We climbed the stairs that led to the small upper room where Emerson filled his last regular charge.  Small as was the room, it probably more than sufficed for the few people who were sufficiently advanced for his notions of a preacher’s mission.  He did not believe in the rites the church clung to as indispensable; he did not believe in the use of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper; he did not believe in prayers from the pulpit unless the preacher felt impelled to pray; he did not believe in ritualism or formalism of any kind,—­in short, he did not believe in a church, for a church, however broad and liberal, is, after all, an institution, and no one man, however great, can support an institution.  A very great soul—­and Emerson was a great soul—­may carry a following through life and long after death, but that following is not a church, not an institution, not a living organized body, until forms, conventions, and traditions make it so; its vitalizing element may be the soul of its founder, but the framework of the structure, the skeleton, is made up of the more or less rigid conventions which are the results of natural and logical selection.

The ritual of Rome, the service of England, the dry formalism of Calvinism, the slender structure of Unitarianism were all equally repugnant to Emerson; he could not stretch himself in their fetters; he was not at ease in any priestly garment.  Born a prophet, he could not become a priest.  By nature a teacher and preacher, he never could submit to those restrictions which go so far to make preaching effective.  He taught the lesson of the ages, but he mistook it for his own.  He belonged to humanity, but he detached himself.  He was a leader, but would acknowledge no discipline.  Men cried out to him, but he wandered apart.  He was an intellectual anarchist of rare and lovely type; few sweeter souls ever lived, but he defied order.

Not that Emerson would have been any better if he had submitted to the discipline of some church; he did what he felt impelled to do, and left the world a precious legacy of ideas, of brilliant, beautiful thoughts; but thoughts which are brilliant and beautiful as the stars are, scattered jewels against the background of night with no visible connection.  Is it not possible that the gracious discipline of an environment more conventional might have reduced these thoughts to some sort of order, brought the stars into constellations, and left suggestions for the ordering of life that would be of greater force and more permanent value?

His wife relates that one day he was reading an old sermon in the little room in the Follen mansion, when he stopped, and said, “The passage which I have just read I do not believe, but it was wrongly placed.”