Four and Twenty Bishops
PAST FINDING Our. By G. R. Balleine. (S.P.C.K., 15s. 6d.) BORN in 1750 Joanna Southcott lived for forty-two years as an ordinary upholsterer before she began to hear a voice. It spoke to her in light verse :
Now I'll tell thcc who thou art The true and faithful Bride.
When Pitt (in 1793) was expecting fifteen years of peace, the. voice prophesied war. It had other successes too. Apart from the approach of the second coming, Joanna's chief doctrine was that she was a bride of Christ and so were her followers. The author of this informative, entertaining and well-written book thinks she had so many of these because of the disappointment caused by a previous prophet, Richard Brothers. Brothers was at one time asking George III to deliver up his crown to him and at another asking the King for 60,000 shovels to rebuild Jerusalem. In 1795 he was certified, which disrupted his plan of marching on Jeru- salem via Constantinople. One would have expected Brothers to have been a discouraging precedent.
Even more surprising than Joanna's initial success is the fact that she still has adherents. Her immediate successor, Turner, proclaimed the ending of rents and taxes and the advent of cheap beer, together with a salary of £20,000 to himself; and at the time of the Reform Bill another prophet, Zion Ward, took the view that the bishops and clergy deserved corporal punish- ment. A more probable reason than political radicalism for the movement's success is perhaps the mixture of eccentricity and orthodoxy which has always characterised it. Joanna went mad on occasion and threw basins at the wall; before she died she ordered that her body be kept warm with hot-water bottles for four days in case she was merely in a trance. But her chapels always used the Prayer Book, she took the Sacraments regularly and the box containing her prophecies was to be opened only in the presence of twenty-four bishops. In the 1840s while some Southcottians were trying to persuade the bishops to open the box, others put on a public trial of Satan and found him guilty. Today the Southcottians at Bedford send out squares of linen with special curative properties, and their last prophet (of Anglo- Catholic background) said they 'must live as persons who do not expect to die.' They describe themselves as 'C of E plus.'
IAN GILMOUR
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