His Formative Early Years

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes, the son of William and Anna Holmes, was born on January 21, 1887 on a small farm near Lincoln, Maine. He was the youngest of nine sons.
Reading was a favorite pastime for the Holmes family members. The favorite childhood book was The Story of the Bible, full of illustrations and sketches of flying angels. The Bible was another family favorite. Ernest's mother would read aloud to the family from the King James version every evening. They also read Drummonds' Natural Law in the Spiritual World, and from this developed a religious viewpoint more expansive than most people had in that era.
Ernest's father would not stand for "hellfire" preaching. One Sunday morning, the local minister delivered a sermon declaring that all people were "worms of the dust, doomed to decay in the dust from which they had sprung." On the way home from church, Ernest's father could not contain his anger. "Don't be scared, boys, about worms of the dust. You are not worms, and it's a big lie. Jesus said, 'Ye are gods,' and you are like God if you keep it that way. Man was made by God. Any other story is a lie."
Ernest loved mythology and would occasionally join one of his brothers, Jerome, in buying a 25-cent book about the Greeks or the legends of the Middle Ages. He also read translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
In 1905, Ernest was 18 and living in Boston. He returned to Lincoln to visit his brother William, a student at Yale University, who was vacationing back in Lincoln. While there, he discovered a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays. He read the book time and again over the next two days and a light came on for him. Fenwicke, another of Ernest's brothers, said of that incident, "It was at that moment that life really began for Ernest Holmes."
It was the idea of an independence of mind that Ernest found so rich and vital in Emerson's writings. The poet emphasized nonconformity, which Ernest loved, for independence had been Ernest's trademark almost his entire life. "Reading Emerson was like drinking water to me," Ernest once said, and it "gave me a realization that in a certain sense every man has to interpret the universe in terms of his own thinking and personal relationships, and that in order to do it, he has to have faith and confidence in his own interpretation."
Ernest believed that man shares universality with all of life and that this unification gives all people a divine participation. "You yourself are an individualization of this thing," he said. "There is a depth and meaning to your own being; if you can discover it, it will answer your own questions."

Edited and excerpted from Path of Discovery,
a booklet prepared by Reverend Scott Awbrey