Jehovahs Witnesses The New World Society (1955)
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JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES
THE NEW WORLD SOCIETY
Marley Cole
VANTAGE PRESS
NEW YORK
FIRST PRINTING--MAY, 1955
SECOND PRINTING—JUNE, 1955
All rights reserved, ineluding the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form Copyright, 1955, by Marley Cole Published by Vantage Press, Inc.
120 West 31st Street, New York 1, N. Y. Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-12633
CONTENTS
one The New World Society Assembles
two Orthodoxy in Reverse
three Their World wide Mission
four Across Nineteen Centuries
five Charles T. Russell — Millennium’s Prophet
six J. F. Rutherford — “The Kingdom Is Here”
seven Defending and Legally Establishing
the Good News
eight A Nation without a Country
nine Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Bible
ten Doctrines of the New World
APPENDIX
Corporations of Jehovah’s Witnesses
Their Day in Court
The Canadian Docket
In the Communist “Paradise”
What Did the President’s Parents Believe?
Charitable Works of Jehovah’s Witnesses
Important Court Briefs
Military
Publications
Charles Taze Russell
Nathan Homer Knorr
Hayden Cooper Covington
Joseph Franklin Rutherford
Tables
Gifts of Relief, Conventions, Growth 217-229
The New World Society Assembles— "Not forsaking the gathering of ourselves together, as some have the custom, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you behold the day drawing near."—Hebrews 10:25, New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures
CHAPTER ONE
THE NEW WORLD SOCIETY ASSEMBLES
AT three o’clock Sunday, July 26, 1953, a small cabin plane and a helicopter circled round and round over Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, New York. Photographers from the metropolitan press, the newsreels, TV stations, and a national magazine focused their cameras earthward upon a scene never witnessed before. The mammoth amphitheater was not only jammed solid with humanity to the last bleacher seat, but thousands of people, in orderly droves, were thronging the outfield grass. Presently, they were settled down quietly, right on the grass, in vast flowerbeds of color, filling the playing field to within a few yards of a gigantic half-moon stage anchored at second base. Ninety-one thousand people were down there in the Stadium.
The photographers tried to work into their view finders the scenes just outside the Stadium. On one side there were two city lots covered by circus-size tents. Up toward the elevated railroad line, a few blocks away, there were more lots covered with tents. So many people had gathered in the tent areas that, as in the Stadium, the seats within tents could not accommodate them all. There were 25,240 people out there, within and around the tents, a total of 116,802 people—sixteen solid acres of humanity.
Then one of the planes zoomed off toward New Jersey. Forty miles away, near Plainfield, it hovered over a still stranger spectacle. It appeared to be a city—the largest city in the county. But it was a trailer city, a tent city. It was laid out in the conventional pattern of streets and avenues. It had materialized, as if out of nowhere, only eight or nine days before, and it would vanish in two or three more days. But right then there were 49,027 people down there.
They were really part of the audience at Yankee Stadium, audibly connected by direct wire and loud-speaker system. At that moment the trailer-city population was listening to the program in progress on the stage at second base, in the Yankees’ ball park.
This was the aerial photographer’s pictorial report of the New World Society Assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1953 style.
Ground cameras, grinding and flashing, were recording the scenes inside Yankee Stadium. Plump, apple-cheeked Percy Chapman, supervisor of the Canadian Branch of Jehovah's Witnesses, in his present role of assembly chairman, was conducting the Witnesses’ spokesman, Nathan H. Knorr, to the podium.
“Mr. Knorr is a world traveler and internationally recognized Bible authority,” Chapman was saying. “He will speak to us on his widely advertised Bible subject, ’After Armageddon—God's New World.’ ”
Thunderous hand clapping filled the Stadium. Mr. Knorr, who is president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, international directive agency of Jehovah’s witnesses, waited while an attendant adjusted his microphone. He looked out toward as many of the 165,829 people as he could see from the stage. He commenced to speak, and his words were carried simultaneously to another invisible audience over the Witnesses’ own 5,000-watt radio station WBBR. Other wires transmitted his message to tape-recording technicians, who recorded it for replaying on a mass scale to no telling how many more people associated with the 14,000 congregations of Jehovah’s witnesses scattered among 150 countries, in the days and years to come.
“Armageddon,” Knorr was saying, “is no mere stormy conflict between two political parties within a nation; it is no mere atomic war between blocs of nations for the domination of the earth—the much-feared World War HI; it is not the climax of the fight between the hateful Communist camp and Christendom’s most powerful religious system and its political, commercial and religious allies.”
Wrapping all the world and its nations up together as Armageddon’s target, Knorr’s voice warmed dramatically. “Armageddon is what the sacred Scriptures of divine prophecy call it, ‘the war of the great day of God the Almighty,’ the war in which the Creator of heaven and earth will face all his foes and will fight as he did in the days of old. God the Almighty foresaw the necessity for that war in due time and he foretold its coming. That war is therefore unavoidable.”
His audience sensed his approaching climax. “The facts of modern history prove we are in ‘the day of God the Almighty’ and his war is very near.”
Again a resounding peal of hand clapping filled the air. No shouting, no hooting, no whistling, but a vibrant sensitive response to every word. And every word pointed to Armageddon as ringing down the curtain on this present living generation.
Yankee Stadium had been the scene of such a demonstration only once before—in 1950, when Jehovah’s witnesses held a similar world convention there.
More than 20,000 of these people came from foreign countries—ninety-six countries in all. Jehovah’s witnesses, as a rule, live on the humbler side of life. But one fourth of their total membership—510,228 as of July, 1953—had managed to get to New York from places as far off as New Zealand, Chile, and Ethiopia. The total cost for transportation, food, and lodging, must have been about ten million dollars.
To stage the eight-day convention the Witnesses had to organize and operate a metropolis bigger in area than modern Jerusalem, and with more people in it than in the whole state of Nevada.
"So far as we are concerned, you people are running your own convention,” Stadium Assistant Superintendent John Anderson told John Groh, the Witnesses' convention manager. Maintenance Supervisor James Regan turned a set of master keys over to them to do with as they pleased. The Stadium's union labor force handed over the job of keeping the grounds clean to the Witnesses’ cleaning department of 962 workers. A city police unit of not less than 35 and, at times, up to 80 men, under Captain Albert Dunn, of the Bronx, reported “no problems.” They had little more to do than look on, while a corps of 4,400 Witness attendants manipulated the throngs in and out of the Stadium, and to and from the cafeteria.
The United States Navy, the Civil Defense Administration, and the New York City Department of Health were among those who sent observers to study the crowd-handling methods and the mass-feeding techniques used by Jehovah’s witnesses.
“Their methods are marvelous,” they reported. “But don’t expect them to work as well for anybody else.”
“Why not?” their superiors demanded.
“Because Jehovah’s witnesses work voluntarily. Who else would do all that work for nothing?”
Volunteered, for example, was a trucking fleet of sixty vehicles, ranging from half-ton pickups to tractor-and-double-trailer jobs. Four farm tractors, three bulldozers, and one back-haul shovel, used at Trailer City, were donated. This giant transportation system was gathered from all over the United States. In most cases, the owners themselves supplied the fuel and upkeep expenses and volunteered their personal services as operators.
Personnel: 288 men and one woman. (A volunteer-service application read: “I own a 1953 Ford half-ton pickup which I would like to put to use. My wife will serve as my helper.” Trucking Department Manager S. H. Plumhoff, not being the kind of man to interfere with family working arrangements, accepted the female truck driver “with pleasure.”)
Scope of work: 61,102 articles for the cafeteria, sound, installations, and other departments were gathered from eighty United States circuits as distant as Texas and California and hauled to New York and back. Other items included twenty truckloads of refrigerators, steam kettles, ovens, and the like; 265,000 board feet of lumber for the seventy-eight buildings at Trailer City; 650 wiring poles; eight miles of plumbing pipe; forty-one miles of wiring; twenty truckloads of chairs, and two truckloads of greenery to decorate the stage.
“We handled everything from a delicate postage-weight scale to two baby-grand pianos, one upright piano, and a bass fiddle,” enumerated Mr. Plumhoff.
“We even trucked in two mothers and their eight children, two trunks, three suitcases, and one tent,” he chuckled. “These delegates got stranded at Grand Central Station. They had no way of getting out to Trailer City, forty miles away.”
Witness Plumhoff concluded his report cheerfully. “It took us eight days to haul the equipment into Yankee Stadium. We have thirty-six hours to get it out.”
“We made it,” he added three days later.
Transportation of an eighth of a million people from ninety-six countries to one point on earth at a specified time is no small feat.
“We organized for it months in advance,” Transportation Supervisor H. E. Miller explained.
“But how?” I asked.
“Jehovah’s witnesses have international headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. Then there are sixty-five additional branch offices world wide. This was organization enough for us to integrate ship and plane facilities and bring delegates from all the continents.”
At least one hundred thousand delegates were expected from North America. “There were special trains from Seattle, Los Angeles, Canada, and other points. More than three hundred buses were chartered. The air lines were taxed to the limit. But all these took care of only twenty per cent or so of the delegates,” Miller said.
“What about the other eighty per cent?”
“Well, in Alaska, Canada, the United States, and Mexico there are four thousand one hundred and thirty-seven Kingdom Halls. Under the Society’s direction in Brooklyn, these were used as transportation centers, wherever necessary,” Miller explained. “A month or so in advance the conven tioners were organized into car groups.”
“How many cars?”
“Oh, twenty-five thousand I would say. And fifteen hundred of them pulled trailers.”
“So by all means of transportation you had from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty thousand people coming at you from outside of New York?”
“That’s about right.”
“How did you manage to take care of them when they arrived?”
“You had better ask Information Department,” Miller advised.
Tall, dapper New York Witness Jerry Molohan, with a staff of three hundred special volunteers, handled the Information Department. “Only it was more than information we gave out,” Molohan avowed.
He explained what he meant by describing all the qualifications an Information Department worker ought to have had to fill the job perfectly. “First of all, he would have to be a native New Yorker with a taxi driver’s knowledge of the city. He would need to know the languages of ninety-six countries. He would have to own a rugged car, his own gasoline station, and the stamina to stay on call twenty-four hours a day.”
Information booths were posted on all incoming highways. From these the auto caravans were directed to individual destinations.
“What about the rest of the traffic?”
"We had information booths set up in all the bus, train, ship, and air terminals to greet them.”
“What about the foreigners?”
“All plane and ship arrivals were met with car drivers and interpreters.”
“What did you do with them?”
“First, we took them to nearby temporary residences, which were converted Kingdom Halls. There we fed them and gave them a chance to refresh themselves. They were assisted through the Customs too, of course. Finally, they were driven to their room assignments.”
“All of this free of charge?"
“With the compliments of the American Witnesses.”
“And you say each person’s room assignment was waiting for him when he arrived?”
“The assignments were waiting at the reception halls.”
“How did you arrange for the rooms?”
“Go see Ray Anderson,” Moiohan replied. “He will tell you how the rooms were arranged."
In three months’ time Jehovah’s witnesses listed rooming accommodations for 85,000 people (not counting Trailer City). Only about 15,000 delegates obtained their accommodations privately, at hotels or in other ways. “Most of the listings came through the Rooming Committee and were obtained the hard way,” R. L. Anderson, the rooming supervisor recounted.
“How?” I inquired.
“By the biggest house-to-house and stair-climbing hunt for rooms in the city's history.”
In his soft-spoken voice Anderson described how, on April 26, a vanguard of 509 house-to-house canvassers sallied forth to obtain the accommodations. “By July, an average of sixteen hundred were in the field every day,” he related.
After spending 133,825 hours (fifteen years of time) on this assignment and incidentally leaving a third of a million pieces of literature with the people they called on, Jehovah’s witnesses arranged accommodations, including Trailer City, for more people than live in Alaska.
New World Trailer City, near Plainfield, New Jersey, was marked off into streets and lots a month prior to the assembly. Sanitation facilities, water supply, and electricity were installed. Seventy-eight buildings, exceeding a half mile in length if placed end to end, were constructed. A crew of four hundred volunteers, mostly from surrounding New York and Jersey congregations, did the work.
“We prepared to receive a population of thirty-two thousand," George Couch, the Trailer City manager said.
“Had you received that many requests for accommodations?”
“We had. We thought that was a remarkable number. It was twice the number that occupied Trailer City at our other world assembly, in nineteen fifty.”
“But you had more than thirty-two thousand?”
“Did we!” Couch laughed guardedly, almost appalled at the memory. “We had thirty-two thousand arrive a day before the convention opened.”
An assistant, Witness L. M. Dugan, butted in. “People kept pouring in at the rate of twelve hundred an hour. They took up all the lots and they kept on coming.”
“We saw blind spots there for a while—Dugan and I!” George admitted.
He had rushed Dugan over to lease some extra fields from the nearest farmers. “We didn’t have time to survey them, lay out lots, or anything,” he continued.
"How did you manage?”
Both men laughed. "We simply clipped the wire fences," Dugan said. "Then, with a big staff of attendants, we led the caravans out across the fields. We turned them off, right and left, onto unmarked plots, with street spaces between them. They all camped right where they stopped, and the installation crews followed through as fast as they could.”
“That,” said Couch, “was one of the fast-growing boom cities in history. There were forty-five thousand four hundred and ninety-two people living there the last day!” (About five thousand people visited the city the last day.)
Between fifteen thousand and twenty-three thousand volunteer workers—about one to every six people attending— were used to operate the New World Assembly. “The main core of this army of personnel has become something near to professional in their particular departments,” John Donnen-wirth, the Volunteer Service manager told me.
“How is that?” I asked.
“Because they have had so much previous experience.”
Jehovah’s witnesses, he explained, must be the "most convention-minded people in the world.” “About every twenty local congregations comprise a circuit. Each circuit holds two assemblies a year, from three hundred to a few thousand attendance.
“About every twenty circuits comprise a district,” he continued. “Each district holds an assembly once a year. For example, in nineteen fifty-two there were forty-six district assemblies in North America.
"Next come the branches,” Donnenwirth went on. "There are branch or national assemblies the years we hold no world assemblies. In nineteen fifty-one, a string of national conventions was held in most of the European capitals, outside the Iron Curtain countries, where Jehovah’s witnesses are banned. Climaxing the string was one in Washington, D. C., where fifty-seven thousand people overflowed Griffith Stadium.”
Topping all the rest are the big world assemblies like the 1950 and 1953 conventions at Yankee Stadium.
“Now, with all this training in conducting assemblies,” Donnenwirth continued, coming to his point, “each department is developing its own special group of workers. I mean workers who are growing more and more skilled in their particular line.”
“How many departments are there?” I asked.
“Oh, twenty major ones or more—cafeteria, attendant, refreshment, cleaning, trucking, installations, sound, public relations, and so on.”
“So each department is developing a class of specialists?”
“From the circuit level on up.”
“These specialists,” I inquired. “Are they professionals or craftsmen in that line, in everyday life? For instance, the convention plumbing department. Is that made up of professional plumbers?”
“As a rule, yes,” Donnenwirth replied, nodding. “But it is not always so.”
“No?”
“For one thing, there are people who follow trades or professions that don’t fit into any department at a convention. For instance, suppose a ballet dancer came up and volunteered for service?”
“Did it happen?”
“It did."
“What did you do with the ballet dancer?”
“We assigned her to the Pioneer Registration Department.”
Besides these innumerable “misfits,” Donnenwirth added, there were Witnesses who wanted to escape from their specialized work in everyday life and do something altogether unrelated.
“The First Aid Department is staffed with Witness doctors, surgeons, chiropractors, osteopaths, and nurses. But there is one surgeon here working in the attendant department.” (The Witnesses do not call them ushers, but “attendants.”)
Shield Halvajian, besides being a regular minister of Jehovah’s witnesses, is an interior decorator in Los Angeles, California. “But Halvajian runs the cafeteria,” Donnenwirth pointed out. “He is an expert cafeteria manager, whether on the circuit-assembly level or world-convention level.”
Donnenwirth himself has specialized in running Volunteer Service departments for several years. He earns his living as an insurance-accounts executive in Akron, Ohio.
Something significant might be read into their experiences as assembly operators, Donnenwirth ventured to add. “We have developed something peculiar and unique among religious groups—or, for that matter, among any other groups.”
“What is that?” He had me curious.
"Do you realize that we are organized and trained to set up living arrangements on any scale?”
“You mean from the circuit level to the world-assembly level?”
“Not only that, but on a permanent basis, if we wanted to.”
The tall, angular Ohioan, whose eyes have a gift of flashing inflections along with his words, restated his meaning in question form.
“Look. Don’t Jehovah’s witnesses believe that Armageddon will devastate all present world systems of things within the present living generation?”
“Right.”
“And that the Armageddon survivors will have to reorganize their living arrangements right out of the rubble?”
“You mean these assembly activities are training a corps of post-Armageddon reconstructors?”
“I would not go so strong as that,” Donnenwirth confessed. “I’m just saying that almost anywhere on earth you might go you will find Jehovah’s witnesses there. And you will find them trained and conditioned to set up community living arangements at the drop of a hat.
"Or maybe,” Donnenwirth concluded, grinning, “I am just overenthusiastic about what these twenty-two thousand volunteer workers have done here at the New World Society Assembly.”*
*1953 CONVENTION VOLUNTEER SERVICE STAFF OF 22,281
(General average at assemblies of all sizes is one volunteer worker for every six conventioners.)
NUMBER OF WORKERS
DEPARTMENT
Attendant (Ushers)
4,383
Auditing
Book Rooms
Cafeteria
4,662
Cleaning
Engineering & Installation
Field Service
First Aid
Immersion
Information
Lost & Found and Check Room
Orchestra
Pioneer Registration
Public Address
Public Relations
Recording (Tape)
Refreshments
4,235
Rooming
Signs
Trailer City
4,105
Trucking & Equipment
Volunteer Service
TOTAL
22,281
This figure does not indude a battery of interpreters who worked with Public Relations.
The 189 Rooming workers cover only the office staff. For three months there was an average of 1,600 canvassers going from house to house seeking accommodations.
The Field Service Department operated through 39 Kingdom Halls from the Coney Island section to the top of Yonkers. When the Rooming work ended the day before the Assembly the Halls were kept open as field service centers for the conventioners. Tens of thousands took part in daily ministerial work, inviting New Yorkers to the Assembly, offering them Bible helps, standing on the streets handing out invitations, or displaying the magazines The Watchtower and Awake!
Orthodoxy in Reverse—’These men that have upset the inhabited earth are present here also," said the Jews, when Paul and Silas came to Thessalonica— Acts 17:6
CHAPTER TWO
ORTHODOXY IN REVERSE
MOST folks—church leaders especially—keep saying that something has got to be done about religion, that “religion as usual” has lost its savor. “Religion in our time has little ‘kick’ in it,” declared Dr. Robert J. McCracken of New York’s Riverside Church.
Everybody agrees that the Witnesses of Jehovah are doing something about religion. You could not produce a more revolutionary religion, even if you took the sum total of all the tenets of Christendom and turned them precisely upside down. It is as if the Witnesses had hit upon the formula that religion as we know it has everything in reverse. To get true worship straightened out (you could almost accuse them of reasoning), you adopt the opposite of what you hear in church.
For just that reason Jehovah’s witnesses find themselves in a peculiar position: while on the one hand, church leaders declare unequivocally that something has got to be done about modem religion (preachers are admitting that communism, for example, is beating Christendom “at her own game of evangelizing the world”), on the other hand, you could not do more toward revolutionizing Christianity than Jehovah’s witnesses have done during the past eighty-odd years.
So look, for a moment, and ask yourself: Are Jehovah’s witnesses the kind of antidote that modern religion has been needing? Are they the bitter pill the Doctor says to take? Are they the landmark on the horizon toward or away from which orthodoxy had better be hastening her careening ship?
Thriving on Universal Opposition
Latin-American Catholics label them an “off-brand Protestant sect.” Protestants on the island of Cyprus announce on street corners that they have no relation with Jehovah’s witnesses. The Orthodox Church in Greece brands them a “Jewish sect.” The Jews remonstrate to the Government. Pakistan Moslems abhor them as “Christians.” Quebec Canadians prosecute them as seditionists. Americans mob them as Communists. Communists murder them as spies for American imperialism.
Jehovah’s witnesses quote a statement by Dr. W. L. Pet-tingill, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Broadway and 79th Street, New York. “The weakness of the church today,” he declared, “is largely the result of the absence of persecution and suffering."
Lack of persecution and suffering may be, as Dr. Pet-tingill says, the weakness of modem orthodoxy. Does that imply that abundance of persecution and suffering has something to do with the strength of Jehovah’s witnesses?
Churchbook membership in the United States has increased by sixty per cent during the past quarter century. During the same period Jehovah’s witnesses multiplied by two thousand per cent.
During the pangs of world wide depression, the second total war, and the wildfire rampage of communism among one third of the earth’s people the Witnesses multiplied internationally by more than fifteen hundred per cent. For several years during that time they preached their good news underground in seventy out of eighty-two countries.
I do not believe the Louisville Courier Journal was exaggerating in 1950 when it tabbed Jehovah’s witnesses “the fastest-growing religion in the world.”
Appeal of the Nonconformists
A precise definition of Jehovah’s witnesses is not easily arrived at. Think of a religion whose members do their own preaching. Think of a religious group that spends more on field preaching than it does on building church structures. Think of a religion with no paid clergy—no class distinctions of clergy and laity. Everybody, young and old, male and female, is enrolled in strenuous, regular ministerial education that turns out one thousand ministers—not members, but ministers—a week and organizes one new congregation somewhere in the world every day in the year.
And think of a half million preachers—the largest single body of united preachers in the world—whose pulpits, in more than one hundred and fifty countries, are the doorsteps, living rooms, curbstones, store counters, business desks, vacant lots, ball parks, stadiums, and civic auditoriums of the inhabited earth.
When you walk into a Kingdom Hall congregation of one hundred Witnesses, you won’t be looking at one minister sermonizing ninety-nine lay members. You will be looking at one hundred preachers, Bible evangelists, Bible educators. Some may be only nine years old. Some of them may be ninety. But they know how to thumb a Bible. And the Bible is their textbook.
Just as the message the Witnesses preach cannot be served up in any orthodox shape, form, or fashion, neither will it support any orthodox system, supreme councils. No money drives. No collection plates. No crusades to save an “ir-reformable and doomed world.” No attempt to “put God into business” or “God into politics” or “God into religion,” as religious systems now stand.
Jehovah’s witnesses tell you that this whole world system of things, held together by its three main components of commerce, politics, and religion, is “a goner.” They urge and beckon you toward a New World System of Things.
This New World Society is no pie-in-the-sky dream to them. It is not coming tomorrow—it is here today. It is to them the realest reality on earth today. Tomorrow, if Armageddon struck all worldly systems from the planet as completely as the Flood washed out "the world that then was,” there would still remain the New World Society intact, a going concern. They believe that. That is how real it is to diem.
And it does exist.
Back in 1949, George R. Stewart published a fascinating book called Earth Abides. He described an imaginary plague that reduced the population of the planet to a few straggling survivors. These few banded together, here and there and started rehabilitating the planet as best they could. By the time the second generation was established they found themselves divided into fearful, jealous little families and clans. The story of nationalism, wars, misery, and confusion started all over again.
Jehovah’s witnesses anticipate an early annihilation of all earth’s population except the New World Society of perhaps a few million. But in the post-Armageddon New World they envision no confusion, disunity, divisions, or wars. The millennial reign of Christ will hold sway over earth. In fact, a preliminary reign, the “day of Jehovah’s judgment,” has already started, here “amid its enemies.” Its aim is to draw together a "great crowd” from all races, kindreds, and tongues from out of the world's great tribulation.
The unity, purpose, devotion, and irrepressible advancement of Jehovah’s witnesses proves well enough that this, to them, is the paramount fact of the universe. They are literally conditioning now for life in the New World.
Their World-wide Mission— “And this good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come."—Matthew 24:14, New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures
CHAPTER THREE
THEIR WORLD-WIDE MISSION
JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES have volunteered to carry out what to them is a divinely inspired mission to deliver a special message to all the inhabited earth. To that end they are organized and trained.
This peculiar good news the Witnesses have for all earthly residents is that of Kingdom Here. “Do you ever pray the Lord’s prayer?” the Witnesses ask you.
“You mean the one we memorize in school?” you inquire.
“That is it,” they reply. “You know how it goes—‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth . . . ’ ” and so on.
"Of course,” you say, nodding.
"Jehovah’s witnesses are not looking for the kingdom to come in the future. We consider it as having started to operate here toward the earth already.”
“Since when?” you demand, startled.
“Since nineteen fourteen.”
"But how,” you insist, “do you get such an idea?”
They open their Bibles to show you prophecies such as Matthew, chapter twenty-four. "Here, for example, is Jesus’ famous world’s-end prophecy,” they point out. “It reads like a blueprint of things happening since nineteen fourteen.”
“Why nineteen fourteen?” you want to know.
“Notice that the disciples inquired of Jesus what would be the sign of his presence in kingdom power, and of the end of the old world ‘system of things.’ ”
"Yes?”
“The sign is composed of dozens of separate occurrences, all coming within one generation. For example, he indicated, the world’s time of the end or consummation period would be marked by the outbreak of world wars. There would be world food shortages, disease, pestilences, earthquakes, distress of nations, global perplexities. All these, once starting, would go on growing worse till the final end, Armageddon.”
“And it started in nineteen fourteen?”
“Even The New York Times remarked,” they reply, "that nineteen thirteen was the last normal year in human history.” And they point out drat World War II was worse than World War I, and that World War III will be an even greater disaster.
“You mean then,” you reason, “that God is bringing increasing sorrows upon the world to make it aware of His Kingdom’s establishment?”
“No,” they reply quickly. “God is not responsible for this world distress. The Devil is. This is his world, the Bible says. Other Bible prophecies, such as Revelation, chapter twelve, show that the Devil knows he has reached the end of his wicked rule. He is now enraged. He is bent on ruining all future prospects of life on earth. He is determined to blind people to the only hope, the Kingdom.”
The work of Jehovah’s witnesses, then, counteracts Satan’s mad drive to plunge the world into violent chaos. That work gives the people hope for life in a new world, under the heavenly kingdom. Those choosing the kingdom will survive the showdown fight at Armageddon, where Jehovah’s forces under Christ achieve a smashing victory over Satan and his world, visible and invisible. The survivors will receive their reward either in heavenly glory or here on earth in a paradise of everlasting life.
The preaching of this good news of the Kingdom constitutes one of the more important aspects of the great composite “sign” that humanity has reached the “consummation of this system of things.” Matthew 24:14, in The New World Translation, reads:
“And this good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come.”
Fulfilling that prophetic command is another law of “new world living” translated into literal action from the pages of the Bible by Jehovah’s witnesses.
“But to put all the inhabited earth on official notice that God’s kingdom has entered upon the earthly scene,” you observe, “is a world-size job.”
The Witnesses reply: “We are a world wide organization. We think, speak, and act in terms of a world movement. We have accepted a world-wide mission.”
“How can you accomplish it?”
"By a world-wide Bible educational program.”
Education is their weapon. Their religion is intellectual, not emotional. In countries such as Mexico, and the Latin-American republics, and throughout Africa, their Kingdom Hall religious centers are also secular educational centers. There Witness ministers serve as school instructors. Tens of thousands of African adults have learned to read and write in these Kingdom Halls of Jehovah’s witnesses.
For their global mission, assemblies like the 1953 world rally serve to furnish, among other things, more educational ammunition. At that convention new published releases included: a brand-new Bible translation (first eight books of Hebrew Scriptures), a 416-page Bible handbook, a 384-page Bible study book called New Heavens and a New Earth, and seventy other new releases in twenty-eight languages.
Public sessions were held in twenty-one languages, including English, and a deaf-mute section took in all the English sessions through interpreters.
During the eight days of the assembly, 3,073,675 pieces of literature and printed matter (not including 5,100,000 handbills) were distributed to Greater New York’s thirteen million people. But this was just a starter, an indicator of the global expansion the assembly touched off.
In the more than one hundred languages employed by them, Jehovah’s witnesses can scarcely find words eloquent or expressive enough to impress on you and me and all the earth’s inhabitants that this generation is one of unparalleled transition. Within the next few years this world’s systems of things—religious, political, economic, and otherwise—will go down to dust in God’s battle, Armageddon. The comparatively small society that will survive is now being shaped, conditioned, and matured for the world’s final end. It is gaining a unity “that not even the shaking of the mountains into the seas can disrupt.” It is growing faster, comparatively, than any other religion on earth.
That is the preachment believed implicitly by Jehovah’s witnesses. It fires them to zeal. They live in an atmosphere of urgency that keeps growing. They drop every other hope, aspiration, and work in this world to devote their lives and resources and time and energies to preaching it.
“Living Now as a New World Society” was one of the key addresses delivered by the Watch Tower president, N. H. Knorr, at the 1953 world assembly. Positive evidence of a kingdom is its subjects, Knorr stressed. Jehovah’s witnesses are subjects of God’s kingdom government. That government now operates through the “absolute heavenly monarch Christ Jesus.” The Kingdom is more real to Jehovah’s people than the United Nations, or any Indian-summer peace the world may enjoy here in the evening of the “last days,” Knorr stressed.
Jehovah’s witnesses in world assembly, he concluded, were demonstrating things the world’s United Nations could not demonstrate—the ability to draw together, live together, and worship together, void of age-old racial, national, religious, or political differences.
“Jehovah’s witnesses are a thousand years before their time,” one journalist commented.
To which a Witness responded: "Human society has grown six thousand years behind the times since Eden; that’s all.”
EXPANSION SINCE GILEAD SCHOOL WAS ESTABLISHED
In the table of continents given here you will see the advance of the New World Society since 1942. In that year the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was not sending out missionaries to all parts of the world. But in 1943 the Bible School of Gilead was opened by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, and from then on the Society’s world-wide missionary work began.
Lands
Hours
Gilead
Place
Witnessed
Total
Spent
Graduates
To
Ministers
Preaching
Teaching
A F R 1
C A
(11 lands)
10,070
2,200,163
None
(17 lands)
24,896
6,298,189
(32 lands)
72,228
15,460,243
(34 lands)
81,793
16,979,027
Asia
( 6 lands)
93,223
None
( 8 lands)
140,661
(19 lands)
2,274
504,301
(19 lands)
2,698
597,050
Euro
P E
(13 lands)
22,796
5,344,006
None
(19 lands)
74,196
12,819,994
(24 lands)
158,867
19,147,879
(24 lands)
179,374
19,433,567
Islands
of the Atlantic,
Caribbean
and Mediterranean
( 6 lands)
1,297
237,057
None
(12 lands)
6,429
1,448,810
(15 lands)
15,659
2,200,647
(29 lands)
17,421
2,248,941
Islands of the Pacific
( 3 lands)
4,275
701,037
None
( 6 lands)
7,385
1,390,228
(12 lands)
26,690
3,590,037
(13 lands)
31,980
4,214,497
North America
( 7 lands)
75,589
19,668,961
None
(12 lands)
91,740
20,787,495
(12 lands)
168,752
25,810,384
(12 lands)
193,542
26,734,105
South America
( 8 lands)
219,905
None
(12 lands)
2,431
956,928
(13 lands)
11,795
1,990,208
(12 lands)
13,174
2,137,541
Grand Totals of the World
( 54 lands)
115,240
28,464,352
None
( 86 lands)
207,552
43,842,305
(127 lands)
456,265
68,703,699
1,421
(143 lands)
519,982
72,344,728
1,626
During the decade 1942-52 the number of Jehovah's witnesses doubled in North America, multiplied five times in Asia, more than six times in the Pacific Islands, about seven times in Europe and Africa, more than twelve times in the Atlantic Islands, and nearly fifteen times in South America.
Across Nineteen Centuries— “Go in through the narrow gate, because broad and spacious is the road leading off into’ destruction, and many are the ones going in through it; whereas narrow is the gate and cramped the road leading off into life, and few are the ones finding it.”—Matthew 7:13, 14, New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures
CHAPTER FOUR
ACROSS NINETEEN CENTURIES
“YOU look around you and you see a person sitting near you who expects, when he dies, to go to heaven. Then you see other persons sitting close by who expect to keep living here on earth and never die a human death.”
That is the way one of Jehovah’s witnesses opened his talk in a Kingdom Hall one evening, in October, 1953.
“Think of it,” he continued, “you are sitting in a congregation of people who believe that in this generation the greatest change of all time is about to take place. A change that will free the earth of death—death-dealing forces and systems of wickedness. That cataclysmic change is called Armageddon in the Bible. A remnant of humanity will pass alive through Armageddon. They will go on living in happiness forever. This will be a cleansed earth—a new earth. They will be living under the thousand-year reign of Christ.”
Did that sound to us like the strangest religion we ever heard? the speaker asked. “When did another group of people —Christians, at that—teach such a thing?”
The Witness speaker paused.
“Ever since Jesus promised that the meek should inherit the earth; ever since Peter quoted Isaiah’s prophecy about a new heaven and a new earth to come, Christians have hoped for that new world. Some have hoped for life in the heavenly realm of it. But if there is a new earthly existence promised, then not everybody would go to heaven. Still, the earthly prospects have not been given much thought since the days of Jesus. Not until Jehovah’s witnesses began stressing the new earth during the last half century.
“And now, another thing. No matter whether Christians looked for heavenly or earthly life under the Kingdom, they had always, until now, cast it ahead, into the future. But this generation has been startled by a new message. The message that the Kingdom is here. New heavens and a new earth!”
Because they preach the doctrine of “Kingdom Here” instead of the doctrine of “Kingdom Come,” Jehovah’s witnesses, the minister reflected good-naturedly, are brushed off by the world with a shrug of the shoulders and a shake of the head. “ ‘A freak religion,’ they call it. ‘Don’t you people claim any connection with Christians in the past?’ they want to know. ‘Did you just appear out of nowhere, without precedent, during the past eighty years or so? All other religions have traditional church fathers. Don’t you Jehovah’s witnesses have any?’ ”
Christianity a Story of Persecuted Minorities, Witnesses Say
“It brings up a challenging thought,” agreed the Witness. “And the answer is yes. We do claim a heritage. A line of Christian predecessors stretching all the way back to Christ.
“It was at times an almost unbelievably thin thread of believers—a thread reddened by their own blood—stretching down the centuries only a perilous inch above the Pagan sea of darkness,” said the Witness.
“To understand what I mean”—his face grew intent— “you will have to view the history of Christianity in an opposite light.”
Opposite to the orthodox history, he meant.
“The world tells the history of Christianity like this: Jesus Christ founded and left a church organization. It continued as such until a.d. 325. Then at the Council of Nice, the Christian Church was established as the one universal, or catholic, church. The dogma and doctrines of the Church were assembled and codified. From that time on Christianity grew in power. Pagan Rome gave way to Christian Rome. The principal world was converted through the Holy Roman Empire to Christianity. Whole nations today profess the Christian faith. Collectively, these nations are called Christendom.”
But Jehovah’s witnesses view the history of Christianity as an exactly opposite story, he explained.
"Christ Jesus founded the true church, yes. He established twelve apostles as its pillars. These twelve had no apostolic successors. The last apostle to die was John, who wrote the Revelation. By the time of his death, about a.d. 100, some ninety-six schisms had appeared in the original church. The schisms widened and kept multiplying. Christian congregations, through their leaders, were compromising with Paganism. Emperor Constantine wanted to integrate the religions of his subjects. That would make it easier for him to rule the Empire.
“So, a.d. 325, Constantine called the religious leaders together at Nice, in Asia Minor. He wanted them to settle upon a body of religious doctrines that would wrap up Christianity and Paganism in one package. The church doctrines adopted at Nice were more Pagan than Christian. From that time on the world has been held together by a fusion religion. It is Christian in name only."
The world, said the Witness, had not been converted to Christianity. It was the other way around. The Witness’ version of Christianity’s history pictured the human race following in an almost solid body far below "that cramped and narrow way” of real Christianity. Christendom, as an organized system of religion, dropped body and soul into the “morass of fused apostasy and outright Paganism,” especially from a.d. 325 onward, he felt.
Even Christians Veered from True Teachings
“Only a few, at all times, held above the quagmire of errant faith," he declared. “In some respects even the few were drawn underneath the Pagan waters of false religion. About the only thing they did not get buried under was the hierarchical authority of the nominal church. That they kicked against, sometimes at the cost of their lives.”
For fifteen hundred years, down to the dawn of the twentieth century, there were martyred minorities, he continued. There were the Arians, the Waldenses, the Lollards, and the Hussites, to name a few. These groups stayed adamantly aloof from “priestcraft.” But, cautioned the speaker, "Even these groups remained in shadowy light when it came to understanding many principal Bible doctrines.”
I was learning from this speaker that Jehovah’s witnesses’ version of Christianity over the centuries opened your eyes to a better understanding of the viewpoint and attitude and character of this modem group. During a search through their theocratic library I found that they have compiled a prolific literature on Christianity’s history. It is chock-full of profiles, biographies, and critical evaluations of the men and movements to whom they would have felt closest had they lived in those times.
I have pieced together, from their literature, a bird’s-eye view of the history of Christianity the way Jehovah’s witnesses write it. You will note that in the entire nineteen-century period there was not a time when the Witnesses feel that they would have been clasped to the heart of the church and the state. They always cast their lot with a dissident group. What practices and doctrines Jehovah’s witnesses have salvaged from the “interim since Christ,” they gleaned from these minorities. It was only with these that the Witnesses found anything at all in common.
What follows is condensed from material published over a period of many years by the Watch Tower people. The authorities they cite are not obscure and questionable sources. Witness writers quote from theological authorities, accepted historians, and standard encyclopedias. The quotations I make are from the Witnesses’ publications. Some of these quotations are made, in turn, by the Witnesses from other sources. To save cluttering up the narrative with endless citations, however, I believe that this explanation will suffice.
I
From Jesus to the Death of Paul
The apostle Paul, up to the time of his death, about the year 65, was probably the most outstanding advocate of Christianity, in the opinion of the Witnesses. This Roman citizen and Benjaminite Hebrew was, by training, a highly educated Pharisee. He eventually renounced “the traditions of the fathers” to become the twelfth apostle, taking the place of Judas Iscariot. Paul pioneered Christianity in the continent of Europe. Centuries later, the Waldenses in the Po valleys were said to have been originally founded by Paul. Jehovah’s witnesses doubt this tradition. The Waldenses, they say, had veered “too far afield doctrinally” for their religion to claim its origin from Paul.
One of the things the Witnesses admire about Paul, and practice in their twentieth-century ministry, is his policy of being financially self-supporting. The book of Acts, chapter 18, verses 1-4, mentions an instance when Paul worked six days a week and preached the seventh.
He supervised a broad district of congregations. He sent out circuit supervisors, like Titus and Timothy, to cover portions of the district. These organizational features are copied by modem Witnesses of Jehovah.
II
From Paul to Arius
The last living link with the original Christian organization was the apostle John. He died about the year 100. John contributed more to the Greek Scriptures than any other writer except Paul. At John’s death, apostasy had set in. The primitive Christian congregation was showing several distinct schisms.
By the beginning of the fourth century, the truly primitive-type Christians in the Roman Empire were few. They stood out as social misfits. They were marked as “refusing military service, obeisance to Caesar, political support, reverence to idols, or any semblance to religious interfaith with their contemporaries.” They kowtowed to no orthodox method of worship, “Pagan or supposedly Christian.” They were in fact, branded as “atheist.” It was against these nonconformists that the most savage persecutions in Christianity’s history were leveled.
When the beheading block and the bloody arena failed to wipe them out, Emperor Constantine struck upon the idea of “interfaith” as a solution. He called together the religious leaders of the Empire at Nice, in Asia Minor. That was in the year 325. The purpose of the conclave was to set down a body of religious doctrines that would suit everybody. There would be one universal, or catholic, code of religion. Ruling the Empire would be easier with the churches organized.
Not everybody was happy with the product Arius, an aged elder, spoke up for the dissident segment of Christians.
He took issue with the Council on its adoption of such doctrines as the Trinity. The Council was settling, in the case of the Trinity, for the theory that the Father and Son were coetemal and coequal. But, said Arius: “The Father is a father; the Son is a son; therefore the Father must have existed before the Son; therefore once the Son was not; therefore lie was made, like all creatures, of a substance that had not previously existed.”
Arius got himself condemned for such arguments. The Trinity doctrine was set down to be as—quoting the Catholic Encyclopedia—“the central doctrine of the Christian religion.” When Protestantism split off from the Church of Rome it retained the Trinity doctrine.
Great Apostasy Organization, A.D. 325
Constantine, the Pagan Caesar, condemned the writings of Arius. The aged dissident was banished into “one of the most inhospitable places in the world,” the Balkan mountains.
“From the time the Nicene Creed was promulgated and accepted,” conclude Jehovah’s witnesses, “there was practically no more Bible study for more than twelve centuries.”
During that interim the Bible “lay buried in the dead Latin tongue.” Few people besides educated monks in monasteries could read it. The Church, say the Witnesses, veered all the way from Bible teachings. “A hierarchical system of Pagan origin” took the place of the “congregational system of Christian origin.” The authority of man-made doctrines and traditions replaced the “God-breathed authority of the Scriptures.” The Church was busy accumulating and absorbing, in the words of Cardinal Newman, “the use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints; . . . incense, lamps and candles; votive offerings on recovering from illness; holy water; asylums; holy days and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields; sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the East, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie
Eleison.” All such things were placed above Scriptural teaching and were, as Cardinal Newman admits, “of pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into the Church.” (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1881, pp. 355-73.)
Having this “fellowship with idols,” the system of religion developed in Christendom could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be identified with the “original Christian congregation of Bible educators founded by Jesus Christ,” say Jehovah’s witnesses.
Ill
From Arius to Peter Waldo
Peter Waldo was a wealthy merchant of Lyons, France. He arranged for the translation of the Gospels from Latin into French about 1160 (the other books of the Scriptures followed later). Waldo is cited by Jehovah’s witnesses as a man who represented the minority Christians of his day. The Waldenses, say the Witnesses, were “the torchbearers for the cause of freedom” during “the gross darkness of the Middle Ages.”
The name “Waldenses,” by the way, is not derived from Waldo. It is an Anglicized form of the European word “Vaudois,” which is drawn from a root meaning “valley.” Waldenses refers to the geographical location of the people who lived in the valleys of the Po River and its tributaries. The Presbyterian Board of Publications published a study of the Waldenses in 1853. It states that the Waldenses were not founded by Peter Waldo. They had existed from time immemorial in the Piedmont valleys of northern Italy. The peculiar dialect of the people stemmed from a very primitive form of Latin. It marked them as being “separated and cut off from Roman influence before that empire broke up under the infiltration of Teutonic powers.”
In the esteem of Jehovah’s witnesses, the Waldenses were and still are, one more among the "hundreds of Protestant sects that have sprouted.” They stood by the Apostles Creed, which, say the Witnesses, includes “that notorious Pagan doctrine, the trinity.” The Waldenses embraced from earliest times "the heathen doctrines of immortality of the soul and hell-fire damnation.” So, the Witnesses conclude, the Waldensian claim to apostolic origin “falls flat, for these three principal doctrines did not originate with the apostles but are hand-me-downs from the Pagan philosophers, picked up and adopted by cultists after the apostles fell asleep.”
Waldenses against Priestcraft
But the Waldenses did have their Christian virtues, the Witnesses say. “They have always believed the inspired Scriptures as the only source of divine truth.” That way they disowned the added traditions of the church “fathers.” And among other things:
“They have believed the office of Pope to be a creation of man. Papal pardons and simony they have considered a racket; nunneries and monkeries are inventions of Satan, celibacy of the clergy a snare of the Devil, and confession before a priest and death-bed repentance of no consequence. They never believed in the doctrine of the mass, but held that the Memorial bread and wine are only symbols. Image worship, worship of the cross, and temples they believe to be idolatry. Likewise the worship of Mary as ‘Queen of Heaven.’ ”
In addition: “They have always believed that purgatory is a fable invented by men, that pilgrimages are only a means of emptying one’s pockets, that holy water is no more valuable than rain water, that the so-called holy relics are nothing more than dead men’s bones. They were also opposed to the shedding of human blood even in a so-called righteous war.”
Personal Ministry
Another thing that rates the Waldenses high in the opinion of Jehovah’s witnesses was the way they carried on their ministry. “They were most energetic in preaching what they believed and in carrying on an activity in harmony with what they preached. Their missionary zeal and the method of their preaching were in the tradition of primitive Christianity. They trained and sent out missionaries two by two, usually a younger with a veteran.”
Their itinerant ministers accepted food and clothing from the people to whom they preached. But for the most part “they worked with their hands to maintain themselves and their families,” the Witnesses add approvingly. “Some were merchants, others were artisans of various trades, and some, like Luke, were practicing physicians. Almost all of them had training in farming and stock raising.”
The Waldenses “placed great stress on reading and studying the Bible, even back in those days before printing from moveable type was invented and when copies of the Bible were very scarce. They memorized great portions of the Christian Greek Scriptures as well as passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. They also made handwritten copies of portions of the Bible and distributed these in the form of Bible tracts.”
Translated Bible
In Peter Waldo’s day the Waldenses produced the Ancient Vaudois version of the New Testament or Greek Scriptures. It was produced in what we know as the Provencal language, the common people’s language. This translation predated any other complete version in English, German, French, Italian, or Spanish.
The missionary work of the Waldenses must have had quite an impact. J. A. Wylie, in his History of the Waldenses, says: “There was no kingdom of Southern and Central Europe to which these missionaries did not find their way, and where they did not leave traces of their visit in the disciples whom they made.”
Persecution
Expansion brought persecution and suppression. Beginning about the end of the twelfth century, and for the next four hundred years, the Waldenses fell victims to the wrath and inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. They were branded as “heretics.” Pope Innocent IV consigned them to extinction, and his ruling was sustained by the most important council of the Middle Ages, the Twelfth Ecumenical Council of 1215. “Political vassals of Rome, dukes and governors, princes and kings, were sent forth to bear the Papal sword in the ‘holy war.’ ” Armies numbering as many as 18,000 men marched to wipe out the Waldenses.
According to the Witnesses: “Some of the most horrifying pages of history are those recounting how these devout people were imprisoned in dungeons, burned at the stake, beheaded before their children, hurled over precipices. Their houses and villages were burned; their womenfolk were stripped naked and outrageously violated; their innocent children massacred.”
The Waldenses and the Witnesses
Modem Witnesses of Jehovah have retained a number of features of Waldensian Christianity. The Witnesses translate and distribute Bibles. They rely only upon the Scriptures for divine authority. They study and preach the Bible as their sole message. To them Christianity is a religion you learn with your mind and practice in your personal ministry. Like the Waldenses, each Witness is a minister, a missionary. The Witnesses go forth by twos, one training the other, from house to house. And similarly, the two groups, ancient and modem, are targets of universal religious anathema.
IV
From Waldo to Wycliffe
Of the Waldenses the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: ‘Persecution gave new vitality to their doctrines, which passed on to Wycliffe and Huss, and through these leaders produced the Reformation in Germany and England.”
So across this bridge we advance a couple of centuries. Here the Witnesses pick up the history of Christianity in the days when the activities of the harassed minorities were symbolized, more or less, in the person of the Englishman, John Wycliffe.
A number of nonconformists were burned to death in England in the year 1428. The deposition of one of the victims reads: "Item—Nicolas Belward is one of the same sect and hath a New Testament . . . and taught the said William Wright [for] the space of one year and studied diligently upon the said New Testament.”
John Wycliffe, a Roman Catholic clergyman, lived, in these troubled times, to translate the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into the English language, “for the benefit of the common man and to the great consternation of Catholicism.”
Wycliffe was a prolific writer. In his day there were no English dictionaries, no spelling books, no grammars. He is known as the father of English prose, as Chaucer is known as the father of English poetry.
He was the foremost scholar and philosopher of England’s foremost university, Oxford. Because he was also Oxford's foremost theologian—so keen a Bible student that he earned the title of "Gospel Doctor”—Wycliffe belongs in the Christian tradition claimed by Jehovah’s witnesses.
Wycliffe Fights Priesthood
Wycliffe got into the thick of the fight that involved Papal benefices. These church offices carried with them, according to the account, “very lucrative incomes and political rank and were auctioned off by the Papal court at Avignon to the highest bidders.”
Another bone of contention was the Papal tax. Somebody declared in Parliament that the Pope’s tax was “taking five times as much from the people as the king’s tax.”
It seems that Wycliffe began to make a name for himself when he campaigned publicly against “the abuse of the monastic orders and, later, against the mendicant friars.”
“These begging friars, of the Dominican and Franciscan orders,” we are told, “had entered England comparatively recently but soon exceeded older orders in power and wealth. They roamed the countryside, mixed Bible stories with ridiculous legends and Greek fables, sold the Pope’s indulgences, privileges and livings, and had great influence with the womenfolk.
“To swell their ranks,” the chronicle continues, "they kidnapped youths from the universities, causing Bishop Fitz-ralph to complain to the Pope in 1357 that as a result of their depredations students at Oxford had dropped from 30,000 to 6,000, all because of parental fears that their sons would be kidnapped.”
…