dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of
the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University
at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry
Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature,
followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James
Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in
Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that
the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly
connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge
graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable
in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose
by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant
talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which
their light could shine before men.

Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a
reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his
fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of
a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from
the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is
hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned
professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling
about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His
brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found
his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the
profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less
exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his
instructors: "If they had examined me, they probably would not have let
me preach at all." His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not
taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which