began to

sciousness really began
"Whence sprang all this? What is the
source, or (as Emerson would have pre-
ferred it) the instrument through which
this new spiritual influence is come into
the world?" And it is this half-awak-
ened consciousness of the common debt
that is now taking form so rapidly. When
the commemoration exercises were planned
several months ago even the moving spir-
its were half skeptical about success on
any large scale, but the response has over-
whelmingly surpassed all expectations.

inquire: Hall. A remarkable audience of more
than 3,000 people, drawn from far and
near, united in a commemoration service
of singular dignity, beauty and impress-
iveness. The musical numbers, though
few, were of extraordinary nobility of
theme and rendered with thrilling effect
by about 200 trained voices of the Handel
and Haydn Society. Upon the platform,
in front of the massed chorus, sat a dis-
tinguished group, including many of the
best-known men in the literary, educa-
tional, and religious life of the country.
The principal address was delivered by
President Charles William Eliot of Har-
vard University, the following being the
more notable points in his estimate of
Emerson:

The memorial program was arranged
practically in two groups: First, a series
of meetings on and about the anniversary
of Emerson's birth, May 25th; second, a
summer school in Concord and Boston
to occupy the last three weeks in July, de- "Emerson has been dead twenty-one
voted to lectures and discussions on Emer- years, and it is thirty years since he wrote
son's personality and influence. The May anything new, but his whole philosophy of
meetings were organized under various life was developed by the time he was
auspices; primarily of the Free Religious forty years old, and it may be doubted if
Association, formed in 1867, of which he wrote anything after 1843 the germinal
Emerson was one of the founders. Other
meetings were arranged in connection with
the regular Unitarian anniversary week;
still others by citizens' committees in Bos-
ton and Concord.

expression of which may not be found in his journals, sermons, or lectures written before that date. If, therefore, we find in the accepted thought or established institutions of to-day recent developments of principles and maxims laid down by Emerson, we may fairly say that his thought outran his times certainly by one, and probably by two, generations of men."

The first meeting of importance was coincident with the thirty-sixth annual convention of the Free Religious Association, held Saturday morning, May 23, in the building erected in memory of Theodore Parker, on Appleton street, Boston. Here the speakers were Edwin D. Mead, president of the association; Rev. Paul Revere Frothingham, present occupant of the pulpit made famous by William Ellery Channing: Rev. Charles F. Carter of Lexington, Massachusetts; Rev. Charles G. Ames of Boston, and Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer. Another gathering of special interest, among the many, was at the regular Saturday luncheon of the Twentieth Century Club. The larger part of the afternoon was occupied in addresses, largely of a personal and reminiscent character, by Dr. Edward W. Emerson, the poet-philosopher's son, and by the venerable Rev. Edward Everett Hale. On Sunday (May 24) Emerson was the theme of morning sermons quite generally throughout the country, in Boston almost universally; and the most notable meeting in all the Boston celebrations came Sunday evening in the beautiful and spacious new Symphony

In discussing Emerson's anticipations of social conditions, Dr. Eliot said: "When he accumulated the original materials of his essay on 'Worship' there were no large cities in the United States, the great experiment of democracy had not developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them in the following description: 'In our large cities the population is godless, materialized-no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? . . . There is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery

and in public opinion, but not

in divine causes." In Emerson's day luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed in our country; but he foresaw its coming and its insidious destructiveness. 'We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man.'

"In 1841 Emerson described in the clearest manner the approaching strife between laborers and employers, between poor and rich, and pointed out the cause of this strife in the selfishness, unkindness, and mutual distrust which ran through the community. He also described with perfect precision the ultimate remedy, the sentiment of love. There is but one remedy for industrial and social strife. It is to be found in kindness, good fellowship, and the affections."

told by Emerson in The American Scholar. In religion Emerson was only a nineteenth-century nonconformist instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. It was a fundamental article in his creed that 'Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.""

President Eliot's address was probably the most conspicuous contribution to the innumerable current discussions of Emerson; but it is entirely probable that the majority sentiment among those privileged In the religious field President Eliot like myself to attend the most notable of placed Emerson in the group of the proph- these gatherings would be that the meetets. "In the first place, he taught that ing at Concord on Monday afternoon, May religion is absolutely natural-not super- 25, marked the closest approach to a gennatural. He believed that revelation is uinely Emersonian spirit. Nearly all the natural and continuous, and that in all speakers had been more or less intimate ages prophets are born. . All associates of their distinguished townsEmerson's religious teaching led straight man, and the atmosphere of personal affecto God-not to a withdrawn creator, or tion, a sense of personal loss from which anthropomorphic judge or king, but to the Concord evidently has not fully recovered all-informing, all-sustaining soul of the in the twenty-one years since Emerson's All the features of the death, seemed thoroughly to pervade the contest over the 'higher criticism' are fore- occasion. The morning exercises were

universe.

single life in its history. They were
eagerly attended by old and young. They
were
were filled with lofty and inspiring
thoughts, and every now and then came
flashes of unexpected humor..
He lived on the lines his thought pursued;
where his standard was planted, to that
height he had himself attained; he was
singularly free from self-assertion; he
sought for and seemed eager to recognize
the superiority of others, and lived among
us here as other men lived."

Of Emerson's lectures in the Town Hall Mr. Hoar said: "It is sometimes irreverently said that he tried them on' in Concord. If this be true, it is comforting to us to admit that they proved a good fit. They are themselves the record of a noble life. They constitute the greatest service rendered to this community by any

can put up your history books," Colonel Higginson said: "Fifty years ago there must have been more than a thousand men and women in America and in England who could look back on that passage and say of it, 'At any rate, it was the making of me. A hundred thousand others since then may have, perhaps, looked back and said of that first thousand readers, 'It was they who made us. You might as well question the creative power of passages in the book of Psalms."

Eloquent addresses by Professors Charles Eliot Norton and William James of Harvard University, one largely reminiscent and the other analytical and appreciative, brought the program to its closing number, a notable tribute by United States Senator George Frisbie Hoar. "Emerson has taught us," declared the Senator, "the virtue of completeness, courage, and sincerity of utterance. In dealing with the things that pertain to the soul he utters no half-truths, no pious frauds. He gives us no milk for babes. The purpose of Emerson, like that of Milton, is to justify the ways of God to man, and they do not need to be clothed in a veil. God is not to be seen, as Moses saw him, from behind.

a few poignant criticisms directing attention to an alleged lack of unity of subject, a lack of focus in thought and treatment, an absence of method and system in Emerson's works.

As if to meet these criticisms there has appeared in the Grande Revue (Paris) a sympathetic exposition of Emerson's thought from the pen of the distinguished French elucidator of the religious philosophy of Nietzsche, of Renan, and many other famous thinkers along modern lines, M. Victor Basch. Besides deeming Emerson "the greatest man of letters America has produced," M. Basch finds him to be primarily the creator of a theology born of the soil from which he (Emerson) sprang. True, M. Basch condemns Emerson's verse as merely a feebler treatment of the themes of the philosopher's prose essays. The Frenchman also admits that Emerson touches in his essays upon so many problems, views them from so many standpoints and under aspects so unexpected, and embroiders them so profusely with citations of facts borrowed from all sciences, arts, and trades that it is difficult to follow his thought, "while to reduce it to unity would amount to its mutilation." However, with the aid of patience and "Mr. Emerson's philosophy had no sto- sympathy, we finally discover two broad icism in it. If it brought him ampler com- converging lines leading through all this pensations than were vouchsafed to thought-maze. These two lines are "Nacommon man, grief also filled to its depths ture" and "the Individual." Beginning a larger heart and touched with its agony with Nature, we learn that every object nerves more finely sensitive than those of in Nature shows to the seeing eye the copy common men. Who has uttered like him of some faculty of the soul, and every in that immortal "Threnody" the voice of faculty of the soul copies an object of parental sorrow? What more loving Nature. Mind necessarily manifests itself heart ever mourned the loss of a brother's under material aspects, and reciprocally love than that which could not be un- all material forms embody themselves in locked because the key had gone with human thoughts. Every man is bound by Charles and Edward. I remember, as if a secret sympathy to some section of it were yesterday, that winter morning Nature whereof he is the representative in my early youth when the messenger and interpreter. Beginning with "the Incame to my father's door before sunrise, dividual," we learn that individual souls bringing his written message to one of the are separated from one another by barriers household, 'Everything wakes this morn- invisible, eternal, insuperable; that God ing except my darling boy.' The noblest has clothed the souls He sends into the emotions of the soul are nobler to us that universe with qualities incommunicable to they have moved him. other souls. There is within us a special faculty capable of seizing spiritual realities, which constitutes, independent of all experience and all external pointing out, a revelation of the existence of God. The moment a man feels himself truly one with God, prayer is superfluous.

EMERSON'S THEOLOGY.-Among vast numbers of eulogies of Emerson called forth by the vigorously promoted celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the philosopher's birth there have appeared

W

BY

WILLIAM P. SPRATLING, M. D.,
Superintendent of the Craig Colony, Sonyea, N. Y.

HEN the entering wedge of the colony system of caring for the defective classes was driven in France in 1840, the wisdom of those who did it could not possibly foresee the success the system was destined to attain a success, while yet in its infancy in the United States, already of sufficient distinction to warrant its greater adoption.

It would be interesting to run briefly over the history of the colony movement at home and abroad, but we forego this to more fully discuss the purposes and advantages of the best method yet devised of caring for the vast army of defectives that abound in every State in the Union, and that not only fully keep pace in numerical ratio with the population at large, but in many localities are increasing in excess of the normal merease in population.

We can outline the purposes and advantages of ideal colonies, as follows:

They provide home life, simple and dental in form; for they take the indifrom his own home, unsuited to his

peculiar needs, to a home especially designed to supply such needs.

2. They tend strongly-and this is the best feature of all-to preserve individuality, the one thing institutions are apt to submerge or destroy. In ideal colonies, individuals, not units and numbers, are integral, essential parts of the whole. There is in them no pressing and moulding of a great mass of humanity in small spaces through routine life until all are essentially alike.

3. The ideal colony provides vocations of all kinds and degrees for all who require them, vocations ranging from the simplest to the most complex, from weeding the cabbage patch to the making of brick and the construction of houses: provides education that begins at the alphabet and ends in some profession that guarantees selfsupport: provides amusements and recreations that are not bound by rules of necessity, regularity, and formality; and provides for the organization of homes in a way to throw congenial spirits into pleasant