He did not believe in the rites the church clung to as indispensable; he did not believe in the use of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper; he did not believe in prayers from the pulpit unless the preacher felt impelled to pray; he did not believe in ritualism or formalism of any kind,--in short, he did not believe in a church, for a church, however broad and liberal, is, after all, an institution, and no one man, however great, can support an institution.

A very great soul--and Emerson was a great soul--may carry a following through life and long after death, but that following is not a church, not an institution, not a living organized body, until forms, conventions, and traditions make it so; its vitalizing element may be the soul of its founder, but the framework of the structure, the skeleton, is made up of the more or less rigid conventions which are the results of natural and logical selection.
The ritual of Rome, the service of England, the dry formalism of Calvinism, the slender structure of Unitarianism were all equally repugnant to Emerson; he could not stretch himself in their fetters; he was not at ease in any priestly garment.

Born a prophet, he could not become a priest.

By nature a teacher and preacher, he never could submit to those restrictions which go so far to make preaching effective.

He taught the lesson of the ages, but he mistook it for his own.