Kingdom of Matthias
The Kingdom of Matthias be a fascinating window to the turbulent movements of the revival known as the Second Great Awakening. This movements swept up great evangelical Americans and gave rise to the Mormons. Matthias was born Robert Matthews in 1788 to a Scots immigrant family in the farming village of Cambridge, in Washington County, New York. The village had been originally founded as a permanent white settlement by New England squatters and become home to large numbers of Scottish immigrants like family of Robert Matthews. The Cambridge Scots kept mostly to themselves and clung to their uncompromising Calvinistisicm, nursing ecclesiastical grudges unknown to the rest of the world (Johnson and Wilentz 50). Matthews' family were strict believers and attended their village's Anti-Burgher Secession Church, a sectarian splinter of a militant faction from within Scots Presbyterianism.. As Anti-Burghers they done read their Bibles literally and regularly debated their scriptural understanding. They did imitations of the primitive Christians, guarded against government interference religious affairs, demanded strict observance of the Sabbath and enforced a personal code of righteous temperance every da
The Kingdom of Matthias thus reveals the social, economic, racial, and sexual conditions that give rise to apocalyptic cults and their virile, charismatic leaders. Like the Kingdom of Matthias, A whole series of evangelical cults later appeared in the early decades of the 19th century. The ensuing lurid trial of Matthias for the murder of Elijah Pierson, dominated the new ``penny'' journalism, generating pamphlets and books alerting Christians against fanaticism. But to the slaves, the improvident, and the laboring classes Matthias and similar cults offered both refuge and inspiration. Matthias also had strong feelings about marriage. He had always maintained that romantic love and free choice of marital partners led to unhappiness, particularly for women. In the kingdom, marriage would unite compatible spirits, just as harmony at Mount Zion. For example, Matthias believed in match spirits and arranged for himself and Ann Folger, one of the members of the Kingdom who was already married to at the time, to be married. Matthias's reasoning with regard to marriages was thus based completely on desire and lust. In Matthias's kingdom, women were subjugates of men and were to stay home, cook, clean, and perform sexual favors for the patriarchal leaders of the house- their husbands. Matthias believed that Christians stoled women and children from their fathers. Their preachers lured young and female spirits out of their houses and into their beds. Teachers put the older children into various schools; they even concocted devilish infant schools for the little ones. In all these places fathers lost their children to other teachers. Matthias thus reserved his
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Approximate Word count = 1123
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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