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LECTURE ON THE TIMES .............................................................................................................................1

Ralph Waldo Emerson.............................................................................................................................1

The times, as we say or the present aspects of our social state, theral Science, Agriculture, Art, Trade,

Letters, have their root in an invisible spiritual reality. To appear in these aspects, they must first exist, or

have some necessary foundation. Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the

existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable, often unsuspected behind it in

silence. The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents

to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is

building up the Future. The Times the nations, manners, institutions, opinions, votes, are to be studied as

omens, as sacred leaves, whereon a weighty sense is inscribed, if we have the wit and the love to search it

out. Nature itself seems to propound to us this topic, and to invite us to explore the meaning of the

conspicuous facts of the day. Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of the

philosopher: and this for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it

Here is very good matter to be handled, if we are skilful; an abundance of important practical questions which

it behoves us to understand. Let us examine the pretensions of the attacking and defending parties. Here is

this great fact of Conservatism, entrenched in its immense redoubts, with Himmaleh for its front, and Atlas

for its flank, and Andes for its rear, and the Atlantic and Pacific seas for its ditches and trenches, which has

planted its crosses, and crescents, and stars and stripes, and various signs and badges of possession, over

every rood of the planet, and says, `I will hold fast; and to whom I will, will I give; and whom I will, will I

exclude and starve:' so says Conservatism; and all the children of men attack the colossus in their youth, and

all, or all but a few, bow before it when they are old. A necessity not yet commanded, a negative imposed on

the will of man by his condition a deficiency in his force, is the foundation on which it rests. Let this side be

fairly stated. Meantime, on the other part, arises Reform, and offers the sentiment of Love as an overmatch to

this material might. I wish to consider well this affirmative side, which has a loftier port and reason than

heretofore, which encroaches on the other every day, puts it out of countenance, out of reason, and out of

The fact of aristocracy, with its two weapons of wealth and manners, is as commanding a feature of the

nineteenth century, and the American republic, as of old Rome, or modern England. The reason and influence

of wealth, the aspect of philosophy and religion, and the tendencies which have acquired the name of

Transcendentalism in Old and New England; the aspect of poetry, as the exponent and interpretation of these

things; the fuller development and the freer play of Character as a social and political agent; these and

But the subject of the Times is not an abstract question. We talk of the world, but we mean a few men and

women. If you speak of the age, you mean your own platoon of people, as Milton and Dante painted in

colossal their platoons, and called them Heaven and Hell. In our idea of progress, we do not go out of this

personal picture. We do not think the sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or our climate more temperate, but

only that our relation to our fellows will be simpler and happier. What is the reason to be given for this

extreme attraction which _persons_ have for us, but that they are the Age? they are the results of the Past;

they are the heralds of the Future. They indicate, these witty, suffering, blushing, intimidating figures of

the only race in which there are individuals or changes, how far on the Fate has gone, and what it drives at.

As trees make scenery, and constitute the hospitality of the landscape, so persons are the world to persons. A

cunning mystery by which the Great Desart of thoughts and of planets takes this engaging form, to bring, as it

would seem, its meanings nearer to the mind. Thoughts walk and speak, and look with eyes at me, and

transport me into new and magnificent scenes. These are the pungent instructors who thrill the heart of each

of us, and make all other teaching formal and cold. How I follow them with aching heart, with pining desire!

I count myself nothing before them. I would die for them with joy. They can do what they will with me. How

they lash us with those tongues! How they make the tears start, make us blush and turn pale, and lap us in

Elysium to soothing dreams, and castles in the air! By tones of triumph; of dear love; by threats; by pride that

freezes; these have the skill to make the world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem the nest of tenderness and

joy. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, when I remember what I

have experienced from the varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which

countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of supernatural powers. There is no

interest or institution so poor and withered, but if a new strong man could be born into it, he would

immediately redeem and replace it. A personal ascendency, that is the only fact much worth considering. I

remember, some years ago, somebody shocked a circle of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed that

our people were identified with their religious denominations, by declaring that an eloquent man, let him

be of what sect soever, would be ordained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. To be sure he

would; and not only in ours, but in any church, mosque, or temple, on the planet; but he must be eloquent,

able to supplant our method and classification, by the superior beauty of his own. Every fact we have was

brought here by some person; and there is none that will not change and pass away before a person, whose

nature is broader than the person which the fact in question represents. And so I find the Age walking about

in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes, and pleasant thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so,

than in the statutebook, or in the investments of capital, which rather celebrate with mournful music the

obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a fanatic; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city boys

very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised him shall be; in the

loveglance of a girl; in the hairsplitting conscientiousness of some eccentric person, who has found some

new scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal; is to be found that which shall constitute the

times to come, more than in the now organized and accredited oracles. For, whatever is affirmative and now

advancing, contains it. I think that only is real, which men love and rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but

what they choose; what they embrace and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify them.

And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery? Let us paint the painters. Whilst the Daguerreotypist,

with cameraobscura and silver plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our Camera also, and let

the sun paint the people. Let us paint the agitator, and the man of the old school, and the member of

Congress, and the collegeprofessor, the formidable editor, the priest, and reformer, the contemplative girl,

and the fair aspirant for fashion and opportunities, the woman of the world who has tried and knows; let

us examine how well she knows. Could we indicate the indicators, indicate those who most accurately

represent every good and evil tendency of the general mind, in the just order which they take on this canvass

of Time; so that all witnesses should recognise a spiritual law, as each well known form flitted for a moment

across the wall, we should have a series of sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality

Certainly, I think, if this were done, there would be much to admire as well as to condemn; souls of as lofty a

port, as any in Greek or Roman fame, might appear; men of great heart, of strong hand, and of persuasive

speech; subtle thinkers, and men of wide sympathy, and an apprehension which looks over all history, and

everywhere recognises its own. To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of men, more than enough:

bloated promises, which end in nothing or little. And then truly great men, but with some defect in their

composition, which neutralizes their whole force. Here is a Damascus blade, such as you may search through

nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village to rust and ruin. And how many seem not quite

available for that idea which they represent! Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more

surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which is much in advance of the rest, quite beyond their

sympathy, but predicts what shall soon be the general fulness; as when we stand by the seashore, whilst the

tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a long

while none comes up to that mark; but after some time the whole sea is there and beyond it.

But we are not permitted to stand as spectators of the pageant which the times exhibit: we are parties also,

and have a responsibility which is not to be declined. A little while this interval of wonder and comparison is

permitted us, but to the end that we shall play a manly part. As the solar system moves forward in the

heavens, certain stars open before us, and certain stars close up behind us; so is man's life. The reputations

that were great and inaccessible change and tarnish. How great were once Lord Bacon's dimensions! he is

now reduced almost to the middle height; and many another star has turned out to be a planet or an asteroid:

only a few are the fixed stars which have no parallax, or none for us. The change and decline of old

reputations are the gracious marks of our own growth. Slowly, like light of morning, it steals on us, the new

fact, that we, who were pupils or aspirants, are now society: do compose a portion of that head and heart we

are wont to think worthy of all reverence and heed. We are the representatives of religion and intellect, and

stand in the light of Ideas, whose rays stream through us to those younger and more in the dark. What further

relations we sustain, what new lodges we are entering, is now unknown. Today is a king in disguise.

Today always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the face of an uniform experience, that all good and great

and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank todays. Let us not be so deceived. Let us unmask the

king as he passes. Let us not inhabit times of wonderful and various promise without divining their tendency.

Let us not see the foundations of nations, and of a new and better order of things laid, with roving eyes, and

The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the party of the Future, divide society

today as of old. Here is the innumerable multitude of those who accept the state and the church from the last

generation, and stand on no argument but possession. They have reason also, and, as I think, better reason

than is commonly stated. No Burke, no Metternich has yet done full justice to the side of conservatism. But

this class, however large, relying not on the intellect but on instinct, blends itself with the brute forces of

nature, is respectable only as nature is, but the individuals have no attraction for us. It is the dissenter, the

theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who engages our

interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that the movement party

The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least in America, by their conscience and

philanthropy, occupy the ground which Calvinism occupied in the last age, and compose the visible church of

the existing generation. The present age will be marked by its harvest of projects for the reform of domestic,

civil, literary, and ecclesiastical institutions. The leaders of the crusades against War, Negro slavery,

Intemperance, Government based on force, Usages of trade, Court and Customhouse Oaths, and so on to the

agitators on the system of Education and the laws of Property, are the right successors of Luther, Knox,

Robinson, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They have the same virtues and vices; the same noble impulse,

and the same bigotry. These movements are on all accounts important; they not only check the special abuses,

but they educate the conscience and the intellect of the people. How can such a question as the Slave trade be

agitated for forty years by all the Christian nations, without throwing great light on ethics into the general

mind? The fury, with which the slavetrader defends every inch of his bloody deck, and his howling

auctionplatform, is a trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and drive all neutrals to take

sides, and to listen to the argument and the verdict. The Temperancequestion, which rides the conversation

of ten thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at every private table, drawing with it all the

curious ethics of the Pledge, of the Winequestion, of the equity of the manufacture and the trade, is a

gymnastic training to the casuistry and conscience of the time. Antimasonry had a deep right and wrong,

which gradually emerged to sight out of the turbid controversy. The political questions touching the Banks;

the Tariff; the limits of the executive power; the right of the constituent to instruct the representative; the

treatment of the Indians; the Boundary wars; the Congress of nations; are all pregnant with ethical

conclusions; and it is well if government and our social order can extricate themselves from these alembics,

and find themselves still government and social order. The student of history will hereafter compute the

singular value of our endless discussion of questions, to the mind of the period.

Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for the Better is magnified by the natural

exaggeration of its advocates, until it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons by the

unfairness of the plea, the movements are in reality all parts of one movement. There is a perfect chain,

see it, or see it not, of reforms emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing some part of the

general idea, and all must be seen, in order to do justice to any one. Seen in this their natural connection, they

are sublime. The conscience of the Age demonstrates itself in this effort to raise the life of man by putting it

in harmony with his idea of the Beautiful and the Just. The history of reform is always identical; it is the

comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect

they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments. They appear to us unfit, unworthy of the faculties we

spend on them. In conversation with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing for our employments; we

speak of them with shame. Nature, literature, science, childhood, appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily

work, not the ripe fruit and considered labors of man. This beauty which the fancy finds in everything else,

certainly accuses that manner of life we lead. Why should it be hateful? Why should it contrast thus with all

natural beauty? Why should it not be poetic, and invite and raise us? Is there a necessity that the works of

man should be sordid? Perhaps not. Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs the effort at the Perfect. It is

the interior testimony to a fairer possibility of life and manners, which agitates society every day with the

offer of some new amendment. If we would make more strict inquiry concerning its origin, we find ourselves

rapidly approaching the inner boundaries of thought, that term where speech becomes silence, and science

conscience. For the origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain of the moral sentiment in man, which,

amidst the natural, ever contains the supernatural for men. That is new and creative. That is alive. That alone

can make a man other than he is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power.

The new voices in the wilderness crying "Repent," have revived a hope, which had well nigh perished out of

the world, that the thoughts of the mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy hour, be executed by the

hands. That is the hope, of which all other hopes are parts. For some ages, these ideas have been consigned to

the poet and musical composer, to the prayers and the sermons of churches; but the thought, that they can

ever have any footing in real life, seems long since to have been exploded by all judicious persons. Milton, in

his best tract, describes a relation between religion and the daily occupations, which is true until this time.

"A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of

so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. What

should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious; fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that.

What does he, therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care

and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation

that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into

his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a

sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say, his religion is now no more

within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good man

frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at

night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey, or

some well spiced beverage, and better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on

green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer

This picture would serve for our times. Religion was not invited to eat or drink or sleep with us, or to make or

divide an estate, but was a holiday guest. Such omissions judge the church; as the compromise made with the

slaveholder, not much noticed at first, every day appears more flagrant mischief to the American constitution.

But now the purists are looking into all these matters. The more intelligent are growing uneasy on the subject

of Marriage. They wish to see the character represented also in that covenant. There shall be nothing brutal in

it, but it shall honor the man and the woman, as much as the most diffusive and universal action. Grimly the

same spirit looks into the law of Property, and accuses men of driving a trade in the great boundless

providence which had given the air, the water, and the land to men, to use and not to fence in and

monopolize. It casts its eye on Trade, and Day Labor, and so it goes up and down, paving the earth with eyes,

destroying privacy, and making thoroughlights. Is all this for nothing? Do you suppose that the reforms,

By the books it reads and translates, judge what books it will presently print. A great deal of the profoundest

thinking of antiquity, which had become as good as obsolete for us, is now reappearing in extracts and

allusions, and in twenty years will get all printed anew. See how daring is the reading, the speculation, the

experimenting of the time. If now some genius shall arise who could unite these scattered rays! And always

such a genius does embody the ideas of each time. Here is great variety and richness of mysticism, each part

of which now only disgusts, whilst it forms the sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or "Comer out," yet,

when it shall be taken up as the garniture of some profound and allreconciling thinker, will appear the rich

These reforms are our contemporaries; they are ourselves; our own light, and sight, and conscience; they only

name the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify. They are

the simplest statements of man in these matters; the plain right and wrong. I cannot choose but allow and

honor them. The impulse is good, and the theory; the practice is less beautiful. The Reformers affirm the

inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means. They do not rely on precisely that

strength which wins me to their cause; not on love, not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on

circumstances, on money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and pride. The love which lifted men to the

sight of these better ends, was the true and best distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a principle

more than a material force. I think _that_ the soul of reform; the conviction, that not sensualism, not slavery,

not war, not imprisonment, not even government, are needed, but in lieu of them all, reliance on the

sentiment of man, which will work best the more it is trusted; not reliance on numbers, but, contrariwise,

distrust of numbers, and the feeling that then are we strongest, when most private and alone. The young men,

who have been vexing society for these last years with regenerative methods, seem to have made this

mistake; they all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the Reform of Reforms must be

The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are

quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind, than the evil

tradition which they reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with

measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those,

who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, selfpleasing,

conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work of the

reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it

better. It is done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics, and clamor. It

is a buzz in the ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character.

We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers

actions, countless, endless actions. You have on some occasion played a bold part. You have set your heart

and face against society, when you thought it wrong, and returned it frown for frown. Excellent: now can you

afford to forget it, reckoning all your action no more than the passing of your hand through the air, or a little

breath of your mouth? The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast

idea. To the youth diffident of his ability, and full of compunction at his unprofitable existence, the

temptation is always great to lend himself to public movements, and as one of a party accomplish what he

cannot hope to effect alone. But he must resist the degradation of a man to a measure. I must act with truth,

though I should never come to act, as you call it, with effect. I must consent to inaction. A patience which is

grand; a brave and cold neglect of the offices which prudence exacts, so it be done in a deep, upper piety; a

consent to solitude and inaction, which proceeds out of an unwillingness to violate character, is the century

which makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to express the respect and joy I feel before this sublime

connection of reforms, now in their infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of

selfreliance. I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private

integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal

beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.

The great majority of men, unable to judge of any principle until its light falls on a fact, are not aware of the

evil that is around them, until they see it in some gross form, as in a class of intemperate men, or

slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent persons. Then they are greatly moved; and magnifying the importance

of that wrong, they fancy that if that abuse were redressed, all would go well, and they fill the land with

clamor to correct it. Hence the missionary and other religious efforts. If every island and every house had a

Bible, if every child was brought into the Sunday School, would the wounds of the world heal, and man be

But the man of ideas, accounting the circumstance nothing, judges of the commonwealth from the state of his

own mind. `If,' he says, `I am selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to establish it, wherever I go. But if I

am just, then is there no slavery, let the laws say what they will. For if I treat all men as gods, how to me can

there be such a thing as a slave?' But how frivolous is your war against circumstances. This denouncing

philanthropist is himself a slaveholder in every word and look. Does he free me? Does he cheer me? He is the

state of Georgia, or Alabama, with their sanguinary slavelaws walking here on our northeastern shores. We

are all thankful he has no more political power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves. I am afraid our virtue is a

little geographical. I am not mortified by our vice; that is obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and swears,

and I can see to the end of it; but, I own, our virtue makes me ashamed; so sour and narrow, so thin and blind,

virtue so vicelike. Then again, how trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the

circumstance of the slave. Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is no slave: you are

the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a

fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master. The exaggeration, which our young people make

of his wrongs, characterizes themselves. What are no trifles to them, they naturally think are no trifles to

We say, then, that the reforming movement is sacred in its origin; in its management and details timid and

profane. These benefactors hope to raise man by improving his circumstances: by combination of that which

is dead, they hope to make something alive. In vain. By new infusions alone of the spirit by which he is made

and directed, can he be remade and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi, who shared with all ardent spirits the

hope of Europe on the outbreak of the French Revolution, after witnessing its sequel, recorded his conviction,

that "the amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect, but can never be the means of mental and

moral improvement." Quitting now the class of actors, let us turn to see how it stands with the other class of

A new disease has fallen on the life of man. Every Age, like every human body, has its own distemper. Other

times have had war, or famine, or a barbarism domestic or bordering, as their antagonism. Our forefathers

walked in the world and went to their graves, tormented with the fear of Sin, and the terror of the Day of

Judgment. These terrors have lost their force, and our torment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we

ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we do, and the distrust that the Necessity (which we all at last

believe in) is fair and beneficent. Our Religion assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of love of the

true, we repudiate the false: and the Religion is an abolishing criticism. A great perplexity hangs like a cloud

on the brow of all cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits, which distinguishes the period.

We do not find the same trait in the Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English periods; no,

but in other men a natural firmness. The men did not see beyond the need of the hour. They planted their foot

strong, and doubted nothing. We mistrust every step we take. We find it the worst thing about time, that we

know not what to do with it. We are so sharpsighted that we can neither work nor think, neither read Plato

Then there is what is called a too intellectual tendency. Can there be too much intellect? We have never met

with any such excess. But the criticism, which is levelled at the laws and manners, ends in thought, without

causing a new method of life. The genius of the day does not incline to a deed, but to a beholding. It is not

that men do not wish to act; they pine to be employed, but are paralyzed by the uncertainty what they should

do. The inadequacy of the work to the faculties, is the painful perception which keeps them still. This

happens to the best. Then, talents bring their usual temptations, and the current literature and poetry with

perverse ingenuity draw us away from life to solitude and meditation. This could well be borne, if it were

great and involuntary; if the men were ravished by their thought, and hurried into ascetic extravagances.

Society could then manage to release their shoulder from its wheel, and grant them for a time this privilege of

sabbath. But they are not so. Thinking, which was a rage, is become an art. The thinker gives me results, and

never invites me to be present with him at his invocation of truth, and to enjoy with him its proceeding into

So little action amidst such audacious and yet sincere profession, that we begin to doubt if that great

revolution in the art of war, which has made it a game of posts instead of a game of battles, has not operated

on Reform; whether this be not also a war of posts, a paper blockade, in which each party is to display the

utmost resources of his spirit and belief, and no conflict occur; but the world shall take that course which the

But we must pay for being too intellectual, as they call it. People are not as lighthearted for it. I think men

never loved life less. I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the faces of any

population. This _Ennui_, for which we Saxons had no name, this word of France has got a terrific

significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. Old age begins in the nursery, and before the

young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, `I want something which I never saw before;' and `I

wish I was not I.' I have seen the same gloom on the brow even of those adventurers from the intellectual

class, who had dived deepest and with most success into active life. I have seen the authentic sign of anxiety

and perplexity on the greatest forehead of the state. The canker worms have crawled to the topmost bough of

the wild elm, and swing down from that. Is there less oxygen in the atmosphere? What has checked in this

But have a little patience with this melancholy humor. Their unbelief arises out of a greater Belief; their

inaction out of a scorn of inadequate action. By the side of these men, the hot agitators have a certain cheap

and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than the others. Of the two, I own, I like the speculators best. They

have some piety which looks with faith to a fair Future, unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it.

And truly we shall find much to console us, when we consider the cause of their uneasiness. It is the love of

greatness, it is the need of harmony, the contrast of the dwarfish Actual with the exorbitant Idea. No man can

compare the ideas and aspirations of the innovators of the present day, with those of former periods, without

feeling how great and high this criticism is. The revolutions that impend over society are not now from

ambition and rapacity, from impatience of one or another form of government, but from new modes of

thinking, which shall recompose society after a new order, which shall animate labor by love and science,

which shall destroy the value of many kinds of property, and replace all property within the dominion of

reason and equity. There was never so great a thought laboring in the breasts of men, as now. It almost seems

as if what was aforetime spoken fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now spoken plainly, the doctrine,

namely, of the indwelling of the Creator in man. The spiritualist wishes this only, that the spiritual principle

should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the

admission of anything unspiritual, that is, anything positive, dogmatic, or personal. The excellence of this

class consists in this, that they have believed; that, affirming the need of new and higher modes of living and

action, they have abstained from the recommendation of low methods. Their fault is that they have stopped at

the intellectual perception; that their will is not yet inspired from the Fountain of Love. But whose fault is

this? and what a fault, and to what inquiry does it lead! We have come to that which is the spring of all

power, of beauty and virtue, of art and poetry; and who shall tell us according to what law its inspirations and

I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of inferring the tendency and genius of the Age

from a few and insufficient facts or persons. Every age has a thousand sides and signs and tendencies; and it

is only when surveyed from inferior points of view, that great varieties of character appear. Our time too is

full of activity and performance. Is there not something comprehensive in the grasp of a society which to

great mechanical invention, and the best institutions of property, adds the most daring theories; which

explores the subtlest and most universal problems? At the manifest risk of repeating what every other Age

has thought of itself, we might say, we think the Genius of this Age more philosophical than any other has

been, righter in its aims, truer, with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.

But turn it how we will, as we ponder this meaning of the times, every new thought drives us to the deep fact,

that the Time is the child of the Eternity. The main interest which any aspects of the Times can have for us, is

the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions, What we

are? and Whither we tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we drift, like white sail across the wild

ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea; but from what port did we sail?

Who knows? Or to what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor

weathertossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or

floated to us some letter in a bottle from far. But what know they more than we? They also found themselves

on this wondrous sea. No; from the older sailors, nothing. Over all their speakingtrumpets, the gray sea and

the loud winds answer, Not in us; not in Time. Where then but in Ourselves, where but in that Thought

through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware that, whilst we shed the dust of

which we are built, grain by grain, till it is all gone, the law which clothes us with humanity remains new?

where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from within, shall we learn the Truth? Faithless,

faithless, we fancy that with the dust we depart and are not; and do not know that the law and the perception

of the law are at last one; that only as much as the law enters us, becomes us, we are living men, immortal

with the immortality of this law. Underneath all these appearances, lies that which is, that which lives, that

which causes. This ever renewing generation of appearances rests on a reality, and a reality that is alive.

To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of nature, the departments of life, and the passages of his

experience, is simply the information they yield him of this supreme nature which lurks within all. That

reality, that causing force is moral. The Moral Sentiment is but its other name. It makes by its presence or

absence right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, genius or depravation. As the granite comes to the surface, and

towers into the highest mountains, and, if we dig down, we find it below the superficial strata, so in all the

details of our domestic or civil life, is hidden the elemental reality, which ever and anon comes to the surface,

and forms the grand men, who are the leaders and examples, rather than the companions of the race. The

granite is curiously concealed under a thousand formations and surfaces, under fertile soils, and grasses, and

flowers, under wellmanured, arable fields, and large towns and cities, but it makes the foundation of these,

and is always indicating its presence by slight but sure signs. So is it with the Life of our life; so close does

that also hide. I read it in glad and in weeping eyes: I read it in the pride and in the humility of people: it is

recognized in every bargain and in every complaisance, in every criticism, and in all praise: it is voted for at

elections; it wins the cause with juries; it rides the stormy eloquence of the senate, sole victor; histories are

written of it, holidays decreed to it; statues, tombs, churches, built to its honor; yet men seem to fear and to

For that reality let us stand: that let us serve, and for that speak. Only as far as _that_ shines through them, are

these times or any times worth consideration. I wish to speak of the politics, education, business, and religion

around us, without ceremony or false deference. You will absolve me from the charge of flippancy, or

malignity, or the desire to say smart things at the expense of whomsoever, when you see that reality is all we

prize, and that we are bound on our entrance into nature to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our own

memories, that in this moment of the Eternity, when we who were named by our names, flitted across the

light, we were afraid of any fact, or disgraced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our

freedom. What is the scholar, what is the man _for_, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time?

Have you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every

unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the

newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of

today, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment man ever

receives from heaven, is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.