Exit Dowie

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 11, 14 March 1907, Page 23

Exit Dowie

John Alexander Dowie— religion-maker, city builder, and autocrat?— has c passed out.' His flame of life went out like a smoky rush-light. His last months were months of failure, deposition, violent quarrels, paralysis, physical wreck, and mental eclipse ; and his last hours (if the cables speak truly) were vibrant with gfreat 'bursts of bis old wild invective against his enemies. But it was, we hope, the poor, jolted intellect that spoke at the last, not the sane and self-possessed dying man that was conscious of his passing and of all that it implied. As a maker of ' sport ' or ' fancy ' religions, Dowie was merely a link in a chain of freakish sequence that has extended without a break from the Reformation to our day. From the- Anabaptists to the Disciples of Free Love, from the Muggletonians to the Dukhoubors, from the Southoottians to the Eddyites— all alike have found

their charter in the Reformed principle that makes the private opinion of even a Hodge or a Colin Clout the court of final, appeal, for Hodge or Colin, in matters of faith and morals. Johanna South-cott and Joseph Smith and John Alexander Dowie built up their religious systems on the same shifting and' sandy foundation as did their spiritual forefathers, the Reformers -of the sixteenth century. In the process of sorfe ing out and picking and choosing, some of them retained more, some less, of the Christianity of Christ. That' is about the only difference among them all : it was merely a question of mixture— how much of man and -how little of Christ went to make up the -new systems 1 . For the rest, the more preposterous the claims of the new Reformers, the more sudden seems to he their success. And it seems to be in no way "marred by the gross obtrusion of the financial element. Johanna Southcott, a domestic servant, pretending' to be about 5 to give birth to the Prince of Peace, piled the shekels high by selling to her adherents thousands of passports to heaven. Joseph Smith

rose to wealth on Ms new ' revelation.' Dowie—professing to be the second Elijah— boldly imitated Smith in.' building a new city, and „ when he « passed in his checks ' was probably in- very truth a millionaire. His will disposes (according to the cables) of over four million pounds of property—although the Zionist officials declare that much of it is imaginary. He _ may have been what Charcot calls a man of ' the fixed idea '—a little crazy, perhaps, in some lobe or other of his 'brain* Or in Zion City he may have bitten off a bigger financial proposition ' than he could well chew. But however that" may be, the cabled description 'of him ' seems not much of a misfit — ' the most astounding spiritual adventurer of the nineteenth century.' '