“If Thoreau was not a pantheist, what was he? No label suffices, but Thoreau encountered and wrote about that transcendent divine source that people throughout history have called God. His God was an infinite, life-giving presence manifest in the natural world and yet not contained by it. It was a God of wildness, surprise, and change, yet it was at the same time benign and loving. Thoreau accepted this divine mystery as the central if unknowable reality of his life, and sought communion with it. In moments of ecstasy he wrote with an emotional certainty about this source, but his belief in a personal God was contingent, never final, more of a moving toward than an arriving at. However tentative his conviction, his fleeting glimpses and taste of the divine deeply moved him and fueled his religious imagination.”