Herald of the Cross, The.
The Divine Love is the Path of Life
1905 Monthly
South Kensington, London. Publisher: Lamley & Company for Order of the Cross; Percy Lud, Humphries and Company. Editor: John Todd Ferrier.
1/1, 1905-current. 32 pp., two shillings and sixpence a year.

The volumes of the journal are called "new series" but no earlier version is known. The journal seems to have been suspended after volume 11, to be resumed in the 1920s. It is more familiar as a leader in the contemporary "crusade against carnivorism" but to Ferrier vegetarianism was only one element of the "realization of the Christ-life, by the path of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and absolute self-abandonment to the Divine will and service." This path in turn was part of a vast cosmological view of man and his destiny that displayed considerable occult and Theosophical influence. Ferrier (1855-1943) was a clergyman who, like many of his peers in the clergy, found religion and abandoned the institutional church to proclaim the "Divine Secret" that had once been known to the ancient Hebrews and to the early Christians but then lost with the "descent of the Church into the bondage of matter." Initially he pursued his anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian interests in connection with Sidney Hartknoll Beard's Order of the Golden Age and its journal The Herald of the Golden Age. He then founded his own Order of the Cross in Paignton with this journal as its organ. The contents were largely written by Ferrier, with occasional articles by others and reprints of Christian classics and the writings of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Basing himself on the "Logia" of Jesus Christ he described in detail the descent of man into matter and his innumerable births and rebirths around the planets of our system and others, all coupled with increasing dissolution and loss of his spiritual nature in the morass of matter, until with the revolutions of the Naros cycles and the coming of the "New Age" the soul could begin its recovery and finally attain the mystical illumination of "Christhood." This process was accompanied by the obtaining of all the "psychic" and "occult" powers, including the ability to communicate with the departed, of man's original state, but Ferrier was careful to caution that these were unimportant in themselves and only signposts on the path to the true goal of recovery of "the wonderful Divine Mystery." National Library of Scotland; Columbia University; Iona College; NYPL; etc.

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