Yet, though we have known Mr. Emerson personally ever since 1836, have held more than one conversation with him, listened to several courses of lectures from him, and read and even studied the greater part, if not all of his works, as they issued from the press, we must confess that, in reperusing them preparatory to writing this brief notice, we have been struck, as we never were before, with the depth and breadth of his thought, as well as with the singular force and beauty of his expression. We appreciate him much higher both as a thinker and as an observer, and we give him credit for a depth of feeling, an honesty of purpose, an earnest seeking after truth, we had not previously awarded him in so great a degree, either publicly or privately. We are also struck with his near approach to the truth as we are taught it. He seems to us to come as near to the truth as one can who is so unhappy as to miss it.
We regard it as Mr. Emerson's great misfortune, that his early Protestant training led him to regard the Catholic question as res adjucata, and to take Protestantism, in some one or all of its forms, as the truest and best exponent of Christianity. Protestantism is narrow, superficial, unintellectual, vague, indefinite, sectarian, and it was easy for a mind like his to pierce through its hollow pretensions, to discover its unspiritual character, its want of life, its formality, and its emptiness. It was not difficult to comprehend that it was only a dead corse, and a mutilated corse at that. The Christian mysteries it professed to retain, as it held them, were lifeless dogmas, with no practical bearing on life, and no reason in the world for believing them. Such a system, having no relation with the living and moving world, and no reason in the nature or constitution of things, could not satisfy a living and thinking man, in downright earnest for a truth at least as broad and as living as his own soul. It was too little, too insignificant, too mesquine, too much of a dead and putrefying body to satisfy either his intellect or his heart. If that is the true exponent of Christianity, and the most enlightened portion of mankind say it is, why shall I belie my own understanding, my own better nature, by professing to believe and reverence it? No; let me be a man, be true to myself, to my own reason and instincts, not a miserable time-server or a contemptible hypocrite.
If Mr. Emerson had not been led to regard the Catholic question as closed, except to the dwellers among tombs, and to the ignorant and superstitious, and had studied the church with half the diligence he has Plato, Mohammed, or Swedenborg, it is possible that he would have found in Christianity the life and truth, the reality, unity, and catholicity he has so long and so earnestly sought elsewhere and found not. Certain it is, that whatever affirmative truth he holds is held and taught by the church in its proper place, its real relations, and in its integrity. The church does not live in the past nor dwell only among tombs; she is an ever-present and ever-living church, and presents to us not a dead historical Christ, but the ever-living and ever-present Christ, as really and truly present to us as he was to the disciples and apostles with whom he conversed when he went about in Judea doing good, without having where to lay his head, and not more veiled from our sight now than he was then from theirs. Does she not hold the sublime mystery of the Real Presence, which, if an individual fact, is also a universal principle?
The Christian system, if we may so speak, is not an after-thought in creation, or something superinduced on the Creator's works. It has its ground and reason in the very constitution of things. All the mysteries taught or dogmas enjoined by the church are universal principles; they are truly catholic, the very principles according to which the universe, visible or invisible, is constructed, and not one of them can be denied without denying a first principle of life and of science. Mr. Emerson says, in a passage we have quoted, "All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature," and seems to concede that it has not yet succeeded in finding it. The church goes beyond even the aim of science, and gives, at least professes to give, not a theory of truth, but the truth itself; she is not a method, but that to which the true method leads. She is the body of Him who is "the way, the truth, and the life;" she gives us, not as the philosophers, her views of the truth, but the truth itself, in its reality, its unity, its integrity, its universality, its immutability. At least such is her profession; for the faith she teaches is the substance—hypostasis—of the things to be hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen—substantia sperandarum, argumentum non apparentium.
Such being her profession, made long before Protestantism was born, and continued to be made since with no stammering tongue or abatement of confidence, the pretence that judgment has gone against her is unfounded. Many have condemned her, as the Jewish Sanhedrim condemned our Lord, and called on the Roman Procurator to execute judgment against him; but she has no more staid condemned than he staid confined in the new tomb hewn from the rock in which his body was laid, and far more are they who admit her professions among the enlightened and civilized than they who deny them. No man has a right to be regarded as a philosopher or sage who has not at least thoroughly examined her titles, and made up his mind with a full knowledge of the cause.
In the Catholic Church we have found the real presence, and unity, and catholicity which we sought long and earnestly, and could find nowhere else, and which Mr. Emerson, after a still longer and equally earnest search, has not found at all. He looks not beyond nature, and nature is not catholic, universal, or the whole. It is not one, but manifold and variable. It cannot tell its origin, medium, or end. With all the light Mr. Emerson has derived from nature, or from nature and soul united, there is infinite darkness behind, infinite darkness before, and infinite darkness all around him. He says, "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic of those inquiries he would put." Suppose it is so, what avail is that to him who has lost or never had the key to the hieroglyph? Knows he to interpret the hieroglyph in which the solution is concealed? Can he read the riddle of the sphinx? He has tried his hand at it in his poem of the Sphinx, and has only been able to answer that
"Each answer is a lie."
It avails us little to be told where the solution is, if we are not told what it is, or if only told that every solution is false as soon as told. Hear him; to man he says,
"Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie:
So take thy quest through nature,
It through a thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply."
The answer, if it means any thing, means that man is "a clothed eternity," whatever that may mean, eternally seeking an answer to the mystery of his own being, and each answer he can obtain is a lie; for only eternity can comprehend eternity and tell what it is. Whence has he learned that man, the man-child, is "a clothed eternity," and therefore God, who only is eternal?