Personal Experiences Of Fanaticism
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
of religion ; they are simply the physical response to the spiritual frame of mind, whatever may cause it.
But one can see that it would be very natural for Christians who have had this physical response in their own bodies to some wonderful spiritual truth, to think that these physical thrills are the divine touch and the token of the divine presence, and that therefore they ought to be sought after and cultivated with all possible earnestness, especially as they may never have felt them at any other time.
Moreover, as they really are very delightful, it is a temptation to cultivate such delightful feelings and to give oneself up to them.
I knew one dear lady who began in the purest and simplest way to give herself up to these emotions, and gradually came to spending most of her time allowing these waves of thrills to flow through her from head to foot, believing that she was in this way realizing more and more the presence of the Lord, and coming more and more into actual union with Him.
And the result was most disastrous in destroying her moral nature, and launching her into a course of impurity from which in the beginning she would have shrunk with horror.
In the case of every fanatic I have known this has been the process, and sooner or later, unless some rather unusual amount of good common sense comes in to deliver the soul, it must end in a sort of physical debauchery which will either make inward or outward havoc of the life.
It is of no use to talk to people under these circumstances.
[heir emotions are too powerful to be checked by argument ; you might 162,
EXPLANATION
OF FANATICISM
as well hope to check Niagara by argument.
The only hope is that Christians may be so warned in the beginning, as to be able to see the danger that lies before them, and therefore avoid it.
The fanaticisms of Thomas Harris, and of his follower, Laurence Oliphant, followed exactly the course I have here sketched, beginning in an honest and earnest desire to follow the Lord whithersoever He might lead, and ending in the most flagrant and open immorality.
It was the same with the doctor of the New York Sanatorium where those strange secrets of union with Christ were explained to me.
Never was there a saintlier man to begin with, and never was there a more pitiful fall.
In fact, this has been the course of every fanaticism I have known about.
Sooner or later Christians, who give themselves up to follow impressions, become the slaves of their emotional natures, and end in giving to their carnal passions the place of authority they have meant to give to God.
I have watched my own experiences in these respects very carefully, and compared them with those of a very intimate friend of mine whose nature was far more emotional than my own.
We were seekers together after the deep things of God, and whenever | made what I thought was a discovery of a new truth
I always at once confided it to her.
And I found that, while in my own case the discovery had been only a keen intellectual delight, in her case it nearly always caused an awakening of her emotions, accompanied very frequently with wave after wave of delicious physical thrills.
She always called these thrills the ' witness
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
of the Spirit' to the truth we had discovered, and, until I had a clearer understanding of the subject, I often felt greatly disappointed that I seemed debarred from receiving this longed-for 'witness'.
But I discovered at last that the differences in our experiences came entirely from the differences in the susceptibilities of our emotional natures, her emotions always responding in physical sensations where my emotions responded in intellectual convictions.
I discovered further that my convictions were far more permanent than her emotions, and that the truths we had discovered simultaneously remained an actual power in my life long after the impressions on her emotions had passed away and left nothing behind them, and I became at last very sceptical of any religious life founded upon the emotions, and realised that conviction was the only safe foundation.
I would, therefore, always urge every seeker after the deep things of God to ignore emotions and care only for convictions.
If emotions come one may enjoy them for what they are worth, and I acknowledge that they are often very enjoyable; but one must never in the least depend upon them, but must be satisfied with nothing short of actual and downright convictions.
And I would place at the entrance into the pathway of mysticism this danger signal: Beware of impressions, beware of emotions, beware of physical thrills, beware of voices, beware of everything, in short, that is not according to the strict Bible standard and to your own highest reason.
With this preface I will now relate some of my explorations into the region of fanaticism, beginning with my first introduction to it.
CEVA PD lsh Res Ll DiREER. oe bea NACT CG. PSM NE of the most mysterious phases of the religious life is the phase of fanaticism.
As it has happened to me to come into close and intimate contact with many of the leading delusions which are apt to mislead Christians, and as I know that people fall into them mostly because of ignorance, I feel that I ought to tell my experiences in order to warn those who may be tempted into similar pathways.
I must say first of all that all the fanatics I have ever known have been at the same time the most devoted of Christians, and have fallen into their fanaticisms along the paths of the most entire consecration to the Lord, and the most absolute faith in His guidance.
And all my own intercourse with them was always because I myself was seeking to know all that could be known of the 'life hid with Christ in God', and was hungering and thirsting after an expression of entire consecration and perfect trust.
That I was not led completely astray in this search arose not from any extra piety on my part, for as a general thing I was not so pious really as the dear fanatics themselves, but because of two facts, one fact being that I am not of an emotional nature, and have always had to receive religious truth through my intellect rather than through my emotions, and the other fact being that at the bottom
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
I have a sort of weight of common sense which, like those weighted toy-men which amuse children by always turning head up no matter how much they may be tumbled over, seemed generally to turn me right side up no matter how far over I might be pushed.
But I had also a very mystical side to my nature which longed for direct revelations from God and for manifest tokens of His. presence, and for many years I sought in every direction to find a satisfaction for this craving.
I never heard of anyone having a 'remarkable experience', or a ' wonderful revelation' that I did not rush off at once to know all about it, and to find out how I could get the same.
And fanatics of every sort and description found in me the most sympathetic and appreciative listener, and the most humble and eager scholar.
As what I wanted was to get at the core of what they had to tell, and to find out if possible the real thing at the bottom of all their delusions and vagaries, I never allowed myself to be shocked at anything they might say, but gave them genuine sympathy, even where
I could not approve, and in consequence a great deal more was poured out to me than ordinarily would have been the case, and hence it is that I came to know about and am able to give the inside history of so much fanaticism.
The beginning of it all was in the year 1871 or 72, when my husband needed a course of treatment for a nervous breakdown.
We took our family to a Hydropathic Sanatorium in New York State, and we stayed there for three or four months.
The head
DOCTOR
R.'S FANATICISM
of the establishment was one of the most saintly men I ever met.
No one could be in his presence without feeling that he was a man who lived in continual nearness and communion with the Lord.
It was not that he talked so much about religion, but it seemed to be in his looks, his atmosphere, his actions, and in everything about him.
A very dear friend of mine was staying in the Sanatorium at the same time ; and as we were both hungering and thirsting to know the deep things of God, we very often had long conversations about it.
One day she said to me, ' Hannah, I believe that Doctor R. knows some secrets of the divine life that thee and I ought to know : he has hinted as much to me when he has been seeing me about my health.
Wouldn't thee like to have him tell us?'
Of course I agreed to this with all my heart, and she decided to ask him.
When I next saw her she said she had asked him, and he had told her that he would ask the Lord whether he was to reveal the secret to us or not.
A few days later he told my friend that he had received permission from the Lord to tell us the secret, and he fixed a time when we were to meet to hear it.
Naturally we were in a state of great excitement and prayed a great deal that we might be rightly guided in regard to it.
Never shall I forget that interview.
He began by telling us that the Baptism of the Holy Spirit was a physical thing, felt by delightful thrills going through you from head to foot, and that no one could really know what the Baptism of the Spirit was who did not experience these thrills.
He said that this had been
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
revealed to him in the following manner.
He had been praying the Lord to give him the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and he found that whenever he prayed especially earnestly he had physical thrills which he thought belonged to earthly passions.
He blamed himself exceedingly for this, and thought what a sensual man he must be that in his most sacred moments such feelings should come.
By fasting and prayer he would get deliverance, as he thought, and would then begin to pray again for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, but invariably, after a short time of prayer, the sensations would return, and the same process of fasting and prayer would have to be gone through. As this happened over and over he was at last almost in despair.
One day, however, when, during an earnest season of prayer, these sensations were particularly strong, an inward voice seemed to say, ' These sensations which you so much condemn are really the divine touch of the Holy
Spirit in your body.'
He said it was very hard for him to believe this, but it seemed to come with such divine authority that he dared not reject it. He asked specially for a sign that if it really were that Baptism of the Spirit for which he had been praying it might be made so plain to him that there could be no mistake.
And this prayer, he said, had been unmistakably answered, and he had been convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that these very sensations, which he had condemned as being of the flesh, were actually the very Baptism of Spirit that he had longed for.
Immediately, he said, he began to receive them with thankfulness, and the result was
DOCTOR
R.'S FANATICISM
that they had become so continuous that there was hardly a moment in his life without them, and that he had found the greatest spiritual enlightenment and uplifting from the moment that he allowed himself to receive these sensations as being the touch of the Lord.
This he told us was the divine secret which had been revealed to him, and which he was permitted to tell chosen souls.
He urged us to take the subject before the Lord in prayer, and to ask Him to enlighten us, and he warned us not to let carnal thoughts concerning this blessed experience come in to blind our eyes to the divine realities it embodied.
My friend and I had not dared to say a word while this revelation was being made to us, and when Dr. R. left we sat for a long while in dumbfounded silence.
We were both utterly ignorant of the wiles of the devil in this direction, and we had such absolute confidence in the holiness of this saint of God, as he seemed to us, that we were afraid our horror at what he had told us must be because we were too carnally minded, as he had said, to be able to see the deep spiritual purity of it all, and we felt that we dared not reject it without further prayer and consideration.
We had several further talks with Dr. R. about it, and he told us these 'baptisms' were really the fulfilment of the union between Christ and His people as the Bridegroom and the bride, described in Ephesians v, 23-32, and typified in the Song of Solomon, and declared in many parts of Scripture, and that to reject it was to reject union with the Lord Himself.
And he described this spiritual union as being so enrapturing and uplifting, and so full
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
of the Lord's actual presence, that at last we began to believe there must be something in it, and to long to know for ourselves the reality of this wonderful consecration. We could not accept a// the details of the experience that Dr. R. gave us, but we did begin to believe that there was a physical ' touch ' of God, that manifested itself in a bewildering delicious sensation of a sort of magnetic thrill of divine life pouring through both soul and body, which lifted one up into an enrapturing realization of oneness with Christ and that this was the true 'Baptism of the Holy Ghost'.
We came to the conclusion that it must be what all the old mystics had known, and that it was the true inner meaning of that Union with Christ for which saints of all ages had longed, and into the realization of which so many of them seemed to have entered.
And we both began earnestly to seek to know it for ourselves.
Before, however, any answer had come to our prayer my friend and I left the Sanatorium and were widely separated, and we have never met since.
She, I believe, did at last come into something of the experience, but to me, in spite of all my prayers and searchings, it was always a sealed book.
No spiritual experience I ever had, and I have had many delightful ones, ever affected me physically in the slightest degree, and although it was at first a great disappointment, I have long come to see, as I shall explain hereafter, that it was far best so.
But at that time, and for many years, I hungered and thirsted for some tangible Baptism that would give me the enrapturing thrills of bliss others seemed to enjoy,
DOCTOR
RA'S FANATICISM
and would assure me that I 'really had received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit for which my soul so eagerly longed.
And it was in the prosecution of this earnest and prayerful search that I encountered the various forms of fanaticism that I am about to describe.
I was always on the look out for anyone who had a 'wonderful spiritual experience,' and in each instance fondly hoped, until my common sense asserted itself, that now at last I had found the key that would open to me the door of this mystic region of divine union.
As usual, when I was interested in anything, my friends had to become interested too, and to all with whom
I dared to touch on such a sacred, yet delicate, subject, I tried to tell what Dr. R. had told us.
And in several instances, both in England and America, those I told of it received the baptism I described, and in each case this very baptism was the opening up for them of a life of union and communion with God far beyond anything they had ever known before.
Even to this day I continually meet with the lasting results in transformed lives and in holy characters of Christians who had entered into the experience.
In many instances the receiving of it by preachers was the beginning of great revivals in their churches, and was, in fact, the initiation of a great deal of the ' Holiness' movement of thirty years ago.
'This movement took hold of the upper classes, and the meetings were largely composed of the aristocracy and the rich and influential people in English Society.
There was nothing sectarian in the whole movement ; no one was asked, or in any way
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
influenced, to leave the Church to which they belonged.
All that was desired was that people should act in daily life according to the doctrines they professed to believe.
It was not so much a difference of belief as a difference of life, and one of the marvellous features of it was the union of people of all forms of belief, and of all denominational relationships without the least effort being made after this union.
In looking back, | can see that this arose from the fact that we were dealing with the fundamental principle of all religion, namely, surrender to God and trust in Him.
Dogmas and doctrines were of no account, and were never referred to, for they were not needed in the region in which this
» movement was carried on.
It was the region of personal experience and absolute realities which must lie at the basis of every religion.
If people worship God at all, they must necessarily have a great fund of common feeling upon which it is helpful to communicate with one another.
But while great spiritual blessings have seemed often to be the result of this experience of union with God, very disastrous outward falls from purity and righteousness have sometimes followed, as will be seen in the following pages, and I have been convinced by all that I have seen and known that it is a dangerous path to enter upon and that it is of the utmost importance a danger signal should be erected at the entrance to it, in order that travellers thereon may be warned of the traps and pitfalls they are almost sure to meet.
= =I N
CLISAt Pale he Seltiel Mies Sa oie oe ACN UAL Ts LiCl io (VL QO" day, not long after our stay at that New York sanatorium, I was taking a walk when I noticed a young lady walking in front of me, whom I did not know, but whose Jack seemed to say to me that we were destined to become friends.
Curiously enough, in a few minutes a friend of mine, coming towards us, stopped and spoke to this lady, and, when I caught up with them, introduced us to one another.
The attraction appeared to be mutual, and we seemed after that to be continually thrown together.
I found her a very interesting and talented person, very religious, and a most successful Christian worker, but rather selfabsorbed.
She was a very strict Friend, and dressed in the strictest fashion of sugar-scoop bonnets, crossed handkerchiefs, with a dainty three-cornered shawl over her shoulders.
We became very intimate, and I was deeply interested in her religious life, and followed her various experiences with profound sympathy.
She was very religious, and we soon discovered that we were both seekers after the mystic life, and especially after the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and we embraced every opportunity we could find of seeking for it together. ae
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
At that time some Methodists who believed in sanctification by faith were in the habit of holding in the summer what were called Holiness Camp Meetings.
These meetings were held at different places throughout the country during the warm American summers, in groves or forests, or on the borders of lakes, or by the seaside.
They were generally held for ten days at a time, and were led by prominent religious preachers and teachers who believed in the doctrine of Holiness, or, in other words, of 'sanctification by faith'.
Those who attended the meetings lived in tents dotted about under the trees, and for the whole ten days of the meeting all earthly cares and interests were as far as possible put aside, and the entire company gave themselves up to religious exercises and religious interests.
In the summer of 187— the friend of whom I speak and I myself, with a large company of congenial friends, attended one of these Camp Meetings, all of us hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and especially longing to know experimentally the conscious baptism of the Holy Spirit.
The whole camp ground was exercised on this subject, and in almost every meeting wonderful testimonies would be given by those who had, as they believed, consciously received it.
Our expectations and our longings were wrought up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, and one evening, after the public meeting under the trees was over, a few of us gathered in one tent for a special prayer meeting on the subject, determined to wrestle and agonise until the answer came.
We knelt in the dark, and poured
MISS
S.'S FANATICISM
out our prayers and supplications, either aloud or in our own souls, literally ' with groanings that could not be uttered', for two or three hours.
But to my great surprise no answer seemed to come, and at last, when the lateness of the hour compelled us to separate, it was with a feeling of unutterable disappointment on my part.
As the company passed out of the tent, I noticed my friend did not pass out with them, and I wondered whether she had slipped out silently before the meeting closed and gone back to her own tent.
I lighted a candle to go to bed when, to my astonishment, I found her lying across the foot of my bed in what appeared to be a swoon.
I spoke to her, and immediately she began to praise God in the most rapturous way :
' Oh, how wonderful ! Oh, how glorious!
Oh, this is the Baptism ! Oh, what a blessing ; 'tis more than I can bear!
Oh, Lord, stay Thy hand!
Flesh and blood cannot bear this glory!'
And similar exclamations burst from her lips in tones of ecstacy.
As may be imagined, I was overwhelmed with awe and delight, and I immediately rushed out to call in my friends to see the wonderful answer to our prayers, for I could not doubt that my friend had received that baptism of the Holy Spirit for which we were all longing. Why she had been picked out, I could not imagine, for she was not, as far as I knew, a bit better or a bit more earnest than any of the rest of us.
However, there it was, and I determined to enjoy it at second-hand as much as ever I could.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
A little awestruck company gathered round the bed, and eagerly drank in all her rapturous exclamations, afraid almost to breathe for fear we should disturb the heavenly visitation.
After a while she seemed to recover from her swoon sufficiently to go to her own tent, and, although very tottering and scarcely able to walk, we managed to take her there and get her undressed and into bed.
And then, determined not to lose a moment of this blissful visitation, I brought in my mattress and lay on the floor beside her bed so as to catch every word that fell from her lips, and also a little in hopes that some of the blessing might spill over on to me.
The night was apparently a night of rapture to my friend, and early in the morning I sent word to the early Prayer Meeting of the great blessing that had come to the camp ground.
Immediately a deputation of the leaders of the meeting came to the tent to ask my friend whether she would not come to their large meeting and bear testimony to the blessing that had been bestowed upon her.
This request, however, seemed to shock her very much, as she said it would be like exposing one's dearest love-secrets to the public gaze, and she entirely refused to go, and blamed me very severely for having told of her experience and brought this exposure upon her. My own impression at the time was that her feeling of annoyance with me, and her refusal to testify, spoiled the blessing, for it very soon seemed to wane and she came back to ordinary life again.
It was one of the foundation principles among believers in the definite baptism of the Holy Spirit
Mi1SS,
5.28 FANATICISM
that if you did not confess it when you had received it, it might be lost ; but I can understand now that she would naturally have been provoked with me for bringing in a company of comparative strangers to stand round her bed and listen to her raptures.
Perhaps if I had stopped to think I should not have done it, but my mind was so set on the one thing, the Baptism of the Spirit, and so overwhelmed with delight at this apparently tangible answer to our prayers, that no other considerations entered into my head.
Had it been myself, I should have wanted it proclaimed on the house-tops, as a definite sign of the presence and power of God.
However, my friend was furious with me, and I cannot but believe that because of this she did lose whatever it was she had.
But in spite of this it seemed to have been what the Swedenborgians call 'her opening into the spiritual world', for, from that time she began to have very strange and wonderful experiences, which in the end became great fanaticisms.
Having had such a blissful and rapturous time, she naturally found ordinary religious life very humdrum and uninteresting, and was continually reaching out for similar raptures.
When I told her of my experiences at the water-cure, and of the secret that had there been revealed to me she immediately seized upon it as a probable opportunity for herself to regain her lost blessing, and went to this same water-cure, and put herself under the teaching of the doctor there, hoping that she also might learn his strange secrets.
The result was that she went into the wildest extravagances.
She embraced all his a
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
views, and felt led, as she fully believed by the Holy Spirit, to great lengths in the lines he taught.
Among other things, she felt it her duty to ask him to stand naked before her, and also to do the same thing herself before him.
'To what other lengths she went I have never known, but she was fully imbued with the idea that the baptism of the Holy Spirit was physical as well as spiritual, and that the great aim of religious teachers should be to excite in themselves and in others those physical thrills which accompany passion, and which she had come to believe were the manifest token of union with Christ.
She took the Song of Solomon to be the exposition of the relation between the soul and Christ as the Bride and Bridegroom, and she confessed to me with great awe that she really believed that Christ had often come to her at night when in bed as the real
Bridegroom, and had actually had a_ bridegroom's connexion with her.
She taught this doctrine to a choice circle of friends, and even tried by personal contact to produce in them those physical thrills which she believed were the actual contact of the Holy Ghost.
She overawed these friends by the tremendous force of her own convictions, and in many cases obtained what I now believe to have been hypnotic control over them, so that they were not surprised or shocked at anything she said or did, but accepted it all as from God, and as being the avenue through which the Holy Ghost was to be poured out upon them.
As far as I knew, however, no one adopted her views, but when the glamour of her presence was removed, they came to their senses and saw
MISS
S.'S FANATICISM
that it had all been a dreadful delusion.
But even then, although their eyes had been opened to see the fearful errors into which she had led them, none of them could doubt the sincerity of her belief in the divine origin of her strange views and practices.
In the course of time, as my interest in this sort of mysticism waned, I lost sight of her, and have never known what the final issue was, although I have reason to believe that her own eyes also must have been at last opened to the mistakes she had made.
In regard to that tent meeting at the camp ground, where she entered into that first wonderful experience,
I met a lady about a year afterwards who had been present at first, but who had been called away suddenly and had not heard of Miss S.'s experience.
She asked me if I remembered that meeting, and said that she was one of those present who were praying for the Baptism of Spirit, and that while she was praying she seemed to have her spiritual eyes opened. She saw the Holy Ghost in bodily form hovering in the air above the meeting, striving to come down into the hearts of the people present, but an invisible barrier seemed to hinder his approach any nearer than about four feet above our heads, and although he pushed and pushed to get through this barrier seemed impregnable, and he was obliged reluctantly to give up the attempt.
She said in her heart, 'Oh, Lord, what does this vision mean ?'
And the reply came, ' It means that all hearts present are so full of themselves that it is impossible for me to find entrance, and it is of no use for people to pray for the
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
Lord to take possession of them unless they are first emptied of self'.
Now as a fact the person who was acknowledged by all to be the most full of self was my friend, Miss S
; who had apparently received the Baptism.
What it was that happened to her, or what the whole thing meant, I was not for many years able to explain, but my opinion now is that, being a very emotional person, her emotions had got worked up to the highest pitch by our prayers and our consecration in the dark, and that what happened to her was simply an overwhelming excitement of her whole emotional nature, and that she did not really receive any greater blessing from God than all the rest of us received, or than would naturally come to souls as earnest and eager as we were.
I must say here that in all my experience of these wonderful outpourings they always happened to emotional people, and were not necessarily accompanied by any increased holiness on the part of the recipients.
I had a neighbour at one time who used to come and see me every day, and fill me with awe and eager longing at the accounts she gave me of the ' waves of glory' that had swept over her during the previous night, which she believed were the tokens of the manifest presence of the Lord.
But at the very same time this friend was so full of self, and so determined to get her own way that she resorted to what often seemed to me dishonest and underhand means to accomplish her ends.
She would say after one of these recitals, and we had turned to business again, ' There is no other woman
VETS SeS Ss. FANA TIL CISM in the world who is so fitted to rule and guide associations as I am; I am the only one who could carry on the work as it ought to be carried on'.
And then she would proceed to arrange plans and devise methods by which she was to be kept in power ; plans, that, looking back upon them now, I can see were neither dignified nor upright.
GH a Ba eR aay.
ALE Wipe ee a Oe VL nw the year 1879 we took a furnished house in Coulter Street, Germantown, for the summer.
A lady who lived next door to us had lent her house to some friends who had the reputation of being wonderful Christians, and of having great revelations and remarkable experiences.
As I was at that time in search of remarkable experiences, I was exceedingly interested in these people, and very soon made their acquaintance.
'The head of the household was a Methodist minister named J.L., and I found him to be a most impressive and interesting man.
He had a way of suddenly turning to you when conversation was going on and saying that he had a message for you from the Lord, and then giving you some solemn word of warning—that the time had come for you to take a decided step, or something of that sort.
There were also in the house two sisters named W., whose father, Dr. W., was a man of position and authority in the Methodist Church, with a great reputation for piety.
Their home was on the Atlantic coast, where they were held in great repute as being people of singular piety and devotion.
From the first I was profoundly impressed by the apparent holiness and devotedness of this household,
THE
L. FANATICISM
and felt that they must have been brought there on purpose to help me onward in my earnest search for a realised oneness with Christ, a oneness to which they seemed to have attained in a very marvellous degree.
The thing which interested me at first was the remarkable way in which they seemed to understand the guidance of the Holy Spirit in all the little daily affairs of life.
I have spoken of this more especially in my chapter on Divine Guidance, but I must say here that their way of looking continually, moment by moment, to the Lord for His Guidance, and their perfect certainty that He did indeed, according to His promise, direct their every step, seemed to invest them with an atmosphere of holiness and to surround them with the conscious presence of the Lord in a way that made itself felt by everyone who came into their presence.
They seemed literally to live and move and have their being in God.
And to a soul, hungering as mine was to know the utmost possibilities of the life hid with Christ in God, it seemed that it ought to be almost like entering the very gates of Heaven to be in their presence, and I threw myself with intense eagerness into their teaching and their influence.
No one could associate with them and not believe that they thought themselves special Divine favourites.
They professed to be so minutely guided in life that I was very anxious to attain the same experience, so finally I got Miss W. to give me a sample of the way in which she was guided.
She said it was like this : that when she was awakened in the morning her first
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF FANATICISM
conscious thought was to consecrate the day to the Lord, and to ask Him to guide her every step of the way throughout the whole day.
She would then ask Him whether she was to get up or not; and very often, although it was apparently very important that she should get up, the Lord told her to stay in bed.
Then, perhaps, in a few minutes the voice would order her to get up.
Then she would proceed to get up.
As she put on each article she asked the Lord whether she was to put it on, and very often the Lord would tell her to put on the right shoe and leave off the other ; sometimes she was to put on one stocking and leave off the other ; sometimes she was to put on both stockings and no shoes ; and sometimes both shoes and no stockings ; it was the same with all the articles of dress.
She said also that often during the day, when she was seated at work, the Lord would tell her to get up and go out of the room, and when she got out would tell her to come back, And often she would be told to move from one chair to the other, or to go and stand on the front doorstep, or to do all sorts of erratic things.
She said that the object of this was to make her pliable so that she would be ready to follow the guidance of the Lord on the instant.
I immediately thought that I would like to live in the same way, so the next morning after this conversation I began the process, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I got dressed or downstairs to my duties, as the voice kept telling me to do all sorts of things.
Then when I did get downstairs I could hardly get through my breakfast, for the voice
Hel.
WAN AML CT Sv
would suggest, just as I would get a mouthful nearly into my mouth, that I must not take it.
I spent the morning running about from one chair to another, going out to the steps and coming back again, and running from one room to the other, and even going so far as to take off my shoes and stockings, and then to put them on again without any apparent cause.
I kept this up until about twelve o'clock, and then my common sense revolted, and I said to myself,
' There is no Divine guidance in this at all.
I have just got the ideas from what Miss W. told me, and I am making it up all out of my own head', and I was forced sorrowfully to conclude that I had not fathomed the secret of Divine guidance yet.
This did not, however, weaken my desire to know the inner depths of the experience of which I heard, but gradually I began to discover that I was in the middle of a party of the greatest fanatics that the world contained.
In spite of their evident holiness, I had been conscious all the while of something mysterious about the whole household, an intangible atmosphere of something wrong which seemed to fill the house, and to look out of the eyes of its inmates, and to be heard in the tones of their voices.
'There was nothing I could lay my hands upon, or could even formulate in my thoughts, and whenever the feeling forced itself upon me I blamed myself as being as yet too unspiritual fully to enter into their heights of spirituality and set myself more determinedly than ever to attain to their divine level.
Believing, as they taught, that human reason must be laid aside in
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
spiritual matters, and only the interior voice of the Spirit obeyed, I refused as long as possible to pay any attention to the pricks of the common-sense basis of my nature, and tried to convince myself that I was in this way being uplifted more and more into the secret things of God's immediate presence.
I must confess it was all very fascinating.
I know of nothing more delightful than to be living, as it were, on the very threshold of the spiritual region, with apparently only a thin veil between, and with the expectation of the veil being drawn aside at any moment and some wonderful blaze of glory bursting forth to overwhelm one with Divine revelations.
Every day during that summer I awakened to a magnificent anticipation, and, if every night I went to bed disappointed, it was only to feel convinced that the expected revelation must surely come the next day.
It is needless to say that nothing of what I expected came to me, but I must confess even after this lapse of time that in many respects their teaching was exceedingly valuable.
And I did receive during the course of the summer a real revelation of God that has made life to me a different thing ever since.
It came to me, as all my revelations always have come, in the form of a conviction.
I wanted a vision, I got a fact; and a thousand times since I have thanked God it was so, though at the time it seemed but a poor and flat fulfilment of my magnificent anticipations.
It came in this wise.
It was the continual habit of this strange household to refer everything to God.
They seemed to make
THEY
L. FANATICISM
Him the centre and circumference, the top and the bottom, the inside and the outside of everything.
They never even seemed to recognize that there were or could be such things as second causes, and they were unable to conceive of any question to which God was not a sufficient answer.
Their one universal reply to everything was simple, the words, ' Yes ; but then there is God'
; and no arguments or questionings could turn them from this by so much as a hair's-breadth.
As may be imagined, during my intercourse with them, because of all the unexplainable mystery accompanied by the apparent wonderful holiness that seemed to surround them, I often found myself in a good deal of spiritual perplexity, and, as I looked upon them as religious teachers deserving the highest confidence,
I continually went to one or other of them with my difficulties, chiefly, however, to the oldest of the W. sisters, Miss Caroline W., who was a woman of great culture and intelligence and unusual spiritual power.
I would pour out to her all my interior perplexities and difficulties and temptations, to which I must say she always listened very patiently, but when I would pause for some comforting or helpful reply, there would always ensue a moment or two of silence, and then she would invariably say in a tone that seemed utterly to conclude the matter, ' Yes, that may all be true, but then, there is God.'
I used to feel quite impatient with her, for I looked upon myself as a 'very interesting case', and my difficulties as being of a rather unusual and interesting kind, and it seemed to me they really
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
deserved greater consideration and more detailed and definite help than was to be found in the simple assertion that 'there was God.'
But my most impassioned or despairing stories of my spiritual woes could never elicit anything more than this.
' Yes, yes,' she would say ; 'I know it all.
But then, there is God.'
The result of this was that she did succeed by constant reiteration in taking my mind off myself and my perplexities and in bringing me to see that God was enough.
Towards the end of their stay, one night, a friend who had come to sit at their feet and I had gone to bed in great perplexity, full of questioning as to how it could be that God would permit people who wanted to follow Him, and were trying to walk in His paths, to wander into error.
We went to sleep in this perplexity, unable to see any light ; but, somehow, in the morning when we met, we turned to each other and said, in the sense that we had never said it before, the single word, ' God !' and with that word came to us a recognition of the all-sufficiency of God in a way that has never left us.
From that moment I, personally, have never had any anxiety, any question, any doubt in the religious life that could not be answered at once by the simple repetition of the word 'God', and ever since, whenever we meet, although it has been thirty or forty years—in fact, in all our letters and conversations—we constantly greet one another with the repetition of that one name, the name of God.
It would be impossible to put into words just what seemed to come to us that morning, but it certainly was
THE
L. FANATICISM
a satisfying revelation of the all-sufficiency of God, just the bare God—if I might use the expression—for all our needs.
And thousands of times since I have had all my perplexities dissipated and all my fears dispelled by the simple repetition of these words,
' God is enough.'
And I shall never cease to feel real gratitude to this strange household for having brought me to this, although
I very soon found out some dreadful things about them.
As the summer passed I became more and more impressed with the strange and mysterious religious atmosphere which surrounded this household, but the time came when my friend wanted her house back again, and when Mr. L. and his friends returned to their several homes, and ] was as much mystified as ever as to what it all meant.
One day, however, shortly after they had gone, I received a telegram from Mrs. C. in Boston, begging me to come and see her at once on a matter of vital importance.
'The message was so urgent that I took a night train, and arrived there the next morning.
Immediately Mrs. C. told me that she thought I ought to know the state of things in this household, and she had sent for me to tell me about it. She brought in a highly respectable woman doctor, who told me the following facts.
The doctor said that she had two very intimate friends in Boston, who were ladies of very good standing, and, in fact, one of them was at the head of a large school, or college, and was considered an authority on education.
They were young women of unusual culture
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
OF FANATICISM
and of great refinement and charm, respected by everybody, with a great religious reputation ; and were, in fact, devoted Christians.
They had become acquainted with Mr. L., the Methodist minister, who was the head of the mysterious household next door to me, about eighteen months before, and had seemed to find great spiritual uplifting from his teachings.
'This doctor was at that time in charge of a hospital, and these ladies would often come to see her.
She noticed that one of them seemed to be losing her spirits, and to be greatly depressed, with so far as she knew no apparent reason.
She seemed to be on the verge all the time of saying something to the doctor which she appeared afraid to continue, and the doctor felt that her friend had a confidence to make to her which for some reason she was reluctant to make.
One night this friend came to stay all night at the hospital and slept in the room with the doctor.
As she was standing by the looking-glass arranging her hair, the doctor noticed something peculiar in her appearance, and it flashed across her mind that her friend was in the family way.
She exclaimed, * Oh, darling, what is the matter ?' and her friend burst into tears.
Nothing more was said; the doctor was too shocked to speak ; she would as soon have expected to find the Angel Gabriel in such a plight as her friend , and they spent the night both weeping, but saying nothing till towards the morning.
Then her friend opened her heart and confided in the doctor.
She told her that she and her companion had been greatly im-