Difficulties in decoding Emerson's message..

In the first half of "The American Scholar" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, there was a tremendous amount of sophistication and English codec that to many, including myself, are misunderstood. It seems a select secret mind, a rare one at that, can reveal the true meaning of Emerson's mind numbing text. A particular passage struck out to me as especially difficult.

The passage read:
"I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action"

Like myself, I'm sure all of you reading this are shaking your heads and massaging your temples. To me a few phrases stand out to be important to the understanding of this particular piece of written text. When looking at the phrase "there is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade" it seems to imply that multiple types of work are equally important to society. Further into that sentence when examining the phrase "for learned as well as unlearned hands." it seems to add the workers themselves to the important factors of this described society.

The most trying sentence of this passage is the final one. "only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgements and modes of action". In my opinion, this final part swings the entire mood of the passage. It seems to be seen that Emerson believes that finding multiple methods of work and workers to complete them is indeed important, but once a man begins his work, he should not be persuaded to go elsewhere by outside influences, at least, from what I understand, until the work is done.

So taking both major elements into mind, it seems that the overall message of this passage is this; One must seek out to do needed and productive tasks, but once a task is started, one must finish it no matter what forces may push back.

Emerson seems to have a multitude of coded messages in his historic pieces, no one can understand his writing, or any writing for that matter, to the fullest extent, unless they wrote it themselves. This is because writing isn't a science, writing is a point of view.