Eleven years later, a man called Hacket, who had proclaimed himself the Supreme Lord of the World, was executed for treason, threatening God to rend his throne in two if He did not save him. God declined to intervene.
In the reign of Charles I, a curious sect known as Ranters preached many of the same doctrines as the Brethren of the Free Spirit: that sin was an illusion, and that therefore adultery, drunkenness, swearing and even theft were not crimes at all. In 1650, Cromwell tried to suppress them with a Blasphemy Act, but was only partly successful. On the other hand, a remarkable prophet named George Fox, who was wandering around England at the same time, and attacking organized religion as contemptuously as any messiah in history, succeeded in impressing Oliver Cromwell, and went on to become the founder of the Quakers, or Society of Friends. (The word “quaker” was applied contemptuously, meaning that they quaked with fear as they talked about the Wrath to Come.)
His friend and disciple James Naylor was less lucky. Female disciples convinced him that he was the Messiah, and he allowed them to persuade him to ride into Bristol as Christ had ridden into Jerusalem. Women shouted “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Israel”, and threw down their cloaks before his horse’s hoofs. He was promptly arrested. Tried in November 1656, he admitted to the judges that he was the Son of God as well as a prophet, and his female disciples assured the judges that this was so. He was sentenced to have his tongue burnt through, and to be branded on the forehead with a letter B for Blasphemer. After that, he was whipped and imprisoned in a damp cell for three years.
It ruined his health, and he died in 1660, soon after his release, when setting out on a preaching expedition. And so another promising messiah experienced the downfall that seems inevitable for prophets who succumb to delusions of grandeur.
Chapter Five
Messiahs in the Land of Opportunity
After the cruelty and bloodshed of the past two chapters, it is a relief to emerge into the calmer waters of the nineteenth century, when a messiah was no longer in danger of being tortured or burnt at the stake. We are in a new atmosphere of tolerance – and of gullibility: an observation that is perfectly illustrated by the amazing case of Saint Matthias.
The Poisonous Prophet
Mathews discovered the power of belief early in life. In 1797, when he was a nine-year-old, he decided that the fruit and sweets being shared around his class at school rightfully belonged to him. He told the other children that his uncle, the “Man of the Thunder”, lived in a passing storm cloud and that he would be angry if the sweets were not all given to his nephew. A moment later, thunder rumbled across the sky and Robert received an armful of goodies from his frightened classmates.
What to most children might only have been an amusing confidence trick had a deeper impact on Robert Mathews. He developed an increasing conviction that he was one of the “chosen”. As part of his training for his mission he decided to become a carter’s apprentice when he was sixteen on the grounds that it was a “divine trade”.
After his apprenticeship he wandered the state, plying his trade and teaching his interpretation of the gospel. His frenetic preaching style earned him the nickname “Jumpin’ Jesus” and he would often stand up in church and dispute with the preacher. He married and settled down in Albany, New York State.
After several years of relatively quiet home living, Mathews suddenly decided that he must take his children “out into the wilderness”, and set off for the deep woods before his distraught wife could stop him. Fortunately, he and his half-starved children were found by a search party of concerned neighbours a few days later. Mathews was apparently relieved to have the children taken to safety, but insisted on staying in the woods himself. It was here, a few days later, that he received the divine revelation that he was in fact the reincarnation of Saint Matthew and was thenceforth to preach the new message – as revealed to him personally by God – as the Prophet Matthias.
At about this time a similar revelation occurred to Elijah Pierson, a rich and successful New York businessman, although in a considerably less biblical setting. He was sitting on an omnibus travelling down Wall Street, when an angel appeared to him alone and proclaimed that he was the reincarnation of the Prophet Elijah and henceforth he must be about the Lord’s work.
Pierson immediately set about organizing a Holy Club, recruiting members from many who had become disillusioned with orthodox Christianity. He also set up a mission in the Bowery Hill red light district to bring the prostitutes to the Lord because, he said, they were “the descendants of Mary Magdalen”.
When his wife became seriously ill Pierson assured her and his flock that, should she pass on, she would be resurrected to help continue their work. She died as her husband sat praying over her fervently and anointing her with oils. When this failed to revive her, Pierson announced that he had seen a vision of the Prophet of the Lord whose coming would set all to rights. He instructed his flock and even his household staff to be in readiness for the great event.
Meanwhile, the Prophet Matthias was establishing himself. Having grown a suitably bushy beard and changed his preaching style from the frenetic to the portentous, he travelled to New York in search of a rich benefactor. Proclaiming his message of vegetarianism, temperance and faith in the word of the Lord, he made a convert of a wealthy businessman called Mills.
Convinced that Matthias was a genuine prophet, Mills virtually begged him to accept money. Saint Matthias was robed in finest purple silk with trappings to match. Mills was also ordered to commission a set of plates mounted with the lion of the tribe of Judah and two silver chalices for the Prophet’s exclusive use.
Unfortunately for Saint Matthias, Mills’s family were less than enthusiastic about the turn of events; they had Mills packed off to the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum. When Matthias threatened them with Hell and Damnation they arranged to have him committed to the Department of the Insane Poor at Bellevue Hospital. After an ignominious period behind bars he was released. But he had enjoyed his period of affluence so much that he determined that this was how he intended to live in the future. He now went to call on a friend of Mr Mills, one Elijah Pierson.
When he arrived at Pierson’s house the door was answered by the black cook, Isabella, who was a Holy Club convert. She asked him timorously, “Art thou the Lord?”
“I am,” he boomed without hesitation and strode in.
Pierson spoke to the stranger for several hours, by the end of which time he was convinced Matthias was he who was foretold. The Prophet rewarded his faith by proclaiming that Pierson was not only the reincarnation of the Prophet Elijah, but also of John the Baptist. Matthias then settled into his new patron’s home and proceeded to live like a king.
The next convert was a well-off friend of Pierson’s, Benjamin Folger. Folger was at first alarmed about the holy man and warned his friend of “the workings of false prophets”, but Matthias’s combination of bombast and biblical quotation soon won him over. As one of his first contributions to the new spiritual kingdom, Folger purchased Matthias a jewel-encrusted sword with which to “smite the devil” and yet more purple robes, this time trimmed with silver and gold.
In fact, the Prophet’s spiritual kingdom seemed to demand large amounts of material wealth. In September 1822, he was taken for a trip to Mr and Mrs Folger’s summer home at Sing Sing. He liked it very much and informed them that he had received a vision to the effect that Folger was to give the house to the servant of the Lord. His disciple faithfully complied, as did Elijah Pierson when the Prophet demanded the deeds to his luxurious house on Third Street, New York, together with its contents.
It was not long before all of Pierson’s and Folger’s property had been placed at the Prophet’s disposal, as well as tens of thousands of dollars. Thus fortified against the works of the devil, Saint Matthias decided that he and his flock of elect should all move to Mount Zion – his name for Folger’s summer home in Sing Sing. The elect consisted of Pierson and his daughter Eliz
abeth, the Folgers and their children and Isabella, the devout black cook who had first recognized the Prophet of the Lord.
Unfortunately, there was little peace at Mount Zion. Comfort inspired Saint Matthias to behave like a tyrant. Lying at ease all day, served like a sultan, he would only assume the vertical position to berate his disciples. Any sign of backsliding or hint of dissent would unleash a torrent of abuse and recrimination. Indeed, his Hell and Damnation sermons often lasted so long that one started at breakfast would leave his followers no time to wash the dishes for lunch.
He also devised some unusual ceremonies – for example, he would bathe in a tub of water, then call his naked disciples to gather about him so that he could sprinkle them with the water he had thus purified.
At some point he decided that Mrs Folger was his soulmate and the “Mother of the Kingdom”, explaining to her husband that she should be relinquished to him. As Folger wavered, his wife suddenly announced that she had seen a vision that confirmed that she was the Prophet’s wife and a virgin in the sight of Heaven; under such divine pressure the unhappy Folger felt obliged to agree. As a consolation prize, Matthias offered him his own daughter, then living with her mother and husband in Albany. Oddly enough the Prophet’s son-in-law agreed to the arrangement – at least, after Folger had bribed him with a gold watch.
Soon the goings-on began to deeply worry Elijah/St John Pierson. Being forced to do menial work was not how he saw the role of a double prophet, and he began to experience the sin of doubt. After violent arguments with the Prophet he left Mount Zion, taking his daughter and the deeds to his house in Westchester County. But his respite was only temporary. Within a week Saint Matthias and his entourage had come to visit.
In what seemed a peace gesture, Matthias went out to pick a big bowl of blackberries, a favourite dessert of Pierson’s. Two others tried a few at dinner, but said they tasted bitter and left them. Pierson, however, ate a good many and became very sick. He vomited continuously, suffered epileptic fits and became partially paralysed. The Prophet stood over the suffering man and declared that he had encouraged fifty devils to enter himself by his sin of dissent and those who tried to help him would suffer a similar fate. No doctor was sent for.
After two days Pierson seemed to recover enough to shuffle about the house, but the Prophet threatened damnation to any who communicated with the sick man. On the fifth day of his illness, Pierson was found lying on his bedroom floor in a coma. The Prophet ordered that he be placed on a pallet of straw and poured cold water over him to wake him from his “hellish sleep”. Not surprisingly, Pierson never regained consciousness and died eight days after he had eaten the blackberries. The Prophet then acknowledged that he had indeed killed Pierson – by making a certain holy sign over him, a gesture that invariably led to the death of his enemies.
Despite such alarming manifestations of his power, the kingdom of Saint Matthias was falling apart. His soulmate (the ex-Mrs Folger) seemed to lose faith in him when she gave birth to their child – prophesied to be a son who would be heir to the kingdom – and it turned out to be a girl. Her ex-husband also seemed to experience doubt when he discovered that the Prophet had bankrupted him. Both asked Saint Matthias to leave their house. He complied reluctantly, but within a week he was back, threatening that sickness would follow if they turned from the light. They insisted and he left again. That same moming, the entire Folger family became sick with violent stomach cramps and continuous vomiting. Fortunately, they all recovered.
This time Matthias had gone too far. He was arrested and charged with murder, and in April 1835 his trial began. The Prophet, on entering the court, made his usual dramatic impression by declaring that those who dared sit in judgement on him were “Damned! Damned! DAMNED!” When the judge restored order he added contempt of court to the charge sheet.
Twelve years later, the Prophet would almost certainly have been found guilty of murder and attempted murder; both Pierson and the Folgers had showed every sign of arsenic poisoning. Indeed, Pierson’s exhumed body should have provided more than enough evidence to send Matthias to the gallows. But the Marsh test for arsenic was not invented until 1847 and American doctors seemed unfamiliar with other European. tests. Eventually the case dismissed for lack of evidence. The Prophet served only four months in jail for his contempt of court, and for assaulting his daughter (he had beaten her with a leather belt for being impiously rude to Mrs Folger).
After serving his sentence he went west, still proclaiming his sainthood, but his reputation preceded him. Newspaper revelations about life at Mount Zion had shocked and titillated readers throughout the United States, and his claims to near-divinity no longer convinced. Fortunately, he was no longer in need of money. He had taken eighty thousand dollars from Pierson alone, of which the daughter Elizabeth was able to recoup only seven thousand dollars through legal action.
In his later years he met Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church of the Latter Day Saints, and they talked all night. Smith later described him as “a brilliant intellect but a mind full of darkness”.
Smith himself was one of the rare – and unfortunate – prophets who arouse his fellow countrymen to murderous rage; his story forms an interesting contrast to that of the egregious Saint Matthew.
The Mormons
Smith, born in 1805, was the son of a Vermont farmer, and when he was ten, his father, Joseph senior, moved to Palmyra, New York, with his wife and nine children. It was a period of feverish religious activity in America, with various sects – Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist – expanding at an explosive rate as they made new converts. Joseph’s mother Lucy became a convert to Presbyterianism, which had been established by John Calvin in Geneva in 1536, as did two of Joseph’s brothers and his sister Sophionia. Joseph attended meetings of the various warring sects, and as he listened to them denouncing one another, he gave a great deal of thought to religion.
In the spring of 1820, after reading a passage in the Epistle of James which declared that those in perplexity should ask God, he went into a grove of trees to pray. There he had a revelation – a pillar of light descended, in which he saw two men; one of these pointed to the other and said: “This is my beloved son. Hear him!” Smith then asked God which sect he ought to join, and was told: “None of them.” They were all wrong, and all creeds were an abomination in His sight. When Joseph came to his senses he was Jying on his back. Back at home he told his mother that he had just learned that Presbyterianism was not true.
The revelation had no profound effect on him, and he later admitted that he continued to enjoy “jovial company” and to behave in a way that was not suitable for one who had been “called of God”.
Three and a half years later, on 21 September 1823, Joseph was saying his prayers in bed when the light appeared again, and he saw a man dressed in a white robe “whose feet did not touch the floor”. The visitor explained that he was an angel called Moroni, who went on to talk at length about the scriptures, then told Joseph that he had written a history of the ancient inhabitants of America on plates of gold. After this, Moroni ascended to heaven in a shaft of light. A few minutes later he reappeared, and repeated everything he had just said, then vanished as before. Soon he was back again, repeating it yet again. The next day, he reappeared as Joseph (in a state of understandable fatigue) was crossing a field, and described where the plates were to be found.
Obeying his instructions, Joseph went to a hill called Cumorah, about four miles away. On the top, he found a large stone; which he levered up with a pole. In the hole underneath was a box, and in this he found some gold plates, a breastplate, and a pair of silver spectacles – which Moroni had called Urim and Thummim – and which would enable him to translate the words on the gold plates.
Smith was not allowed to take them yet. The angel showed him a vision of the heavens, and also of the Prince of Darkness and his legions, then explained that Joseph must spend four years of preparation in order to become worthy of transl
ating the plates.
A Mormon gathering in Salt Lake City
In 1827, Smith was finally allowed to take the gold plates away with him. He carried them home in a borrowed buggy, but seems to have showed them to no one, not even his wife Emma, who went with him to collect them. Two months later, with fifty dollars presented by his first disciple, a farmer called Martin Harris, Smith and his wife went to Harmony, Pennsylvania, and there Joseph settled down to translating the plates with the aid of the silver spectacles. He did this behind a screen, so that no one actuallly saw the plates. Martin Harris called at some point, and took away a piece of paper with a transcription of some of the characters on it – they were apparently in a script called “reformed Egyptian” – and showed them to a New York professor named Anton, who gave him a certificate saying that the characters were genuine. But when he heard that they had been obtained from an angel Anton tore up his certificate.
The Book of Mormon
So The Book of Mormon came into existence. It told how America had been originally settled by people from the Tower of Babel in the fifth century AD. These settlers gradually degenerated into men of violence. Eleven hundred years later, more settlers arrived in Chile, including four brothers. From one of the brothers, who was fair, descended a white race, the Nephites; from the other three, who were dark, descended the Indians (or Lamanites). After his death on the cross, Jesus Christ appeared in America and preached the gospel. And in AD 385, after the Nephites were almost wiped out by the Lamanites near the Hill Cumorah, their prophet Mormon wrote the history, which was then buried in the hill.