Kingdom of Heaven, The.
On Earth peace, good will toward men
Other titles: The Kingdom of Heaven / The Optimist and Kingdom of Heaven / The Kingdom of Heaven, or, Little Philosopher / The True Union, or Scientific Socialist
1864-1875 Monthly
Anderson, IN, Huntsville, IN, Berlin Heights, OH, Syracuse, NY, Boston, MA. Editor: Thomas Cook; Thomas Cook and Eliza Jane Robinson; Thomas and Sarah A. Cook; Sarah A. Wakeman Cook, medium editress; Thomas Cook, medium editor. Succeeded by: Religio-Philosophical Journal (merged 1868-1873); The Spirit of Truth
1/1, January 1864-January 1875, with large gaps between the early issues and those published in Boston in the 1870s.
4-8 pp., 13 x 19.
50-75 cents a year; "To those unable to pay it will be sent free."

The journal was first published from Anderson, Madison County, Indiana; the second volume was completed at Huntsville in the same state at the end of 1865. It was not published in 1866 and the third volume was published from Berlin Heights in 1867 and thereafter it was "merged" into the Religio-Philosophical Journal (for which Cook worked for two years), only to be resumed in Syracuse, New York in 1874 and then removed to Boston. This was the work of Thomas Cook, an itinerant millenarian radical. While disavowing "free love," Cook did practice something distinctly akin to it. In 1860 he "freed" his wife from their marriage and moved to Berlin Heights, Ohio, a magnet that attracted waves of socialists and free-love advocates. On these "free lovers," see the notes under the Age of Freedom, Nichols’ Journal of Health, Nichols’ Monthly, and The Social Revolutionist. Cook seems to have advocated the utility of a variety of sexual partners in the search for the one, true "spiritual affinity." He envisioned the process as beneficial to the production of superior children. On Cook, see Joan Passet, The Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 43-4, 51, 88-89. The essence of Cook’s revelation was that everything and everyone were part of the spirit of God and that the only evil or sin was ignorance of our own divine, eternal nature. This is a form of the recurring Edenic antinomianism that has haunted Western peripheral groups of all periods, and Cook drew the expected conclusions from his premises. The journal seems to have been published intermittently and under a variety of names and appears to have been suspended from c. 1868 until restarted in Boston in 1874. After the failure of the original efforts, Cook worked for a time in Chicago for the Religio-Philosophical Journal. The Prospectus of the Kingdom of Heaven appeared in Hull’s Crucible, May 23, 1874, and proclaimed it was to be "devoted to the scientific or naturalistic explanation of Spirit or the God power first known as Christianity, and latterly as Spiritualism; and to the practical application of this Power to the organization of spiritual families, groups, churches or communities; the inevitable destiny of the whole human race in time, and final result of all Spiritualism." The Religio-Philosophical Journal for December 5, 1874, announced that "Thomas and Sarah A. Cook" had suspended publication of the journal. Cook later published The Spirit of Truth. The radical nature of The Kingdom of Heaven was such that in its final incarnation in Boston under S.A. Wakeman Cook, medium editress; Thomas Cook, medium editor, the Banner of Light refused to exchange free issues with it. University of Rochester; American Antiquarian Society; University of Michigan.

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