This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Emerson was ordained junior pastor of the Second Church in Boston on 11 March 1829, as colleague to the senior minister Henry Ware. The office was not a formality he drifted into: he had studied at Harvard Divinity School, was licensed to preach in 1826, and supplied pulpits for three years before Second Church called him. For a while it suited him. He married Ellen Tucker in 1829, and the congregation, an old and settled one, gave him a stable income and a public platform he used seriously.
The break came over a single point of practice, not a sweeping crisis of belief. On 9 September 1832 he preached a sermon telling the congregation that he could no longer administer the Lord's Supper as a perpetual, literal rite, because he did not believe Jesus had instituted it to be repeated forever rather than observed once, as a Passover meal among friends. The congregation, through a committee, offered him a way to stay: he could keep the pulpit and simply not administer the sacrament himself, leaving that part of the service to someone else. He declined the compromise and submitted his formal resignation on 22 September 1832.
What followed was not a plan. He had no other position, and no immediate income beyond his first wife's estate, settled after her 1831 death. He travelled to Europe in 1832 and 1833, met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, and came home to build a new occupation from lecturing, an activity that did not yet have the institutional respectability the ministry carried. Nature followed in 1836. The position and its ending were not preamble to that book; they were the condition that made writing it possible, since the pulpit he left behind was the platform he would have kept using if the Lord's Supper had not forced the question.