bear the brand of using language to Christ which no man of culture would now apply to a Cæsar, a Danton, or a Napoleon. He says, "this shoves Jesus and Judas both aside." He speaks, again, of Christ's "tropes," as if the man who died on Calvary because he would not lie, was an exaggerator and a rhetorician, when he said, "I and my Father are one," or, "he that has seen me, has seen the Father."

We have heard a dog baying at the moon-we have heard of a maniac spitting foam at the stars-we have watched the writhings of crushed mediocrity as it gazed on the bright pages. of genius-and we have understood, excused, pittied, and forgiven all such in their morbid or mistaken feelings. But how one calling himself a man, and reputed really a man of genius, could, in his most unhappy hour, have uttered a word against our Brother-God-the Eternal Child-the Babe in the Manger-the Boy in the Temple-the Carpenter in the Shed -the Weeper at the Grave-the Sufferer on the Cross-the Risen from the Tomb-the Exalted to the Heavens-the Friend by eminence of our fallen Family-the Expected from the Clouds-The Type and Test of whatever is holy, and charitable, and lovely, and lofty in the race of man-passes our conceptions, and has strained to its utmost our power of forgiveness.

Why, we must also inquire, has he said such things, and yet not said more of Jesus? "What thinkest thou of Christ ?" If he was an impostor, say so. If he was a madman, say so. If he was God in human shape, say so. If he is merely the conventional ideal of human nature, say so more distinctly. If he is neither, nor all of these, then what is he? whence has he come? Emerson, while striking hard, and often, and openly, at the divinity of Jesus, and not sparing quiet sotto voce insinuations against his character and his power over the minds of men, has never yet propounded or sought to propound any probable or intelligible theory of Christ. He has simply, with muttered, or more than muttered, sneers or sighs over his unacknowledged claims, turned away, refusing to look at or to worship this great sight."

"

Man seems the Christ of Emerson. And a sorry Christ he is. "Man," says Bacon, "is the god of the dog," but were a dog fancying himself a man, it were a supposition less mon

strous than the universal Immanuelism of Emerson. If man be the Christ, where are the works which prove him so? If every man has the divinity within him, why are the majority of men so corrupt and malignant? If the history of man be the history of God in human nature, why is it little else than one tissue of blood, falsehood, and low sin? We think he might far more plausibly start and defend the hypothesis that man is the devil; and that his history has hitherto been but a long development of diabolism. And, in proving this, he might avail himself to great advantage of Quetelet's tables, which demonstrate the significant fact, that certain works of a rather infernal character, such as murder, arson, and rape, reappear in steady and mathematical succession, and no more than summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, are ever to cease. The presence of such an eternal law would go far to prove that man was an immutable and hopeless child of hell.

Many strange deductions seem to follow from Emerson's theory, nay, are more or less decidedly admitted by him. If man be the Christ or God incarnate, then there can be no such thing as guilt, and there ought to be no such thing as punishment. Whatever is done, is done, not by God's permission or command, but by God himself. God is at once the judge and the offender. If man be God tncarnate, it follows that he is the creator of all things. This Emerson repeatedly intimates. The sun is but a splendid mote in man's eye; the moon is but his produced and prolonged smile; the earth is the shadow of his shape; the stars are lustres in the room of his soul; the universe is the bright precipitate of his thought. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning of the Creation of God, and its ending too. "The simplest person," he says, "who, in his integrity, worships God, becomes God." It follows, again, that no supernaturalism ever did or ever could exist. according to Emerson, Moses, not Jehovah, who spoke on Sinai. It was Isaiah's own human soul which saw the fate of empires as distinctly as we see stars falling through the midnight. It was the mere man Christ Jesus, who taught, and worked, and died in Judea. The possibility, in like manner, of any future revelation from heaven is ignored-ignored by the denial of any heaven save the mind of man. This is the dunghill-Olympus on which Emerson seats his shadowy gods.

It was,

And whatever strange and aerial-seeming shapes may hereaf ter appear upon its summit, are to be in reality only sublimated mud-the beauty and the strength of dirt. "Man," to use Foster's language, is to produce an "apotheosis of himself, by the hopeful process of exhausting his own corruptions," or sublimating them into a putrid holiness.

It follows, again, that whatever he may say in particular passages, there can be no advancing or steady progress in humanity. The laws which develop it are unchangeable, the climate in which it lives is subject to very slight variations; its "Oversoul" is a stern demon, with, perhaps, as he says, "a secret kindness in its heart," but outwardly a very Moloch of equal calm and cruelty; and under his eye, society and man must work, and bleed, and suffer on, upon this rolling earth, as on an eternal treadmill in a mist. 'Tis a gospel of despair, which in reality he teaches, of the deepest and the most fixed despair. The dungeon into which he introduces his captives is cold and low; it has no outlet: no key called Promise is to be found therein; the sky, indeed, is seen above through the dome, but it is distant-dark-with strange and melancholy stars, and but one hope, like a cup of prisonwater, is handed round among the dwellers in this dreary abode that of Death. And yet, but of late thousands of our young, rising, and gifted minds were, and many are still, forsaking the free atmosphere, the strait but onward way, and the high-hung star of hope, and Christianity, for this dismal, insulated, and under-ground abyss, where the very light is as darkness. It follows, again, that humility and all its cognate virtues are mere mistakes. "Trust thyself-every heart vibrates to that iron string." A greater than Emerson said, two thousand years ago, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;" and another of the same school said, "When ye are weak, then are ye strong." We are not defending a false or voluntary humility. But surely, unless you can prove that all strength, and purity, and peace, are enclosed in yourself, to bow before the higher-to draw strength from the stronger-to worship the divine-is the dictate of cultured instinct, as well as of common sense. Almost all the powers and elements of nature combine in teaching man the one great simple word, "Bend." "Bend,"

the winds say it to the tall pines, and they gain the curve of their magnificence by obeying. "Bend," gravitation says it to the earth, as she sweeps in her course round the sun; and she knows the whisper of her ruler, and stoops and bows before the skiey blaze. "Bend," the proud portals of human knowledge say it to all aspirants, and were it the brow of a Bacon or a Newton, it must in reverence bow. Bend," the doors, the ancient doors of heaven say it, in the music of their golden hinges, to all who would pass therein; and the Son of Man himself, although he could have prayed to his Father, and presently obtained twelve legions of angels, had to learn obedience, to suffer, to bow the head, ere as a King of Glory he entered in. "Trust thyself." No; Christianity says, "Mistrust thyself-trust God. Do thy humble duty, and call the while on the lofty help that is above thee." Even Shelley, a far more gifted mind than Emerson, tells us, borrowing the thought from Burke, to "fear ourselves, and love all human-kind."

It follows, finally, that there seems no hope to us from the exclusive and idolatrous devotion to nature which Emerson has practised and recommends. He, appearing to believe that nature is his own work, has conned its pages with all the fondness which a young author feels for his first poems. And yet he has learned from it, or at least taught us, extremely little. If he has, as he says, met "God in the bush," why no particulars of the interview? Why no intelligible precept, no new law from that "burning bush" of the West? Why does nature, in his hands, remain as cold, silent, enigmatic, and repulsive we mean as a moral teacher-as ever it was? Why does its "old silence" remain silent still, or only insult us with fragments of mysticism and echoes of blasphemy? Alas! Emerson's "Essays" are another proof of what Hazlitt, from bitter experience, said long ago, "Neither poetry nor nature are sufficient for the soul of man." And although Emerson has, with more sever self-purgation, if not with a truer heart, approached the shrine, he has derived, or at least circulated, quite as little of real knowledge, or of real satisfaction and peace, as the honest but hapless author of "The Spirit of the Age."

The fact is (and we are grieved to announce it), this writer

with all his talk about spiritualism and idealism, seems to us, in essence, if anything at all, a mere materialist-believing not, however, in the wide matter of suns and stars, but in the sublimated matter of his proper brain. He has brought the controversy of ages to a point-the point of his own head. This he claps and clasps, and says, "Talk of God, Heaven, Jesus, Shakspeare, the earth, the stars-it's all here." Even as, not long ago, we heard a poor woman, in fever, declaring that there was 66 more sense in her head than in all the world besides!" And into what wilds have some of his followers, both in America and here, wandered, till, in search of their master, they have lost themselves. One of them will make an earth-heap among the woods, and show his companions how God should make a world. Others take to living on acorns and water; and one lady, of some abilities, has lately written a small volume of poems, in which, amid many other symptoms of the most rabid Emersonianism, such as sneering at the power and influence of the Bible, magnifying the soul, &c., she, in one little copy of verses, avows herself a worshipper of the Sun--it being the epic, we suppose, of her transcendent spirit!

It is high time that all such egregious nonsense should be exposed; and we only regret that our space does not permit us more fully at present to expose it. We "bide our time." And we can speak the more freely, that we have passed through a section of the Emersonian shadow ourselves--never into its deepest gloom, but along the outskirts of its cold and hopeless darkness. We, however, never lost our faith in Jesus, nor regarded Emerson's notions of Him with any other feelings but disgust and sorrow. We never "kissed our hands" to the sun. But we at one time regarded Emerson as a sincere man, astray on one of the by-paths from the road leading up to the " City." We have seen reason to change our mind, and to say of him, and of all such, "Beware of the Flatterer." His system, to our knowledge, has shaken belief, has injured morality, has poisoned the purest natures, has embittered the sweetest tempers, has all but maddened the strongest minds, has been for years a thick cosmical cloud between lofty souls and the God of their childhood and their fathers, has not even led to that poor, beggarly, outwardly