Faith on the March — A. H. Macmillan (1957)
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 259 pages. Introduction by N. H. Knorr, President, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.
Two summaries follow: a one-page overview, and a detailed summary of roughly one sentence per page of the original, organised under the book’s own chapter titles.
One-Page Summary
Faith on the March is the memoir of Alexander Hugh Macmillan (1877–1966), written in his eightieth year after more than half a century inside the organisation that became Jehovah’s Witnesses. Its claim on the reader’s attention is positional rather than literary: Macmillan lived at the Brooklyn headquarters from 1901, was Russell’s designated assistant, went to federal prison with Rutherford in 1918, and was still resident at Bethel under Knorr when he wrote. Knorr’s introduction frames the book as more than one man’s story, noting approvingly that Macmillan “reveals Jehovah’s witnesses as human,” admits their mistakes, and explains why no human organisation can be infallible. That framing is worth holding onto, because the book is a sanctioned account: Macmillan wrote it with permission to use the Society’s files, and Knorr read the manuscript for technical accuracy.
The narrative divides into three movements. The first traces origins — Macmillan’s Nova Scotia boyhood, his sister’s death from diphtheria, an abandoned seminary track and a nervous breakdown, his conversion at a Moody revival, and then his discovery of Russell’s The Plan of the Ages in a Boston meeting hall. Interleaved with this is Russell’s own story: the Allegheny teenager so troubled by eternal torment that he chalked Bible texts on sidewalks, who tested the creeds, abandoned the Bible for his father’s clothing business, and was drawn back by a chance evening in a dusty mission hall around 1870. This section culminates in 1914, and Macmillan’s handling of that year is the book’s most revealing passage. He does not pretend the expectation was met. He quotes his own embarrassing prediction that he was delivering his last public address, describes Russell announcing at breakfast that the Gentile times had ended, and then argues that the error lay in where the Kingdom was established — in heaven rather than on earth — not in the date.
The middle section is the most historically substantial, covering Russell’s death in 1916 and the crisis that followed. Macmillan gives an unusually frank account of the 1917 power struggle: P. S. L. Johnson’s delusions in Britain, four directors attempting to reduce Rutherford to a figurehead, a policeman summoned to a Brooklyn office to force the confrontation into the open, and a lawyer’s opinion that the four had never been legally directors at all. He then documents the 1918 Espionage Act prosecution in detail, tracing the removal of the France Amendment through the Congressional Record and quoting a Justice Department memorandum that named The Finished Mystery as dangerous propaganda. Eight officers received eighty-year sentences; the conviction was reversed in 1919 on the grounds that they had not received an impartial trial. His prison chapters are warmer than one expects — bedbugs, a stolen bread box, a deputy warden overheard repeating “Macmillan is right.”
The third section covers the movement’s institutional maturation under Rutherford and Knorr: the shift from elected elders to appointed overseers in 1938, the radio network of 408 stations, sound cars and portable phonographs, the flag-salute cases that ran from defeat in 1940 to reversal in 1943, the roughly 4,500 Witnesses imprisoned over draft-board rulings, the Theocratic Ministry School, and the Gilead missionary training farm. Threaded through it is the doctrinal argument the book exists to make: that the “faithful and wise servant” is a class rather than a man, that interpretation belongs to God and emerges from harmonising texts rather than from ecclesiastical authority, and that prophecy can only be recognised after the fact rather than calculated in advance.
What gives the book its particular interest is the tension between candour and apologetic. Macmillan concedes real things — failed expectations, “partially inaccurate public expressions,” internal ambition, creature worship, his own hasty predictions — and he concedes them deliberately, because each concession is recruited as evidence of a prophesied cleansing. The disappointments become proof rather than counter-evidence. A reader looking for institutional history will find dates, names, court citations and figures that can be checked; a reader looking for critical distance will not find it, and should treat the causal claims about clergy conspiracy, in particular, as the account of an interested participant rather than a settled record.
Detailed Summary
Approximately one sentence per page of the original, organised by chapter.
Part One: “Called Out of Darkness”
1. A Turning-Point
Macmillan opens not with his birth but with his vantage point: an old man in 1957 who has lived from ox-carts into the age of jet propulsion and thermonuclear weapons. He presents himself as an official inside the movement rather than an observer of it, having served under three presidents of the Watch Tower Society. His governing claim is that proximity has strengthened rather than eroded his conviction. He frames the book around a question he expects the reader to share: how does a person know he has found the right religion? His own search began in his teens with ordinary adolescent restlessness and an unanswered curiosity about why human beings live briefly and then die. The chapter’s emotional center is his father’s deathbed in Canada, where the young Macmillan expected resistance and instead found agreement. His father, a Calvinist, had independently begun doubting predestination and had already read a Watch Tower publication that answered questions his minister could not. Their weeks of study together drew in neighbors and settled on the theme of an earthly new world rather than a heavenly reward. His father’s direct question — whether he would be lonesome in the grave — draws the book’s first sustained doctrinal argument, that death is an unconscious sleep from which the dead are called back. Macmillan answers it with an analogy to dreamless sleep and with texts from Job and Revelation, reading the latter aloud as his father died. The chapter then turns outward to 1957 anxieties: stockpiled thermonuclear weapons, guided missiles, Communist expansion, and the cost of maintaining “free” nations. He argues that modern security rests on nothing durable and that the clergy’s silence about the end of the present order is a dereliction. His answer to why his faith abides is evidentiary rather than mystical — he says he has watched predicted things happen and seen the movement survive persecution and internal subversion.
2. Beginning a New Way
The second chapter argues that adopting this faith requires reorganizing one’s thinking, quoting Paul on being transformed by making the mind over. Macmillan claims Christendom had centered its theology on man’s salvation while neglecting the name and personality of God. The narrative then leaves Macmillan entirely and turns to Charles Taze Russell, born February 16, 1852, to Scottish-Irish parents in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Russell is introduced as a boy so troubled by eternal torment that he chalked Bible texts on sidewalks at fourteen to warn loafing men. He moved from the Presbyterian to the Congregational church seeking something less narrow, worked through the Y.M.C.A., surveyed the creeds, and found all of them wanting. Macmillan reports that Russell tested every doctrine against four divine attributes — love, justice, wisdom and power — and rejected anything that set them at odds. Having exhausted Christendom and then the Oriental religions, Russell concluded at seventeen that the Bible itself must be unreliable and turned his energy to his father’s clothing business. The turning point comes around 1870, when Russell heard singing from a dingy Allegheny hall and stepped in to hear the Adventist preacher Jonas Wendell. Macmillan is candid that Wendell’s exposition was not especially clear, crediting it only with restoring Russell’s confidence that the Bible was trustworthy. Russell organized a small Bible class at eighteen, using a method — pose a question, gather every related text, agree on a conclusion, record it — that Macmillan says still shapes Witness study. The class concluded that the soul is not immortal, that the dead are unconscious, and that Adam lost fellowship with God, his Edenic home, and his right to life. From this they derived the ransom: Jesus had to become fully and only a man to satisfy a life-for-a-life requirement. They further concluded that Christ would return invisibly as a spirit, which separated them from Second Adventists expecting a fleshly return, and Russell published The Object and Manner of Our Lord’s Return in 1873. In January 1876 Russell encountered Nelson H. Barbour’s magazine Herald of the Morning, learned of the Emphatic Diaglott’s rendering of “presence” rather than “coming” at Matthew 24:3, and paid Barbour’s way to Philadelphia to hear the chronology out. Their partnership produced the book Three Worlds in 1877 and a revived Herald, but broke when Barbour, disappointed that 1878 brought no rapture, publicly attacked the ransom doctrine. Russell withdrew, launched Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence in July 1879, and in 1884 chartered the corporation now known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Macmillan notes the magazine’s growth from six thousand copies to more than three million in forty-six languages by 1957, with over six hundred and fifty thousand active preachers.
3. “God’s Word Is a Fire”
It opens with a set piece from an Allegheny convention after the 1886 publication of Russell’s The Plan of the Ages, where a dusty traveler named George M. Kellogg stood up and compared himself to a goat that had eaten its own shipping tag. Macmillan then supplies his own background: born July 2, 1877, in Canada to strict Presbyterian parents, raised in a Nova Scotia town with no Protestant church. His oldest brother’s declared agnosticism shocked him, particularly the argument that a God who consigned billions to hell must enjoy their groans more than the praises of the few. The decisive event was the death of his younger sister from diphtheria at thirteen, two days after they had gone sledding together, which convinced him that life was short enough to demand a decision. He resolved at sixteen to become a preacher, left for school, suffered a nervous breakdown, and abandoned the seminary track. Adrift in Boston, he attended Dwight L. Moody’s revival at Tremont Temple and, after a sleepless night weighing whether religion required surrendering humor and ordinary pleasure, knelt and dedicated himself. Before he could enroll at Moody’s school in Northfield, a conversation at his workplace led him to a meeting at No. 4 Park Square, Boston, where Alexander M. Graham lectured from a chart Macmillan could not follow — but where he obtained The Plan of the Ages. Reading it that night, he found the argument that the church’s failure to convert the world was explained by the gathering of a limited “seed,” which answered a question that had troubled him. His enthusiasm made him accost strangers on the street, including one who assumed he meant an Abraham who ran a pawn shop on Salem Street. The chapter’s most self-critical passage describes him hurling the book across his room on reaching Chapter 10, which taught that Jesus was a perfect man and nothing more, because visiting clergymen had taught him to associate that view with Unitarians and with Judas. He retrieved the book, dusted it off, reread it, and concluded that only a real man could satisfy a life-for-a-life sentence, and that a part-divine Jesus would have been a hypocrite. After challenging a Tremont Temple Sunday school leader on why the fire in the sheep-and-goats parable should be literal when the animals were symbolic, he was publicly rebuked and left. He met Russell at a Philadelphia convention in 1900, was struck that Russell made himself personally available to questioners as Moody did not, was baptized that September, and entered full-time ministry in July 1901. Russell invited him to live at the Allegheny Bible House, where, both parents having died, the orphaned young man was told the door would always be open to him. He records the 1909 move of headquarters to Brooklyn — the Plymouth Bethel annex on Hicks Street becoming the Brooklyn Tabernacle, and Henry Ward Beecher’s former residence at 124 Columbia Heights becoming Bethel — and notes he was still living there in 1957. He also notes marrying at a Washington convention in October 1902, and baptizing J. F. Rutherford in 1906.
4. “End of All Kingdoms in 1914”
The fourth chapter confronts the year that defines the movement’s credibility, and Macmillan does not soften it. He concedes that expectations varied widely and that there was far more independent thinking and “private interpretation” among them than Scripture allows, a lesson he says he had personal reason to learn. He recalls Russell’s August 1914 preaching tour and the convention at Saratoga Springs on September 27–30, where Macmillan spoke on “The End of All Things Is at Hand.” He quotes his own unfortunate line — that this was probably the last public address he would ever deliver, because they would be going home soon. Returning to Brooklyn, the Bethel family was at breakfast on October 2 when Russell entered, clapped his hands, and announced that the Gentile times had ended and their kings had had their day, to applause. Macmillan admits he would not have been surprised to start rising heavenward at that moment. Russell then rearranged the Sunday program to assign Macmillan the 10:30 address, to general laughter at the expense of his “last” sermon. Macmillan took Psalm 74:9 as his text and argued that some had been hasty, and that the task was to keep busy until God decided when anyone would be taken. To support that, he quotes Russell writing at the start of 1914 that if the church were not glorified by October they would try to feel content with God’s will, that the chronology had been a blessing for waking them early, and that if the date passed they should ask whether they had expected “the wrong thing at the right time.” He then lays out the chronology in full: Gentile times began when theocratic kingship ended with Zedekiah at Jerusalem’s fall, dated to 607 B.C., and were to run “seven times.” Using Revelation’s equation of 1,260 days with “a time, and times, and half a time,” seven times becomes 2,520 days, converted to 2,520 years on the day-for-a-year principle, yielding autumn 1914. He is explicit that the date 1914 appears nowhere in the Bible, comparing this to the Jews’ expectation of a first advent that was likewise undated. The chapter’s argument is that the world’s end did not end the work: what was predicted was the close of the nations’ unchallenged rule, not the removal of the church.
Part Two: Birth of a Nation
5. God’s Judgment Begins at His House
Russell died on a train near Pampa, Texas, on October 31, 1916, and Macmillan carried the telegram into the Bethel dining room the next morning. He describes a moan going up across the room, no one eating breakfast, and little work being done that day. He reveals that Russell had privately summoned him months earlier and asked him to serve as assistant to the president, telling him bluntly that no man is indispensable to God’s work. Macmillan had objected that if Russell died everyone would simply fold their arms and wait to go to heaven, and Russell told him he did not see the issue. Before departing on his last tour, Russell put Macmillan in full charge of the office and Bethel Home, instructing department heads to obey him whether they agreed or not. With the election two months off, an executive committee was formed of Rutherford, Van Amburgh, and A. I. Ritchie, with Macmillan assisting. When Van Amburgh asked whom to put forward, Macmillan named Rutherford, and the two of them held a large block of proxies from shareholders. Rutherford was elected president on January 6, 1917, without campaigning for it. Macmillan draws an extended contrast between the two men: Russell raised in comfort and parental affection, mild and generous but uncompromising on doctrine; Rutherford born on a Missouri farm in 1869 to a father who would not fund his education, forced to hire a replacement laborer and borrow on his word alone to attend school. The resulting crisis he frames as a test of motive — whether people were attached to a man’s pleasing disposition or to the work itself. The specific trigger was P. S. L. Johnson, sent to Britain per Russell’s wishes, whose welcome there warped his judgment until he concluded he was the “steward” of Jesus’ parable and later the world’s high priest. Johnson tried to seize the London bank account and dismissed staff without authority, and after Rutherford recalled him he set about persuading four directors to reduce the president to a figurehead. Macmillan recounts the confrontation in which the four ordered Van Amburgh upstairs to make a quorum, and how, on Rutherford’s prior instruction, he had office manager Robert J. Martin fetch a policeman — an old Irishman who twirled his nightstick and advised the men to leave. A Philadelphia corporation lawyer’s written opinion then established that the four had never been legally directors at all, because Russell had appointed them for life while the law required annual election by shareholders. The break came in July 1917 over publication of the seventh volume, The Finished Mystery, issued as a posthumous compilation from Russell’s notes; the four objected, were asked to conform or leave, chose to leave, and founded their own organization. Macmillan explains that he airs these “family troubles” deliberately, treating the split as a prophesied cleansing rather than an embarrassment.
6. “Mischief Framed by Law”
External pressure now replaced internal dissent, and Macmillan attributes it primarily to clergy angered by the movement’s claims about 1914 and by its exposure of their own war advocacy. He notes that William Jennings Bryan toured the country urging America to stay out of the war and resigned as Secretary of State when it entered on April 6, 1917, while most clergy pushed the other way. On February 12, 1918, Canada banned several of the Society’s publications including The Finished Mystery, and he quotes the Winnipeg Tribune linking the censor’s order directly to a denunciation from a Presbyterian pulpit. The following day, United States secret service agents seized the Society’s books at Hicks Street in Brooklyn and found nothing detrimental. On February 24, 1918, Rutherford delivered “The World Has Ended—Millions Now Living May Never Die” at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles, fixing much of the blame for the war on religious leaders who had taught the divine right of kings for fifteen hundred years. The Los Angeles Morning Tribune gave the lecture a full page, the ministerial association met the same day to demand an explanation from the paper’s manager, and three days later Army Intelligence occupied the Los Angeles headquarters. Macmillan then documents a legislative campaign, arguing the prosecution was engineered rather than incidental. The Selective Draft Act of June 15, 1917, exempted religious conscientious objectors, and Rutherford’s advice to inquiring young men went no further than telling them to register and file for exemption under Section 3. General James Franklin Bell visited Rutherford to press him to instruct the men at Camp Upton to accept any assignment, and was refused. Macmillan reports Bell’s later admission that a 1917 Philadelphia clergy conference had sent a committee to Washington seeking to have Espionage Act cases tried by military courts with the death penalty, and Bell’s parting line that the bill failed because Wilson prevented it, “but we know how to get you, and we are going to do it.” He then traces the France Amendment, which would have protected anyone uttering “what is true, with good motives and for justifiable ends,” through Senate adoption and subsequent removal at the Justice Department’s urging. He quotes John Lord O’Brian’s letter into the Congressional Record stating that the Act’s effectiveness came from treating motive as irrelevant, and naming religious pacifism the most dangerous propaganda in the country. He further quotes an Attorney General memorandum singling out The Finished Mystery by name and alleging the Bible Students’ headquarters were a resort of German agents. The amended Espionage Act passed without the France Amendment on May 16, 1918 — ten days after warrants had already been issued for the arrest of the Society’s officers. Eight men were arrested on May 8, including Rutherford, Van Amburgh, Robison, Martin, Woodworth, Fisher, De Cecca and Macmillan, released on $2,500 bail each.
7. Sentenced to Eighty Years for Preaching the Gospel
Before the trial, visitors from a civil liberties organization warned Macmillan that this was not one denomination’s grudge but a coordinated campaign against unpopular minorities. The trial opened June 3, 1918; after affidavits of bias removed Judge Garvin, Harland B. Howe was brought in from Vermont — the same judge O’Brian had commended in the Congressional Record for treating intent as inferable, a fact the defendants did not know. The government’s theory was that The Finished Mystery had been written to obstruct the war and that letters to draft-age members furthered a conspiracy. Against Macmillan personally the only evidence was a countersigned check paying for printing a book he might never have seen, plus testimony that he managed the office in Rutherford’s absence. Howe himself observed that no act had been shown beyond the check and said Macmillan would be discharged if no evidence of conspiring appeared. Macmillan reports being told that a government attorney was lobbied in the hallway by former opponents inside the Society, who urged that he was the worst of the group and should not be released. Offered release by his own attorney that night, he answered that if his friends were going to Atlanta for preaching the gospel he wanted to go with them. The next morning the government reopened its case with board minutes bearing what it claimed was his signature; the government’s own witness, William F. Hudgings, insisted he could not identify it and was jailed for contempt and indicted for perjury. Macmillan notes that the Supreme Court eventually ruled in Hudgings’ favor, Chief Justice White holding the lower court had exceeded its jurisdiction and acted arbitrarily in violation of due process — an assessment he offers as representative of Howe’s conduct throughout. A former Society officer who could not recall ever seeing him write then identified the signature. The defense showed the manuscript was substantially complete before the Espionage Law existed, that the organization was religious rather than political, and that they had never advised anyone to resist the draft, though as dedicated Christians they could not engage in mortal combat. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all four counts after about four and a half hours, and Howe sentenced them the next day, declaring their propaganda more harmful than a division of German soldiers and their punishment deservedly severe. Seven received eighty years on four concurrent counts, amounting to twenty years in Atlanta, with De Cecca later given forty. Macmillan’s account of prison is unexpectedly warm: bedbugs in Brooklyn’s Raymond Street jail, buttonhole work in the tailor shop, a guard reducing the six-foot-four Rutherford to tears through the kindness of Italian and Jewish prisoners who finished his jacket for him. He tells of unwittingly buying a stolen bread box for a safety razor and being summoned by the Deputy Warden, and of telling him that if their teaching was false they belonged in prison, but if true, God help the government that persecuted them. The Deputy sat with his head bowed and was later overheard repeating “Macmillan is right,” after which the men were treated with consideration and permitted to teach Sunday school classes — Macmillan’s being fifteen Jewish men studying the promises to Abraham. He closes with the January 1919 election, when he told Rutherford that their absence let Jehovah rather than men choose the president, and Rutherford, re-elected by telegram, vowed to crush creature worship even if it got him kicked out.
8. A New Nation Comes to Life
Released March 25, 1919, after nine months in Atlanta, the men returned to an organization that had been dismantled. Macmillan quotes Judge Howe’s letter of March 3, 1919, admitting his principal purpose had been to make an example as a warning to others, that he believed most of the defendants sincere, and that he now favored leniency since they could do no more harm. The commutation effort failed because on March 21 the Circuit Court admitted them to bail at $10,000 each, and on May 14 reversed the conviction, Judge Ward holding they had not received the temperate and impartial trial to which they were entitled. He devotes a passage to rebutting the label “ex-convict” applied to Rutherford, noting that a convicted felon must be disbarred, that Rutherford never lost his license, and that he appeared before the Supreme Court as counsel and remained a member of its bar from 1909 until his death in 1942. Returning to work, they found the Tabernacle sold, Bethel dismantled, printing plates and equipment destroyed, and the headquarters buried on the top floor of a Federal Street building in Pittsburgh. The chapter’s most vivid scene is the arrival of an unnamed wealthy friend from a Southern state who walked into the office looking travel-worn, asked for a private room, cut open his undershirt, and produced roughly ten thousand dollars in bills. Rutherford meanwhile devised a deliberate test of whether the work should continue at all, advertising a lecture titled “The Hope for Distressed Humanity” at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles for Sunday, May 4, 1919. Macmillan is explicit that this was a test case: if nobody came, they were finished, and clergy had predicted only a few tramps would attend. Within twenty minutes of the doors opening the hall was jammed with about 3,500 people, and 600 were turned away, prompting an overflow meeting the following night for 1,500. Rutherford, already ill, could speak only an hour before an associate finished for him, and he contracted pneumonia which doctors attributed to poisoned air and poor food in Atlanta; Macmillan says he never fully recovered. By July he was back at work, and an assembly was arranged at Cedar Point, Ohio, for the first of September.
9. Jehovah Chooses and Cleanses His Channel
Macmillan pauses the historical narrative to trace a change in how Witnesses understood the channel through which God dispenses truth. He offers a self-incriminating anecdote: as a young man he asked Russell whether angels visited his study to explain things to him. Russell, amused, put his hand on his Bible and said everything necessary was there, that he was a student of prophecy but not a prophet, and that light would grow brighter as they kept studying. When admirers said they wished they knew as much as he did, Russell told them it was their own fault, since he printed everything he knew. Another memory reinforces the point: after preaching three times in one day at Cleveland in 1901, Russell refused a sleeping berth on the train, saying that if the friends must stay up all night, so would he. He is unusually frank about the scriptural gymnastics involved: they applied to Russell personally the man with the inkhorn in Ezekiel, the smitten shepherd of Zechariah, the “faithful and wise servant” of Matthew 24, and even Revelation 19:10. Russell himself, he insists, never claimed to be the channel, only a servant working in it, and warned that anyone unfaithful would be set aside and replaced. He quotes Russell’s October 1884 announcement of the charter application, which anticipated that the work would continue through an organization with legal standing rather than through him. Asked directly who the faithful and wise servant was, Russell would answer that some said he was and others said the Society was — and Macmillan concedes both were true, since Russell in an absolute sense was the Society. Rutherford, having watched what elevating an individual produced, refused to let anyone regard him as pastor or channel, and by 1923 was teaching that the Society as an organization bore the responsibility while officers were merely its servants. The doctrinal turn came in a 1931 London talk on Ezekiel 9, where Rutherford argued that the six men with slaughter weapons represented invisible heavenly forces, so the man with the inkhorn must likewise picture a class rather than a person. From this the “faithful and wise servant” was redefined as a body of anointed Christians rather than Russell, supported by Isaiah 43, where many witnesses answer to a singular “servant.” The chapter’s second half is a reconstructed doorstep conversation with a lifelong churchgoer who asks why Witnesses call on people who already have a religion. Macmillan answers that sincerity is not the test, and argues from ancient Israel that a nation can be delivered for God’s name’s sake while most of its members perish in the wilderness. He presses the point that apostasy began inside the first-century congregation, citing Paul to the Corinthians, Galatians, Thessalonians and Ephesian overseers, and John on deceivers denying Christ come in the flesh. His conclusion is that longevity does not authenticate a religion, and that the only safeguard is testing doctrine against the Bible directly rather than delegating it.
10. Interpretation Belongs to God
This chapter answers the charge that Jehovah’s Witnesses interpret the Bible to suit themselves, and Macmillan’s reply is that they claim not to interpret it at all. His argument rests on the image of the whole household seated at one table being served by Christ, so that study is individual but understanding is uniform rather than privately construed. The chapter is built around a long exchange with a lifelong Catholic over the trinity. The man concedes the word does not appear in Scripture but defends the Church’s authority to pronounce dogma clarifying what the Bible leaves indistinct. Macmillan’s counter is practical: if an authority outside the Bible settles the question, the biblical texts themselves become superfluous, and no one outside that church has reason to accept the ruling. He proposes instead that the correct interpretation is whatever harmony emerges when all relevant texts are compared, since that harmony reveals God’s own mind rather than a man’s. He then works through the standard trinitarian proof-texts. On “I and the Father are one,” he points to the surrounding verses about works done in the Father’s name, and to Jesus’ prayer that his disciples “may be one, as we also are one” — which, read the same way, would enlarge the Godhead well past three. On “if you have seen me you have seen the Father,” he again places the statement in its context of words spoken and works done. He adds that the one delegating authority is superior to the one receiving it, and cites Jesus’ own statement that the Father is greater than he. His closing analogy is marriage: two people become one flesh without anyone reading a mystical union into it. He also notes that none of these passages mentions a third person, so at most they could establish a duality. The chapter then draws a sharp distinction between doctrine and prophecy. Doctrine, he argues, can be reasoned out by comparing scriptures, which is how the cardinal teachings were restored under Russell. Prophecy cannot: quoting Peter that no prophecy springs from private release, he says fulfillment must be awaited and recognized rather than calculated. He applies this to the movement’s own history, explaining that the “great multitude” of Revelation 7 could not be understood until the tribulation period had begun, and that this understanding did not arrive until 1935. He is explicit that they no longer expect new doctrine so much as clearer appreciation of prophecies already given, and denies that they set a date for the end. Joseph’s question to Pharaoh’s officers — “Do not interpretations belong to God?” — supplies the chapter’s title and its thesis, reinforced by Daniel being told the words were sealed until the time of the end.
11. Built on a Primitive Foundation
The chapter explains how the movement replaced congregational democracy with what it calls theocratic appointment. Rutherford’s critique of Christendom targeted Protestant higher criticism for quietly eroding confidence in the Bible, and Catholicism for supplementing it with tradition, along with expensive buildings, collection plates, salaried clergy, bazaars, raffles and bingo. His charge was that religion had been commercialized into a business proposition rather than devotion, and his slogan that religion is a snare and a racket made enemies in earnest. Organizationally, Russell had left much to individual discretion, with traveling speakers choosing their own subjects and producing considerable confusion about what was actually taught. Rutherford’s response was to become the main spokesman himself, and in 1927 the door-to-door ministry was made the duty of every individual, with Sunday stressed as the best day to find people home. Macmillan reports that this caused a furor even internally, quoting elders who preferred to prepare a nice sermon and deliver it in a frock coat and wing collar. He illustrates the objection with a businessman named Cuppett, rebuked by a Mrs. Knox for selling on Sunday, who answered that he would stop if she could show him from Scripture that it was wrong to do the Lord’s work on the Lord’s day. Cuppett’s argument from Jesus healing on the sabbath, and the observation that she accepted a collection plate financing her minister’s salary but thought a printed sermon at cost was commercial, changed her mind. The first arrest for Sunday preaching followed at South Amboy, New Jersey, in 1928. Macmillan then makes the case against elected elders, describing congregational elections as political caucuses in which a sister might host a party for the other sisters and steer the conversation toward her husband’s candidacy. Rutherford, a former lawyer and politician, recognized the corruption such a system invited and turned to the apostolic pattern instead. The argument is that the first-century congregation was theocratic: apostles were selected by Jesus rather than elected, and appointments were made by those authorized from Jerusalem rather than by popular vote. When these conclusions were published in The Watchtower in 1938, another cleansing followed, as long-standing elders who would not take up the door-to-door work found themselves outside the organization. Under the new arrangement men became elders by service activity and were then appointed, rather than being elected to an office. Macmillan argues the practical payoff is orderly expansion: a congregation of two hundred publishers can split into two of one hundred, each recommending overseers to headquarters for appointment, with identical doctrine and procedure maintained throughout.
12. A Second Struggle to Survive
This chapter catalogues the persecution of the 1930s and early 1940s and insists the objection was always to the message rather than to itinerant preaching as such. Radio expanded the reach: Rutherford’s first broadcast came in 1922, the Society’s own station WBBR opened on Staten Island in February 1924, and a fifty-three-station network carried a Toronto convention talk in 1927. By 1933 Rutherford’s talks were carried by transcription on 408 stations across six continents, and his 364-station hookup set a record for the largest wired network. That year opponents set out to drive him off the air by pressuring station managers with boycott threats, sometimes cancelling contracts mid-talk on the grounds that the talks were too controversial. Macmillan notes pointedly that Rutherford paid commercial rates for every minute and accepted responsibility for every statement, which stiffened the resistance of the more liberal stations and defeated the campaign. Sound cars carried transcribed lectures into country roads and towns, and he recounts a Fayette County, Pennsylvania, attorney explaining that a truck on the hillside had swept Rutherford’s talk up and down the valley and inflamed the mining community. The organized response was the divisional campaign: volunteer car groups converging on a trouble spot with each minister pre-assigned specific blocks, covering every home within an hour or two, while two ministers went to the police station — not to request a permit, which they held was unnecessary, but to explain what was happening. He recounts Honea Path, South Carolina, where Anton Koerber and McLamb walked between two lines of men holding clubs and guns to attend a trial, and the judge permitted a full defense, questioned the defendants himself, and dismissed them with an apology. In 1937 Rutherford voluntarily withdrew from radio in favor of portable phonographs, and within a year ninety four-and-a-half-minute lectures existed in sixteen languages. Fascism appeared at home in the form of Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front, whose members infiltrated Rutherford’s Madison Square Garden lecture of June 25, 1939, and tried to start a riot; police declined to intervene, Witness ushers ejected them, and three ushers were arrested for felonious assault before a three-judge court exonerated and commended them. On the flag salute, Macmillan explains the position carefully: Witnesses are not campaigning to stop anyone else saluting, regard the matter as individual, and abstain because saluting would attribute salvation to a government, citing Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refusing Nebuchadnezzar’s image. The 1940 Supreme Court decision upholding compulsory salute, with one dissent, touched off the most violent wave of persecution yet — beatings, burnings, forced castor oil, men dragged by ropes and strung up — prompting Solicitor General Francis Biddle to warn on NBC that the Nazi evil would not be defeated by emulating its methods. Abroad it was far worse, with thousands imprisoned or driven underground under Hitler and bans imposed from France and Poland to Canada, Australia and the Gold Coast. Rutherford died on January 8, 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, and Macmillan closes by noting that this time there was no fear, because creature worship was gone and theocratic structure was in place.
Part Three: The New World Survives
13. The Triumph of the Good News
Nathan Homer Knorr became the third president with what Macmillan calls hardly a ripple, which he offers as proof of Rutherford’s success in rooting out dependence on individuals. He was in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, when the news came, and at the Norfolk congregation that evening the announcement was made and nothing more was said — nobody asked what would happen now. Knorr, born April 23, 1905, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, entered full-time ministry in 1923 straight out of high school, was trained by Martin in the publishing plant, succeeded him as manager in 1932, became vice-president in 1940, and took the presidency at thirty-six. He toured Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America while the war still raged, accompanied by vice-president Fred W. Franz, whom Macmillan describes as a University of Cincinnati honors graduate who turned down a Rhodes-plan place at Oxford or Cambridge in 1914 to enter the ministry, and who worked in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Latin. The growth figures he cites are striking: Witnesses in Europe emerged from the war three times as numerous as they entered, sixfold in Poland and eighteenfold within five years; Canada added four thousand ministers to six thousand during a three-year ban. On the legal front, Hayden C. Covington brought a new flag case in 1943 and the Supreme Court reversed itself, producing the line Macmillan quotes about no official, high or petty, prescribing what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism or religion. By mid-1955 more than forty favorable Supreme Court decisions had accumulated. Macmillan reproduces a conversation with Covington on why no Espionage Act prosecution came in the Second World War, receiving the blunt answer that they were not guilty and the government knew it, plus the observation that the Roosevelt administration and Biddle were markedly more liberal than Wilson’s had been. Trouble instead came from local draft boards acting arbitrarily, and roughly 4,500 Witnesses went to prison after being denied the right to show that boards had violated the law — a practice the Supreme Court approved in Falbo and condemned too late in Estep. Macmillan was assigned with T. J. Sullivan to visit about twenty federal prisons every six weeks, travelling thirteen thousand miles, sitting up in smoking cars that left him feeling like a smoked ham. His most substantial prison episode concerns men who refused vaccination as equivalent to blood transfusion and were placed in solitary; he persuaded the warden to let him address them all, told them plainly that vaccine is a serum containing no blood, and after two hours they agreed to submit after token resistance and to write a letter of apology. Asked afterward how he had managed it when the same arguments from officials had failed, he answered that he had talked the Bible to them, and that is the book Jehovah’s Witnesses obey.
14. Expanding the Education for Life
Knorr’s second front was training, on the premise that the organization could be no stronger than the individuals composing it. The zone arrangement he promoted before becoming president — twenty congregations per zone, each visited by a zone servant — went into operation October 1, 1938, and within three years active ministers had more than doubled, though Rutherford discontinued it in December 1941. Knorr reorganized zones into circuits in the autumn of 1942 and four years later added twice-yearly circuit assemblies. Knorr’s aim was unity of thought without turning preachers into parrots. Macmillan supplies a charming precedent from 1902 in Kansas City, where five colporteurs who knew nothing of public speaking formed what they called the School of the Prophets, each taking ten minutes and receiving criticism that he says would sound strange today. In April 1943 the Theocratic Ministry School became a fixed part of every congregation’s programme, with weekly instruction in speaking, composition and grammar followed by three student talks and counsel from the instructor. Two years later came a public meeting campaign, with house-to-house advertising in each neighbourhood, personal invitations, transport arranged for those who lacked it, and handbills at busy intersections on Saturday afternoons. The global instrument was the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, established on a seven-hundred-acre farm in the Finger Lakes region about 250 miles from Brooklyn, graduating its first hundred students in 1943 with the understanding that whatever assignment Knorr chose would become their home. By 1955 students had been drawn from forty-five countries and sent to one hundred lands, with over 1,800 in the field. Macmillan distinguishes their method from other missions: they carry the message to homes even into the bush, learn the language, respect local custom, and teach the illiterate to read rather than gathering converts by feeding and clothing them — since, as he puts it, a full stomach does not necessarily make a man a Christian. He relates his niece’s exchange in a Chilean bank, where a priest asked what she was doing there and she replied that it was hard to see why she had to come from New York to teach his people to read what is in the Bible, at which the cashier agreed and the conversation ended. He rebuts a claim in Our Sunday Visitor that gains come chiefly among the illiterate in backward countries by noting those are countries where the writer’s own religion has controlled education for centuries, and by citing European growth from 22,896 preaching Witnesses in 1942 to 227,374 in 1955. His sharpest thrust concerns a priest’s published letter thanking the author of that series because it ended a confused parishioner’s interest — Macmillan observes the writer has admitted that, on straightforward Bible doctrine, his college and seminary training was no match for a woman with a grade-school education who had studied briefly with Witnesses, so he resorted to name-calling.
15. Jehovah Provides for His Family
The financing chapter opens with the slogan “Seats free, no collection,” and the claim that no comparable organization operates at scale with no solicitation whatever. Macmillan grounds the policy in Jesus’ instruction to give freely, arguing that what the apostles were told to give was service rather than money, and quotes Russell’s declaration in the second issue of the Watch Tower that the magazine had Jehovah for its backer and would never beg nor petition men for support. He notes the magazine has never missed an issue since August 1879 and now prints three million copies. Russell used his personal fortune at the outset and Rutherford financed preaching trips from savings, but the bulk of the cost, he argues, is borne invisibly by individual ministers who pay their own carfare and the printing cost of literature they give away. Congregational expenses are met by boxes at the back of the hall where no one knows who gives or how much, and contributions for literature barely cover printing. For larger needs, The Watchtower carries an annual notice inviting each person to state what he hopes to contribute — never a pledge, never a goal, and used only to plan the year’s work. The chapter’s centerpiece is the building of the first factory at 117 Adams Street in 1926, when Macmillan and Martin proposed issuing interest-bearing notes to their own people rather than borrowing from a bank. Rutherford objected that such a notice in The Watch Tower would cause a furor and look like begging, but eventually issued a special supplement explaining the purpose. Returning from a trip six weeks later, Macmillan found Rutherford glum because only dribbles had come in, and explained that the friends kept money in savings banks or in glass jars under the cellar stairs and needed time. He wagered a chicken dinner — Rutherford always did like chicken — that funds would be sufficient within two months, and returned to be told the notes were oversubscribed and money was being sent back. Macmillan likens this to Moses being told the people brought more than enough for the tabernacle and had to be restrained from bringing. Later additions in 1946 and the thirteen-story building of 1955 were financed the same way, with no new notes issued until previous ones were settled. The chapter’s second half describes Bethel domestic life: about 450 people at fifty tables of ten, Knorr presiding at meals and living there with his wife, all directors receiving the same fourteen dollars a month allowance for personal needs as everyone else. A short worship period with discussion of the day’s text opens each breakfast, after which Knorr stays in the dining room so any member can raise a question without an appointment. Macmillan extends the pattern to ordinary Witness households, where the day’s text is read and children encouraged to comment, and argues that the disappearance of family worship elsewhere is linked by sociologists to broken homes and juvenile delinquency.
16. You Can Live Forever
The closing chapter is frankly an appeal rather than a narrative, delivered by a man who describes himself as in his eightieth year and says life is just beginning. He measures his lifetime against the prophecy that a little one shall become a thousand, noting that active ministers numbered in the hundreds when he joined and now number in the hundreds of thousands. He rejects the idea that one may enter God’s new world by the church of one’s own choice, using the analogy that no country lets prospective nationals stipulate their own terms of admission. Reviewing his own account, he argues his faith survived because it had to, having been tested by opposition from without and by men who tried to wreck the organization from within and were separated by their own choice. He claims a brotherhood in which total strangers can trust each other within hours, because both are bound by the same standards and know that violating them for momentary advantage could cost everlasting life. Against social reformers who call it foolish to look to God for a permanent cure, his answer is that Witnesses are already living as a society the reforms the world seeks — they do not shoot each other on battlefields because they were born in different places, and are not divided by conflicting doctrines or party factions. He puts the choice starkly: support the present system or fit oneself for God’s new world, with no middle course and a widening chasm that will eventually close. The practical steps he lists are investigation, faith, repentance, approach to God through Christ’s ransom, unconditional dedication, and baptism by total immersion, followed by training that comes from studying the Bible rather than years of expensive study of philosophy and sociology. His picture of the world after Armageddon is domestic rather than apocalyptic: a serene calm, neighbours who mean you well, bodies restored to the freshness of youth, and the dead brought back — you will be working in your garden and hear a familiar voice calling from the room you prepared for your parents. He ends by turning his own tests into questions for the reader: if the Bible contradicted what you have always believed, which would you follow; if you had to choose between a dearly loved individual and your Creator, what would you decide; if worship were forbidden and might cost your life, what would you do. He says he has faced each of these decisions and is more determined than ever, that it has made life worth living, and that it is still helping him face the future without fear.