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To Heaven in A Swing: The Transcendentalism of Cyrus Bartol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

William R. Hutchison
William R. Hutchison
Affiliation:
American University, Washington, D. C.
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Extract

Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 1963 , pp. 275 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1963

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References

1 Emerson, Edward W. and Forbes, Waldo E., eds., The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. IV (Boston, 1909–1914), p. 114Google Scholar; Emerson's Complete Works, Vol. X (Boston, 1883), p. 322; Frothingham, Octavius B., Transcendentalism in New England (New York, 1886), p. 342.Google Scholar

2 Eliot, Samuel A., ed., Heralds of a Liberal Faith, Vol. III (Boston, 1910), pp. 17–22Google Scholar; Munger, Theodore T., Horace Bushnell (Boston, 1900), pp. 135Google Scholar, 348. “During a large part of [Bartol's] ministry, certainly after Theodore Parker died, he was the most original Unitarian preacher in Boston.” Harvard Graduates Magazine 9 (March, 1901), 421Google Scholar. The listing of Bartol's books in the Eliot volume is incomplete, omitting Discourses on the Christian Body and Form (Boston, 1853); Church and Congregation (Boston, 1858); and The Word of the Spirit to the Church (Boston, 1859).

3 Word of the Spirit, pp. 17–18; Radical Problems (Boston, 1872), p. 84.

4 Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates 1636–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), p. 926; Eliot, Liberal Faith, pp. 17–22; Higginson, Thomas W., Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1884), p. 144Google Scholar; Shepard, Odell, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston, 1938), pp. 91–92, 135.Google Scholar

5 Christian Examiner 31 (1842), 372; Body and Form, p. 10. See also ibid., ch. 15; Discourses on the Christian Spirit and Life (Boston, 1850), ch. 7; and Confession of Faith: a Sermon (Boston, 1844), pp. 13–16.

6 Examiner 31, 371; Bddy and Form, p. 2.

7 Word of the Spirit, pp. 30–31.

8 Bartol to Bellows, December 2, 1852. Henry W. Bellows Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter “BP”). See also Bartol letters of February 12 and March 4 and 11, 1845, BP. The reformer John T. Sargent held a similar view of Parker's rise to influence, and expressed it with considerable bitterness. Sargent, The Crisis of Unitarianism in Boston (Boston, 1859).

The Bellows-Bartol correspondence, in BP, numbering some 500 items, is apparently the only significant collection of Bartol materials available; the main body of Bartol's papers is believed to have been destroyed in a fire. Dr. George A. Bartol, letter to author, May 10, 1961.

9 Bartol to Bellows, July 6, 1860, BP. Bartol, , A Discourse Preached in the West Church on Theodore Parker (Boston, 1860), p. 3.Google Scholar

10 ibid., pp. 4, 11–12, 14–15.

11 ibid., pp. 8–13, 24. Bartol's estimate of Henry Ward Beecher shows the same canons of criticism applied to a different set of abilities: “He is a man of genius, but I never saw genius before mixed with such ill-assorted and extraneous materials of vulgarity and conceit. … He is a spoiled beauty, and yet a heroic heart. God save him from the smallness that disfigures his greatness, for there are few such Christian energies in the land.” Bartol to Bellows, January 22, 1855, BP.

12 ibid., pp. 24–25, 16–17.

13 ibid., pp. 22, 23, 27.

14 See especially Spirit and Life, chs. 10, 18, 22, and 29; Body and Form, chs. I, 2, 15, and 18.

15 ibid., p. 5.

16 Eliot, Liberal Faith, I, 47; Cooke, George W., Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1902), p. 135Google Scholar; Bartol, Body and Form, p. 6.

17 Unitarians just at this time seemed “pathetically anxious to be acknowledged by the orthodox as really Christian.” Wilbur, Earl M., A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 463.Google Scholar See the Ellis's, Rev. George E.A Half Century of the Unitarian Controversy (Boston, 1857)Google Scholar for illustration of the conciliatory mood.

18 Bartol to Bellows, August 9, October 3, 1855, BP. Again, in a letter of August 28: “The new orthodoxy of Unitarians, the dogmas with which I find my ideas of the matter insulted, drive me more strongly than ever to the Reason God put in us and which he has made Christ to be to us …”

19 The Suspense of Faith: An Address to the Alumni of the Divinity School of Harvard University (New York, 1859).

20 Bartol, Word of the Spirit, pp. 3–4, 49. Bartol to Bellows, October 13, 1859, BP.

21 The Rising Faith (Boston, 1874), p. 234; Radical Problems, p. 55.

22 “The Theological Transition,” Radical 2 (1867), 292; Radical Problems, p. 112.

23 Bartol to Bellows, August 9, 1855, BP.

24 Bartol to Bellows, March 16, 1855, BP.

25 James, The Church of Christ Not an Ecclesiasticism: A Letter of Remonstrance to a Member of the soi-disant New Church (2nd. edn., London, 1856), pp. 10–11. The first edition had appeared in 1854.

26 Emerson came for “two days' solid talk” in early August, 1855; and Bartol three days later was announcing to Bellows his rejection of ecclesiasticism. Bartol to Bellows, August 6 and August 9, 1855. Emerson to Bartol, August 14, 1857, in Rusk, Ralph L., ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol V (New York, 1939), pp. 81–82.Google Scholar

27 For reflections of Bartol's concern, see Bushnell's letters to him in Cheney, Mary B., Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York, 1880).Google Scholar Bartol's general estimate of Bushnell's influence upon him is in ibid., pp. 184–88. Bartol called Nature and the Supernatural “the chief theological work of the time.” Christian Examiner 66 (1859), 115.Google Scholar Unavailability of the Bushnell-Bartol correspondence (save for a meager sampling in Cheney) is one of the foremost tragedies in the apparent loss of both sets of papers. (Bushnell's grandson told me the family knows of no substantial collection. Howell Cheney to author, May 25, 1956.)

28 Schneider, Herbert W., A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1946), p. 133.Google Scholar

29 The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Vol. VII (Cambridge, Mass., 1900), p. 320Google Scholar; Christian Examiner 50 (1851), 174–202, and 48 (1850), 53–88. The essays later collected in Max Müller's Chips from a German Workshop (1867) were first published during the 1850's. Clarke's Ten Great Religions appeared in 1871–83; Johnson's Oriental Religions, 1872–77.

30 Bartol to Bellows, February 25, March 21, 26, April 2, 1865, BP; Radical Problems, p. 106; Rising Faith, p. 78.

31 “Theological Transition,” pp. 294–95. Bartol to Bellows, September 22, 1866. See also October 5, 1866, November 23, 1868, BP.

32 “Theological Transition,” p. 290. For the controversies connected with the formation of the National Conference and the Free Religious Association, see Persons, Stow, Free Religion (New Haven, 1947).Google Scholar

33 Bellows to Bartol, April 12, 1865, BP. For Bellows’ career, see Maxwell, William Q., Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York, Longmans, Green, 1956)Google Scholar; and Walker, Frank, “Ecumenicity and Liberty: The Contribution of Henry W. Bellows to the Development of Post-Civil War Unitarianism,” Proceedings of the Unitarian Historical Society 13:2 (1961), 1–24.Google Scholar

34 Bartol to Bellows, February 4, 1867, BP.

35 Free Religion, p. 43.

36 Bellows to Bartol, February 6, 1867, BP. The Liberal Christian was edited by Bellows. The unsigned piece in question, a commentary on Bartol's “Theological Transition,” had spoken of the “almost fascinating style of this otherwise unsatisfactory article,” and had complained about Bartol's apparent belief “that nobody ever dreamed of the existence of the Holy Spirit until he made it known.” It also accused Bartol of letting others carry the radical fight at Conference meetings, and only afterwards meddling with the result. Liberal Christian, January 26, 1867. The attack upon Bellows by radical John Weiss occurred when the latter resigned in protest from the governing board of the American Unitarian Association.

37 Persons, Free Religion, p. 25; Bartol, Five Ministers, 40th Anniversary Sermon (Boston, 1877), p. 14Google Scholar; Bellows to Bartol, March 18, 1867, BP.

38 Congregational Freedom, A Discourse … Preached … March 3, 1867 (with subsequent proceedings of the Parish) (Boston, 1867); Bellows to Bartol, April 16, 1867, BP.

39 ibid., August 28, 1868 and March 23, 1869, BP.

40 Persons, Free Religion, pp. 106, 108–9.

41 Radical Problems, pp. III–12, 83–84, 169, 177, 267, 83, 75.

42 ibid., pp. 377 and 98–99; Rising Faith, p. 110. The plea could become grandiloquent: “I write and preach my sermons with heartbeats and tears; and, after a few years, send them by the thousand, without compunction, to the papermill.” Radical Problems, p. 377.

43 Transcendentalism, p. 343.

44 Rising Faith, pp. 376–77. In certain chapters of this book (e.g., ch. VIII, on “Forms”) Bartol seems almost to have been frightened by free religion back to his position of the 1840's. See also the chapter on Channing in his Principles and Portraits (Boston, 1880).

45 Rising Faith, p. 110.

46 For a balanced assessment of Bartol's “affectations” see Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine I (1874), 242–49. Also Charles G. Ames's estimate in Eliot, Liberal Faith, Vol. III, pp. 18–20. But from the distant and, for the moment, Congregationalist vantage point of Moncure Conway in Cincinnati, Bartol's Word of the Spirit seemed a “sublime pretense.” Gohdes, Clarence L. F., The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (Durham, 1931), pp. 204–5.Google Scholar

47 Bartol to Bellows, July 13, 1866, BP.

48 Bellows to Bartol, March 8, 1866, BP.