An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge

The Divinity School Address is the common name for the speech Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838, formally titled Acquaint Thyself First Hand with Deity. Speaking to graduating divinity students, their professors, and local ministers at a time when Harvard was the center of American Unitarian thought, Emerson argued that moral intuition, present in every individual, is a better guide to moral sentiment than inherited religious doctrine, and he set aside the necessity of believing in the historical miracles attributed to Jesus. The address reflected Emerson's own break with organized ministry: he had resigned his pulpit at Boston's Second Church in 1832 after coming to doubt that the rite of the Lord's Supper was consistent with Jesus's original intentions. Its open break with conventional Unitarian theology in favor of Transcendentalist ideas made the speech deeply controversial on delivery.