ome time in hiding. When he came back to the believers, he had bated
nothing of his claim to divinity, but he was no longer so bold. He now
told them that the New Jerusalem would not come down at Leatherwood
Creek, but in the city of Philadelphia, and he departed to the scene of
his glory. Three of the believers followed him over the rugged mountains
and through the pathless woods, finding food and shelter by hardly
less than a miracle; but they did not find the New Jerusalem at their
journey's end. Dylks had told them that where they should see the
heavenly light the brightest, there they should behold the beginning of
the New Jerusalem; but they nowhere saw this light, though they
walked the streets of the earthly city night and day. Two of them were
substantial farmers, and when they had lost all hope, and had lost even
Dylks himself (for he soon vanished), they pledged their tobacco crops
and so got money enough to come home, where they lived and died in the
full faith that Joseph C. Dylks was God Almighty, though he never did
anything to prove it but snort like a startled horse, wear long hair on
foot and a halo on horseback, and fail in everything else he attempted.
The third of this company of his followers, a young minister of the
United Brethren, did not return for some years; then he came, well
dressed and looking fat and sleek, and preached to the people on
Leatherwood Creek the faith in which he had not faltered. He accounted
for the disappearance of Dylks from the eyes of his other worshipers in
Philadelphia very simply: he had seen him taken up into heaven.
But the people had merely his word for the fact; Dylks never descended
to earth again as his apostle promised, and the belief in his divinity
died out with those who first accepted him.
XX. WAYS OUT.
In 1893 Jacob S. Coxey, a respectable citizen of Massillon, started a
movement in favor of good roads which took the form of a pilgrimage to
Washington to petition Congress for its object. Several armies, as they
were called, from different parts of the country, met in Massillon, and
under Mr. Coxey's leadership, set out on a long and toilsome march over
the Alleghanies to the capital, living by charity on the way. Many of
the soldiers of these armies might well have been idle and worthless
persons; there were doubtless others who were sincere and sane in their
hope that the representatives of the people might be persuaded to do
something for bet
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