William Gayley Simpson - Toward the Rising Sun

William G. Simpson

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Contents

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY JEROME DAVIS

I. YEA TO LIFE

II. THE WAY TO ONE'S SPRING

III. OBSTACLES AND SEDUCTIONS

IV. A REGIMEN FOR SPIRITUAL PREGNANCY

V. WHERE IS THE HANDFUL OF STICKS? BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biographical Sketch By Jerome Davis

* In the narrative parts of the following biographical sketch, I have tried as far as possible to use Bill Simpson's own words, that the reader may get a truer picture of the man and his spirit

AMERICA is a land of action. Men are practical, and theories to receive social recognition must be translated into deeds so that all can see results. The United States has hardly produced any great prophets or individual mystics who have sacrificed everything they had in order to clothe their highest vision in their own flesh and blood. Perhaps it is not without significance that in the first half of the twentieth century we should find amongst us a man who, in his quest for truth and his determination to put his deepest insights and his surest convictions into practice, has not only broken resolutely with conformity to things as they are but has refused to worship at the shrine of achievement even when it is idealized as unselfish service.

Bill Simpson, as he has come to be known, is an American mystic who, whatever else may be said for or against him, has tried to follow the gleam of truth and inner conviction regardless of consequences. For him it is not enough to see: it is equally necessary to do what one sees. It is not enough to dream dreams and to see visions: it is equally necessary to struggle to make those dreams come true and to realize those visions on earth. And he challenges the reality and the value of any alleged service to humanity for the sake of which a man has to violate his integrity. He would say with Emerson:

He that feeds men serveth few, He serves all who dares to be true.

Bill Simpson, the oldest of three children, was born July 23rd, 1892, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Almost entirely of Gaelic ancestry, he traces back on his mother's side to hardy yeomen stock and on his father's through a long line of scholars, schoolmasters, and ministers.

His early home-life seems to have been almost perfect. It was held up in many circles as the ideal. Often he himself has declared that he looked back upon it as the Kingdom of God in miniature. Sometimes when his mother could not understand the course which he was following, he would say to her that all he was doing was to take the love and the ideals which he had known within the limits of the family circle and to declare that henceforth in him they must be felt and applied without limit, to the ends of creation. The life of the home centered in the Church. Bill's early life was full of it. And even into his twenty-fifth year it commanded his loyalty and devotion, and he poured into its

service all that he then had in him.

He finished high school shortly before he was sixteen. Lafayette was the ancestral college of his family, and he went there as a matter of course. Here he came under the "heretical" influence of Professor John M. Mecklin, now at Dartmouth College, through whom he first learned not to be afraid to think, not to be afraid to place question-marks against tradition, and to undress the saints. He graduated in 1912 with Phi Beta Kappa standing and as valedictorian of his class.

In his last year, he had decided that he must become a minister, but his conclusions about Jesus made any orthodox seminary out of the question. His parents were strongly opposed to his going to so radical an institution as Union Theological Seminary, then the storm-center of heresy trials in the Protestant Church, and most would have yielded to parental pressure, but not Bill Simpson. He realized that no school could help him which did not meet his intellectual problems with a love for truth and an open-mindedness as fearless as his own. He knew that he would have to go to some seminary like Union or abandon the ministry altogether.

He was graduated in 1915 with a magna cum laude. Wishing for a hard task and one where he could be of the greatest possible service to his fellow men, and having at that time almost no knowledge of the problems that menaced the life of mankind in the world of economics, politics, and international relations, he had expected to go to India or China as a missionary. But during the summer of 1915 he was unexpectedly confronted with a momentous decision. He was called to be the assistant in a church of millionaires in a college town, which would certainly have been a stepping-stone to preferment in his profession. But he also had the opportunity of going to a broken-down church, in one of the most sordid industrial districts of New Jersey, which could make no definite promise of any salary whatever. He decided to take the latter, and there are those who think that all he has done since was contained in that choice.

It was while minister of this church that he took his stand against the War and also gradually moved toward socialism. So much so, that when the men of his church went to the heads of the factories to solicit contributions toward the larger church building which had come to be needed, the reply was, "Get that man Simpson out of here and you can have all the money you want, but not a cent so long as you keep him." Indeed, it gradually became evident that his radical protest against war on the one hand and against the iniquities of the economic order on the other was more than even most of his own church members could stand. Many of them withdrew, some who had been his staunchest supporters became his bitterest enemies. Agents of the Department of Justice came to listen to his sermons and stayed to warn him to stop such preaching, and to threaten him with imprisonment or secret abduction if he kept on. But he did keep on, until in the fall of 1918, feeling that the church was not his and that he had no right to break it up any further, he resigned. But in the resignation which he read both to his church people and to his presbytery, he declared that the Church was a prostitute and a Judas - a prostitute