Personal Experiences Of Fanaticism
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
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article.
I said, however, that I would only write one, and that he need not expect me to continue.
For some reason, however, my article excited more interest than anything else in the paper, and he begged me so much to go on writing that I finally consented to give him an article every month.
But these articles were dragged from me, so to speak, at the point of the bayonet, for I never wrote them in any month until the printers were clamouring for their copy.
I could not be said, therefore, to have had any great feeling or sense of being called to write them, beyond the fact that I did it to oblige my husband, and yet these articles, collected in a book, made the * Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,' which book has been translated into almost every language in the world, has gone through a hundred editions, and very few books on experimental religion seem to have been as helpful to God's children as this has been.
I never go to a meeting that one or more persons do not tell me that that book is their principal guide in life, that they keep it under their pillows or beside their bed, and that in every spiritual emergency they go to it for help.
I have thousands of letters telling of the blessing it has been and the many remarkable circumstances connected with it, which, if I had time to look over my papers, I could insert.
It has been the turningpoint in thousands of lives, and yet it contains no deep mysteries, and is in reality the simplest, most commonplace statement of a few fundamental religious principles, which, however, are of universal application.
I speak of all this especially on account of the fact that the
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book was not written under any special feeling of being called to write it, nor with any idea that it was in the least an especially religious service.
I did it simply and only to oblige my husband, and that was all there was to it.
I didn't even pray much about it, nor had I any thought that I was doing a work for the Lord ; and, as I have had many similar experiences in my life, I have come to the conclusion that an ordinary everyday walking in the path of duty, and especially in the path of kindness, is a better foundation for doing good work for the Lord than any great ecstacies of inspiration, or any special sense of having a 'mission' or being
'called' to a special service.
The fact is most of my work which has been most successful has been done purely from motives of kindness and courtesy.
I have found this to be the largest factor in the guidance of my life.
On one occasion J had a dear friend who was very nervous.
She used to cry on the smallest provocation and about things which had no personal element in them, except that they upset her nerves.
For instance, she said that if she was going along the street, and some one who was going in the same direction suddenly turned round and faced her, she would burst into tears ; or, if she saw anyone who was particularly ugly, or who had any specially disagreeable feature or tone of voice, it would upset her nerves, and put her all in a quiver of distress.
She and I attended a little prayer meeting that was held once a week at a friend's house, where we went more intimately into our own personal experi2a
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ences than could have been done in a public meeting.
One morning she announced to us at the beginning of the meeting that we were to devote that meeting to her ; she told us about her nervousness and said, 'I do not think that a Christian woman ought to be so much upset by trifles, and I want you all to unite with me in prayer at this meeting that I may be delivered.'
I confess that I had not much expectation that praying would do her any good, as I thought it was a physical condition which probably could never be alleviated.
But when the time came we all knelt down to pray, and of course I knelt with them.
I supposed that there would be fervent prayers offered for our friend by the others, and I did not really intend to pray myself at all, but to my astonishment the whole little company prayed all round in turns and never mentioned her case.
It seemed to me that this was very impolite, and, in fact, unkind, when she had thrown herself so upon our sympathy, and so mainly, with the idea that she might not be disappointed, and simply out of an impulse of politeness and kindness, when the rest had finished
I prayed for her ; but, I confess, I had not the slightest idea that anything would come of it, except that her feelings would be smoothed by the recognition of her need.
Imagine my astonishment when we rose from our knees and she turned to me and said, ' Hannah, thy prayer is answered ; I am cured'.
And as a fact she was cured from that time.
Another case was once when I was attending a meeting After I had spoken, a woman rose from the middle of
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the meeting and said, 'If that lady who has just spoken will come and lay hands on me and pray for my recovery
I shall be healed of a throat trouble that has caused me great suffering for many years, and for which the doctors declare they can do nothing.'
I thought to myself, ' How little that woman knows how unbelieving I am with regard to faith healing.
I am certain my prayers would do her no good.'
And, in fact, I was rather amused at her ignorance, and had to cover my face to hide a smile.
The meeting went on for a little longer, and by the time it closed I had entirely forgotten the incident, and began to talk to a friend beside me, when someone came hastily in and said, ' Mrs. Smith, that woman is waiting for you to come and pray for her, and you must come at once, for she says her throat is very bad.'
Out of kindness I went, but I said to the woman as I entered the room, ' You have sent for me to pray for you, but I haven't a particle of faith that it will do the least bit of good.'
' Yes, it will,' she replied ; 'it will cure me.
Kneel right down here beside me, and lay your hand on my throat and ask God to heal me, and I know I shall be healed."
Out of kindness I did as she wished, although I confess it seemed to me something of a farce.
However, when we rose from our knees, to my amazement her voice was changed, and she declared her throat was cured.
I heard from her quite often afterwards, and the story was always the same, that the cure was complete.
As I bade the woman farewell, she said, ' Now, Mrs. Smith, you have the gift of healing, and you
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ought to exercise it.'
I did not think it was likely to be true, but I thought I would try it, so I went to my sister, who was suffering from a chronic disease, told her the incident, and said, ' Now I am going to pray for thee, and if thee is cured I shall be sure I have the gift.
If thee is not cured, then I shall think it was the woman's own faith that did it, and not my prayers.'
There was no change in my sister's condition, so I came to the conclusion that I did not have the gift.
Another instance where the impulse of kindness produced wonderful results, was in the case of a friend who had become, from severe rheumatic suffering, a victim of the opium habit.
One day when we were talking together, she said, 'I believe if you would pray for me, I could be cured of this habit.'
I myself had no idea that it could be done, but, of course, when a person wanted me to pray for them, I should not think of refusing, so I kneeled down beside her wheel-chair and prayed, and the result in her case also was a complete cure.
This, and many similar instances, convinced me that one had only to do the kind thing which came nearest to hand, and one was pretty sure to be following the guidance of the Lord.
It seems to me to illustrate the fact announced by our Lord when he said ' the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath', meaning, as I believe, that religion was made to fit into man as he is in this world, and that to be a good human being is to be the best Christian that can be made.
It is like a little girl I heard of once who was asked if she knew
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what it was to be a Christian, and she said, ' Yes, it's to do just as Jesus Christ would have done if he had been a little girl and lived in my house'.
I feel more and more that it is a great mistake to think religion is something mysterious and out of the common order, and I am sure that while we are on this earth the highest we can attain to is to be the best human beings possible, and not try to be angels.
When the butterfly is in the caterpillar stage of its existence, all it is called upon to do is to be a good caterpillar, and not try to stretch out wings that it hasn't got.
When it becomes a butterfly, then it must cease to be a caterpillar and be a good butterfly.
And we, when we leave this cocoon of ours, may then stretch our wings which we shall then have, but should not strain ourselves while in this cocoon to put out wings that we have not got.
Religion is made for man : man as he is here and now; and to be a good man or woman seems to me of far more account than to have the greatest possible ecstacy or to live in the greatest spiritual absorption.
It is perfectly plain that God has put us into this world to be human beings, not angels, and his own teaching is that in that calling wherein we are called, there to abide.
I am convinced that a large majority of the spiritual difficulties and the grave spiritual mistakes made by Christians arise from the fact that they are trying to be something that they were never meant to be, and to live on a plane that they were not meant to enter until they leave this world.
All the fanaticisms of which I give an account in this record distinctly came from this cause.
The dear Saints
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who fell into them were trying to be more than human.
They tried to enter a region of which they knew nothing, and where they were therefore certain to be deceived.
CHVALP ATE Rae kal
CONGO STON
@): of the most common delusions of fanaticism is that the leaders prominent in any special way come, sooner or later, to believe that they are Christs.
Why this is I have never been able to discover, and, to tell the truth, I have never investigated this particular form of heresy very closely, because my common sense revolted from it at the start.
Mr. L., however, the account of whose religious vagaries I have given in: another place, not only believed that he was
Christ, but thought that he was destined to be the father of "Christ's children', who were to found a race that was to revolutionise the world.
These children, according to him, were to be begotten in a spiritual way, without bodily contact, but his practice did not bear out his assumption.
Another Christ is alive at the present moment, and his name is J. Pigott, and the account of his fanaticism has been spread through the newspapers and is well known.
There is another Christ in Persia who has managed to get hold of some friends of my own.
He lives in Akka, a military station in the northern part of Palestine.
His name is Beha-Ullah.
He and his followers are disciples of Bab, the well-known Persian religious leader.
'The Bab in his writings referred continually R*
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to a coming Great One, ' He whom God would manifest.'
He constantly exhorted his followers not to reject this Great One when he should appear, and Beha-Ullah is supposed to be the realisation of this prophecy.
My own knowledge of this movement comes from two or three personal friends in England, who have become his disciples, and believe fully that he is, as he declares, a reincarnation of Christ, and that his religion is (they pretend) flooding the Eastern countries with new life and light.
'The sister of one of these friends came to me in great trouble because she was afraid that if she refused to become a disciple of BehaUllah she might be rejecting a real incarnation of Christ, and as I had helped her sometimes in her spiritual life, she came to me for advice.
She was an earnest soul whose only desire was to know the truth.
I frankly told her that I did not believe Beha-Ullah was any more Christ than I was, and that at that moment I knew a dozen Christs scattered around the suburbs of London.
There are a number of other delusions which are more obviously fanatical than those arising from Divine
Guidance, and against which it is therefore not quite so necessary that Christians should be warned.
The fanaticism of speaking with tongues is one of them.
In this fanaticism it is believed that the Lord takes hold of your vocal organs and prays through you in new tongues.
I do not know why it is that this delusion is so apt to come to Revivals, but I have known a great many instances, and in one case it went so far that two apparently sensible people allowed their young daughter
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of thirteen years to go out to China (I believe it was) as a missionary, she not knowing a word of Chinese, but being led to speak gibberish in this way, and they all believed that when she got there the Chinese would at once understand.
What really happened when she did get there, however, I have never heard, but I presume she had to come home again.
The expectation of the Second Coming and of the End of the World is another very common form of fanaticism.
I knew a party once who went out on a certain day all dressed up in white to a hill near the place they lived, expecting to be lifted up to the heavens.
They hadn't ordered in any food, nor any winter clothes nor stores—they were so sure the end of the world was coming.
Of course they had to do all this when they got back from the hill.
But one of the curious things about it is that they were not the least discouraged, or seemed not to be at the time.
I have noticed that this is generally the way with fanatics : they find some way of explaining their disappointments, and go on as before, and I believe it is because they are not in any sense led by reason, and so do not feel a need for their experiences to follow any logical plan.
Visions of the Lord, interior voices, conviction of sinlessness, belief in spiritual bodies are all more or less similar forms of fanaticism.
I remember once I was introduced to a mysterious creature, a man he looked like, who was, I heard, of a strange sect called the 'Temple', and who declared to me that he had not slept a wink for eight years, but had every night got
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out of his body and travelled around the world on errands of service for the Lord!
He declared that he saw angels as plainly as he saw men, and knew them all apart, and that Michael had light flaxen hair and Gabriel dark eyes and hair, and they all lived in the sun!
He was like all other cranks, with some slight variations, and like all the rest believed that his religion and his experiences were the ushering in of a new era in the world's history.
I do not know how many ' new eras'
I have heard tell of.
At least fifty, I should think, but they do not seem to have made any great difference to anyone but the poor souls who believed in them.
Spiritualism has always seemed to me a very dangerous path, which might at any minute lead to fanaticism, and for my own part I have found it necessary to rap every spirit that came over the head to find out whether it had any common sense before I surrendered myself to its guidance.
Certainly, if there is any truth in the teaching of spiritualists it is clear that the spirit world must be inhabited by evil spirits as well as good, and there is an awful risk in giving oneself up to their control.
With Faith Healing I have had a great deal of experience, and I will record what I have found out about it.
My first knowledge in regard to it came from Dr.
C. of Boston, a most delightful Christian doctor, who thought he had discovered in the course of his practice that spiritual remedies for diseases were far more effectual than medical remedies, and consequently he combined with his ordinary medical treatment, treatment by prayer for those who desired it.
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I heard of a great many cures by Dr. C., and finally I invited thirty invalids whom I knew to meet him at our house for him to pray with them, and, if possible, to heal them.
He held a little meeting with them and pointed out that their faith must be added to his faith or nothing could be done, and he induced each one of that thirty to express the faith that they were healed, but I am sorry to say that as far as my knowledge went not a single one found any difference.
Against this, I must put the fact that there were remarkable healings of nervous disorders, which, however, one could easily understand would be affected by a change of mind.
Dr. C. was not the only faith healer whom I knew.
I knew also a Mr. S. of New York, of whom wonderful stories were told, some of which I knew personally to be true.
I have also met a great many individuals who have been cured, as they believed, by faith, and also I have known a great deal about Christian Science or the Mind Cure system of healing, and I believe I have investigated every phase of this kind of thing:
Faith Cure, Divine Healing, Mental Science, Christian Science, Mind Cure, and I will tell you a story that I think will illustrate them all.
Four blind men were taken to see an elephant, and on their return were asked to describe it.
One of the men was put at the elephant's trunk, one at his tail, one at his leg, and one at his ears.
The description of the man who was put at the trunk was that an elephant was like a snake ; the man at the leg declared that an elephant was like the trunk of a tree ; the man at the
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ears declared that an elephant was like a palm-leaf ; and the man at the tail declared that an elephant was like a whip.
Each man was right in the description of what he had seen, but none had seen the whole.
My own impression is that all these different phases of faith cure, mind cure, etc., show us people getting at one especial feature of a grand truth, but that none of us yet have seen the whole.
As far as I can make out this grand truth is the great fact that Spirit controls matter, and that if we were spiritually enough developed we should be able to control matter according to our measure as God does in His measure.
I believe it is a Divine law that if we could say with absolute faith to a mountain, ' Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea', the mountain would have to go. And I feel sure that all these different phases are efforts made towards this end, but that each one, because of our present undeveloped condition is weak and imperfect and liable to fail.
All doctors say that there is no more certain way of catching a disease than being afraid of it ; and equally no more certain way of being preserved from a disease than to have no fear.
A desponding person is apt to fail in everything he undertakes, while a cheerful, courageous person seems to succeed without any effort.
Our mental conditions are far more powerful to affect material things than we know, and I believe that there is here a secret for enormous power, if human beings once understood it.
I was once talking with an occultist who had been through all the phases of occult teaching
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in India.
He told me that there was one especial secret by which they lived, and by means of which they accomplished all their ends.
I asked him to tell me that secret ; he said it would not be safe to tell it to anyone who had not been trained to use it aright, that if a mighty power such as it was were to be let loose in the world it would become, in the hands of unscrupulous or ignorant people, a fearful danger.
He said it required long training and much discipline to make a person fit to receive the revelation of this secret.
I made up my mind that if I possibly could I would entrap him into letting it out, and I skilfully led the conversation in such directions as I thought would conduce to this end.
I asked him, among other things, to show me the occult treasures he possessed, thinking that in one of these
I might perhaps discover his secret.
Among other things, he brought out a very exquisite old volume of occult lore which he told me was exceedingly rare and difficult to procure, and he believed he was the only person in America who possessed a copy.
I asked him how he got it. He said, "1 made up my mind to have it'.
' But', I said, ' how could that procure it for you ?'
' All things ', he said, ' come to him who knows how to will and to be silent', and then in a sudden burst of confidence he exclaimed, ' There, Mrs. Smith, that is the secret if you can understand it'.
It may be that all the mysteries of mesmerism and hypnotism can be explained in this way ; I think it is likely that some day it will be seen that we are able to be real co-workers with God in a sense far beyond
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what we have yet imagined. I believe that all the laws of life are the same, whether in the spiritual or the material world, and that what have seemed to us like miracles are really the outcome of laws about which we are ignorant, or into which we have only a scant insight.
I cannot help thinking that prayer belongs to a region of law which we have not yet discovered.
It is not that we change God's mind and induce Him by our coaxing to do something that He did not intend to do before ; but it is that our prayer has put us into line with His laws and made it possible for His law to work through our instrumentality.
In prayer, all the Divine supply is provided, but it will not reach us unless we make the connexion that renders it possible for that supply to reach us.
Our prayer neither creates the power nor coaxes it to come, but brings it by a Divine law to its destined end.
To my mind there is an enormous amount of unbelief in the praying habits of Christians.
It is as if God were unwilling to bestow blessings, and that it was necessary to go through great wrestlings and agonies in order to get them from Him. I think that story of Jacob and the Angel has done a great deal to perpetuate this attitude of mind.
The careless reader supposes that it was Jacob who wrestled with the Angel and conquered the Angel by superior strength.
But the real truth is that it was the Angel who wrestled with Jacob, that Jacob was the one who had to be conquered, not the Angel, and that the victory was only won when
Jacob was made so lame and weak that he could not wrestle any longer.
I believe that most of the conflicts
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and wrestlings of Christians are caused by their resistance to God, and that the victory comes only when they are too weak to resist any longer and are forced, as Jacob was, to submit.
The sum of all my investigations is to be found in this, that there is a truth behind every form of Faith-healing, or Divine Healing, or Christian
Science ; but at the same time I have come to the conclusion that faith and mind cure both lead sooner or later into spiritualism, and that they are therefore very dangerous.
But from all my investigations into Fanaticism, I did discover one truth, more important to Christians than any warnings about dangers in this world, and more fundamental than everything else in the world put together, and that truth was God.
How I discovered it I have partly told in the preceding chapters and partly in other places, but I must tell it again.
I find in my ' Journal', under date of June 13th, 1879, the following entry concerning the summer when the L. household lived next door to me :
' The Lord has been teaching me very blessed lessons about the interior life during the past six months.
He sent some of His children to spend the summer in a house near ours.
One of them especially helpful to me.
She is what I call a "' mystic "—one of those who know the Spirit's voice, and who walk alone with God.
And she has taught me that the great thing in religion is to live and move and have our being in God.
Not in experiences, nor in views, nor in doctrines, nor in anything of any kind, but simply in God alone.
At last I