American cities were in turmoil by the end of the Civil War. Brother had cut down brother; Baptist had butchered Baptist and the war cries in the name of God had echoed from the hills on both sides of the battlefield.
Love of God and neighbor and Puritan ideals were left bleeding at Shiloh, Gettysburg and Bull Run. Every principle held dear, every core belief, every ironclad absolute had taken fire and felt the sting of rifleball and bayonet as disillusioned men returned to civilian disillusionment.
Mothers lost sons and wives lost their husbands. Churches mourned the passing of the brethern.
Each farm and homestead had weakened from the drain of muscle and manpower. Loss was everywhere! A time of change and healing was at hand or surely despair would take the country down to hell.
Delusion of Utopia or City on the Hill of Saint Augustine; every Pilgrim fantasy had blown away. A wind of change enflamed the land and hearts were afire for something solid to prevail.
Men and women turned frantically once more to their ideal of God. The bromides wouldn't swallow and the pill of faith stuck fast. Grace and love of yesteryear rang hollow in the ear. Hearts hungered for something more...something better...something true or truer still. Souls uncertain gulp down what they need: absolutes. A circled calendar date might serve them well if God's glory lay thereupon.
Four years after the Civil War in the "Show me" state of Missouri, a Baptist farm family harvested a son.
Joseph Franklin Rutherford burned with zeal for the profession his father sought with unfulfilled longing: the Law.
Rutherford hung his hat in the chambers of the Fourteenth Judicial District of Boonesville. A substitute, a stand-in, a fill-in job was all that he could land when the regular presiding Judge was not around. No doubt proud, his family nicknamed him "Judge" and forever more it stuck as he wore it as a badge of honor to the end.
At a tender age of 25, Joe the Judge pored over thick tomes of the laws of men while he hungered for the law of God.
He craved certainty and the solid facts no ordinary church or congregation could provide. His was a legal mind which bent toward a neat row of figures and a bottom line. Local congregations whispered of pie in the sky bye and bye. Rutherford craved the boom of thunder, solid certainty, authority! More and more he felt less and less confident of any authority behind stained glass windows and towering steeples nearby. The Judge ruled God inadmissable.
Rutherford turned to atheism. His Baptist brethern condemned his Presbyterian bride to be! It sickened him how men of faith could condemn without fair trial. The elders in his church would not accept a woman of another faith!
To hell with them; to hell with them all!
Yet, the empty hollow of atheism did not satify his cravings for certainty. He longed for a higher purpose and a noble cause to espouse.
STUDIES IN THE SCRIPTURES by Pastor C.T.Russell penetrated his legalist mind and
laid out like a law book cause to effect clear as a dawning day! Old Testament precedents and an Almighty Judge proved irresistible.
Twelve years later he was rebaptised. To his old fath an apostate he had become!
Rutherford the travelling speaker with dramatic flair took each congregation by storm as though they were a jury to persuade. His talented, athoritarian presentation thundered logical persuasions for the faint of heart.
Russell's chronology, charts and exposition of all things sacred, hidden and profound appealed to Rutherford's natural ostentation and showman's heart.
"That which cannot satisfy the mind has no right to satisfy the heart."
The works of Pastor Russell worked a charm.Unlike Russell, Rutherford was still the coarse farmhand and his tactics crossed the line to bullying if opposed in argument.
For Russell he proved useful as an editorial committee member on a rotating basis. But, only in terms of Russell's own writings. No "original" material could be considered. For one thing, Russell was viewed as the "mouthpiece" of Jehovah God. He became the "faithful and wise servant" who served spiritual food at the proper time. Who but this singularity, this slave, dared open up the wisdom and the secrets of a Mighty Lord? The Judge, spellbound, studied Russell's dominion with ambitious eyes.
Russell died of natural causes on a train in Pampas, Texas in 1916. Rutherford wasted no time. A lawyer knows that any will written can be broken! He maneuvered to wrest control. Twelve years of controversy commenced. Twelve years of wrangling, argument and bullying. Central Organization insidiously transformed Russell's formerly independant Bible Students into the instrument of the Judge's personal vision.
Russell adamanetly spoke out against any local controls by a central authority. Pastor Russell had left the Presbyterian church for this reason. He had migrated to the Congregationalist church solely because each church preserved Autonomy. Now, Judge Rutherford was breaking faith with his former mentor and Pastor by using travelling representatives to gain church membership lists and institute controls.
Rutherford misrepresented THE FINISHED MYSTERY as a posthumous work of Russell. It wasn't. It was an incomplete first draft of a commentary on Revelation which Rutherford's selected writers finished at his direction.
The tone and thrust were apparently not Russell and the Bible Students felt the harsh, bullying mind come through a coarser voice.
Russell's theology evaporated and Rutherford's appeared.
Rutherford's juggernaut began to move. He and his writing committee used the publishing power of the Watchtower to work secretely acquired membership lists.
What worked best for Pastor Russell was the urgency of End Times and the implacable Armageddon shadow on faint hearts yearning for amnesty from their Lord.
1914 had been advertised as, "not the beginning of the end"-- the end of the beginning. It had passed and the World War ended and peace filled the land with security. Rutherford seized on "Peace and Security" and the rise of the League of Nations as the new trigger for world's end! The publicity machine shifted into high gear pointing to the final year: 1925!
The die was cast. A new religion was born. The vacuum of Armageddon was about to suck families into a halfway house of limbo where man, woman and child could earn deliverance from destruction by peddling magazines door to door. Their stay of execution remained in force as long as they wore their badge of immunity, their King's X: an identifying mark as Jehovah's Witnesess.
The above is a discarded chapter from my novel. I didn't want to waste it! It was too much blah blah exposition. However, some of you might enjoy it instead.
...OUTLAW