God's Breath in Man and in Humane Society (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from God's Breath in Man and in Humane Society
A...)
Excerpt from God's Breath in Man and in Humane Society
A very ancient document, now much discredited, avers that God breathed into man the breath of life, and that he became a living soul. The con verse of that statement is the scientific one, that Nature breathed into man, and that he became a dominant and intelligent animal.
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The Joy bringer: Fifty Three Melodies of the One-in-twain. February-March, MDCCCLXXXVI
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Thomas Lake Harris was an English-born American mystic and poet. He was also preacher of the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York.
Background
Thomas Lake Harris was born on May 15, 1823, in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England. When he was about five years old his parents, Thomas and Annie (Lake) Harris, emigrated to America and settled in Utica, New York, where his father set up as grocer and auctioneer. Four years later Thomas’ mother died. His stepmother apparently treated him harshly and thus caused the boy to dwell much on the memory of his mother and to cherish her love imaginatively.
Career
Befriended by the Universalist minister of the town, though his parents were “strict Calvinistic Baptists, ” Thomas Harris went frequently to the minister’s house for instruction and finally lived there entirely. He wrote poetry and made several contributions to Universalist journals. In December 1845 he accepted a call to the pastorate of the Fourth Universalist Society in New York City. He became acquainted with Andrew Jackson Davis in 1847, who initiated him into the mysteries of mediumship and into the Harmonic philosophy, which Davis had constructed on a Swedenborgian basis. Under Davis’ influence, he organized in 1848 an Independent Christian Congregation in New York, of which Horace Greeley was a member. It was as a direct result of one of his sermons here that the New York Juvenile Asylum was founded.
In 1850, after the death of his wife, Harris abandoned his congregation and severed his connections with Davis. He was then associated for a time with James D. Scott and Ira S. Hitchcock who led a group of over a hundred followers to Mountain Cove, Fayette County, Virginia (now West Virginia), where they expected to await the second coming of Christ. The part Harris played in this little spiritualist community was apparently small, though he probably made some contributions to its publication, the Mountain Cove Journal. After it broke up, he wandered about for a while lecturing on spiritualism.
About 1850 Harris had begun to go into trances and while in communication with the celestial world to compose long mystic poems on the theme of celestial love. In this manner he dictated The Epic of the Starry Heaven (1854), A Lyric of the Morning Land (1855), and A Lyric of the Golden Age (1856). These poems were the first of a long series and laid the basis for his own distinctive teachings. He was attracted for a time by Swedenborgianism, but had begun to diverge from its beliefs when in May 1857 he founded a monthly journal, The Herald of Light, published until August 1861.
In 1859-1860 Harris went on a lecture tour to England, where he won the interest of Laurence Oliphant and his mother, Lady Oliphant, who later became his disciples. Upon his return to the United States, with a group of his followers who were seeking fitness for “the Brotherhood of the New Life, " he settled on a farm at Wassaic, New York. Two years later the community was moved to Amenia, New York, where it prospered and about 1865 was joined by Lady Oliphant and later by her son. At the instigation of Lady Oliphant a larger tract of land (1, 600 acres) was purchased at Brocton, near Dunkirk, New York, and the community was moved to this new location, called Salem-on-Erie.
Harris, the Oliphants, and the other members (about forty in all), invested heavily in this colony, which was at first organized on a semi-communistic plan and carried on farming and vine growing. The communistic plan soon gave way to a “family partnership” and this in turn to a “patriarchal” society, in which Harris, as “Father, ” held and administered all the property. This community was known as “The Use. " All its members denied Self completely and surrendered themselves to the Divine Use or purpose. Their distinctive practices were “open breathing, ” a kind of respiration by which the pivine Breath (or Holy Spirit) entered directly into the body; and a system of celibate marriage whereby each person was left free to live in spiritual union with his or her heavenly “counterpart. ”
In 1875, owing to a divergence between Harris and Oliphant, the community split; several of Harris’ followers sold out to Oliphant and moved with Harris to Santa Rosa, California, where they purchased a 1, 200-acre vineyard, which they called Fountain Grove. After 1881, when Oliphant broke away completely and recovered his share of the investment, Harris’ California estate became the official home of the group. In The New Republic (1891), he praised the efforts of Bellamy and the Utopian Socialists, and his Theosocialism, as there set forth, attempted to give a theological justification and religious motivation for a new social system.
After a visit to England in 1891, Harris moved to New York City, where he lived and wrote in retirement until his death. The most important of his numerous works, in addition to those mentioned above, are: Hymns of Spiritual Devotion (2 vols. , 1861); The Arcana of Christianity (3 vols. , 1858 - 78); The Lord, the Two-in-One, Declared, Manifested and Glorified (1876); The Wisdom of the Adepts (1884); Star-Flowers (1887); The Brotherhood of the New Life: Its Fact, Law, Method and Purpose (1891); God’s Breath in Man and in Humane Society (1891); The Song of Theos (1903).
Harris began to study for the Baptist ministry but was converted in 1843 to Universalism and was soon given a small charge. After two years of preaching he became seriously interested in the evidences for spiritual survival contained in the phenomena of spiritualism.
Views
The basis for Harris’ teaching was the (Swedenborgian) doctrine that God “is not male nierely, nor female merely, but the two-in-one”; and that in Heaven, or the “New Life, ” man attains union with God and the “conjugal spirits” are joined into a perfect unity. The “Brotherhood of the New Life” consisted of those who from the beginning of time had attained that felicity; its representatives on earth were the earthly focus for the spiritual regeneration of humanity. Meanwhile Harris himself was struggling “interiorly” to break through the natural forces of evil by rallying the “vortical atoms, ” and attain to his spiritual “two-in-oneness, ” or union with his heavenly counterpart (the Lily Queen). This he finally achieved in 1894 when he became technically immortal or “Theos. ” The “crisis” or end of the natural world was now eagerly expected and Harris predicted its imminence repeatedly.
Personality
Most of those who knew Harris seem to have been impressed by the prophetic force of his personality, as well as by his remarkable eloquence and poetic gifts. He was opposed to creeds and to ecclesiastical organization, and insisted that he had not founded a new cult.
Connections
Thomas Harris fell deeply in love with Mary Van Amum, whom he married in 1845. In 1855 he had married his second wife, Emily Isabella Waters, with whom he lived in “The Use” until her death in 1883. In 1891 he married his secretary, Jane Lee Waring, the most prominent member of the community.