HIS RELATIONS WITH CLERGYMEN.
415
ing relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds
who sometimes
find their way into pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals. It is not within our best-fenced churches and
creeds that the self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the Concord
prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when
he wrote
:
" Neither
and out first
of
is
God appointed and confined, where
what place these
heard to speak
chooses not as
;
his chosen shall
for he sees not as
man chooses, lest we
man
be
sees,
should devote
ourselves again to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our faith one
while in the old convocation house, and another while in the Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be there canon ized is not sufficient without plain convincement,
and the charity of patient
instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the mean est Christian who desires to walk in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the
number
of voices that can be there
made; no, the Seventh himself with there, though Harry all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices
from the dead,
to swell their
number."