A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past, wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual hold; Poe, though he did not venture till his days of downfall to write his Eureka, thereby proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist; and Emerson's poetry, no less than his prose, constantly expresses his pantheism; while his gifted disciple Thoreau, in some ways a more stringent thinker than his master, was either a pantheist or a Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches. [1867] The economic conditions of American life have till recently been unfavourable to the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the unique figure of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view of life; [1868] Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism of their no less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men of letters since the Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel Wentworth Higginson, have been avowedly on the side of rationalism, or, as the term goes in the States, "liberalism." Though the tone of ordinary conversation is more often reminiscent of religion in the United States than in England, the novel and the newspaper have been perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than here; and in the public honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia, may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has disappeared from the region of his birth.