Religious Fanaticism
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
assuredly. wrong, the want of humility that added the sting to the anxiety, and that, in some way I could not quite yet understand, the only thing by which I could break this pride in pieces must end in being right.
So I am dealing to the best of my present powers with this mischief.
. And I tell you of it, that you may learn all I can find to say of the weakness and faults that will want what help you will give them, and not because you shall never find in me any but the most absolute submission both in deed and will.
I hope and believe I shall have bruised even this inward resistance long before it could run the risk of throwing upon you or anyone else any part of the suffering which ought to belong only to me.
So now I ask to put myself and ourselves under your direction in all matters.
You will determine what proof we must acquire to ourselves that we hold our happiness in absolute fief to our duty ; in what manner, when you think it well, we shall inaugurate the joining of our lives ; and the degree in which we can usefully comply with or disregard the prejudices of my family and friends on the subject of performing the marriage ceremony, and disposing of the property belonging to me.'
Thus, in all seriousness and sincerity Alice yielded her will and bowed before the prophet she had never seen, and at last the desired permission came.
There was trouble, indeed, on her side of the family, as her letter showed.
But Laurence and his bride had no fears.
They and all they had were at the disposal of the prophet, for he alone could lead them on the way of
THE BROTHERHOOD
OF THE NEW
LIFE salvation.
Laurence and Alice were married in London in 1872, and for a year they were allowed to live happily in Paris ; then, as suddenly as before the call came to return to Brocton, and Laurence and his wife and mother obeyed it at once.
New orders awaited them ; "Father ' instantly separated husband and wife, and set
Alice to the task of ' putting off the old and much admired refinement, polish and intellectual charm,' and learning in its place how to attend to the house and rear chickens.
While she was undergoing this probation, Laurence was sent out into the world again to conduct a number of financial enterprises from which Harris hoped for wealth.
Lady Oliphant stayed at Brocton, still washing handkerchiefs, still separated from her son, but a little comforted by the presence of his wife.
Year after year this curious arrangement lasted.
Laurence travelled to and fro, and went several times alone to England, still writing articles, and still working faithfully for the good of the whole community.
Meanwhile, at Brocton, Harris made the discovery that Alice was not her husband's counterpart.
In 1876 he bought a property at Santa Rosa, in California, and moved the most fully initiated of his disciples there ; and Alice, but not Lady Oliphant, was of the number.
Two years later Laurence followed them, apparently without permission, hoping for a sight of his wife ; but he was refused admittance, and although he waited about for several weeks, he finally accepted his rejection, and returned to Brocton, still obedient, though very much cast down by the stern decree.
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
Very soon after this Harris discovered in Alice strong resemblances to his own counterpart, Lily Queen ; and whether from this or some other unknown cause, she made a sudden departure from Santa Rosa.
Still, however, the prohibition against joining Laurence was in force, and still she believed in the authority of 'Father'.
She betook herself alone to an outpost town, and earned her living by teaching.
Laurence meanwhile went on with his devoted service, and once more went to London alone in 1879 ; there he threw himself into a scheme for the colonisation of Palestine, which led him to travel there and in Turkey, hoping for a concession from the Sultan.
The whole thing failed, and in 1880 he was in London again, and there, suddenly, his wife at last joined him. Whether she was a little disillusioned with Harris is not clear ; but certainly the bond still held to some extent, and the allegiance was not broken off.
The next year Laurence himself went back alone to Brocton to see his mother, who was still washing handkerchiefs there.
He found her ill in body and troubled in mind.
Rumours of Harris's peculiar way of life at Santa Rosa were disturbing the Brocton group, from which the master had now been absent over five years, and Lady Oliphant was very anxious to know the truth.
She was, however, seriously ill, though Laurence refused to believe it, feeling convinced that she was in such perfect communion with her counterpart, his father, that heavenly strength was sustaining her.
He took her trouble of mind much more seriously, and together they went to California
HHI RROCHERHOOD OFVTHEENEW
LIFE to seek an explanation of the evil reports from Harris himself.
They still hoped that all could be put right, and that the prophet they had been blindly obeying for sO many years would re-establish his hold over their doubting hearts.
When they reached him at last, however, they met with a very cold reception.
Instead of explanations, reproaches and rebukes were heaped upon their heads, and they were bidden to be gone.
And everything they saw and heard confirmed their worst fears.
In great trouble and distress they moved on towards a 'cure' of which they had some hopes, but on the way there Lady Oliphant grew worse, and died in great suffering, believing to the very last that she was perfectly safe.
With this blow the scales fell from Laurence's eyes.
He was reduced to misery and distress and physical illness, but his allegiance to Harris had melted away and he even authorized some of his friends to begin a lawsuit for the recovery of some of the property which had been made over to 'Father'.
From that moment there was war between the disciple and the master.
Alice, meanwhile, was in England, as yet faithful ; and it was Harris himself who opened her eyes.
He, hoping to score a victory in the legal battle which was waging between the two men, took steps to have Laurence certified as insane.
'To complete this business, of course, the consent of his relatives was needed, and Harris cabled to Alice peremptorily ordering her to send this consent.
The effect was the opposite of what he had intended.
Alice's eyes too were opened, and when
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
Laurence was at length well enough to rejoin her in 1882 they were of one mind, and the despotic rule which had hitherto governed their lives was over.
Although the scales had fallen from Laurence's and Alice's eyes in regard to Harris, the hold of the strange religion stood firm.
Laurence Oliphant and his wife believed as ardently in counterparts as they did before ; they still thought the world would be transformed and mankind saved by this revelation, and they still meant to devote their whole lives to the spreading of this truth.
They settled at Haifa, and established there not exactly a community, but a centre for the religion they were preaching.
A certain number of believers corresponded with them, and visited them, and they wrote together the strange book ' Sympneumata Cental which their faith is set forth even more obscurely than in any of the writings of Thomas Lake Harris.
There too Laurence wrote his incredible novel, ' Masollam', in which he gave a picture of Harris as unmistakable as it is bewildering.
The hidden forces over which they believed he had had control remained at their command; the great truths which he had perverted were theirs to preach.
For Laurence himself said they ' tried to push the world on a little further by placing two or three young couples, who were not married, in a tempting proximity in order to teach them the habit of self control'; and, in this extraordinary fashion they began to spread the light.
Alice Oliphant died in January, 1886, and Laurence was prostrated by the loss.
In spite of his honest belief that she
Ui Esp RO LHERH OOD OF
TLHED NEW
LIFE was with him still as his heavenly counterpart, he mourned for her bitterly ; and the fact that in less than two years he was married again was but a proof of his bereavement.
For her spirit, or some other guiding, led him to return to America, and inspired him to seek the acquaintance of Rosamond Dale Owen, a leading Spiritualist.
In her he immediately recognised something which he felt to be a part of his lost Alice, and they were married at once.
He told his friends that his position as a teacher of hidden truths was difficult, especially as he must of necessity talk much of the relations of the sexes, and of the importance of female influence.
His special leading to attract women disciples increased his troubles, and it was hardly possible for him to pursue his mission without a wife.
This argument, and the obvious sincerity of his mourning for Alice, satisfied his friends and comforted his admirers ; but scandal was more difficult to avoid than he supposed.
There were two young people, a brother and a sister, whom he had converted to his views, who were anxious to join him at Haifa and to make over the whole of their fortune for the propagation of the doctrine.
Their friends became exceedingly alarmed, not only by the financial side of the affair, but also by rumours of the nature of Oliphant's teaching, and in desperation they lodged a complaint with the National Vigilance
Association.
An action in the courts for ' detournement de mineurs' was pending in 1888 when Laurence fell desperately ill and died ; and the public revelations which would have been inevitable were never made.
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
Harris, all this time, had been preaching and practising the old doctrine.
The defection of the Oliphants had been a severe blow, and had caused much bitterness and ill-feeling.
A great many diatribes went forth against the deserters, which however fell short of their mark, in spite of the fury which inspired them.
One single example, out of hundreds, will be enough to show the nature of the attack.
'Here and there,' wrote Harris in the pamphlet, 'God's Breath in Man'
(published in 1891), "as the fact of a new respiration creeps into slow publicity,
Nature, whose art is endless imitation, occasionally frolics in men and women of conceited thought and mediumistic temperament for a simulated breath-play.
These counterfeits are however easily detected ; first of all by the pompous arrogance of their assumptions, and by the vanity and egoism of their lives.
If the note of danger is to be sounded it must be at the ensuing.
There are also magical respirations both simple and complex, resultant from the practice of hypnotic arts, from efforts for self-penetration among experimenters in occult sciences, and from mediumistic initiations among spiritualists, from possessions and obsessions, and also from the intrusion of larvous and ghostly effigies into the structures of mental and passioral Sensations hues Whether it was the intrusion of ' larvous and ghostly effigies' or merely the result of the law-suit by which Oliphant sought to recover his property, the Community at Brocton came to an end, and such of the faithful as
THE BROTHERHOOD
OF THE NEW
LIFE had no 'conceited thought' or ' mediumistic temperament' congregated at Santa Rosa.
The family there was small, but it was exceedingly strange ; and the time came when scandals began to gather about it too.
A lady who was anxious to join the Brotherhood came to lodge near by, and as she saw it closer, her desire to become a disciple vanished.
She told such tales, and spread such shocking stories of the household that the interest of the neighbourhood became aroused.
Harris still maintained that 'angels were at work changing the chosen ones into the arch-natural state ready for the Second Coming. They clean out the inside', he declared,
'and leave only a husk of humanity, and unload all the grosser parts upon the damned'.
It was no good.
Temporally minded people refused to admit the ' universal scope and purity ' of the doings of the ' cleaned-out husks', and in 1901 Harris felt himself constrained by the force of public opinion to marry his leading disciple, and leave the State.
After that his influence ended.
He was an old man, and no longer a prophet.
His disciples were sadly disillusioned, and fell away ; and with his death the whole dreadful business ended, leaving only a warning and a black memory in the world behind.
GEAR spike Tex LATER RELUG FOU See OCr ERE EIN toe THE
KORESHANS,
AND (HE HOUSE Org ey al Os: and the Brotherhood of the New Life were experiments of the middle of the century, but the last fifty years of it saw other equally extraordinary phenomena, which, although they resemble their predecessors in many particulars, are worth mention if only to prove that the failure and collapse of one delusion is no safeguard against the uprising of another, equally pernicious and equally absurd.
In 1861 the little sect of Adonai Shomo (said to be the Hebrew words for The Lord, the Spirit is there) made its appearance in Massachusetts.
Its leader, Frederick Howland, had first been a Quaker, then was converted by the Millerites, and finally in 1855 received the gift of tongues.
Followed by a small band of believers who expected to attain to 'the Melchisedec
Priesthood ' he set up a small communistic society which lasted till 1896.
Howland believed that death had lost its power over him and his followers, and although he was himself killed in a carriage accident in 1871 this faith survived.
The leadership was taken over by a man named Cook, who claimed to be Christ's Viceregent, but who was in reality an ex-convict of vicious habits.
No precise records of the developments of this venture
LATER RELIGIOUS EXPERIMENTS
remain, but there is an obituary notice in one of the histories of Communistic experiments from which the whole story may easily be deduced.
'Cook', the sentence runs, "instituted such revolting practices as led to his indictment before a Grand Jury, and subsequent imprisonment'.
And with this Adonai Shomo ended.
In 1876 a Revival in Texas led to a curious community, which, though it was never accused of ' revolting practices' was sufficiently original to be worth describing.
At the time it began, Mrs. Martha MacWhirter, its leader, was a married woman, living with her husband and twelve children in a small Southern town.
She and some of her women friends began to study the Bible, as a consequence of a Revival which had come their way, and their study of the Holy Book led them to separate from the local Methodist Church to which they all belonged.
A great commotion arose in the town, and when the 'Sanctified Band', as they called themselves, refused to send their children to Sunday School, and insisted on teaching them at home, and moreover on teaching them that the formalities of the Church were wicked, the commotion increased.
'The husbands of these intrepid ladies were chased through the streets and beaten, their houses were stoned, and the civic authorities issued a decree (which however was never enforced), that they must all leave the town.
Great was the tribulation in the MacWhirter family.
Nothing could shake Martha, nothing could make her yield ; and her poor husband with much regret joined the general wife-deserting movement which followed.
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
The Sanctified Band were undismayed.
It is true that their economic position was desperate—since they had hitherto been supported by their husbands, and were now left without means ; but they were sure that the Lord would provide.
They stuck together, eighteen in number, and divided up the little money they had.
They then set to work to earn what they could, one taking in washing, one going out to daily service, one cutting timber, and one opening a boarding house.
By rigid economy and ceaseless industry they kept alive, and before very long they were considerably more prosperous than they had been in the old days before their husbands left them.
The boarding house developed into a hotel, and other hotels were added to it, and by 1898 they were such substantial citizens that one of them, though a woman, was elected to the local Board of Trade.
By this time they had abandoned the name of the Sanctified Band, and were known as the ' Woman's
Commonwealth', and presently they decided to move to Washington.
Their city, which had once tried to expel them, now begged and implored them to remain, but to no purpose.
To the capital they went, and there continued to flourish, surviving even the death of the founder in 1904, and holding firmly to their celibacy, their community of goods, and their protest against outward forms.
Although in name they were a female movement, they always declared that men were free to join them, and did actually have some male members at one time ; but only one of these men could endure the atmosphere of the group for long, and even he finally departed.
£43
LATER
RELIGIOUS EXPERIMENTS
The Lord's Farm, which was founded by P. B.
Mnason in 1877, a year after the Woman's Commonwealth, was similar in its main ideas.
Celibacy, and the rejection of outward forms, combined with a strict following of the precepts of the Bible (as Mnason understood them) was the basis of the creed, but with these people community of goods was carried to a further extreme.
Not only did they share what they had with each other, but with everyone who came their way.
The doors of their ' City of God' (which they sometimes called The Lord's Farm, and sometimes the Land of Rest and Peace, and sometimes the State of Eternal
Bliss) stood open to every comer, and tramps and vagrants gathered there year after year.
The community was, however, sufficiently vigorous to withstand this infliction, and lived and nourished itself on fruit, vegetables and fanatical words for many years.
In 1890 this community was under the leadership of H. T.
Mnason, presumably a son of its founder.
It still carried on the same line of conduct, but had substituted free love for celibacy, and added a frenzied dancing to its previous absence of ritual.
Under this regime the community was given the name of 'Angel Dancers', and its meetings, which were held in the open air, were visited by many sightseers.
After grace was said before meals, the true believers were accustomed to leap over the table, in proof that the devil was vanquished, and they were at all times on the look out for his arrival.
The custom of welcoming all comers was continued, and so many bad characters collected at the Lord's Farm
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
that the civil authorities intervened, and in 1893 sent Mnason and some of his companions to prison for 'malicious mischief, and maintaining a _ disorderly house'.
The believers took their persecution in good part, and went on with their community when they were liberated, remaining to the end honest and successful farmers, whom it was impossible to rouse to anger, or to persuade that any of their visitors were rogues.
In time, however, the adherents died off, and there were said to be only twelve of them in 1908.
Mrs. Beckman, of the Church Triumphant, gathered her followers to the number of three or four hundred in Illinois in 1880.
Her claim was that she was the mother—or at any rate the spiritual mother—of Christ in His Second Incarnation.
The course of her triumph ran more or less smoothly until the Christ was made known ; but when her disciples learnt that he was a young German named G,. J. Schweinfurth there was doubt and division in the camp.
The young man himself was a simple and harmless youth, who lived mainly in a cave, and did not cut his beard ; but Mrs.
Beckman's claims were disputed, a party arose which objected to female leadership, and in the usual fashion this sect, like all the others, disappeared.
The Koreshans, who began in 1870 were less transitory.
Their prophet, Cyrus R. Teed, was born in 1839, and 'illuminated' when he was about thirty years old.
His illumination had many points in common with St.
Simonism, though there is no evidence that he was aware of the fact.
Like Enfantin and Bazard he believed
LATER RELIGIOUS EXPERIMENTS
that the world was to be ruled by a man and a woman together, of whom the woman was to be the greater ; but, unlike his unhappy predecessors, he found the woman and his ' central duality " was complete.
The Koreshans believed in an elaborate ' Cellular Cosmogony', and followed a ritual which they thought was modelled upon the motions of the stars and planets.
Their New Jerusalem, 'the vitellus of the Cosmogenic Ege ' was situated at Estero, Florida, but they had one or two smaller establishments, and the total of their resident members was about five hundred, and they claimed in addition ten thousand adherents in the world outside.
Korishanty, they thought, would supersede Christianity, as Christianity had superseded Judaism, and in the meantime they organised the ' Society of the Arch-Triumphant' in several American cities.
Their settlement was however their chief effort, and there they practised community life combined with vegetarianism and frequent religious ceremonies.
They allowed marriage in a modified form, but preferred celibacy ; and they claimed that part of their mission was to reconcile all the races of the world.
All this is familiar doctrine, and had frequently been believed before the Koreshans appeared upon the scene.
But the long rigmarole of their creed contained one thing which was both novel and comprehensible, and which marks it out from among the other sects in a somewhat astonishing way.
'This article of faith taught that the woman leader of the Community, Victoria Gratia as she was called, would one day execute the
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
man leader, Cyrus R. Teed (Koresh), after which her greatest work would begin!
Teed himself spoke freely to visitors of this coming event, and confessed that he did not know the time nor the manner of his impending murder, but that when it was accomplished he was sure
'the chosen woman of the age will be exalted into divine motherhood and imperial pre-eminence as the divine-natural head of all orders of Church and State.'
It is curious to speculate upon the feelings and intentions of Victoria Gratia during the long years while this crime was impending.
Her portrait shows her to be a tall large woman, with dark hair elaborately waved, and a wide mouth.
There are no signs of her dreadful mission in her face which though it seems hard and arrogant has no tragic expression ; and in the event the mission failed.
Cyrus R. Teed died a natural death, and Koreshanty has as yet shown no sign of replacing
Christianity.
The House of David is the last of the communities to be considered.
Its downfall is of recent occurrence, and the revelations with which it was accompanied have shocked the whole country, and given a widespread warning against the follies and evils of religious extravagance.
'The reason for including an account of this community here is not so much to add to an already forcible warning as to show how close was its relation to the other sects and how far from original or isolated its peculiarities were.
Benjamin Purnell, and Mary his wife, who were
LATER RELIGIOUS EXPERIMENTS
jointly the Shiloh, or seventh Messenger of the last dispensation, were natives of the State of Kentucky, and their first religious experience was with a short lived colony of Southcottians in Detroit, whose leader, Michzl Mills, was sent to prison for the ill-treatment of young girls.
After this, Benjamin and Mary set up for themselves and in 1907 the centre of the sect was at Benton Harbour,
Michigan, where there was a settlement of over seven hundred people, and where preparations were being made for the 144,000 men and 144,000 women whom they believed to be the children of Israel, now scattered like lost sheep among the Gentiles, but destined to be saved on the Last Day.
'They claimed to possess the same revelation as had been vouchsafed to Joanna Southcott, which had been passed on through John Wroe and James Jezreel, and four other intermediaries to Mary and David themselves.
Their beliefs included the familiar delusion that they were exempt from mortal death, and the revelation that for the Gentiles the end of the world was due in August, 1916. They preached and practised community of goods, even extending it to wearing apparel, and they preached (if they did not practise) entire chastity.
They wore simple clothes, and the men did not cut or shave their hair ; they spent much of their time in music, for which purpose they maintained several brass bands and an orchestra, and they carried on an extensive publishing business, for the diffusion of their own works.
They had a monthly paper, ' The