Thoreau doesn’t seem to have had a particularly harmonious relationship with formal religion, and he makes some side-swiping comments about the church and its representatives, while also being an immensely reverent – and in that sense – religious person.

‘I see dumb-bells in the minister’s study, and some of their dumbness gets into his sermons.’   10 Oct 1860

Source: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 1837-1861, Damion Searls (ed.), preface by John R. Stilgoe (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), p. 635

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