Transcendentalism and Baseball 3

Is it not natural for a people who have rid themselves of rule by a European nation to also rid themselves of a European religion? Some writers of the transcendentalist period in the early 19th century like Nathaniel Hawthorne remained Christians but even they sought a genuine new spirituality that the old Catholic and Protestant practices could no longer provide. They all sensed that Christianity fit the past but not their time. However none of them escaped to new spiritual experiences without the key elements of Christian experience remaining in their minds since they all knew the main themes in the bible. Emerson was a consecrated minister before he renounced his ministry. Hawthorne observed in Rome at Saint Peter's Catholics going to confession and confessed that he would have practiced it if he could have believed it would allow him a genuine experience. In his last novel, The Marble Fawn. his American hero and heroine search the artistic and religious remains in Italy for genuine uplifting spiritual experiences. They find little in the Italian Christianity of their time, the 1850s, that is genuine and in their two European friends, Miriam and Donatello, they brush up against genuine evil.

Daniel McNeill

Read the complete essay, Transcendentalism and Baseball, at the website of The United States of the World at: www,usoftheworld.com/culture