Thoreau once declared that he "was born in the nick of time." This statement may puzzle or startle the reader when he first encounters it, but it should be noted as one of the most significant sentences Thoreau ever wrote. To a great degree, the character of Thoreau's life and the very production of Walden were results of his birth date. In 1817, the transcendentalist movement, for which Thoreau was destined to be one of the major spokesmen, was born. It would become, by the late 1830s, the intellectual force that charged Thoreau's imagination and channeled his energies into a vocation of writing and lecturing about the possibilities of an ideal existence for man. While Thoreau was not very interested in the immediate concerns that initiated the transcendentalist movement, men like Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott, and Emerson, who had been in the movement since the 1820s, strongly attracted the young Harvard graduate of 1837 and virtually forged the shape of his mature life.
One would not know it from Thoreau's writings, but the transcendentalist movement was the result of a heated religious controversy within the Unitarian church. It began in the 1820s with a revolt of the younger clergymen in and around Boston. They were protesting what Emerson termed "the corpse-cold Unitarianism of Harvard College and Brattle Street." They saw in Unitarianism a form of religion that had lost the ability to fulfill the spiritual and emotional needs of worshippers because of its hyper-rational approach to Christianity. To these young clergymen, Unitarianism had removed the essentials of genuine religious experience — intuition, feeling, and mystery — and had replaced them with a rationalistic, common-sense, "rule-book" approach to the religious life. The Calvinists, with their rigorous beliefs, had charged that it was not a religion at all, but merely a Sunday morning social gathering for businessmen who did not wish to be troubled about the ethics of their everyday dealings. And although the optimistically inclined transcendentalists had little in common with the Calvinists, they agreed with this assessment of Unitarian complacency in spiritual matters. In one sense, the transcendentalists were like the Calvinists: They lamented the loss of the deeply felt experience of God and the rigorous morality that had characterized faith in New England before the rise of Unitarianism. Orestes Brownson spoke for quite a few young clergymen when he termed Unitarianism "the jumping-off place from the church to absolute infidelity."
