Independent Thinker, The.
The Magazine that Makes You Think
1900--1905 Monthly
New York, NY. Publisher: Independent Literature Association. Editor: Henry Frank. Succeeded by: The Metaphysical Magazine (The Independent Thinker was consolidated into this in 1905, as a "Department of Independent Thought" under Frank's guidance)
Corporate author: Organ of the Metropolitan Independent Church1/1, January 1900-1905. $1.00 a year, 16 pp.

Frank (1854-1933), unlike many of his contemporaries in New Thought publishing, was educated (he had taught at Cornell), a fact reflected in the journal's content. Frank was decidedly of the East-Coast variety of New Thought that emphasized Emerson, the Oversoul and reform, rather than the West-Coast variety that embraced financial success, personal magnetism, and power, and He began as a Methodist minister and then a minister in the Congregational Church (until expelled from the Western New York Association of Congregational Churches in 1890 for heresy) and then turned "Independent" (i.e., he became a"Scientific Christian") and moved to New York city where he started the New York Metropolitan Independent Church, the publisher of this journal, and increasingly turned to New Thought and a vaporous form of Christianity: "All the superstitious worship of God since the beginning of history has not as much spiritual efficacy in human experience as one profound glimpse of the eternal truth, that spiritually Light prevails and not Darkness, Truth and not Error, Love and not Hate," etc. The Church also promoted a Psychic Study Society Course and held regular meditation sessions, presumably on the topics Frank covered in his lectures: reincarnation, karma, immortality, psychology, metaphysics, etc. The journal featured a weekly discourse by Frank, but also claimed to be "abreast of the Highest Scholarship of the age in Philosophy, Economics, Psychology, and the 'New Thought.'" The advertisement in The Ideal Review, 1900, was even more glowing: This magazine was called into existence, originally, to satisfy the popular demand for the publication of the discourses of Henry Frank, which are delivered each Sunday morning in Carnegie Lyceum. These discourses are expositions of The New thought, founded on the most rigid scientific facts. If you have been bewildered and disappointed by expositions of Christian Science, Mental Science, mystifying metaphysics and muddy materialism, read Mr. Frank's discourses, and you will find a Philosophy to live by and a Religion that cannot be laughed down or refuted. Besides the discourses, contributed articles from able authors appear in each issue." Noted in "List of Advance Thought Publications," The New Cycle, March 1900, 159-60; advertised in New Man, September 1900. The journal carried occasional articles by the likes of Hugh O. Pentecost, Paul Carus, et al., extensive book reviews, and advertisements for the more aggressive side of New Thought that was largely ignored in the journal itself: The New York Institute of Science, Rochester ("Startling Discoveries"), Charles W. Close, Parzival Braun, Helen Wilmans, George W. Carey, and Sydney B. Flower's Psychic Research Company in Chicago, etc. Frank wrote regularly for many spiritualist and New Thought journals from the 1880s on, including Occult Review, Mind, Metaphysical Magazine, and Eltka (in the last of which he signed himself "Fellow of the Illuminati"), etc. He had earlier published the Rostrum (1887-1888) in Jamestown, New York, with his weekly discourse (then Methodist) supplemented with news and reform topics. LOC; Northwestern University.

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