ABSTRACT
As the people of the Pacific took on new forms of dress, they might well have been advised to consider these words from early in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, or Life in the Woods: ‘I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes’ (Thoreau 1971: 23). I want to start with this admonition since it seems appropriate – dare I say ‘fitting’? – for several reasons. Written in 1854, these words speak to us from the heyday of the missionary endeavour. Voicing Thoreau’s version of New England Transcendentalism, with its roots in Puritanism and ties to Universalism, they issue – however idiosyncratically – from the heart of Protestant modernity in a form that will be especially familiar to many of us today. It is perhaps no accident that, at least in America, Thoreau was revived as a guru in the Sixties when the likes of Henry Ward Beecher, Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing had long been forgotten.
