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Summary:
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From Pat Deveney's database:
Christian Spiritualist, The.
Every Plant Which My Heavenly Father Hath Not Planted Shall be Rooted Out
1854--1857 Weekly
New York, NY.
Editor: John H.W. Toohey and Horace H. Day (with the active assistance of Emma Hardinge [Britten]), S.T. Munson.
Publisher: Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge.
Succeeds: Messenger of Light (bought)
1/1, May 13, 1854-3/52, May 2, 1857. Volume 3 of the journal apparently has not survived but its end date is given in Spiritual Telegraph, May 9, 1857.
6-8 pp, $2.00 a year ("payable within three months"). This was an attempt to organize American spiritualism from the top down. The Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge was a grand creation, peppered with the names of judges, lawyers and professors--but woefully short, as the existing spiritualist press noted bitingly, of the names of those who had been popularizing the movement since its beginning. The Society's instigator was John Shoebridge Williams (later involved in the very curious Order of the Patriarchs) who convinced Horace H. Day to start a new organization along decidedly Christian lines and to fund a journal to propagate its ideas. J.H.W. Toohey, who was to edit The Christian Spiritualist, and P.B. Randolph were prominent in the society. Day was a rich industrialist who was striving at the time with Charles Goodyear over the the rights to vulcanized rubber, but he agreed to fund the society, which hired Kate Fox as a resident medium "at a liberal salary," and also paid for its journal. The Messenger of Light was bought, presumably to supply a mailing list, and the journal began in May 1854. Emma Hardinge [Britten] was given a room at the journal's headquarters at 553 Broadway in New York where she worked as a "test medium," and was said to have contributed articles under the name "Ezra" though neither she nor her pseudonym appears in the surviving volumes. Emma herself, in her later continuation of Ghost Land, painted her role in the journal somewhat more grandly: "On the floor above, a handsomely furnished apartment was placed at the disposal of Mrs. Hardinge, whose tests were rendered by writing, clairvoyance, pantomimic representations, and trance speaking. The upper floor of this great building was appropriated to the printing department of a weekly paper entitled The Christian Spiritualist, the chief portion of which was written and edited by Mrs. Hardinge." The young Cora L.V. Scott Hatch, who was to have an extraordinarily long career as a medium, was also hired by the society. All of this was not well received by spiritualists, who resented the imposition of order and hierarchy on their new movement. Emma Hardinge [Britten], Modern American Spiritualism (1870), 134, says the journal had a "limited subscription list, but a very large gratuitous circulation." On the whole affair, see Ernest Josephs Isaacs, A History of Nineteenth Century American Spiritualism as a Religious and Social Movement (U. Wisconsin Ph.D. dissertation, 1975), 227-234. Day closed the paper in 1856, settled with Goodyear in the early 1860s (receiving a sum variously stated as $350,000 or $500,000), and died in 1878, scarcely noted by spiritualists for his early contributions. Smith College; Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Kentucky); University of Texas, Austin; Stanford University; LOC.
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