3.
Issues of Death and Life

Not long after the death of Starr King, unorthodox beliefs were appearing among many northern Californians. By the late 1860s the largely unarticulated popular tradition that we saw in Chapter 1 was being developed by organized groups and spokespersons offering various alternatives to orthodoxy for the Anglo-Protestant population. Spiritualists, for example, who had been present in California since the 1850s publicizing their séances, experienced a resurgence of interest after the Civil War. In 1867 they were able to start their own newspaper, which announced itself as an exponent of liberal religion while denouncing revivalism and all dogmas and creeds.^[1] Seventh-day Adventists, preaching the imminent end of the world and espousing unusual theories about the life after death, began a vigorous California missionary campaign in 1868.^[2]

Even within the traditional denominations there were dissidents, three of whom were tried as heretics. The first heresy trial was that of S. D. Simonds, who since 1851 had been editor of the California Christian Advocate , the major Methodist newspaper. Simonds questioned the doctrine of the Trinity and favored a unified view of God understood through the figure of Christ.^[3] It is clear from his columns in the Advocate that he always had a strong interest in science and modern thought and in resolving the conflicts between the Bible and secular critics; eventually he was led in a more liberal direction. Simonds was tried for heresy in 1864 but maintained his connection with the church, which reinstated him on grounds of his good character in 1868. Another trial, more serious in its consequences, occurred in 1868–69 among the Presbyterians, when the Rev. Laurentine Hamilton questioned received doctrines about the life after death, or the "future state" as it was euphemistically called. Hamilton was disbarred from the ministry in 1869 and started his own independent church. In 1874 the Methodists again had to deal with a liberal, D. A. Dryden, who was, like Simonds, a highly respected

minister from pioneer times. Dryden was excluded from the ministry and went to work for the U.S. government's Indian Bureau.^[4] Thus as liberal beliefs, made more respectable by Thomas Starr King, appeared among Anglo-Protestant leaders, traditional ministers tightened their defenses by insisting on heresy trials. It may seem strange that California ministers would resort to arguing over abstruse points of doctrine only a few years after people had warmly supported the open and expansive religiosity of Starr King. Indeed, it seemed strange to many Californians at the time. Perhaps it was true, as King had once written privately to a friend, that in California there was "the tightest orthodoxy [among ministers], in connection with a noble large-heartedness among the people."^[5]

Yet heresy trials are not held merely for the sake of intellectual argument. Heresy, as George Shriver has written, is the dislocation of an entire scheme of the universe by the denial of some crucial element within it.^[6] That dislocation is precisely what was happening in California between 1865 and 1875. The crucial element denied by at least two of the heretics and many dissidents was the orthodox view of life after death. Spiritualists held that people continued to develop and progress to different levels even after they died; there was no steady state of heavenly bliss or hellish punishment. Adventists denied the eternal punishment of the wicked, and in addition believed that the soul did not live in a heaven after the body died: instead it "slept" till the final resurrection, when it would awaken along with the body. The two ministers who were permanently excluded from their denominations, Hamilton and Dryden, also questioned the punishment of the wicked and developed unusual views of the afterlife. Simonds, who was reinstated, had chosen another, apparently less offensive, point of quarrel. We can hardly doubt that the afterlife was the heart of the problem that traditionalists had with dissidents. As the conservative Pacific Methodist observed in 1869, the doctrine of eternal punishment of the wicked was one of the most questioned beliefs of the day,^[7] and related issues about the afterlife were being raised on all sides.

Such questions were not new. Unitarians and Universalists had asked—and, in their own ways, answered—them some fifty years before.^[8] But after the Civil War this issue came sharply into popular consciousness, not only in California but all across the nation. In the Northeast and Midwest, which dominated national Protestantism, new ideas about the afterlife came to the fore mainly through pop-

ular books and hymns. The novels of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, beginning with her best-selling The Gates Ajar (1868), questioned orthodox belief and portrayed the life after death as a pleasant New England town, filled with friends, families, and cultural events such as concerts by Beethoven. Even crotchety agnostics got into heaven, and the punishment of the wicked was virtually dismissed as an issue for outmoded theologians.^[9] Theologians paid little attention to Phelps's books, but these and similar works reflected popular consciousness about the issues at hand.

Americans after the Civil War—if we include the Spiritualists, after 1850—wove new fantasies about the life after death. These ideas were, in part, transmutations of utopian and millenarian hopes that had influenced American Protestantism in the North from 1830 to 1850. As utopianism and millennialism faded and society moved toward consolidation and control, visions of the future came to rest in images of the afterlife—which, after all, were more malleable than the world here below.^[10] Like utopias, these visions developed out of hope for the spiritual completion of the human being. Thus Phelps developed the ideal of the New England community in heaven, and the Spiritualists imagined a spirit world peopled with family, friends, and heroes.

Harmless as such fantasies might seem, they were dangerous to Protestant orthodoxy in California. Traditional views of a stable heavenly society with eternal bliss for the righteous and eternal punishment for the wicked encouraged belief in the possibility of a clear social and moral order on earth. Questioning the standard views of reward and punishment would cast doubt on the entire divine order of things, established in heaven for all eternity, and would call into question Anglo-Protestant aims of establishing a moral society. If heaven was not ordered as they had believed, how could they say that the order they proposed on earth was according to a divine plan? Thus heresy about the afterlife could be connected to disturbing ideas about society and human destiny in life.

This will become clearer from a specific example. The most illuminating case is that of Laurentine Hamilton, for we have a full record of his heresy and we can reconstruct with considerable confidence its social context. Then we can return briefly to other examples to shed further light on the relation between images of the afterlife and the social reality of northern California white Protestants.

Beginning on Easter Sunday in 1868, Laurentine Hamilton, pastor of Oakland's First Presbyterian Church, preached a series of four sermons on immortality. These sermons must have been the talk of the town, for he was soon asked to publish them. When they appeared in print he achieved immediate notoriety throughout the Bay Area: he was called before the Presbytery of San Jose to defend himself against charges of heresy. The action was shocking because Hamilton was one of the respected ministers of the region. A graduate of Auburn Seminary in New York, he had years of California service behind him, having spent two years in the small town of Columbia (Tuolumne County) and eight years in San Jose before coming to Oakland in 1865. First Presbyterian was a prestigious appointment, probably the wealthiest church in Oakland after First Congregational. Hamilton was not a great orator, but he had become known for his thoughtful sermons and sympathetic manner.^[11] He was well enough respected in clerical circles to have had a sermon published recently in the Occident (April 1868). The paper's stated policy was to publish only noncontroversial sermons, all of which were by well-known ministers; Hamilton's was a mildly liberal but totally inoffensive defense of the Christian Sabbath.

His series on immortality, however, was quite controversial, especially the second sermon, entitled "Future Punishment," which examined the fate of the wicked after death.^[12] In it he argued that if God was truly good and merciful, he would not punish sinners forever. It was more reasonable to suppose that he would either stop the punishment at some point, or arrange matters so that it would come naturally to an end. In fact, Hamilton suggested, the church had misinterpreted the notion of eternal punishment. The biblical adjective translated "eternal" was in Greek aionios , from the noun aion , which really meant a "dispensation"—a "certain period or flow of time during which one connected series of events and changes runs its course and ends in some consummation."^[13] Thus the punishment of the wicked might be for some given period or periods, but it would not truly be eternal in the sense of "endless."

That notion led Hamilton to an entirely different conception of the afterlife. He urged his audience not to imagine our eternal lives as static, "an eternal monotony of psalm-singing or aimless, effortless ecstasies;" that would be "cushions of idleness, misnamed rest." Instead, we should think of our lives after death as going through beginnings, culminations, transformations, and new beginnings

through eon after eon. Heavenly life was "the starting forth on a new career of progress . . . a new goal of attainment . . . guided anew for another stretch of the onward and upward advance, all progress still depending on effort."^[14] His reinterpretation of the term "eternal" thus undergirded a different conception of the afterlife as progressive and changing.

Conversely, Hamilton argued, we should not imagine the punishment of the wicked as entailing their screaming in pain in eternal flames. Rather, the wicked would suffer a gradual decline, the reverse of progress and advance. Their punishment was a "fearing, shrinking sense of his [God's] being which feels him without knowing him . . . a growing blindness that is ever closing in on the soul in thicker darkness." Hamilton declined to say whether the diminishing light of the soul was ever finally snuffed out. But, via an unusual metaphor, he suggested that it was not: "This dying life is the spiritual counterpart to that line in mathematics which forever approaches but never touches a curve—the spiritual asymptote of annihilation." We may even believe, he suggested, that Christ's atonement was so powerful that salvation could be offered, on the other side of death, to those whose powers were withering.^[15]

Punishment, then, could not be said to be eternal, for the suffering of the wicked would actually decrease as their sensitivity declined. The greater their distance from God, the less they could feel. And for all practical purposes, Hamilton believed, wickedness could be said simply to die out. Therefore it did not make sense to urge people to come to God because otherwise they would "burn" forever. Instead, Christians should appeal to their inner sense that "the divine powers of life in them are dying." Spiritually, the wicked suffer not pain but loss—the loss of their own vital powers of feeling and knowing.^[16]

Hamilton offered a utopian fantasy of the afterlife that contrasted sharply with orthodox views of heaven and hell. In asking people to imagine a life beyond the grave where they would continue to change and progress, he projected the increasingly popular image of nineteenth-century society as a civilization of growth and progress, where independent individuals set goals and achieved them, gaining a sense of accomplishment and fullness of life. Unlike real society, however, there was no competition in the afterlife, nor were there any wicked people trampling on the efforts of the good. They, because of their lack of sensitivity and devotion to God, were becoming weaker and weaker and were being left far behind.

Interestingly, neither the good nor the evil side of the world beyond was characterized by great emotion or passion. The good were essentially followers of the work ethic, planning and carrying out, learning and accomplishing; but Hamilton said nothing of a growing intimacy, either between a soul and God or among the souls of the dead themselves. We might assume that, unlike the wicked, they retained capacity for feeling; but that was not important in Hamilton's portrayal. Their reward was not intimacy or ecstasy, but accomplishment. The wicked were dying on all counts, in feeling as well as in capacity to know and do; but they did not cry out or suffer agonies at their loss, nor were they demoniacal creatures raging in anger at God. Rather, they grew cold. Hamilton's utopia contained neither joy nor bliss, his dystopia neither pain nor sorrow.

That vision was in tune with Hamilton's general attitude toward emotionality in religion. In the first and third of his sermons on immortality, "The Knowledge of God Eternal Life" and "Fear the Foe of Love," he criticized revivalistic religion for appealing to people's fears, working them up and then letting them down. That, he said, kept people bouncing back and forth between hope and despair, leading not to love of God but to frustration and disbelief. When he was called before the Presbytery to justify the stance taken in his sermons, he launched an attack on two giants of tradition: Jonathan Edwards, father of American evangelicalism, and Charles Spurgeon, recognized as one of the greatest preachers in nineteenth-century Britain. He declared that their views of the gruesome torments of hell were "boundless absurdities." In general, he said, the old views of heaven and hell were based on "an over-strained horror or fear which . . . is essentially hardening and unhealthful, and positively diseasing to the moral sensibility."^[17]

Such statements were unlikely to persuade the old guard. They had probably been raised on emotional, revivalistic religion and did not find it hardening or unhealthy. Over the previous two years a major revivalist, A. B. Earle, had been touring the northern part of the state at the invitation of orthodox ministers of many denominations; they were promoting "old-time religion" just at the moment that Hamilton was attacking it. Moreover, liberal religious groups like the Unitarians and Spiritualists were drawing many people away from orthodoxy already, and the Methodists had declared one of their own leaders heretical. In such a situation the Presbyterian ministers must have agreed with Methodist Bishop Thompson's belief

that, precisely because of the mixture of views in California, it was necessary to preserve orthodoxy from too much "rational" religion.^[18] The Presbytery voted to exclude Hamilton from the ministry. The one dissenting vote was cast by an intellectual from the College of California, Professor Henry Durant, who defended Hamilton when the latter did not appear for trial.

Unfortunately for the public image of the Presbyterians, Hamilton did not quietly fade from view. The Sunday before the final verdict was announced, he gathered with his congregation and announced his impending separation from the Presbyterian church. He and about one-half of his parishioners decided to form their own church.^[19] The secular papers rallied around Hamilton, declaring that the trial reminded them of the days of the Inquisition, and pleading for liberty of conscience. The denominational papers quietly supported the Presbytery's stance, but without saying too much directly on the issue. Undoubtedly, they did not wish to raise too many questions within their own ranks. Meanwhile, Hamilton remained prominent in Oakland. A year after his declaration of independence, the Oakland Directory in its church listings gave him and his church two-thirds of a page of description, a highly positive advertisement. In contrast, it described the First Presbyterian Church—the other half of his former congregation—in the briefest possible fashion, giving merely the bare facts of its location, its size, and its new pastor.^[20] Over the years Hamilton continued to be recognized as a leader of liberal Christianity, even though his congregation declined in size.

Hamilton attracted many of the elite and upwardly mobile of Oakland. He took with him, when the church split, not only Professor Durant but also a judge, S. B. McKee; Rev. D. McClure, the principal of Oakland Military Academy; and J. S. Emery, the Bay Area contractor after whom Emeryville was named. Educators and real estate men seem to have been prominent in his church, suggesting that those with intellectual leanings and those with an eye to expansive growth (and to connecting with others who had money to buy) were attracted to Hamilton.^[21] Oakland itself was a boom town at the time. Northern California in general was in the midst of its first great expansion since the gold rush, because people were expecting the completion of the transcontinental railroad (finished in 1869). In Oakland land values were exploding and there were plenty of opportunities to make money in business or speculation. But this

meant that it was also a time of great uncertainty, with frequent change of status and careers and high social mobility.

Those most deeply involved in the economic fortunes of society—the wealthy, the upwardly mobile, the speculators—belonged to either First Presbyterian or First Congregational in Oakland. A significant number of these people were so attracted to Hamilton's utopian vision of the future life that they were willing to leave the stability of their home church and risk a different religious venture. To them Hamilton's views seemed more rational and "progressive." Their own lives were dedicated to progress in the material sphere; as Californians, they would likely have faced many alternative choices and changed careers more than once.^[22] The general instability of home life, land ownership, and legal institutions was still an important feature of California life. In that context a clear division between the righteous and the wicked would be difficult to imagine, let alone accept. For men who made daily choices in an atmosphere of economic and moral uncertainty, wagering the security of their families on the next turn in the real estate market, the prospect of clearly identifying good and evil must have seemed dim indeed. It was better to think of each choice as something from which one could learn, gradually correcting one's errors and accomplishing a little at each stage. And that, in essence, was what Hamilton's vision of the future life offered. Orthodoxy, in contrast, believed in objective good and evil that could be objectively rewarded or punished. There were no gradations, no second chances. It was an awesome system—too awesome for the uncertainties of California social life. An opportunistic decision might result in a man's being condemned to the flames of hell for eternity; the torment of that thought would, for some people, be unacceptable, given already the uncertainties of their daily lives. Hamilton's version of the afterlife was highly reassuring.

His attacks on emotional religion would be appealing for similar reasons. It was indispensable, in many situations, to suppress one's emotional responses to events in order to deal with economic uncertainties; this would be especially true of businessmen and speculators who were deeply dependent on the fortunes of the market. Revivals could conceivably have offered an outlet for some of those suppressed feelings. But California lacked the continuing social supports—small churches with intimate relations between parishioners and minister, the structures of town or farm life—that had been part

of the context of earlier revivalism. Without these it was best to avoid emotionalism, with its risk of arousing fears and anxieties that were already plentiful.

Hamilton's vision of the afterlife, then, suggested moral relativism as opposed to religious and moral objectivity, continual change and growth rather than stable order, "rationality" (that is, congruence with the emerging social order) over emotionality. While Hamilton's following was small, his reputation was large, and his followers were among the most respectable members of society. Moreover, his views bore just enough similarity to those of other dissenters (primarily Unitarians and Spiritualists) to make ministers, and undoubtedly the religious population at large, wonder whether these dissenting minorities were harbingers of the future. We will consider some of these other dissenters briefly to show more clearly how they together reflected a growing sense of the disparity between traditional doctrine and the world in which California Protestants lived, worked, and dreamed.

Closest to Hamilton among his contemporaries were the Spiritualists. So far as we know, Hamilton had no interest in their communication with the spirits of the dead. We would expect him to class that practice as superstition, in league with the mysticism and pietism he rejected. But if we exclude that feature of spiritualism, there were many similarities to his own doctrine. Like Hamilton, the Spiritualists believed that the soul progressed in the life beyond. Most held, following the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Andrew Jackson Davis,^[23] that there were a number of cycles or spirals of existence beyond this world, and the soul would have repeated chances to rise higher in the levels of being, moving toward God. Most rejected all orthodoxy because it insisted on dogmas and creeds, and criticized revivalism. Spiritualists, as R. Laurence Moore has shown, wished to be recognized as rational and believed that ultimately their beliefs would be proven empirically by modern science.^[24] Blind faith or emotion had nothing to do with the truth of religion.

As we observed earlier, Spiritualism was enjoying a resurgence in California around the time of Hamilton's trial, and its popularity would continue into the 1870s and beyond. Judging from the California organ of Spiritualism, The Banner of Progress , these groups were building their popularity primarily on the two features of their

doctrine that were most similar to Hamilton's approach: emphasis on progress and development in the afterlife and rejection of orthodoxy with its creeds and revivalistic tendencies. We have no direct information on California Spiritualists that would tell us what sorts of people were attracted to the movement. Nationally, the prominent and well educated were drawn to it, and the style and advertisements in the Banner of Progress suggest a highly literate and even intellectual audience. However, no firm conclusions can be drawn from this, since the prominent denominational papers of the time also carried many articles demanding a considerable intellectual ability. Nevertheless it is clear that Spiritualism represented a diffuse but real challenge springing from the same sources as Hamilton's heresy: a dissatisfaction with the orthodox view of the future life and a new image of the universe presided over by a good and rational deity.

A somewhat different deviation from strict orthodoxy appeared in the case of D. A. Dryden, who was tried for heresy by the Methodists in 1874. We can reconstruct but little of the development of his thought, as we have only his brief account of the controversy and an occasional newspaper communication, the latter being not particularly revealing. From his account it appears that he was less radical than Hamilton but shared some similar viewpoints. Dryden held on the one hand to the pietism of early-nineteenth-century Methodism; he held that true doctrines were better expressed in Methodism's comforting hymns than in its creed. The truth of the church lay in its emphasis on living a life of love.^[25] Thus, while Dryden saw the center of Christianity as a personal relationship with Jesus, he wished to reject the beliefs expressed in the creeds: the traditional attempt to describe God, Christ, and man rationally. He focused on the issue of life after death because the sharp separation between good and evil implied in traditional beliefs about heaven and hell was no longer acceptable to him, as it had not been to Hamilton. Dryden saw the life after death as a continuous process of growth in spiritual consciousness. There would be no battle between good and evil powers; there was no time of judgment in which the righteous were eternally divided from the wicked. Like Hamilton, Dryden emphasized continual change, progress, and growth, and denied a once-for-all, objective decision about good or evil.

Dryden wrote that he had come to these views gradually, as a result of his own study over a period of several years. During that time, he was preaching all over the northern part of the state, either with

a regular church appointment or as an itinerant. His contributions to Methodism must have been substantial, for he and his wife were remembered as a great pioneer Methodist couple in California.^[26] During that period of intense activity he was developing and preaching alternative views of the afterlife that emphasized progress and denied harsh judgments, but without, in his case, rejecting emotional religion with its yearning for intimacy with God. In short, a good number of Methodists in the 1860s and early 1870s must have heard Dryden express his heterodox views.

California Protestants in these years, then, included a broad range of liberals, from reforming Methodists like Dryden to the influential elite supporting Hamilton to the radical Spiritualists. They were certainly not dominant; even if we added earlier liberals such as Unitarians and Universalists, they still would have constituted a small minority. But given the high rate of secularism in the area, there were enough of them to be threatening—especially when secular papers added their voices to the fray, encouraging breaks with tradition under the label of "liberty of conscience." The vocal presence of dissidents and heretics was a reaffirmation of California Protestants' independent thinking, in which they took such pride. Moreover, the dissidents viewed themselves as part of the vanguard of progress, and in that respect too they reinforced many Californians' image of themselves as building a great modern society out of their own resources.^[27]

The growth of liberal dissent continually undermined Anglo-Protestant traditions. California social patterns, among whites at least, did not support either legalistic or sentimental religiosity; the utopias of the afterlife offered by Hamilton, Dryden, or the Spiritualists were more directly related to life patterns familiar to Californians. They were, above all, utopias of change and development, oriented toward the individual's progress, free of moral judgment and social expectations. At the same time, they were not mere reflections of social life as it was. The utopias ensured continual growth rather than ups and downs; and they promised that the evildoers, the thoroughly selfish or harmful, would be left far behind. One may well ask, however, if these pictures of the afterlife were so clearly suited to Californians—their self-image, their way of thinking, their hopes and dreams—why did the dissident movements not sweep the state? Why did orthodoxy survive these attacks? Were there hidden weaknesses in the new liberalism?

We can best approach these questions by comparing the liberalism of the late 1860s and 1870s to that of Thomas Starr King. King captured the hearts of thousands of Californians with his liberal version of Christianity, but he left the church institutions strictly alone. He did not even attempt to campaign for his own denomination, because he saw true spirituality as flowing through all channels, inside and outside the churches. One may imagine that if he had developed a religious institution, he could have been a great threat to the established denominations. For he did have a social vision: a rich image of the individual in the social order, of California in the nation, of the social order and the national identity as connected to the natural order. All of these were connected in a mystical way with the plan of God for the whole world, and all could be felt by the individual who developed his spiritual sense. King evoked, in the individual heart and mind, expansive feelings and a sense both of participating in a great dream and of belonging to a social and natural community.

Later liberals adopted the mild anti-institutionalism that we find in Starr King (and in earlier American liberal thinkers); they, like he, believed that spirituality did not flow only in organized channels of belief and ritual. But they lacked the larger social vision, the sense of interlocking destinies and of belonging to communities.^[28] Far more than Starr King's, Hamilton's vision of the future was individualistic. Dryden's preference for the "life of love" portrayed in Methodist hymns suggests a potential interest in religious community, but it is more likely that, like most pietists, Dryden was concerned more with the inner life and one's relation to Jesus. The Spiritualists for their part offered a vision and a present experience of community—through communion with the departed. One could reestablish a relation with one's relatives, or with great heroes as models of humanity, even while living here on earth. But Spiritualists did not usually transfer that sense of connectedness to the earthly plane, to building community in a strong sense among fellow believers. Generally they fragmented into small groups with no central leadership, and spiritual development itself remained individualistic.

The one strength of orthodoxy, in contrast, was the church as an institution. Traditional Protestantism offered strong fellowship and a variety of community-building activities, both inside and outside the churches. The dissidents, we might say, offered great hopes for the future, but left people too much alone in the present. The traditional Anglo-Protestants, focusing more and more on everyday real-

ity—on "business Christianity"—maintained the allegiance of the majority of Protestants who wanted a church attachment at all. As long as their liberal challengers remained individualistic, anti-institutional, or both, their success was limited.

We should consider one exception to the patterns we are discussing. Among the dissenters on the issue of the afterlife during this period was a group new to California, the Seventh-day Adventists. They were not liberal by any means. But they did question some basic tenets of orthodoxy: they denied that the soul lived on after death, and they denied the eternal punishment of the wicked. The Adventists held that the soul "slept" while the body lay in the grave, and that both soul and body would awaken at the final resurrection, when all people would be judged. Then the good would reign forever and the wicked be destroyed. There would be no punishment in the flames of hell^[29] —that feature of the orthodox view that so horrified liberal thinkers.

Clearly the Adventists were like the orthodox in their insistence on judgment, with a clear division between the righteous and the wicked. They could hold this position consistently because they had a clear moral code, much like traditional Protestantism with the addition of certain distinctive commands and practices—observing Saturday as the Sabbath and vegetarianism, for example. Yet they denied the prevailing theories of the immortality of the soul, especially the idea of heaven and hell as residences of spiritual beings. This meant a denial of the utopian vision, or rather a delay of it, since utopia would come when Christ returned (a time they believed was not so far distant). The denial of heaven and hell discouraged people from thinking of reunion with their families, companionship with angels, ethereal pleasures, or any of the other familiar fantasies of heaven. The point was to live a life of obedience to God now; the results would appear at some distant time.

Despite the simplicity of this vision, which cut through the many speculations about the afterlife, it was not attractive to many Californians. By 1906 the Adventists' membership numbered about 6,400, less than one-half of 1 percent of the population. That was not a bad showing for a small sect (the Unitarians, for example, numbered only about three thousand), but it was not enough to make the Adventists highly influential. This reminds us that beliefs by themselves, however "rational" or straightforward, are not convincing without the accompanying satisfaction of a congruent social

reality. Adventist practice required a strong relationship to a community, to be sure, and that may have been attractive to some Californians cut loose from other social bonds; but it also required submission to authority. In a society of supposedly independent thinkers, it was easier to be socially respected by being a secularist or agnostic than an adventist. In other ways, too, Adventism required a degree of separation from the general society that was undoubtedly too difficult for many.

Thus, despite challenges on all sides, the Anglo-Protestants of the center held their ground, largely on the basis of their institutional reality, the churches themselves. Moreover, they still held out the hope that California would be remade in the image of Massachusetts and society would achieve its goal of a divinely modeled moral order; when that happened, the familiar visions of heaven and hell would make more sense too. In the meantime they disparaged or ignored the dissidents and held firmly to traditional doctrines. The Pacific Methodist simply insisted that the orthodox position on the future life and eternal punishment had to be believed, whatever our "tender sympathies." The Evangelist , a Disciples of Christ paper, decried the "remote speculations" with which people were occupying themselves. Instead, the editors said, we should concern ourselves only about the simple gospel truths contained in Scripture. If "THE HUMAN MIND IS LEFT ALONE WITH THE WORD OF GOD," they declared, if "it is brought into direct contact with the divine law and testimony," all arguments over the future state would cease.^[30] Of course, the so-called heretics believed that they were doing exactly what the Evangelist prescribed: interpreting the scriptural word of God with their own human minds.

Still, the orthodox remained on the defensive. Sermons of the 1870s show that Anglo-Protestant ministers increasingly had to defend their religion against challenges from outside. Throughout the 1850s and most of the 1860s they could, using their churches as a base, encourage their audiences to bring traditional morality to California, educate young men properly, understand current events as the providence of God, and learn and teach Christian doctrine more thoroughly—in general, to work at building a Christian civilization. Occasionally they used their sermons as opportunities to criticize Roman Catholics or Mormons as well. In the 1870s and later, however, they had to spend their time defending the very idea of the Christian Sabbath. They had to reply to Spiritualists, Rosicrucians,

Adventists, "freethinkers," and critics from scientific circles, as well as deal with issues raised by Mormons, Catholics, Chinese, and Jews.^[31] Pluralism became a more pressing problem than any other; the social reality of California was growing ever more distant from the traditional view of an ordered, homogeneous society. Varieties of liberalism continued to sprout, never becoming strongly enough institutionalized to counter the churches, but continually challenging their authority and the visions of the good life that they cherished.

In the 1870s Anglo-Protestant leaders pinned their hopes on two especially important features of traditional American Protestant life. One was the temperance movement, the symbol of morality in outward personal behavior. The other, more significant in California at this time, was observance of the Sabbath, the symbol of traditional community life. When these two practices were undermined and proved impossible even as hopes (they were never dominant social realities), Protestants were left with nothing but church membership and the vagaries of private belief. In addition, therefore, to Protestant controversies over belief, we must understand their conflicts over practice. In the next chapter we will look at the most significant of these conflicts: the question of the Sabbath.