perfect examples pointing to that perfection which nothing yet
has attained.

Thoreau's mysticism at times throws him into elusive moods--but
an elusiveness held by a thread to something concrete and
specific, for he had too much integrity of mind for any other
kind. In these moments it is easier to follow his thought than to
follow him. Indeed, if he were always easy to follow, after one
had caught up with him, one might find that it was not Thoreau.

It is, however, with no mystic rod that he strikes at
institutional life. Here again he felt the influence of the great
transcendental doctrine of "innate goodness" in human nature--a
reflection of the like in nature; a philosophic part which, by
the way, was a more direct inheritance in Thoreau than in his
brother transcendentalists. For besides what he received from a
native Unitarianism a good part must have descended to him
through his Huguenot blood from the "eighteenth-century French
philosophy." We trace a reason here for his lack of interest in
"the church." For if revealed religion is the path between God
and man's spiritual part--a kind of formal causeway--Thoreau's
highly developed spiritual life felt, apparently unconsciously,
less need of it than most men. But he might have been more
charitable towards those who do need it (and most of us do) if he
had been more conscious of his freedom. Those who look today for
the cause of a seeming deterioration in the influence of the
church may find it in a wider development of this feeling of
Thoreau's; that the need is less because there is more of the
spirit of Christianity in the world today. Another cause for his
attitude towards the church as an institution is one always too