This was the line that got Emerson banned from Harvard. Speaking to future ministers — men about to enter the institutional church — he told them to abandon institutional religion. Not faith itself, but the apparatus of received doctrine, inherited authority, and secondhand revelation that he believed had suffocated the living spirit of Christianity. Emerson's argument was that the historical church had committed two fundamental errors: it had made Jesus into a demigod rather than an exemplar of human potential, and it had treated revelation as 'somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.' The remedy was radical self-reliance: 'The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.' He urged them to be 'a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost' and 'acquaint men at first hand with Deity.'