On the other hand, this direct relationship with the source of moral power made him joyfully obedient to the impulses of what he at various times designated as the heavenly vision, the divine necessity, or the overlord of his soul. A certain levity, almost a frivolity, which he exhibits now and then in the presence of creeds, churches, pious organizations, is actually the consequence of his entire reverence in the presence of every unmistakable manifestation of spiritual life. Like his friend Carlyle, he feels that the religious edifices of the day are become uninhabitable; the religious spirit is seeking a new house. "Religion," he remarks, "does not seem to me to tend now to a cultus as heretofore, but to a heroic life. We find difficulty in conceiving any church, any liturgy, any rite that would be genuine."
This sounds like a radical utterance. It is radical with the root and branch thoroughness of Emerson's inherited Puritanism, a vital Puritanism urgent with fresh power, impatient of a corrupted tradition and a conformity that withholds one from the living truth. The tendency of the traditional religious culture he criticizes, as indifferent to æsthetic development, narrowly and incompletely moral, and averse from the wide reaches of living truth which are open to the modern mind in the domains of science. He holds that the founder of the faith in which most of his countrymen were bred was indeed a pure beam of truth whose ethical utter-
