Invited by the graduating class rather than by the faculty, Emerson addressed the Harvard Divinity School in July 1838 and told the students that historical Christianity had made two errors. It had exaggerated the person of Jesus, turning a man who saw the moral law clearly into an object of worship, and it had treated revelation as something finished, so that preaching had become the repetition of another man's experience. The word miracle, he said, as the churches used it, had come to sound monstrous, because it was set against nature rather than being one with it.
The reaction was immediate and severe. Andrews Norton, the leading conservative Unitarian scholar, published a reply calling it the latest form of infidelity; the address was denounced across the liberal establishment; and Harvard did not invite Emerson to speak again for close to thirty years. The controversy is the moment Transcendentalism separated from Unitarianism rather than remaining a wing of it.
His long term influence ran outside the churches. He was read as a permission rather than as a doctrine, and by people he would not have predicted: Whitman took a poetics from him, Nietzsche read him with pleasure, and the American New Thought movement adopted him wholesale, to the point where Ernest Holmes said everything he himself taught was already in Emerson. The atlas records that line of descent because it is the main channel through which his religious thought reached ordinary practice.