It is possible to view the natural world in two ways: as necessary, bound by consubstantial ties to whatever else has being; or as contingent, possessing being only through the free power of something else which is itself necessary. These two positions in their purest form are naturalism and supernaturalism, the one monistic and the other dualistic. According to the first, the natural world is all that is; and self-understanding and self-realization are the proper activities of man. According to the second, the natural world must bow before its Creator, Who brought it into being from pure nothingness; and the proper activities of man are work and worship. Exemplary of these positions are the Timaeus of Plato and the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:4a.

Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”

If in the Civil War God was preserving American nationality, giving the nation a baptism of blood, after that sacramental rebirth the question naturally arose, why had nationality been preserved, and what purpose was the regenerated nation to serve? In asking the question Protestant clergymen assumed that history had meaning, a plot, and that the United States would play a role in it. When they looked forward, what did they see ahead for America on the world stage? Upon investigation that forward look emerges as more than a blurred daydream. Leaders of Protestant thought analyzed American destiny in terms of sophisticated contemporary interpretations of history. From their analysis grew serious intellectual ideas of destiny which in retrospect appear as a prelude to later imperialism.

The last lines of CD plate xi (lines 21–23) have baffled commentators although the text is practically intact, except for a lacuna at the very end of line 23. The words employed in the passage by themselves are easily understood. It is their combination which causes difficulties. Especially the latter part of the passage under review—xi. 22b–xii. 1a—as yet has not been convincingly interpreted. The legal matter there dealt with remains unexplained. When editing CD for the first time S. Schechter frankly admitted: “The meaning of the law is entirely obscure to me.” And with C. Rabin's painstaking edition at hand H. Bardtke still maintains: “die Vorschrift Zeile 22b–23 kann nur unbefriedigend erklaert werden.” In view of this impasse a new attempt at a solution may be permitted.