Hawthorne and his Puritans -- Emerson and the moral sentiment : we are as gods -- Christians and their slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe and others) -- Melville in the Holy Land -- Walt Whitman : I am the man -- Lincoln : the Almighty has his own purpose -- Emily Dickinson : the alone to the alone -- William James : rescuing religion -- Mark Twain : the American funnyman who put God on trial -- T. S. Eliot : the pilgrim from St. Louis -- Robert Frost : the survival of the fittest -- Faulkner : God over the South.