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

not the unjust wishes of those who love us, shall impair our freedom,
but we shall resist for truth's sake the freest flow of kindness, and
appeal to sympathies far in advance; and, -- what is the highest form
in which we know this beautiful element, -- a certain solidity of
merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, and which is so
essentially and manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted, that
the right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and
nobody thinks of commending it. You would compliment a coxcomb doing
a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that
accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest
applause. Such souls, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of
Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs
not praise their courage, -- they are the heart and soul of nature.
O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn.
There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a
crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority, -- demanding not
the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension,
immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice, -- comes graceful and
beloved as a bride. Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not
himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead
began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination,
and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged
crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out
of question, that the angel is shown. But these are heights that we
can scarce remember and look up to, without contrition and shame.
Let us thank God that such things exist.

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh
quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are
manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all
attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms,
seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its
own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new
worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, -- to-day,
pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.
Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the
forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find
they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is,
first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom
of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify. Two
inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first; the Sabbath,
the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns welcome alike into
the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into
prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity
of spiritual being. Let it stand forevermore, a temple, which new
love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its first
splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching, --
the speech of man to men, -- essentially the most flexible of all
organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits,
in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of