The Search for the Devine
The search to find and please God has always been a goal of all Americans throughout the history of America. The first Puritan settlers believed that God was an unreachable and unapologetic deity whom controlled every aspect of their lives. They also believed that the devil lurked in the wilderness with the savages that lived deep within the forests. Throughout the course of time, the idea of only being able to worship God at church became obsolete with conventional transcendental thinkers such as Emerson. Although the search and appreciation of God has not changed, the means of worship and the overall idea of God has and continues to change as the world changes. God’s sovereignty was wildly popular and feared amongst …show more content…
Caroline Stansbury Kirkland writes about the hard ships she had to face out in the new frontier in her story A New Home—Who’ll Follow. Following her husband she is forced to move west with her family to Michigan. The west was a new frontier and a big change from Boston where she originally lived. She was afraid that her family would turn wild and savage themselves if they spend a lot of time being isolated in the wilderness. This illustrates that although many years gap from when the puritans originally settled, their ideas regarding the forest and the devil remain. Her first alarming incident regarded a women and her family, “Michigan was not without its terrors, owing to the horrible drunkenness of the master of the house, whose wife and children were in constant fear of their lives, from his insane fury” (Kirkland 172). The women told Kirkland her story and how she had once lived a comfortable life in Connecticut but the wilderness consumed and changed her …show more content…
Transcendentalism came about by Ralph Waldo Emerson because he felt that church was still too constricting. He believed that people should focus more on their senses and intuition rather than reason, which differed from the deist who focused more on science and reasoning. Transcendentalist, unlike both puritans and deist believed that the divine was everywhere and in everything because God made everything. Because we are all divine we are all united by God. They also believed that everyone should trust in their five senses to understand the world around them. The main difference of the transcendentalist group and the puritans is how the transcendentalist valued nature as being the purest representation of Gods
The search to find and please God has always been a goal of all Americans throughout the history of America. The first Puritan settlers believed that God was an unreachable and unapologetic deity whom controlled every aspect of their lives. They also believed that the devil lurked in the wilderness with the savages that lived deep within the forests. Throughout the course of time, the idea of only being able to worship God at church became obsolete with conventional transcendental thinkers such as Emerson. Although the search and appreciation of God has not changed, the means of worship and the overall idea of God has and continues to change as the world changes. God’s sovereignty was wildly popular and feared amongst …show more content…
Caroline Stansbury Kirkland writes about the hard ships she had to face out in the new frontier in her story A New Home—Who’ll Follow. Following her husband she is forced to move west with her family to Michigan. The west was a new frontier and a big change from Boston where she originally lived. She was afraid that her family would turn wild and savage themselves if they spend a lot of time being isolated in the wilderness. This illustrates that although many years gap from when the puritans originally settled, their ideas regarding the forest and the devil remain. Her first alarming incident regarded a women and her family, “Michigan was not without its terrors, owing to the horrible drunkenness of the master of the house, whose wife and children were in constant fear of their lives, from his insane fury” (Kirkland 172). The women told Kirkland her story and how she had once lived a comfortable life in Connecticut but the wilderness consumed and changed her …show more content…
Transcendentalism came about by Ralph Waldo Emerson because he felt that church was still too constricting. He believed that people should focus more on their senses and intuition rather than reason, which differed from the deist who focused more on science and reasoning. Transcendentalist, unlike both puritans and deist believed that the divine was everywhere and in everything because God made everything. Because we are all divine we are all united by God. They also believed that everyone should trust in their five senses to understand the world around them. The main difference of the transcendentalist group and the puritans is how the transcendentalist valued nature as being the purest representation of Gods