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Epilogue
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Epilogue Looking back in the 185os over a long and productive career as an itinerant Methodist preacher, Peter Cartwright saw a long chain of enthusiasm and imposture linking the eclectic prophets of the early republic who had so bedeviled him to the organized millenarian movements of antebellum America. The prophets of the 1790s "would even set the very day that God was to burn the world, like the self-deceived modern Millerites. They would prophesy, that if any one did oppose them, God would send fire down from heaven and consume him, like the blasphemous Shakers. They would proclaim that they could heal all manner of diseases, and raise the dead, just like the diabolical Mormons. They professed to have converse with spirits of the dead in heaven and hell, like the modern spirit rappers. Such a state of things I never saw before:' he concluded, "and I hope in God I shall never see again."1 What, apart from the hostility of mainstream evangelicals, connected revolutionary era prophets to their more famous antebellum progeny? The current historical wisdom tends to credit Peter Cartwright's assessment of the Millerites, Shakers, Mormons, and "spirit rappers" as direct lineal descendants of Richard Brothers and company. John Brooke, Clarke Garrett, E. P. Thompson, and Leigh Eric Schmidt, among others, have made a strong argument for the existence of a shared intellectual tradition linking radical Protestant dissenters across two centuries and two continents.2 In Brooke's magisterial account of the roots of Mormon cosmology, the potent blend of medieval hermeticism, alchemical magic, and religious primitivism that an 1 Peter Cartwright, Autobiography ofPeter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher, ed. W. P. Strickland (NewYork, 1856), p. 52. 2 John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making ofMormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York, 1994); Clarke Garrett, Spirit Possession and Popular Religion from the Camisards to the Shakers (Baltimore, 1987); E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York, 1993); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). Epilogue 261 obscure seeker named Joseph Smith put together in 1830 can be traced directly back to the radical sectarians of the 1640s, the French Prophets of the early 1700s, the assorted continental pietists of the mid-eighteenth century, and the millenarians of the 1790s. The affinities among the various spiritualist movements ofthe seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries are real enough, centered in an unshakable belief in God's indwelling presence in man. An antipathy to learning and the intellect, to church structure and to hierarchy in general, an openness to the spiritual gifts ofoutsiders and outcasts, a primitive desire to restore man to his prelapsarian purity and the true church to its pentecostal origins, and a deep suspicion of wealth and birth as markers of spiritual worth-all these elements can be found, in various combinations, in the dissenting sects of the Radical Reformation. But in temperament and cultural disposition, Smith and his antebellum peers seem to me of a different type altogether than the republican prophets of the late eighteenth century. Their profound alienation from the structures of modern life registers the extent of the social, economic, and political changes that transformed a proto-revolutionary society perched precariously on the threshold of modernity into a liberal democratic colossus. Too much separated the religious and intellectual culture of the early Victorians from that of the revolutionary generation-too many paths not taken and journeys aborted for those Anglo-Anlericans still searching for tangible evidence of God's ongoing presence in the world. One path that proved a spiritual dead end was the Enlightenment faith in pure reason and the transparency of truth. As we have seen, reason proved an especially unreliable ally in the prophet's drive for respectability; the more reasonable his or her demeanor, the more suspicious his audience that deception was at work. Antebellum prophets saw little benefit in adapting their message to the language and forms of the Anglo-Anlerican public sphere. Reason, they concluded, had led sincere Christians astray, first down the treacherous path of deism and infidelity, and then, for an unfortunate few, down the path to disbelief itself. At the end of the journey of discovery, which enlightened scientists and philosophers promised would bring truth and justice to a benighted world, lay the self, not God, a self moreover stripped of charisma, the very thing that...