ABSTRACT
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) had begun a ministerial career but broke his connection with the Second Church in Boston in 1832. He was invited by the graduating students of the Harvard Divinity School to address them in July 1838 and took the opportunity to go further in exposing what he took to be the inadequacies of the tenets of the reigning Unitarianism in the School and the pulpits of the Boston area to which he had once subscribed. The controversy he provoked sprang in essence from his challenge to all institutional and creedal authority in religion by his stress on the individual, intuitive search for truth.
