The Miracle Club by Mitch Horowitz

Author:Mitch Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/New Thought
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

METAPHYSICS THE HARD WAY

James Allen was born on November 28, 1864, to a working-class family in the industrial town of Leicester, in central England. His mother, Martha, could neither read nor write. (She signed her marriage certificate with an X.) His father, William, was the proprietor of a knitting factory. The eldest of three brothers, James was bookish and mild, doted upon by his father, who treasured learning and reading. He vowed to make “young Jim” into a scholar.

When James turned fifteen, central England’s textile industry experienced a severe slump, and William lost his business. In 1879, he pulled together his savings and traveled alone to America, hoping to find work, reestablish himself, and then bring over the rest of the family. But on the brink of the Christmas season, the unthinkable occurred. Two days after William reached New York City, news returned home that he had been killed—the victim of a murder-robbery. William’s body, its pockets picked over, lay in a city hospital.

The Allen family faced economic disaster. James, the studious teen, was forced to leave school and find work locally as a factory framework knitter to support his mother and two brothers. He sometimes put in fifteen-hour days. The job consumed him for nine years.

Even amid the strains of factory life, however, James retained his father’s love for literature, and whenever possible he read Scripture, Shakespeare, Western translations of Buddhism, and early tracts on vegetarianism and animal rights. His interest in the ethical treatment of animals grew from his studies of karma and Buddhism. Allen retained the self-possessed, serious bearing that his father had sought to cultivate in him. When his workmates went out drinking or caught up on sleep Allen studied and read two to three hours a day. Coworkers called him “the Saint” and “the Parson.”

Around 1889, Allen found new employment in London as a private secretary and stationer, presumably friendlier vocations to the genteel, self-educated man than factory work. The move to London, and the access it gave him to lending libraries and bookstores, marked a turning point in his life. Over the next decade, Allen cultivated an interest in the world’s spiritual philosophies, poring over the works of John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and translations of the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, and the sayings of Buddha.

Later on, he grew interested in America’s burgeoning New Thought culture through the work of Ralph Waldo Trine, Christian D. Larson, and Orison Swett Marden. He developed a personal philosophy that closely aligned with New Thought. The mind, as Allen saw it, is an organ through which God and man coalesce; as such, thoughts determine destiny.

Also in London, he met his wife and intellectual partner, Lily Oram. They wed in 1895, and the following year gave birth to a daughter, Nora, their only child.

By 1898, Allen discovered an outlet for his spiritual and social interests when he began writing for the magazine, the Herald of the Golden Age. The journal was an early voice for vegetarianism, metaphysics, social reform, and practical spirituality.

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