[146] See Sanders on the Holy Maid of Kent.
TO BE CONTINUED.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT IN NEW ENGLAND.[147]
This volume reads pleasantly. There is attached to it a peculiar interest, and something of the charm of a romance, for those who have had some knowledge of the transcendental movement in New England, and acquaintance with its leaders. The author has evidently written his account with feelings of sympathy and friendship, which he acknowledges, and these have led him to bring out all the good points of the movement, while its shortcomings, exaggerations, and absurdities are scarcely, if at all, hinted at. The style is clear and smooth, the narrative never falters; the writer has contrived to throw a certain halo around the leaders of transcendentalism, and succeeded in presenting in his book a series of ideal portraits calculated to impose somewhat upon strangers. The impression which the work leaves on the mind of the reader is as if he had been listening to the conversation of a member of a mutual admiration society. Octavius Brooks Frothingham is not a “central thinker,” his knowledge of the subject of which he treats is very limited, and his religious insight is null. Transcendentalism requires a differently-equipped man to be its historian. There is, somehow, a narrowness of structure and a peculiar twist in the faculties of the New England mind—perhaps a constitutional inheritance—which renders it inapt to conceive first principles and grasp universal
truths; and although transcendentalism was an effort to rise above this condition, it nevertheless carried with it in its flight all these defects.
Our author has not written a history, but an interesting sketch which will be useful, no doubt, to some future historian. To write a history, especially of a philosophical and religious movement such as transcendentalism pretended to be, and really was, requires more than an acquaintance with persons and facts. One must comprehend its real origin, and have mastered and become familiar with his subject. This is a task which Mr. Frothingham has not accomplished.
Every heresy segregates its adherents from the straight line of the true progress of the human race, all deviations from which are, in the nature of things, either transitory or fatal. They live, for the greater part, outside of the cumulated wisdom and the broad stream of the continuous life of humanity. When the heresy has almost exhausted its derived life—for no heresy has a source of life in itself—and the symptoms of its approaching death begin to appear, the intelligent and sincere who are born in it at this stage of its career are the first to seek to regain the unbroken unity of truth. This is reached by two distinct and equally legitimate ways. The first class gains the knowledge of the whole body of the originally revealed truth, from which its heresy cut it off, by tracing the truths retained by the sect to their logical connection with other no less important
truths equally contained in the same divine revelation. The second class falls back upon the essential truths of natural reason; and as all supernatural truth finds its support in natural truth, it follows that the denial of any of the former involves a denial of the latter. Heresy always involves a mutilation of man’s natural reason. Once the integral natural basis recovered, the repudiation of heresy as contrary to reason follows logically. But the experience of the human race, that of the transcendentalists included, shows plainly that nature does not suffice nature; and this class, at this moment, starts out to find a religion consonant with the dictates of reason, satisfactory to all their spiritual necessities, and adequate to their whole nature. They ask, and rightly, for a religion which shall find its fast foundations in the human breast. This appeal can only be answered, and is only met, by the revelation given to the world in the beginning by the Author of man, completed in the Incarnation, and existing in its entirety and in unbroken historical continuity in the Catholic Church alone.