On this date, January 24, back in 1867 Ralph Waldo
Emerson delivered a talk at the Unity Church just off Washington Square Park,
the structure that gave way after the fire of 1871 to the Scottish Rite
Cathedral that stands at the corner of Walton and North Dearborn today. Dr. Robert Collyer, the pastor of Unity
Church, introduced the eminent man of letters.
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| Dr. Robert Collyer |
Collyer must have been an avid listener to
Emerson’s message that night; he was no stranger to persecution and
hardship. Born in England, he had,
before he was 26-years-old, served as a blacksmith’s apprentice, become a
minister in the Methodist church, and lost his wife and infant daughter. Coming to the United States in 1850 he worked
as a hammer maker in Pennsylvania during the week, preaching on Sundays. His anti-slavery messages, though, meant the
end of his Methodist pastoral duties and the church stripped him of his
license. He joined the Unitarian Church
and in 1860 came to Chicago as a missionary.
By 1865 he had served the dead and the dying in the Civil War and had
overseen the construction of the Unity Church, one of the grandest churches in
the city.
In describing Emerson’s address that evening,
The Chicago Tribune wrote, “The peculiarly concise and metaphysical style of
this eminent man, and the abstruse ideas which he conveys in a close chain make
it impossible to do justice to the lecture in a brief and disjointed report . .
. But some of the pearls of thought that were scattered though the house may
be set in type so as to afford ample food for the reflective mind. Each of them constitutes a sermon in itself.” [Chicago Tribune, January 25, 1867]
Emerson entitled his lecture “The Man of the
World.” Toward the end of his address
that evening, just two years after the end of the great war that saw an
estimated 620,000 men die in the line of duty, he said,
Would that we could feel that this country is
the last great charity of the war, the end of all struggles to establish
morality as the object of government.
Intellect and not property should be represented, or at least not
property without intellect. The work of
America is to make the advance of ideas possible – to prove the principle that
everything that is immoral is inhuman.
In the condition of America at this hour, prayer has become right. It is relieved of its moral curse, it has no
foreign complications; it proposes to do right to all classes of people, and to
make it possible that the American citizen shall be a true man of the world.
 |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson |
One wonders how this address went over in a
wide-open town, choking in coal smoke and manure, running at maximum boiler
pressure toward the acquisition of wealth.
Four years later Unity Church would burn to the ground in the Great
Fire. A dozen years later Robert
Collyer, a national figure by that time, would leave for the Community Church
of New York City, where he would become Pastor Emeritus in the same year that
Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition.
Emerson spoke for over an hour that evening. A hundred years later I would read his essay on self-reliance and decide that I would spend my life in the high school English classroom. I find it very cool to consider the fact that this great thinker, an intellect that helped to shape American thought in the mid-nineteenth century, spoke these words just a little more than two miles from where Jill and I live today
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