Thomas Lake Harris

• Thomas Lake Harris
• Born: May 15, 1823
• Died: March 23, 1906

Christian mystic, spiritualist, and founder of a Utopian community, was born in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England, the only child of Thomas Harris and Annie (Lake) Harris. The family moved to the United States in 1828, when he was five, and settled in Utica, then a booming city in central New York State, where his father operated a grocery and worked as an auctioneer. When Harris was nine, his mother died and his father married a woman who treated the boy harshly. Though his parents were strict Calvinist Baptists, Harris was befriended by a Universalist minister in Utica, accepted his instruction, and went to live with him. While helping out in his father’s store, Harris studied for the Baptist ministry, but at the age of twenty, in 1843, he converted to Universalism. In 1845 he married Mary Van Arnum, with whom he had two sons. Also in that year he was appointed pastor of the Fourth Universalist Society in New York City.

The next two years were a period of religious crisis for Harris. Despondent about his congregation’s lack of faith in a higher, immortal world, he wondered “whether any real ability remains in man to exercise ... such practical and efficient prayer to God, as would sustain the union of the human soul with the Divine Spirit.” If not, Harris believed, “then religion on this Earth was proven indeed to be dead.”

In 1847 Harris became interested in spiritualism, a doctrine then much in vogue, that claims that personalities survive death and communicate with the living. That year Harris met Andrew Jackson Davis, a twenty-year-old clairvoyant known as the Poughkeepsie Seer, and accepted Davis’s “manifestations” of spiritual phenomena. Harris volunteered to act as a missionary for Davis’s spiritualist theories, which were grounded in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish religious philosopher, and served as editor of Davis’s periodical, the Universcoelum.

In 1848, with Davis’s help, Harris organized in New York City the Independent Christian Congregation, which counted Horace Greeley, editor of The New-York Tribune, among its members. In the summer of that year, troubled by “a growing and alarming body of juvenile destitution and crime” in New York, Harris heard a voice saying, “We wish you to write for us.”Jotting down words as fast as possible, Harris composed a sermon and delivered it to his congregation the next morning, moving his listeners to tears. Immediately afterward, Horace Greeley organized a public meeting and proposed a campaign to house and care for poor youths. Thirty thousand copies of Harris’s sermon were distributed, and it was also read from more orthodox pulpits. The New York State legislature granted a charter, public funds were appropriated, private gifts were collected, and the New York Juvenile Asylum was built.

Scandalized by Davis’s liaison with a married woman, Harris broke with him in 1850 and quit his pastorate. In March of that year he reported that “a majestic angelic man” had descended to him and planted the seed of “his first purely Heaven-inspired—God-inspired—poem,” The Epic of the Starry Heaven, which Harris dictated in several sittings late in 1853. It was followed by two others, A Lyric of the Morning Land (1854) and A Lyric of the Golden Age (1856). In these and later poems he set forth his vision of a divine world populated by angels who communicated with mortals by “the Divine Breath,” initiating them in “the New Life” and leading them by seven “degrees of opening” to a perception of “the Kingdom of God within them.” Harris’s gifts as a speaker and poet attracted many followers, estimated at one time to number about 2,000 in the United States and Great Britain; his ideas were usually stated in language that prevented them from being understood except by the initiated.

Harris, whose first wife had died in 1850, married Emily Isabella Waters in 1855, the year in which he wrote The First Book of the Christian Religion, a restatement of Swedenborg’s doctrines. In March 1857 “the Lord saw fit to subject me to a trial” in which, Harris said, he communicated with a demon named Joseph Balsamo. The records of the communications were published as The Arcana of Christianity (1858). In May 1857 Harris founded a monthly journal, The Herald of Light, “devoted to the Orderly and Christian Spiritualism of the New Church”; it ceased publication in August 1861. In the fall of 1860 Harris traveled to England, where, as a lecturer, he won the notice of the British journalist, traveler, and statesman Laurence Oliphant, who later became a disciple. On his return in May 1861, Harris declared that “all things announce” a “battle for the universal freedom of mankind,” and he organized his followers into a community called the Use, which settled first at Wassaic, New York, and then in nearby Amenia. At the urging of Laurence Oliphant and his mother, Lady Oliphant, who had joined the group, a tract of 1,600 acres was purchased at Brocton, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie, and the community moved there to farm. At first organized according to a communitarian plan, the forty members agreed to a patriarchal system under which all property was owned by Harris, known as “Father.”

The members of the Use, calling themselves the Brotherhood of the New Life, practiced a way of life they called theosocialism. They were determined to deny selfishness and surrender themselves to the spirit of God, inviting this influence by a ritual called “open breathing.” Holding with Swedenborg’s teaching that God represents the union of two aspects, male and female, they strove, through the practice of celibate marriage, to achieve unity with the divine, whose plan for the regeneration of humanity was, they felt, dependent on their own spiritual perfection.

A dispute between Harris and Oliphant led in 1875 to the departure of Harris and his followers to Fountain Grove, a 1,200-acre vineyard in Santa Rosa, California. In 1876 Harris set forth his religious teachings in The Lord, the Two-in-One, then ceased publication of his works for fifteen years. During this period he printed for private circulation a series of poems and hymns, including the 5,000-line Star Flowers.

Emily Harris died in 1883. In 1891 Harris married his secretary, Jane Lee Waring. Also in that year he published The New Republic, a commentary on the work of social theorists such as Edward Bellamy and a theological justification for his own vision of social reform. After a visit to England, Harris settled in New York City to continue his writing. He reported attaining oneness with the divine in 1894, but the expected result—the end of this world and the advent of the next—did not materialize. His “entire uplift from outward form of manifestation” took place in 1906, when he was eighty-two.

The only full-length biography of Harris is A. A. Cuthbert, The Life and World-Work of Thomas Lake Harris (1909; reprinted 1975), a vague history written by an adherent. A sketch in The Dictionary of American Biography (1932) lists Harris’s writings and includes a bibliography. A sketch of the life of Laurence Oliphant in the British Dictionary of National Biography (1927) describes Oliphant’s association with Harris. See also H. W. Schneider, A Prophet and a Pilgrim (1942), and R. McCully, The Brotherhood of the New Life (1914).