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      Harvard's James Freeman Clarke was one in a long line of nineteenthcentury New England liberals who, in advance of William James, helped lift up the mystics as the bearers of a universal spirituality. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)

      Of first importance was the deployment of the new mysticism in the intensifying conflicts between religion and science, which in some minds amounted to a warfare. On this minefield, the revamping of mysticism was intended as a shield against untrammeled naturalism, “the fierce onward current of purely scientific thought.” “Never was there an age,” one anonymous essayist insisted in 1878, “when what is true in Mysticism needed emphatic assertion more than it does today. The general drift of thought is antagonistic to the spiritual and the eternal. Science, and by this word is generally understood the material and economic province, absorbs in itself all thought and investigation.” The very reality of the spiritual world was increasingly up for grabs in the second half of the nineteenth century, and mystics offered their own kind of empirical evidence for its existence. Not surprisingly, many of America's native-born mystics emulated Swedenborg in his ability to claim to occupy both religious and scientific domains. As the Concord seer Henry David Thoreau quipped in 1853, “The fact is I am a mystic–a transcendentalist–& a natural philosopher to boot.”³⁶

      The cracks appearing in the once unified relationship between religion and science were bad enough, but more life-threatening were the ragged sectional divisions of the pre– and post–Civil War periods. The new mysticism had a modest place in these politics as Northern intellectuals sought a religious vision to serve the national cause of Union. Frothingham, for one, made it plain that the issues of disunion were crucial to his reflections on the future religion of the United States. These divisions whetted his desires to discern a transcendent spirit that would override knotted sectional differences, admittedly on the North's terms. Charles C. Everett (1829–1900), a Harvard professor of theology who took up James Freeman Clarke's mantle in comparative religions, wrote of mysticism in 1874 as having “to do with wholes,” with the common and the unifying. “The word mysticism, whenever properly used,” he said, “refers to the fact that all lives, however distinct they may appear, however varied may be their conditions and their ends, are at heart one.” For Everett, no more sublime exemplar of this “mystical view of life” could be adduced than “our martyred president, Abraham Lincoln,” a truly “tender and heroic soul” who understood “alike the glory and the terror” of his “great work” and who held firm for “the unity of all being” against “modern atomism.” The growing liberal fascination with a globalized mysticism of universal brotherhood could serve a specific New England vision of capturing a holy union out of the rubble of rival nationalisms, North and South.³⁷

      Notwithstanding the interiority and solitude that these liberal Christians and post-Christians were championing, they were never far removed from the political and social realms. The suspicion that all this Transcendental talk of mysticism was isolating and self-absorbed is not borne out in these circles. Even Frothingham, who was as misty-eyed on mysticism as they came in his embrace of Vaughan's work, readily counseled that “genuine spirituality goes into the street” and does not seek the cloister. Indeed, much of the liberal writing on mysticism came to focus precisely on activism, on the “fusion of mystic communion with ethical passion.” “Mysticism is the form of religion most radical and progressive,” the Unitarian George W. Cooke wrote with complete confidence in 1894. William James himself was impatient with any equation of mysticism with a gospel of repose. His consistent measure of religious experience was its fruits, its production of saintliness and active habits–what he called “the moral fighting shape.” James imagined mystical experience as a way to unleash energy, to find the hot place of human initiative and endeavor, and to encourage the heroic, the strenuous, the vital, and the socially transformative. Likewise, the Quaker Rufus Jones, who followed in James's footsteps and became one of the most prolific American writers on mysticism, characterized mystics as “tremendous transmitters of energy.” He exemplified this through his own lifelong dedication to international relief work.³⁸

      Time and again, liberal religious leaders were adamant about the inseparability of mysticism and political activism, prayer and social progress. In his book Mysticism and Modern Life, published in 1915, the Methodist John Wright Buckham (1864–1945) made the connections between Christian spirituality and the tackling of the industrial crisis explicit with his category of “social mysticism.” Buckham, a professor for more than thirty years at the Pacific School of Religion, drew a sharp line on this point: active service to others was actually a requirement to be considered under his tendentious heading of “Normal Mysticism.” From the Unitarian Francis Greenwood Peabody (who developed social ethics as a distinct field at Harvard Divinity School in the 1880s) through the Quaker Howard H. Brinton (who was a guiding force in the Pendle Hill retreat center for contemplation and social action in the mid-twentieth century), the galvanizing concern for liberals was almost invariably “ethical mysticism.” Those deep concerns for a spirituality of social vision and transformation would make Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Howard Thurman patron saints for religious liberals. The convergence of political progressivism, socioeconomic justice, and mystical interiority was at the heart of the rise of a spiritual left in American culture.³⁹

      Finally, mysticism mattered existentially to all those wayfarers who invested so much in it. Spirituality in this new guise was embraced because of the distress it potentially assuaged, the questions of meaning it hoped to answer, the divided selves it tried to make whole, and the epiphanies it occasionally wrought. The dark question that James asked–“Is Life Worth Living?”–was hardly

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