Fulfilment of a Grand Prophecy - Hazrat Ahmad’s Challenge to John Alexander Dowie — Page 77
Fulfillment of a Grand Prophecy 81. THE OUTLOOK - THE WEEK, April 14, 1906,. ZION IN A FERMENT. The troubles which have been smoldering in. John Alexander Dowie's community, for many months, this last week broke out into flames. The leader of the strange religious cult which is known as the Christian Catholic Church of Zion has been an autocrat from the beginning. He has displayed great skill in selecting from various sources the most effective devices for impressing with a sense of his power the sort of people whom he has succeeded in gathering together. Faith healing combined with time-clock devices for recording prayers, elaborate ritual skillfully combined with the informality of revival services, great industrial schemes combined with an arrangement by which the various undertakings are vested in him personally, observances of fasts and certain forms of abstinence combined with appeals to some of the crudest passions and desires for selfindulgence, a complicated organism combined with a retention of supreme power for himself, constitute some of the methods by which he has built up a city in Illinois and has created for himself a position which combines the function of an army general, an ecclesiastical patriarch, a religious prophet, a miracle-worker, a fortune-teller, and a corporation magnate. Financial adverses seem now to be the cause of this autocrat's present difficulties. Added to these are his physical disability, which has shaken the faith of some of his followers in the superabundance of his power to deal with the ills of the human flesh, and the suspicions of his subordinates in office that he is inclined toward polygamy. From the contradictory reports in the daily papers this much at least appears: that he is separated from his wife and son, and that divorce proceedings have been or about to be commenced; that the community sympathies with the wife; that the lieutenant to whom in his temporary absence he gave a power of attorney involving complete control of the property of the community has used this power to deed the property to a different representative of Zion; and this action has been accompanied by a communication from the new leader informing him that he has been suspended from office. What he may accomplish by his personal presence when he reaches Zion it is impossible to say. At other critical states in his career he has succeeded in rescuing himself from very grave difficulties; but now, with his most trusted lieutenants and even his wife and his son attacking him with bitterness and determination, he is in a position the only outcome of which appears to mean either his own retirement or the disintegration of the community he has constructed. The present condition of. Dowieism illustrates the fact that superstition has within itself elements which bring it to destruction.