Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  They offered hospitality to the Bullardites, as they did to all visitors. The two groups shared a rejection of the world’s pleasures and a yearning for salvation. But while the Pilgrims were filthy, the Shakers venerated cleanliness. The Pilgrims, as one chaste Shaker recorded in her diary, “pretend to marry a woman in God & by doing sanctify the flesh.” The Shakers constructed buildings with wide hallways to prevent even inadvertent contact between male and female. Repulsed by what he found, Bullard shook the dust from his feet and continued westward.

  The life of Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, paralleled that of Jemima Wilkinson. A blacksmith’s daughter from Manchester, England, Lee fell under the influence of the Shaking Quakers whose “operations of the spirit” included violent trembling and writhing. The death of four successive children convinced her that “the marriage of the flesh is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

  Jailed for blasphemy, consumed by divine revelation, Lee saw that she was the incarnation of the Word of God. She proclaimed the feminine church. “It is not I that speak,” she declared, “it is Christ who dwells in me.” A vision brought her to America just before the Revolution. She and her followers gained a reputation. “They run about in the woods and elsewhere hooting and tooting like owls,” one rumor had it. They made no excuses. “We are the people who turn the world upside down,” the Shakers proclaimed.

  In 1780, Lee, also known as Mother Ann, converted the Baptist evangelist Joseph Meacham. She told him that God had both a male and a female nature and would soon appear on earth as a woman. She undertook a preaching tour of New England, conveying an emotional brand of Christianity. “In admonition she was quick, sharp, and powerful as lightning,” a follower noted. “When she rejoiced, her joy was unspeakable . . . when she wept, it seemed enough to melt a heart of stone.”

  But the Shakers’ celibacy, refusal to bear arms, and devotion to their English-born leader rankled a population still in the midst of war against Britain. Protestant ministers railed against her and mobs harassed her followers. In Petersham, Massachusetts, they dragged her from her horse, beat her, tore her clothing to see if she was really a woman, and sent her to prison for six months.

  Mother Ann died in 1784. Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright, another early convert, took charge. They organized self-sufficient villages, beginning with one in New Lebanon. Those who committed themselves turned over all their property to the group. “They have everything in common,” a visitor wrote. “How they manage with their combs and toothbrushes, I did not presume to ask.”

  After Joseph Meacham’s death in 1796, Mother Lucy led the sect for a quarter century. The Shakers established communities in eastern New England, along the region of the Erie Canal, and farther west. Devotees were attracted to the Shakers’ unique mixture of hard work, communal sharing, and spiritual ecstasy. Renunciation, a penance for some, was a liberation for others. A Shaker elder declared, “The joys of the celibate life are far greater than I can make you know. They are indescribable.”

  Folks from Palmyra sometimes journeyed eighteen miles on a Sunday evening to a Shaker community in Sodus, on the shore of Lake Ontario. If the Smith family did not make the journey, they certainly heard reports from those who did. Inside their meeting hall, the Shakers set aside seating for visitors. They knew some spectators would laugh, but the services gave them an opportunity to proselytize their wonderful message.

  The Shaker men and women gathered in two groups. First they intoned a strange chant, “accompanied by a gentle stamping of the feet.” Then they repeatedly marched toward the audience, wheeled and marched away. All this they did “with the utmost gravity,” their faces blank, bodies rigid. They began “to whisk around with greatest rapidity, like so many dervishes.” They skipped in concentric circles, the men and women revolving in opposite directions, never touching. They moved “with a sort of galvanized hop, hands paddling like fins and voices chanting wild airs.”

  They shook themselves violently from head to foot, every limb moving “in a sort of tremulous motion.” Some went into “violent hystericks” that brought to mind “the wild and maddened tenants of Bedlam.” A Shaker elder declared that their rituals burned up the carnality and greed natural to humankind and left behind “delightful feelings.”

  Some onlookers found the display “unearthly, oppressive, and bewildering.” For others, the Shakers’ beliefs and example opened new possibilities of salvation. “All appeared happy,” a visitor noted, “and upon each face rested the light of dignified serenity.” A few who came to watch stayed to join.

  Joseph Smith Jr., whose mind absorbed influences from all directions, knew about the strange habits of the Shakers, about the outlandishness of Isaac Bullard’s Pilgrims, and about the experimental spirituality of other groups along the frontier. Like most believers of his day, he understood that life on earth was a path to an everlasting existence. Everything else—acquisition, renown, camaraderie, requited love, financial security, political power—was dross, or worse, an occasion of sin. Those whose eyes were open understood that eternity was all. And, as Emily Dickinson, herself born into the midst of this holy turmoil, would declare: “All—is the price of All.”

  The Spirit of God

  It was a marvelous time to be a Christian in America. Preachers everywhere, especially those west of the Appalachians, could feel the rising waves of spiritual enthusiasm. On the frontier, youth predominated, and the drug of choice for young adventurers was religion. In 1821, Charles Finney left behind his promising law career to do God’s work.

  It was a mark of his restless energy that he would, at twenty-nine, take up a profession of which he had no experience. Many years of grueling theological training were the usual requirement to become a minister. Finney’s sudden ardor for religion, combined with his native intelligence, enabled him to squeeze all the preparation he felt he needed into less than two years. At the end of 1823, Presbyterian officials in northern New York gave him a provisional license as an evangelist. He would have no permanent congregation, but would minister to isolated settlements. Finney traveled the frontier area around the western edge of the Adirondack Mountains. He preached “in school houses, and barns and groves, as best I could.”

  The new preacher was convinced of the urgency of his mission. Finney grieved over the sinners who died unredeemed and who “have gone down to hell, while the church has been dreaming.” He was willing to do whatever it took to rescue souls before their terrifying descent.

  For more than two years, Finney wore himself out organizing rural revivals. He preached, counseled, exhorted folks to repent, demanded that they embrace Jesus and give themselves over to the shattering glory of Christian rebirth. In one church, he challenged congregants to rise to their feet if they accepted Jesus. Nobody moved. “You have taken your stand,” Finney blustered angrily. “You have rejected Christ and his Gospel.” Compromise was not his style. When a young woman said she loved God, Finney shook his fist in her face. “You lie!” he told her. “You ought to go to hell.”

  He preached four times a week without notes or outline. He knew what he wanted to say, and he drove home his message with devastating effect. Winter, when the demands of farming slackened, was revival season. He trekked from one remote hamlet to the next through thigh-deep snow. In the northern New York village of Antwerp, as Finney urged repentance, membership in the Presbyterian Church leaped from sixteen to fifty-six in three months.

  Finney developed a double-barreled approach to his work that combined hard logic and hot feeling. He preached like a lawyer convincing a jury. His arguments left his listeners unable to defend their refusal of Christ’s love. Finney demanded a response. “You admit that what I preach is the Gospel,” he intoned. “Now will you receive it?”

  Yet he knew that it was more important to win hearts than minds. His own emotional fervor infected his congregation. “The Spirit of God came upo
n me with such power, that it was like opening a battery upon them,” he said of one meeting. While preaching at Antwerp, he sensed that “something flashed over the congregation.” It was a “kind of shimmering.” His listeners, overcome, “began to fall from their seats; and they fell in every direction, and cried for mercy. If I had a sword in each hand, I could not have cut them off their seats as fast as they fell.”

  In an instant, he himself began “laughing in a most spasmodic manner.” He covered his face with a handkerchief, worried that the congregants might not understand that it was “irrepressible, holy joy that made me laugh.”

  His work in the backcountry aroused opposition as well as excitement. Conservatives saw in him a blasphemer. Some threatened to tar and feather him. A man who was “greatly enraged” by the unorthodox goings-on attended a service in a rural schoolhouse armed with a pistol and intent on killing the evangelist. But Finney’s preaching got to him first. Before he could pull his gun, the man fell from his pew, groaning that he was sinking into hell.

  In three months, Finney delivered seventy-seven sermons, held prayer meetings every few days, and visited four hundred sixty-nine homes to pray with those swept up in the revivals. He fell ill from the exertion and began coughing blood. In July 1824, he received his official ordination as a Presbyterian minister.

  That October, he finally married Lydia Andrews. Now thirty-two, Finney was twelve years older than his new wife, but she was his senior in religion, having converted at the age of eleven. After the wedding, she stayed with her parents in Whitesboro, just outside Utica. Charles went north to find them a home near Watertown. Called to oversee another revival, he delayed fetching his new bride. Eternal souls urgently depended on him. He stayed until spring before finally reuniting with the patient Lydia.

  Everywhere he went, Finney insisted that although God might choose the elect, every man and woman was a free agent. Bad choices, not innate depravity, were what made mankind corrupt. “A sinner under the influence of the Spirit of God,” he said, “is just as free as a jury under the arguments of an advocate.” He reminded farmers that although God was indeed sovereign, they did not wait for the Almighty to “give them a crop only when it pleases him.” They worked at it.

  Finney understood that the U.S. Constitution’s ban on federal support of religion had brought about a revolution in America’s churches. The states were also in the process of weaning congregations from their tax revenues: in 1833, Massachusetts would be the last state to end public subsidies of religion. Citizens were left to choose their own faith. The numerous denominations had to compete for members and for their contributions.

  The concept of market competition, then penetrating into more and more facets of American life, now applied to religion as well. Americans were free people, salvation a matter of choice. Finney shaped his message accordingly. “Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted,” he declared.

  Finney gained experience in the hinterlands, but he soon felt the need to bring his message to the more densely settled region along the new Erie Canal, where many more souls needed saving. He visited his old mentor George Gale at the town of Western, just north of Utica. Gale invited him to preach a revival in his church.

  What the Presbyterians of Western got was a bombshell. They were accustomed to erudite, yawn-inducing explications of Scripture from pastors whose minds were more attuned to the intricacies of theology than to the urgency of salvation. The effect of Finney’s words, one observer noted, was “like cannonballs through a basket of eggs.” His clear voice and hypnotic gaze brought home the commonsense quality of his preaching. His sermons startled listeners out of their torpor and awakened in them a desperate desire to be saved.

  Soon, congregants were “falling under the power of God,” sinking to the floor, fainting. Conversion followed conversion; dead churches sprang to life. In a day when religion was headline news, Charles Finney was becoming a sensation. People flocked to Western from Rome and other nearby cities to hear this dynamic new preacher.

  “Oh, God, smite that wicked man, that hardened sinner,” Finney begged, pointing his long finger. “God Almighty, shake him over hell!”

  Clouds of Heaven

  Men and women have at times imagined that the current corrupt age is a prelude to great change. Some become convinced that what lies ahead sparkles with happiness and sunshine. Others foresee darkness, the death of the world, the end.

  Early Christians were certain of Christ’s promised return, which they sensed was imminent. This Second Advent would be accompanied by the great cataclysm described in the Gospels and hinted at in the prophetic books. The sun would darken, trumpets would sound, and Jesus would establish His thousand-year earthly kingdom.

  Later, apocalyptic events came to be seen in a spiritual light, not as physical realities. St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin in the fourth century, deemed the Book of Revelation to contain “as many mysteries as it does words.” Church fathers largely ignored the ominous prophecies. During the Middle Ages, forecasting a literal Apocalypse constituted heresy.

  But the undercurrent remained. Christian visionaries ventured guesses about the timing of the end. Some thought that, as Peter’s epistle taught, “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” Christ would appear “in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” The dead would literally rise from their graves, and those who were saved would be “caught up to meet the Lord in the air.” It would happen not in a dream but in the world of flesh and blood, of pain and ecstasy.

  William Miller, shaken by his war experience and by his conversion to faith, was particularly sensitive to the unease of his times. In trying to understand it, he had turned to the source of all truth. The Bible, he said, was a “feast of reason.” Paradoxically, Miller also understood that prophecies “always have a figurative meaning.” When the Scriptures said Jews they meant Christians; when they said days, they meant years. The verses whispered to him in chorus. Mountains suggested governments, beasts referred to kingdoms, waters to people, the papacy was the Antichrist, a leopard stood for Greece.

  Yes, an interpreter needed discernment to penetrate the dreamscape, but a common man using common sense could do it. “The Bible is a system of revealed truths, so clearly and simply given, that the ‘wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein,’” Miller wrote, paraphrasing Isaiah.

  Miller immersed himself in the phantasmagoria of the Book of Revelation—the beasts full of eyes within, the angel standing in the sun, death mounted on a pale horse. “How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice and the transgression of desolation?” Daniel asked. The Lord answered: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” Miller knew what all this meant.

  He understood the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew’s Gospel. The five foolish virgins brought no oil for their lamps when they went to meet the bridegroom. The midnight cry rang out, “The bridegroom cometh!,” and they missed their chance to attend the marriage feast. The bridegroom was Christ, the arrival his second coming. Preparation was essential.

  In 1818, after two years of intense study, Miller came to a conclusion. He had looked into holy Scripture and seen that “the end of all things was clearly and emphatically predicted, both as to time and manner.” His discovery left him wide-eyed with awe and trepidation. “I believe,” he finally declared, “that the second coming of Jesus Christ is near, even at the door . . . on or before 1843.”

  If this was true, did it mean he had a responsibility to warn others, to raise the midnight cry? The unassuming farmer agonized over the question. For now, he told no one of the impending calamity. Yet the knowledge burned in his heart.

  Beyond Description

  On September
21, 1823, Joseph Smith and his family spent the evening speculating about eternity. Amid flickering candlelight, they discussed the Bible and the claims of competing religious faiths. Joseph, almost eighteen now, kept the memory of his earlier vision locked in his heart. He had refused to join any of the churches, all of which he had been told were abominable.

  Joseph was an ordinary teenager. With his striking blue eyes and aquiline nose, he had become “a great favorite with the ladies.” Like almost all males of the time, he occasionally drank too much. He “fell into many foolish errors.” Talk of religion sometimes left him feeling guilty over his entanglement with the “vanities of the world.”

  That evening, he and his siblings mounted the narrow stairs to the sleeping loft under the pitched roof. With the candle out, the room descended into darkness. The air was tangy with the smell of dirty feet and sweaty work clothes. The silence bottomed out in the whispering, whistling breath of sleepy children. Joseph’s mind would give him no rest. His thoughts kept reaching into the dark, into celestial realms.

  He tossed and turned. Achingly aware of his follies and sins, he prayed for forgiveness. His eyes grew sensitive to the gloom. An eerie brightness began to erase the shadows. Morning? Moonlight? No, the unearthly glow intensified, illuminating the chamber like day. The radiance etched every object, every rafter, every sleeping face. He saw a person by the door in a robe of exquisite whiteness, a figure “glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning.”

  The individual spoke to him, fired words into his head like shots from a pistol. He was Moroni, a resurrected being. He caused immense ideas to flood Joseph’s mind. The youth saw the great judgments and desolations that would afflict the present generation. Moroni conveyed a revelation from God that commanded Joseph to perform a fabulous, urgent mission. Then he silently gathered the light into himself and ascended toward heaven. The boy stared after him, slack-jawed with amazement.