Cosmic Consciousness · 48 of 59

Part 5, Chapter 26: T. S. R.

CHAPTER 26. T. S. R.

Born 1840. Entered Cosmic Consciousness in 1872, at the age of thirty-two years. Was a member of a Presbyterian Church in good standing. Upon illumination left the church and has had no connection with any similar organization since. Was always an earnest, thoughtful man. “In 1872 [an informant says] his friends thought for a time that he was becoming insane.

Insight

T. S. R. left his Presbyterian church on illumination and never joined another organized congregation. The pattern recurs across Bucke’s anonymous cases: the experience displaces denominational identity rather than confirming it. C. P. left Methodism for what Bucke calls a semi-infidel vein, R. P. S. moved through several traditions, the Anglican C.Y.E. drifted into Quaker silence and then into nothing nameable. Bucke takes this as evidence that the cosmic sense outgrows ecclesial categories, which is consistent with his Whitman-as-apex argument. The institutional sociology of late-Victorian American Protestantism makes the same observation from the other side: the rise of New Thought, Christian Science, theosophy, and the early Pentecostal movement through these decades represents a mass exit from the inherited denominations into experience-based religion.

He passed through a grave spiritual crisis, the exact nature of which is not known to me. * Whatever it was, it, to all appearance, passed over, and he has been ever since not only sane but exceptionally intelligent and rightminded. He is the best read Emerson scholar that I know.

In all his home relations—by wife, children and friends—he is greatly beloved. He has a positive certainty of individual immortality. He is a very modest man, but has a certain air or manner which impresses those who meet him that he (being a mere clerk) is a richer man than his millionaire employers, and that he knows it.”