Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/225

Andrews Norton 209 the Rev. John Norton, the notable minister of Ipswich and of Boston, Andrews Norton was born in 1786 at Hingham. In 1804 he graduated at Harvard, and spent the next fifteen years as graduate student, tutor, and lecturer, there and at Bowdoin. In 1 8 19 he was appointed Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature in Harvard College, acting also from 18 13 to 1821 as the College Librarian. His Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrine of Trinitarians, first published in 1819 in a con- troversy with Professor Stuart of Andover, soon became a Unitarian classic. In 1833 and 1834 he was engaged with Charles Folsom in editing The Select Journal of Foreign Periodi- cal Literature, one of the numerous magazines of that period of growing international culture. The first nimiber contains Macaulay's Essay on Hampden, reprinted from The Edin- burgh Review; Paulin Paris's Letter upon the Romances upon the Twelve Peers of France, from F6russac's Bulletin Universel ("translated from the French with notes by Professor Longfellow"); and reviews from The Foreign Quarterly Review and elsewhere. For a number of years Norton contributed also to The North American Review, and was influential in its management. I Emerson's celebrated Divinity School Address^ in 1838 brought to a head Norton's distaste for the Transcendental movement. A year later he addressed to the alumni of the Harvard Theological School at their Commencement reunion his Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, which, by oppos- ing Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Strauss, and Hegel, whom apparently Norton considered responsible for much Trans- cendental error, refutes Emerson by indirection, without mentioning him or taking explicit issue with his views. Yet the clash of their opinions is uncompromising. Where Emer- son insisted upon intuition, Norton requires an outer revelation evidenced by historical documents. Where Emerson insisted that genuine religion cannot be received at second-hand, but is intuitive and immediate, Norton emphasizes the dependence of laymen upon expert authority and mediation in difficult matters of research and exegesis. Where Emerson rejected any conception of a miracle that would oppose it to the ordinary course of nature, implying that nature is miracxilous enough, » See also Book II, Chap. DC. _ VOL. II — 14