In response to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address, Henry Ware, Jr. delivered a sermon titled The Personality of the Deity in the chapel of Harvard University on September 23, 1838. Because of the wide circulation of Emerson's address among non-Divinity students, Ware found it necessary, after a lengthy exchange of letters with Emerson, to present his response to the entire University community during the next term. The sermon refuted some of Emerson's pantheist ideas and reasserted, as the title suggests, the willful personality of God. The sermon is generally regarded as one of Ware's best works and marks a turning point in the perceptions of true Unitarianism. Where it had previously been portrayed as liberal or even radical by the Trinitarians who had just fifty years before controlled the University, the departure of the Trinitarians and the rises of Transcendentalism and of Secular Humanism now made Unitarianism the conservative position. Although widely condemned by University faculty, Emerson's address was very popular among students, many of whom, as Unitarian ministers, led their congregations towards Emerson's ideology. Accordingly, Ware's sermon never received the wide attention and study that Emerson's address did.
Famous quotes containing the words personality and/or deity:
“But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Dog. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)