Emerson's withdrawal from the pulpit. Theodore German philosophy in New England. ity, to maintain that we are conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our own immortality, or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He announced truths, his method was that of the seer, not of the disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman and descended from eight generations of clergymen, had resigned the pastorate of the Second Church of Boston because he could not conscientiously administer the sacrament of the communion-which he regarded as a mere act of commemoration-in the sense in which it was understood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of "lay preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a church. The representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal following. The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called after him, "Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to "fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons, was stigmatized as a "boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's "Remarks on a National Literature," quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on British literature. And, in fact, German literature began, not long after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an American edition of Carlyle's "Miscellanies," including his essays on German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In 1838 Ripley began George to publish "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," "Specimens of Foreign which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of Standard translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected, he was helped by Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had more or less connection with the transcendental movement. The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on "The Transcendentalist," 1842, is as follows: "What is popularly called transcendentalism among us is idealism. The idealism of the present day acquired the name of transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them transcendental forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble doubt of idealism." He calls the universe a shade, Ripley's Literature." Transcendentalism a form of idealism. Emerson an idealist. The "Oversoul." Emerson's "The Transcendentalist." a dream, "this great apparition." "It is a sufficient ac- |