They, hand in hand, with wandering steps & slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way—
her sympathy overflowed, and she added in the margin “too bad.”54 Yet the comment applied to more than those two legendary parents of the human race; it applied to the whole human dilemma. There was incipient religious protest as well as spontaneous schoolgirl sentiment in her exclamation. In time Milton’s God himself might come to seem too bad to be believed.
Emerson, in his essay on his brilliant Calvinistic aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, wrote, “Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious authority in their mind, and nowise the slight, merely entertaining quality of modern bards.”55
It was all right for Emerson to write of this in the past tense, for in the Boston world which he inhabited a new day had brought radically new religious views and tastes.56 But in Sanbornton Bridge, Milton and Young still had authority for those in the older religious tradition.
To be sure, another sort of religion also had currency and widespread influence there: the religion of the popular revivals, by that time mostly Methodist and Baptist. The important thing about the revivalist movement sweeping the rural United States was that it shifted the ground from hardheaded logic to undisciplined emotion, from doctrine to piety, from an educated ministry to lay preachers and itinerant evangelists who felt themselves moved by “the Sperrit” but who might be all but illiterate.
There was a general feeling that in getting away from the intellectual foundations of the past the revivalists were getting back to the conditions ● ● ●
54 [Mary Baker Glover, “Leaving paradise,” copybook, A09002, p. 11, MBEL.]
55 [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Mary Moody Emerson,” in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. 10, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1883), p. 376.]
56 The single year of 1836 saw the publication of Emerson’s Nature, Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels, George Ripley’s Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion, Orestes Brownson’s New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, Convers Francis’s Christianity as a Purely Internal Principle, and W. H. Furness’s Remarks on the Four Gospels. Yet all of these together did not create the excitement generated among Americans by the publication in the same year of Pickwick Papers. A Dickensian romp in a stagecoach had a clear advantage over transcendental cajolements to hitch one’s wagon to a star.