, made by me in my sixteenth year, which most assuredly no
mortal could ever have understood or made, or cared to make, if he had
not read the Neo-Platonists; for Marsilius Ficinus himself regarded this
work as a pendant to them, and published it as such. Which work I
declared was not a Christian Platonic forgery, but based on old Egyptian
works, as has since been well-nigh proved from recent discoveries. (I
think it was Dr. Garnett who, hearing me once declare in the British
Museum that I believed Hermes was based on an ancient Egyptian text, sent
for a French work in which the same view was advanced.)

The ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and _odium theologicum_ which prevailed
in America until 1840 was worse than that in Europe under the Church in
the Middle Ages, for even in the latter there had been an Agobard and an
Abelard, Knight-Templar agnostics, and _illuminati_ of different kinds.
The Unitarians, who believed firmly in every point of Christianity, and
that man was saved by Jesus, and would be damned if he did not put faith
in him as the Son of God, were regarded literally and truly by everybody
as no better than infidels because they believed that Christ was _sent_
by God, and that Three could not be One. Every sect, with rare
exceptions, preached, especially the Presbyterians, that the vast
majority even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the devil
that far greater power than God against which Bishop Agobard had
protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he was pointed at in the
streets; and if a man had even seen a "Deist," he spoke of it as if he
had beheld a murderer. Against all this some few were beginning to
revolt.

There came a rumour that there was something springing up in Boston
called Transcendentalism. Nobody knew what it was, but it was dreamy,
mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion. Firstly, it was
connected with Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally with
everything German. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it. I
had a quick intuition that here was something for me to work at. I
bought Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_, first edition, and read it through
forty times ere I left college, of which I "kept count."

My record here as regards some books may run a little ahead; but either
before I went to college or during my first year there (almost all before
or by 1840-'41), I had read Carlyle's "Miscellanies" thoroughly,
Emerson's "Essays," a