Thanks to Darren Russell for providing this excerpt of an editorial about the True Followers
Church. It is totally the opinions of an outsider looking at the church.
Last April, Mr. Russell wrote an article explaining his reasons for faith healing. Tomorrow, January 18, I will publish a follow up article by him on the same subject.
* * * * *
By R. W. Gilbert
The Sunday State Journal, July 4, 1909,
excerpted from Editorial page.
Down near Hutchinson, Kansas,
there remains still some of that faith which is the salt of the earth. A group
of fanatics dubbing themselves “The True Followers of Christ,” have begun to
actually and literally follow the teachings of The New Testament. Of course we
all do this so far as is consistent with our business interests, and the
welfare of our families, but these people, who are in the strictest sense
heretics-that is more religious than their brethren- follow the New Testament
to their own and children's undoing. These are the sort of people that are
really dangerous to conventional Christianity and ought to be sent to the
asylum or burned at the stake or something of the kind.
Among other things requiring
splendid courage, truly heroic faith, these people will take a live rattlesnake
in their hands “in the name of Christ” and let it bite them, with even greater
courage they will hand it to their sons and dear ones and let it also bite
them. Think of it! In this cautious, cold, skeptical twentieth century, with
it's timid worship of the safe and sane, it's Laodicean faiths and it's still
more moderate heterodoxies, there are men and women and children who are voluntarily
risking their lives, voluntarily submitting their bodies to torture for the
sake of a few words of Jesus Christ. Ignorant, absurd, irrational, criminal?
Certainly, so were the prophets before them. Certainly, for their Kingdom is
not of this world. Certainly, for they are really religious.
The rattlesnake test? It is not
such a bad one after all. The man who endured such a test successfully would be
worth something, would be worth a whole conference of ecclesiastical side
steppers and stand patters. Such a man would be an excellent addition to the
United States Senate just now...he would do what he thought was right in a
homely, straightforward way, he would say exactly what he pleased, and he would
not give a whoop if the president and both parties and all the crowned heads of
Europe were arrayed against him. Simply because he would be religious.
Another reason why the
rattlesnake test would be a good one to apply to the modern world is that there
are so many things in the modern world worse than rattlesnakes. There are so
many deaths in the modern world more dreadful than death from the bite of a
serpent. For at the worst a rattlesnake can only make your body swell up and
die, but the sins which folks introduce into their houses without the slightest
qualms may make their souls swell up and die.
So much for the “Followers of
Christ.” They will soon be wiped out, or conform (which is an ignoble method of
being wiped out) and go the way of the Doweyites and Doukhobors and such like
folks who follow the Bible with a crazy consistency. But the expediently
orthodox person and the prudently heretical person will remain with us and keep
up their sham battles. They will do no particular harm or good to the young
people, as young people want above all to be interested and flabby folk are not
wont to be interesting. A narrow minded bigoted zealot will make converts
because he believes in something with all his might...but the tolerant preacher
and the religious “expert” will make no converts for the simple reason that you
can not make something out of nothing. There is not the slightest danger that
the professor who is personally unconvinced will “create conviction,” whereas
the man of original religious endowment will create conviction whether he
wishes to or no. God has made heaven for his saints, and hell for his enemies,
but only He knows what fate is reserved for the folks who merely “study
religious phenomena.”
…
But men were made to do better
than they know how, to be considerably bigger propositions than harmless
skeptics. They must be believers, they must be willing to adventure everything
on the turn of the die, they must somehow or another drop their anchor into the
unseen and cease their drifting and driveling, or be forever not worth
mentioning in an obituary or otherwhere . The one thing that matters is belief,
the attitude you face life in. If you grasp the rattlesnake boldly, if you face
death and pain without flinching, then everything else is of little account. If
you dodge and shrink and make objections and slip back into an easy-going
self-indulgent life, then who cares how learned or rich or gentlemanly you may
be. And the only real dynamic courage and hope and joy that I know of is
religion. We praise practicality and efficiency and deplore other worldliness,
but the most faith in the Christ of the New Testament.
