Written by distinguished historians with the force of a novel, this book reconstructs the web of religious ecstacy, greed, and seduction within the cult of the Prophet Matthias in New York in 1834 and captures the heated atmosphere of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Illustrations.

In the autumn of 1834, New York City was awash with rumors of a strange religious cult operating nearby, centered around a mysterious, self-styled prophet named Matthias. It was said that Matthias the Prophet was stealing money from one of his followers; then came reports of lascivious sexual relations, based on odd teachings of matched spirits, apostolic priesthoods, and the inferiority of women. At its climax, the rumors transformed into legal charges, as the Prophet was arrested for the murder of a once highly-regarded Christian gentleman who had fallen under his sway. By the time the story played out, it became one of the nation's first penny-press sensations, casting a peculiar but revealing light on the sexual and spiritual tensions of the day. In The Kingdom of Matthias, the distinguishd historians Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz brilliantly recapture this forgotten story, imbuing their richly researched account with the dramatic force of a novel. In this book, the strange tale of Matthias the Prophet provides a fascinating window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening--movements which swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of the God of the Jews. His hypnotic spell drew in a cast of unforgettable characters--the meekly devout businessman Elijah Pierson, who once tried to raise his late wife from the dead; the young attractive Christian couple, Benjamin Folger and his wife Ann (who seduced the woman-hating Prophet); and the shrewd ex-slave Isabella Van Wagenen, regarded by some as "the most wicked of the wicked." None was more colorful than the Prophet himself, a bearded, thundering tyrant who gathered his followers into an absolutist household, using their money to buy an elaborate, eccentric wardrobe, and reordering their marital relations. By the time the tensions within the kingdom exploded into a clash with the law, Matthias had become a national scandal. In the hands of Johnson and Wilentz, the strange tale of the Prophet and his kingdom comes vividly to life, recalling scenes from recent experiences at Jonestown and Waco. They also reveal much about a formative period in American history, showing the connections among rapid economic change, sex and race relations, politics, popular culture, and the rich varieties of American religious experience.

The true history of a legendary American folk hero In the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himself one day by jumping seventy feet into the tumultuous waters below Pawtucket Falls. When in 1827 he repeated the stunt in Paterson, New Jersey, another mill town, an even larger audience gathered to cheer on the daredevil they would call the "Jersey Jumper." Inevitably, he went to Niagara Falls, where in 1829 he jumped not once but twice in front of thousands who had paid for a good view. The distinguished social historian Paul E. Johnson gives this deceptively simple story all its deserved richness, revealing in its characters and social settings a virtual microcosm of Jacksonian America. He also relates the real jumper to the mythic Sam Patch who turned up as a daring moral hero in the works of Hawthorne and Melville, in London plays and pantomimes, and in the spotlight with Davy Crockett—a Sam Patch who became the namesake of Andrew Jackson's favorite horse. In his shrewd and powerful analysis, Johnson casts new light on aspects of American society that we may have overlooked or underestimated. This is innovative American history at its best.

A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world. In a new preface, he reassesses his evidence and his conclusions in this major work.

That Men Would Praise the Lord breaks apart the process of mass conversion in the sixteenth century to explain why the Reformation occurred, using Nîmes, the most Protestant town in France, as a case study. Protestantism was overwhelmingly successful in Nîmes (since most people converted), but the process culminated in two bloody massacres of Nîmes's remaining Catholics. Beginning in 1559, Nîmes went through a revolutionary period comparable to 1789 in its intensity. Townspeople flocked to hear Protestant preachers and then took over Catholic churches, destroyed statues and stained glass, and zealously took part in the Wars of Religion, which convulsed France beginning in 1562. As the Protestant movement grew, it had to adapt to changing circumstances. Nîmes's first Protestants were attracted to Calvin's theology. Later converts believed that the Church needed to be cleansed of its excesses to encourage moral reform and to assist the royal treasury. Iin the end, many converted because of peer pressure or under duress. Thus rather than argue that one factor - whether religious, economic, or political - explains the Reformation, Tulchin emphasizes that the Protestant movement was the result of compromises forged among its members. The conclusion extends his arguments to the rest of France. That Men Would Praise the Lord marries techniques from the social sciences, anthropology, and cultural history in an analytic narrative, resulting in a new, interdisciplinary theory of the Reformation.

The Mysteries of Christianity is Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s youthful magnum opus, a logically rigorous and spiritually profound dogmatic theology. In its pages, he explores the intelligibility of Christianity’s supernatural mysteries and their deep connectedness, ultimately demonstrating that Christian theology constitutes a science before the court of human reason, even as its object transcends human comprehension. Scheeben’s task is to present a unified view of the whole panorama of revealed truth, and he pursues this by considering nine key Christian mysteries: the Trinity, creation, sin, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the Church and its sacraments, justification, eschatological glory, and predestination. Since the mystery of the Trinity is the root of the supernatural order, Scheeben begins here, showing that the foundation of the salvific economy lies in the eternal processions of persons in God—the begetting of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit being in different ways the cause of the life of grace in the human soul. When the Son and the Spirit are sent into the world in the Incarnation and through the bestowal of grace, they provide the way for human beings to see God face-to-face in the beatific vision, the end for which God created humans. Among the means of return to God, Scheeben particularly emphasizes the Eucharist, on account of its close connection with the mystery of the Incarnation. By placing his treatment of the Eucharist before that of the Church, he signals that his is a genuinely Eucharistic ecclesiology, centered on the abiding presence of the incarnate divine Son.