V. Opponents of Church and of Christianity.

§ 210. SECTARIANS AND ENTHUSIASTS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC

AND ORTHODOX RUSSIAN DOMAINS.

It cannot be denied that since the Tridentine attempt to define

the church doctrine far fewer sects condemning the church as such

have sprung from Roman Catholicism than from Protestantism. Yet such

phenomena are not wanting in the nineteenth century. Their scarcity

is abundantly made up for by the numberless degenerations and errors

(§ 191) which the Catholic church or its representatives in the

higher and lower grades of the clergy not only fell into, but actually

provoked and furthered, and thus encouraged an unhealthy love for

religious peculiarities. Were the absence of new heretical, sectarian

and fanatical developments something to be gloried in for itself alone,

the Eastern church, with its absolute stability, would obtain this

distinction in a far higher degree. In the Russian church, however,

the multitude of sects which amid manifold oppressions and persecutions

continue to exist to the present day, in spite of many persistent and

even condemnable errors, witnesses to a deep religious need in the

Russian people.

§ 210.1. =Sects and Fanatics in the Roman Catholic Domain=

(§ 187, 6-8, § 190).--On the Catholic Irvingites see § 211, 10.

1. =The Order of New Templars= sprang from the Freemasons

(§ 172, 2). Soon after their establishment in France the

Jesuits sought to carry out their own hierarchical ideas.

The fable of an uninterrupted connection between freemasonry

as a “temple of humanity” and the Templars of the Middle

Ages, and the introduction therewith in their secret

ceremonies of exercises, borrowed from the chivalry of

romance, afforded a means toward this end. The idea was

started in the Jesuit college at Claremont and was approved

and accepted by the local lodge. In A.D. 1754 a great

number of their noble members, who were disgusted with the

Jesuit templar farce, withdrew in order as “New Templars”

to continue the old order in the spirit of modern times. In

consequence, however, of the revolution that broke out in

A.D. 1789 they could no longer hold their ground as a band

of nobles. Napoleon favoured the reorganization of the order

freed from those limits. The day of Molay’s death (§ 112, 7)

was publicly celebrated with great pomp in Paris, A.D. 1808

and the order spread among all French populations. On the

Bourbon restoration the grand-master was, at the instigation

of the Jesuits, cast into prison and the order suppressed.

After the July revolution he was liberated and a new temple

was opened in Paris in A.D. 1833. The show-loving Parisians

for a long time took pleasure in the peculiar rites and

costume of the templars. When this interest declined the

order passed out of view. Its religion, which professed

to be a primitive revelation carried down in the Greek and

Egyptian mysteries, from which Moses borrowed, then further

developed by Christ and transmitted in esoteric tradition by

John and his successors the grand-masters of the templars,

taught a divine trinity of being, act and consciousness, the

eternity of the world alongside of God and an indwelling of

God in man. It declared the Roman Catholic church to be the

only true Christianity (_église chrétienne primitive_). Its

sacred book consisted of an apocryphal gospel of John in

accordance with its own notions.

2. On the communistic society of =St. Simonians=, which also

sprang up in France, see § 212, 2.

3. St. Simon’s secretary was =Aug. Comte=, the founder of the

Positivist philosophical school (§ 174, 2) and he maintained

intimate relations with his master all through life. In

his later years he undertook by carrying his philosophical

doctrine into the practical domain to sketch out a “religion

of humanity,” and thus became the founder of a Positivist

religious sect. The men of science indeed who had adopted

his philosophical principles (Littré, Renan, Taine, Lewes,

Leslie Stephens, Tyndall, Huxley, Draper, etc.), repudiate

it; but in the middle and lower ranks some were found

longing for an object of worship, who endeavoured on the

basis of his _Calendrier positiviste_ and _Catechisme

positiviste_ to form a religious society for the worship

of humanity. His festival calendar divides the year into

thirteen months of four weeks each, named after the thirteen

great benefactors of mankind (among whom Christ does not

appear), while the weeks are named after lesser heroes. By

the profound veneration of woman, which savours greatly of

Mariolatry, as well as by the fantastic worship of heroes,

geniuses and scholars, which is a mimicry of the popish

saint worship, and by the adoption of a sacerdotalism like

that of Catholicism, this religion of humanity shows itself

to be an antichristian growth on Roman Catholic soil.

§ 210.2.

4. =Thomas Pöschl=, in the second decade of the century,

presents an instance of a degeneration of originally

pietistic tendencies into mischievous fanaticism. A

Catholic priest at Ampfelwang near Linz, he sought under

the influence of Sailer’s mysticism to awaken in his

congregation a more lively Christianity by means of

prayer meetings and the circulation of tracts, in which

he proclaimed the approaching end of the world. When the

district in which he lived was, in 1814, attached to Austria,

he was committed to prison, and his followers accepted as

their leader the peasant =Jos. Haas=, who led them further

still into fanatical excesses. His fanaticism at length went

so far that on Good Friday of 1817 a young maiden belonging

to their party suffered a voluntary death after the example

of Christ for her brothers and sisters. Pöschl professed the

deepest horror at this cruel deed for which he was blamed.

He died in close monastic confinement in 1837.

5. The Antinomian sect of the =Antonians=, most numerous in

the Canton Bern, had its beginning among the Roman Catholics.

Its founder was Antoni Unternährer, born and reared at

Shüpfheim, near Lucerne, in the Catholic faith. From 1802

he resided at Amfoldingen, near Thun, where he stood in

high repute among the peasants as a quack doctor, gave

himself out as the son of God a second time become man, and

proclaimed by word and writing the perfect redemption from

the curse of the law by the introduction of the true freedom

of the sons of God, which was to show itself first of all

in the absolutely unrestricted intercourse of the sexes.

After two years’ confinement in a house of correction he was

banished from the Canton Bern and transported to his native

place, where, abandoning all pastoral duties, he died in a

police cell in 1814. The sect, which had meanwhile spread

widely, and at Gsteig near Interlaken had obtained a new

leader in the person of Benedict Schori, a third incarnation

of Christ, could not be finally suppressed, notwithstanding

the liberal use of the prison, till the beginning of 1840.

Even at this day scattered remnants of Antonians are to be

found in Canton Bern.

6. When the Austrian constitution of 1849 gave unconditional

religious toleration, the Bohemian =Adamites= (§ 115, 5),

of whom remnants under the mask of Catholicism had continued

down to the nineteenth century, ventured again publicly

to engage in proselytising efforts. An official enquiry

instituted on this occasion declared that the sect,

consisting of Bohemian peasants and artisans, had its

headquarters among the mystics of the Krüdener school,

that its religious doctrine was a mixture of communism,

freethinking and quietism, and that its members were in

their ordinary public life blameless, but that in their

secret nightly assemblies, where they dispensed with

clothes, they celebrated orgies regardless of marriage

or relationship.

7. =David Lazzaretti=, formerly a carrier in Tuscany,

appeared in his native place after an absence of several

years, in 1872, declaring that he was descended from a

natural son of Charlemagne and had been entrusted by the

Apostle Peter with a message to the pope, pointing to a

cross that had been burnt upon his brow by the apostle

himself. He startled those of the Vatican, where he was

quite unknown, by declaring that the bones of his ancestors

lay under the ruins of an old Franciscan cloister in Sabina,

of whose existence nobody was aware, the discovery of

which seemed to vouch for his claims. These were all the

more readily admitted when it was found that he made the

restoration of the Pope’s temporal power his main task. The

number of his adherents, mostly peasants, soon increased

immensely, reaching, it is said, 40,000. On Monte Labro they

built a church with a strong “David’s Tower,” over which

“St. David” appointed two priests who, when they had made

certain changes in worship at the call of the prophet, were

excommunicated by the bishop. David now began to spread

his socialistic and communistic ideas. He insisted that

his adherents should surrender their goods to him as

representative of the society, and promised down to

December 31st, 1890, the introduction of community of goods

throughout Italy and afterwards in other countries. In

Arcidosso, the prophet’s birthplace, a beginning was to be

made, but in its overthrow on August 18th, 1878, he met his

death, and his befooled followers waited in vain for the

fulfilment of his dying promise that he would rise again

on the third day.

§ 210.3. =Russian Sects and Fanatics.=--After the attempt under

Nicholas I. at the forcible conversion of the =Raskolniks=,

especially the purely schismatic =Starowerzians= or Old Believers

(§ 163, 10), had proved fruitless, the government of Alexander II.

by patience and concession took a surer way to reconciliation and

restoration. In October, 1874, their marriages, births and deaths,

which had hitherto been without legal recognition, were put on

the regular register and so their lawful rights of inheritance

were secured. Under Alexander III. in 1883 an imperial decree was

issued, which gave them permission to celebrate divine service

after their own methods in their chapels, which had not before

the legal standing of churches, and declared them also eligible

for public appointments.--To the =Duchoborzians= (§ 166, 2),

sorely oppressed under Catherine II. and Paul I., Alexander I.,

after they had laid before him the confession which they had

adopted, granted toleration, but assigned them a separate

residence in the Taurus district. Under Nicholas I. they were to

the number of 3,000 transported to the Transcaucasian mountains

in 1841, where they were called Duchoborje.--The Württemberg

Pietist colonists of South Russia originated among the peasants

the widespread sect of the =Stundists= soon after the abolition

of serfdom in 1863. The originator of those separatist meetings

for the study of Scripture, which led first of all to the

condemnation of image worship and making the sign of the cross

as unbiblical, and subsequently to a complete withdrawal from the

worship of the orthodox church and the forming of conventicles,

was the peasant and congregational elder Ratusny of Osnowa near

Odessa, to whom, at a later period, with equal propagandist zeal,

the peasant Balabok attached himself. The latter was, in 1871,

sentenced to one year’s imprisonment at Kiev and the loss

of civil rights, and in 1873, at Odessa, a great criminal

prosecution was instituted against Ratusny and all the other

leaders of the sect, which, however, after proceeding for five

years ended in a verdict of acquittal. A process started in 1878

against the so-called =Schaloputs= had a similar issue. This sect,

spread most widely among the Cossacks of Cuban, rejects the Old

Testament, the sacraments and the doctrine of the resurrection,

but believes in a continued effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the

prophets of the church who have prepared themselves for their

vocation by complete abstinence from flesh and spirituous liquor

as well as by incessant prayer and frequent fasting.

§ 210.4. About the middle of the eighteenth century among the

“_Men of God_,” the strict interpretation of the prescriptions of

their founder Danila Filipow (§ 163, 10) had led many to abstain

wholly from sexual relations; when a peasant Andrew Selivanov

appeared as a reformer and founded the sect of the =Skopzen=

or mutilators, who, building on misinterpreted passages of

Scripture (Matt. v. 28-30, xix. 12; Rev. xiv. 4) insisted upon

the destruction of sexual desire by castration and excision of

the female breasts, generally performed under anæsthetics, as a

necessary condition of entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The

first Skopzic congregation was gathered round him in the village

of Sosnowka. The “men of God” enraged at his success denounced

him to the government. He was punished with the knout and

condemned in 1774 to hard labour at Irkutzk. The idea that

Peter III., who died in 1762, was still alive, then widely

prevailed. The “men of God” had also adopted this opinion,

and proclaimed him their last-appearing Christ, who would soon

return from his hiding-place to call to account all unbelievers.

Selivanov, who knew of this, now gave himself out for the exiled

monarch, and was accepted as such by his adherents in his native

place. When Paul I., Peter’s son, assumed the reins of government

in 1796, a Skopzic merchant of Moscow told him secretly that his

father was living at Irkutzk under the name of Selivanov. The

emperor therefore brought him to Petersburg and shut him up as an

imbecile in an asylum. After Paul’s death, however, his adherents

obtained his release. He now lived for eighteen years in honour

at Petersburg, till in 1820 the court again interfered and had

him confined in a cloister at Suzdal, where after some years

he died. Sorely persecuted by Nicholas I. many of his followers

migrated to Moldavia and Walachia where they, dwelling in

separate quarters at Jassy, Bucharest and Galatz, lived as owners

of coach-hiring establishments, and by rich presents obtained

proselytes. Still more vigorously was the propaganda carried on

in the Moscow colonies on the Sea of Azov. There in Morschansk

lived the spiritual head of all Russian Skopzen, the rich

merchant Plotizyn. After the government got on the track of

this society, Plotizyn’s house was searched and a correspondence

revealing the wide extension of the sect was found, together with

a treasure of several, some say as much as thirty, millions of

roubles, which, however, in great part again disappeared in a

mysterious manner. Plotizyn and his companions were banished

to Siberia and sentenced to hard labour, the less seriously

implicated to correction in a cloister.--The secret doctrine of

the Skopzen so far as is known is as follows: God had intended

man to propagate not by sexual intercourse but by a holy kiss.

They broke this command and this constituted the fall. In the

fulness of time God sent his Son into the world. The central

point of his preaching transmitted to us in a greatly distorted

form was the introduction of the baptism of fire (Matt. iii. 11),

_i.e._ mutilation by hot irons for which, in consideration

of human weakness, a baptism of castration may be substituted

(Matt. xix. 12). Origen is regarded by them as the greatest saint

of the ancient church; to his example all saints conformed who

are represented as beardless or with only a slight beard. The

promised return of the Christ (in this alone diverging from the

doctrine of the “men of God”), took place in the person of the

emperor Peter III. whom an unstained virgin bore, who was called

the empress Elizabeth Petrovna. The latter after some years

transferred the government to a lady of the court resembling her

and retired into private life under the name of Akulina Ivanovna,

where she still remains invisible behind golden walls, waiting

for the things that are to come. Her son Peter III., who had

also himself undergone the baptism of fire, escaped the snares of

his wife, reappeared under the name of Selivanov, performed many

miracles and converted multitudes, obtained as a reward the knout,

and was at last sent to Siberia. Emperor Paul recalled him and

was converted by him. Under Alexander I. he was again arrested

and imprisoned in the cloister of Suzdal. But he was conveyed

thence by a divine miracle to Irkutzk, where he now lives in

secret, whence at his own time he shall return to judge the

living and the dead.--They kept up an outward connection with the

state church although they regarded it as the apocalyptic whore

of Babylon. In their own secret services inspired psalms were

sung, and after exciting dances prophecies were uttered.[567]

§ 211. SECTARIES AND ENTHUSIASTS IN THE PROTESTANT DOMAIN.

The United States of America with their peculiar constitution formed

the favourite ground for the gathering and moulding of sects during

this age. There, besides the older colonies of Quakers, Baptists and

Methodists from England, we meet with Swedenborgianism and Unitarianism,

while Baptists and Methodists began to send missionaries into Europe,

and from England the Salvation Army undertook a campaign for the

conquest of the world. But also on the European continent independent

fanatical developments made their appearance.--A new combination of

communism with religious enthusiasm is represented by the Harmonists and

by the Perfectionists in North America. The Grusinian Separatists and

the Bavarian Chiliasts are millenarians of German extraction, of whom

the former sought deliverance from the prevailing antichristian spirit

in removal from, and the latter in removal to, South Russia. The

Amen churches sought to gather God’s people of the Jewish Christian

communities together in Palestine, while the so-called German Temple

sought to gather the Gentile Christians. As Latter Day Saints, besides

the Adventists, the Darbyites established themselves on an independent

basis; the Irvingites, with revival of the apostolic offices and

charisms, and their American caricature, the Mormons, with the addition

of socialistic and fantastic gnostic tendencies. The religion of the

Taiping rebellion in China presented the rare phenomenon of a national

Chinese Christianity of native growth, and a still rarer manifestation

is met with in American-European spiritualism with pretended spirit

revelations from the other world.

§ 211.1. =The Methodist Propaganda.=--From 1850 the American

Methodists, both the Albrechtsleute (§ 208, 4) and the Episcopal

Methodists, have sent out numerous missionaries, mostly Germans

into Germany, whose zeal has won considerable success among

the country people. In North-West Germany Bremen is their chief

station, whence they have spread to Sweden, Central and Southern

Germany, and Switzerland, and have stations in Frankfort,

Carlsruhe, Heilbronn, and Zürich.--Of a more evanescent character

was the attempt made on Germany by the so-called =Oxford Holiness

Movement=. In 1866 the North American Methodists celebrated their

centenary in New York by the appointment of a great revival and

holiness committee, in which were also members of many other

denominations. Among them the manufacturer, =Pearsall Smith=, of

Philadelphia, converted in 1871, exhibited extraordinary zeal. In

September, 1874, he held at Oxford great revival meetings, from

which the designation of the Oxford movement had its origin. By

some Germans there present his opinions were carried to Germany.

In spring, 1875, he began his second European missionary tour.

While his two companions, the revivalists Moody and Sankey,

travelled through England for the conversion of the masses, Smith

went to Germany, and proceeding from Berlin on to Switzerland,

gave addresses in English, that were interpreted, in ten of the

large cities. The most pious among clergy and laity flocked from

far and near to hear him. The new apostle’s journey became more

and more a triumphal march. He was lauded as a reformer called

to complete the work of Luther; as a prophet, who was to fructify

the barren wastes of Germany with the water of life. The core of

his doctrine was: Perfect holiness and the attainment of absolute

perfection, not hereafter, but now! now! now! with the constant

refrain: “_Jesus saves me now_;” not remission of sins through

justification by faith in the atoning efficacy of Christ’s blood,

which only avails for outward sinful actions, but immediate

extinction of sins by Christ in us, proved in living, unfaltering,

inner, personal experience, etc. By a great international and

interconfessional meeting at Brighton, lasting for ten days, in

June, 1875, at which many German pastors, induced by the payment

of travelling expenses, were present, the crown was put upon

the work. But at the height of his triumph, under the daily

increasing tension and excitement the apostle of holiness showed

himself to be a poor sinful son of man, for he strayed into

errors, “if not practically, at least theoretically,” which his

admirers at first referred to mental aberration, but which they

hid from the eyes of the world under a veil of mystery. Toward

the end of the Brighton conference he declared to his hearers:

“Thus plunge into a life of divine unconcern!” and, “All Europe

lies at my feet.” And in subsequent private conversations he

developed a system of ethics that “would suit Utah rather than

England,” to which he then so conformed his own conduct that

his admirers, “although satisfied of the purity of his own

intentions,” were obliged energetically to repudiate and with

all speed send away across the sea the man whom their own

unmeasured adulation had deceived.

§ 211.2. =The Salvation Army.=--An extremely fantastic caricature

of English Methodism is the =Salvation Army=. The Methodist

evangelist, =William Booth=, who in 1865 founded in one of the

lowest quarters of London a new mission station, fell upon the

idea in 1878, in order to make an impression on the rude masses,

to give his male and female helpers a military organisation,

discipline and uniform, and with military banners and music

to undertake a campaign against the kingdom of the devil. The

General of the Salvationists is Booth himself, his wife is his

adjutant, his eldest daughter field-marshal; his fellow-workers

male and female are his soldiers, cadets and officers of various

ranks; chief of the staff is Booth’s eldest son. Their services

are conducted according to military forms; their orchestra of

trombone, drum and trumpet is called the Hallelujah Brass Band.

Their journal, with an issue of 400,000, is the _War Cry_;

another for children, is _The Little Soldier_, in which Jane,

four years old, dilates on the experiences of her inner life; and

Tommy, eleven years old, is sure that, having served the devil

for eleven years, he will now fight for King Jesus; and Lucy,

nine years old, rejoices in being washed in the blood of the Lamb.

The army attained its greatest success in England. Its numerous

“prisoners of war” from the devil’s army (prostitutes, drunkards,

thieves, etc.) are led at the parade as trophies of war, and

tell of their conversion, whereupon the command of the general,

“Fire a Volley,” calls forth thousands of hallelujahs. Liberal

collections and unsought contributions, embracing several

donations of a £1,000 and more, are given to the General, not

only to pay his soldiers, but also to rent or to purchase and fit

up theatres, concert halls, circuses, etc., for their meetings,

and to build large new “barracks.” Its wonderful success has

secured for the army many admirers and patrons, even in the

highest ranks of society. Queen Victoria herself testified to

Mrs. Booth her high satisfaction with her noble work. At the

Convocation, too, in the Upper as well as the Lower House,

distinguished prelates spoke favourably of its methods and

results, and so encouraged the formation of a Church Army, which,

under the direction of the mission preacher Aitken, pursues

similar ways to those of the Salvation Army, without, however,

its spectacular displays, and has lately extended its exertions

to India. The temperance party after the same model has formed a

Blue Ribbon Army, the members of which, distinguished by wearing

a piece of blue ribbon in the buttonhole, confine themselves

to fighting against alcohol. In opposition to it public-house

keepers and their associates formed a Yellow Ribbon Army, which

has as its ensign the yellow silk bands of cigar bundles. Soon

after the first great success of the Salvation Army, a Skeleton

Army was formed out of the lowest dregs of the London mob,

which, with a banner bearing the device of a skeleton, making

a noise with all conceivable instruments, and singing obscene

street songs to sacred melodies, interrupted the marches of the

Salvation, and afterwards of the Church, Army: throwing stones,

filthy rotten apples and eggs, and even storming and demolishing

their “barracks.”--In 1880 a detachment of the Salvation

Army, with Railton at its head, assisted by seven Hallelujah

Lasses, made a first campaign in America, with New York as

its head-quarters. In the following year, under Miss Booth, it

invaded France, where it issues a daily bulletin, “_En Avant_.”

In 1882 it appeared in Australia, then in India, where Chunder

Sen, the founder of the Brama-Somaj, showed himself favourable.

In Switzerland it broke ground in 1882, in Sweden in 1884, and

in Germany, at Stuttgart, in November, 1886. Africa, Spain, Italy,

etc., followed in succession. These foreign corps outside of

England also found considerable success. Almost everywhere they

met with opposition, the magistrates often forbidding their

meetings, and inflicting fines and imprisonment, and the mob

resorting to all sorts of violent interference. Nowhere were both

sorts of opponents so persistent as in Switzerland in 1883 and

1884, especially in Lausanne, Geneva, Neuenburg, Bern, Beil, etc.

Although General Booth himself at the annual meeting in April,

1884, boasted that £393,000 had been collected during the past

year for the purposes of the army, and over 846 barracks in

eighteen countries of the world had been opened, and now even

spoke of strengthening the army by establishing a Salvation Navy,

the increasing extravagances caused by the army itself, as well

as the far greater improprieties of those more or less associated

with it, has drawn away many of its former supporters.

§ 211.3. =Baptists and Quakers.=--=Baptist= sympathies

and tendencies often appeared in Germany apart from an

anti-ecclesiastical pietism or mysticism. But this aberration

first assumed considerable proportions when a Hamburg merchant,

Oncken, who had been convinced by his private Bible reading of

the untenableness of infant baptism, was baptized by an American

baptist in 1834, and now not only founded the first German

baptist congregation in Hamburg, but also proved unwearied in

his efforts to extend the sect over all Germany and Scandinavia

by missions and tract distribution. Oncken died in 1884. Thus

gradually there were formed about a hundred new Baptist German

congregations in Mecklenburg, Brandenburg (Berlin), Pomerania,

Silesia, East Prussia (Memel, Tilsit, etc.), Westphalia,

Wupperthal, Hesse, Württemberg and Switzerland. In Sweden

(250 congregations with 18,000 souls) they were mainly recruited

from the “Readers,” who after 1850 went over in crowds (§ 201, 2).

They also found entrance into Denmark and Courland, but in

all cases almost exclusively among the uncultured classes

of labourers and peasants. After long but vain attempts at

suppression by the governments during the reactionary period

of 1850, they obtained under the liberal policy of the next two

decades more or less religious toleration in most states. They

called themselves the society of “baptized Christians,” and

maintained that they were “the visible church of the saints,”

the chosen people of God, in contrast to the “hereditary

church and the church of all and sundry,” in which they saw the

apocalyptic Babylon. Even the Mennonites who “sprinkle,” instead

of immersing, “all,” _i.e._ without proper sifting, they regard

as a “hereditary” church. With the Anglo-American Baptists they

do indeed hold fellowship, but take exception to them in several

points, especially about open communion.--A peculiar order of

Baptists has arisen in Hungary in the =Nazarenes= or Nazirites,

or as they call themselves: “Followers of Christ.” Founded

in 1840 by Louis Henefey originally a Catholic smith, who had

returned home from Switzerland, the sect obtained numerous

adherents from all three churches, most largely from the Reformed

church, favoured perhaps by the not yet altogether extinguished

reminiscences of the Baptist persecutions of the eighteenth

century (§ 163, 2). They practised strict asceticism, refused

to take oaths or engage in military service, and kept the bare

Puritan forms of worship, in which any one was allowed to preach

whom the Holy Spirit enlightened. Their congregations embraced

weak and strong friends, and also weak and strong brethren.

The strong friends after receiving baptism joined the ranks of

weak brethren, and then again became strong brethren on their

admission to the Lord’s Supper. The church officers were singers,

teachers, evangelists, elders, and bishops.--In North America

=Quakerism=, under the influence of increasing material

prosperity, had lost much of its primitive strictness in life

and manners. The more lax were styled _Wet-_, and their more

rigorous opponents _Dry-Quakers_. Enthusiasm over the American

War of Independence of 1776-1783, spreading in their ranks, led

to further departures from the rigid standard of early times.

Those who took weapons in their hands were designated _Fighting

Quakers_. The General Assembly disapproved but tolerated these

departures; neither the Wet nor the Fighting Quakers were

excommunicated, but they were not allowed any part in the

government of the community. In 1822 a party appeared among

them, led by Elias Hicks, which carried the original tendency of

Quakerism to separate itself from historical Christianity so far

as to deny the divinity of Christ, and to allow no controlling

authority to Scripture in favour of the unrestricted sway

of reason and conscience. This departure from the traditions

of Quakerism, however, met with vigorous opposition, and the

protesting party, known as _Evangelical Friends_, pronounced more

decidedly than ever for the authority of Scripture. In England,

notwithstanding the wealth and position of its adherents,

Quakerism, since the second half of the eighteenth century, has

suffered a slow but steady decrease, while even in America, to

say the least, no advance can be claimed. In Holland, Friesland,

and Holstein, Quaker missionaries had found some success

among the Mennonites, without, however, forming any separate

communities. In 1786 some English Quakers succeeded in winning

a small number of proselytes in Hesse, who in 1792, under the

protection of the prince of Waldeck, formed a little congregation

at Friedersthal, near Pyrmont, which still maintains its

existence.--On the sects of Jumpers and Shakers, variously

related to primitive, fanatical Quakerism, see § 170, 7.[568]

§ 211.4. =Swedenborgians and Unitarians.=--In the nineteenth

century =Swedenborgianism= has found many adherents. In England,

Scotland and North America the sect has founded many missionary

and tract societies. In Württemberg the procurator Hofacker

and the librarian Tafel, partly by editions and translations of

the writings of Swedenborg, partly by their own writings, were

specially zealous in vindicating and spreading their views. A

general conference of all the congregations in Great Britain and

Ireland in 1828 published a confession of faith and catechism,

and thirteen journals (three English, seven American, Tafel’s

in German, one Italian and one Swedish) represent the interests

of the party. The liberal spirit of modern times has in various

directions introduced modifications in its doctrine. Its

Sabellian opposition to the church doctrine of the Trinity

and its Pelagian opposition to the doctrine of justification,

have been retained, and its spiritualising of eschatological

ideas has been intensified, but the theosophical magical

elements have been wholly set aside and scarcely any reference

is ever made to revelations from the other world.--From early

times the =Unitarians= had a well ordered and highly favoured

ecclesiastical institution in Transylvania (§ 163, 1). But in

England the law still threatened them with a death sentence. This

law had not indeed for a long time been carried into effect, and

in 1813 it was formally abrogated. There are now in England about

400 small Unitarian congregations with some 300,000 souls. The

famous chemist Jos. Priestly may be regarded as the founder of

North American Unitarianism (§ 171, 1), although only after his

death in 1804 did the movement which he represented spread widely

through the country. Then in a short time hundreds of Unitarian

congregations were formed. Their most celebrated leaders were

W. Ellery Channing, who died in 1842, and Theodore Parker, who

died in 1860, both of Boston.

§ 211.5. =Extravagantly Fanatical Manifestations.=--The English

woman Johanna Southcote declared that she was the “woman in the

sun” of Revelation xii. or the Lamb’s wife. In 1801 she came

forth with her prophecies. Her followers, the =New Israelites= or

Sabbatarians, so called because they observed the Old Testament

law of the Sabbath, founded a chapel in London for their worship.

A beautiful cradle long stood ready to receive the promised

Messiah, but Johanna died in 1814 without giving birth to him.--A

horrible occurrence, similar to that recorded in § 210, 2, took

place some years later, in 1823, in the village of Wildenspuch in

Canton Zürich. =Margaret Peter=, a peasant’s daughter, excited by

morbid visions in early youth, was on this account expelled from

Canton Aargau, and was carried still farther in the direction

of extreme mysticism by the vicar John Ganz, by whom she was

introduced to Madame de Krüdener (§ 176, 2). Amid continual

heavenly visions and revelations, as well as violent conflicts

with the devil and his evil spirits, she gathered a group of

faithful followers, by whom she was revered as a highly gifted

saint, among them a melancholy shoemaker, Morf, whom Ganz

introduced to her. The spiritual love relationship between the

two in an unguarded hour took a sensual form and led to the

birth of a child, which Morf’s forbearing wife after successfully

simulating pregnancy adopted as her own. This deep fall, for

which she wholly blamed the devil, drove her fanaticism to

madness. The ridiculous proceedings in her own house, where for a

whole day she and her adherents beat with fists and hammers what

they supposed to be the devil, led the police to interfere. But

before orders arrived from Zürich, she found refuge in an asylum,

and there the end soon came. Margaret assured her followers that

in order that Christ might fully triumph and Satan be overthrown,

blood must be shed for the salvation of many thousand souls. Her

younger sister Elizabeth voluntarily allowed herself to be slain,

and she herself with almost incredible courage allowed her hands

and feet to be nailed to the wood and then with a stroke of the

knife was killed, under the promise that she as well as her

sister should rise again on the third day. The tragedy ended

by the apprehension and long confinement of those concerned in

it.--The sect of =Springers= in Ingermannland had its origin

in 1813. Arising out of a religious excitement not countenanced

by the church authorities, they held that each individual

needed immediate illumination of the Holy Spirit for his soul’s

salvation. So soon as they believed that this was obtained,

the presence of the Spirit was witnessed to by ecstatic prayer,

singing and shouting joined with handshaking and springing

in their assemblies. The special illumination required as its

correlate a special sanctification, and this they sought not only

in repudiation of marriage, but also in abstinence from flesh,

beer, spirits and tobacco. The “holy love,” prized instead of

marriage, however, here also led to sensual errors, and the

result was that many after the example of the Skopzen (§ 210, 4)

resorted to the surer means of castration.--Among the Swedish

peasants in 1842 appeared the singular phenomenon of the =Crying

Voices= (_Röstar_). Uneducated laymen, and more particularly

women and even children, after convulsive fits broke out into

deep mutterings of repentance and prophesyings of approaching

judgment. The substance of their proclamations, however, was not

opposed to the church doctrine, and the criers were themselves

the most diligent frequenters of church and sacrament.--In the

beginning of 1870 the wife of a settler at Leonerhofe, near San

Leopoldo in Brazil, =Jacobina Maurer=, became famous among the

careless colonists of that region as a pious miracle-working

prophetess. In religious assemblies which she originated, she

gave forth her fantastic revelations based upon allegorical

interpretations of Scripture, and founded a congregation of the

“elect” with a communistic constitution, in which she assumed

to herself all church offices as the Christ come again. Rude

abuse and maltreatment of these “Muckers” on the part of the

“unbelieving,” and the interference of the police, who arrested

some of the more zealous partisans of the female Christ, brought

the fanaticism to its utmost pitch. Jacobina now declared it the

duty of believers to prepare for the bliss of the millennium by

rooting out all the godless. Isolated murders were the prelude

of the night of horror, June 25th-26th, 1874, on which well

organized Mucker-bands, abundantly furnished with powder and shot,

went forth murdering and burning through the district for miles

around. The military sent out against them did not succeed in

putting down the revolt before August 2nd, after the prophetess

with many of her adherents had fallen in a fanatically brave

resistance.

§ 211.6. =Christian Communistic Sects.=--The only soil upon which

these could flourish was that of the Free States of North America.

Besides the small Shaker communities (§ 170, 7) still surviving

in 1858, the following new fraternities are the most important:

1. The =Harmonites=. The dissatisfaction caused among the

Württemberg Pietists by the introduction of liturgical

innovations led to several migrations in the beginning

of the century. Geo. Rapp, a simple peasant from the

village of Iptingen, went to America in 1803 or 1804

with about six hundred adherents, and settled in the valley

of Connoquenessing, near Pittsburg in Pennsylvania. As a

fundamental principle of this “Harmony Association,” which

honoured father Rapp as autocratic patriarch, prophet and

high priest, and with him believed in the near approach of

the second advent, the community of goods holds a prominent

place. By diligence and industry in agriculture, labour

and manufactures, they reached great prosperity under the

able leadership of their patriarch. In 1807 the community,

by a resolution of its own to which Rapp agreed, resolved

to abstain from marriage, so that henceforth no children

were born nor marriages performed. A falling off in numbers

was made up in 1817 by new arrivals from Württemberg and

afterwards by the adoption of children. Industrial reasons

led the community in 1814 to colonize Wabashthal in Indiana,

where they built the town of Harmony, which, however, in

1823, on account of its unhealthy situation, they sold

to the Scotchman Robert Owen (§ 212, 3), and then founded

for themselves the town of Economy, not far from Pittsburg,

where they still reside. In 1831 an adventurer, Bernard

Müller, appeared among them, who, at Offenbach, had, for

a long time, under the name of Proli, played a brilliant

part as a prophet called to establish universal spiritual

monarchy, and then, when in danger from the courts of law,

had fled to America. In Economy, where he passed himself

off as Count Maximilian von Leon, persecuted on account

of his belief in the second coming, he found as such a

hearty welcome, and within a year, by his agitation for

the reintroduction of marriage and worldly enjoyments, drew

away a third part of the community, embracing 250 souls.

The dissentients with 105,000 dollars from the common

purse withdrew and settled under the leadership of the

pseudo-count as a New Jerusalem society in the neighbouring

village of Philippsburg. But the new patriarch conducted

himself so riotously that he was obliged in 1833 to flee to

Louisiana, where in the same year he died of cholera. His

people now in deep distress turned to Dr. Keil, a mystic

come from Prussia, who reorganised them after the pattern

of Rapp’s communistic society, but with liberty to marry,

and brought them to a prosperous condition in two colonies

mainly founded by him at Bethel in Missouri and Aurora

in Oregon. Economy, too, flourished in spite of the heavy

losses it sustained, so that now the common property of the

populace, which through celibacy had been reduced to about

eighty persons, amounts to eight million dollars. Father

Rapp died in 1847, in his ninetieth year, confident to the

end that he would guide his church unto the hourly expected

advent of Christ.

2. When in 1831 a wave of revival passed over North America,

J. H. Noyes, an advocate’s assistant, applied himself to the

study of the Bible and became the founder of a new sect, the

=Bible Communists= or =Perfectionists= of the Oneida Society.

He taught that the promised advent of Christ took place

spiritually soon after the destruction of Jerusalem; by it

the kingdom of Adam was ended and the kingdom of God in the

heart of those who knew and received him was established.

The official churches were only state churches, but the

true church was scattered in the hearts of individual saints,

until Noyes collected and organized it into a Bible family.

For them there is no more law, for laws are for sinners

and the saints no longer sin. Each saint can do and suffer

whatever the Spirit of God moves him to. All the members of

the congregation constitute one family, live, eat, and work

together. Goods, wives and children are in common. It lies

with the wife to accept or refuse the approaches of a man.

But soon this proclaimed freedom from law sent everything

into confusion and disunion; schism―apostasy prevailed.

But Father Noyes now saved his church from destruction

by introducing a correction to this freedom from law in

_Sympathy_, _i.e._ in the agreement of all members of

the family. The odium which fell upon the community from

without on account of its “complex marriages,” induced him

at last in August, 1879, although he still always maintained

the soundness of his principle of free love and its final

victory over prejudice, to ordain the introduction of

monogamic marriages, and the community acquiesced. With

regard to community of goods, meals and children, however,

they kept to the old lines. The parent community has its

seat at Lenox in Oneidabach in New York State. Alongside of

it are three daughter communities. They have their prophets

and prophetesses, but no ritual service and no Sunday. Their

employment (they number about 300 souls) is mainly fruit

culture and the manufacture of snares of every kind for wild

and other animals.[569]

§ 211.7. =Millenarian Exodus Communities.=

1. The =Georgian Separatists=. The stream of Württemberg

emigrants above referred to turned also toward Southern

Russia. The settlers in Transcaucasian Georgia in the long

absence of regular pastors fell into fanatical separation,

which the clergy who followed in 1820 could not overcome.

Under the direction of three elders (one of them an old

woman) as representing the Holy Trinity, they lived quietly,

refused to baptize their children, to give their dead burial

according to the rites of the church, to call in physicians

in sickness, and at last rejected the marriage relation. In

1842 their female elder, Barbara Spohn, wife of a cartwright,

appeared in the rôle of a prophet, proclaiming the near

approach of the end of the world and calling upon her

followers to pass through the wilderness to the promised

land, there to enter into the millenial kingdom. They were

to take with them no money, no bread, etc., but only a staff;

their clothes and shoes would not wear old in the desert,

they could eat manna and quails, and in the holy land Christ

would dress them in the bridal robe. The government sought

in vain to bring them to reason and to obstruct their way,

when about three hundred of them wished at Pentecost, 1843,

to start on their journey. They were allowed to send three

men to Constantinople and Palestine to seek permission from

the Turkish government to settle in a spot near Jerusalem.

But these returned before the close of the year with the

news, that Palestine is not the land that would suit them.

This brought the majority to their senses and they rejoined

the church.

2. Equally unfortunate was the attempt at colonization made

in 1878 by some =Bavarian Chiliasts=. The pastor Clöter

in Illenschwang had for a long time in the “_Brüderbote_,”

edited by him, urged the emigration of believers to

South Russia, where, according to his exposition of the

apocalyptic prophecy, a secure place of refuge had been

provided by God for believers of the last times during the

near approaching persecutions of antichrist. In June, 1878,

the tailor Minderlein with his family and nineteen other

persons started to go thither. Minderlein died by the way,

and his companions after enduring great hardships were

obliged to return, and reached Nuremberg again in October,

absolutely destitute. Clöter, however, was not discouraged

by this misfortune. In December he called his adherents

from Bavaria, Württemberg and Switzerland, together to a

conference at Stuttgart, where they formed themselves into

the “=German Exodus Church=.” In the summer, 1880, Clöter

himself travelled to South Russia and thought that he found

in the Crimea the fittest place of refuge. On his return he

was banished, but after some days liberated, though deprived

of his clerical office. A final stop was then put to the

exodus movement.

§ 211.8.

3. The =Amen Community= owed its feeble existence to a

Christian Jew, Israel Pick of Bohemia. Believing that he

was not required in baptism to renounce his Judaism, but

that rather thereby he first became a true Jew, through

a onesided interpretation of Old Testament promises to his

nation, he wished to found a colony of the people of God

in the Holy Land on Jewish-Christian principles. The whole

Mosaic law, excluding the observance of the Sabbath and

circumcision, was to be the basis, together with baptism and

the Lord’s Supper, of ecclesiastical and civil organization.

He succeeded in winning a few converts here and there, to

whom he gave the name of the Amen Community, because in

Christ (the אֱלֹהֵי אָמֵן Isa. lxv. 16) all the prophecies of

the old covenant are Yea and Amen. Its chief seat was at

Munich-Gladbach. In 1859 Pick travelled to Palestine in

order to choose a spot for the settlement of his followers

and there all trace of him was lost.

4. The founder of the =German Temple Communities= in Palestine

was Chr. Hoffmann, brother of General Superintendent

Hoffmann of Berlin, and son of the founder of the Kornthal

Community (§ 196, 5), in connection with Chr. Paulus, nephew

of the well known Heidelberg professor Paulus (§ 182, 2).

In 1854 they issued an invitation to a conference at

Ludwigsburg, for consultation about the means for gathering

the people of God in Palestine. A great crowd of believers

from all parts, numbering some 10,000 families, was to

embark for the holy land to form there a new people of God

which, on the foundation of prophets and apostles, should

strictly practise the public law of the old covenant in

all points of civil administration, including the laws

of the sabbath and the jubilee. The conference besought

of the German League that it would use its influence with

the Sultan to secure permission for colonization with

self-government and religious freedom. As the German League

simply declined the request, the committee bought the estate

of Kirschenhardthof near Marbach, in order there temporarily

and in a small way to form a social commonwealth observing

the Mosaic law. In 1858 Hoffmann went with two of his

followers to Jerusalem in order to look out a place there

suitable for their purpose. The result was unsatisfactory.

Therefore he issued in 1861 a summons to take part in a

German Temple. Consequently a number of men from Württemberg,

Bavaria, and Baden, Protestants and Catholics, forsook

their churches, ordained priests and elders, and appointed

Hoffmann their bishop and held regular synods. The final

aim of this procedure, however, was always still to find

a settlement in Palestine and erect a temple in Jerusalem

which, according to prophecy, is to form the central

sanctuary for the whole world. Colonization in the East

was tried as a means to this end. Since 1869 there have

been five organized colonies, with a Temple Chief and

a congregational school, embracing about 1,000 souls,

established in Palestine, _viz._ at Jaffa, Haifa, Sarona,

Beyrout, and in 1878 even in Jerusalem, whither the original

colony at Jaffa was transferred. The German Imperial

Government refused indeed in 1879 to give the recognition

sought for to the civil and political organization of the

Palestinian colonies, as in a foreign country beyond its

jurisdiction, but granted to its Lyceum at Jerusalem a

yearly contribution of 1,500 marks and to the schools

of Jaffa, Haifa and Sarona from 650 to 1,000. In 1875

Hoffmann published at Stuttgart a large apologetical and

polemical work, “_Occident und Orient_,” which contained

many thoughtful remarks. But since then, in the central

organ of all the Temple Communities inspired by him,

the “_Süddeutsche Warte_,” he has openly and distinctly

attached himself to Ebionitic rationalism, by denying

and opposing the fundamental evangelical doctrine of the

trinity, redemption, and the sacraments. These theological

views, however, were by no means shared in by all the

Templars, and caused a split in the community, one section

at Haifa with the chief templar there, Hardegg, at its

head, separating from the central body as an independent

“Imperial Brotherhood.” The seceders, joined by many German

and American templar friends, again drew nearer to the

Evangelical church and ultimately became reconciled with

it. But Hoffmann has, in his last work, _Bibelforschungen_

i. ii.: _Röm.- u. Kol. br., Jerus._ 1882, 1884, carried his

polemic against the church doctrine to the utmost extreme of

cynical abuse. He died in December, 1885. At the head of the

denomination now stands his fellow-worker Paulus. From year

to year several drop back into the Evangelical church so

that the community is evidently approaching extinction.

§ 211.9. =The Community of “the New Israel.”=--The Jewish

advocate Jos. Rabinowitsch at Kishenev in Bessarabia, who had

long occupied himself with plans for the improvement of the

spiritual and material circumstances of his fellow-countrymen,

at the outbreak of the persecution of the Jews in 1882 in South

Russia eagerly urged their return to the holy land of their

fathers and himself undertook a journey of inspection. There

definite shape seems to have been given to the long cherished

thought of seeking the salvation of his people in an independent

national attachment to their old sacred historical development,

broken off 1850 years before, by acknowledging the Messiahship

of Jesus. At least after his return he gave expression to the

sentiment, based on Romans xi.: “The keys of the holy land are

in the hands of our brother Jesus,” which, in consequence of

the high esteem in which he was held by his countrymen, was

soon re-echoed by some 200 Jewish families. His main endeavour

now was the formation of independent national Jewish-Christian

communities, after the pattern of the primitive church of

Jerusalem, as “_New Israelites_,” observing all the old Jewish

rites and ordinances compatible with New Testament apostolic

preaching and reconcilable with modern civil and social

conditions. The Torah, the prophets of the Old Testament and the

New Testament writings, are held as absolutely binding, whereas

the Talmud and the post-apostolic Gentile Christian additions to

doctrine, worship, and constitution are not so regarded. Jesus,

Rabinowitsch teaches, is the true Messiah who, as Moses and

prophets foretold, was born as Son of David by the Spirit of God

and in the power of that Spirit lived and taught in Israel, then

for our salvation suffered, was crucified and died, rose from the

dead, and ascended to the right hand of the Father in heaven. The

trinity of persons in God as well as the two natures in Christ

he rejects, as not taught in the New Testament and originating

in Gentile Christian speculation. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper

(and that “according to the example of Christians of the pure

Evangelical confession in England and Germany”) are recognised

as necessary means of grace; but the Lord’s Supper is to

be, according to its institution, a real meal with the old

Jewish prayers. As to the doctrine of the Supper, Rabinowitsch

agrees with the views of the Lutheran church. Circumcision and

the observance of the Sabbath and the feasts (especially the

Passover), are retained, not indeed as necessary to salvation,

therefore not binding on Gentile Christians, but patriotically

observed by Jewish-Christians as signs of their election from and

before all nations as the people of God. In January, 1885, with

consent of the Russian Government, the newly-erected synagogue

of “the holy Messiah Jesus Christ” for the small congregation

of Rabinowitsch’s followers at Kishenev was solemnly opened,

the Russian church authorities, the Lutheran pastor Fultin and

many young Jews taking part in the service. Soon afterwards

Rabinowitsch received Christian baptism in the chapel of the

Bohemian church at Berlin at the hands of Prof. Mead of Andover,

probably in recognition of the aid sent from America.--A

Jewish-Christian religious communion with similar tendencies

has been formed in the South Russian town of Jellisawetgrad under

the designation of a “_Biblical Spiritual Brotherhood_.”

§ 211.10. =The Catholic Apostolic Church of the

Irvingites.=--Edward Irving, 1792-1834, a powerful and popular

preacher of the Scotch-Presbyterian church in London, maintained

the doctrine that the human nature of Christ like our own was

affected by original sin, which was overcome and atoned for

by the power of the divine nature. At the same time he became

convinced that the spiritual gifts of the apostolic church could

and should still be obtained by prayer and faith. A party of his

followers soon began to exercise the gift of tongues by uttering

unintelligible sounds, loud cries, and prophecies. His presbytery

suspended him in 1832 and the General Assembly of the Church of

Scotland excommunicated him. Rich and distinguished friends from

the Episcopal church, among them the wealthy banker, Drummond,

afterwards prominent as an apostle (died 1859), rallied round

the man thus expelled from his church, and gave him the means to

found a new church, but, in spite of Irving’s protests, brought

with them high church puseyite tendencies, which soon drove

out the heretical as well as the puritanic tendencies, and

modified the fanatical element into a hierarchical and liturgical

formalism. The restoration of the office of apostle was the

characteristic feature of the movement. After many unsuccessful

attempts they succeeded by the divine illumination of the

prophets in calling twelve apostles, first and chief of whom

was the lawyer Cardale (died 1877). By the apostles, as chief

rulers and stewards of the church, evangelists and pastors (or

angels, Rev. ii. 1, 8, etc.) were ordained in accordance with

Eph. iv. 11; and subordinate to the pastors, there were appointed

six elders and as many deacons, so that the office bearers of

each congregation embraced thirteen persons, after the example

of Christ and His twelve disciples. In London seven congregations

were formed after the pattern of the seven apocalyptic churches

(Rev. i. 20). Prominent among their new revelations was the

promise of the immediately approaching advent of the Lord. The

Lord, who was to have come in the lifetime of the first disciples

and so was looked for confidently by them, delayed indefinitely

His return on account of abounding iniquity and prevented the

full development of the second apostolate designed for the

Gentiles and meanwhile represented only by Paul, because the

church was no longer worthy of it. Now at last, after eighteen

centuries of degradation, in which the church came to be the

apocalyptic Babylon and ripened for judgment, the time has

come when the suspended apostolate has been restored to prepare

the way for the last things. Very confidently was it at first

maintained that none of their members should die, but should live

to see the final consummation. But after death had removed so

many from among them, and even the apostles one after another,

it was merely said that those are already born who should see the

last day. It may come any day, any hour. It begins with the first

resurrection (Rev. xx. 5) and the “changing” of the saints that

are alive (the wise virgins, _i.e._ the Irvingites), who will

be caught up to the Lord in the clouds and in a higher sphere be

joined with the Lord in the marriage supper of the Lamb. They are

safely hidden while antichrist persecutes the other Christians,

the foolish virgins, who only can be saved by means of painful

suffering, and executes judgment on Babylon. This marks the end

of the Gentile church; but then begins the conversion of the Jews,

who, driven by necessity and the persecution of sinful men, have

sought and found a refuge in Palestine. After a short victory of

antichrist the Lord visibly appears among the risen and removed.

The kingdom of antichrist is destroyed, Satan is bound, the

saints live and reign with Christ a thousand years on the earth

freed from the curse. Thereafter Satan is again let loose for

a short time and works great havoc. Then comes Satan’s final

overthrow, the second resurrection and last judgment. Their

liturgy, composed by the apostles, is a compilation from the

Anglican and Catholic sources. Sacerdotalism and sacrifice are

prominent and showy priestly garments are regarded as requisite.

Yet they repudiate the Romish doctrine of the bloodless

repetition of the bleeding sacrifice, as well as the doctrine of

transubstantiation. But they strictly maintain the contribution

of the tenth as a duty laid upon Christians by Heb. vii. 4.

Their typical view of the Old Testament history and legislation,

especially of the tabernacle, is most arbitrary and baseless.

Their first published statement appeared in 1836 in an apostolic

“_Letter to the Patriarchs, Bishops, and Presidents of the Church

of Christ in all Lands, and to emperors, kings, and princes of

all baptized nations_,” which was sent to the most prominent

among those addressed, even to the pope, but produced no result.

After this they began to prosecute their missionary work openly.

But they gave their attention mainly to those already believers,

and took no part in missions to the heathen, as they were sent

neither to the heathen nor to unbelievers, but only to gather and

save believers. In their native land of England, where at first

they had great success, their day seems already past. In North

America they succeeded in founding only two congregations. They

prospered better in Germany and Switzerland, where they secured

several able theologians, chief of all Thiersch, the professor

of Theology in Marburg, the Tertullian of this modern Montanism

(died 1885), and founded about eighty small congregations with

some 5,000 members, chief of which are those of Berlin, Stettin,

Königsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Cassel, Basel, Augsburg, etc.

Even among the Catholic clergy of Bavaria this movement found

response; but that was checked by a series of depositions and

excommunications during 1857.--In 1882 the Lutheran pastor

Alpers of Gehrden in Hanover was summoned to appear before the

consistory to answer for his Irvingite views. He denied the

charge and referred to his good Lutheran preaching. As, however,

he had taken the sacramental “sealing” from Irvingite apostles,

the court regarded this as proof of his having joined the party

and so deposed him.[570]

§ 211.11. =The Darbyites and Adventists.=--Related on the

one hand to Irvingism by their expectation of the immediately

approaching advent and by their regarding themselves as the

saints of the last time who would alone be saved, the =Darbyites=,

on the other hand, by their absolute independentism form a

complete contrast to the Irvingite hierarchism. John Darby,

1800-1882, first an advocate, then a clergyman of the Anglican

church, breaking away from Anglicanism, founded between 1820 and

1830 a sectarian, apocalyptic, independent community at Plymouth

(whence the name =Plymouth Brethren=), but in 1838 settled in

Geneva, and in 1840 went to Canton Vaud, where Lausanne and Vevey

have become the headquarters of the sect. All clerical offices,

all ecclesiastical forms are of the evil one, and are evidence

of the corruption of the church. There is only one office, the

spiritual priesthood of all believers, and every believer has

the right to preach and dispense the sacraments. Not only the

Catholic, but also the Protestant church is a “Balaam Church,”

and since the departure of the apostles no true church has

existed. In doctrine they are strictly Calvinistic.[571]--The

=Adventists=. Regarding the 2,300 days of Dan. viii. 14 as so

many years, W. Miller of New York and Boston proclaimed in 1833

that the second advent would take place on the night of October

23rd, 1847, and convinced many thousands of the correctness of

his calculations. When at last the night referred to arrived

the believers continued assembled in their tabernacles waiting,

but in vain, for the promise (Matt. xxiv. 30, 31; 1 Cor. xv. 52;

1 Thess. iv. 16, 17), at “the voice of the archangel and the

trump of God to be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord

in the air.” This miscalculation, however, did not shake the

Adventists’ belief in the near approach of the Lord, but their

number rather increased from year to year. Most zealous in

propagating their views by journals and tracts, evangelists

and missionaries, is a branch of the sect founded by James White

of Michigan, whose adherents, because they keep the Sabbath in

place of the Lord’s Day, are called _Seventh Day Adventists_.

§ 211.12. =The Mormons or Latter Day Saints.=--Jos. Smith, a

broken down farmer of Vermont, who took to knavish digging for

hid treasures, affirmed in 1825, that under direction of divine

revelations and visions, he had excavated on Comora hill in

New York State, golden tablets in a stone kist on which sacred

writings were engraved. A prophet’s spectacles, _i.e._, two

pierced stones which as a Mormon Urim and Thummim lay beside

them, enabled him to understand and translate them. He published

the translation in “the Book of Mormon.” According to this

book, the Israelites of the ten tribes had migrated under their

leader, Lehi, to America. There they divided into two peoples;

the ungodly Lamanites, answering to the modern Redskins, and

the pious Nephites. The latter preserved among them the old

Israelitish histories and prophecies, and through miraculous

signs in heaven and earth obtained knowledge of the birth

of Christ that had meanwhile taken place. Toward the end

of the fourth century after Christ, however, the Lamanites

began a terrible war of extermination against the Nephites,

in consequence of which the latter were rooted out with the

exception of the prophet Mormon and his son Moroni. Mormon

recorded his revelations on the golden tablets referred to, and

concealed them as the future witness for the saints of the last

days on the earth. Smith proclaimed himself now called on of God,

on the basis of these documents and the revelations made to him,

to found the church of _The Latter Day Saints_. The widow of a

preacher in New York proved indeed that the Book of Mormon was

almost literally a plagiarism from a historico-didactic romance

written by her deceased husband, Sal. Spaulding. The MS. had

passed into the hands of Sidney Rigdon, formerly a Baptist

minister and then a bookseller’s assistant, subsequently Smith’s

right-hand man. But even this did not disturb the believers. In

1831 Smith with his followers settled at Kirtland in Ohio. To

avoid the daily increasing popular odium, he removed to Missouri,

and thence to Illinois, and founded there, in 1840, the important

town of Nauvoo with a beautiful temple. By diligence, industry

and good discipline, the wealth, power and influence of their

commonwealth increased, but in the same proportion the envy,

hatred and prejudices of the people, which charged them with

the most atrocious crimes. In 1844, to save bloodshed the

governor ordered the two chiefs, Jos. and Hiram Smith, to

surrender to voluntary imprisonment awaiting a regular trial.

But furious armed mobs attacked the prison and shot down both.

The roughs of the whole district then gathered in one great troop,

destroyed the town of Nauvoo, burned the temple and drove out

the inhabitants. These, now numbering 15,000 men, in several

successive expeditions amid indescribable hardships pressed on

“through the wilderness” over the Rocky Mountains, in order to

erect for themselves a Zion on the other side. Smith’s successor

was the carpenter, Brigham Young. The journey occupied two full

years, 1845-1847. In the great Salt Lake basin of Utah they

founded _Salt Lake City_, or the New Jerusalem, as the capital

of their wilderness state _Deseret_. The gold digging of the

neighbouring state of California did not allure them, for their

prophet told them that to pave streets, build houses and sow

fields was better employment than seeking for gold. So here

again they soon became a flourishing commonwealth.

§ 211.13. In common with the Irvingites, who recognised in them

their own diabolic caricature, the Mormons restored the apostolic

and prophetic office, insisted upon the continuance of the gift

of tongues and miracles, expected the speedy advent of the Lord,

reintroduced the payment of tithes, etc. But what distinguished

them from all Christian sects was the proclamation of polygamy as

a religious duty, on the plea that only those women who had been

“sealed” to a Latter-day Saint would share in the blessedness

of life eternal. This was probably first introduced by Young in

consequence of a new “divine revelation,” but down to 1852 kept

secret and denied before “the Gentiles.” The ambiguous book of

Mormon was set meanwhile more and more in the background, and

the teachings and prophecies of their prophet brought more and

more to the front. “The Voice of Warning to all Nations” of the

zealous proselyte Parly Pratt, formerly a Campbellite preacher,

exercised a great influence in spreading the sect. But the most

gifted of them all was Orson Pratt, Rigdon’s successor in the

apostolate. To him mainly is ascribed the construction of its

later, highly fantastic religious system which, consisting of

elements gathered from Neo-platonism, gnosticism, and other forms

of theosophical mysticism, embraces all the mysteries of time and

eternity. Its fundamental ideas are these: There are gods without

number; all are polygamists and their wives are sharers of their

glory and bliss. They are the fathers of human souls who here on

earth ripen for their heavenly destiny. Jesus is the first born

son of the highest god by his first wife; he was married on earth

to Mary Magdalene, the sisters Martha and Mary and other women.

Those saints who here fulfil their destiny become after death

gods, while they are arranged according to their merit in various

ranks and with prospect of promotion to higher places. At the

end of this world’s course, Jesus will come again, and, enthroned

in the temple of Salt Lake City, exercise judgment against all

“Gentiles” and apostates, etc.--The constitution of the Mormon

State is essentially theocratic. At the head stood the president,

Brigham Young, as prophet, patriarch, and priest-king, in whose

hands are all the threads of the spiritual as well as secular

administration. A high council alongside of him, consisting of

seventy members, as also the prophets and apostles, bishops and

elders, and generally the whole richly organized hierarchy, are

only the pliable instruments of his all-commanding will. Every

one on entering the society surrenders his whole property, and

after that contributes a tenth of his yearly income and personal

labour to the common purse of the community. Soon numerous

missionaries were sent forth who crossed the Atlantic, and

attained great success, especially in Scotland, England and

Scandinavia, but also in North-West Germany and in Switzerland.

On removing the misunderstanding that prevailed about their

social and political condition, and supplying the penniless out

of the rich immigration fund with the means to make the journey,

they persuaded great crowds of their new converts to accompany

them to Utah.

§ 211.14. In 1849 the Mormons had asked Congress for the

apportioning of the district colonized by them as an independent

and autonomous “State” in the union, but were granted, in

1850, only the constitution of a “territory” under the central

government at Washington, and the appointment of their patriarch,

Young, as its governor. Accustomed to absolute rule, in two years

he drove out all the other officers appointed by the union. He

was then deprived of office, but the new governor, Col. Sefton,

appointed in 1854, with the small armament supplied him could not

maintain his position and voluntarily retired. When afterwards in

1858 Governor Cumming, appointed by president Buchanan, entered

Utah with a strong military force, Young armed for a decisive

struggle. A compromise, however, was effected. A complete amnesty

was granted to the saints, the soldiers of the union entered

peacefully into the Salt-Lake City, and Young assumed tolerably

friendly relations with the governor, who, nevertheless, by the

erection of a fort commanding the city made the position safe for

himself and his troops. On the outbreak of the war of Secession

in 1861 the troops of the union were for the most part withdrawn.

But all the more energetically did the central government at the

close of the war in 1865 resolve upon the complete subjugation of

the rebel saints, having learnt that since 1852 numerous murders

had taken place in the territory, and that the disappearance of

whole caravans of colonists was not due to attacks of Indians,

who would have scalped their victims, but to a secret Mormon

fraternity called Danites (Judges xviii.), brothers of Gideon

(Judges vi. ff.) or Angels of Destruction, which, obedient to

the slightest hint from the prophet, had undertaken to avenge

by bloody terrorism any sign of resistance to his authority,

to arrest any tendency to apostasy, and to guard against the

introduction of any foreign element. The Union Pacific Railway

opened in 1869 deprived the “Kingdom of God” of its most powerful

protection, its geographical isolation, while the rich silver

mines discovered at the same time in Utah, peopled city and

country with immense flocks of “Gentiles.” The nemesis, which

brought the Mormon bishop Lee, twenty years after the deed,

under the lash of the high court of justiciary as involved in

the horrible massacre of a large party of emigrants at Mountain

Meadows in 1857, would probably have also befallen the prophet

himself as the main instigator of this and many other crimes had

he not by a sudden death two months later, in his seventy-fifth

year, escaped the jurisdiction of any earthly tribunal (died

1877). A successor was not chosen, but supreme authority is

in the hands of the college of twelve apostles with the elder

John Taylor at their head.--Repeated attempts made since 1874

by the United States authorities by penal enactments to root out

polygamy among the Mormons have always failed, because its actual

existence could never be legally proved. The witness called could

or would say nothing, since the “sealing” was always secretly

performed, and the women concerned denied that a marriage had

been entered into with the accused, or if one confessed herself

his married wife she refused to give any evidence about his

domestic relations.--Recently a split has occurred among the

Mormons. By far the larger party is that of the “Salt Lake

Mormons,” which holds firmly by polygamy and all the other

institutions introduced by Young and since his time. The other

party is that of the Kirtland, or Old Mormons, headed by the son

of their founder, Jos. Smith, who had been passed over on account

of his youth, which repudiates all these as unsupported novelties

and restores the true Mormonism of the founder. The Old Mormons

not only oppose polygamy, but also all more recently introduced

doctrines. They are called Kirtland Mormons from the first temple

built by their founder at Kirtland in 1814, which having fallen

into ruins, was restored by Geo. Smith, jun., and became the

centre of the Old Mormon denomination. In April 1885 they held

there their first synod, attended by 200 deputies.[572]

§ 211.15. =The Taepings in China.=--Hung-sen-tsenen, born in

1813 in the province of Shan-Tung, was destined for the learned

profession but failed in his examination at Canton. There he

first, in 1833, came into contact with Protestant missionaries,

whose misunderstood words awakened in him the belief that he was

called to perform great things. At the same time he there got

possession of some Christian Chinese tracts. Failing in his

examination a second time in 1837, he fell into a dangerous

illness and had a series of visions in which an old man with a

golden beard appeared, handing to him the insignia of imperial

rank, and commanding him to root out the demons. After his

recovery he became an elementary teacher. A relative called Li

visited him in 1843. The Christian tracts were again sought out

and carefully studied. Sen now recognised in the old man of his

visions the God of the Christians and in himself the younger

brother of Jesus. The two baptized one another and won over

two young relatives to their views. Expelled from their offices,

they went in 1844 to the province of Kiang Se as pencil and

ink sellers, preached diligently the new doctrine and founded

numerous small congregations of their sect. The American

missionaries at Canton heard of the success of their preaching,

and Sen accepted an invitation to join them in 1847. The

missionary Roberts had a great esteem for him and intended to

baptize him, when in consequence of stories spread about him

their relations became strained. Sen now returned in 1848 to

his companions in Kiang Se, who had diligently and successfully

continued their preaching. In 1850 they began to attract

attention by the violent destruction of idols. When now all the

remnants of a pirate band joined them as converts, they were in

common with these persecuted by the government and proclaimed

rebels. The expulsion of the hated Mantshu dynasty, which two

hundred years before had displaced the Ming dynasty, and the

overthrow of idolatry were now their main endeavour, and in 1857

they organized under Sen a regular rebellion for the setting up

of a Taeping dynasty, _i.e._, of universal peace. The Taeping

army advanced unhindered, all Mantschu soldiers who fell into

its hands were massacred, and of the inhabitants of the provinces

conquered, only those were spared who joined their ranks. In

March, 1853, they stormed the second capital of the empire,

Nankin, the old residence of the Ming dynasty. There Sen fixed

his residence and styled himself Tien-Wang, the Divine Prince.

He assigned to ten subordinate princes the government of the

conquered provinces, almost the half of the immense empire.

Thousands of bibles were circulated; the ten commandments

proclaimed as the foundation of law, many writings, prayers

and poems composed for the instruction of the people, and these

with the bible made subjects of examination for entrance to the

learned order. An Arian theory of the trinity was set forth; the

Father is the one personal God, whose likeness in bodily human

form Sen strictly forbade, destroying the Catholic images as well

as the Chinese idols. Jesus is the first-born son of God, yet

not himself God, sent by the Father into the world in order to

enlighten it by his doctrine and to redeem it by his atoning

sufferings. Sen, the younger brother of Jesus, was sent into the

world to spread the doctrine of Jesus and to expel the demons,

the Mantschu dynasty. Reception takes place through baptism. The

Lord’s Supper was unknown to them. Bloody and bloodless offerings

were still tolerated. The use of wine and tobacco was forbidden;

the use of opium and trafficking in it were punished with death.

But polygamy was sanctioned. Saturday, according to the Old

Testament, was their holy day. Their service consisted only

of prayer, singing and religious instruction; but also written

prayers were presented to God by burning.

§ 211.16. Sen himself had no more visions after 1837. But other

ecstatic prophets arose, the eastern prince Yang and the western

prince Siao. The revelations of the latter were comparatively

sober, but those of the former were in the highest degree

blasphemously fanatical. He declared himself the Paraclete

promised by Jesus, and taught that God himself, as well as Jesus,

had a wife with sons and daughters. He was at the same time a

brave and successful general, and the mass of the Taepings were

enthusiastically attached to him. Sen humbly yielded to the

extravagances of this fanatic, even when Yang sentenced him to

receive forty lashes. Sen’s overthrow was already resolved upon

in Yang’s secret council, when Sen took courage and gave the

northern prince secret orders to murder Yang and his followers

in one night. This was done, and Sen was weak enough to allow the

executioner of his secret order to be publicly put to death so as

to appease the excited populace. But he thus again in 1856 became

master of the situation.--One of the oldest apostles of Sen,

his near relative Hung Yin, had been turned off at Hong Kong.

He there attached himself to the Basel missionary, Hamberg, who

in 1852 baptized him and made him his native helper. In hope of

winning his cousin to the true Christian faith, he travelled in

1854 to Nankin, which however he did not reach till January, 1859.

Sen received him gladly and made him his war minister. But his

efforts to introduce a purer Christianity among the Taepings were

unsuccessful, for he tried the slippery way of accommodation, and

under pressure from Sen set up for himself a harem. In October,

1860, on Sen’s repeated invitation, his former teacher, the

missionary Roberts of Nankin, arrived and was immediately made

minister for foreign affairs. The Shanghai missionaries, several

of whom visited Nankin, had interesting interviews with Yin in

1860, but not with the emperor, as they refused to go on their

knees before him. They were encouraged by Yin to hope for a

future much needed purifying of Taeping Christianity. Yang’s

revelations, however, held their ground after as well as

before, and were increased by further absurdities. To such

crass fanaticism was now added the inhuman cruelty with which

they massacred the vanquished and wasted the conquered cities

and districts. Had the European powers ranged themselves in a

friendly and peaceful attitude alongside of the Taepings, China

might now have been a Christian empire. Instead of this the

English, on account of the extreme opposition of the Taepings

to the opium traffic, took up a hostile position toward them,

while they were also in disfavour with the French, who had been

denounced by them as idolaters on account of their Romish image

worship. Down to the beginning of 1862, however, Yin’s influence

had prevented any hostile proceedings against the Europeans in

spite of many provocations given. But after that the Taepings

refused them any quarter. Roberts fled by night to save his life.

Against disciplined European troops the rebels could not hold

their ground. One city after another was taken from them, and at

last, in July 1864, their capital Nankin. Sen was found poisoned

in his burning palace.[573]

§ 211.17. =The Spiritualists.=--The shoemaker’s apprentice,

Andrew Jackson Davis of Poughkeepsie on the Hudson, in his

nineteenth year fell into a magnetic sleep and composed his

first work, “The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations

and a Voice to Mankind,” in 1845. He declared its utterances

to be spiritual revelations from the other world. But his

later writings composed in working hours made the same claim,

especially the five volume work, “Great Harmonia, being a

Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial

Universe,” 1850 ff. Both went through numerous editions and

were translated into German. The great spiritual manifestation

promised in the first work was not long delayed. In a house

bought by the family of Fox in Hydesville in New York State a

spectral knocking was often heard. Through the intercourse which

the two youngest daughters, aged nine and twelve years, had with

the ghosts, the skeleton of a murdered five years’ old child of

a pedlar was discovered buried in the cellar, and when the family

soon thereafter left the house, the ghosts went with them and

continued their communications by table turning, table rapping,

table writing, etc. The thing now became epidemic. Hundreds

and thousands of male and female _mediums_ arose and held an

extremely lively and varied intercourse with innumerable departed

ones of earlier and later times. The believers soon numbered

millions, including highly educated persons of all ranks, even

such exact chemists as Mapes and Hare. An abundant literature

in books and journals, as well as Sunday services, frequent

camp-meetings and annual congresses formed a propaganda for

the alleged spiritualism, which soon found its way across the

ocean and won enthusiastic adherents for all confessions in

all European countries, especially in London, Paris, Brussels,

St. Petersburg, Vienna, Dresden, Leipzig, etc. They now broke

up into two parties called respectively Spiritualists and

Spiritists. The former put in the foreground physical experiments

with astonishing results and miraculous effects; the latter,

with the Frenchman Allan Kardec (_Rivail_) as their leader, give

prominence to the teaching of spirits by direct communication.

The former in reference to the origin of the human soul held by

the theory of traducianism; the latter to that of pre-existence

in connection with a doctrine of re-incarnation of spirits

by reason of growing purity and perfection. The latter see

in Christ the incarnation of a spirit of the highest order;

the former merely the purest and most perfect type of human

nature. But neither admit the real central truth of Christianity,

the reconciliation of sinful humanity with God in Christ.

Both evaporate the resurrection into a mere spectral spirit

manifestation; and the disclosures and utterances of the spirits

with both are equally trivial, silly, and vain.--In England the

famous palæontologist and collaborateur of Darwin, Alfr. Russel

Wallace, and the no less celebrated physicist Wm. Crookes, are

apologists of spiritualism. The latter declared in 1879 that

to the three well-known conditions of matter, solid, fluid and

gaseous, should be added a fourth, “radiant,” and that there is

the borderland where force and matter meet. And in Germany the

acute Leipzig astrophysicist Fr. Zöllner, after a whole series

of spiritualistic séances conducted by the American medium

Slade in 1877 and 1878 had been carefully scrutinized and

tested by himself and several of his most accomplished scientific

colleagues, was convinced of the existence and reality of higher

“four dimension” space in the spirit world, to which by reason

of its fourth dimension the power belonged of passing through

earthly bodily matter. The philosophers I. H. Fichte of Stuttgart

and Ulrici of Halle have admitted the reality of spiritualistic

communications and allege them as proofs of immortality.

Among German theologians Luthardt of Leipzig regards it all

as the work of demons who take advantage for their own ends

of the moral-religious dissolution of the modern world and its

consequent nerve shaking that prevails, just as in the ancient

world in the beginnings of Christianity. Zöckler of Greifswald

finds an analogy between it and the demoniacal possession of

New Testament times; so too Martensen in his “Jacob Boehme,”

and on the Catholic side W. Schneider; while Splittgerber refers

most of the manifestations in question to a merely subjective

origin in “the right side of the human soul life,” but puts

the materialization of spirits in the category of delusive

jugglery. Spiritualism has scarcely rallied from the obloquy

cast upon it by the unmasking of the tricks of the famous medium

Miss Florence Cook in London in 1880 and of the distinguished

spirit materialiser Bastian by the Grand-duke John of Austria

in 1884.[574]

§ 211.18. To the domain of unquestionable illusion belongs

also the spiritualistic movement of Indian =Theosophism= or

=Occultism=. The American Col. Olcott of New York had already

moved for twenty-two years in spiritualist circles when in 1874

he met with Madame Blavatsky, widow of a Russian general who had

been governor of Erivan in Armenia. She professed to have been

from her eighth year in communication with spirits, then to

have had secret intercourse with the Mahatmas, _i.e._ spirits

of old Indian penitents, during a seven years’ residence on the

Himalayas. She now promised to introduce the colonel to them.

Olcott and Blavatsky founded at New York in 1875 a society for

research in the department of the mystic sciences, travelled in

1878 to Further India and Ceylon, and settled finally in Madras,

whence by word and writing they proclaimed through the whole

land theosophism or occultism as the religion of the future,

which, consisting in a medley of Hinduism and Buddhism, enriched

by spiritualistic revelations of Mahatmas, vouched for by

spiritualistic signs and miracles and conformed to the most

recent philosophical and scientific researches in America and

Europe, aimed at heaping contempt upon Christianity and finally

driving it from the field. As fanatical opponents of Christian

missions in India they were strongly supported by the Brahman

and Buddhist hierarchy, and soon obtained for the theosophical

society founded by them not only numerous adherents from

among the natives, but also many Englishman befooled by their

spiritualistic swindle. As apostle and literary pioneer of the

new religion appeared an Anglo-Indian called Sinnett. In spring,

1884, Madame Blavatsky and Col. Olcott went on a propagandist

tour to Europe, where, in England, France, Austria, and Hungary,

they won many converts, while Col. Olcott at Elberfeld and

Madame Blavatsky at Odessa founded branches of their theosophical

society.--But meanwhile in India affairs assumed a threatening

aspect. Blavatsky on her departure had entrusted the keys of

her dwelling and her mysterious cabinet with its various panels,

falling doors, etc., to Mr. and Mrs. Coulomb, who had been

hitherto her assistants in all her juggleries. Madame Coulomb,

however, quarrelled with the board of theosophists at Madras, and

revenged herself by placing in the hands of the Scottish mission

letters addressed by Blavatsky to herself and her husband which

supplied evidence that all her spiritualistic manifestations

were only common tricks. In addition she gave public exhibitions

in which she demonstrated to the spectators _ad oculos_ the

spiritual manifestations of the Mahatmas, and subsequently

published an “Account of My Acquaintanceship with Madame

Blavatsky, 1872-1884,” with discoveries of her earlier rogueries.

Meanwhile the swindler had herself in December, 1884, returned to

Madras in company with several believers gathered up in England,

among others a young English clergyman, Leadbeater, who some

days previously in Ceylon had formally adopted Buddhism. The

theosophists now demanded that the reputed cheat and deceiver

should be brought before a civil court. The president, however,

declared that the investigations and judgment of a profane

court of law could not be accepted to the mysteries of occultism,

but promised a careful examination by a commission appointed by

himself, and Blavatsky thought it advisable “for the restoration

of her health in a cooler climate” to make off from the scene of

conflict.[575]

§ 212. ANTICHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM.

While the antichristian spirit of the age breaks out in various

theoretical forms in our literature, there also abound social and

communistic movements of a practical kind. Socialism and communism both

aim at a thorough-going reform of the rights of property and possession

in strict proportion to the labour spent thereon. They are, however,

distinguished in this, that while communism declares war against all

private property and demands absolute community of goods, socialism, at

least in its older and nobler forms, proceeding from the idea of precise

correspondence between capital and labour, seeks to have expression

given to this in fact. From the older socialism, which endeavoured

to reach its end in a peaceful way within the existing lines of civil

order, a later social democracy is to be distinguished by its decidedly

politico-revolutionary character and tendency to attach itself more

to communism. This modern socialism thinks to open the way to the

realization of its hare-brained ideas by the confusion and overthrow

of existing law and order.

§ 212.1. =The Beginnings of Modern Communism.=--As early as

1796 Babeuf published in Paris a communistic manifesto which

maintained the thesis that natural law gives all men an equal

right to the enjoyment of all goods. His ideas were subsequently

systematized and developed by Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, and Louis

Blanc in France, and by Weibling and Stirner in Germany. In

a treatise of 1840 Proudhon answered the question, _Qu’est-ce

que la propriété?_ in words which afterwards became proverbial,

and formed the motto of communism: _La propriété c’est le vol._

But the mere negation of property affords no permanent standing

ground. All altars must be thrown down; all religion rooted

out as the plague of humanity; the family and marriage, as the

fountain of all selfishness, must be abolished; all existing

governments must be overthrown; all Europe must be turned into

one great social democracy. A secret communistic propaganda

spread over all western Europe, had its head centres in Belgium

and Switzerland, crossed the Alps and the Pyrenees, as well as

the Channel, and found a congenial soil even in Russia.

§ 212.2. =St. Simonism.=--The Count St. Simon of Paris, reduced

to poverty by speculation, proposed by means of a thorough

organization of industry to found a new and happy state of things

in which there would be pure enjoyment without poverty and care.

An attempted suicide, which led however to his death in 1825,

made him in the eyes of his disciples a saviour of the world. The

July revolution of 1830 gave to the new universal religion, which

reinstated the flesh in its long lost rights and sought to assign

to each individual the place in the commonwealth for which he

was fitted, some advantage. “Father” Enfantin, whom his followers

honoured as the highest revelation of deity, contended with

pompous phrases and in fantastic style for the emancipation of

woman and against the unnatural institution of marriage. But

St. Simonism soon excited public ridicule, was pronounced immoral

by the courts of justice, and the remnants of its votaries fled

from the scorn of the people and the vengeance of the law to

Egypt, where they soon disappeared.

§ 212.3. =Owenists and Icarians.=--The Scotch mill-owner

=Rob. Owen= went in 1829 to America, in order there, unhindered

by religious prejudices, clerical opposition, and police

interference, to work out on a large scale his socialistic

schemes for improving the world, which in a small way he believed

he had proved already among his Scotch mill-operatives. He

bought for this purpose from the Württemberger Rapp the colony

of Harmony (§ 211, 6); but wanting the necessary capital for

the socialistic commonwealth there established, and failing to

realize his expectations, discontent, disorder, and opposition

got the upper hand, and in 1826 Owen was obliged to abandon all

his property. He now returned to England, and addressed himself

in treatises, tracts, and lectures to the working classes of

the whole land, in order to win them over to his ideas. A vast

brotherhood for mutual benefit and for the enjoyment of their

joint earnings was to put an end to earth’s misery, which the

positive religions had not lessened but only increased. In 1836,

in the great industrial cities socialist unions with nearly half

a million members were formed, with their head centre and annual

congress at Birmingham. The practical schemes of Owen, however,

had no success in England, and his societies no permanency. He

died in 1858.--Still more disastrous was the fate of the Icarian

Colony, founded in Texas in 1848 by the Frenchman =Stephen Cabet=,

author of “_Voyage en Icarie, Roman philos. et social_,” 1840,

as an attempt to realize his communistic-philanthropic ideas on

the other side of the Atlantic. The colonists soon found their

sanguine hopes bitterly disappointed, and hurled against their

leader reproaches and threats. Some ex-Icarians accused him in

1849 before the Paris police-court as a swindler, and he was

condemned to two years’ imprisonment and five years’ loss of

civil privileges. Cabet now hastened to France, and on appeal

obtained reversion of his sentence in 1851. Returning to America,

he founded a new Icarian colony at Nauvoo in Illinois. But there,

too, everything went wrong, and a revolt of the colonists obliged

him to flee. He died in 1856.[576]

§ 212.4. =The International Working-Men’s Association.=--Local

and national working-men’s unions with a socialistic organization

had for a long time existed in England, France, and Germany.

The idea of a union embracing the whole world was first broached

at the great London Exhibition in 1862, and at a conference in

London on September 28th, 1864, at which all industrial countries

of Europe were represented, it assumed a practical shape by the

founding of a universal international working-men’s association.

Its constitution was strictly centralistic. A directing committee

in London, Carl Marx of Treves, formerly _Privatdocent_ of

philosophy at Bonn, standing at its head as dictator, represented

the supreme legislative and governing authority, while alongside

of it a general standing council held the administrative and

executive power. The latter was divided into eight sections,

English, American, French, German, Belgian, Dutch, Italian,

and Spanish, and annual international congresses at Geneva,

Lausanne, Brussels, Basel, and the Hague gave opportunity for

general consultation on matters of common interest. Reception as

members was granted by the giving of a diploma after six months’

trial, and involved unconditional obedience to the statutes

and ordinances of the central authorities and the payment of

an annual fee. The number of members, not, however, exclusively

drawn from the working classes, is said to have reached two and

a half millions. The society adopted the current socialistic

and communistic ideas and tendencies. The religious principle

of the association was therefore: atheism and materialism; the

political: absolute democracy; the social: equal rights of labour

and profit, with abolition of private property, hereditary rights,

marriage, and family; and as means for realizing this programme,

unaccomplishable by peaceable methods, revolution and rebellion,

fire and sword, poison, petroleum and dynamite. Such means have

been used already in various ways by the international throughout

the Romance countries; but specially in the brief Reign of Terror

of the Paris Commune, March and April, 1871, in the relatively

no less violent attempted revolt at Alcoy in Southern Spain in

July, 1873. But meanwhile differences appeared within the society,

which were formulated at the Hague Congress in 1872, and led to

splits, which greatly lessened its unity, influence, and power to

do mischief, so that this congress may perhaps be regarded as the

first beginning of its end.[577]

§ 212.5. =German Social Democracy.=--=Ferd. Lassalle=, son of

a rich Jewish merchant of Breslau, after a full course of study

in philosophy and law, began in 1848 to take a lively part in

the advanced movements of the age, and when he found among the

liberal citizens no favour for his socialistic ideas turned

exclusively to the working classes. In answer to the question

as to what was to be done, by the central committee of a

working-men’s congress at Leipzig, he wrought out in 1863 with

great subtlety in an open letter the fundamental idea of his

universal redemption. All plans of self-help to relieve the

distress of working men hitherto proposed (specially that of

Schulze-Delitzsch) break down over the “iron economic law of

wages,” in consequence of which under the dominion of capital and

the large employers of labour wages are always with fatalistic

necessity reduced to the point indispensable for supplying a

working man’s family with the absolute necessaries of life.

The working classes, however, have the right according to the

law of nature to a full equivalent for their labour, but in

order to reach this they must be their own undertakers, and

where self-help is only a vain illusion, state help must afford

the means. By insisting on the right to universal suffrage

the working classes have obtained a decided majority in the

legislative assemblies, and there secured a government of the

future in accordance with their needs. On these principles the

Universal German Society of Working Men was constituted, with

Lassalle as its president, which position he held till his

death in a duel in 1864. Long internal disputes and personal

recriminations led to a split at the Eisenach Congress in

1869. The malcontents founded an independent “Social Democratic

Working-Men’s Union,” under the leadership of Bebel and

Liebknecht, which, particularly successful in Saxony, Brunswick,

and South Germany, represents itself as the German branch

of the “International Working-Men’s Association.” It adhered

indeed generally to Lassalle’s programme, but objected to the

extravagant adulation claimed for Lassalle by their opponents,

the proper disciples of Lassalle, who had Hasenclaver as

their leader and Berlin as their headquarters, substituted a

federal for a centralistic organization, and instead of a great

centralised government in the future desired rather a federal

republic embracing all Europe. But both declared equally in

favour of revolution; they vied with one another in bitter hatred

of everything bearing the name of religion; and wrought out

with equal enthusiasm their communistic schemes for the future.

At the Gotha Congress of 1875 a reconciliation of parties was

effected. The social-democratic agitation thus received a new

impulse and assumed threatening proportions. Yet it required such

extraordinary occurrences as the twice attempted assassination of

the aged emperor, by Hodel on May 11th, and Nobiling on June 2nd,

1878, to rouse the government to legislative action. On the basis

of a law passed in October, 1878, for two and a half years (but

in May, 1880, continued for other three and a half years, and in

May, 1884, and again in April, 1886, on each occasion extended

to other two years), 200 socialist societies throughout the

German empire were suppressed, sixty-four revolutionary journals,

circulated in hundreds of thousands and with millions of readers,

and about 800 other seditious writings, were forbidden. But that

the social- democratic organization and agitation was not thereby

destroyed is proved by the fact that in August, 1880, in an

uninhabited Swiss castle lent for the purpose, in Canton Zürich,

a congress was held, attended by fifty-six German socialists,

with greetings by letter from sympathisers in all European

countries, which among other things passed the resolution

unanimously, no longer as had been agreed upon at Gotha, to seek

their ends by lawful methods, as by the law of the socialists

impossible, but by the way of revolution.--On the other hand, the

German Imperial Chancellor Prince Bismarck in the Reichstag, 1884,

fully admitted the “right of the worker to work,” as well as the

duty of the state to ameliorate the condition of working men as

far as possible, and in three propositions: “Work for the healthy

workman, hospital attendance to the sick, and maintenance to the

invalided,” granted all that is asked for by a healthy social

policy.

§ 212.6. =Russian Nihilism.=--In Russia, too, notwithstanding a

strictly exercised censorship, the philosophico-scientific gospel

of materialism and atheism found entrance through the writings

of Moleschott, Feuerbach, Büchner, Darwin, etc. (§ 174, 3),

especially among the students. In 1860, Nihilism, springing

from this seed, first assumed the character of a philosophical

and literary movement. It sought the overthrow of all religious

institutions. Then came the women’s question, claiming

emancipation for the wife. The example of the Paris Commune

of 1871 contributed largely to the development of Nihilistic

idealism, its political revolutionary socialism. The Nihilist

propaganda, like an epidemic, now seized upon the academic youth,

male and female, was spread in aristocratic families by tutors

and governesses, won secret disciples among civil servants as

well as officers of the army and navy, and was enthusiastically

supported by ladies in the most cultured and exalted ranks. In

order to spread its views among the people, young men and women

disguised in peasant’s dress went out among the peasants and

artisans, lived and wrought like them, and preached their gospel

to them in their hours of rest. But their efforts failed through

the antipathy and apathy of the lower orders, and the energetic

interference of the government by imprisonment and banishment

thinned the ranks of the propagandists. But all the more closely

did those left bind themselves together under their central

leaders as the “Society for Country and Freedom,” and strove

with redoubled eagerness to spread revolutionary principles

by secretly printing their proclamations and other incendiary

productions, and scattering them in the streets and houses. On

January 24th, 1878, the female Nihilist _Vera Sassulitsch_ from

personal revenge dangerously wounded with a revolver General

Trepoff, the dreaded head of the St. Petersburg police. Although

she openly avowed the deed before the court and gloried in it,

she was amid the acclamations of the public acquitted. This was

the hour when Nihilism exercised its fellest terrorism. The fair,

peaceful phrase, “To work, fight, suffer, and die for the people,”

was silenced; it was now, sword and fire, dagger and revolver,

dynamite and mines for all oppressors of the people, but above

all for the agents of the police, for their spies, for all

informers and apostates. An “executive committee,” unknown to

most of the conspirators themselves, issued the death sentence;

the lot determined the executioner, who himself suffered death

if he failed to accomplish it. What was now aimed at was the

assassination of higher state officials; then the sacred person

of the emperor. Three bold attempts at assassination miscarried;

the revolver shot of Solowjews on April 14th, 1879; the mine on

the railway near Moscow that exploded too late on November 30th,

1879; the horrible attempt to blow up the Winter Palace with

the emperor and his family on February 17th, 1880; but the

fourth, a dynamite bomb thrown between the feet of the emperor

on March 13th, 1881, destroyed the life of this noble and humane

monarch, who in 1861-1863 had freed his people from the yoke of

serfdom. As for years nothing more had been heard of Nihilist

attempts, it was hoped that the government had succeeded in

putting down this diabolical rebellion, but in 1887 the news

spread that an equally horrible attempt had been planned for

the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II.,

but fortunately timely precautions were taken against it.