Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers his last sermon as minister of the Second Church in Boston.

In his sermon, he declares, “I have no hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it.” The minister since 1829, Emerson resigns his post shortly afterward, when the congregation fails to support his proposal to abandon communion. In a poem a month later, he writes, “I will not live out of me / I will not see with others’ eyes / My good is good, my evil ill / I would be free.” Emerson makes a sharper criticism of Unitarianism in 1846.*