The Perfectionists Of Oneida
CAPE Reeve)
THE PERFECTIONISTS OF ONEIDA
IE the foregoing chapter we have seen something of the credulous attitude of religious and idealistic people in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the peculiar and adventurous atmosphere in which they lived.
It remains to describe in more detail the two most extreme examples of abnormal religions, the Perfectionists of Oneida and the Brotherhood of the New Life.
The leaders of these two sects, John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) and Thomas Lake Harris (18231903), were both of them educated men, and men of great personal charm.
Both were earnest and sincere Christians in their youth, and both honestly believed themselves to be the recipients of Divine inspiration.
Both led their followers to believe remarkable delusions, and both were forced by the pressure of outside public opinion to abandon their strange practices before they died ; and both, in their curious courses through life, completely and thoroughly dislocated the lives of those with whom they came in contact.
We must consider them separately, taking Noyes, the earliest in date, and the least dangerous in practice, first.
When the great Revival of 1831 swept over the New England States, John Humphrey Noyes was a young
THE PERFECTIONISTS
OF ONEIDA
man of twenty.
He was caught up in the enthusiasm of the great awakening, and as he himself said, ' Fixed his heart on the millennium, and resolved to live or die for it'.
Being by nature thoughtful and independent, and not in the least afraid of following his own ideas to what seemed to him their logical consequences, he was soon in a heretical position.
He studied theology at Andover, and at Yale, and read the Bible so repeatedly, and so attentively that to the end of his life he could name not only the book and chapter, but even the number of the verse and the place on the page of almost every text submitted to him.
During the course of these studies he made a discovery which altered his whole outlook on life, and which separated him at once from the orthodox Churches.
This discovery was that the Second Advent had already taken place, at the time of the fall of Jerusalem in the year a.p. 70, and he understood from this that the Devil had at that moment begun his reign, and that the symptom of his power was the existence of the organised Churches.
The Ten Commandments, he thought, had at that same moment ceased to be in force, and consequently all that was needed for Salvation was a full consecration and a genuine belief.
Upon those who could achieve these things the mantle of perfection would descend, and thereafter they would be incapable of sin.
Noyes himself reached this enviable position on the 20th of February, 1834; and from that moment, while he and his followers considered that he was perfect, the world at large held that he was crazy.
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