You can never come to any peace or power until you put your whole reliance in the moral constitution of man
We acquire courage by our success daily & have a daring from experience which we had not from genius. I regret one thing omitted in my late Course of Lectures; that I could not stay with distinctness & conspicuously the great error of modern Society in respect to religion & say, You can never come to any peace or power until you put your whole reliance in the moral constitution of man & not at all in a historical Christianity. The Belief in Christianity that now prevails is the Unbelief of men. They will have Christ for a Lord & not for a brother. Christ preached the greatness of Man but we only hear the greatness of Christ.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:459
He may not have said it then, I hear it now. Loud and clear. This may be my favorite of the excerpts so far.