"Emerson,_Ralph_Waldo_-_An_Address" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict
conscience of numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship
retains, it owes to the scattered company of pious men, who minister
here and there in the churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too
great tenderness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted from
others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and
so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character.
Moreover, the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent
preachers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, --
nay, in the sincere moments of every man. But with whatever
exception, it is still true, that tradition characterizes the
preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not
out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is
necessary and eternal; that thus, historical Christianity destroys
the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the
moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the resources of
astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice it is to that Law,
the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear and
rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly
emulate, that it is travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted
and behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The
pulpit in losing sight of this Law, loses its reason, and gropes
after it knows not what. And for want of this culture, the soul of
the community is sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a
stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline, to make it know itself
and the divinity that speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of
himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, to
be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to be
wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his
kind.

Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of
the intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in
names and persons. The Puritans in England and America, found in the
Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome,
scope for their austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom.
But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room. I
think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our
churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on
men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the
good, and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half
parishes are _signing off_, -- to use the local term. It is already
beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the
religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the
Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, "On Sundays, it seems wicked to
go to church." And the motive, that holds the best there, is now only
a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, that the
best and the worst men in the parish, the poor and the rich, the
learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as
fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, -- has