probably more than sufficed for the few people who were
sufficiently advanced for his notions of a preacher's mission. He
did not believe in the rites the church clung to as indispensable;
he did not believe in the use of bread and wine in the Lord's
Supper; he did not believe in prayers from the pulpit unless the
preacher felt impelled to pray; he did not believe in ritualism or
formalism of any kind,--in short, he did not believe in a church,
for a church, however broad and liberal, is, after all, an
institution, and no one man, however great, can support an
institution. A very great soul--and Emerson was a great soul--may
carry a following through life and long after death, but that
following is not a church, not an institution, not a living
organized body, until forms, conventions, and traditions make it
so; its vitalizing element may be the soul of its founder, but the
framework of the structure, the skeleton, is made up of the more
or less rigid conventions which are the results of natural and
logical selection.

The ritual of Rome, the service of England, the dry formalism of
Calvinism, the slender structure of Unitarianism were all equally
repugnant to Emerson; he could not stretch himself in their
fetters; he was not at ease in any priestly garment. Born a
prophet, he could not become a priest. By nature a teacher and
preacher, he never could submit to those restrictions which go so
far to make preaching effective. He taught the lesson of the ages,
but he mistook it for his own. He belonged to humanity, but he
detached himself. He was a leader, but would acknowledge no
discipline. Men cried out to him, but he wandered apart. He was an
intellectual anarchist of rare and lovely type; few sweeter souls
ever lived, but he defied order.