Ralph Waldo Emerson was an important American literary figure in the 19th century. Best known as a leader in the Transcendental movement, he wrote a number of well known essays and speeches, as well as a biographer and editor of the publication “The Dial”.  Emerson was a very influential figure with address “An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge”, subsequently renamed “The American Scholar”, considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Emerson’s “... teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s ...”.  Even in the early Twentieth century, Napoleon Hill was strongly recommending repeated reading of Emerson’s essay “Compensation” in both “Think and Grow Rich” and “Law of Success”.

With regard to “Compensation”, the following has been taken from Wikipedia:

“In his essay, Emerson states that everything is well compensated for. Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every benefit has a tax, and correspondingly every tax has a benefit. The cheat cheats himself. The swindler swindles himself. The real prize of labor is knowledge and virtue. Wealth and credit are mere external signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.

Emerson also states that problems and obstacles are seeds of success. Our strength grows out of our weakness. A great man is always willing to be little. A person who is spoiled by successes and advantages, goes to sleep. When a person is pushed, tormented and defeated, he has a chance to learn something, he gains facts, learns his ignorance and real skill.

Emerson states that the belief that the good suffer and that justice is not done, is an immense fallacy. Nature guarantees that every contract must be paid. If you have an ungrateful master, serve him more. Learn to put God in your debt ...”

The following represents the opening paragraph from “Compensation”, in which Emerson states his motivating desire for writing “Compensation”, as follows:

“Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition, and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be, because it really is now.  It appeared, moreover, that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that would not suffer us to lose our way”.

In his biography of Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. writes the following of “Compensation”:

““Compensation” might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful, and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John Bunyan’s view:

“A Christian man is never long at ease, When one fright's gone, another doth him seize”.

Emerson shows up the “success” of the bad man and the failures and trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which would have made him throw his sermon into the fire”.

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