"strange compound of contradictions." Like Gilfillan, Bungay noted that Emerson did not seem terribly "sanguine in his hopes of progress." Noah Porter, another persistent critic, wrote in the New Englander, in 1856, that "he is so naif, so innocent in his manner, that we scarcely know whether to class him with those innocent souls that have not yet attained to the knowledge of good or evil, or with those subtle souls that know so much of both as to be indifferent to either." Returning to the charge a few years later in a review of The Conduct of Life, Porter wrote that the "shallowness and flippancy" of Emerson's views on Christianity revealed his moral and intellectual "incompetence." Porter found the essay on "Fate" particularly "appalling"—the "most horrible" imaginable account of the "merciless and remorseless absolutism of a universe of impersonal law, ... bereft of its God." ^*

It was only gradually that a more genial Emerson emerged in the public mind, the familiar "sage of Concord." Early reviewers, even in their outrage, correctly sensed something troubling and difficult in Emerson's work, something not easily reconciled with the prevailing patterns of religious and political belief. In time, however, those who governed public taste agreed to ignore the substance of his thought and to install him in the pantheon of literary worthies as a "seer," an inspiring personality, a

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Emerson, Porter thought, was a "stoic in his proud defiance of a Personal Divinity, in his quiet acquiescence in an all-powerful Fate and in the sovereign self-reliance with which he confronts the movements of destiny." Emerson worshiped necessity, instead of seeking to "overcome Fate by substituting in its place a Providence that cares for the best ends of the whole by means of wide-reaching and sternly working laws, while yet it loves, and pities, and comforts the humblest individual that suffers by their action." Whether or not this was an accurate description of Emerson's position, Porter's opposition of "fate" and "providence"—key terms that so long served to distinguish the classical, republican tradition from the Christian tradition (or at least from the dominant tradition in Christian thought)—shows that this vocabulary was still in general use even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Emerson was also a "stoic," Porter added, "in his contempt of the unenlightened masses, in his deification of intelligence, and in the arrogance with which he claims to humanity the prerogatives that belong to God alone." These are hardly the qualities usually associated with Emerson today, but they were often attributed to him in the nineteenth century.

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