no wonder, Channing thought, that people were deserting the Calvinist churches in droves. They wanted a "rational religion," not a system that "outraged" reason and conscience alike. They wanted a religion that gave them reason to hope that good behavior would enjoy its proper reward. They wanted "encouragement and consolation," not hellfire and brimstone. Channing found the "silent but real defection from Calvinism" one of the "most encouraging" signs of the times—another indication of the "progress of society." But his own religion of "love, charity, and benevolence" soon came under attack in its own right. Liberals triumphed over Calvinism only to find themselves confronted with a "defection" in their own ranks—one that was far from silent.

Speaking in 1838 at Harvard, the stronghold of Unitarianism, Emerson told Channing's disciples that they belonged to a "decaying church," that they had lost the "principle of veneration," that their Christianity was "petrified," that their Christ was a hero frozen in stone, and that liberals had nothing of any value to say about the "death of faith" in modern society—were themselves partly responsible for it, in fact. In the Divinity School Address, Emerson said to the Unitarians what Jesus said to the high priests, what Luther and Calvin said to the pope, what Edwards said to those brought up in the accommodating faith of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard: that the spirit had been lost in the letter, the substance of religion in its forms, the "eternal revelation in the heart," as Emerson called it, in the rituals and regulations. No more than his predecessors in the prophetic succession did Emerson call for a new religion. "Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing."

These particular words are seldom quoted by historians of New England transcendentalism, most of whom see the movement as a further step in the secularization of religion, a step beyond Unitarianism, one more stage in the progress of the human mind, as Channing would have put it. No doubt this is how some of the transcendentalists—Bronson Alcott, for example—actually saw themselves, but Emerson can be called

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