In Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance," what does he mean by the passage, "[We are] guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the...

In this passage, Emerson is using language with religious connotations to make the point that everyday people aren't meant to be followers or passive bystanders on the sidelines. Everyone should take up the roles we usually reserve for a few, special leaders — the roles of

• guides (showing others the way),


• redeemers (helping themselves and others break free from sins and oppressive moral constraints), and


• benefactors (doing deeds that benefit the world).

By taking these active roles, people are doing God's work ("obeying the Almighty effort") and making spiritual progress ("advancing on Chaos and the Dark").

By itself, that may not sound like a very unusual message, especially to the modern reader. It's common nowadays to hear that everyone should be an activist and try to improve the world. But if you look what precedes this statement, you can see that Emerson is talking about something more radical.

He is telling the reader, in effect, "Don't take direction from anyone else, not even people who are regarded as intellectual or spiritual authorities." If men like Moses, Plato, and Milton are great, it's because they were true to their own beliefs and spoke their minds. We should be doing the same.

The temptation is that we will be intimidated by authority, tradition, or public opinion. We'll decide that our personal intuitions aren't trustworthy, and therefore we'll defer to the judgment of others — act as if we are "minors and invalids in a protected corner."  But that's the opposite of the lesson we should take from the likes of Moses, Plato, and Milton. Instead of ceding our own judgment to great men, we should learn from their example and trust in our own instincts:

"They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side."