It is one of the compelling axioms of history that the influence of Jesus Christ has been the only effective force in the attainment of the highest marriage standards. Unfortunately it is equally true that, wherever the clear-cut statements of Christ's faith have been questioned by religious cults, matrimonial ideals have suffered.
This helps to account for the fact that in this age of more than 300 religious isms (when newspaper advertisements feature columns of announcements publicizing exotic worship under such designations as The School of Silent Unity, Transcendent Science, The Ultimate Thought Society, The Church of Psychic Research, The Rosicrucian Philosophy, The School of Spiritual Science, The Philosophical Church of Natural Law), we have experienced a consistent deterioration of marital standards. Any one acquainted with contemporaneous religious life must view with the keenest amazement the noxious influences of mystic cults that have helped to spread the names of Gautama, Lao-tse, Confucius, the Bab, the Mahatmas, the Father-Mother God, Ishtar, Isis and Osiris, and other figures of pagan pantheons throughout the land like an epidemic. The Scriptural warning "A man's enemies are the men of his own house" (Micah 7:6) is strikingly applicable to our endless fabrication of cults, since some of the most vicious opponent. of matrimony have come from the ranks of religion. How literally has St. Paul's warning to Timothy (2 Tim. 3:1-6) been fulfilled: "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. From such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts."
One of the more elaborate of these extravagances is found in the Hindu invasion of the United States, by which the pseudo-panacea of Yogism is spread throughout the nation. Fat swamis, quoting Yogoda and Einstein, frequent our cities to preach the "gospel" of cosmic vibration and to sing hymns of "eternal symphony" dedicated to Krishna, lord of Yogis, lord of love, and, according to the estimates of conservative Hindu mythology, the husband of 16,000 wives and the father of 180,000 children. From this background of Indian sensuality especial appeal is directed to, American women. At a visit of a well-known swami to St. Louis five times as many women as men were present at a typical meeting in the Gold Room of Hotel Jefferson, one of the distinguished-salons in that city. While dozens of these female students of Sankhya, Yoga, and Vedanta came apparently from the bluer sections of the St. Louis West End, the majority were middle-class women in the thirties and forties. They sat ready to receive advice in practical and domestic questions from an obese Hindu pseudo-prophet, who declared: "My words are the words of God."
A sinister aspect of Yogism is described in the American Social Hygiene Association's folder The Medical Charlatan. Under the title "Case No. 3" it calls attention to a Hindu Yogi who offered to treat disease by mail. Law-enforcing authorities, cooperating with the Hygiene Association, wrote a letter describing a medical case of disease with incomplete symptoms. The Yogi diagnosed the symptoms (purposely described so vaguely that diagnosis would be impossible) as a serious venereal disease. The writer of the letter was advised "not to consult a local doctor, as he would be reported to the health department and taken to the county hospital, where three to five years of treatment would be required. A cure by this ‘quack’ was guaranteed in six or eight weeks at a cost of ten dollars a week."
Much more dangerous because of its wider web and stronger meshes is the closely related theosophy founded more than fifty years ago by a Russian adventuress, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, "one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting charlatans" (C. E. Bechhover Roberts, The Mysterious Madame). At the age of seventeen she married the "ugly? old General Blavatsky" but deserted him after less than three months and during a twenty-five years' globe-trotting left an international trail of scandal. First she eloped to Constantinople with a sea captain; then followed successive affairs with an opera singer, an episode with a baron, a marriage in New York while previous husbands still lived, an illicit union with a Philadelphia merchant, and other similar experiences.
Ordinarily the moral and religious theories of a woman with her past would command no serious attention, but by that strange perversion which, rejecting the exposition of divine truth, accepts fraud, her weird combination of voodooism, astrology, Indian occultism, karma, Nirvana, and cabalistic eccentricities of all kinds, this religious hodgepodge was accepted, we are told, by 100,000 people at the time of her death. During her quarter-century wandering she claimed to have pushed through the almost impenetrable barriers of Tibet, contacting the Mahatmas, "the elder brothers of the human race," and learning from them the esoteric secrets of this occult brotherhood. These "revelations" were codified into a religious system, which excludes Christ, ridicules the Bible, and poisons all Christian hope. In addition to taxing the credulity even of semi-intelligence she tells in detail how the Mahatmas paraded their astral bodies before her and by some spiritist form of radio called precipitation sent her personal messages from Tibet to America in the fraction of a split second. Exposure was inevitable. The Psychical Research Society pronounced the verdict of fraud.
No scientific body is required to pronounce upon her teachings in regard to marriage and morality, which feature the usual cultic debauch. In Madame Blavatsky's The Key to Theosophy (p. 207 f.) we read this catechetical dialog:
"Enquirer: 'Must a man marry or remain a celibate [in accepting theosophy]?'
"Theosofhist: 'There is no reason why he should not marry if he likes to take the risks of that lottery where there are so many more blanks than prizes.'
"Enquirer: 'But why cannot one acquire this knowledge and power when living a married life?'
"Theosophist: 'Can a man serve two masters? No. Then it is equally impossible for him to divide his attention between the pursuit of occultism and a wife.'"
Theosophy emphasizes the high-sounding doctrines of soul marriage; yet theosophists are told that legal and conventional marriages must be cast aside when affinity meets affinity, that lawful companions must be deserted when the male and female principles of the spirit world are thrown together in soul unions. Mercine Elan Sloan, investigator of theosophy, says: "I have seen clandestine love-letters sent by. a writer of theosophic books to a woman theosophist, with whom he was working the affinity proposition, that contained matter of such a character that the postal authorities took the case in hand to suppress the correspondence. The woman protested innocence of intention, claiming it to be only a test of her spiritual development. But that man was connected with a Chicago outfit of deceivers who worked the 'Great School' secret order for the express purpose of ensnaring women. ... By gradual instruction and influence, members are led to the point of believing that promiscuous sexuality is proper if only it be an expression of spiritual affinity. Our public libraries contain books, of which the general public has no knowledge, that are eagerly read by women under theosophic tutelage. Librarians say that they get books in response to demands from patrons, but do not know the nature of the contents. A few years ago the librarian in the city of Washington had me analyze for him some such books; for he had not time for it nor the information by which to judge. Such books should be destroyed; for their pernicious influence is corrupting many." (Modern Theosophy, p. 70.)
Indeed, what good can be expected from a creed in which Madame Blavatsky lays down the following blasphemous definition of marriage: "Matrimony is ... a monstrous repetitive existence, wherein its adherents are gently held by the soporific anesthesia of public opinion, that deadly effluvia by which the majority of mortals are slowly, but surely led to ruin and dismay, where their mdividual advancement is held in check, genius abrogated and destroyed, and development arrested, except after those lines which are in accord with this terrible monster."
Can any benefit come from a system in which Madame Blavatsky confides to her initiates: "I carefully prepared those whom I could trust so that they would not drift back into the worldly methods. I sought in this way to impart magnetic and sexual truths which could be imparted from ear to ear"? Are these sentiments of a college president's wife expressive of higher home ideals: "My husband and children are no more to me than any others equally deserving regard. My religion [theosophy] teaches me that they have no claim on me, and I am free to seek the perfect life alone"? (Sloan, ibid., 51.) Is the hope of a purer, more helpful attitude toward marriage to be derived from the teachings of Madame Blavatsky's successor, Mrs. Annie Besant, who left her husband after seven years of married life, joined the Freethinkers' Society as an energetic atheist, and then was arrested with Charles Brad-laugh, atheist, for distributing birth-control literature? Is there any ray of hope in the teachings of Catherine Tingley, the megalomaniac theosophist, who claimed to be the incarnation of Blavatsky and who did not shrink from asserting that she was the greatest teacher of all ages, not excluding Christ?
Well known is the fraud and deceit practiced by spiritist mediums. Recently the American Society for Psychic Research assigned to Dr. H. C. McComas the task of investigating the methods of professional spiritists. He recorded that if, when visiting a medium, he discarded "sympathy and imagination, her statements about me became a sort of crazy-quilt of irrelevant remarks." He admitted that men with scientific training are "about the poorest in the matter of debunking séance frauds." And he stated, "It is necessary for the séance chamber to be filled with vigorous vibrations in order to prime the supposed power. This results in loud and awful singing and enables the medium to do various things without your hearing them."
Even more significant is the statement of Rose Mackenberg, who for thirteen years has investigated spiritist meetings and has more than 1,500 exposures of fraud to her credit. She is employed by banks, chambers of commerce, and civic groups who ask her assistance when they believe that clients or communities are being duped by the pretense of psychic powers. In discussing her varied experiences, she declared: "I never married, but I received messages from 1,000 husbands and twice as many children in the world to come. Invariably they told me that they were happy where they were, which was not entirely flattering to me. During the course of my investigation I have visited mediums all over the country; but whether they lived in luxurious hotels or fire-trap tenements, their messages were all of the same caliber. I have even been ordained six times as a spiritualistic minister. These ordinations took anywhere from twenty-three minutes to three days and cost me from $5 to $25. In order further to test the psychic powers claimed by the presiding mediums, I took such ridiculous names as Allicia Bunck (all is a bunk) and F. Raud, easily read as 'fraud'; but I was not suspected. My money was accepted, I was presented with a nicely engraved certificate of ordination, and became a supposedly full-fledged seer, ready to communicate with departed spirits at so much per communication."
Not so well known, however, is the immorality that spreads beneath the surface of this cult and the domestic tragedies to which the Endor road leads. Besides denying every fundamental truth of the Scriptures, spiritism has loaded upon itself the vice of ridiculing marriage. In spite of its "higher" interpretation of marriage, neither its personnel nor its results have ever inspired confidence. Margaret Fox lived her last years in drunken destitution. Those who have followed her often display so much deceit and lechery that they must immediately be disqualified as mentors of morality. Some of the mediums have been infamous. In his oft-quoted work on spiritism Baron von Schrenk-Notzing reproduces about 150 photographs featuring Eva C., his favorite medium. Yet the Baron himself concedes her notorious, immoral character. Ann O'Delia Diss Debar, whose name stands "among the half-score or more in the front ranks of the history of spiritualism" and who handled financial deals involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, has been classed as among "the ten most prominent and dangerous female criminals of the world." "Her repertoire is claimed to have run the full gamut from petty confidence games to elaborately contrived schemes aimed at the magnates of Wall Street." (Houdini: A Magician among the Spirits, p. 66f.) She was found guilty of various crimes in New York, Geneva, and New Orleans, and was finally sentenced to seven years' penal servitude in London for "aiding and abetting the commission of rape." The files of an unmuzzled newspaper will reveal in its record of mediumistic activity many parallels of spiritist crime.
The tragedies resulting from the counsel of this necromantic immorality may be anticipated. Here is a young Barnard College student who, insisting that she was in love with a spirit, was finally driven to suicide; a Washington, D. C., husband was granted a divorce because his wife confessed that she had a "spirit affinity by the name of Alfred"; a San Francisco father shot and killed two of his sons, maintaining that communications from his dead wife had begged him to send all five children to her. Here is the record of a bridegroom's being married to a spirit bride; a St. Louis husband who complains to the court because of the indiscretions into which spiritism led his wife; a woman minister of a fashionable Los Angeles church patiently awaiting a message from the soul of a realty broker who committed suicide after promising that he would communicate with her as soon as he reached "the other world"; a Milwaukee husband who told the court that his wife, a devotee of spiritism, neglected her home to attend séances, where she would hug and kiss the materialized spirit of her first husband; a Newark mother who swallowed poison after slaying her baby son in the belief that as an emancipated spirit she could guide her husband to a spiritist heaven and happiness. Here, as a climax, is the confession of Margaret Fox, in which she admits that under the badge of spiritualism immorality stalks unchecked. "Do you know," she asks, "that there is something behind the shadowy mask of spiritualism that the public can hardly guess at? I am stating now what I know, not because I actually participated in it, — for I would never be a party to such promiscuous nastiness, — but because I had plenty of opportunity, as you may imagine, of verifying it. Under the name of this dreadful, this horrible, hypocrisy — spiritualism — everything that is improper, bad, and immoral is practiced. They go even so far as to have what they call 'spiritual children.' They pretend to something like the immaculate conception. Could anything be more blasphemous, more disgusting, more thinly deceptive than that? In London I went in disguise to a quiet séance at the house of a wealthy man, and I saw a so-called materialization. The effect was produced by the aid of luminous paper, the luster of which was reflected upon the operator. The figure thus displayed was that of a woman virtually nude, being enveloped in transparent gauze, the face alone being concealed. This was one of those séances to which the privileged non-believing friends of believing spiritualists could have access. But there are other séances, where none but the most tried and trusted are admitted and where there are shameless goings-on that vie with the secret Saturnalia of the Romans. I could not describe these things to you because I would not."
This consultation of spirits, then, stands condemned by its own procedure. The wonder of it all is that in our scientific age and in a country where popular government is instituted to guard and promote the well-being and prosperity of the citizens, there are still communities in which the spiritist mediums can flaunt the invitation to their séances before the public eye. To ban these modern con-suiters of familiar spirits, home-wreckers that they are, from the length and breadth of the land would be a public service of monumental proportions.
In Christian Science the disparagement of marriage is also unmistakable. Mrs. Eddy was embittered against matrimony through her own marital experiences. Her first husband, George W. Glover, died soon after their marriage. Her second husband, Dr. Daniel Patterson, deserted her. And her third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, to whom she was married at the age of fifty-six (although her age was given as forty on the marriage license), was completely dominated by her personality. This disillusionment has expressed itself in an unmistakable rancor. Marriage is assailed as carnal. Obedient followers are reminded that Jesus was not restricted by family ties and that the Scriptures prohibit us from calling any man "Father." Mrs. Eddy wrote in all seriousness: "To abolish marriage at this period and maintain morality and generation would put ingenuity to ludicrous shifts; yet this is possible in Science although it is today problematic." (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 286.) Her answer to the question "What do you think of marriage?" is cynical: "It is often convenient, sometimes pleasant, and occasionally a love affair." (Ibid., 52.) In her earlier and bolder teachings Mrs. Eddy did not shrink from asserting that the truly spiritual state could be obtained only "by abstinence from marriage. In Science and Health and other writings these socially dangerous statements were toned down; but in related utterances (some of which were biological absurdities, omitted in subsequent editions) an undeniable apathy toward marriage is inculcated by such statements as the following:
"Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge inculcates that it is, but Christian Science indicates that it is not." (Ibid., 288.)
"Human nature has bestowed on a wife the right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, . . .she may win a higher." (Ibid., 289.)
And when the "Mother Church" in Boston was dedicated, Mrs. Eddy's biting derision rose to such scorn that she declared marriage to be synonymous with legalized lust. (Christian Science Journal, July, 1906.)
This endorsement of practical celibacy led some of "Mother" Eddy's most devoted pupils astray. Mrs. Josephine Curds Woodbury, who tried to apply Mrs. Eddy's preachments, startled the world in 1890 by claiming a virgin birth for her son, "The Prince of Peace." Mrs. Eddy had not been consulted about this miracle, and her reaction was one of almost unrestrained fury. Mrs. Wood-bury was excommunicated. Taking up her defense in the Arena (May, 1899), she insisted that Mrs. Eddy had taught that "women may become mothers through a supreme effort of their own minds or through the influence on them of an unholy ghost, a malign spirit." Developing the influence of this demoniacal element, Mrs. Woodbury charged: "Women of unquestioned integrity who have been Mrs. Eddy's students testify that she has so taught and that by this teaching families have been broken up, that thus maidens have been terrified out of their wits. . . . Whatever her denials may be, such was Mrs. Eddy's teaching while in her college; to which she added the oracular declaration that it lay within her power to dissolve such motherhood by a wave of her celestial rod. The selfish celibacy of nuns and clergy, Christian or heathen, with consequent ecclesiastical interference in family life have been and are mischief-breeding blunders, fatal alike to morals and health."
One of Mrs. Mary Baker Glover-Patterson-Eddy's most-beloved pupils was Mrs. Augusta Stetson, who likewise endeavored to follow the matrimonial teachings of "the Leader." In the minutes of Mrs. Stetson's Christian Science Institute we find reports of several of her addresses which describe marriage as unclean and carnal, directly opposed to the ethical and spiritual life. She emphasized absolute virginity — "that pure virginity which is at once the heritage and the prime requirement of the sons and daughters of God." Swihart in Since Mrs. Eddy (pp. 110—113) brings this summary of her attitude toward marriage: "Among the students who received these advance doctrines a few rebelled, but a great number endorsed them. Some families were greatly stirred, especially when not all of the members were Christian Scientists. With her practitioners Mrs. Stetson was much more rigid than with her church-members. Of the former she demanded absolute chastity. One day her secretary told her that a man who had been one of her chief assistants in building the church had married. Mrs. Stetson, with eyes flashing, exclaimed: 'What? Has he forsaken me?' The secretary explained that he had not left her; at least he had not yet begotten any progeny. Then Mrs. Stetson exclaimed: 'What did I ever get married for?' Her secretary replied: 'Well, Teacher, you didn't know any better; did you?' Mrs. Stetson then admitted: 'I was a fool; wasn't I?'"
It may well be anticipated that these teachings created a furore. They provoked the following editorial in the New York World: "Couples intending to marry have asked Mrs. Stetson's approval and, not receiving it, have abandoned the idea. Wives have been taught that a more spiritual existence would be the life of a nun, and as far as possible, some of them have tried to live like nuns. All family relations are regarded by the initiated in Mrs. Stetson's church as errors, save only the relation of brother and sister. Childbirth is the result of sin in any wife, and no practitioner is allowed to help any woman at such a time, even though she die. Husbands and wives having no children, but desiring them, are not to be aided to thus 'perpetuate the error of belief in birth and death,' and the relation of parent to child, it is taught, should be that of brother and sister only. Of course, the people who are 'not ready’ are not told these things, but they are taught to most students who pay their hundred dollars for the advanced instruction."
The accepted Eddyism of our day has of course not seriously endeavored to maintain its founder's antagonism to marriage. But the pronouncements of "the infallible Mother" still stand. The marriage ceremony has never once been performed in any of the hundreds of pretentious temples of Eddyism that dot the élite sections of our large cities; for Christian Science has neither a marriage ritual nor any officials authorized to perform the ceremony. Its effects may be seen both in the generally disdainful attitude which the practitioners assume toward marriage and in the many childless families of its adherents. Frederick W. Peabody (The Religio-Medical Masquerade, p. 164) points out that the effect of Mrs. Eddy's anti marriage bias "is shown in the difference between Christian Science Sunday schools and Christian Sunday-schools. The membership of Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian Sunday schools is about the same as their church-membership; while in Christian Science Sunday schools there is but one child for every five church members." Together with its broad perversions involving God, the Scripture's, sin, redemption, eternity, and every fundamental Christian doctrine, the belittling of marriage and the denial of the divine wisdom by which it was instituted must be rejected by every Christian who loves the truth of God.
Mormonism comes under similar indictment, particularly because of its endorsement of polygamy. This practice is based on a somewhat complicated doctrinal foundation. The supreme ruler in this polytheistic system is "our father Adam," the paragon of spirituality. Others who partake of this divinity are Christ, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young. "Each god through his wife or wives raises up a numerous family of sons and daughters, ... for each rather and mother will be in a condition to multiply forever and ever." (The Seer, I, 37.) These deities create the souls for the physical bodies on earth. When the faithful Mormon dies, he, too, becomes a god, and his honor is enhanced by a large number of children. This article of the Mormon creed authorizes polygamy; for the myriads of spirits which are awaiting incarnation must have bodies. Though there are apparently two conflicting statements in The Book. of Mormon, the sense of its much-disputed passage in Jacob 2:6 is that, when God has not commanded polygamy and it is practiced for mere sensual gratification, it is an abomination; but when God has commanded polygamy — as He did to the Mormons — so that seed may be raised up to Him, it is a duty.
In harmony with these teachings the "saints" certainly recognized plural wifery as a sacred obligation and produced immense families. Joseph Smith, of epileptic ancestry, graduated from peepstones and crystal balls to mystic disclosures by the angel Moroni, boasted in prophecy: "One hundred years won't pass away before my posterity will outnumber the present inhabitants of the State of New York." He was the author of The Revelation of Celestial Marriage, written through the aid of an amanuensis because Smith was illiterate. This "revelation" he "received" in 1843. Nine years later it was embodied in the official creed of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants (sec. 132): "And again, as pertaining to the law of priesthood: if a man espouse a virgin and desire to espouse another, ... he may have ten virgins given unto him by this law; he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given unto him; therefore he is justified" (p. 473). Joseph Smith's personal polygamy, before he was assassinated by a mob ai Carthage, Illinois, has been demonstrated beyond all question. (Cf. the affidavits in Charles A. Shook, The True Origin of Mormon Polygamy.) Brigham Young, his successor, was survived by twenty-five wives and fifty-six children. In 1873 he had been sued for divorce by Anna Eliza Yeung, Wife No. 19, as she was called. At various times it was necessary to imprison and fine this Mormon "saint" for failure to pay alimony.
As every contradiction of divine ordinances, polygamy pro-, motes domestic strife and raises deep-rooted problems. A crisis arose in early Mormon history which called for these sermonic remarks by Brigham Young on September 21, 1856 {Journal of Discourses, Vol. 4, pp. 55, 57): "Men will say, 'My wife, though an excellent woman, has not seen a happy day for a year,' says one; and another has not seen a happy day for five years. — I am going to give you from this time to the sixth day of October next for reflection that you may determine whether you wish to stay with your husbands or not, and then I am going to set every woman at liberty and say to them, 'Now go your way, my women, with the rest, go your way.' And my wives have got to do one of two things; either round off their shoulders to endure the afflictions of this world and live their religion, or they may leave, for I will not have them about me. I will go into heaven alone rather than have them scratching and fighting around me. — Prepare yourselves for two weeks from tomorrow; and I will tell you now that, if you tarry with your husbands after I have set you free, you must bow down to it and submit yourselves to the celestial law. You may go where you please after two weeks from tomorrow; but remember that I will not hear any more of this whining."
This permission to "go where you please" sounds generous. But where could the desert-bound women find refuge? Walda R. Schumann, who has spoken with some of the early settlers in Utah and recorded the otherwise suppressed feelings of the women, writes (Walther League Messenger, November, 1935, p. 146 ff.): "Many Mormon women were able to put up with polygamy in a matter-of-fact, come-what-may, philosophical sort of way. Take, for instance, the wife who was informed by her husband that he had made arrangements to marry a second wife, a young girl of her acquaintance, on the following day. Objections were useless, so she might as well acquiesce and keep her husband in a good humor toward herself by putting up a picnic lunch, which she set into the buggy, for her husband and his new bride to enjoy after the wedding ceremony. In fact, she even helped the girl dress for the occasion that she might look her prettiest. Most of the women, however, experienced much heartache, jealousy, and untold misery, some even losing their minds under the terrible strain. What would have been your reaction, do you suppose, had you been in the place of the young wife and mother who passionately loved her husband and could hardly await the day that he returned from two years of mission-work in England only to find that he had brought back with himself another wife? And with this younger woman the heart-broken wife had to share everything."
Despite the hardships which plural marriages brought upon the Mormon wives and mothers, woe to the unfaithful wife! There was one atonement for the sin of adultery: expiation by blood! Militant Brigham Young declares: "I know, when you hear my brethren telling about cutting people off from the earth, that you consider it a strong doctrine; but it is to save them, not to destroy them." (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 4, pp. 53, 54.) In his biography of Young, M. R. Werner draws this gruesome picture of the doctrine of blood atonement in operation: "One of the wives of a Mormon in Salt Lake City was unfaithful to him while he was on a mission in foreign lands. When he returned, the Church was in the throes of the [Mormon] reformation, and his wife believed that she was doomed to lose the right to those children she had borne her husband in lawful wedlock and that she would be separated from him and from them in eternity. She told her husband of her fears and of her sin, and he agreed with her that the fears were justified and the sin awful. She sat on her husband's knee and embraced him as she had never done before, while, as he returned her kisses, he cut her throat and thereby sent her spirit to the gods in all its former purity." (P. 404 f. Cf. T. B. H. Sten-house. The Rocky Mountain Saints, pp. 469, 470.)
These practices soon brought the polygamous Mormons into conflict with their fellow-countrymen. In 1882 the Edmunds Act was passed, disenfranchising all who lived in polygamous relations. It has been estimated that about 12,000 names of men and women were removed from the registration lists. In 1890 Wilford Woodruff, president of the Mormons, issued his celebrated manifesto, Concluding with the lukewarm statement: "I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land." It would be difficult to prove that this statement is anything more than advice. For many years his counsel was ignored. Thus, Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the founder of the cult, married to five wives, succeeded to the presidency in 1901. In March, 1907, soon after the birth of his forty-third child, he was found guilty of breaking the law against polygamy and was fined $300.
The statute has not been able to wipe out polygamy. It still flourishes in the Mormon hinterland. On March 15, 1935, the Hon. Lyie B. Nicholas told the Utah House of Representatives, then in session: "I assure you that there is a deplorable condition existing, particularly in Salt Lake County. Polygamy is being practiced, and many plural wives and their children are on the relief rolls." As a consequence of these conditions a bill was passed by the Utah Legislature making polygamy a felony instead of a misdemeanor. When a more strictly enforced law in Arizona summoned John Y. Barlow for jury trial on the charge of polygamy, he declared: "We are believers in the true, first Mormonism. We are directed to enter a new covenant of marriage, meaning the acceptance of a plurality of wives and the propagation of families, in the doctrines of the Church. It is a God-given law, and we believe the power and the glory of the spirit in the hereafter depends upon the obedience of man to the law of God." (Associated Press Dispatch, October 14, 1935.) Investigators found that eighteen of the nineteen children at the Lee's Ferry (Arizona) school were the offspring of one of Barlow's associates and followers:
This much is certain: Mormonism has never openly condemned polygamy. Presiding Bishop Nibley perhaps gave expression to the prevalent Mormon attitude on this question when, writing in Era, the Mormon young people's magazine with reference to the twoscore and three children of multi-married Joseph F. Smith, he asked: "Is not this . . . about the most God-pleasing piece of work that man can do, ... the work of a god in embryo? The whole church can take pride in the vindication of a great principle which he has so successfully wrought out." In Articles of Faith (14th English edition, 1925, p. 425), by James E. Talmage, "one of the twelve apostles of the church," the intervention of the Government in prohibiting plural marriage is cited as "a suspension of divine law" and the responsibility is solemnly placed on the nation.
Mormonism finds some solace for the prohibition of polygamy in the doctrine of celestial marriage, permitted those members of the church who are judged worthy of participation in this special blessing. Their marriage is supplemented by the ecclesiastical "sealing," in which allegedly the union is made indissoluble "for time and for all eternity." Men may be sealed to an unlimited number of women, while a double "celestial" standard in Mormon theology prohibits a woman from being sealed to more than one man. Indeed, Mormon women are told they are saved through their husbands. Proxy marriages and sealed marriages are adopted for the particular benefit of the women who died unsealed. By these teachings Mormonism, despising the plain implications of Biblical truth (Matt. 22:20) and its exalted emphasis on marriage, compensates for the polygamy ruled out by an unsympathetic Supreme Court and creates a polygamous heaven.
Similarly startling in its departure from the Biblical sanctity of matrimony are the heresies of Baron Emanuel Swedenborg (1688—1772). In the realm of science Swedenborg possessed that extraordinary genius which anticipates discoveries and inventions by centuries. Long before Laplace advanced his nebular hypothesis, this son of a theological professor at Upsala had formulated the identical theory, faulty as modern investigation has shown it to be. A century and a half before any other physiologist he demonstrated that the motion of the brain synchronizes with respiration and not with the circulation of the blood. It is claimed that his theories in regard to the functions of the spinal cord and the ductless glands harmonize with recent investigation. He was a pioneer in paleontology, an expert in metallurgy, a mathematician of such renown that he was offered the chair in this science at the University of Upsala, and a parliamentarian who dealt with such strikingly modem topics as currency, balance of trade, liquor laws. He was far ahead of his time in his theories on light and cosmic atoms, as well as in a half-dozen more complicated scientific hypotheses. He invented an ear-trumpet for the deaf, eliminated smoky chimneys, improved defective stoves, and even sketched an airplane which in some respects is a prototype of our monoplane.
How constructive his career would have been if he had restricted the researches of his prodigious mind to science! Instead, after reaching middle age, he substituted psychic and spiritual investigation for these concrete studies. Here the debacle started. The heavens were opened to him, he claimed, by the personal manifestation of the Lord. He insisted that he was called by the Lord God "to unfold the spiritual signs of the Holy Scriptures." What he unfolded was anything but spiritual and Scriptural. He denies the inspiration of thirty-two of the sixty-six books of the Bible, brands its literal sense as unholy, and by his allegorical interpretation reduces it to absurdity. He misinterprets the Trinity, overrules the omnipotence of God, contradicts the Christian doctrine of redemption, rejects the verities of the Resurrection, and denies other basic teachings of Scripture.
Parallel in the depths of its descent from revealed truth is his speculation regarding marriage, with which his acquaintance, unlike that in his scientific researches, was wholly theoretical. Swedenborg was a bachelor. The translation of one of his voluminous treatises has been labeled "one of the most obscene and impure books in the English language. . . . Many parts of it, like 'the perversions practiced in the worship of Hindu idols, are too impure to be presented to the reader's eye."
However strenuously Swedenborg's followers today may squirm under this indictment of their patron's creed; however insistently they may try to spiritualize or condone, the absolute fact remains that not once, but repeatedly Emanuel Swedenborg taught that those who for various causes cannot enter marriage should nevertheless be permitted to enjoy its intimacies.
I cannot print on these pages the exact words in which this debauch is set forth by Swedenborg. Nor will I mention the sanction that his writings offer to procedures too delicate to be recorded. Suffice it to say that doctrines of plurality of wives, easy divorce, 'mild adulteries," lasciviousness, a sensual Mohammedan heaven, are the least of these glaring errors. One cannot but wonder, reading the excrescences of this man, who on his death-bed requested Communion, how his followers in the Church of the New Jerusalem can attempt to spiritualize these gross immoralities.
Another woman destined to become the founder of an anti-marriage sect was Ann Lee. Her own married life was tragic. Her four children died in rapid succession, and her husband later deserted her. Long before this separation she had allegedly received revelations against. marriage and had been arrested for preaching that wedded life was merely carnal and should be disavowed in preparation for Christ's second coming. While imprisoned in Manchester, England, she spoke to four examining clergymen in seventy-two different languages — at least according to her own story — and received another vision telling her that she was a second incarnation of Christ and the head of all women as Christ was the head of all men. As the father spirit was manifested through Jesus, so the mother spirit was to be manifested through her. She emigrated to America in 1774 to promote the spread of her church, called "the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming" or designated by unsympathetic observers as "the Shaking Quakers" or "the Shakers," because of the gyrations and contortions in which she and her followers often indulged under the ecstasy of religious excitement.
Rejecting the deity of Christ and the authority of the Scriptures, "Mother Lee" and her followers stressed virginal purity and insisted that there was to be no marriage or giving in marriage. The Shakers claim that the greatest cause of moral debasement is matrimony; their followers live apart in communal settlements, men and women segregated and guarded by untiring vigilance. This suicidal doctrine has of course brought them perilously close to the edge of extinction. Their rapid decline may be shown by the fact that, according to government census, in 1916 there were twelve Shaker churches, with 367 members, while ten years later, in 1926, these figures had been cut in half, only six Shaker churches, with 192 members, remaining. On several occasions I visited their now extinct colony at Lebanon, New Hampshire, and spoke with the patriarchal inmates. I have never been able to leave without the lasting impression that this dying remnant tragically symbolizes the folly of nullifying the matrimonial institutions of God.
Similarly ascetic is the House of David at Benton Harbor, Michigan, perhaps best known to the readers because of its long bearded baseball team and the sordid trial of Benjamin Purnell, who claimed to be the seventh and consuming messenger prophesied in Rev. 10:7. Declaring that the birth of children is sinful and therefore to be avoided, that marriage must be purely spiritual, Purnell, under the guise of a higher religion, deliberately contradicted his theories and was banished from his own colony because of immorality. Another one of the self-incriminations with which the salesmen of celibacy have burdened themselves!
Thus this procession of counterfeits of Christianity marches on, with leaders like "Judge" Rutherford of "millions-now-living-will-never-die" fame (whose wife was finally granted a divorce after five years of scandal); with representatives of the type of Mrs. Semple-McPherson-Hutton, whose multiple matrimonial careers and divorces are common knowledge. All these, parading in the name of religion and under the guise of special revelation, by example or direct precept, have torn God's sacred gift of holy matrimony from its Scriptural shrine. They have loaded themselves down with the millstones of offense while posing as liberating teachers of humanity.