Religious Fanaticism
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
Flying Roll', which set forth their ideas amid a mass of flamboyant verbiage, and their four sacred
' Books of Wisdom' propounded the Three Glories : the Origin of Evil, True Circumcision, and the Coming of Shiloh to their own entire satisfaction, and to the bewilderment of the Gentile mind.
All went well, and much money came into the community, but in 1923 troubles arose.
A family of believers suddenly lost their faith, and brought a civil and criminal action against King Benjamin and his associates for appropriating £40,000, and for assaulting two young girls, driving another insane, and generally conducting the community in an immoral and unlawful manner.
During the course of the preliminary hearing before the Grand Jury, Benjamin disappeared, and when the police came to arrest him he was nowhere to be found.
Large rewards were offered, and he was sought for all over the world, but it was not until the end of 1926 that the police got a hint of his whereabouts from two disillusioned members.
Then followed a dramatic scene.
A body of mounted police armed with axes and searchlights entered the community grounds in the middle of the night and broke into Shiloh, the central building, where in a luxurious secret underground room the prophet was found.
The revelations which followed closed the history of the House of David and the career of its King.
With this final example the list of religious and communistic failures must end.
There were indeed many more in the latter half of the nineteenth century which are not chronicled here, and there are many still
LATER RELIGIOUS EXPERIMENTS
in existence which began at that time. But contemporary attempts to reform the world are not carried on in quite the same atmosphere as the earlier adventures.
The blaze of publicity which now attends any unusual enterprise, and the limelight of journalistic exaggeration which accompanies it have swept away the innocent unsophisticated public to which such creeds used to appeal.
Modern prophets and evangelists get their followers by a different method.
They have their business and publicity managers, their advertisement agents and their official photographers.
Their creeds may be as dangerous and as perverted as those of their predecessors, but the atmosphere in which they exist has changed. And this book is an attempt to show the conditions amid which Hannah Whitall Smith's personal experiences of fanaticism were acquired.
She made her explorations into this strange world between the years 1850 and 1880, and moved among people who had seen in their youth the rise of the Fourierite Movement, and who had lived through the Civil War.
After 1880, though her interest in these marvels still continued, her faith in their possibly divine origin was gone.
She watched the newspapers for accounts of new sects, and preserved a mass of documents recording their downfall ; but was herself content to leave them alone.
Among the papers she collected there are many queer tales of false Christs and false Moseses; there are descriptions of orgies of religious excitement, and accounts of impending Days of Judgment.
There is the story of Sandford, who set out singlehanded to build a vast
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
temple to the Lord, and who built it.
There is the story of Dowie, and the multitude he led forth to the New Zion, with a brightly coloured map of that peculiar city.
There is the awful tale of the man who took his son up on to a mountain, offering him, as Abraham offered Isaac to the Lord, which tells how, since this hand was not stayed, he killed the boy.
There is an account of the bonfire movement, when excited people threw: into the flames all that they held most precious on earth, until at last a woman threw in her infant child, hoping thus to please the Lord.
All these anda hundred more examples of the limitless folly of mankind are recorded in her collection, and are to be found in the newspapers of the end of the century.
But since she knew them only at second-hand, and since they have already been so fully and so publicly recorded, they can be omitted.
It is enough to know in detail the delusions of one single age.
The forces of diseased imagination are playing still upon the mass of the ill-educated and ignorant, bringing disaster and pitiful human tragedy in their train. Though they take different forms to-day, miracles, marvels, false hopes and vain delusions are still betraying men's emotions and confounding their senses, and disaster still comes into the world from the false promptings of the spirit.
Subconscious impulses still disguise themselves as inspiration, and mankind still seeks Divine sanction for its secret, uncomprehended desires.
For Babylon is not fallen, and ' the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever'.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
FANATICISM
HANNAH WHITALL SMITH
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EXPLANATION
OF FANATICISM
ie careful study of the subject of Fanaticism, and a great deal of most intimate intercourse with the Fanatics, I have come to the conclusion that the whole explanation of it lies in the fact that the emotional nature is allowed absolute control.
The subject of the emotional nature is one of the mysteries that have never yet been fully solved ; but one thing is very certain: it is the most uncontrollable part of our nature, and the least to be depended upon.
Everything affects our emotional nature: the state of one's health, the state of the weather, the sort of food we eat, the atmosphere we live in, the circumstances of our lives, whether pleasant or otherwise, and especially, and more than anything else, the influence of other people upon us.
Emotions are more contagious than the most contagious disease in the universe.
We all know that if we see one person yawn we are more than likely to do it ourselves, and if one person cries in a company it is very apt to set the whole company crying.
I have noticed this with regard to deaths: you can bear the death of someone you love with quiet resignation when alone, but if you meet a person who begins to cry about it, off you go at once and cry about it yourself, not because the trial is any worse, but because you have
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
caught the contagion of emotion.
It is the same way with laughing ; and, in fact, with almost every feeling.
A cheerful person can cheer up a whole circle of unhappy people, and a depressed person can depress the most cheerful, and all this often without a word being said, but simply by the mysterious, contagious power of emotion.
In the whole history of religion this has been very marked.
In all the strange manifestations of the Middle Ages, when whole communities would dance, or would flagellate themselves, or would fall into trances, or do all sorts of strange and fanatical things, the whole thing can be traced entirely to the contagion of emotion.
And in these modern fanaticisms which I shall describe, this element of emotional contagion was always most marked.
Of course the special and strongest emotions of our nature are the emotions of our affections and our passions, and invariably in every fanaticism that I have known the emotion of passion has sooner or later been aroused and given predominance.
Among the old Mystics there can be found the diagram of a religious thermometer marked in its different degrees with the emotions likely to be produced, and among these, very prominently, is marked the emotion of passion.
As far as I have known it, no fanatic ever began with the least idea of this, but they have been led on to it by slow and imperceptible degrees, and landed in the final issue before they knew where they were.
The first beginning of this emotional evolution comes generally from the fact that people take their inward impressions as being the voice of the Lord.
I cannot speak too
EXPLANATION
OF FANATICISM
strongly about this.
Every fanaticism that I have ever known has begun by the following of these inward impressions.
It is a most delightful doctrine to believe that God guides His people, and that it is really true that "the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord', and it is very natural that every Christian heart should want to know this guidance.
The difficulty is how to get at it, and one of the easiest solutions of this difficulty seems very often to lie in a yielding to interior impressions.
We know that the voice of the Lord is supposed to be an interior voice and that therefore it can only be heard within the soul.
When people are in specially religious frames of mind, their emotional nature is always specially open to impressions, and it is certainly the most natural thing in the world for them to believe that the interior impressions which come in these solemn and sacred moments must necessarily be of the Lord.
I cannot tell how many fanatics, when I have tried to convince them of their errors, have said to me:
'But, Mrs. Smith, what am I to do?
These inward voices come to me in my most solemn and sacred moments, when I feel myself to be nearest the Lord and most abandoned to Him, and how can I believe that at such moments He would allow the delusions of the devil to deceive me?'
The mistake arises from limiting the voice of the Lord to impressions only, and not recognizing that His voice comes to us in many other ways, and that the real voice of the Lord must be one in which all His different voices harmonize.
For, as I have shown in my chapter on Guidance, God
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
speaks to us in many different voices, and no one voice, however powerful or impressive it may be, must be taken as authoritative unless it is in harmony with God's other voices on the same subject.
It stands to reason that God cannot tell us a thing in one voice and tell us exactly the opposite in another.
If He says, for instance, in the Bible, 'Thou shalt not steal', He cannot possibly say in the voice of an inward impression,
'Thou must steal'.
His voices may be many, but His message can be but one.
If there is a contradiction in the voices, the speaker cannot be the same.
Therefore, in giving themselves up to the guidance of the voice of interior impressions only, without regard to the other voices by which God speaks, Christians enter upon a pathway of the utmost danger.
Nothing is more unreliable than these interior impressions taken alone, and, what is worse, nothing is more contagious.
When an earnest Christian, who is seeking to know the guidance of the Lord, hears of another Christian being guided in a certain direction, it is ten to one that he will have the same guidance.
I do not consider this to be specially of the devil, but simply and only a fact of human nature which has never been half enough realized or understood.
'Therefore, if you are in a company of people who profess to know the voice of the Lord, it is most unsafe to yield yourself to their influence without bringing in the balancing power of God's other voices of which I have spoken ; and the only real safe guidance ever to follow is one's conviction
EXPLANATION
OF FANATICISM
of right.
These convictions are always made up of the harmony of God's four especial voices, i.e. the voice of the Bible, the voice of circumstances, the voice of one's highest reason, and the voice of one's inward impressions.
Of course, one's interpretation of these various voices will necessarily be in accordance with the standard of right and wrong which surrounds one.
For instance, I can imagine a religious and ignorant person interpreting God's voices to mean something which might be entirely right in his own circle, but which would be entirely wrong in a circle more enlightened than his own.
The time has not yet arrived in the history of the human race when in this world we can have any absolute standard of right and wrong, for even in following the Lord Jesus Christ we are each one biased by the way we look upon what He did, and the explanations we give to His teaching.
We must therefore believe in each other's honesty of purpose as much as we believe in our own, and we must grant that what may seem wrong to us may seem right to another person whose outlook is on a different plane from our own.
To go back to the way in which fanaticism grows :
Christians begin with an earnest desire to know entire consecration to the Lord in a faithful following of Him whithersoever He shall lead.
'They take their inward impressions as being the only voice in which God communicates with them, and feel that loyalty requires that they shall follow these impressions without regard to any other consideration.
I have known the dearest ie
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
and sweetest saints in the world started on a career of fanaticism by simply taking the ground that, when things looked strange or doubtful they must, as they express it, give the Lord the benefit of the doubt : that is, if they are not quite sure whether a thing is right or wrong they must judge by whether it is hard or easy : if it is hard, then they must believe it is of the Lord and must do it: if it is easy, then they must believe it is of the devil and not do it.
This to my mind is an utterly mistaken foundation.
I believe that we never ought to act in doubt, but ought always to wait for an inward conviction that the thing really is right or wrong.
Our Lord Himself said that His sheep should know His voice, not be in doubt about it, but be sure of it, and unless a sheep is sure of his shepherd's voice it is a fatal mistake for it to follow.
Positive certainty must be the necessary foundation of all God's guidance, and this certainty can only be arrived at by the harmony of every voice in which He speaks. Embryo fanatics, however, know nothing of this, and believe that they are most faithful and obedient when they follow every impression that they receive.
Naturally the impressions, being encouraged in this way, grow in power, and as the emotional nature is thus aroused more and more, it is a very simple matter for that part of the nature which is most emotional to be in course of time aroused also.
It generally begins with physical thrills, which in themselves are a perfectly natural manifestation of the emotional nature, and which only become dangerous when they are looked upon, yielded
EXPLANATION
OF FANATICISM
to and encouraged as being of divine origin.
All human beings know about these thrills.
We are very apt to feel them at the sight of some deed of heroism, or the hearing of the story of it, or the sight of some beautiful picture, or the hearing of an eloquent speech, or the reception of some stirring piece of news; in short, on the occasion of any circumstance, whether religious or otherwise, which is calculated to arouse the emotional nature.
These thrills proceed, no doubt, from that part of our nervous system in which passion resides : they are, as I said, perfectly natural and contain no cause for alarm, but when yielded to and indulged in they do become harmful : and, sooner or later, they lead to the development of the passional nature to such an extent as to become perfectly uncontrollable.
In the case of fanatics these thrills are very apt to accompany the discovery of new truth, or the quickening of the affections in devotion to the Lord; they are the natural physical accompaniments of the awakened spiritual nature.
In emotional people they are much stronger, naturally, than in calmer, quieter people, and are more likely to gain absolute control.
The whole mistake lies in attributing these physical sensations to a divine origin ; they are no more divine in the religious life than they are when seeing a fine picture, or hearing fine music.
I have heard many people say with regard to Wagner's music that it went through them with thrills of delight, and yet nobody attributes these thrills to God.
They are not a divine touch in the case of music, and they are not a divine touch in the case