Wherefore come out from among them,
and be ye separate, saith the Lord,
and touch not the unclean thing;
2 Corinthians 6:17
"Ralph Waldo Emerson may be regarded as the founding father of New Thought.
He was much influenced by his reading of the Hindu scriptures. He wrote: "In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the
conception of the fundamental Unity. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat-Gita, and the Vishnu Purana. . . . I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavat-Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us".
Emerson delivered a lecture on “The Oversoul,” at the Harvard Divinity School in 1844. He talked of a ‘divine presence’ that permeates the whole creation and all living things.
The close parallel between Hindu scripture and Emerson’s
enunciation here is unmistakable.
Emerson was settled in Concord, Massachusetts, which now boasts an impressive Emerson Museum. Leading Transcendentalists in Massachusetts included Henry David Thoreau, Phineas Quimby, Margaret Fuller, Palmer Peabody, James Freeman Clark, and Mary Baker Eddy. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded the Unity Church in 1889 with headquarters in Missouri."
UniversityOfWestFlorida
