possessions of the Church were
few. Fifteen years afterwards, it had a fortune of more than a million
pounds.

In order to carry out his plan of building a town in which neither
spirits nor tobacco should be sold, and which should be inhabited only
by Sionists, it was necessary that all the land should belong to him,
and he had to reckon with the probably exorbitant demands of the
sellers. To circumvent these his real intentions had to be hidden, and
with the help of his faithful auxiliaries this was successfully
accomplished.

I do not know what has become of Sionism during recent years. Will the
dynasty be continued after the reign of John Dowie by that of his son
William Gladstone Dowie; or will the death of the prophet, as stated by
those who have seen the eclipse of other stars of first magnitude, be
the signal for the dissolution of the sect?

What matters, however, is the genesis and not the duration of an
enchantment which has united around one central figure, so many
thousands who thirsted for the simultaneous salvation of their souls
and of their purses.

CHAPTER III

THE ADEPTS OF THE SUN OF SUNS

Nearly all Communistic theories when applied in practice prove
failures, but there seems to be one infallible safeguard--that supplied
by religion. Faith, when mingled with the trials and disenchantments
of life, appears to mitigate them, and communal experiments based on
religious beliefs nearly always prosper. This applies to the
half-religious, half-communal sects of modern Russia, and the principle
has also been adopted by the American apostles of communism.

One of these, Dr. Teed of Chicago, understood it well, and his sect
was, in fact, merely a religious sect based on the principle of
communal possessions. Its adherents took the name of _Koreshans_,
after the title _Koresh_ (or the sun) boasted by its founder. He,
_Koresh_, "Light of Lights," "Sun of Suns," was called by Heaven to
teach the truth to mortals, and to show them which road to eternal
salvation they should follow in order to prosper upon earth. Founded
in Chicago, the sect moved recently to Florida, and there, from day to
day, Teed had the satisfaction of seeing the number of believers
steadily increase.

He had at first to put up with a good deal of ridicule, for his
teaching, based upon that of Fourier, and incorporating some of the
mystical ideas of Swedenborg, was not at all to the taste of his
fellow-citizens. The