"The highest is present to the soul of man; the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or power, or beauty, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and by which they are. Believe that throughout nature spirit is present; that it is one, that it does not act upon us from without, but through ourselves.... As a plant on the earth, so man rests on the bosom of God, nourished by unfailing fountains, and drawing at his need inexhaustible power."
And so in his poem called "The Problem" he teaches that all religions are from God; that all the prophets and sibyls and lofty souls that have sung psalms, written scripture, and built the temples and cathedrals of men, were inspired by a spirit above their own. He puts aside the shallow explanation that any of the great religions ever came from priestcraft:—
"Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,
The canticles of love and woe.
"The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the moving wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost."
In all that Emerson says of nature he is equally devout. He sees God in it all. It is to him full of a divine charm. "In the woods," he says, "is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reigns, and we return to reason and faith." "The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part and particle of God." For saying such things as these he was accused of Pantheism. And he was a Pantheist; yet only as Paul was a Pantheist when he said, "In Him we live and move and have our being;" "From whom and through whom are all things;" "The fullness of him who filleth all in all." Emerson was, in his view of nature, at one with Wordsworth, who said:—
"The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces he could read
Unutterable love. Sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."
Emerson has thus been to our day the prophet of God in the soul, in nature, in life. He has stood for spirit against matter. Darwin, his great peer, the serene master in the school of science, was like him in this,—that he also said what he saw and no more. He also taught what God showed to him in the outward world of sense, as Emerson what God showed in the inward world of spirit. Amid the stormy disputes of their time, each of these men went his own way, his eye single and his whole body full of light. The work of Darwin was the easier, for he floated with the current of the time, which sets at present so strongly toward the study of things seen and temporal. But the work of Emerson was more noble, for he stands for things unseen and eternal,—for a larger religion, a higher faith, a nobler worship. This strong and tender soul has done its work and gone on its way. But he will always fill a niche of the universal Church as a New England prophet. He had the purity of the New England air in his moral nature, a touch of the shrewd Yankee wit in his speech, and the long inheritance of ancestral faith incarnate and consolidated in blood and brain. But to this were added qualities which were derived from some far-off realm of human life: an Oriental cast of thought, a touch of mediæval mysticism, and a vocabulary brought from books unknown to our New England literature. No commonplaces of language are to be found in his writings, and though he read the older writers, he does not imitate them. He, also, like his humble-bee, has gathered contributions from remotest fields, and enriched our language with a new and picturesque speech all his own.
Let us, then, be grateful for this best of God's gifts,—another soul sent to us filled with divine light. Thus we learn anew how full are nature and life of God:—
"Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation;
From the heart of God proceeds
A single will, a million deeds."