Hannah Whitall Smith
HANNAH WHITALL SMITH
As her Papers show, Hannah Whitall Smith sincerely believed, even after all her sad experiences, that the fanatics she knew were acting in good faith.
Wild and wicked as they sometimes appeared, she thought them at least sincere, and held that Christian charity should enter into our judgments concerning them.
Without faith it is almost impossible to be convincing, and unless they had been honestly trying to reach the state of mystical communion with God they could none of them, she thought, have been successful.
The fact that many of them fell away from their ideals, and descended to trickeries and shams made no difference.
The snares which beset a prophet are many ; divination, wonder working and mystification are easier than a holding fast to the narrow road ; and once embarked upon these things it is doubtless difficult not to rush headlong to ruin.
But in the beginning, she believed, the false prophets, like the true saints, have sought to know God.
There is one other point which she would have wished brought forward in any introduction to her book, for it emphasises the intention with which she wrote ; and that is the fact that delusions, deceptions and religious manias continue to flourish to this day.
The sects and aberrations of half a century ago seem wild and outrageous now, and well nigh incredible ; but they can be paralleled quite closely by modern examples.
We shall not here describe anything of recent date, nor any creed which still finds adherents; but we must remember that the story is not ended, and that the old mistakes and the old follies are living still.
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
The history of religious error is as old as that of mankind, though it is not quite so complex.
There have been myriads of false prophets, and their followers have been legion.
Every creed has had fantastic variants and the number of strange sects has been enormous ; for the human mind seems to love mystery, enchantment and excess.
If the field of religious aberration is vast, however, and if the phenomena it presents are staggering, they are not in outline difficult to understand.
For there is much similarity in the manifestations of different ages, and the same problems, and the same solutions recur again and again.
For our purposes we do not need to go back to the primitive religions, or to trace out those remnants of old beliefs which are to be met with in later creeds.
We must indeed remember that the origins of the sects we are to consider lie far back in the beginning of religious thought, and that fanatics and seers have always played upon the credulity of simple people, and kept alive a succession of astonishing delusions upon the great subjects of life and death, good and evil.
Never since men first became conscious of the passage of time has there been any lack of false prophets.
Between the rivers of Mesopotamia and among the sands of Egypt, as well as in the Tibetan hills and the dark
African forests, strange esoteric sects have had their rise, and wild faiths and mystic orgies have.been known.
In every race and in every age the same impulses have arisen, the same experiments have been tried, and the same strange answers found for the impenetrable prob-
HANNAH WHITALL
SMITH lems of existence.
The forms have differed, but the essence has been the same ; for religious mania takes its rise in some of the deepest impulses of human nature, and finds its expression through some of the commonest of human failings.
For the purpose of understanding the American sects of the nineteenth century we need not travel back so far.
It is enough to trace their ideas through the Christian era to see that their leaders did not stand alone, but were really following along well-made paths, and wrestling, in their new and unsophisticated world, with the very same problems which had tormented devout men and women in the first centuries after Christ, had maddened them in the Middle Ages, and driven them into the troubles and confusions of the Reformation period.
The American sects, indeed, were isolated and ignorant, and believed themselves to be the only living recipients of Divine Inspiration.
They did not know what had happened in the world before, and they advanced, all ignorantly, to the old disasters and the old mistakes.
Their stories present a sad and repellent picture of misguided enthusiasm driving men and women to the verge, and over the verge of insanity.
Werejit' not that the same causes are still producing the same results, it might be better to leave the whole thing unchronicled.
But, after all, the history of human thought and human error is interesting and valuable ; and, though there is little in these sects to admire, there is much from which a moral may be drawn.
Galea Pela Pema) AN AGC OU Nia O Pere ie ere Oe
SOCIETY AND URRELGIOU Se! 10 Git
IN AMERICA AT THE BEGINNING OF
"TH Fe NON
abet) PNe let C@obe Ne et) eiva i ES before the American War of Independence proclaimed to the whole world that the new Republic was the home of Liberty and Opportunity, the Colonies in New England had been known to offer an escape from some of the oppressions and tyrannies of Europe.
The early settlers who made their way to the new land crossed the Atlantic for a variety of reasons, but one of their most frequent impulses was rebellion against the religious conformity required at home.
The Pilgrim Fathers set off across the ocean because they felt an imperative call to worship God after their own fashion, and longed to live in a land where liberty of conscience was allowed ; and it was in this hope that the early Puritans and Quakers settled in Boston,
New York and Philadelphia.
And as they spread out over the surrounding country they gave to the new civilisation they were founding the definitely Christian and Protestant atmosphere which it wears to this day.
In spite of their reasons for coming to America, the early settlers were not tolerant themselves, as their successors are now.
They brought with them a burning
RELIGLOUS THOUGHT
IN AMERICA
flame of religious excitement, and were as full of the zeal of persecution as the ecclesiastical authorities from which they had escaped.
Religious cruelties in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were as natural in the new lands as in the old, and the men and women who had left their homes for Christ's sake expelled heretics from their midst, and even burnt and hanged them with a holy joy, firmly believing that everyone who did not share their convictions would be damned.
Among them, as among their contemporaries in Europe, there were witches and witch hunters, and there were prophets and 'inspired' teachers who saw visions and dreamed dreams.
'There were even unorthodox, or rather semi-orthodox sects, such as the followers of Anne Hutchinson in Boston in 1634.
There were, too, several small communistic religious experiments, such as the ' Labadist Community of Protestant Mystics' established in Maryland in 1680, the 'Community of the Woman in the Wilderness' in Pennsylvania in 1694, and the ' Contented of the GodLoving Soul' who were founded in Germantown in the same year.
If these phenomena were to be examined in detail they would no doubt be found to be full of interest, but it is likely that they would differ hardly at all from the similar manifestations which were to be seen in England and Germany at the same time.
The traditions which the settlers had brought over, and were still bringing over, were all-powerful, and nothing indigenous to America had as yet made its appearance in the religious world.
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
Religion, in every form which it has taken in the world, has been built upon a great and complex heap of the ruins of former creeds. Local superstitions, the half-remembered myths and folklore of long centuries, are still twisted into the lives of the peasantry of Europe, and the ritual of Catholicism was superimposed upon a foundation of pure Paganism.
In America, however, in the seventeenth century, the only antiquity which influenced the Puritans was that which they brought with them.
The Indians and their gods were despised and unknown, and had no effect upon the thoughts of the new white settlers ; and the Africans, who came at a later date, were equally separate and apart. No modifying influences crept into the religion of the white men from the rivers and mountains ; no local deities, no nymphs or satyrs haunted the lonely spaces of the new world.
The Puritan settlers were afraid of their own imaginations, and detested and feared the influences of poetry.
Stark were their doctrines, and rigid their conceptions of life ; and the only latitude they allowed themselves was the weaving of a complex edifice of theological subtlety upon the foundation of their positive
© belief.
The great Revivals of Jonathan Edwards, in 1740, began what may be called an American school of doctrine ; and that date marks the real starting-point of our enquiry.
The impetus which his preaching and his books gave to all the American churches was marked ; and although there was nothing definitely abnormal about his movement, it displayed all the dangerous revival symptoms.
24,
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
IN AMERICA
Groaning, shouting and extreme emotional excitement were common, and Edwards himself was dismissed from his pastorate in 1750 after a dispute on the significant question of whether men and women admitted to church during a Revival, but not truly 'converted', should or should not be allowed to partake of the Lord's
Supper.
Edwards died in 1758, and after his death a Revivalist party sprang up which was known as the Edwardean, or New Divinity party, and which made a considerable ferment in the land.
They split among themselves, and indulged in great controversies on questions of belief ; and one of their chief subjects of concern was the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination, which some of them came to interpret as implying native sinlessness.
All this, though it doubtless contained in many instances the elements of really fanatical movements, was not actually led over the edge of doctrinal disputing into the morass of mystical experiment.
It did, however, have the effect of preparing the way for what was to come later, by accustoming men's minds to new teaching, and it planted the beguiling thought of natural sinlessness in a soil where it was destined to flourish.
During the years which preceded the Revolution new interests came to mitigate the bitterness of religious disagreement.
Politics ran theology hard for the first place in men's thoughts, and for a time the great ideas of national independence and social equality held the field.
The men who fought the War against England, and who adopted the Declaration of Independence and
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
the American Constitution were not concerned to persecute each other for their religious beliefs.
Toleration was part of their great doctrine of Liberty ; and they thought they were establishing freedom through the length and breadth of their land.
In truth, however, the liberty and tolerance of the people of the country would not stand very strict examination. Judged by tests such as any school of philosophical thinkers might have applied, the actual individual practice fell very far short of the great ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Wherever enough people were collected together for a village or a township to grow up, the pressure of social convention was overwhelming, and the inhabitants of the young Republic found themselves, and were content to find themselves, enjoying 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ° along almost exactly parallel lines.
The fact that people necessarily lived in small and isolated villages, or in the still more widely scattered outposts of the West, accentuated this tendency.
Nowhere is the grip of convention so strong as in small villages ; nowhere is it so essential to think and speak and act exactly like one's neighbours ; and nowhere is the pressure of other people's opinions so overwhelming.
The villagers of New England, as they journeyed West founded new settlements on the pattern of those they had come from, they carried with them their ideas, their religion and their social taboos, and planted them as firmly and as successfully as their crops and orchards.
The impulse towards liberty, indeed, seemed to