EMERSON. II. IN normal development one outgrows Idealism. Youth is a poet impulsive and Utopian; middle age is exuberant but realistic; the poetry of old men is in their lives rather than in their verses. Both truth and moderation come only with experience. It is for this reason that Emerson is the delight of young men. The readers of Swedenborg are men who have left behind them their years of adolescence. Youth can indeed "build its transcendental world," and in the glow of enthusiasm dream on for a time, all unconscious of the thousand teachings of Christianity gained through home influences, school-training and innumerable societarian agencies. These may even be constrained awhile to foster and nourish a faith alien to their own nature. But the time should nevertheless come when illusions must go. Family cares, faithless friends, illness, trade reverses, misfortunes in varied guise, assert their presence, and man is forced at last to realise to himself the instability of that self-built transcendental world he had fondly believed rested upon eternal foundations. "We are strangers and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding!" At such a time that soul fares best who knows the Divine Father as the infinitely Compassionating One. In the Christhood of God it finds peace. Shall we accept Emerson's assurance that such longing to know is in vain? Nay, rather will we say, as he himself says of another class of facts, "We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds the order of things can satisfy." In other words, we must believe in the possibility of entering intellectually into the things of Faith. The New Jerusalem is received, not self-built. It is then that the light of disillusion destroys the cherished visions of proprium. But it reveals a new heaven and earth, compared with which youth's imagined transcendentalism of yore is but faint and limited mirage. God is then no longer thought of as a stream of influences, a tendency, a cosmic force: He is known to rational intuition as the Divine-Human Lord. As with the individual so with society. Civilization is at present 1 Emerson's Works (2 vols., London, 1868), vol. ii. p. 140. in à condition of arrested development. Thus for the few who get beyond the stage of transcendentalism, thousands ere reaching it break down into absolute materialism; while nearer stands scepticism, which will only question, and ritualism, which dares not search. "The world lieth in darkness," and the doctrines of the New Jerusalem shine like a broken fringe of glory upon Christendom's dark theological disc. Agonized with doubts respecting God, revelation and the future life, Christendom looks helplessly around, her feet entangled amidst innumerable obstacles of traditionalism and sin. Emerson upbraids her. "You have lost faith in the Divine!" he says. But he too is found to be powerless for spiritual emancipation. As we now proceed to show, his transcendentalism is after all mere naturalism, sporting indeed at times in religion's disguise, yet ever apt, through its irreligious phantasmagoria, to mislead both its neighbour and itself. Some brief statements in proof of this. 66 I. Consider, for example, his idea of Our FATHER in Heaven. "The soul is not a compensation, but a life," says he. "The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence" (i. p. 52). Here Emerson comes nearer fact than in any of his other definitions of what he means by God," yet if "the acknowledgment of God arising from a true knowledge of Him, constitute the essence and soul of every part of theology," 1 one sees little possibility of clear knowledge here. "Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul," he elsewhere writes. "The simplest person, who, in his integrity, worships God becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable" (i. p. 122). Such Pantheism offers no ground of content for hearts burdened with the sense of sin. A philosopher comfortably located upon his own broad acres may not care, perhaps, to look deeper into the matter than this: but imagine his disciples taking such thoughts into our densely-crowded cities, and preaching them there as the Everlasting Gospel! What man, what class of men, could be supposed to win a glow of emotion from hymnings like the following: 1 Swedenborg, T. C. R. 5. "Silent rushes the swift Lord Through ruined systems still restored, Lost in God, in Godhead found" (i. p. 493). In one place Emerson speaks approvingly of Sabbath and preaching, but when he asks, "In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking for ever the soul of God?" (ii. 197)—when he asks, “Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit ?" (ii. 228)-when he tells us that "the contest between the Future and the Past is one between Divinity entering and Divinity departing," and that "nothing but God will expel God" (ii. 268)-when he invites us to "build altars to the Beautiful Necessity," to "build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution" (ii. 328); we may well refer him to the scene of old when "Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are rather superstitious. For, as I was passing along, and was looking at your objects of worship, I found also an altar on which was written, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD." To Emerson God was infinite and impersonal. II. The doctrine of God Incarnate Emerson utterly repudiates. "Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue is not that mine? His wit-if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit" (i. 53). With greater transcendental coarseness, he says on another occasion: "This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside" (i. 29). The contradiction underlying the two passages argues no small degree of indifference, and accounts for the powerlessness of transcendentalism as an influence for propagandism. There is not the example and power of the real Christ-life. III. Having no clear idea of God, Emerson could not but doubt respecting the Future Life. "I cannot tell," he says, "if these won derful faculties which house to-day in this mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you ; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the universe; before the world was, they were" (ii. 234). Poor Shelley, in the saddest verse of his " Adonais," did not sink so low as this! The crude doctrine of the transmigration of souls lies half suspected there: we transcend nearly nineteen hundred years of progress, and go back in thought to Jerusalem of old, when the question was asked, 'Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? When we read of Rabelais dying, three centuries ago, with the sad words upon his lips, Je vais chercher le grand Peut-être / when we read of Montaigne, some years later, giving utterance, in the hour of death, to the sceptical Que sçais-je ?2 we think of the Dark Ages, on whose confines these men lived, but that the father of a nineteenth-century philosophy should, in a matter of such solemn import, be no nearer the light is indeed passing strange. A still greater marvel is that he should feel at rest thus. IV. The Bible, as containing a special divine revelation, is ignored. "See," exclaims Emerson, "what strong intellects dare not yet hear God Himself, unless He speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives" (i. 29). Time, we may safely say, will be its own vindicator here: men who read David, Jeremiah, and Paul, through ages to come, will find this negational transcendentalism mere Dead-Sea fruit. On another occasion Emerson writes: "If a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak, which is its fulness and completion?" (i. 28). Shall we then say Emerson is the oak whereof Isaiah was the acorn? As well call darkness the noontide of sunlight, or confound the Paradise of the heart with the unrest of the "Everlasting No." V. A confusion of thought as to the essential nature and the final issues of right and wrong conduct is a peculiarity of this transcendentalism. "The carrion in the sun," says Emerson, "will convert itself to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or 1 I am going in quest of the great Perhaps ! What do I know? jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true" (i. 331). Vive la Commune! where a government succumbs to the principle underlying this statement. To declare that that "From world to world the Godhead changes," 66 "Alike to him the better, the worse,— The glowing angel, the outcast corse" (i. 431), "That night or day, that love or crime, Leads all souls to the Good" (i. 546)— this is indeed to confirm another saying of the same writer's: "There is a crack in everything God has made" (i. 46). An impersonal God (i. 116); a Christless world; a perhaps in regard to the soul's immortality; a doubt as to the essential difference between right and wrong; a Church without a Bible,—such is the outcome of this muchbelauded transcendentalism! On getting near the idol we see it is only an idol! As keenest satire upon the entire system falls Emerson's own words in his song to the "World-Soul:" "Alas! the sprite that haunts us deceives our rash desire; It whispers of the glorious gods, and leaves us in the mire. We cannot learn the cipher that's writ upon our cell; Stars help us by a mystery which we could never spell" (i. 406). Emerson's lecture on Swedenborg in his "Representative Men" did good service in the way of drawing public attention to the Swedish philosopher. The latter's works, however, had unfortunately been examined from a scientific standpoint and with a Unitarian bias: thus much of the good that should have followed from the publicity given was neutralized by serious misinterpretations. As the lecture still goes uncorrected, there may be a use in pointing out some of these shortcomings. I. The fact of Swedenborg's intercourse with spirits is denied. As a delusion it is accounted for in this way:- Whatever he some excessive determination to form in his constitution, he saw, not saw, through abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events" (i. 323). But,-remembering that Swedenborg was clearly under no mental derangement in his ordinary relations with statesmen, scientists, the Court of Sweden, and the public generally during this period, is it not more probable that he had such spiritual intercourse, than that the other-world memorabilia of some twenty-seven years of active life, and covering thousands of pages, should be altogether a de |