The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

III

I became a devout little Episcopalian, and at the age of fourteen went to church every day during Lent. I taught a Sunday-school class for a year. But I lost interest because I could not discover how these little ragamuffins from the tenements were being made better by learning about Jonah and the whale and Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. I was beginning to use my brains on the Episcopalian map of the universe, and a chill was creeping over my fervor. Could it possibly be that the things I had been taught were merely the Hebrew mythology instead of the Greek or the German? Could it be that I would be damned for asking such a question? And would I have the courage to go ahead and believe the truth, even though I were damned for it?

I took these agonies to my friend Mr. Moir, who was not too much troubled; it appeared that clergymen were used to such crises in the young. He told me that the fairy tales did not really matter, he was not sure that he believed them himself; the only thing of importance was the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the redemption by his blood. So I was all right for a time—until I began to find myself doubting the resurrection of Jesus Christ. After all, what did we know about it? Were there not a score of other martyred redeemers in the mythologies? And how could Jesus have been both man and God at the same time? As a psychological proposition, it meant knowing everything and not knowing everything, and was not that plain nonsense?

I took this also to Mr. Moir, and he loaded me up with tomes of Episcopalian apologetics. I remember the Bampton Lectures, an annual volume of foundation lectures delivered at Oxford. I read several volumes, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me; these devout lectures, stating the position of the opposition, suggested so many new doubts that I was completely bowled over. Literally, I was turned into an agnostic by reading the official defenses of Christianity. I remind myself of this when I have a tendency to worry over the barrage of attacks on socialism in the capitalist press. Truth is as mighty now as it was then.

I told my friend Mr. Moir what had happened, but still he refused to worry; it was a common experience, and I would come back. I felt certain that I never would, but I was willing for him to keep himself happy. I no longer taught Sunday school, but I remained under my friend’s sheltering wing, and told him my troubles—up to the time when I was married. Marriage was apparently regarded as a kind of graduation from the school of chastity. My friend did not live to see me as a socialist agitator; he succumbed to an attack of appendicitis—due, no doubt, to his habit of talking Christianity all through dinner and, just before the butler came to remove his plate, bolting his food in a minute or two.

For a time my interest was transferred to the Unitarian Church. I met Minot J. Savage of the Church of the Messiah, now the Community Church; his arguments seemed to me to possess that reasonableness that I had missed in the Bampton Lectures. I never joined his church, and have never again felt the need of formal worship; from the age of sixteen it has been true with me that “to labor is to pray.” I have prayed hard in this fashion and have found it the great secret of happiness.

An interesting detail about Dr. Savage: he was the first intellectual man I ever met who claimed to have seen a ghost. Not merely had he seen one, he had sat up and chatted with it. I found this an interesting idea, and find it so still. I am the despair of my orthodox materialistic friends because I insist upon believing in the possibility of so many strange things. My materialistic friends know that these things are a priori impossible; whereas I assert that nothing is a priori impossible. It is a question of evidence, and I am willing to hear the evidence about anything whatever.

The story as I recall it is this. Savage had a friend who set out for Ireland in the days before the cable; at midnight Savage awakened and saw his friend standing by his bedside. The friend stated that he was dead, but Savage was not to think that he had known the pangs of drowning; the steamer had been wrecked on the coast of Ireland, and the friend had been killed when a beam struck him on the left side of his head as he was trying to get off the ship. Savage wrote this out and had it signed by witnesses, and two or three weeks later came the news that the ship had been wrecked and the friend’s body found with the left side of his head crushed.

If such a case stood alone, it would of course be nothing. But in Edmund Gurney’s two volumes, Phantasms of the Living, are a thousand or so cases, carefully documented. There is another set of cases, collected by Dr. Walker Franklin Prince, of the Boston Society for Psychical Research in Bulletin XIV of that society. I no longer find these phenomena so difficult of belief, because my second wife and I demonstrated long-range telepathy in our personal lives. Later on, I shall be telling about our book, Mental Radio.