Where Bunyan's tale portrays a Christian's spiritual "journey" through life, Hawthorne's satirizes many contemporary religious practices and philosophies, including transcendentalism.
[3] He may have been directly attacking some of the newer ideas popular at the time, including Unitarianism and transcendentalism,[4] but according to some educators, several of his comments also indicate his dissatisfaction with Bunyan's religiously exclusive theology.
[7] Reflecting Hawthorne's own distrust of Emerson's idealism, the characters in the story are confused by the Giant Transcendentalist as he "shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted".
[9] Hawthorne seemed pleased to have offended some of the clergy he knew personally when, not long after the story was published, he wrote to Sophia Peabody that an acquaintance of his treated him coldly: "I suspect the Celestial Rail-road must have given him a pique; and if so, I shall feel as if Providence had sufficiently rewarded me for that pious labor".
[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote privately to Henry David Thoreau that the story "has a serene strength which one cannot afford not to praise,—in this low life".
[11] The American composer Charles Ives based the second movement of his Fourth Symphony on Hawthorne's story, expanding on his earlier piece for solo piano, also entitled The Celestial Railroad.