"Emerson, Ralph W. - Lecture on the Times" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey,
or some well spiced beverage, and better breakfasted than he whose
morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany
and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his
kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion."

This picture would serve for our times. Religion was not
invited to eat or drink or sleep with us, or to make or divide an
estate, but was a holiday guest. Such omissions judge the church; as
the compromise made with the slaveholder, not much noticed at first,
every day appears more flagrant mischief to the American
constitution. But now the purists are looking into all these
matters. The more intelligent are growing uneasy on the subject of
Marriage. They wish to see the character represented also in that
covenant. There shall be nothing brutal in it, but it shall honor
the man and the woman, as much as the most diffusive and universal
action. Grimly the same spirit looks into the law of Property, and
accuses men of driving a trade in the great boundless providence
which had given the air, the water, and the land to men, to use and
not to fence in and monopolize. It casts its eye on Trade, and Day
Labor, and so it goes up and down, paving the earth with eyes,
destroying privacy, and making thorough-lights. Is all this for
nothing? Do you suppose that the reforms, which are preparing, will
be as superficial as those we know?

By the books it reads and translates, judge what books it will
presently print. A great deal of the profoundest thinking of
antiquity, which had become as good as obsolete for us, is now
re-appearing in extracts and allusions, and in twenty years will get
all printed anew. See how daring is the reading, the speculation,
the experimenting of the time. If now some genius shall arise who
could unite these scattered rays! And always such a genius does
embody the ideas of each time. Here is great variety and richness of
mysticism, each part of which now only disgusts, whilst it forms the
sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or "Comer out," yet, when it
shall be taken up as the garniture of some profound and
all-reconciling thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate
decoration of his robes.

These reforms are our contemporaries; they are ourselves; our
own light, and sight, and conscience; they only name the relation
which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go
to rectify. They are the simplest statements of man in these
matters; the plain right and wrong. I cannot choose but allow and
honor them. The impulse is good, and the theory; the practice is
less beautiful. The Reformers affirm the inward life, but they do
not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means. They do not rely on
precisely that strength which wins me to their cause; not on love,
not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on circumstances, on
money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and pride. The love