The divinity within against historical religion: is the moral sentiment the only revelation, or is this infidelity?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

God is not a person seated outside the world and known through ancient miracles; God is the soul of the whole, present and speaking now in the moral sentiment of every heart. Revelation is not a document closed long ago but the perpetual influx of the divine into the receptive mind. Jesus saw this and said it; he did not monopolize it. To worship him as an exception is to miss the very thing he taught.123

Sources

  1. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends, are now setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship of the civilized world, it has great historical interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been the consolation of humanity, you need not that I should speak.
    Nature, Addresses, and Lectures
  2. The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul's own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes.
    Essays, First Series
  3. And I see not why to these simple instincts, simple yet grand, all the heights and transcendencies of virtue and of enthusiasm are not open. There is power enough in them to move the world; and it is not any sterility or defect in ethics, but our negligence of these fine monitors, of these world-embracing sentiments, that makes religion cold and life low.
    Lectures and Biographical Sketches

Where the argument is made

  • "The Divinity School Address" (1838)
  • "The Over-Soul" (Essays: First Series). The rejection of the authority of miracles and of the historical Jesus as uniquely divine
  • the moral sentiment as "the essence of all religion."

How the argument was received

Contested from 1838 as heresy, pantheism, and "infidelity"; central to the quarrel between Transcendentalism and orthodox Christianity.