Religious Thought In America
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
IN AMERICA
have been exhausted with the War of Independence.
The French Revolution, which set such strong currents of Liberalism flowing in. Europe hardly touched the people of America at all.
Their own Revolution had contributed directly to the conflagration in Europe, and they thought they had no need of further development.
'The 'effete monarchy' had been thrown off, and the traces of social inequality wiped away from the laws.
All men—all white men at least—were already free and equal in the young United States, so why should they bother with foreign theories, or foreign turmoils?
Neither the reaction which swept over Europe in the first years of the new century, nor the Radical revival which succeeded it had any counterpart in America ; and, unknown to themselves, the people of the great new country settled into a rigid social conservatism as oppressive, and as fatal to individual liberty as the ' yoke' they had so triumphantly thrown off, The uniformity of the ways of life and thought throughout the country was indeed in flat contradiction to the generally accepted idea of what America was like.
Theoretically all men were declared free.
In sober fact, however, chattel slavery was a settled institution, and remained in force for years after it had been abolished in the rest of the civilized world.
Legally and on paper all opinions might be held, and all religions practised ; actually everyone thought very much alike, and variations from the general Puritan assumptions in religion led to social ostracism if not to tarring and ay
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feathering in a very short time.
Politically the democracy was complete ; yet, until the question of slavery entered the field, there were practically no divisions of principle among politicians, no schools of Radicals, no group of philosophical thinkers, no effective or recognized opposition to things as they were..
The system of civilization seemed to be so deeply rooted in the consent of the people that no attention was paid to it; and the whole force and energy of the time was poured into the task of settling and developing the vast new land.
These facts must be borne steadily in mind in considering the oddities which we are about to chronicle.
Numerous and remarkable as these were, and wild as were their claims to universality, they were all of them really insignificant in the history of the United States, and the exaggerated and freakish atmosphere in which they had their rise must not be taken as typical of early nineteenth-century America.
It was indeed peculiar to that country and that time.
The world has never seen its like before, and probably never will again ; but for all that it is but a bypath, an excrescence upon the normal history of the period, which was in the main a time of steady and sane national expansion, and of the conquest by civilization of the great unpeopled spaces of the West.
The mere fact of the size of the country, taken with the theoretical liberty of which its people were so proud, made these experiments possible.
Men, if they were strong enough, and rebellious enough, cou/d make their way against the uniform pattern of the time, and attract
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adherents and followers.
And when they did so there was nothing external to stop them short.
There was room enough for new experiments, and there was credulity and ignorance enough too, so that America, for all its conformity, offered a field for strange and wild social and religious theories, in which the bold and adventurous could sow what seeds they chose.
In the early and middle years of the nineteenth century queer crops grew up from these sowings.
'The tale of their planting and their ripening is strange ; their harvest, when it came, was sorrow and disillusion ; and it would have been better had the seed fallen by the wayside for the birds of the air to devour.
GH Apes hme ANA
COCO UNST2EORO TH EPP OREEGH
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SHRELS* (NSE Rer UN@ PH SE Raa oN LN Pe Eee CEINeL Oey AES new world, to which so many religious refugees turned in hope, if it was not all that they imagined, still offered them great and substantial advantages over the homes they fled from.
There was plenty of room, and a good living for such as were hard working and thrifty ; there was legal toleration, and freedom from the oppressive interference of State or Church schools, and from military service; and there was a refreshing absence of respect for authority.
All these things were what they were seeking, so that their dreams and hopes were satisfied. America was, to them, the Promised Land.
Apart from the Quakers, the first religious vagaries to find a footing in America came from Germany.
In that country the storms and turmoils of the Reformation period had left an active religious ferment which had never entirely died down.
Peasant sects underwent spasmodic persecution for their beliefs, and new revivals expressing the old Quietist and Anabaptist doctrines broke out again and again, and refused to be suppressed.
These peasant sects were closely related to movements which had persisted in Christendom from earliest
FOREIGN RELIGIOUS
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times.
Some of their beliefs were held by the Gnostics of the second century, and by the Encratites and the Novatians of the third and fourth.
They resembled the Montanists of the second to the sixth centuries, and almost exactly paralleled the Waldenses who suffered persecution in the Alps from the eleventh to the end of the sixteenth centuries.
They had a strong likeness to the 'Friends of God', who spread through the Rhine
Valley in the year 1300, and they were derived in strict historical descent from Wyclif and the Lollards, and from John Huss of Bohemia, who was burnt at the stake for his beliefs in 1415.
The writings of the mystic, Jacob Boehme (born in 1575) were the cause of repeated revivals in Switzerland, Bohemia and South Germany, and these, when diffused among a people already predisposed to receive them by their Anabaptist tendencies, led to the formation of a great many distinct, but similar sects.
There is no need to trace out the details of their genealogies.
'Their main principles were always much the same; a belief in the possibility of present-day inspiration, a literal acceptance of the Bible, and an absolute refusal to recognize the authority of either
Church or State.
Their adherents were gentle, harmless people, stubborn in their opposition to military service and in their determination to teach their children in their own way, and impassioned in their rejection of the Sacraments.
Most of them were believers in adult Baptism—in some cases by immersion; they held ceremonial Agapae, or love feasts, and practised the Oriental custom of washing each other's feet.
In all
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things they followed as closely as they could what they believed to be primitive Christianity, and generally believed with Saint Paul, that marriage was evil.
Very few of them were able to exclude it altogether, but, even when they were obliged to recognize it, they held it to be an inferior state to celibacy, and much to be discouraged.
Like the early Christians they had a distinct communistic tendency, believing themselves to be only the stewards of the Lord's property, and they were nearly always vegetarians, as well as abstainers from wine and tobacco, These inoffensive sects were bitterly persecuted in Europe all through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and at the end of the seventeenth century a group of Mennonites left their native land and set out for America, the country of Promise and Liberty.
They called themselves the ' Brethren of the Free Spirit', and were affectionately known as ' The Harmless People ' by their new neighbours ;_ and they settled down in German-speaking colonies in peace.
The Mennonites had been founded by a Dutchman In 1536, and they were divided into several distinct groups, known by different names, such as the Apostolic,
Reformed, Defenceless, etc.
The most important of these groups was the Amish, which separated from the parent sect in about 1700, before the emigration to America.
These, as well as the parent sect, journeyed to the Promised Land, and came to be known there as the ' Hookers', because they had a scruple about Wearing buttons, and fastened their clothes with hooks,
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About the year 1725 one of these Mennonite groups was joined by one Conrad Beissel, a German who had come to America hoping to join the 'Woman in the Wilderness Community', which however had ceased to exist.
'This man was a mystic, who lived for some years as a hermit, and during this period he received the revelation that Saturday was the true Sabbath day.
He published this belief, and was joined by five followers, three men and two women, who settled near him in his solitude.
Gradually other converts came, and in 1732 a regular communistic society was formed among them, and dwellings (built according to Biblical instructions without nails) were set up, and the place was called Epurata.
'The people lived with the utmost simplicity, most of them remaining celibate, and at first they adopted a peculiar dress.
Until Beissel's death in 1786 the community prospered greatly in the only ways it wished to prosper, namely, in harmony and spiritual peace ; but when his influence was withdrawn its membership diminished.
It did not break up, however, and in 1900 there were still seventeen persons who professed its faith.
In 1800, fourteen years after Beissel's death, an American preacher named Peter Lehman visited Ephrata, and was so greatly impressed with what he saw there that he determined to found a similar colony in his own town of Snowhill.
At first he had only four members, but by 1814 they were forty, and they built a Cloister, a Chapel, a Brother House and a Sister House, and established what was really a monastery without vows
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which endured for many years, but had ceased to exist by 1900.
Both this and the Ephrata Community itself seem to have been quiet and orderly places, with no trace of fanaticism or exaggeration, and so too were the Moravians, or Hussites, who reached America in 1740, and who still form a considerable and distinct group.
Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, gives an interesting account of a Moravian village, and in particular describes their views on marriage in 1756.
'I enquired,' he says, 'concerning the Moravian marriages, whether the report was true that they were by lot.
I was told that lots were used only in particular cases ; that generally, when a young man found himself disposed to marry, he informed one of the elders of his class, who consulted the elder ladies that governed the young women.
As these elders of the different sexes were well acquainted with the tempers and dispositions of their respective pupils, they could best judge what matches were suitable, and their judgments were generally acquiesced in ; but if, for example, it should happen that two or three young women were found to be equally proper for the young man, the lot was then recurred to.
I objected, if the matches are not made by the natural choice of the parties, some of them may chance to be very unhappy.
"And so they may," answered my informer, "'if you let the parties choose for themselves' ; which, indeed, I could not deny.'
A sect similar to the Moravians came to America from Germany in 1719, and was known as the Dunkers, of
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or Tunkers ; and another, about the same time from Denmark, called the Schwenfeldians ; and both these settled, as the Moravians and Mennonites had settled, in Pennsylvania.
In 1804 the number of these Germanspeaking settlers was increased by the arrival of shiploads of the followers of George Rapp.
'These people struggled for some years against great material hardships, and in 1814 they sold out their land in Pennsylvania, and removed to Harmony, Indiana, where they were far more prosperous.
The Rappites differed somewhat from the other German sects which had come before, in that they believed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur before the death of their leader, and several other curious things as well.
Adam, they thought, had been created in the exact image of God, a dual being both male and female, and if he had been content to remain in his original state he would have produced offspring spontaneously.
These beliefs did not make much practical difference in their lives, which were so prosperous and easy that their leader presently became anxious lest their growing leisure should allow time for mischief and rebellion.
Accordingly he decided, in 1825, to move the whole settlement away from their village of Harmony, and to begin again in a new place.
He sold all the land, with the farms and the village as they stood, to Robert Owen, and, as we shall see, it became under his management the scene of a different communistic experiment.
The Rappites, meanwhile, removed to a place in Ohio, which they named Economy, and there they again established themselves in prosperity.
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Rapp himself was a very remarkable man, one of those simple good men 'before whom no evil can stand'.
He was ready to receive and believe, all who came to see him; and one of the chief features of his settlement was the unquestioning hospitality with which all travellers, whether honest seekers or mere beggars and rogues, were admitted, housed and fed.
This trustfulness, however, very nearly led to disaster when, in 1832, a deliberate impostor entered the community and endeavoured to capture it for himself.
This man, whose name was really Bernhard Miller, gave himself out to be a Count Maximilian de Leon, and claimed that he had a special revelation which was written in a Golden Book.
According to this revelation the simplicities, the vegetarianism, and particularly the chastity of the Rappites were condemned, and during the winter that he stayed at Economy he turned 250
Rappites from their allegiance.
Five hundred, however, remained faithful, and Miller with his followers was obliged to go away ; though they managed to take a large part of the wealth of the community with them.
Rapp himself was undismayed by these events.
" The tail of the Serpent', he said, quoting from the Book of Revelation, ' drew the third part of the stars of Heaven and did cast them to the Earth'.
And indeed this seemed to be their fate. Ina very short time the seceding members had used up the $105,000 they had taken, and came back to ask for more.
When it was refused they fell to quarrelling among themselves, and finally set upon and nearly killed Miller, who had claimed
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that he would make gold for them from stones, but had failed to do so.
He was obliged to make his escape, and died soon after, and all his followers dispersed.
The real Rappites, relieved by the withdrawal of all their unstable and discontented elements, entered upon their period of greatest prosperity, and continued to flourish until Rapp's death in 1847.
This event was unexpected to the very last.
As he lay on his deathbed, and almost with his last breath he reaffirmed his original belief, 'If I did not know that the dear Lord meant I should present you all to Him', he murmured,
"TI should think my last moments had come'.
They had; and with his loss the community began slowly to decline.
They lingered a long time, but in 1892, being then but a tiny handful, they wound up their joint affairs and dispersed, and only four of them were living in 1903.
Another party of German peasants was helped by the English Quakers to escape from persecution, and in 1817 they were led from their homes by Joseph Bimeler and reached the shores of the Promised Land.
These people called themselves ' Separatists" and settled at Zoar, and they were more closely allied to the Quakers in their beliefs than any of the other religious emigrants.
They made a great point, for example, of not taking oaths, or uncovering the head in greeting or prayer, and they said ' thee and thou' to all men.
They also condemned organized prayer, as being a mere ' babbling with the mouth'; but, unlike the Quakers, they were exceedingly fond of music.
'They had been founded in the first place by a servant girl called Barbara Grubermann, an