The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-05-29
PUNGENT REMARKS ON
 EMERSON'S CELEBRATION

From the New York Mail and Express. \o been discovering Emerson in the
 last week or ten days is some thing alarming. The crowd, which Is aware what it's intellectual leaders are thinking only when they are quoted in the newspapers, seems to be waking up to the conclusion that 1t has had new prophet. a new demigod. whose wisdom was not a whit less than supernatural, and that It has somehow and suddenly become its duty to fall down and worship him. And all this when people were think ing of Emerson merely as great trans cendentalist" which means a dealer in intellectual moonshine, who died score of years ago after writing some books that only a few people ever cared to read. That Emerson should be so much alive, and so apparently pre-eminent in American thought is an astonishment to many.
 It certainly Is astonishing that men should have found not merely so much, but so many things, in Emerson as they have reported in this weeks commem- orations. It is surprising, for instance, to read these ords spoken by President Schurman of Cornell last night:
 Emerson exercises more influence to- day, I venture to say, than any other prophet, sacred or profane. does at the present time.'
 The Rev. Dr. Albert J. Lyman last night, in Brooklyn, called Emerson "a ray of intellectual fire straight from the source of things;' which does not sug- gest hero worship so much as 1t sug- gests Brahmanism, or at least Buddhism and its notion of avatars.
 The Emerson celebration has indeed been no apotheosis. And as all extrav- agance provokes It's reaction, 1t was only to be expected that all the Emerson talk should have been accompanied by an undercurrent of incredulity and mockery, which has scarcely come to the surface in print but has been heard in much sarcastic protest wherever talking men and women come together. People do not accept new gods without resistance. And at least one man has arisen, In the per son of the Rev. George A. Gordon of Bos- ton, to warn the modern Christian world that Emerson was not of it, but was the messenger of a doctrine which is distinct ly hostile to the accepted principles of Christianity as well as to the prevalent social order.
 Emerson has his detractors as well as his adorers he has, indeed. two schoois of detractors, one of which regards him as a highly gifted mischief maker, anti | Christian and anarchistic, while the other regards him as a rattle-brained phrase maker. incapable of systematic thought, whose influence is exercised only upor those who cannot think for themselves
 The commemoration of the centenary will help to sift the truth from the erroI in all these contrasted judgments. Thai Emerson's influence whatever 1t may 1 finally come to, is growing in the world is evident Half dozen leading Ger. | man presses are turning out excellent translations of him at she present mo- ment He has been admirably translated | into Spanish. The French are writing books about him. The Americans know l as a rule. less about him than the Eng fish and Germans, but they respond 1 promptly as a people to a first class ad vertisement, and that Emerson has nov 1 surely had. We predict that reviva