He believed that the spiritual force of human character imaged the
divine:--

"The sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye."

Yet man is not an order of nature, but a stupendous antagonism, because
he chooses and acts in his soul. "So far as a man thinks, he is free."
It is interesting to-day, after all the long discussion of the doctrine
of evolution, to see how the much earlier conceptions of Emerson match
the thoughts of the latest exponents of the philosophic results of
evolution.

The present generation of scholars and ministers has been passing
through an important crisis in regard to the sacred books of Judaism and
Christianity. All the features of the contest over "the higher
criticism" are foretold by Emerson in "The American Scholar." "The poet
chanting was felt to be a divine man; henceforth the chant is divine
also. The writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled
the book is perfect. Colleges are built on it; books are written on
it.... Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant." This
is exactly what has happened to Protestantism, which substituted for
infallible Pope and Church an infallible Book; and this is precisely the
evil from which modern scholarship is delivering the world.

In religion Emerson was only a nineteenth-century non-conformist
instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. It was a fundamental
article in his creed that, although conformity is the virtue in most