In 1874, a decade after the death of his father-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Parsons Lathrop, assistant editor of the Atlantic Quarterly, observed in his essay “The Novel and Its Future” that “Christ's thought, however slow to manifest itself firmly in the details of our social, political, and religious organization, has assuredly taken root in the novel.” In light of the perceived deficiencies of social institutions in enacting Christian principles, Lathrop's observation bespeaks the value of a particular narrative tradition. What did he perceive the novel to be doing that social, political, and religious organizations had failed to do? What did he mean by “Christ's thought”? He was not, of course, alluding to theology or doctrine. He was suggesting something about the capacity of narrative to instill proper moral feeling or Christian sentiment, or as Harriet Beecher Stowe had similarly put it in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the capacity to bring the readers' sympathies “in harmony with the sympathies of Christ,” to “feel right.” He was also suggesting something about the capacity of narrative to represent reality as Christians understood it. Unlike secular, more materialist understandings that made the object world an end in itself, American Protestants in the Augustinian tradition understood the world, like the novel, as another form of representation that largely obscured, while occasionally disclosing, the invisible reality beyond the material. Lathrop's observation suggests the novel's capacity as a literary form to address deficiencies in the sermon, catechism, religious tract, and other extra-biblical genres.