The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-01-02
DUPES AT SHILOH. ME.
MUCH-pELupEp CoMMuNI-
TT,
Who are the Victims of Man Who
 out-Do,viss DOvvls.

fSStleSS dllu IlreleSS dIlDlLlOu, WHO seems to have gained almost hypnotic control F. W. Sanford was born on Bowdoin Ridge" graduated at Bates; studied in Cobb divinity school, from which he failed to receive diploma, and in the Free Baptist ministry had two short pastorates, at Topsham, Me, and at Great Falls, N. H. The ambition to control others seems to have been born in him. His first preaching abounded exhortations that involved the idea that he was superior to ordinary men. and an authorized mouthpiece of God. At the divinity school be assumed that it was his mission to lead all his mates to what he asserted was higher Chris tian life.
 Gauged by his ambitions, his course in his two pastorates entirely failed. Meanwhile he came in contact with the Christian alliance, and became irr- pressed with the peculiar successes of men like Simpson and Muller. In 1894 he went to a Free. Baptist convention at Old Orchard, announced certain vast revelations and outlined his proposed career as faith evangelist. He was coldly received.
 He had, and has, a certain kind of power with a certain class of minds. Pleasant in appearance, tall, good look ing, with a voice artifically modulated
 to a tremalo thrill that is effective on the nerves of susceptible hearers, he be- gan to pick these out and get them in his train and control
 There are in every church, perhaps, restless, emotional spirits, over stained, visionary and millenarian in their views. Some of them, apart from these tendencies, are good workers, and near ly always they are sincere. To these
 people who need judicious checks on
 these nervous tendencies, Sanford sup
 plies, instead, the spur. They are exci
 totable; he excites them. They are ad-
 dicted to criticising the worldliness of
 the church; he frames their complaints.
 They have literalistic and extreme no-
 tions; he makes such views scriptural
 They like wild singing, noise, out-of-
 door meetings; he arranges and con-
 ducts them.
 Studying this movement at first hand.
 have become certain that it's infiu-
 ence is wicked and blasphemous unut-
 terably destructive to all sane instincts
 of the soul. No surer and swifter spir-
 itual ruin has ever befallen any conpa- ny of religious dupes than that which
 has been wrought by the preaching and influence of this Shiloh prophet.
 On Beulah Hill, overlooking the An
 droscoggin. the Shiloh community, un-
 der Sandford's leading, have erected a
 great temple, third of mile in the
 outer circuit, with two smaller build
 ings, where about three hundred people are gathered, and where a Bible school
 is maintained. A scattered following is
 found in other places. These buildings
 represent sacrifices. Women walked from Boston, begging their way, to add
 the amount of the fare to the funds.
 Farms were sold and all earthly possess
 sions turned into cash, by families who
 were later turned out penniless. One of
 these victims died in an old forest camp of smallpox, contracted at Shiloh He was expelled because unable to induce
 his sons. who had run away from Shi-
 loh, to return. He went out ragged and
 poor, wearing an old pair of slippers
 made of pulp waste. The villagers of
 Lisbon Falls rallied to save his widow from utter destitution, furnished room and supplied food, while not a "Holy Ghost and Us" devotee, so far as could learn. ever so much as inquired as tc his sate or hers. His young son told me that the property which this family put into Sandford's hands amounted tc eight thousand dollars. Many similar
 accounts are current. some of them : equally discreditable.
 These dupes of an ambitious fanatic ; accept without question the long cata- logue of lying miracles that Sandford professes to have worked. These in.
 clude headings, such as the causing o1 , a shortened limb to grow, cures of can. $ cer, consumption, pneumonia, diphthe. 3 ria and other diseases, without use ot . medicine. One woman was ostensibly 7 raised from the dead. Besides these 3 headings innumerable other miracles : have been announced. Sanford bough a boiler for the temple and arranged tt : have it appear on a certain day. I have : it on the best authority that he told the 3 Shiloh devotees over and over that Goo 5 had revealed to him that boiler would 1 l Ue .SelIIs Dut lud& ue uiu riiOL kION l whence nor how. Foundations were 5 made, the boiler came on the day pre-
 dicted, and fitted them to a hair. The , thing was Ieralded as a miracle of God 7 This blasphemous trick was run dowr
 and eyposed-but all in vain so far as 7 the Shiloh devotees are concerned. Il f Sandford should assure them that Goo , wove the boiler out of geese feathers h, would be implicitly believed.
 r Tn similar fashion this charlatan ar S ranges his telegram for miraculous e appearance of funds. At five minutes f to twelve he groans as he announces . that the money promised before twelv, S is only half in hand. Shall we let tn, f great God be proved a liar? Pray : brethren, pray" So they pray, the. s groan, they moan on their faces, the, V call historically on the Almighty f Four minutes, three minutes, two min V utes to twelve! Then, hallelujah! tn
 telegram! Some one rushes up to tn
 desk with it. Breathless silence
 Praise the Lord Unknown benefacto q says he will give all that is lacking i Hysteria reigns, and this blaspheme Il gets glory to himself as a man wh r holds the very keys of the kingdom o j. heaven.
 Q Many of these people, left unmolestec