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Updated: June 19, 2025
When, as in harvest, an extra number of hands is needed at any labor, it is of course easy to divert at once a sufficient force to the place. The women do not labor in the fields, except in such light work as picking berries. Shakers do not toil severely.
It will be seen, from the passages I extract from Elkins, that he came under what he supposed to be "spiritual" influences himself: "In the spring succeeding the winter of which I have treated, a remarkable religious revival began among all the Shakers of the land, east and west.
One of the families has just erected a large and, for Shakers, uncommonly stylish dwelling; and all the buildings are in good repair and well painted. Nevertheless they have not had an easy task to make a living. "If we have got any thing here," said an elder to me, "it is because we saved it." They have, however, the advantage of an excellent farm.
The "Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers, commonly called Shakers," was formally organized at New Lebanon, a village in Columbia County, New York, in September, 1787, three years after the death of Ann Lee, whose followers they profess themselves, and whom they revere as the second appearance of Christ upon this earth, holding that Christ appeared first in the body of Jesus.
The Shakers report that in the waning of the eighteenth century they chased the evil one through the coverts of Mount Sinai, Massachusetts, and just before dawn of a summer morning they caught and killed and buried him.
Let the same spirit reign among the people for a short time, which reigned in Boston when the Quakers were put to death for their religion, and the Shakers also would be able to boast of their martyrs in defence of the truth of their particular sect, and of course of the miracles and revelation on which it is said to have been founded.
The Shakers use what they call "Confession of sins to the elders;" the Amana people have an annual "untersuchung," or inquiry into the sins and the spiritual condition of the members; the Perfectionists use what they rightly call "Criticism" perhaps the most effective of all, as in it the subject is not left to tell his own tale, but sits at the oyer of his sins and disagreeable conduct, being judge rather than witness.
"The shakers are the worst paid and the hardest worked employees. The young girls expect to become folders and feeders. The older women are widows with children, or women with husbands sick or out of work or in some way incapacitated. Indeed, many of all these laundry workers, probably a larger proportion than in any other trade, are widows with children to support.
It seems passing strange that while the Shakers, Quakers and other peculiar sects have all come in for a share of newspaper discussion, this most peculiar sect called McDonaldites, or Jerkers, have escaped the pen of the reporter.
They never heard of Platonism, or of Pythagoras in their lives, and, consequently, the polemic tricks, and evasions, which have been, as hinted just now, resorted to by Protestant divines, to shift from the shoulders of Christianity to those of Plato or Pythagoras, the obnoxious principles we have been considering, are of no use in this case, as, whatever the characters of these Shakers may be, they were formed by the New Testament, and by nothing else; and I believe, that every scholar in ecclesiastical history, who reads Browns history of the Shakers, will be immediately and powerfully struck with the resemblance subsisting between them, and the Christians of the two first centuries.
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