ideals to which Emerson and Henry David Thoreau aspired on a highly sophisticated level, plain men of the time sought at a Methodist mourners’ bench or class meeting.” It was a kind of “evangelical transcendentalism” which thrived in the idealism of a young and growing America. By 1856 holiness had become so popular that Jesse T. Peck’s book, The Central Idea of Christianity, seemed to express the feeling of a large segment of American Protestantism.39 This crusade