Great Ideas, Wrong Audience

When I began reading, I looked at the passage through the eyes if the graduates, looking for what offended them etc. But as the speech progressed, I could no longer hear it through them, because it struck a chord so deeply in me. Emerson "spoke what [I] thought" though I had never really realized I was thinking it, "told me what [I] knew, that gave [me] leave to be what [I] inwardly [am]." As he describes on page 111 when contrasting the "real" snowstorm to the "spectral" minister, religion has become so impersonal it is unreal, it's not true, it doesn't apply to us. I am not religious and I doubt I ever will be, but if I were to be, Emerson's idea of religion is much more appealing to me. It is based, not off of ancient stories telling of false 'miracles', but off of the daily and undeniable miracles occuring daily all around us, in nature, and in ourselves. Yet the truth is "tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal and necesary". That is all moving and true, but as a divinity school graduation speech a wrong time and very audience. These men have just spent years training for a position that Emerson tells them is useless and failing miserably, in a church that he says is "decaying" and flawed at its very core. He tells these men, basically, that they and their life's work is pointless, old news, "ancient history merely...not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society". Congratulations, you've just been trained to preach a 'distorted doctrine'! Yet Emerson not only insults the ministers but Christianity itself, which can't have gone over well with the crowd to whom he was speaking. It is true, there are some who would "kill you, if you say [Christ] was a man" and that is exactly what Emerson does. Though I think it was an incredible speech, at the divinity school graduation one can hardly be surprised at his punishment.