S. I. Hickey
Samuel Ingraham Hickey, a
Presbyterian clergyman in disfavor with a mission to the poor because of
aggressive missionary tactics, obtained a copy of The Plan of the Ages
shortly after publication. He wrote a lengthy letter to Russell expressing his
frustration as his denomination and his belief that Millennial Dawn had
led him to Truth. He attended Bloomsburg Normal School (now Bloomsburg
University), to train as a teacher. And he attended Washington and Jefferson
College. Later, Hickey graduated from Princeton Seminary and was ordained July
15, 1884. A year later he transferred from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn, New York,
where he became the Associate Pastor of Throop Avenue Church. His primary
assignment was to mission and temperance work. Beyond his first letter to
Russell, there is almost no surviving record of his work in Brooklyn. We can
place him at Clifton Place Chapel in Brooklyn on July 3, 1886, assisting at a
day-long temperance rally. And in September 1886 he preached at a rally of the
West Newburgh, New York, Total Abstinence Society. [1]
Hickey’s aggressive street ministry
led him to Watch Tower doctrine. He purchased a brush from a paint store, using
it to apply paste to broadsides warning of eternal torture. An adherent working
in the store discussed restitution doctrine with him, “but he, being a regular
ordained minister of the Presbyterian Denomination, could not see it.” The
store clerk recalled that Hickey thought him to be “a little off.” Hickey
returned some days later to find the clerk reading Food for Thinking
Christians to a group of men:
Another day, I was reading out of food in the store to
a crowd of men, and Bro. Hickey was present. He came over to me and said, “What
have you got there?” I told him it was a little book called “food for thinking christians.” He asked
me where I got it, and I told him. He said he would write to you, and he did.
You sent him millennial dawn, and you know how he was closeted for three days
with dawn and the Bible, and when
he came around to the store again, he was very happy, and praising the Lord.[2]
Hickey wrote to Russell in August
1886. His letter is preserved entire in Zion’s Watch Tower:
New
York, August 23, 1886. To the Author of Millennial Dawn:
dear brother:
Truly the entrance of his Word giveth light! Your book, Millennial Dawn, has
been used by God to so illuminate his divine revelation that the glorious view
seems to have left me like one in a trance. Trained, as I have been, in the
most rigidly Calvinistic school of thought, my whole self naturally and quickly
assumed the defensive as I caught the spirit of the book in its opening pages.
But God had beyond all doubt, been preparing my mind and heart for the
childlike reception of his truth. And laying aside all prejudice, preconceived
notions, and “traditions of the elders,” I closeted myself for the greater part
of three days with my Bible and Dawn, and earnestly seeking, in prayer, the
guidance of God's Holy Spirit to lead me into all truth, I feasted upon the fat
things and drank in the precious truth until I could almost say with Paul, “Whether
in the body I cannot tell; or whether out of the body I cannot tell: God
knoweth.”
I
have long since become dissatisfied and disheartened concerning the clash and
din of jarring discord among opposing creeds and rival sects composing the
heterogeneous “mass of baptized profession” – each division, large or small,
wresting the Scriptures to conform to its own particular phase of belief,
causing the Word to appear so distorted that its divine Author would fail to
recognize his own production. But, blessed be God, the Scriptures, in reality,
cannot be broken, and however men may seem to pervert them to support their
peculiar views, they remain unchanged and unchangeable – the Rock of Eternal
truth! I praise God that he has made you instrumental in opening my eyes to
behold the beautiful symmetry which the Word exhibits in the marvelous
combination of its manifold and multiform parts, and in unstopping my ears to
hear the delightful harmony which its many and varied notes produce when taken
in their entirety.
S.
I. HICKEY, Presbyterian Minister.[3]
In a follow-up letter, Hickey told Russell of his
frustrations with mission work:
Having
failed during the fall and winter to bring the “neglected classes” within the
Mission building to hear the gospel, I began in May a more aggressive method …
. And for thus breaking away from the customary methods which had proved
futile, and going out “into the streets and lanes of the cities,” I immediately
lost caste with the Church and my ministerial brethren. The controllers of the
Mission requested my withdrawal, and the committee from a large Presbyterian
church in this city, who had engaged me to preach for them during this summer,
waited upon me and requested me to release them from the agreement. They wanted
not a man in their pulpit who had so little regard for his clerical dignity.
Since which time I have been proclaiming what I believed to be the truth
by distribution of tracts and other religious literature, and by posting up
bold-type Scripture texts on fences, telegraph poles, etc. through the city. …
Now
that I have received the truth as God has permitted you to present it to me, I
long to proclaim it, and to give my whole time and attention to the work of
spreading it abroad. Can you suggest ways and means? I am prepared to, and
expect at the next opportunity to withdraw from all “ecclesiastical”
connections.[4]
Presbyterian upset was precipitated by his outdoor
ministry. The last Sunday in May 1886, with permission of the owner, he
preached to a crowd at Ridgeway park, a baseball field and amusement area. Some
“vicious boys” threw stones and there was “some disorder” when he began speaking,
A Queens County deputy sheriff tried to stop him and “roughly handled” him. The
crowd turned sympathetic, and the land owner restrained the deputies, pointing
out that he had permission to be there, and they did not.[5]
This was duly reported in the press. Scandal followed, and Hickey took up an
independent street ministry but remained an ordained Presbyterian minister. He
might have expected a difficult crowd and police intervention. The Queens
County Sheriff strictly enforcing Sunday laws, canceling baseball games and
boxing matches. The crowds were notoriously violent. But it was these people Hickey
wanted to reach.
After reading The Plan of the Ages, he withdrew
from the Presbyterian ministry October 4, 1886. His resignation was duly
reported in the conference report of October twenty-six. He left the Presbyterian ministry amidst
endless gossip. “Numerous predictions were made concerning me by friends,
relatives, and former clerical associates,” he wrote. “One was to the effect
that I would soon go into infidelity; another, that I would lose my reason;
another, that I would return to the fold of Orthodoxy and Calvinism.”[6]
Some weeks earlier the Hickeys changed residence,
moving from 974 Myrtle to 174 Hart Street, from one Brooklyn brownstone to
another. We do not know if the move is related to his disaffection with the
Presbyterians, but suspect it may reflect a decrease in income associated with
his loss of preaching and mission assignments.[7] He
immediately took up the Watch Tower ministry. When asked back by the Newburgh,
New York, temperance society in late October 1886, he spoke on themes we can
identify with Watch Tower theology: “Proof of Two Salvations” and “The Judgment
Day.”
The
Newburgh, New York, Daily Register
October
30, 1886.
Hickey was introduced to the Brooklyn congregation and
entered the colporteur work. (Russell called it “canvassing.”) By February
1887, Russell listed him among those most prominent in the work.[8] Simon
Blunden assisted him in the work, and though we only have one record for that,
Blunden’s assistance was probably greater than noted in the single letter that
mentions it. Blunden’s letter to Russell was published in the March 1887, Watch
Tower. “I aided Brother Hickey four Sundays in succession,” Blunden wrote.[9]
And he started a series of meetings that were “favorably
started.” Illness intervened. By mid-year 1887, his activity was restricted by
a debilitating and painful illness. His physician advised him to travel to
Saratoga Springs, “and drink certain of the waters there for the removal of the
gravel by dissolving.” The gravel, complained of by Dumas’ Aramis in fiction,
are kidney stones, painful in real life in ways a fictional character never
experienced. Hickey considered selling The Plan of the Ages to pay
expenses. His wife tried to dissuade him.[10] While
still ill, Hickey and his wife traveled to Newburgh, New York, a small village
about sixty miles north of New York City, to keep the annual communion
observance. About twenty took communion. We draw from his report that he used
his previous contacts within the Temperance movement to spread the Watch Tower
message.[11] As we observed, he
preached the Watch Tower message there as early as October 1886, and his work
bore fruitage.
He spent about four months at Saratoga drinking the
mineral water and waiting on a cure. As did many fervent Christians in that
era, he believed each life event was directed by God. He sought meaning in his
illness, concluding:
… that the prime object my Heavenly Father had
in view in the severity of his dealings with me during the three months (just
past) of physical suffering, was to bring me to see what is now manifestly my
plain duty. That is, to devote all the strength God gives me to the work of
carrying to others and to as many as possible, that same blessed
instrumentality which served to dispel the darkness from my own pathway, and to
carry me forward and upward to such sublime heights of vantage ground, as to
make me spurn forever anything and everything that is of the earth earthy; and
to so fill and sway and agitate my throbbing heart as to all but burst, it in
the sudden and mighty inflow of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord; and to
plunge me into such fathomless depths of the boundless ocean of God's love as
to cause me to struggle and gasp, and – in my supreme joy, to wonder what
possibilities there must be – can be, when we see face to face. God, I say, has
been teaching me by exceedingly severe dealings that my bounden duty is “go and
do likewise!” I can see very plainly now as I look back at the various stages
of my sickness, how that God, in love permitted a severe and sudden attack when
I thought I was gaining and began to plan for “my way.” That happened so often,
that at last my dull comprehension has been sharpened and I have answered my
Master with a “Yea, Lord, thy servant heareth!”[12]
We could have summarized his belief in a sentence or
too, but it affords us insight into his character and personality. This was not
hyperbole. He meant what he said, and, though others took the same tack, this
statement is fraught with such emotion that one wonders about his mental
stability. He was at least an emotional Christian rather than a rational one.
We find him in extremes elsewhere in his life as we show below. However, true
to his word, he sold Millennial Dawn while recuperating in Saratoga,
even though he believed he was dying. He believed Saratoga was an unfavorable
spot: “there could probably be no less favorable spot chosen than this wicked,
brilliant, flashing Summer resort.” But he still sold ten to fifteen copies a
day.[13]
The Brooklyn, New York, directories from 1888 and 1889
list him as a canvasser. We do not know if that’s a reference to his colportage
or to commercial sales. Hickey disrupted a Presbyterian conference in May 1889.
He seems never to have resolved issues connected to his difficulty within the
Presbyterian Church. He had a circular printed in some quantity and interrupted
the meeting of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church being held in
New York City. Newspaper reports described him as “a crank.” He “appeared near
the moderator’s desk and shouted to the brethren to ‘awake and bestir
themselves.’”[14] The Pittsburgh
Dispatch reported: “Soon after the afternoon session began a small man with
a peaked brown beard and a pale complexion stepped from somewhere to the head
of the center aisle next to the platform. He had under one arm an Oxford Bible,
and in the hand a package of circulars.” He tossed circulars to the
crowd, shouting, according to the Dispatch, “Men, brethren, fathers, it’s time to awake out of sleep. You are
stupefied -” Reaction was immediate:
“You
have no right here,” began the Rev. Dr. Howard Crosby. Other cries resounded
through the church and half the brethren were on their feet. Two or three
gray-haired and spectacles doctors of divinity jumped out into the aisle, got
behind the intruder and pushed him, unresisting, down the aisle toward the
door. On the way out he showered the commissioners with black-bordered
circulars. “I am an ex-Presbyterian clergyman, he said, “and your servant in
Christ, S. I. Hickey. I’m sorry the brethren didn’t approve of me. For further
information address me at Station B, Brooklyn. … I am only doing what I believe
is my duty.”[15]
We couldn’t locate a copy of Hickey’s circular and
believe that sort excerpts from it in The Dispatch article are all that
survive. The newspaper described the circular as “a little misty.” It appeared
to be, wrote the reporter, “an argument in support of the doctrine of probation
after death.” The followed the only surviving paragraphs:
We
Presbyterians have an army of clergy distinguished by flattering titles,
seeking worldly advancement, who covetously receive honor one of another, many
receiving princely salaries beside perquisites for their hire.
Wherein
the Inconsistency Lies.
We
have as officers in our church the President of the United States, Cabinet
officers, Supreme Court, Governors, editors and owners of metropolitan
journals, merchant princes, manufacturing monarchs, railroad magnates, stock
manipulators, monopolizers of the earth and its bounties, and other great ones.
Mark our flagrant duplicity, therefore, in claiming to be followers of Jesus
Christ, whom the world’s rich and great hated and despised, who said to His disciples:
‘The world hath hated them because they are not of this world.’
After being tossed out of the church, he and an
unnamed companion continued to distribute circulars. Dr. Crosby called the
police who ejected them. This was and remains an illegal violation of free
speech rights, but the police in this era felt empowered to made decrees with
no basis in law. We do not know what Russell felt about Hickey’s invasion of the
Presbyterian Assembly. He never says. But he welcomed Hickey to the Memorial
convention at Allegheny the next month and spoke favorably of him in a subsequent
convention report.[16]
He could not support himself through colportage,
becoming instead a “traveling representative of New York interests.” He
preached and met with Watch Tower adherent groups as he traveled. In 1891 he
became editor of the Commercial Enquirer, of New York, and
assistant editor of the Dry Goods Chronicle. He is listed as an editor
in the 1901 Newark, New Jersey directory. But he continued to travel
commercially, selling “novelties,” small, cheap gifts and toys.[17]
The public record conflicts with a family history published in 1904, and we do
not know which is correct. The genealogy says of Hickey:
Early
in 1898, being relieved of all commercialism, he was at last fully
convinced, God’s Spirit witnessing with his spirit, that Christ meant
literally that his disciples were to “labor not for the food which
perisheth,” to “seek not,” any temporal thing, but that “all things should be
superadded” to one “seeking the Kingdom of God.” Hence, his only and
all-absorbing occupation is just the striving to enter the Kingdom with
Christ.
In February 1899, he addressed a rambling letter to
Russell that without giving specifics testifies to a crisis of faith. Published
in the March 1st issue of The Watch Tower, it speaks about
his view of Christ as exemplar. He said he had been emphasizing it until it
obscured his view of Christ as Ransomer. These are all phrases used in the
continuing Ransom-Atonement controversy. But the letter isn’t clear enough to
say with assurance what he meant. He reread Tabernacle Shadows and was
impressed with it, and incidentally tells us that he was living in near
poverty.
“I have not sinned willfully, in the sense of Heb. 10:26,”
he wrote. But he felt he had sinned and was ready to return to Christ. He
reread the four volumes of Millennial
Dawn, convinced anew they were “truth.” He told Russell of his conviction:
After
this study came a careful perusal of the four volumes of millennial dawn, drawn in their order
from the library. The reading consumed many days, because of frequent silent
meditations and constantly recurring references to the Law and to the Testimony.
I could write much of this experience. But suffice it to say that I believe
that these volumes present the only interpretation of the Holy Scriptures extant,
that discovers the teachings of those sacred books to be at once harmonious and
logical, symmetrical and complete, scientific and rational, satisfying alike
the exactions of the intellect and the yearnings of the heart, and likewise
offering the persistent disciple achievement of such exalted glory as to
infinitely transcend the highest conceivable aspiration of the spirit – the new
creature.
His return to Watch Tower theology was brief. Later
that year Hickey abandoned his Watch Tower beliefs and associated with Paton’s Larger
Hope Society, becoming pastor of a universalist church in Arlington New Jersey.[18] At
the risk of psychoanalyzing the dead, we state that Hickey seems less than
stable. He put himself in positions a more cautious individual may not have. His
judgment seems impaired in key circumstances. But we really do not know. We don’t
know why he was persuaded to adopt universalism. We are not likely to know
either.
[1] His transfer to Brooklyn is noted in Minutes of the
Fourth Annual Session of the Synod of New York, 1885, page 53. His transfer
from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn is noted in Church Gleanings, The Christian Union¸
October 15, 1885, page 26. Temperance meetings: Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
July 3, 1886, and The Newberg, New York, Daily Register, October 16,
1886. He was born March 13, 1855, in Rochester, New York. He died in New Jersey
in 1917.
[2] Extracts from Interesting Letters, Zion’s Watch Tower,
March 1887, page 1.
[3] Kind Words of Commendation: Zion’s Watch Tower,
October 1886, page 8. [Not in Reprints.]
[4] Another Chosen Vessel, Zion’s Watch Tower¸
September 1886, page 8.
[5] Untitled article, The New York Tribune, June 5,
1886.
[6] S. I. Hickey to C. T. Russell in the September 1887,
issue of Zion’s Watch Tower, page
2. [Not in Reprints.]
[7] Ecclesiastical Record: Presbyterian Monthly Record¸
September 1886, page 365.
[8] Extracts from Interesting Letters, Zion’s Watch Tower,
February 1887, page 7. [Not in Reprints.]
[9] See Extracts from Interesting Letters, in that issue,
page 2. [Not in Reprints.]
[10] Letter from Hickey to Russell found in the August 1887
ZWT, page 2. [Not in Reprints.]
[11] Letter from Hickey to Russell found in the May 1887, ZWT,
page 8. [Not in Reprints.]
[12] S. I. Hickey to C. T. Russell in the September 1887, issue
of Zion’s Watch Tower, page 2.
[Not in Reprints.]
[13] ibid.
[14] Presbyterians in Conference, The Rock Island, New York,
Argus, May 18, 1889.
[15] He Was Not Posted … Another Crank Causes a Sensation, The
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dispatch, May 18, 1889.
[16] C. T. Russell: View from the Tower, Zion’s Watch Tower,
June 1889, page 2.
[17] Princeton Theological Seminary, 1909 list of Alumni; 1900
Census; Brooklyn, New York, directories for 1888 and 1889; Newark, New Jersey
directory for 1901; R. S. Greenlee: The Stebbins Family Genealogy¸
Chicago, Illinois, 1904, Volume 2, page 897.
[18] The Universalist Register for 1900, page 119.
1 comment:
Very interesting!
I'll make a translation of part of this article
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