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

come to be a paramount motive for going thither.

My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of
a decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity
can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go
to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the
market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of
youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without
honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention
them.

And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding
days can be done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground
of our complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with
the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever
a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a
man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all
religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He
is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and
nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the
age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of
degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man;
indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It
is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that
He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity, -- a faith like
Christ's in the infinitude of man, -- is lost. None believeth in the
soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me!
no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet,
avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret;
they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their
soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the
whole world. See how nations and races flit by on the sea of time,
and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one good
soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster,
reverend forever. None assayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of
the nation, and of nature, but each would be an easy secondary to
some Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man.
Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take
secondary knowledge, as St. Paul's, or George Fox's, or Swedenborg's,
and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts,
and if, as now, for centuries, -- the chasm yawns to that breadth,
that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the
good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men,
and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you
shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins,
Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also
am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms
himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was