Cyrus Augustus Bartol figured prominently in the religious, intellectual, and literary life of nineteenth-century Boston. As minister of the historic West Church for fifty-two years, he participated in the Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and free religious movements. However, just as the West Church was nominally Unitarian but remained staunchly independent of sectarian creed and label, so was Bartol in, but never totally of, these movements. His dissatisfaction with temporal forms and institutions inspired a lifelong search for what he called the Church of the Spirit. Bartol's core belief, from which flowed all his ideas concerning religion, nature, and man in society, was his abiding faith in a personal theism. His spiritual odyssey originated in his identity as a visionary and critic, a kind of religious Man Thinking. As he wrote to his friend, Reverend Henry W. Bellows, on 16 June 1849: "Your destiny in this world is cast as irrevocably as mine...