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XI

The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably of our time also, I fancy, could make very little of Emerson’s religion. It was the religion of the spirit and not of the utilitarian and matter-of-fact understanding. It identified man with God and made all nature symbolical of the spirit. He was never tired of repeating that all true prayers answered themselves–the spirit which the act of prayer begets in one’s self is the answer. Your prayer for humility, for charity, for courage, begets these emotions in the mind. The devout asking comes from a perception of their value. Hence the only real prayers are for spiritual good. We converse with spiritual and invisible things only through the medium of our own hearts. The preliminary attitude of mind that moves us to face in this direction is the blessing. The soldier who, on the eve of battle, prays for courage, has already got what he asks for. Prayer for visible, material good is infidelity to the moral law. God is within you, more your better self than you are. Many prayers are a rattling of empty husks. Emerson says the wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

Although Emerson broke away from all religious forms, yet was there something back of them that he always respected, as do we all. He relates that one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his chamber after midnight, claiming a share in it. “But after his lamp had smoked the chamber full, and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, and made in low whispers a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed between us. I fretted no more, but respected and liked him.”

Contrasting his own case with that of so many young men who owed their religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public institutions, he says: “How much happier was my star which rained on me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was itself a culture, an education.”

XII

A course of ten lectures which he delivered in Boston in February, 1840, on the “Present Age” gave him little pleasure. He could not warm up, get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: “A cold mechanical preparation for a delivery as decorous,–fine things, pretty things, wise things,–but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment.” Because he lacked constitutional vigor, he could expend only, say, twenty-one hours on each lecture, if he would be able and ready for the next. If he could only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, he said, he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: “I have not yet adjusted my relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too young, or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?” Later he sighs, “If only I could be set aglow!” He had wished for a professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted from the church–something to give him the stimulus of a stated task. Some friend recommended an Abolition campaign to him: “I doubt not a course in mobs would do me good.”

Then he refers to his faults as a writer: “I think I have material enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots.”