The great sentence of the Divinity School
address, "God is, not was; he speaketh, not spake," was the
emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy of the soul's
access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand prophets in
all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School, their
eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed
Emerson's injunction to turn away from past records and
historical authorities and to drink from the living fountain of
the divine within themselves; but to the professors, "the stern
old war-gods," this relative belittlement of historical
Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before Emerson
was again welcomed by his alma mater.
The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord
Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson.
He was a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind
forbade formal, consecutive, logical thought. He was not a
philosopher in the accepted sense, though he was always
philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite of his curious
searchings in the realm of metaphysics.
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