Handshakes and Great Shakes
Handshakes and Great Shakes is an article published in the Daily Express on 7 september 1920.
Handshakes and Great Shakes
NEW UPLIFTER AT THE ALBERT HALL.
MILLENNI-HUM!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the other spiritualists are not going to have it all their own way. Judge Rutherford is after them. He will show them up and turn them down at the Albert Hall next Sunday evening.
Who is Judge Rutherford? He is J. F. Rutherford, of New York City, president of the New York People's Pulpit Association and president of the International Bible Students' Association. He is a rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, middle-aged man, with the combative look of a K.C. an open-fronted collar and bow-tie, and enough faith to shift the Himalayas. A large-size picture placard of him is hanging outside the Albert Hall, and every one looks at it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the spiritualists believe that they can speak with thedead. Judge Rutherford has a much more attractive idea. He is a Millenniumist. When the time comes the dead are all going to awaken, and there will not be any more dead, and you will be able to walk about on this nice old earth and shake hands with Christopher Columbus or your great-great-grandmother.
SCIENTISTS CONFOUNDED.
The silly idea of the scientists that the earth will one day peter out is disposed of. Judge Rutherford points out that you have, only to turn to Ecclesiastes 1. 4 to find that "the earth abideth for ever." Instead of the end of the earth, there will be a new age — the millennium — when there will be no profiteers, and coal will be 15s. a ton, and the good people will be happy for ever and ever. Moreover, like the new world that was talked about during the war, it is coming ever so soon. That is why Judge Rutherford's placards announce in large letters that "Millions new living will never die." He is going to prove it.
There seems, indeed, to be a suspicion that the millennium really began to begin in 1799, and that telephones, telegraphs, taxicabs, and Ford motor-cars are signs of the new age. We are beginning to wake up.
Judge Rutherford is dead against the spiritualists. He declares that "this so-called science of communicating with the dead is nothing more than demonism, or spiritism, and is a menace to the welfare of mankind." He puts "Sherlock Holmes" and the devil in the same cart.
If there is to be a millennium and a general resurrection, from Adam and Homo Pithecanthropus downwards, the dead must, in Judge Rutherford's view be entirely dead, and therefore you cannot talk to them. That settles it, or at any rate Judge Rutherford says so.
