"Emerson,_Ralph_Waldo_-_An_Address" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the
injurious impositions of our early catachetical instruction, and even
honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear
the Christian name. One would rather be

`A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,'

than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature,
and finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even
virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man
even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live
after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the
infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely
forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's nature; you
must accept our interpretations; and take his portrait as the vulgar
draw it.

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is
excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That
which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me,
makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for
my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over
me, and I shall decease forever.

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect
of my strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across
my mind, are not mine, but God's; that they had the like, and were
not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble
provocations go out from them, inviting me to resist evil; to subdue
the world; and to Be. And thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves
us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles, is a
profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now,
as always, to be made, by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It
is true that a great and rich soul, like his, falling among the
simple, does so preponderate, that, as his did, it names the world.
The world seems to them to exist for him, and they have not yet drunk
so deeply of his sense, as to see that only by coming again to
themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow forevermore. It
is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to enable
me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all men will
see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting,
overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a
goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to
be and to grow.

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less
flagrant to Jesus, than to the souls which it profanes. The
preachers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and shear
him of the locks of beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see
a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when I see among my