s Divinity School students would be receptive to views that tended to “chill or shock” others. Surely this exchange, and possibly others like it, helped Emerson better understand his audience and prepare a message specifically suited to them.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 597 Purpose The “Divinity School Address” has long been characterized as a general attack on Christianity and as a representative transcendentalist document.12 It was intended to be neither. Rather, it focused its energies on proper and effective preaching, much like an ordination sermon. Emerson makes relatively few references to his audience in the first half of the address, emphasizing instead what he sees as the flaws of historical Christianity, but to overlook its second half, in which he clearly speaks to the preachers-to-be before him, is to mis- represent the whole. Whatever else Emerson sought to accom- plish, he counseled the students about the responsibilities of their office, and an accurate interpretation of the address must acknowledge that immediate purpose. Properly understood, the “Divinity School Address” is not an attack on Christianity per se but on the way it was being inculcated.13 “I shall endeavor to discharge my duty to you, on this occasion,” Emerson told the six seniors in attendance, “by pointing out two errors in [the Christian church’s] administration.”14 The allusion to errors and to administration suggests

12In addition to many of the contemporary responses, Joel Porte, in his Representa- tive Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), reads the address as an attack on Christianity intended to provoke a reaction. See also Railton, “Rhetoric and Audience,” p. 47n. Clarence Gohdes argues that “the Divinity School Address had better be regarded as one of the concrete manifesta- tions of a general attitude among the transcendentalists, and not as an extraordinary bit of spiritual pioneering” (“Some Remarks on Emerson’s Divinity School Address,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 1.1 [1929]: 31). 13Modern readers who take Emerson’s implicit rejection of Christ’s divinity as an attack on Christianity neglect the setting of his address. Because Harvard was a stronghold of Unitarianism at this time, his audience would not have considered the divinity of Jesus to be a necessary doctrine of Christianity. If Emerson’s intention was to assault Christianity on these grounds, he would not have done it at Harvard Divinity School. It was not Emerson’s disbelief in Christ’s divinity that challenged conservative Unitarianism but rather his implicit rejection of biblical miracles, his privileging of individual intuition over doctrine, and his criticism of the Christian establishment. 14Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Ernest Spiller et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), 1:81; subsequent citations will appear in the text with the designation Works. The two “errors” to which Emerson alludes consist of Christian preachers’ emphasis on the “person of Jesus” rather than the doctrine of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 598 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY a goal of reform, not rejection. Therefore, to portray Emerson as “America’s first ‘death-of-God’ theologian” based on the “Divinity School Address,” as Sydney Ahlstrom does, mistakes the man.15 In closing his comments to the young men about to enter the ministry, Emerson invites them to “rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar,” not by contriv- ing a new religious system, which would be “as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Rea- son,” but by giving themselves fully to their calling. “Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing,” he advises. “For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul” (Works, 1:92). Emerson explicitly rebuffs the call for a new religious system, then, as he charges his auditors instead to reinvigorate the one they have inherited. Although the address certainly highlights beliefs common to many adherents of transcendentalism, its context and content suggest that Emerson was more determined to inspire the prospective preachers before him than he was to establish himself as the spokesperson for an alternative religio-philosophical movement.16

Preparation There is no doubt that Emerson believed that his address had a wider appeal than the students to whom he ﬁrst delivered it, as evidenced by his decision that August to have the address printed not just for the students but for a general population;17

the “soul” and the denial of ongoing revelation, which “throttles the preacher” (Works, 1:82–84). 15Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 603. 16In 1885 transcendentalist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who was present at the delivery of the “Divinity School Address,” emphasized the force and significance of the address as well as its defining role in commencing a new movement when she referred to the speech as the “apocalypse of our Transcendental era in Boston” (“Emerson as Preacher,” in Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Reflections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003], p. 153). 17See Emerson, Letters, 2:147n.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 599 still, his journals and letters reveal that the Divinity School’s seven seniors were the primary focus of his preparations. “We shun to say that which shocks the religious ear of the people,” he notes in his journal a week before the address. “I refer to the discourse now growing under my eye to the Divinity School” (JMN, 7:41–42). Given the controversial nature of his discourse, Emerson’s trepidation is understandable. Ultimately, though, he concludes that he must be forthright with the students. “But when I have as clear a sense as now that I am speaking simple truth without any bias, any foreign interest in the matter,—all railing, all unwillingness to hear, all danger of injury to the conscience, dwindles & disappears” (JMN, 7:41– 42). To be sure, his April conversation with the Divinity School students had assuaged to some degree Emerson’s fears of of- fending the students’ sensibilities, but a concern about injuring their conscience remained. Only his determination to speak the truth as he saw it superseded that concern. Emerson speciﬁed his target audience on other occasions. A journal entry on 8 June notes, “I would say to the young scholar: Permit none to invade your mind. Live with God alone” (JMN, 7:7). In his preparatory notes, he writes, “You standing in this Creative Hour, desire & aim to understand your relation to [Christianity]. Redeem it. Be Christians” (JMN, 12:9). In a journal entry on 21 June, he imagines the spiritual turmoil that the students have suffered. “In elegant Cambridge, have you walked a mile in perturbation of the spirit?” he asks. “Yet,” he counsels, “somehow you must come to the bottom of those doubts or the human soul in its great ebbs & ﬂows asking you for its law will call you, Boy! Life[,] authentic life[,] you must have or you can teach nothing” (JMN, 7:27). On 17 July, two days after delivering the address, he refers to it as his “speech to the young men” (JMN, 7:43). In a letter to Thomas Carlyle on 6 August, he writes, “I have written & read a kind of Ser- mon to the senior class of our Cambridge Theological School a fortnight ago . . . for though I hate American pleniloquence, I cannot easily say No to young men who bid me speak also.”18

18Emerson to Carlyle, 6 August 1838, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 191.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 600 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Himself a former student of Harvard Divinity School, Emer- son had served as pastor of Boston’s Second Church. In that capacity, he considered preaching of the utmost importance, as he thought it should be for the graduating seniors seated before him on 15 July 1838.19 Not long into his tenure, however, he could no longer reconcile his misgivings about the institution of the Lord’s Supper with the requirement that he administer it. As he told his congregation when he resigned his pulpit in 1832, “It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart.”20 For Emerson, the Lord’s Supper was an unnecessary cultural tradition that had no spiritual power for him. Although he had no objection to individuals receiving communion if they found it meaningful and no objection to other clergymen administering it if they did not share his reservations, he could not in good conscience continue to perform this particular function of his position. But for Emerson, there had always been an important distinction between administering and ministering. He reas- sured his congregation that the office of a minister “has some [duties] which it will always be my delight to discharge according to my ability wherever I exist. And whilst the thought of its claims oppresses me with a sense of my unworthiness, I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change can deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its highest functions.”21 In other words, Emerson had resigned a post, not a vocation. As Wesley T. Mott observes, “Emerson maintained that in resigning his pulpit he never left the ministry but rather was free to fulfill it.”22 It is no wonder, then, that in answering the divinity students’ request that he speak to them, he closed the note with a reference to their common charge to preach: “In the good hope of our calling” (Letters, 7:301). Emerson’s subsequent career as a lecturer, his continued weekly attendance at church, and his address to the Divinity

19See Railton, “Rhetoric and Audience,” p. 35. 20Emerson, “Sermon CLXII [‘The Lord’s Supper’],” in Complete Sermons, 4:194. 21Emerson, “Sermon CLXII,” 4:194. 22Wesley T. Mott, Strains of Eloquence: Emerson and His Sermons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 185.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 601 School students amply demonstrate his abiding belief in the power of preaching to effect great good. And yet, that potential was all too often unrealized. His journals and notebooks are filled with laments for and examples of bad preaching, which he characterizes as rigid, lifeless, and soulless.23 In his view, too many clergymen failed to live up to his own guiding principle that preaching must be done only with the “whole heart” fully engaged. Significant change, he was convinced, would come only when a new generation of young preachers, unencumbered by tradition, resisted conformity. “Do let the new generation speak the truth,” he writes in his journal, “& let our grandfathers die” (JMN, 7:39). These ideas converged in the notebook he kept in 1838 as he was preparing for his July speech. Under the heading “Discourse to Cambridge Theological School, 15 July, 1838,” Emerson sketches out his ideas on the subject of preaching: “The moral nature of man is to be preached”; “Nothing is more real than the office of the moral teacher”; “Preaching is very bad”; “Preaching is verbal; timid; useless”; “Preaching gives no sign of life. It has not been lived”; and “Falsehood of preaching” (JMN, 12:8–9). Often he cross-references a particular line to a journal entry, and many of these notebook/journal passages are found in modified form in the “Divinity School Address.” For example, next to the notebook line “Foolishest preaching” (JMN, 12:8), he cites a journal entry of 6 June, which includes the comment “This afternoon, the foolishest preaching—which bayed at the moon. Go, hush, old man, whom years have taught no truth” (JMN, 7:22). In the “Divinity School Address,” these incipient observations are transformed into the injunction “But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush” (Works, 1:84). Tracing Emerson’s train of thought in this way provides insight into his composition process, but it also reveals how thoroughly the forthcoming speech to prospective ministers weighed on his mind.

23For a full discussion of Emerson’s concern with the state of Christian sermons during this time, see Conrad Wright, “Emerson, Barzillai Frost, and the Divinity School Address,” Harvard Theological Review 49.1 (1956): 19–43.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 602 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Genre Emerson was not the first to criticize prevailing modes of preaching in the first half of the nineteenth century; as Lawrence Buell notes, demands for improvement were widespread during this period.24 The prevalence of revivals, the rise of the press, and the general democratization of American religion compelled established Christian ministers to tailor their sermons to the popular expectations of their congregations, the new “sovereign audience,” as Nathan O. Hatch has referred to them.25 Seminaries, including Harvard Divinity School, hired chairs of sacred rhetoric and incorporated the study of homiletics into their curricula.26 However, the sermon delivered by a senior clergyman before a new minister’s formal ordination remained the most direct, most personal instruction the prospective preacher would receive. Emerson thought of his address as a comparable instance of spiritual tuition and encouragement. Although he had resigned the pastorate, Emer- son wrote to Carlyle that he conceived of his address as “a kind of Sermon.”27 A comparison of the “Divinity School Address” to ordination sermons in the Congregationalist/Unitarian tradition reinforces the claim that Emerson was working within the conventions of Christianity to reform religion, not to dismantle it. Even Emerson’s focus on the perceived errors of Christianity in the first half of the “Divinity School Address” was not uncommon; in the course of their ordination sermons, preachers often alluded to apparent problems or controversies with the intent of proposing how they might be corrected or resolved, specifically as a way to rally the new minister to the challenges he would confront. For example, in his sermon at the ordination of Jonathan Cole on 21 January 1829, John Brazer claims

24Lawrence Buell, “The Unitarian Movement and the Art of Preaching in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 24.2 (1972): 169–70. 25Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 125. 26Buell, “The Unitarian Movement and the Art of Preaching,” p. 172. 27Emerson to Carlyle, 6 August 1838.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 603 at the outset that Unitarianism has been disparaged as having no spiritual power. He goes on,

Believing this objection to be unfounded and injurious, I have thought that an attempt to remove it might not be inappropriate to an occasion like the present, when we meet together to witness and sanction a union between Pastor and People, whose object is to promote the inﬂuence of those leading truths, which are thus called in question.

After detailing his concern during the ﬁrst half of the sermon, Brazer, like Emerson, turns mid-sermon to the role of the preacher, whose responsibility it is to address the problem. Much of his advice might be seen as foreshadowing the “Divinity School Address”: “It is possible to ﬁll up the time with a sermon, which shall have ‘proper words in proper places,’ . . . but which, after all, will be . . . as powerless as the prattle of a child”; “[the preacher] will endeavor to feel as well as to understand the truths he utters, feel them in their full import.”28 Brazer’s formula is not unique. Convers Francis dedicates most of his sermon at the ordination of Oliver Stearns to out- lining the ideal character of Christianity and correcting misconceptions before concluding with some constructive advice to the new pastor.

In the character of Christianity, the faithful minister will ﬁnd at once his most solemn admonition and his strongest encouragement. He will not consider himself, like the priests of ancient times, a manager of the ceremonies of sacred things. The production of goodness, of spiritual purity, will be his great work.29

28John Brazer, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Jonathan Cole, as Pastor of the First Congregational Society in Kingston, January 21, 1829 (Salem: Foote & Brown, 1829), pp. 4, 13, 14. 29Convers Francis, A Sermon, Preached at the Ordination of the Rev. Oliver Stearns, to the Pastoral Care of the Second Congregational Society in Northampton, Nov. 9, 1831 (Northampton: T. W. Shepard, 1831), p. 22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Instances abound.30 Even more famous ordination sermons, such as William Ellery Channing’s “Likeness to God,” preached at the ordination of Frederick A. Farley in 1828, conform to this pattern of exposing the errors, misconceptions, and controversies within Christianity before turning to concentrate on the role of the preacher. Theodore Parker’s “Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” delivered at the ordination of Charles C. Shackford in 1841, differs only in that he employs more second-person references and offers instructions more relevant to the entire congregation than to Shack- ford specifically. Even in this case, however, his advice centers on the pulpit and what type of preaching a congregation should seek.31 Emerson’s address bears a similar configuration to the forego- ing examples. After itemizing the most significant threats to the purest exercise of Christianity in the first half of his discourse, including the two primary errors of Christian administration— an exaggeration of the person of Jesus and a rejection of ongoing revelation—Emerson turns his full attention to the cure:

30See, e.g., James Kendall, A Sermon, Delivered at the Ordination of Rev. Oliver Hayward, to the Pastoral Care of the East Church and Parish in Barnstable, Nov. 8, 1815 (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1816); Henry Ware Jr., A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. William Henry Furness, as Pastor of the First Congregational Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, January 12, 1825 (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1825); James Kendall, A Sermon, Delivered at the Ordination of Hersey Bradford Goodwin, as a Colleague Pastor with Ezra Ripley, D. D. of the Congregational Church and Society in Concord, Mass. Feb. 17, 1830 (Concord: I. R. Butts, 1830). In some cases, the division between the principles of or challenges to Christianity and the discussion of the role of the minister is not clearly divided into separate sections of the sermon, but even in these instances, there is still an awareness of the general state of Christianity coupled with an emphasis on the relevance and importance of proper preaching. Examples of this type include Henry Ware, A Sermon, Delivered January 17, 1821, at the Ordination of the Rev. Charles Brooks to the Pastoral Care of the Third Church and Parish in Hingham (Boston: Ezra Lincoln, 1821); Henry Ware Jr., A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of Rev. Chandler Robbins, over the Second Congregational Church in Boston, December 4, 1833 (Boston: James W. Burditt, 1833). This ﬁnal sermon was delivered by Emerson’s predecessor at Boston Second Church at the installation of his successor. The published version includes a hymn written by Emerson. 31William Ellery Channing, A Discourse Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Frederick A. Farley, as Pastor of the Westminster Congregational Society in Providence, Rhode Island, September 10, 1828 (Boston: Bowles and Dearborn, 1828); Theodore Parker, A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity; Preached at the Ordination of Mr. Charles C. Shackford, in the Hawes Place Church in Boston, May 19, 1841, 2nd ed. (Boston: Freeman and Bolles, 1841).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 605 better preaching. Admittedly, the deﬁciencies he recognizes are different from those generally acknowledged in ordination sermons, but his purpose in identifying them is the same. He is not content simply to reveal Christianity’s ﬂaws as he under- stands them but rather, mustering all of his persuasive powers, he entreats the young men to set out to rectify them. Of course, in adopting any model, Emerson was loath to conform too closely to it. Most ordination sermons, for example, employed few, if any, second-person addresses to the new minister. That type of appeal was generally reserved for the “Charge” and the offering of the “Right Hand of Fellowship.” In these instances, after the ordination sermon concluded, the clergymen present welcomed the newly ordained man into the ministry, impressed upon him the nature of his call, and in- voked God’s blessing upon his career. (Certain aspects of Emer- son’s speech approximate the “Charge.”) Moreover, Emerson invokes no biblical verse or verses at the outset, as all ordination sermons did, nor does he employ any throughout.32 His address is slightly longer and its structure less overt than typical ordination sermons of the time, which still employed a rather rigid outline style inherited from Puritan models. That Emer- son’s address was, in fact, a commencement speech accounts for the differences, and everyone who witnessed the talk that day would have taken it as it was billed. Still, the similarities between the speech and typical ordination sermons help clarify the function and objectives of the “Divinity School Address.”

The Address Having been present at the performance, Theodore Parker, himself a relatively new minister, recorded that night in his journal that Emerson “surpassed himself as much as he sur- passes others in a general way.”33 Parker was struck by both

32Carol Johnston argues that Emerson’s speech alludes to the book of Jeremiah, but he cites no passage. See her “The Underlying Structure of the Divinity School Address: Emerson as Jeremiah,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1980): 41–49. 33Theodore Parker, journal, 15 July 1838, Manuscripts & Archives (UU), Andover– Harvard Theological Library, http://www.hds.harvard.edu/library/exhibits/featured -images/parkers-journal-entry-on-emersons-divinity-school-address.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the style and substance of what he had heard. Unfortunately, no transcript of the address exists, and Emerson’s original manuscript is lost. There is reason to believe, however, that the published version closely follows that which was delivered. Emerson initially intended to prepare his manuscript for print at the request of the Divinity School students and for their beneﬁt alone (Letters, 2:147n). As late as 28 July, he had no plans for general publication. In a letter of that date to Henry Ware Jr., who had expressed reservations about the speech, Emerson wrote, “I shall be admonished by this expression of your thought to revise with greater care the Manuscript before it is printed (for the use of the Class)” (Letters, 2:150). By the beginning of August, however, he was considering wider publication, in part to stem mounting misunderstand- ings and misrepresentations. He wrote to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody on 2 August, “I do not think that Cambridge address very good. ...ButtheClassinvitedmetoprintit (not publish) & I consented. I have since thought it would be better to publish if printed at all, for frank explanations [sic] sake, & so I think of asking their leave to publish it” (Letters, 2:151). This course was eventually pursued, and the “Divinity School Address” was offered to the general populace by the end of August. But even after the decision to publish had been reached, evidence suggests that Emerson resisted pressure from all sides to alter it.34 On the one hand, Ware and his half-uncle Samuel Ripley were recommending that he delete or qualify controversial sections of the address.35 On the other hand, Peabody was encouraging him to undercut his critics by including in the published version a paragraph from the original manuscript that he had omitted during the delivery because of time constraints. This particular paragraph, Peabody believed, would help justify Emerson and clarify his positions, and so she “begged him to print it . . . , since it was part of the original.” He refused. “Those gentlemen have committed

34See Porte, Representative Man, pp. 156–57, for an alternative reading of the evidence. 35See Letters, 2:148n.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 607 themselves against what I did read,” he replied, “and it would not be courteous or fair to spring upon them this passage now, which would convict them of unwarranted inference.”36 In the face of temptations to tone down his criticisms of the administration of Christianity or to shore up his speech against further attacks, even with material he had originally intended to include, Emerson responded simply, “I must abide by what I delivered.”37 A careful reading of the address, whether revised for publication or not, reveals how consistently Emerson keeps the Divinity School class of 1838 in his sights. He refers multiple times to his “duty” to the graduating students “on this occasion,” and he “endeavor[s] to discharge” that duty by speaking directly to them “whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ” (Works, 1:81, 84–85). Emerson was fond of employing the second person, both in his essays and in his lectures. Often he uses “you” to refer to an abstract or absent audience,38 but in the “Divinity School Address,” as with “The American Scholar” delivered a year earlier, his immediate audience is clearly in view. “You, my young friends, are now setting forth to teach” (Works, 1:81), he reminds the students seated before him in the front row.39 “Young friends” is not merely a rhetorical ﬂourish. Emerson knew some, if not most, of the graduating seniors personally, and although he was always

36Quoted in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), p. 373. According to Peabody’s recollection, the paragraph that had been omitted was a warning against “ego-theism,” the tendency to elevate the individual above “all human culture; setting up against Jesus Christ every little self magniﬁed.” 37Quoted in Peabody, “Emerson as Preacher,” p. 154. 38Examples can be taken from Emerson’s Nature: “Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions” (Works, 1:45). Emerson here addresses an abstract audience. Without changing the essential signiﬁcation, he could have written, “One must build, therefore, his or her own world. As fast as anyone conforms his or her life to the pure idea in his or her mind, that will unfold its great proportions.” The sentence “You also are a man” offers an example of an absent audience (Works, 1:44). The “you” here refers to any male who reads the essay; it is not a direct address to a known member of a present audience. 39See Neil Baldwin, The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 70.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY keenly aware of his secondary audiences40 and the formality of the setting, he spoke to the young men as friends, offering them career advice as any commencement speaker should. In this case, however, since these young men are “setting forth to teach,” the guidance is not merely professional. For Emer- son and his audience both, it is spiritual and personal. Taken together, the following passages demonstrate that the “Divinity School Address” aims to inﬂuence the types of preachers the young men would become:

The true preacher can always be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,—life passed through the fire of thought. [Works, 1:86] The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. [Works, 1:84] Tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; . . . it comes out of the memory, and not out of the soul; . . . it aims at what is usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal. [Works, 1:87] It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. [Works, 1:89] Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. [Works, 1:90] Be to them a man. Look to it first and only, that you are such; that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,—are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,—but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connexion,—when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own soul, you shall gain a greater confidence in other men. [Works, 1:90]

40In this case, Emerson’s secondary audiences are the faculty at Harvard Divinity School, the friends and family of the graduating students, and other interested parties with some connection to the school, such as Peabody.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 609 Discharge to men the priestly ofﬁce, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel. [Works, 1:90] Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at ﬁrst hand with Deity. [Works, 1:90]

Such a lengthy list of examples illustrating the supreme importance Emerson placed on reformed preaching practices would not be necessary were it not for the scarcity of scholarship ac- knowledging such direct admonitions and instructions. What- ever application they may have had to Christianity or religion generally, they reveal that Emerson did not misunderstand his primary audience and immediate context, nor did he betray their trust. On the contrary, by considering the goals of the seven seniors who had invited him to address them and speaking the truth as he understood it “with [his] whole heart,” he paid them the highest respect. Although he recognized that not all would accept his ideas, he felt that avoiding controversial issues merely to appease his listeners would constitute the greatest insult and perﬁdy. To Ware, Emerson wrote that delivering the address caused him pain, for he knew that some of his “dear friends & benefactors” might dissent. “Yet,” he continued, “as my conviction is perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrine . . . , you will see at once that it must appear to me very important that it be spoken out, & I thought I would not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compli- ment as to suppress any opposition to their supposed views out of fear of offence.”41 To whatever extent Emerson may have shocked or angered some in attendance, he never lost sight of his fundamental responsibility to the Divinity School’s seven seniors.

Reception Notwithstanding Emerson’s good faith and constructive intentions—Carol Johnston argues that his “purpose was to instruct, not offend; to favorably impress, not enrage his

41Emerson to Ware, 28 July 1838, Letters, 2:149–50.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY audience”42—controversy erupted almost immediately. Given the religious climate of the time, the reproaches were not particularly surprising. Even Emerson had foreseen the possibility of censure, though he was deeply troubled by it when it came. Just days after the “Divinity School Address” was published, Norton launched an attack in the Boston Daily Advertiser on Emerson and the “new school” he represented. And Ware, a leading figure at Harvard whom Emerson had succeeded as minister of Boston Second Church and with whom he maintained a cordial correspondence, found it necessary to publicly respond to Emerson’s speech. Ware’s reaction, not nearly so heated as Norton’s, likely re- flects the mainstream Unitarian attitude toward the address. He had attended the commencement speech and conversed with Emerson immediately thereafter, apparently conveying some degree of approbation. The next day, however, Ware’s doubts prevailed. Writing to Emerson, he noted that It has occurred to me, that, since I said to you last evening, I should probably assent to your unqualified statements if I could take your qualifications with them, I am bound in fairness to add, that this applies only to a portion, and not to all. With regard to some, I must confess that they appear to me more than doubtful, and their prevalence would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of Christianity.43 Ware interpreted Emerson’s address as a rejection of God as a person—an intelligent, conscious agent—and believed that such a denial threatened the very basis of Christianity. The sermon he delivered on 23 September, “The Personality of the Deity,” was partially written (and generally received) as a response to the “Divinity School Address.”44

42Johnston, “The Underlying Structure of the Divinity School Address,” p. 42. 43Ware to Emerson, 16 July 1838, quoted in George Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971), p. 69. 44Pointing to evidence from the Christian Examiner, Cooke explains that Ware’s sermon “was understood to be aimed at Emerson” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 71). However, when sending a copy of the sermon to Emerson, Ware explains, “By this mail you will probably receive a copy of a sermon which I have just printed, and which

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 611 Emerson answered Ware on 8 October. Assuming a non- confrontational stance, he wrote, “If it assails any doctrine of mine,—perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers generally,—certainly I did not feel any disposition to de- part from my habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst I say mine.” Suggesting that his address was being misinterpreted already, he went on, “In the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers.”45 His disinclination to engage in the debate he had sparked prompted Emerson to reflect in his journal that “every word, every striking word that occurs in the pages of an original genius will provoke attack & be the subject of twenty pamphlets & a hundred paragraphs. . . . Let him not be misled to give it any more than the notice due from him, viz. just that which it had in his first page, before the controversy” (JMN, 7:117–18). In illustrating the shortcomings of the Christian ministry and proposing a remedy in the “Divinity School Address,” Emerson had accomplished all that he had intended when he accepted the invitation from the class of 1838; he did not need nor did he care to participate in the religious firestorm that ensued. Others, however, had no such reservations. When Norton renewed his attack on Emerson in an address delivered to the alumni of Harvard Divinity School a year after Emerson had

I am unwilling should fall into your hands without a word from myself accompanying it. It has been regarded as controverting some positions taken by you at various times, and was, indeed, written partly with a view to them. But I am anxious to have it understood, that, as I am not perfectly aware of the precise nature of your opinions on the subject of the discourse, nor upon exactly what speculations they are grounded, I do not, therefore, pretend especially to enter the lists with them, but rather to give my own views of an important subject, and of the evils which seem to be attendant on a rejection of the established opinions” (3 October 1838, quoted in Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 72). 45Emerson to Ware, 8 October 1838, quoted in Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 73. William Ellery Channing conﬁrmed that Emerson’s views were being misinterpreted. Speaking of Ware’s “The Personality of the Deity,” he said, “He is ﬁghting with a shadow, for Mr. Emerson expressly says, and makes a great point of it, that God is alive and not dead” (quoted in Peabody, Reminiscences of Channing, p. 379).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY given his graduation speech, Emerson’s friends rushed to his defense.46 In pamphlets, newspapers, and sermons, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and James Freeman Clarke took up the debate where Emerson was content to leave it. While the subsequent pamphlet wars regarding miracles, the personality of God, authority, and interpretation helped to immortalize the “Divinity School Address,” they also drew attention away from the original context of the speech. Much has been written about the general reception and outcomes of the published address, but the seven seniors for whom it was originally intended have been almost entirely neglected. Reﬂecting on the impact of the address one hundred years after its delivery, Trueblood devotes not even a full paragraph to two of the students before dismissing them all as not “especially fertile soil.”47 They deserve a closer look. Inﬂuence Ironically, the clearest call for investigating the seven graduating seniors may come from Norton, whose “The New School in Literature and Religion” can be considered the opening shot in the pamphlet war that was ultimately to divert attention away from the original context of Emerson’s address. In staunchly de- fending the Unitarian establishment, Norton accuses Emerson of having neither appreciation nor respect for the circumstances of the speech:

But what his opinions may be is a matter of minor concern; the main question is how it has happened, that religion has been insulted by the delivery of these opinions in the Chapel of the Divinity College at Cambridge, as the last instruction which those were to receive, who were going forth from it, bearing the name of christian preachers.48

Norton is doubly distressed. First, it appalls him that Har- vard generally, or the Divinity School speciﬁcally, might be

46Andrews Norton, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Inﬁdelity, Delivered at the Request of the “Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School,” on the 19th of July, 1839 (Cambridge: John Owen, 1839). 47Trueblood, “Inﬂuence of Emerson’s Address,” pp. 42–43, 56. 48Norton, “The New School,” pp. 34–35.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 613 associated with Emerson’s speech or perceived as endorsing it. In fact, it would be decades before Harvard would allow Emerson to speak there again. Second, he worries about the long-term effects that Emerson’s “last instruction” might have upon the graduating seniors preparing to enter into their min- istries. Eager to distance the institution from Emerson, Norton emphasizes that it was not the faculty who had invited him but the graduating seniors. In doing so, Norton argues, they had become “accessories, perhaps innocent accessories, to the commission of a great offence,” and he demands to know “what exculpation or excuse they can offer.”49 The faculty had learned their lesson; it would be years before the students once more enjoyed the right to select their own commencement speaker. Norton’s indictment alone warrants an examination of the individual members of the graduating class. Are they innocent and impressionable, as he suggests on the one hand, or com- plicit and culpable, as he intimates on the other? He demands that they answer for themselves, and their lives are the only account they can give at this historical distance. Of the seven seniors who graduated from Harvard Divin- ity School in 1838, the three most likely to have been “innocent accessories” to Emerson’s heresy were Theodore Haskell Dorr (1815–76), Crawford Nightingale (1816–92), and Fred- erick Augustus Whitney (1812–80). Four letters regarding the commencement address were sent to Emerson on behalf of the class of 1838: the initial invitation to speak (21 March), a letter requesting his manuscript (16 July), a note thanking him (19 July), and a letter indicating that the students had de- cided to print and circulate 300 copies of the address (20 July). Although three of the letters carried multiple signatures, Dorr and Nightingale signed none of them. Whitney signed only the letter requesting the manuscript (Letters, 2:144, 147n). Whether these three simply did not know Emerson as well as the others, objected to his ideas, or simply were un- available or uninterested when the letters were written is unclear.

49Norton, “The New School,” p. 35.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 614 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY All three were ordained as Unitarian ministers and remained in New England throughout the course of their lives. Dorr, ordained on 28 May 1839, married Nancy Caroline Richards two days later. He served, in turn, churches in the Massachusetts towns of Billerica, East Lexington, Winchendon, and Sherborn. He apparently suffered from mental illness and died in an asy- lum “in a very excited state and full of delusions.”50 Nightin- gale, ordained on 7 November 1838, was pastor of a church in Cabotville, Massachusetts, and, while there, married Mary Hoyt Williams. He subsequently ministered to a number of other congregations and was a missionary before retiring in Dorchester, Massachusetts. While visiting Providence, Rhode Island, he stepped in front of a cable car, which, because he had lost his hearing, he did not know was approaching, and was killed. In some reminiscences published posthumously, Nightingale recalls that Emerson once stayed at his home when lecturing in Groton, Massachusetts. The reﬂection is ﬂattering to Emerson, but it focuses almost entirely on the quotidian— Emerson’s interest in the names of the dolls of Nightingale’s daughter and the architecture of the Nightingale home.51 Whitney was ordained on 21 February 1844, in Brighton, Massachusetts, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He married Elizabeth Perkins Matchett on 11 January 1853, and he retired from preaching to focus on writing history in 1858. He published several biographies and town histories before his death in 1881.52 Though the evidence in extant records is far from conclusive, these three members of the graduating class seem, among their

50Biographical material is drawn from General Catalogue of the Divinity School of Harvard University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), p. 52,andCharles Horatio Gates, Memorials of the Class of 1835, Harvard University (Boston: David Clapp & Son, 1886), p. 22. 51Biographical material is drawn from General Catalogue, p. 52, and Samuel Abbott Green, Groton Historical Series: A Collection of Papers Relating to the History of the Town of Groton, Massachusetts, vol. 3 (Groton: John Wilson and Son, 1893), pp. 415–18. 52Biographical material is drawn from General Catalogue, p. 53, and Frederick Clifton Pierce, The Descendants of John Whitney, Who Came from London, England, to Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1635 (Chicago: Press of W. B. Conkey Company for the author, 1895), p. 482.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 615 peers, to have been the least affected by Emerson’s address. They may have even objected to it. The 19 July note to Emerson indicated that “some of the class did not assent to his views but that all thanked him” (Letters, 2:147n). It is signed by the three other members who attended the graduation ceremony: Simmons, Blake, and Wilson.53 Dorr and Whitney appear not to have had any connection with Emerson after graduation, and Nightingale, who respected Emerson on a personal level, did not engage with his ideas. In two pages of reminiscences, the only comment about intellectual inﬂuence is bland and remote: “However great Mr. Emerson was in his philosophy he was greater in his humanity.”54 More telling, however, is the fact that the careers of all three men remained fully within the boundaries of conservative Unitarianism. The liberal views expressed in the “Divinity School Address” never moved them to the types of nonconformity Emerson encouraged. Benjamin Fiske Barrett (1808–92) was older than the other students, closer in age to Emerson than to most of them, and he knew Emerson personally. Having been invited by the Uni- tarian Society in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to preach on four consecutive Sundays beginning on 15 July, Barrett had left Cambridge the day before Emerson delivered his address and apparently was not able to return in time to hear it. Nonethe- less, he almost certainly read it after it was published.55

53Rusk notes (Letters, 2:147n) that Simmons, Blake, and Wilson comprised the committee that had invited Emerson, possibly to explain the exclusion of other signatures, but the 16 July letter makes it clear that correspondence with Emerson on behalf of the class of 1838 was not restricted to the committee. 54Green, Groton Historical Series, 3:417. 55Biographical material is drawn from Barrett, Autobiography. Curiously, Barrett’s signature appears on a note written to Emerson on 16 July 1838 (postmarked in Boston on 17 July) on behalf of the graduating class requesting permission to print his remarks. Barrett’s autobiography suggests that, after arriving on 14 July, he remained in East Bridgewater for four weeks. Knowing in advance that he would miss Emerson’s address, Barrett may have asked that his name be included on the 16 July note. The postscript, however, calls such an assumption into question: “P. S. We have written this in haste, and have had time to present it only to the gentlemen whose names are written above.” The postscript appears below the signatures of B. F. Barrett, W. D. Wilson, H. G. O. Blake, F. A. Whitney, and R. C. Waterston (who had graduated the previous year). The signatures of B. F. Barrett, H. G. O. Blake, and W. D. Wilson appear a second time beneath the postscript. Barrett may have made the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 616 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Barrett’s decision to accept the preaching invitation and forego Emerson’s address was life changing. On the Saturday night he arrived in East Bridgewater, he and his host discussed religion. The conversation eventually turned to Swedenborgian- ism, and, recognizing how little he knew about its precepts, Barrett resolved to study the subject. The following night, he lodged with another family, which happened to own several books on the New Church, or Swedenborgianism. Possibly at the same time Emerson was delivering the “Divinity School Address,” Barrett was reading about the religion, “surprised to ﬁnd in it so little that [he] objected to, and so much that [he] could cordially accept.”56 After joining the New Church, he devoted himself to his adopted faith, becoming a Swedenborgian minister in 1840 and serving several congregations. Eventually, he founded the American New-Church Tract and Publication Society in 1864. The night of 15 July 1838 was momentous for Barrett—not because he had heard Emerson’s speech but because he had had a fortuitous conversation and read some books found in the home of a stranger. Still, Emerson was not uninvolved in Barrett’s career choice. While a student at Harvard Divinity School, Barrett had withdrawn Swedenborg’s Apocalypse Revealed from the library and begun to read it; he had done so because Emerson had personally recommended the book to him.57 Emerson’s connection with William Dexter Wilson (1816– 1900) seems to have been rather more direct. The tickets

thirty-mile trip from East Bridgewater, where he was boarding, on the morning 16 July, having fulﬁlled his Sunday obligations of the previous day. Since his name appears ﬁrst in each set of signatures and matches the hand of the rest of the note, he may have even initiated the request and collected his classmates’ signatures. This may help explain the “haste” with which the note was written and sent. In any case, Barrett was clearly interested in reading the address. Senior Class of Divinity College to Emerson, 16 July 1838, Emerson Letters from Various Correspondents, MS Am 1280 (3516), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 56Barrett, Autobiography, p. 59. 57Barrett, Autobiography, pp. 54–55. Possibly recalling Emerson’s familiarity with New Church writings, Barrett wrote to Emerson in 1860 requesting that he review a book of poetry with Swedenborgian themes written by Barrett’s friend and fellow Swedenborgian William H. Holcombe. Barrett to Emerson, 11 September 1860, Emerson Letters from Various Correspondents, MS Am 1280 (186).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 617 Wilson received in December 1837 were most likely for Emer- son’s “Human Culture” lecture series, which he first presented in Boston. According to a letter Wilson sent Emerson on 26 February, Wilson attended all of the Boston lectures and would have purchased a ticket to see Emerson again in Cambridge were it not for “circumstances not wholly within [his] control.” In the letter, Wilson reveals his profound interest in Emer- son’s thought: he asks Emerson for a reply, the manuscript of his most recent lecture, and an opportunity “to see [him] and have a conversation upon a few topics.” He reports that at Har- vard there is “an uncommon interest in philosophical inquiries” that is “growing every day,” and “it is impossible for any one attentively to read or hear [Emerson’s lectures] without being influenced for good.”58 Just a few weeks later, Emerson received the invitation to address the Divinity School’s graduating class. Given that Emerson had lectured in Cambridge the month before, other seniors may have shared Wilson’s enthu- siasm, but Wilson, no doubt, pushed hard and was primarily responsible for Emerson’s acceptance. Even after meeting all the seniors at the commencement address, Emerson sent his correspondence to the class of 1838 to Wilson. It is not surprising, then, that Emerson appears to have had a strong influence on Wilson. At least through 1840, Wilson continued to attend Emerson’s lectures, write to him, and seek his advice.59 In 1841 he wrote a brief history of Unitarian- ism, which was published in the Dial, the flagship journal of transcendentalism Emerson later edited. The article includes phrases that seem to have been lifted directly from the “Divin- ity School Address”: “more zealous and more deeply religious in their public teaching”; “breathe life into their dead formu- las”; “they must preach from a deeper religious experience.”

58Wilson to Emerson, 26 February 1838, Emerson Letters from Various Corre- spondents, MS Am 1280 (3515), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. See also Eleanor M. Tilton, “Emerson’s Lecture Schedule—1837–1838— Revised,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21.4 (1973): 389. Biographical material about Wil- son is drawn from General Catalogue, p. 53. 59Wilson to Emerson, 23 January 1840, Emerson Letters from Various Correspon- dents, MS Am 1280 (3518).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 618 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY While Wilson shared Emerson’s desire for reform in the Uni- tarian Church, he eventually pursued his own course. Both men believed that Christianity needed to be revitalized, but Wilson called for a return to doctrinal Calvinism: “Depravity, the Divinity of Christ, the Influence of the Holy Spirit, Elec- tion, Justification by Faith, will be facts of the religious life; not dogmas to be enforced upon the belief of the hearer, but the spontaneous and natural expressions of one’s own experience.”60 A year later, Wilson joined the Episcopal Church and eventually became a priest. Later in life, he accepted positions as Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Hobart College and Cornell University, and he wrote extensively on religion. Though their religious principles differed, Wilson and Emerson shared throughout their lives the conviction that religion must be experienced firsthand, not imposed by an institution. More than any other student in his class, George Frederick Simmons (1814–55) became the type of preacher Emerson called for in the “Divinity School Address.”61 Ordained in Boston on 9 October 1838, he was formally installed in the ministry earlier than his classmates, and he embraced his pro- fession with energy and passion. In 1845, he joined Emer- son’s extended family when he married Mary Emerson Ripley. Mary’s father, Samuel Ripley, was the half-brother of William Emerson Jr.62 When William died in 1811, Ripley helped care for William’s widow and her children, including young Waldo, on whom Ripley had a profound influence. He remained a caring half-uncle and mentor to Emerson, who was close to the entire Ripley family. Simmons and his wife named their third child and second son, born in 1852, Edward Emerson Simmons.

60William Dexter Wilson, “The Unitarian Movement in New England,” Dial 1:4 (1841): 441. 61Biographical material is drawn from General Catalogue, p. 53, and William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit; or Commemorative Notices of Dis- tinguished Clergymen of the Unitarian Denomination in the United States (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1865), pp. 554–59. 62Samuel’s father Ezra married Phebe Bliss Emerson, Waldo’s paternal grand- mother, after the death of her ﬁrst husband, William Emerson Sr.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 619 In his 1838 address, Emerson had counseled his auditors that the “true preacher can always be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,—life passed through the fire of thought” (Works, 1:86). Simmons dealt out his life, short as it was, throughout his ministry. Immediately following his ordination, he moved to Mobile, Alabama. William Sprague, author of Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit, notes that “he felt conscience-bound to protest against the institution of Slavery; though, in doing it, he knew that he was assailing the most inveterate prejudices of the community in which he lived.” According to Sprague, Simmons’s preaching was so un- compromising that a mob formed against him and threatened his life. After being driven from the South in 1840, he returned to Massachusetts, where he again became “most zealously devoted to his work, and spent no small part of his time in pastoral visitation.”63 Although Emerson had counseled against a minister routinely visiting each family in his parish simply out of duty, the caring minister should be a true friend. Sharing his inner thoughts, emotions, and beliefs, he would develop bonds with those in his congregation while never allowing such re- lationships to weaken his convictions or his conscience. In this regard, Simmons certainly fulfilled the spirit of Emer- son’s address. He also fulfilled that spirit by seeking to improve his intellectual grasp of his calling. As Sprague commented, Simmons’s “mind was deeply exercised on some theological questions, upon which he wished to bestow more attention than would consist with what he considered due from him to his pastoral charge.”64 Accordingly, he resigned from his pulpit and traveled to Europe to study. Upon returning to the United States, he became a pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he upset his congregation in 1851 by preaching two sermons that defended British abolitionist George Thompson and con- demned the Springfield mob that had threatened him. George Spring Merriam writes of that occasion that when “the pastor of the Unitarian church, Rev. George Simmons, spoke manfully

63Sprague, Annals, p. 555. 64Sprague, Annals, p. 555.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 620 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for the rights of free speech, it cost him his dismissal from the parish.”65 Simmons died just a few years later from typhus fever. As accounts of his life demonstrate, he, like Emerson, refused to do anything in his office of a minister unless he could do it with his “whole heart.” If Simmons captured the essential spirit of Emerson’s address through his preaching, Harrison Gray Otis Blake (1816– 98) manifested that same spirit through his secular pursuits.66 Of all of the graduates of 1838, with the possible exception of Simmons, Blake came to know Emerson most closely. He first visited Emerson’s home in November 1838, shortly after which Emerson sent him tickets to the “Human Life” lecture series (JMN, 12:266). During the course of one of his many visits to the Emersons (JMN, 7:147n), Blake was introduced to Thoreau, subsequently becoming one of his most devoted disciples and closest associates. The two exchanged numerous letters, and after Thoreau’s death, Blake became his literary executor, in which capacity he edited and wrote introductions to many of Thoreau’s works. Because Blake was an ardent transcendentalist and so close to Thoreau and Emerson, tracing the specific influence the “Divinity School Address” may have had on him is quite difficult. It is clear, however, that it did in fact make an impression, and a lasting one at that. A month before he died in 1898, Blake was asked to write an autobiographical letter. In it he comments, “It is interesting to me to remember thatI...wasoneoftheclasswhoinvitedMr.Emersonto address us in that year [1838].”67 Sixty years after Blake heard the “Divinity School Address,” it still came to mind as one of the more significant events of his life. Daniel Gregory Mason explains that, early in his career, Blake “diverged from the conventional and empty forms of religion, though certainly he had already begun to develop the

65George Spring Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, 2 vols. (New York: Century Company, 1885), 1:96. 66Biographical material is drawn from General Catalogue, p. 52, and Daniel Gregory Mason, “Harrison G. O. Blake, ’35, and Thoreau,” Harvard Monthly, May 1898, pp. 87–95. 67Quoted in Mason, “Harrison G. O. Blake,” p. 88.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 621 essentially religious idealism of thought which afterwards became so dominant in his whole mental attitude.”68 After he graduated, he preached for about one year, apparently without being ordained. In a 17 July 1839 letter to Emerson, Blake shared some of his reservations about the Christian ministry, admitting that hearing Emerson’s address had had an effect on his views (Letters, 2:212n). In his reply, Emerson acknowledged the challenges facing Blake and encouraged him in his vocation, reemphasizing the need for religious self-reliance (Letters, 7:351–53). Eventually Blake chose, out of principle like Emer- son, to give up formal preaching. An obituary in the Worcester Gazette suggests that Blake’s religious views were “too far in advance of his time.”69 Mason writes, “That he had the courage of his convictions he had shown already when he retired from the ministry on the threshold of his career, and he kept on showing it, and earning peace by it, even until the end.”70 Twentieth-century critic Walter Harding goes even further, claiming unequivocally that it was the “Divinity School Ad- dress,” speciﬁcally, that encouraged Blake to quit the ministry: “after hearing Emerson’s address, [Blake] began to question some of the dogmas of the church and ended by resigning his pastorate.”71 Though he felt he could not be a member of the new generation of preachers who were to breathe new life into old forms, Blake nevertheless lived out Emerson’s charge to cast away conformity in religious exercise and trust himself. After leaving the ministry, Blake became an instructor in a girls’ school. Even though his vocation had become not preaching but teaching, it still bore the marks of Emerson’s advice. Mason characterizes Blake’s teaching style as “markedly individual in character, bringing into play much magnetism and

68Mason, “Harrison G. O. Blake,” p. 88. 69Quoted in Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick, eds., Toward the Making of Thoreau’s Modern Reputation: Selected Correspondence of S. A. Jones, A. W. Hosmer, H.S.Salt,H.G.O.Blake,andD.Ricketson(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 7. 70Mason, “Harrison G. O. Blake,” p. 90. 71Walter Harding, The Days of Henry David Thoreau: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 231.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 622 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY tact, and suiting itself in each case to the demands of the particular temperament.”72 Emerson had counseled, “Let their [parishioners’] timid aspirations ﬁnd in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere” (Works, 1:90). Even more important, he had warned them against rigid, formulaic preaching. Blake’s personalized teaching and attention to his audience, even in a school setting, indicate that he had taken Emerson’s lessons to heart.

Conclusion Notwithstanding the difficulty of determining with absolute precision the influence that the “Divinity School Address” alone had on the seven graduating seniors of the Harvard Divinity School class of 1838, emphasizing their lives and careers refocuses attention on the primary audience and purpose of the address. Doing so reveals that Emerson was not ready to dismiss Christianity in July 1838. “What greater calamity can fall upon the nation,” he asks the Divinity Hall audience, “than the loss of worship?” (Works, 1:88–89). Writing in 1879,just after Emerson had been invited back to Harvard Divinity School to speak once again, Elizabeth Peabody claims that “Mr. Emerson has never lost his spiritual identification with Christ, but preached him better than he knew perhaps.”73 The “Divinity School Address” certainly was not an “open declara- tion of war against Revealed or Historical Religion,” nor was it intended to be “entirely destructive of all faith.”74 Emerson was too sensitive to his immediate audience to use them as an excuse to launch an attack, and in that audience rested his highest hopes for religious reform. Examining the individual members of the graduating class also highlights Emerson’s tendency to take under his wing individuals embarking on their careers. Indeed, the “Divinity

72Mason, “Harrison G. O. Blake,” p. 89. 73Peabody, Reminiscences of Channing, p. 373. 74Samuel Osgood to J. F. Clarke, 4 September 1838, quoted in Robert D. Habich, “Emerson’s Reluctant Foe: Andrews Norton and the Transcendental Controversy,” New England Quarterly 65.2 (1992): 224.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00321 by guest on 28 September 2021 SEVEN SENIORS AND EMERSON 623 School Address” deserves to be remembered as an early and significant example of Emerson’s lifelong commitment to mentoring. The most obvious example of such a commitment is his relationship with Thoreau, but Emerson spent his life meeting and corresponding with intellectually curious younger Americans and offering them his encouragement. As Buell writes, “Throughout his career, Emerson liberally dispensed advice about books and writing to those who sought him out, from former pupils he had taught in Uncle Samuel Ripley’s school to the numerous aspiring young writers who sought his guidance or patronage.”75 As an instance of encouragement and advice at the outset of his career, the “Divinity School Ad- dress” anticipates Emerson’s mentoring relationship with Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Emma Lazarus, and others. Emerson’s commitment in all cases to voicing the truth as he saw it could at times strain his relationship with those he hoped to help, but it is also clear that their particular goals and needs could also shape his message, as it had when he addressed the seniors. But, of course, his message also influenced them. Notwith- standing the challenges of determining exact influence, it would be imprudent to suggest that the address had no impact on Dorr, Nightingale, Whitney, Barrett, Wilson, Simmons, and Blake. They responded in their letters, and they responded in their lives. Though he did not agree with Emerson’s views, G. T. Davis recognized that the “young men [of Harvard Divinity School] have grown weary of leading strings.”76 While some may not have accepted Emerson’s opinions, instead casting out the reassuring anchors of established or common religious practices, others recognized in the address an invitation to sever the lines that tied them to those anchors. Despite the important place that it holds in America’s intellectual, literary, and religious history, the “Divinity School Address” was also, despite

75Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 293. 76G. T. Davis, “Review of Divinity School Address,” Boston Morning Post, 31 August 1838, in Myerson, Emerson and Thoreau, p. 41.

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Jeremy Leatham is a Ph.D. student in American literature at Baylor University. His academic interests include American intellectual, cultural, and religious history and literature of the American frontier. He teaches composition, participates in various writing groups, and works as a researcher and editor for an online encyclopedia of world religions.

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