!There is in the mind of God a plan which embraces every creature of all his vast domains, and this plan is an eternal purpose of boundless opportunity, unlimited progress, and endless life. And the infinite treasures of such a matchless career are yours for the striving!
 
The goal of eternity is ahead! The adventure of divinity attainment lies before you! The race for perfection is on! Whosoever will may enter, and certain victory will crown the efforts of every human being who will run the race of faith and trust, depending every step of the way on the leading of God’s spirit and on the guidance of that good spirit of Jesus, which so freely has been poured out upon all flesh."
 
—The Urantia Book, 365
 
An introduction to The Urantia Book can demonstrate its extraordinary nature. The Urantia Book is a 2,097-page volume with four parts divided into 196 papers. It provides detailed descriptions of human and animal origins, nature, history, and destiny. It claims celestial authorship by describing itself as a “composite presentation by many beings.”1 Briefly, it teaches that human beings were created in the image of God, endowed with free will, are imbued with a fragment of God that serves as a guide toward eternity, and by their faith they traverse the universe until they reach Paradise, eternal life. The book states that it is the fifth epochal revelation to earth and defines its purpose and goal to “expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception” The Urantia Book page numbers are cited in parentheses. (1).2 According to the book, there have been five epochal revelations in the earth’s history. These revelations are stated as confirming the plan of “progressive development for a world of mortal habitation.” They are described as follows:
 
• The Dalamatian Teachings occurred five hundred thousand years ago when a Planetary Prince was established to uplift the primitive tribes on earth.
 
• The Edenic Teachings were forty thousand years ago in the era of Adam and Eve, supermaterial beings sent to earth to uplift the planet biologically and culturally.
 
• Melchizedek of Salem lived four thousand years ago and was sent to earth to sustain the belief in one God in order to prepare the way for Jesus.
 
• Jesus lived two thousand years ago and came not to start a new religion but to teach us that we are all God’s children. According to The Urantia Book, it was to reveal God to man and man to God in a way that better reflected Jesus’ true teaching. He brought the Spirit of Truth who seek to change the world even today in positive ways.
 
• The Urantia Book. The purpose of the book is to expand humans’ cosmic consciousness, concept of the cosmos, and awareness of their supreme duties as citizens of the universe.
 
The Urantia Book contains many ideas familiar to Christianity in that it incorporates a great deal of material from both the Old and New Testaments. This chapter will describe the teachings of the book, albeit very briefly, and it will highlight some of the ways The Urantia Book differs from the Bible. This chapter cannot fully depict the scope or breadth of The Urantia Book or illustrate the consistency of its themes. In the future religious scholars will best decipher the teachings of The Urantia Book as by comparing its teachings to other sacred texts. I can demonstrate that the book delineates the vast plan of the Paradise Deities for universe children—to know God, find him, and evolve to become more and more like him.
In his unpublished 1958 history, Sadler wrote sixteen ways that Urantia teachings changed his and the Forum members concepts of cosmology and philosophy. This two-decades-long “class” from their superhuman friends expanded their understandings by explaining that Earth was part of a far-flung cosmos containing trillions of inhabited worlds. The universe is really a giant school, where humans evolve to eternal life by fusing with their Thought Adjusters and becoming “finaliters” who will have a home on Paradise. The fragment of God, a Thought Adjuster, lives inside each person’s mind to help spiritually guide him or her to a more spiritual life. The Urantia Book introduces scores of different celestial personalities. Sadler noted that he spoke with several of them during the Papers’ manifestation. The Urantia teachings also told of the special reasons for Jesus’ bestowal on earth.
Sadler wrote a series of workbooks to guide students of The Urantia Book in their study. These workbooks are evidence of Sadler’s mastery of the similarities and differences of the teachings of the Bible and The Urantia Book. Seventeen workbooks were completed:
 
• Urantia Doctrine
• The Theology of The Urantia Book, Part I, Part II, Part III & Part IV
• Worship and Wisdom
• The Short Course in Doctrine
• Summary of The Theology of The Urantia Book
• Science in The Urantia Book, Volume 1 & II
• The Teachings of Jesus
• Topical Studies Vol. I & II
• The Urantia Book and the New Testament
• Analytic Studies Vol. I & II
• Diagrams and Maps
 
Sadler completed the workbooks in concert with feedback from members of the Seventy who met at his home on Wednesday nights. The workbooks were intended for use by the Urantia Brotherhood School which began in September 1956. In the volume Bible Study, Sadler noted that the Bible and The Urantia Book emphasized Jesus’ religion differently. According to The Urantia Book, Christianity is the “religion about Jesus as differentiated from the religion of Jesus.” To support the point that the Bible never claims infallible authority, he quoted Paul’s statement in Timothy 2, 3:16. “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In addition, Sadler pointed out that even though Jesus frequently quoted Scripture, he never alluded to it as being inspired. Jesus never called Scripture the word of God.3 Therefore Sadler concluded that, strictly speaking, the Bible should not be called the word of God. “Inasmuch as God may be speaking in and through the Bible, it would be qualifiedly the divine word.” In this sense, he opines that The Urantia Book was spoken of as “The Word Made Book.” Sadler regarded the Bible as an incarnation, the union of the human and the divine. In his eyes the higher criticism of the Bible had about run its course in the mid twentieth century. Now, he saw an era of common sense where “the time is ripe for the real interpretation of the Urantia Book to appear,” and in his mind it did.4
Reviews of The Urantia Book noted that it is an exceptional work. One said, “The Urantia Book is one of the most impressive literary achievements of all time. The fourth section alone, perhaps the most detailed rendition of the life of Christ, is stupendous. The rest of the book, which basically is a cosmology that expands far beyond the skimpy mythology of the Bible, is a masterpiece of storytelling and metaphysical speculation.”5 The Let Us Reason Ministries—a group that seeks to “Deliver, Define, and Defend” the gospel and the truth of “the word”—wrote, “The book consists of deep and profound philosophical ramblings and shrewd conglomerations of Bible stories and history, as well as other religions. It certainly has the air of being given by a higher intelligence, one that is able to manipulate words and concepts far beyond any human being.”6
The authors of The Urantia Book begin the text with a description of the complex and infinite universe and end it with the simple and the finite life of Jesus, because this method—complex to simple—is the best way to attain “spiritual wisdom” rather than “generic knowledge.” This method allows for human destiny to be revealed rather than just our origin. A celestial being called a Divine Counselor of Uversa explains in Paper 19 that to study any reality problem, human or divine, terrestrial or cosmic, we must do a “full and unprejudiced study and correlation of three phases of universe reality: origin, history, and destiny” (215). The Foreword and four parts of the book are:
The Foreword. Is intellectually dense and challenging. The Foreword was authorized by the Ancients of Days and “presented” by a Divine Counselor, a being of very high rank. Five of the authors are described as one-time mortals who had achieved Paradise and become “trinitized” beings who are now assigned to special service of the superuniverse rulers. A Mighty Messenger, who is a trinitized being and the author of Paper 22, describes the act of trinitization as being a secret, “I cannot fully unfold to the material mind the experience of the supreme creative performance of perfect and perfected spiritual beings — the act of trinitization. The techniques of trinitization are among the secrets of Vicegerington and Solitarington and are revealable to, and understandable by, none save those who have passed through these unique experiences. Therefore is it beyond the possibility of any being successfully to portray to the human mind the nature and purport of this extraordinary transaction.” (249)
 
Part I. “The Central and Superuniverses” this group of papers was “Sponsored by a Uversa Corps of Superuniverse Personalities, acting by authority of the Orvonton Ancients of Days.” These thirty-one papers begin with a description of God and the central universe of divine perfection. It describes God as the source of all true love, our Creator Father who places a fragment of himself, called the Thought Adjuster, in our minds to act as a spirit guide as we evolve toward Paradise. God is the source of all that is good, beautiful, and true.
 
Part II. “The Local Universe” contains twenty-five papers that are “sponsored as a group by a commission of Nebadon personalities numbering twelve and acting under the direction of Mantutia Melchizedek.” This series of papers describes how the universe evolved, explains the celestial personalities who serve in the local universe including angelic corps, describes how the local universe is governed, details the mansion worlds where we go after we die and then narrates our universe career as evolving spirits, and tells the story of Lucifer and his rebellion.
 
Part III. “The History of Urantia” like Part II, is sponsored by a group of personalities acting under the direction of Mantutia Melchizedek. These sixty-three papers depict the history of how life was established on Earth all the way until Jesus’ arrival. It explains the origin of Earth, how Life Carriers are beings who institute life on planets using life plasm and )they wrote Papers 57-65 in The Urantia Book), implanted life on the planet, how humans evolved, the story of Adam and Eve—highly advanced celestial beings brought to Earth to upstep the genetic life of human beings on the planet, how religion, government and marriage evolved, and what angels, and, Thought Adjusters are.
 
Part IV. “The Life and Teachings of Jesus” were based on a narrative by a secondary midwayer (celestial beings nearer human than angel who operate on Earth) who was assigned to the superhuman watchcare of the apostle Andrew. The exception is the first paper which was indited by a Melchizedek. The papers are “sponsored by a commission of twelve Urantia midwayers acting under the supervision of [this] Melchizedek revelatory director.” These seventy-seven papers portray the life of Jesus from before his birth to his death. The Urantia Book enlarges the view of traditional Christianity because Michael is described as the divine Son of God who created the part of the universe where we live. In other parts of the grand universe there are other Sons of God who have created their own universes just like Michael. Michael came to earth as Jesus so he could experience life on earth as a human in order to become more understanding and loving as our sovereign and to teach us to live the religion of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus.
 
The first two parts of The Urantia Book are the densest, containing the most unique concepts and the most original propositions. The second two parts are original in their presentation but rely more heavily on books written in English and published between 1880 and 1942. The Urantia Book describes the religion of revelation as evolutionary and always progressive. Revelation’s purpose is to expand truth, to present cosmic data to assist in illuminating spiritual teachings, to clarify knowledge, and to allure people to seek the God of love. It intends to accomplish this by portraying teachings that are not too advanced from the thought and reactions of the age in which they are presented—in this case, the early twentieth century. “The Gift of Revelation” in Paper 92 argues that “revelatory religion is propounded by the real spiritual world; it is the response of the supernatural cosmos to the mortal hunger to believe in, and depend upon, the universal Deities. Evolutionary religion pictures the circuitous gropings of humanity in quest of truth; revelatory religion is that very truth” (1007). Sadler stated that “Jesus was the greatest of all revelations—the incarnation—but he preached a simple gospel: the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men.” In answer to a question about why there was no “startling” new institution based on the teachings of The Urantia Book, Sadler said:
 
The Urantia Book is an attempt to unify present-day scientific knowledge and religious truth. The main purpose of the Urantia papers is to help the average person to a better understanding of Jesus’ religion. This means an emphasis on the religion of Jesus as contrasted to the religion about Jesus.
 
The Urantia Book, while presenting many new concepts, devotes much attention to the exaltation of much that is old—the home, education, and social equity.
 
Remember, it is not the purpose of The Urantia Book to start a new church. The book condemns sectarian religions. The book is a gift to all religions, including Christianity.7
 
Highlights from the Foreword and each of the four parts of the book can only begin to illustrate the depth and sweep of material covered.
 
 
ForewordThe Foreword and Part I contain the most intellectually difficult papers in the book. Bill Sadler, Jr. gave a series of topical talks about The Urantia Book in the late 1950s and early 1960s in California and Oklahoma City. Few people have written or spoken with the same intimate knowledge of The Urantia Book. His explanations helped those in the early study groups understand some of the more challenging concepts in the book. He gave a talk about the Foreword on June 12, 1961, which remains one of the most accessible descriptions of this complex paper. Several excerpts follow:
 
I would like to communicate to you my feeling for the intent which is behind the Foreword. The Foreword starts out with an apology, it says that our language isn’t very good (and indeed it isn’t) and it says … we want to help you understand. You see, the secondary purpose of The Urantia Book is the illumination of the human mind. Its primary purpose is the salvation of human souls, but the Book makes an intellectual appeal because the Book is in English, therefore it’s got to enter our consciousness through mind. The Foreword tips its hat, in two paragraphs, to the human desire to start from man and proceed to God. You’ll recall in one of the papers where they first talk about Trinity Teacher Sons, they tell why they wrote the Book the way they did, starting from God and proceeding outward and downward to man. They point out that if you start from man and go to God … this might be a certain way of grasping fact, but the truth would elude you. You don’t start with consequences, you start with causes, you start with sources, and so they start this book talking about God, but there are two paragraphs here (that start on page one at the bottom) which very quickly accede to the human yearning to start from the simple and proceed to the complex. In the last two paragraphs on page one they very quickly start with our world and go right into Paradise and then they add a few comments:
 
“Your world is one of many similar planets which make up the local universe of Nebadon. This, with similar creations, makes up the Superuniverse of Orvonton, from whose capital, Uversa, our commission hails. Orvonton is one of the seven evolutionary superuniverses of time and space which circle the never-beginning, never-ending creation of divine perfection—the central universe of Havona. At the heart of this eternal and central universe is the stationary Isle of Paradise, the geographic center of infinity and the dwelling place of the eternal God.”
 
I submit that’s quite a paragraph, isn’t it? In just in just eight or nine lines of type, they start here and take you swiftly into the center of all things. This is their concession to the human desire to start from the simple and go into the complex. I think it’s very significant that the Foreword starts with a discussion of Deity and divinity.
 
Deity they define as a word which is larger than the word God, because God means a personal aspect of Deity. Deity can be other than personal, as well as personal.
 
It’s quite foreign to orthodox Christian theology it is not only foreign to Western philosophy. The concept of a finite God is encountered in western philosophy, but usually when you encounter that concept, it is to the exclusion of an infinite God. Only in this Book do I find the two concepts associated. In the evolutionary Supreme Being, the Universal Father who inhabits eternity and pervades infinity, is escaping from the terrible limitation of absolutes. Through the Supreme Being, the Universal Father vicariously can have the experience of having an origin, of having a time of growth, of knowing what it is to struggle.
 
How could an infinite God know struggle, except through a finite expression of that infinite God? As you see, God’s love, His purpose, His energies, broadside throughout the finite level, in creation and evolution, then consider a bringing back together of all these things, and that is the supreme function of deity.
 
This section goes on to discuss divinity, and it points out that there are many different kinds of divinity, qualities of divinity, but that the one thing which is characteristic of divinity is it is the cement that holds all the acts of deity together. If something is related to deity in any way, shape or form, it manifests qualities of divinity. Elsewhere in the papers, the comprehensible elements of divinity are defined as truth, beauty and goodness. We are told that these are unified in living personalities, as love, mercy and ministry.
 
They sum up, at the end of this section, the functioning entity of a human being: body, mind, spirit, and soul. The body, our life mechanism. The mind, which we think with and confuse ourselves with. The spirit, which invades the mind, just as sperm invades the womb, and the soul is the embryo that comes into origin as a result of that cosmic conception. The human mind is the material womb of the soul. The spirit that comes from the Father is the invader, and when that invasion takes place, in about the fifth year of mortal life, something new begins to grow, and this is the embryonic soul that evolves within the womb of the mind, and this is the soul which has the capacity to survive death.
 
 
Part 1. The Central and SuperuniversesThe Universal Father—God has created planetary systems populated by numerous beings who can know God, receive divine affection, and love him in return. Human beings are part of this divine creation and are on a long journey to understand God’s divine nature and realize his supreme mandate, which is “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” (73) This quest for God is the supreme universe adventure for all the inhabitants of the worlds of time and space. “Ever bear in mind that these profound truths pertaining to Deity will increasingly clarify as your minds become progressively spiritualized during the successive epochs of the long mortal aspect to Paradise” (21–72).
In his June 12, 1961, talk about the Foreword, Bill explained how The Urantia Book expands upon the concept of God:
 
The word God has more than one meaning in these Papers, the word God is used with seven different meanings. We are familiar with the first three, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. We’re not familiar with God the Supreme, this is the emerging Deity of the finite level of existence. This is evolutionary Deity. This is God in time, not God in eternity. This is God in space, not God in infinity. God the Supreme is a consequence of the acts of infinity. God the Sevenfold is an association of Deity. Our encounter with God the Sevenfold is in the bestowal of Jesus, a very real encounter. When Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” he spoke as God and for God and this is the truest illustration that we can apprehend concerning the function of God the Sevenfold. God the Sevenfold is God anywhere in time and space. God in action, in the imperfect evolutionary domains. To us, the only God that we can comprehend is in the human bestowal of Jesus, and this is God the Sevenfold in action. God reaching out from Paradise to fellowship with any creature at any level of existence, even mortal creatures at the lowest level of existence. What God the Supreme is to the finite level, God the Ultimate is to the super finite, the absonite level, that level which, (always like the ham in a sandwich, if the lower piece of bread is finite and the upper piece of bread is absolute and infinite, then the ham would be absonite, transcendental separating the finite from the absolute). God the Absolute would be the final expression of Deity. God the Absolute would be the final experiential or comprehensible expression of the Father, as the Eternal Son is the existential expression of the Father.8
 
The Eternal Son—This is the aspect of the Universal Father that relates to time-bound mortals. He is the Second Person of Deity (the third person of Deity is designated as the Universe Mother Spirit whose spiritual presence is known as the Holy Spirit) of the existential Trinity from eternity. This Son is the associative co-creator with the Universal Father of all universes and things. He is devoted to bringing the love of God to the universes of universes—to execute spiritual aspects to the Father’s eternal purpose (73–89). Bill explained the Eternal Son as follows:
 
The Eternal Son is the pattern personality. All personality is fashioned after the similitude of this absolute pattern in varying degrees. The Father simply steps aside from the absolute personality. In so doing, he possesses himself of Father personality. I can best understand that by thinking, “If he can be father of the absolute person, he can be father of any person.” At the same time, he builds the absolute machine. He builds it for the same reason that men build machines: to act as a material governor, to perform repetitive acts. This absolute machine is the Isle of Paradise. It’s the only machine which the Father ever built personally. It is just as much a revelation of the Father, or of God, as is the Eternal Son. The Father is the source of Paradise as he is Father of the Eternal Son. The Eternal Son, then, is the Universal Father minus everything which is non-Deity, extra-divine, and other-than-spiritual.9
 
The Infinite Spirit—Is the Third Person of Deity, also known as the Infinite Reality, the Universal Organizer, or Personality Coordinator of all aspects of God. The Infinite Spirit can be thought of as love and mercy to ascending creatures such as humans. The Spirit guides humans through their evolution toward God. In their lowliest form they minister to people as angels. This Spirit also ministers to the human mind through the Adjutant Mind Spirits of our local universe. As the Conjoint Actor, the Infinite Spirit is the source of mind for human beings to “constitute a living ladder whereby mortal man climbs from chaos to glory” (90–107).
The Paradise Trinity—Is the Universal Father, Eternal Son, and Infinite Spirit. “The original and eternal Paradise Trinity is existential and was inevitable. This never-beginning Trinity was inherent in the fact of the differentiation of the personal and the nonpersonal by the Father’s unfettered will and factualized when his personal will coordinated these dual realities by mind. The post-Havona Trinities are experiential—are inherent in the creation of two subabsolute and evolutional levels of power-personality manifestation in the master universe.” (15) The Urantia Book states that Jesus taught the apostles the truth about the Trinity but they thought he was speaking figuratively. “Not since the times of Jesus has the factual identity of the Paradise Trinity been known on Urantia (except by a few individuals to whom it was especially revealed) until its presentation in these revelatory disclosures.” (1145) They are equal to each other and they are one. The Urantia Book teaches that we can only have a partial understanding of the Paradise Trinity because we are imperfect beings. Even though we are limited in our understanding we are reminded that “The mortal mind can immediately think of a thousand and one things—catastrophic physical events, appalling accidents, horrific disasters, painful illnesses, and worldwide scourges—and ask whether such visitations are correlated in the unknown maneuvering of this probable functioning of the Supreme Being. Frankly, we do not know; we are not really sure. But we do observe that, as time passes, all these difficult and more or less mysterious situations always work out for the welfare of the universes” (108–17).
The Isle of Paradise—Sadler through his celestial contacts learned the proposition that “The Father, in eternalizing the Original Son, simultaneously revealed the infinity potential of his nonpersonal self as Paradise.” Paradise is the eternal center of the universe of universes and the abiding place of the Universal Father, the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit and their associates. Its spiritual beauty, the magnificence of its physical perfection, superb intellectual accomplishments of its inhabitants are considered to be beyond mortal comprehension. It is from eternity—outside the time and space realm. It is the most “gigantic organized body of cosmic reality in all the master universe. This is where God lives—he is personally, literally, and actually present. And from him, an infinite being, flow the flood-streams of life, energy, and personality to all universes (118–27). Paradise is the goal of spiritual evolution for all ascending mortals, “Every God-knowing mortal who has espoused the career of doing the Father’s will has already embarked upon the long, long Paradise trail of divinity pursuit and perfection attainment. And when such an animal-origin being does stand, as countless numbers now do, before the Gods on Paradise, having ascended from the lowly spheres of space, such an achievement represents the reality of a spiritual transformation bordering on the limits of supremacy.” (127)
Havona—Is the name of the central and divine universe—the center of all creation. The Paradise Havona system is the perfect and eternal nucleus of the master universe. “The Paradise-Havona System, the eternal universe encircling the eternal Isle, constitutes the perfect and eternal nucleus of the master universe; all seven of the superuniverses and all regions of outer space revolve in established orbits around the gigantic central aggregation of the Paradise satellites and the Havona spheres.” (129) It contains one billion worlds of unimaginable beauty and “superb grandeur” that are settled, perfect and established. The layout of the worlds is in seven concentric circles that surround the three Paradise satellite circuits. We evolve through these worlds with definite goals of intellectual, spiritual, and experimental achievements. It is part of our universe schooling—study worlds. We are told that each of the worlds on Havona is an original and unique creation that contains a variety of surprises for us mortals. “Havona is the pre-Paradise training goal of every ascending mortal, the portal to Paradise and God attainment” (140, 152–63).
The Seven Superuniverses—Are the seven superuniverses of creation, a giant ellipse that swings around the central universe, Havona. They are organized, and each location and number of every inhabited world is known and ministered to lovingly by a multitude of spiritual beings. There are superuniverse circuits and local universe circuits that serve as the two energy-circuit divisions. When a local universe gains enough spiritual harmony, physical stability and spiritual loyalty, it becomes settled in light and life and may be eligible for admission into the “spiritual confederation of the perfected union of the supercreation” (164). Each one of the seven superuniverses have a special function and a unique nature. Earth, Urantia, is part of the seventh superuniverse, known as Orvonton. The Urantia Book explains that Earth is planet number 606 of 619 in the Satania system. “Your planet is a member of an enormous cosmos; you belong to a well-nigh infinite family of worlds, but your sphere is just as precisely ministered and just as lovingly fostered as if it were the only inhabited world in all existence” (182–83).
The Corps of Finality—Is the spiritual destiny of human beings. The corps are made of “perfected and ascendant beings of time and space,” who will have as yet unrevealed opportunities for universe service. “Evolutionary mortals are born on the planets of space, pass through the morontia worlds, ascend the spirit universes, traverse the Havona spheres, find God, attain Paradise, and are mustered into the primary Corps of the Finality, therein to await the next assignment of universe service. The author of this paper, a Divine Counselor and One without Name and Number, tell us we are free to theorize with them the mystery of our ultimate destiny of the Paradise Corps of Finality.
 
Part II. The Local UniverseEvolution of Local Universe—The local universe is the creation of a Creator Son of the Paradise order of Michael. This series of twenty-four papers was “sponsored” by a Nebadon Corps of Local Universe personalities acting under the authority of Gabriel of Salvington. All these beings are of local universe origin. The local universe contains one hundred constellations and one hundred systems of inhabited worlds. The local universe is evolutionary in physical, intellectual and spiritual natures. Even though this universe was created and is administered by Michael and his assistants, God is actively present through his ordained agencies and personalities.
 
There is great and glorious purpose in the march of the universes through space. All your mortal struggling is not in vain. We are all part of an immense plan, a gigantic enterprise, and it is the vastness of the undertaking that renders it impossible to see very much of it at any one time and during any one life. We are all part of an eternal project which the Gods are supervising and outworking. The whole marvelous and universal mechanism moves on majestically through space to the music of the meter of the infinite thought and the eternal purpose of the First Great Source and Center. (364)
 
The Life Carriers--Life does not appear spontaneously in the universes. The vital spark of life is bestowed through the Life Carriers, not by them. The Universe Mother Spirit supplies the essential factor of the living life plasm. The Life Carriers design and carry life to the planets, implant it, and foster its development. Life Carriers are a type of Universe Son. “They are the carriers, disseminators, and guardians of life as it appears on the evolutionary worlds of time and space” (399).
The Ministering Spirits of the Local Universe—The seraphim are the angelic corps of a local universe. The Universe Mother Spirit creates seraphim in pairs who will work together. They do not have bodies—they are of spirit nature and origin. Seraphim are described as being a trifle ahead of human beings in the scale of creature existence in nature and personality endowment. One of their purposes is to serve as guardians of destiny. As mortals evolve seraphim are assigned in accordance to the intellectual and spiritual nature of the individual. Once assigned, they serve for the rest of the mortal’s life. Angels work in the social, ethical, and moral environments to assist human beings in ascending spiritually. Seraphim function as teachers by urging the mortal mind into paths of new and progressive experiences. They do not manipulate. Angels respect the dignity of the human personality and act to make the best possible use of the course chosen (418-425, 1245-1246).
The Lucifer Rebellion--Lucifer was a created being—a Lanonandek Son of Nebadon. Considered one of the most brilliant personalities of his kind. He succumbed to the urge of self rebelled against the divine plan. Lucifer wrote a manifesto declaring that God did not exist, that the local universe should be autonomous instead of Jesus acting as the sovereign leader; and argued against training mortals in the principals of universe administration because they were unsound. The Lucifer Rebellion caused many other worlds to rebel with him and Satan. The arch-rebels were removed of administrative authority but were not adjudicated until Jesus came to Earth on his bestowal mission over 2000 years ago (601-612).
The Seven Mansion Worlds—The seven satellites of world number one in Jerusem (headquarters of Satania, our local universe). These seven worlds are where mortals go after they die to resume their lives just as they were before death. The journey begins on the first mansion world where mortals are resurrected in a new body with the “mortal-mind transcripts,” and “active creature-memory patterns” become spiritualized and the transition toward Paradise continues. The mansion worlds are where mortal survivors transition into higher spiritual attainment or a true Paradise ascender (530-540).
The Morontia Life--Morontia is a level of existence (or a condition) between the material and the spiritual. The Urantia Book proposes that after humans die they don’t just enjoy endless bliss and eternal ease. The goal of transcendence is achieved by evolving through a series of worlds where we have the opportunity to grow spiritually. “The mortal-survival plan has a practical and serviceable objective; you are not the recipients of all this divine labor arid painstaking training only that you may survive just to enjoy endless bliss and eternal ease. There is a goal of transcendent service concealed beyond the horizon of the present universe age. If the Gods designed merely to take you on one long and eternal joy excursion, they certainly would not so largely turn the whole universe into one vast and intricate practical training school, requisition a substantial part of the celestial creation as teachers and instructors, and then spend ages upon ages piloting you, one by one, through this gigantic universe school of experiential training,” (558) Morontia Life is what life on the seven mansion worlds is called. Human beings evolve ever higher by making spiritually fruitful decisions which grow their soul. Morontia Life is “one of the stages of their agelong progress from animal to angel and from angel to spirit and from spirit to God” (558). Mortals assume a morontia body when they wake up on the mansion worlds. Jesus’ resurrected body was a morontia body.
 
Part III. The History of UrantiaPart III tells of the origin of Earth, Urantia; the evolution of animals, plants, and human beings; Adam and Eve and their default; government, marriage and religion; how seraphim (angels) act as guardians of destiny; and explains God the Supreme. The papers in Part III have a broad subject matter that reflects the science of the early twentieth century.
Colored Races—The Urantia Book describes the evolutionary races of Earth in terms that reflect the thinking of the early twentieth century. It describes many peoples who lived on Earth until the six Sangik races emerged in one family five hundred thousand years ago. The races are named: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo. The story describes migration of these racial groups migrated and their characteristics. Although The Urantia Book makes it clear that all people are equal spiritually, it does point out many negatives about the defective and degenerate natures in all the races.
Adam and Eve--In current biblical scholarship, the story of Adam and Eve is considered folklore. Contemporary liberal theologians refer to the story as not being historical fact but a method to present spiritual truths. Adam and Eve, in The Urantia Book is as an order of beings designed as “biologic uplifters” to the human race. When a planet evolves to the point where natural evolutionary tendencies have stagnated out an Adam and Eve can be sent from the local universe to bring new, higher genetic blood strains into the indigenous people. “The Material Sons and Daughters always serve together. It is the essence of their service at all times and in all places never to be separated. They are designed to work in pairs; seldom do they function alone.” (828) The overall plan is for the Adam and Eve to have many children of their own and that then these pure “Adamites” mate with the local inhabitants to bring superior evolutionary traits, such as greater disease resistance. The Urantia Book describes Adam and Eve as vegetarian, having bodies that shimmered in the sunlight (this is how the concept of halos originated), eight feet tall, and with superior eyesight and senses. They were able to see the angelic hosts and other orders of beings on the planet. Adam and Eve defaulted due to Eve growing impatient with the progress of their mission and having sex with a man. Adam, despondent, chose to share Eve’s fate and did the same with a woman. The Melchizedeks stopped the enterprise because Adam and Eve erred from the divine plan. (850-851).
Religion--The definition of religion in The Urantia Book is a human being’s personal relationship with God. Religion is man’s liberator:
 
The purpose of religion is not to satisfy curiosity about God but rather to afford intellectual constancy and philosophic security, to stabilize and enrich human living by blending the mortal with the divine, the partial with the perfect, man and God. It is through religious experience that man’s concepts of ideality are endowed with reality (1116).
 
Bill’s description of his experience of God:
 
Listen, even in this life, you can get a feeling for it, you know? I live with a feeling of the flavor of God. Not having been raised in a church, I may impress you characters as being a very un-pious guy. It’s simply because my experience with God doesn’t happen to flow in normal channels. I can taste the Universal Father. And, to me, that’s a very ordinary thing. And it amazes me that most people don’t have this flavor. But, to me, that’s just as common and ordinary a thing as the fact that I can feel gravity acting on the mass of my body to give me the feeling of weight. You know? Just as ordinary. To me, God is just as plain and simple as dried apples and rainwater. And why make a big fuss about it? This is a normal, natural human experience. And I’m continually surprised when I find lots of people say they don’t have this experience.
 
Now, if no other human being agreed with me, I would decide I was paranoid, but I wouldn’t change my conviction. I can’t. I got that feeling before I ever read these papers. And I got it just before I was introduced to them.
 
One day I sat down and wrote my mother a long letter, asking her what she and father believed. And when I started that letter, I wasn’t sure; and when I finished that letter, I knew, and I’ve known ever since. And I didn’t have any cold sweat or anything else. I can’t tell you at what point in writing the letter I discovered that I knew. It was a very common discovery, completely free from emotion.
 
This realization was not born during the simple writing of that letter. I discovered it. There had been a-borning I suspect for about a year before then.10
 
The Thought Adjusters--are the fragments of God that lives within human minds:
 
The Adjusters are the actuality of the Father’s love incarnate in the souls of men; they are the veritable promise of man’s eternal career imprisoned within the mortal mind; they are the essence of man’s perfected finaliter personality, which he can foretaste in time as he progressively masters the divine technique of achieving the living of the Father’s will, step by step, through the ascension of universe upon universe until he actually attains the divine presence of his Paradise Father. (1176)
 
Thought Adjusters constantly communicate to their mortal charges to evolve through enlightened thinking and action. They don’t speak per se, in fact, The Urantia Book advises that we are unable to distinguish between the Thought Adjuster’s communications and our own intellect until we are more spiritually advanced. They are always near to mortals. They do not speak directly to us; they assist us in spiritualizing our minds with “picturizations of destiny” that become more vivid as we ascend heavenward. Once people achieve the requisite cosmic growth they “fuse” with their Thought Adjuster and attain immortality (1203–14). Sadler wrote that “The Adjusters are on loan for the time being—but it is intended that they become ‘one with us.’”(26.5) Bill spoke about his relationship with his Thought Adjuster this way:
 
I’m interested in getting as much help from my partner [Thought Adjuster] as I can. I feel rather diffident about discussing my problems with an infinite God, even though in my mind and heart I know he’s got all the time in the world for me. But somehow it seems presumptuous. He’s running a big universe. And it seems to me that there are so many other things that he could more profitably spend his time on.
 
But I don’t feel this way about this Thought Adjuster. Because this Thought Adjuster is God individuated for me. And I am his business. For this particular assignment, I am his principal concern. He may have some peripheral activities going on, but they’re definitely secondary to me. Just as you are primary to the function of your Thought Adjuster.
 
I have no hesitancy about discussing anything with this Thought Adjuster. I have a feeling of comradeship for him. And let me explain. I’ve never heard him say anything to me. If I ever did, it would probably scare me quite out of my wits, and I would immediately feel this is paranoia, you know? And I would put the whole thing on ice and think about it for quite a number of weeks or months, until my human judgment could evaluate it, or until a little time passed.
 
And yet I’ve never doubted that this is a dialogue. It’s a dialogue between two conscious beings, one of whom is deaf. I can talk, but I can’t hear. And I don’t let my deafness impair my faith in the least. I keep asking my partner for help in certain directions: How can I be more useful? How can we do a better job about coping with my ego? This belligerent self that I’m not sure I’ve conquered at all. And if I were sure, then I’d be afraid of that concept, too—I’d fear this was spiritual pride, you know, which goeth before a hell of a crash.
 
I try to tell my partner about what life is like down here. There’s a whole lot that he doesn’t get out of this world, because he doesn’t have eyes, you know? He doesn’t have ears. He has a sensory mechanism, but it’s quite different from mine. I know he’s trying to tell me about Paradise. I tell him about this world--what it means to me.
 
When we go to a new city, I kinda let him see the city through my eyes. We talk about this. I probably spend more time talking to him in the privy than any other single place on earth, because there’s the one place I’m sure to be alone. It’s when I occasionally ride trains--in the bedroom--one is alone. But that’s not just because I love my Thought Adjuster. I happen to be a creature who needs periodic solitude. This is temperamental.
 
I think if I’m going to be able to live more of this, he’s got to help me. He’s got to help me be less of a mammal, and more human. The heck with being more spiritual. This is for the future. I’m content if I can just become less mammalian, and more human. I’m not trying to be a frog. I can think about frogdom, but I’m a tadpole now. I’m not trying to get out on dry land, I wouldn’t live. I’ve got to live in water. I’ll wake up on dry land.
 
I ask my partner, “How can I be of more service?” Because in my religion, there’s none of this. My religion is very, very simple. Somewhere, at the center of all things, is the boss. And these odd critters I bump into down here on earth are the boss’ kids. And they should be treated accordingly. That’s my religion. I can say it in three sentences. My partner’s interested in this, because he comes from the boss. He understands that these are the boss’ kids, and I’m sure he’ll help me in every way he can. I have no doubts about this.
 
The thing that dismays me is my own inconstancy. This mammalian inertia. Not that I do evil or sinful things, but I don’t do enough. It’s not that I dwell on sinful thoughts, but that I forget to deal with the Boss and my Partner. Yet, the book tells me that God can look on the inside of me and see that dismaying and dismal picture which I know about, and he still loves me.11
 
Personality Survival--Earth is where the divine adventure begins. With a Thought Adjuster as a guide, mortals evolve through successive stages of growth until they fuse with their Thought Adjuster and become immortal. Personality is bestowed upon human beings as a potentially eternal gift from God. It is changeless. As mortals evolve it helps unify the changing realities they experience and helps coordinate all relationships. Here is an excerpt of how Bill described the journey after mortal death:
 
You know, this isn’t going to be quite as bad as you think.
 
When you fuse with your Thought Adjuster, one of the contributions which the Adjuster will make to the new being is past-eternal memory. Now, I don’t believe that your human consciousness will be able to absorb that past-eternal memory beyond the limits of achieved comprehension.
 
Audience: Will it vary with the individual?
 
I think it will vary with your life span. In other words, when you have lived on the mansion worlds ten thousand years, the Adjuster will be able meaningfully to communicate to you ten thousand years worth of past time. And when you have lived a billion years, the Adjuster will be able to communicate to you in those terms. And when you have lived a trillion, trillion years, you’ll be able to go quite a ways back. I’ve got an absonite (level of reality closer to God) number very handy. This is a second floor number.
 
When you have lived a jillion years, the Adjuster will be able to do quite a lot with you. Do you follow me? If your soul were mature, you wouldn’t wake up on the mansion worlds, because these are incubating worlds, designed to do for premature souls just what an incubation job does for a premature birth in a hospital. Let’s go back to resurrection morn. And let’s take inventory of precisely what happens. Let’s say that—to simplify matters—let’s say that you have a personal seraphim, so you make it on the third day. I just don’t want to have to deal with a mass of people, see? And you are waking up in one of the private resurrection rooms off the main amphitheaters. And they are getting ready for you; they got three days warning. So the proper authorities go over to the morontia quartermaster department, and they draw out of issue one standard GI form, first stage morontia, suitable for the type of being that you were.
 
God the Supreme--This is the aspect of God that operates on the experiential worlds of time and space, such as Earth. The Supreme is the avenue on which God’s love outflows to all creation. God the Supreme is the catalyzer and focus for all human growth—it pours understanding and insight to a creature’s limit to help it connect with eternity. As Jesus was a living channel from humanity to divinity because he personally experienced the complete universe path of progression, the Supreme Being functions as the “actual embodiment and personal epitome of all creature evolution, progression, and spiritualization” (1281). Mortals grow from a material creature to a spiritual one through the strength, power, and persistence of their own decisions and as their Thought Adjuster reaches down to assist the soul in its growth. The Supreme expands as his mortal children evolve—human beings are partners with this aspect of Deity because they are co-creators in the Supreme’s immortalization (1282).
 
Part IV. The Life and Teachings of JesusThis part describes Jesus as a Creator Son known as Michael of Nebadon, one of a series of beings who bestow themselves in the universes of time and space to earn their sovereignty over their own (self-created) part of the universe. This bestowal experience helps them become intelligent, understanding and wise leaders of their own universes. Jesus coming to Earth was his last—seventh—bestowal. In 1935, a commission of twelve Urantia midwayers sponsored this series of seventy-seven papers. The introduction to the Jesus papers, as they are known, describes the source of this narrative as a secondary midwayer who was assigned to the superhuman watchcare of the Apostle Andrew.
The Urantia Book is consistent with biblical theology in that they both maintain the importance of the spiritual realities of love, faith, and eternal life. However, The Urantia Book goes beyond what the Bible offers in how it details Jesus’ life year by year, in the intricacies about the eternal career of human beings, and the spiritual and biologic life on Earth. Life in this universe consists of interlocking activities between celestial beings and divine spirits who labor to honor God and to help his humans advance to higher spiritual realities (54). Divine truth is living, expanding and always growing to assist mortals on their survival of life after death.
The Atonement Doctrine--The atonement doctrine, the text asserts, is an insult to Deity. It is rejected because it misrepresents God’s love for his children. God would never require the sacrifice of Jesus to heal the sin of Adam and place humankind back into grace. It was evil men, not our Heavenly Father, who crucified Jesus. Even if God was a stern monarch, he would never be satisfied with the childish scheme of substituting one innocent sufferer for a guilty offender. The whole concept of ransom and atonement is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. Jesus taught that God is a true and loving Father, not an offended monarch who delights in punishing his children. The crucifixion does have some positive significance because his death greatly illuminated the path to salvation for the whole universe, not just those on earth. The cross stands for sacred service to yourself and the welfare and salvation of your fellows. The Urantia Book suggests that we look at the cross as the final manifestation of the love and devotion of Jesus to his life’s mission—to stimulate our realization of God’s eternal love and his Son’s unending mercy—across the universes of time and space (2017–19).
Original Sin--Original sin is rejected. The definition of sin in the book is “a purposeful resistance to divine reality—the conscious choosing to oppose spiritual progress—while iniquity consists in an open and persistent defiance of recognized reality and signifies such a degree of personality disintegration as to border on cosmic insanity” (754). In other words, when we make a spiritually fragrant decision—choosing to be unselfish—we grow our soul. If we repeatedly make decisions that violate the loving nature of the universe than we don’t grow our souls. The Urantia Book affirms that Jesus’ attitude toward sinners was one of eternal and loving salvation not condemnation. “Love is truly contagious and eternally creative.” (2018) Jesus went beyond a higher quality of justice to prove that “divine love does not merely forgive wrongs; it absorbs and actually destroys them.” (1746) True love destroys hate. For Jesus taught that God’s love is rehabilitation—eternal survival.
The Twelve Apostles--The complete history of the twelve is written. The Urantia Book greatly expands upon what is revealed in the Bible in Matthew 10:2–4; Mark 3:13–19; and Luke 6:12–16. The apostles were laymen. They had not been to rabbinical school nor had they had what we could call higher education but they had enjoyed separate experiences on how to live. The Urantia Book describes each apostle individually and in great depth. Sadler was quoted as saying the descriptions of the apostles were what made him believe The Urantia Book was a revelation.
Nature of the Resurrection--After Jesus was buried the chief of the archangels on Earth summoned the council of the resurrection of sleeping humans to see if they could restore Jesus to life. They realized that they did not have the power to resurrect him. As a Creator Son he had laid down his life and would pick it up again when he made that choice to do so. Jesus came forth from the tomb in his morontia (in between material and spiritual) body. His body of flesh remained in the tomb. His morontia body just like ours will be when they are resurrected on the mansion worlds. Morontia bodies do not have blood that circulates and do not partake of ordinary material food—but they are real (2029). The celestial hosts then disposed of his Earth body by accelerating time to have the body of Jesus return to dust sooner. So when the Bible reports that the tomb was empty it was because of the special dissolution by the celestial hosts. Jesus appeared to others in this morontia body. His first appearance was to Mary and the women who went to the tomb to anoint his body with embalming lotion. The tomb was empty, and as the women sat down outside the tomb puzzling at the missing body, Jesus appeared. The morontia body is quite different from a human body so the women did not recognize him at first. But when he spoke to Mary, she immediately knew it was Jesus’ voice. The book informs the reader that the women could see Jesus with their mortal eyes in this spiritualized state because of the work of the transformers and the midwayers (2020-2028).
The Urantia Book restates that the power that Jesus has—to endow life—was what allowed him to rise from the dead and it is the same as the gift of eternal life that he bestows on believers. Human beings will arise on the mansion worlds in a new body in the same way Jesus did on Earth. Jesus made nineteen morontia appearances on Earth before he ascended to Edentia (2029–58). It is noted that as Jesus ascended to the Father his apostles gradually started to change his message. Instead of the religion of Jesus they certainly changed it into a form of religion about Jesus (2051).
Pentecost--The Spirit of Truth arrived as Jesus had promised after he ascended. It brought the believers a new sense of spiritual joy, security and confidence. It was a new consciousness of spiritual strength. This new bestowal of the Son’s spirit in the form of the Spirit of Truth made certain that all normal human beings would be able to accept a Thought Adjuster. In this manifestation it helps mortals have an enhanced fellowship with Jesus, help people understand Jesus’ message as well as to “illuminate and reinterpret his life on Earth.” The Spirit of Truth is bestowed to “lead all believers into all truth, into the expanding knowledge of the experience of the living and growing spiritual consciousness of the reality of eternal and ascending sonship with God” (2061).
“The first mission of this spirit is, of course, to foster and personalize truth, for it is the comprehension of truth that constitutes the highest form of human liberty. Next, it is the purpose of this spirit to destroy the believer’s feeling of orphanhood. Jesus having been among men, all believers would experience a sense of loneliness had not the Spirit of Truth come to dwell in men’s hearts.” (2060.7) 194:2.2
In Paper 194, the book informs that the apostles in their joy after the Spirit of Truth was bestowed, focused on the fact of Jesus’ resurrection—not on his message. In this they stumbled into an error of substituting some of the facts of the gospel for the gospel message itself. The Urantia Book affirms that Jesus’ message is: “The fact of the Fatherhood of God, coupled with the resultant truth of the sonship-brotherhood of men. Christianity, as it is developed from that day, is the fact of God as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, in association with the experience of believer-fellowship with the risen and glorified Christ” (2059). They began to preach a new gospel about Jesus in place of the former message of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
Faith of Jesus--The last chapter of The Urantia Book describes Jesus as a man with a “sublime and wholehearted faith in God,” who experienced ups and downs but never doubted God’s watchcare and guidance. This faith was not “traditional or merely intellectual,” it was “personal and purely spiritual.” Jesus did not originate the idea of God as a Father, but he did achieve a new revelation by stating that every mortal creature is a child of this Father of love, a son of God (2087).
 
Jesus did not cling to faith in God as would a struggling soul at war with the universe and at death grips with a hostile and sinful world; he did not resort to faith merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a comfort in threatened despair; faith was not just an illusory compensation for the unpleasant realities and the sorrows of living. In the very face of all the natural difficulties and temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he experienced the tranquility of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very presence of the heavenly Father. And this triumphant faith was a living experience of actual spirit attainment. Jesus’ great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of living faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of one mortal, did God ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth. (2087)
 
The Urantia Book is vastly more detailed about Jesus’ life than the New Testament. The New Testament describes twenty-nine days in Jesus’ life. The Urantia Book dedicates 689 pages to his year-to-year activities for all of his thirty-six years.12 As in the Bible, the Jesus of The Urantia Book is both human and divine and serves as a mediator between human beings and God. The book explains that we have mistakenly assumed that Jesus was the Second Person of Trinity. The reality of the situation is much more complex. At the dawn of eternity the Isle of Paradise and the Central Universe were created along with a plan for finite evolutionary worlds within their own local universes. The Universal Father (God) and the Eternal Son originated an order of Michael Sons—Creator Sons—(of which Jesus was one) who would create this own universe such as the Milky Way. Michael, according to The Urantia Book, coming to Earth as Jesus, is both the creator and savior of our own part of the universe.
In the prologue of John, Paul in Col. 15–16, and the writer of Hebrews 1:2 noted that Jesus was a creator. Although this statement puzzled theologians, The Urantia Book authors expand that concept in a detailed manner. All of these Creator Sons are unique beings in their nature and personalities. Each of them is considered the “only begotten Son” of their universe. The book describes Jesus as the local universe personification of the Universal Father and the Eternal Son in his own universe. As with the biblical Jesus, The Urantia Book Jesus brings mortals up to the Father through his benevolent ministry. This is reflected in the Bible in John 12:32, “I, when I am lifted up from the Earth, will draw all men to myself.” In both the Bible and The Urantia Book, the Spirit of Truth is bestowed on the planet after Jesus ascends to heaven.
The Urantia Book also takes leave of the Bible in the areas of scriptural infallibility. The attitude of The Urantia Book is that all things that pass through human minds cannot be the Final Truth. It makes no claims of infallibility—in fact it states that it is not inspired and that much of the science contained in the book will be outmoded. It came from God in that it brings new revelational truth but that revelation only becomes complete when mortals achieve the Father, because the Father is the source of all truth. The Urantia Book asks its readers to honor all religion’s sacred texts because they contain truth but at the same time to understand that the truth they contain is only partial. God is the source of truth, not a book, because it can only serve as a road map to truth—it is not the truth.
Eternal Life--Salvation is not when you die on Earth and wake up in heaven as a full-fledged spiritual being. Instead, the plan for mortal attainment of eternal life is a vast scheme of universe education. Humans ascend toward Paradise—the goal of destiny for all spirit personalities—by growing spiritually through a succession of worlds where they become less material and more spiritual by their decisions. All people who know God and choose to do the Father’s will have embarked on the journey to Paradise. The journey is portrayed as “an endless unfolding of an almost infinite panorama” of “exhilarating service, matchless adventure, sublime uncertainty, and boundless attainment.” (1194) The adventures ascending humans will experience will be based upon their own choices. The possibilities as hinted at in The Urantia Book appear to be unlimited—what your soul desires will be experienced.
Another theme running throughout The Urantia Book is the importance of service to one’s fellows. Bill explained service this way during one of his lectures:
 
I read this book, of course I want to read it all, but I want to live it. I don’t want just the words just to come in and know it intellectually. I want to live it. How? How do you start? It’s a very good question. I think you—I think you—I can’t speak for anybody but myself. This is too intimate. What in essence you have asked me is, “What is your religion—not your theology or philosophy?”
 
I think there is a possibility of developing, from this blue book, a religion the like of which this world has never yet seen. A religion that’s full of good humor. A religion which is full of the joy of existence. A religion which is totally devoid of fear on the theological or spiritual nature.
 
A religion which people wear casually and yet earnestly. A religion which is gracious in its tolerance, in its leashed strength. A religion which has nothing to do with any one day of a week. A religion which pervades the whole of a human life, twenty-four hours a day. A religion which is dealt with in a familiar, friendly way. A religion which is a part of a human being.
 
A religion which is inseparable from philosophy, from ethics, from morality, from economics, from political thinking, and everything else. A religion which seeps down through all the levels of a human personality until it becomes indistinguishable from the whole social fragrance of that human being.
 
This, to me, is religion which appeals. And this, to me, is a religion which you don’t find very much of in human history.
 
This is a religion which you’re good-natured about. This is a religion where you don’t pick it up gingerly, you know. You breathe it, like you breathe air. You drink it like you drink water. It’s a normal part of living. It’s real. It’s not something that’s dissociated, compartmentalized, or set off. It’s something which your--it’s so much a part of your life that you’re casual with it. It’s a familiar thing. You’re casual with it like you’re casual with clothing that’s well broken in--an old suit of tweeds. It’s a friendly, familiar, warm thing. It’s nothing which you feel either ashamed of or heroic about. It’s something which you just are.
 
The text of The Urantia Book is comprehensive, detailed, internally consistent, and edifying to believers. It proclaims that it is the fifth epochal revelation of truth to our world. It describes a friendly universe created by God who is also a loving Father, with whom we can have a personal relationship now and in eternity. The book urges and encourages us to seek truth wherever it may lead us. “Truth is relative and expanding; it lives always in the present, achieving new expression in each generation of men—even in each human life” (757).
I personally found my spiritual world was briefly turned upside down by my research discoveries for this book. As Rufus Jones stated in his 1904 book, “There are few crises to compare with that which appears when the simple, childhood religion, imbibed at mother’s knee and absorbed from early home and church environment, comes into collision with a scientific, solidly reasoned system.” However after thinking it through I came to a place where I understand that facts are different than truth. Sacred texts are not history books; they are books of faith. Facts have no quarrel with faith. Faith is a confidence in the validity of a spiritual consciousness. For me it is the most powerful method for living a life of buoyancy. After all, facts don’t have a quarrel with religious faith as theories do. If the religious value of a text is dependent on it being factually correct, then it has little value. But if readers find that the book’s teachings lead them to a place of greater spiritual insight then its value is immeasurable.13
Two important elements that The Urantia Book shares with other sacred texts from the Bible to the Koran are, first, it seeks to re-enchant its readers and bring them back onto their own spiritual path through its teachings, and second, the achievement of authority and authenticity comes from a creative figure, in this case a group of celestial beings that spoke through a human channel. The Urantia Book differs from other sacred texts in several meaningful ways as well. First, it claims celestial authorship rather than inspiration from an angelic being or God. Second, it was written over a period of two decades with hundreds of people asking questions of a group of celestial beings rather than being channeled by a person in a shorter period of time or written by a multitude of human authors over centuries. Third, the people behind its writing never sought any financial gain or fame from doing so. Fourth, there is no authoritative body supporting an Urantian religion based upon the teachings of the book. The Urantia Book neither favors nor desires an organized religion. Instead it calls upon its readers to have a religion based upon their personal relationship with God:
 
The purpose of religion is not to satisfy curiosity about God but rather to afford intellectual constancy and philosophic security, to stabilize and enrich human living by blending the mortal with the divine, the partial with the perfect, man and God. It is through religious experience that man’s concepts of ideality are endowed with reality. (1116).
 
In one of his lectures about spreading The Urantia Book, Bill described how to be useful to one’s fellow man:
 
This book is not religion. This book is a cosmology, a philosophy, a metaphysics, a theology. Anything which is in written language is not religion. It’s intellectual. That should be very, very clear.
 
But this book is attempting to make an intellectual approach, a philosophic approach, to the religious nature of man. And if you encounter a person who is not philosophical, don’t rub his nose in Part One of this book, and the Foreword, and everything else. Give him the spiritual heart of this book. I don’t think he has to know anything about the Trinity of Trinities to qualify for the first mansion world. It says you have to accept sonship with God, that’s all.
 
But there are a lot of people who are curious. I am. As the papers point out, one of the things that’s wrong with Christianity is that—from a philosophical standpoint—it’s a pretty sterile religion. Pretty sterile. You want to know something? Mahayana Buddhism offers a great deal to a thinking God-seeker which Christianity does not offer. It’s a much broader religion, with a richer philosophy.
 
Arnold Toynbee well says that the two best religions on earth today are Christianity and the Mahayana form of Buddhism. And I think he’s very discerning when he further says, in his judgment, neither of them are good enough.
 
If you find a person who is hungry to understand more about the universe, to take the findings of science and attempt to reconcile them with the spiritual longings of his heart—and this is the function of philosophy—then you better either know this book and be able to discuss it with him, or pass him on to one of your philosophic-minded colleagues who can do this.14
 
The origin story of The Urantia Book—how it came to be—echoes both terrestrial and eternal realities of other sacred texts. It is a story of how humans seek to illuminate the larger mysteries of the universe to better understand the reason for their lives. The pattern for most religious texts is that they claim a supernatural origin that scholars later discover to be grounded more in myth than in fact. For example, in the later nineteenth century, critical studies of the Bible became the genesis for Christianity to divide itself into liberal, conservative, and fundamentalist camps. This was because nineteenth-century science declared that many of the Bible’s descriptions of the physical world were false. The Bible described grass, land plants, and trees as being created before the sun. We know that this is not possible. As this debate raged, Christian scholars had to decide how to interpret the Bible based upon what they believed. How should they explain these discrepancies to the laity? Was the Bible infallible or not? These questions led liberal religionists to appreciate the fact that symbolic language in the Bible can represent spiritual truths, while at the same time the text is full of science “stories.” The same can be said of The Urantia Book. It is a text that is filled with stories that reveal new spiritual truth but as with earlier sacred texts, it relies on myth to teach while reflecting the era in which it was written. The Urantia Book, because of the breadth and depth of its teachings, remains an unparalleled religious achievement in the 20th century.
 
____________
1   The Urantia Book, 1008
2   All page number references are from The Urantia Book. The previous four epochal revelations are found on page 1007: (1) the Dalamatian Teachings: Prince Caligastia’s staff revealed the true concept of the First Source and Center; (2) the Edenic Teachings, Adam and Eve portrayed the Father of all to the evolutionary peoples; (3) Melchizedek of Salem, an emergency Son of Nebadon who taught the cardinal precepts of trust and faith; and (4) Jesus of Nazareth, the essence of his teachings were love and service.
3   http://www.urantia.org/bible-study/1-bible-authority-and-significance
4   http://www.urantia.org/bible-study/5-interpretation-bible
5   See Amazon.com reviews, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Urantia-Book-Foundation/dp/0911560513.
6   “The Urantia Book,” Let Us Reason Ministries, 2009, http://www.letusreason.org/Cults17.htm.
7   William Sadler, “Consideration of Some Criticisms,” 14.
8   The Urantia Book Workbook, Foreward and Part I, 27
9   http://urantia-book.org/archive/readers/doc611.htm
10  http://urantia-book.org/archive/readers/doc701.htm
11  http://urantia-book.org/archive/readers/doc714.htm
12  Much of the information in this section comes from Meredith’s Sprunger’s essay “Urantia Book Deviations from Traditional Christian Beliefs” (http://www.urantiabook.org/introductions/urantia-book-differences.htm).
13  Jones, Social Law.
14  http://urantia-book.org/archive/readers/doc713.htm

There have been questions about how I could state that Dr. Sadler never studied with Dr. Freud. Here is the research I’ve done that led me to the conclusion that he didn’t meet or study with Freud. If anyone can find documented evidence that supports a different conclusion then I will consider changing my mind.
 
Dr. Freud started to become well known in the 1890s, after he coauthored Studies of Hysteria with Josef Breuer. Due to his fame, meticulous records were kept of all his correspondence, meetings, students, and appearances. Freud was a heavily scheduled man; the archives have all his appointment books, class lists, and records of his meetings. I was told by one of his archivists that no one had unnoted meetings with him. There are two main archives that house Dr. Freud’s papers. I contacted both of them during my research. Neither one had any record of Dr. Sadler corresponding, studying, or meeting with Dr. Freud or Anna Freud. Nor do Sadler’s travel records indicate he was ever in the same city as Freud.
 
On July 11, 2011, Keith Davies, at the Freud Museum in London, wrote me that they have no record of any contact between Dr. Sadler and Freud. This archive, on the grounds of where Freud lived the last year of his life (1938), contains Freud’s personal library and collection, Anna Freud’s personal library, an archive containing essential documentation on the life and work of Sigmund and Anna Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, a research library specializing in the history, theory and culture of psychoanalysis, and a large library of photographs.
 
On July 12, 2011, Harold Blum, MD, Executive Director of Sigmund Freud Archives, confirmed to me that there was no correspondence between Dr. Sadler and Dr. Freud in their collection. The Sigmund Freud Archives is dedicated to collecting, conserving, collating and making available for scholarly use all of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic and personal papers, his correspondence, photos, records, memorabilia, etc.
 
Carolyn Kendall wrote the following email on July 1, 2011. She said that Sadler told her that Freud never responded to his letters:
 
"Interesting about the 1911 shipping dates. However, on my biographical list that Christy made up, it was in 1910 that he "studied in Leeds, England and Vienna, Austria."  I found a Sadler Timeline on line that listed the trip in 1911, with a note, "per Meredith Sprunger," and the whole timeline by Mullins.*"
 
"When I worked at 533, Doctor told me he had "sat at the feet" of Freud. And that Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were also his student/associates. I assumed he meant at the same time. I saw letters in the general files from Carl Jung and Anna Freud. He also said, "If you read Jung's book, you'll see that he moved farther away from Freud than I did."  He said that Anna and he met for a dinner when she came to America on a visit. She had been in her teens when he knew Freud. He said Freud would have nothing further to do with Sadler because he fell away over the issue of sex being the primary motivation in life. He said, 'The old Jew would have nothing to do with me; he never answered my letters.'  I assume that's why he didn't list Freud in his professional biography. He apparently told Meredith about Freud. Meredith often got four out of ten points wrong in what he wrote about Sadler and the early days."
 
*Sadler did not go to Europe until 1911. There is no record of his being in the same city as Freud in Europe or America. Nor is there any record of his being a student in the Freud archives. Freud traveled to the US only once in 1909 to speak at Clark University in Worcester, MA (Carl Jung came with Freud to lecture students on psychoanalysis).
 
Larry Bowman joined the First Urantia Society held in the Sadler’s home when he was 15 in 1954. First Urantia Society consisted of people who had been called the Forum. He started keeping a diary in January 1957. Larry said it was a closed group, meaning anyone who wanted to attend had to be interviewed by Dr. Sadler. In Larry’s diary there is one mention of Sadler stating he studied with Freud, Jung, and Adler:
 
Saturday, June 27, 1959:
I was in attendance that day at the annual picnic at Pine Lodge, the Sadler family’s hilltop retreat that overlooked Lake Michigan at Beverly Shores, Indiana. My diary says there was no official count of how many were there, but “Christy said it was one of the largest crowds she had ever seen there. Practically all the regular members of [First Urantia Society] were there, as well as several people from the Culver, Indiana group [I don’t mention Meredith or Irene Sprunger specifically] and some from the Burches’ study group. …
 
… We finished up the evening by several of us sitting on the front porch watching the sun go down and listening to Dr. Sadler—the Great Man—talking of some of his experiences: his days with Freud, Adler, and Jung; his days with Thurston, the magician, as they exposed mediums and fakes. What a life he has had! What a man he is!
 
Sadler said that he studied with Freud, Adler, and Jung; in other words he studied psychiatry professionally. This 1937 letter provides evidence that Sadler never studied with any of the three men he listed. This letter is also a good example of Sadler’s standing in the field of medicine: respected even though he was self-taught. Haven Emerson, a professor at Columbia University in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, wrote to Stuart Pritchard, the medical director of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, on March 29, 1937:
 
"I made inquiries concerning Dr. William Sadler of Chicago and have the personal statement of Professor Adolf Meyer that Dr. Sadler would be a suitable person for carrying on an educational campaign among our general practitioners and introducing modern sound principles of psychiatry and mental hygiene into the work of the County Health Departments and medical practice locally."

Dr. Meyer further states that Dr. Sadler has never had any formal adequate training in psychiatry. He is what might be called a “one- man institute” of psychiatry but in his writing and his outlook he is entirely sound.

Had Sadler ever studied with Freud or Jung, Dr. Adler certainly would have known it and stated that fact to Dr. Meyer. Sadler clearly studied their work. But as of yet there is no proof that he studied with any of them. Sadler was respected enough by Dr. Adler to recommend him to teach general practitioners and the County Health Departments which does speak well of him. 
 
Another important aspect of Dr. Sadler’s comments about Freud and Jung is that he never listed in his professional biographies that he studied with them. Other evidence that questions whether Sadler’s studied with Freud comes from Carolyn Kendall and Marc Demarest. They both pointed out that when Sadler provided his professional credentials to the Chicago Medical Society for its 1922 History of Medicine and Surgery and Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago, he didn’t mention his relationship with any of the leading psychiatrists. Marc did some research on Sadler’s traveling schedule and the possibility meeting Freud. Sadler and Freud were not in European cities at the same time. Marc concluded the travel schedules do not support Sadler studying with Freud. This is what Sadler said in his professional biography:
​
The link to Marc’s piece on Sadler and Freud:
 
http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2011/04/sidebar-testable-facts.html
 
Without any evidence, or record of Sadler studying with Freud, the conclusion I came to is that he didn’t. We can try and ascertain why Dr. Sadler would make statements about Freud, Jung, and Adler that were not true. I think Sadler was an excellent storyteller and loved being an entertainer. We have heard from Forum members and his students that he told lots of stories. He loved this activity. I tried to find evidence of his studying with Freud and was unsuccessful. I concluded that Sadler, in his humanness, loved to spin a yarn to Forum members, students, and others. Do I find this dishonest or proof he was a liar? No. I think his motive was to entertain, not deceive. Dr. Sadler was a complex human being who appears to have understood the value of storytelling to entertain friends while being wise enough to tell the truth professionally. There is ample proof that Sadler was a highly respected person. The fact that Dr. Sadler was an excellent storyteller does not take away from his professional accomplishments, or more importantly, the eternal truths found in The Urantia Book.
 

​The Forum 
Our superhuman friends thus spent upward of two decades in extending our cosmic horizons, enlarging our theologic concepts, and expanding our over-all philosophy.
 
—William S. Sadler
 
in 1922, the Sadlers moved into their new home at 533 Diversey Parkway in Chicago, Christy entered their life, and the Urantia papers Forum was soon to begin.1 The Sadlers spent their days practicing medicine, writing books, and lecturing. In the evenings, they served as stewards to celestial communications.
The Forum was in essence a laboratory. A paper was read, questions were asked, and a follow-up draft would be read the following Sunday. The Sadlers found the process validating. Had the Forum not sparked any interest, it would have ended. The belief they were doing something important for humankind kept them focused for decades.
It began in January 1923, when Sadler was traveling in Kansas to deliver a talk on Gestalt therapy. He wrote his son, then sixteen years old:
 
Say, let’s start a Sunday evening Forum at our house. I’ll answer and direct discussion on Philosophy, Religion, Ethics and Race Betterment. We would keep open house and invite our friends and patients to come when they felt like it. We don’t go to church any place and we ought to set aside that much for our own improvement. Talk it over with your mother.2
 
Sadler believed that doctors should maintain contact with their patients. He thought a meeting of “informal discussion and social exchange” would be a good way to accomplish that need.3 In a 1960 history, Sadler wrote, “This group came to consist of professional men and women—doctors, lawyers, dentists, ministers—together with individuals from all walks of life—farmers, housewives, secretaries, and common laborers.”4
By the time Sadler arrived home on Sunday, February 11, Lena had invited thirty people. The session would be held from three to five o’clock. The Sadlers proved a powerful draw: they were both well-known physicians who spoke professionally and were well read. For the first two years, Forum meetings were open to all. Forum members brought friends and family to hear talks about primary emotions and instincts, genetics, chromosomes, character, Darwin, heredity, Mendelism, and eugenics.
Another reason the Sadlers may have entertained the idea of a Forum was to help Bill. His mental illness was affecting his success at school and he was increasingly isolated. As it turned out, he ran away from home a year later, in March 1924, to enlist in the Marines, which he did under an assumed name. He was away for the first four years of the Forum.
The meeting that changed everything occurred on a Sunday, November 23, 1924, when the discussion was on false mediums and related phenomena.5 The talk focused on the differences between trance mediums and alleged spirit visitations. Sadler had experience investigating fraud in spiritualism, the belief that the dead could communicate with the living. Oral history of this meeting notes that a guest asked Sadler if it were possible for alleged spirit beings to actually transmit messages to human beings. Sadler answered that in his experience all cases of psychic phenomena but one he had investigated turned out to be fraudulent. This apparently was the opening he had been waiting for. He then described the sleeping subject case he had been investigating since 1911. Lena did not attend this meeting. On her return, she was shocked to hear that he had spoken of the case. The next week, she brought notes that she had taken during night-time sessions with the subject and read them to the group. The attendees found it fascinating and asked numerous questions.6
The Contact Commissioners (group communicating with the celestial beings) heard many strange concepts from the celestials during the contacts. In his 1960 history, Sadler noted seventy-five concepts that were “new and original as presented in The Urantia Book, not to mention more than one hundred additional narratives which represent enlargement, amplification, and clarification of existing knowledge.” He wrote that their “superhuman friends” had told them that the universe is far flung with millions of inhabited planets, explained the story of the evolution of humankind and the cosmos, that the central universe was called Havona, that there were seven superuniverses, defined the Supreme Being, told them all about the numerous orders of angels, and about the “Thought Adjuster” which is the fragment of God that lives in our mind.
Overall, the development of the Urantia papers fell into four phases over the thirty years:
 
• Phase 1: 1911–1923. The pre-papers period, sleeping subject introduced the Sadlers to the celestial beings who were communicating through him. Forum begins 1923.
 
• Phase 2: 1924–1929. An announcement by celestial beings starts the flow of the first series of the Urantia papers to the Contact Commissioners in response to questions from Forum members. Celestial communication was through written and spoken contact. Sadler stated that some of the papers were just appearing in his home. It is uncertain whether sleeping subject was involved in this series.
 
• Phase 3: 1930–1935. Expanding of text. Jesus papers arrive complete in 1935 (Jesus papers were not the result of Q & A).
 
• Phase 4: 1936–1942. Forum final review of papers for publication.7
On September 27, 1924, the group officially attending the Sunday meetings became known as the Forum. They continued the established question-and-answer format beginning on Sunday, October 7, 1924, at three o’clock in the afternoon. In the first hour, a paper would be read. Then refreshments would be served. A second hour of questions-and-answers followed. This process helped refine and expand the papers. This Q & A period continued for seventeen years, ending on May 31, 1942. Over that period, the Forum had 486 members, each of whom signed an oath of secrecy.8 Approximately thirty to fifty attended the Forum each week. Forum membership was self-selecting because those who stayed believed that celestial beings were communicating with the Contact Commission.
Forum members dressed as for church. They called each other by their first names with one exception. Sadler was known as Doctor, though his close friends called him Doc or Poppy. Sadler was not one to engage in small talk unless the Chicago Cubs were mentioned. A life-long fan, he knew all the players, their positions and team statistics, and was always ready to share his knowledge.9
On December 14, 1924, Sadler told the Forum members that he had received a message ten months earlier from an unseen being named Machiventa Melchizedek, on February 11. Melchizedek had announced through the sleeping subject that they would “be receiving a wonderful new revelation.” Carolyn Kendall, a Forum member, noted in her history that a Melchizedek being was accompanied by the leader of the secondary midwayers named ABC. This was the first time that the Contact Commissioners learned of the purpose of the celestial contacts of the previous decades—preparation to bring this revelation to Earth. She notes that the midway creatures had been planning the Urantia revelation for almost five hundred years.10
In The Mind at Mischief, the best-selling of all of Sadler’s books, Sadler wrote about the origin story of The Urantia Book in the appendix:
 
In discussions of fraudulent mediums or self-deceived psychics, the reader of this book has several times encountered the statement that there were certain exceptions to the general indictments there made, and was referred to this appendix. It now becomes my duty to explain what I had in mind when those footnotes were inserted.
 
In the interests of scientific accuracy on the one hand, and of strict fairness on the other, it becomes necessary to explain that there are one or two exceptions to the general statement that all cases of psychic phenomena which have come under my observation have turned out to be those of auto-psychism. It is true that practically all the physical phenomena have proved to be fraudulent, while the psychic phenomena are almost invariably explainable by the laws of psychic projection, transference, reality shifting, etc. But many years ago I did meet one trance medium, a woman now deceased, whose visions, revelations, etc., were not tainted with spiritualism. As far as my knowledge extends, at no time did she claim to be under the influence of spirit guides or controls, or to communicate messages from the spirits of departed human beings. Her work was largely of a religious nature and consisted of elevated sayings and religious admonitions. I never had the privilege of making a thoroughgoing psychic analysis of this case, and am not in a position to express myself as to the extent to which her revelations originated in the subconscious realms of her own mind. I make mention of the case merely to record the fact that I have met one instance of psychic phenomena apparently of the trance order that was not in any way associated with spiritualism.
 
The other exception has to do with a rather peculiar case of psychic phenomena, one which I find myself unable to classify, and which I would like very much to narrate more fully; I cannot do so here, however, because of a promise which I feel under obligation to keep sacredly. In other words, I have promised not to publish this case during the lifetime of the individual. I hope sometime to secure a modification of that promise and be able to report this case more fully because of its interesting features. I was brought in contact with it, in the summer of 1911, and I have had it under my observation more or less ever since, having been present at probably 250 of the night sessions, many of which have been attended by a stenographer who made voluminous notes.
 
A thorough study of this case has convinced me that it is not one of ordinary trance. While the sleep seems to be quite of a natural order, it is very profound, and so far we have never been able to awaken the subject when in this state; but the body is never rigid, and the heart action is never modified, tho [sic] respiration is sometimes markedly interfered with. This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities. In fact, he is more or less indifferent to the whole proceeding, and shows a surprising lack of interest in these affairs as they occur from time to time.
 
In no way are these night visitations like the séances associated with spiritualism. At no time during the period of eighteen years’ observation has there been a communication from any source that claimed to be the spirit of a deceased human being. The communications which have been written, or which we have had the opportunity to hear spoken, are made by a vast order of alleged beings who claim to come from other planets to visit this world, to stop here as student visitors for study and observation when they are en route from one universe to another or from one planet to another. These communications further arise in alleged spiritual beings who purport to have been assigned to this planet for duties of various sorts.
 
Eighteen years of study and careful investigation have failed to reveal the psychic origin of these messages. I find myself at the present time just where I was when I started. Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind. Much of the material secured through this subject is quite contrary to his habits of thought, to the way in which he has been taught, and to his entire philosophy. In fact, of much that we have secured, we have failed to find anything of its nature in existence. Its philosophic content is quite new, and we are unable to find where very much of it has ever found human expression.
 
Much as I would like to report details of this case, I am not in a position to do so at present. I can only say that I have found in these years of observation that all the information imparted through this source has proved to be consistent within itself. While there is considerable difference in the quality of the communications, this seems to be reasonably explained by a difference in state of development and order of the personalities making the communications. Its philosophy is consistent. It is essentially Christian and is, on the whole, entirely harmonious with the known scientific facts and truths of this age. In fact, the case is so unusual and extraordinary that it establishes itself immediately, as far as my experience goes, in a class by itself, one which has thus far resisted all my efforts to prove it to be of auto-psychic origin. Our investigations are being continued and, as I have intimated, I hope some time in the near future to secure permission for the more complete reporting of the phenomena connected with this interesting case.11
 
The Contact Commission members served as the stewards of the typewritten manuscript and kept a carbon copy of the transcript in a fireproof vault. The commissioners assumed full responsibility for supervising all publication details, securing the copyrights, and proofreading the galleys. They never disclosed the methodology of how the book was written. These were people who talked about the celestial communications but never revealed the identity of the sleeping subject. Several of them, it appears, received celestial messages from the various beings involved. In his 1960 history, Sadler wrote that the main reason the celestials did not want the identity of the contact known was that they did not want any human to be associated with The Urantia Book. They hoped that the revelation would stand on its own declarations and teachings. The celestials were determined that future generations would have the book free of any human connections—they did not want a Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Calvin or a Wesley. Bill Sadler said that the man himself did not want to be known and that the book did not carry the imprint of the printer who brought the book into being. Urantia Foundation is listed as the printer.
The celestial beings and the Contact Commission made an agreement that the humans would always be present together when oral dictation was occurring through the unconscious subject. When the sleeping subject was receiving messages and writing them down, none of the commissioners would be present. The contact person was also involved later when they received written mandates and communications. Bill Sadler told Forum member Carolyn Kendall that the verbal communications occurred by what he called “direct voice.” One or more contact commissioners heard voices in numerous different places such as Chicago; Pine Lodge, Indiana; and Culver City, California.12
In January 1925, the celestials directed the Contact Commissioners to ask the Forum members to write down questions that would benefit mankind. Sadler told Kendall that they decided to start with questions about the origin of the cosmos, deity, creation, and other topics far beyond present-day knowledge. The following Sunday, Forum members brought their questions, which the commissioners narrowed down to about 180. Sadler told her that eight Urantia papers appeared in answer to those questions: “The Universal Father” (two papers), “The Eternal Son,” “Universe Arrangement,” “The Conjoint Actor,” “The Central and Divine Universe,” “The Universe of Universes,” and “The Seven Superuniverses.”
The next nineteen papers covered the personalities from paradise to the superuniverse level; fifteen papers covered the physical evolution of the universe, administration and personalities of the local universe, the Lucifer rebellion and cosmology; the next nine papers detailed the Edenic regime, its downfall, racial evolution, and two papers on the Melchizedeks; the next three were the bestowals of Christ Michael, the Thought Adjusters, and the Seraphic guardians. The total number of papers in the first series was fifty-six, plus the Foreword. Later in 1925, the celestials asked the commissioners to make the Forum a closed group. Forum members were required to sign a pledge of secrecy and not to discuss any of the information they gleaned at the meetings to anyone outside the group. Thirty membership tickets were issued to the first Forum members.13
Until 1931, the celestials approved every prospective Forum member. After that date, the Contact Commissioners took over that role. Helen Thurman Carlson, who said she was the last person approved by the celestials, thought that the revelatory beings had been warning the commissioners about potentially unreliable applicants to the Forum.14
Sadler described the process in his 1960 history draft:
 
We would read a paper on Sunday afternoon and the following Sunday, the new questions would be presented. Again these would be sorted, classified, etc. …. Fifty-seven papers were received by this method between 1925–1929 …. This program covered several years and ultimately resulted in the presentation of the 196 Papers as now found in The Urantia Book …. From first to last, when Papers appeared, the questions disappeared. This was the procedure followed for the many years of the reception of The Urantia Papers. No questions, no Papers.15
 
During phase 3, the Urantia papers were expanded. The first three papers in the original fifty-six became ten. A new religion papers series was added. One Forum member, Lee Miller Jones, spent “hours and hours typing questions to submit to the revelatory commission [celestial beings] so that they could give us new information that would be meaningful to humans.”16 By 1934, the first three parts of the book were complete. The Forum members assumed the entire book was complete. A year later, they received a surprise: Part IV, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus,” a series of seventy-six papers, was delivered.
Sadler explained how Part IV appeared in his 1960 history:
 
The delay of one year in the reception of the Jesus Papers—Part IV of The Urantia Book—may be explained as follows: The midwayers were a bit apprehensive about becoming involved in the suit pending in the universe courts—Gabriel v. Lucifer—and they hesitated to complete their project until they were assured that they had full authority to retell the story of Jesus’ life on Earth.
 
After some months’ waiting there came a mandate from Uversa directing the United Midwayers of Urantia to proceed with their project of revealing the story of the life and teachings of Michael [Jesus] when incarnated on Urantia, and not only assuring them that they were not in ‘contempt’ of the Uversa courts but instead granting them a mandate to do this service and admonishing any and all persons connected therewith to refrain from interfering with, or in any way hindering, the execution of such an undertaking.
 
And this is the explanation of why the Jesus Papers appeared one year after the other Papers had been completed.
 
Sadler reported that the celestials provided him with a simultaneous narrative of the court proceedings for the trial of Gabriel v. Lucifer. For Part IV, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus,” the midwayers were mandated by their superiors to draw on the highest human concepts as well as their memories in compiling this series of seventy-seven papers. Another of their sources were notes made by the Apostle Andrew (of Jesus’ apostles). Part IV appeared in total on one day in 1935. Sadler said, “The biggest surprise was the Jesus Papers. We never expected to get a whole new story of Jesus’ life. This was a big shock.”17
Phase 4 of the Urantia papers occurred between 1936 and 1941. Sadler noted in his history that during this final review the celestials asked the Forum members to go through the papers and ask questions about the “clarification of concepts” and “removal of ambiguities.” This took several years. During this time, few revisions or amplifications were made to the text. In 1939, the Commission decided to organize a class to study the Urantia papers. They told the Forumites about their plan and those who wished to could join the group. About seventy people raised their hands and the Seventy, as they came to be known, were born. The Seventy took over the Wednesday evening study group that had been meeting at the Sadlers for two or three years. The group began on April 3, 1939, and carried on until the summer of 1956. During these years, the Seventy class enrolled 107 students. The Seventy was the precursor to the “School of the Urantia Brotherhood” in September 1956.18
Sadler and the other Contact Commissioners used the Seventy to assist them in creating this series of workbooks intended to train teachers and leaders across the country. The workbooks would make the study of and the concepts in The Urantia Book more uniform. The Sadlers directed members of the Seventy to study the Urantia papers and then write their own papers on different topics to be teaching tools for the future Brotherhood School. At the same time, both Sadlers gave lectures to this group to help them understand the more difficult concepts in The Urantia Book. This process developed eight workbooks to aid readers.
Sadler closed the Forum to new members between January 1935 and January 1939 while they reviewed the second series and the Jesus papers. This is also the time when Lena was diagnosed with breast cancer. The celestials asked the Forum members to make a final review of the entire set of papers between 1936 and 1941. The Forum lasted until May 31, 1942.19 The Forum did not meet in the summer months except for an annual picnic.
At the picnic on June 6, 1942, the Forum was officially released from its duties of asking questions and the celestial messages continued. On June 19, 1943, during the annual summer picnic, Sadler read a message reportedly from secondary midway creatures. Marian Rowley, a member of the Forum, took notes in shorthand. It was discovered later that the source of these messages was Emery Reves’s book A Democratic Manifesto, published in 1942. There is evidence of awareness of source materials by those in the Forum during those years. A person who worked at Urantia Foundation when Christy was alive gave the author a set of papers, among which is a typed sheet titled “Communication Received in 1945.” These words were struck out and replaced, in Marian Rowley’s handwriting, with “Excerpts from Emery Reeves ‘Democratic Manifesto.’” This document was found in 1982 in Christy’s desk as she lay in the hospital dying.
The most important documents for a historian are those written at the time of the events they describe. We have two sets of primary source documents in the form of diaries from people who attended the Forum. Clarence Bowman kept the earliest diary. Harold and Martha Sherman also kept a detailed diary of their attendance. Bowman attended the Forum in the early days, beginning in 1924. Bowman’s diaries were quite tiny in size, about three by four inches, and he wrote only a few sentences about the topics and a few messages he heard read. 20
Bowman’s first Forum meeting was on November 23, 1924. He noted it in his diary: “In aft[ternoon] went to Sadlers forum and heard some of his disclosures of fake mediums. He also told us of the phenomena of supposedly extra mundane?? Origin.” His second attendance is the first record we have demonstrating that messages from celestial beings were being read to the group: “In aft[ternoon] went out to Dr. Sadler’s forum. Wonderful revelations from Machavalia (Machiventa) and ABC were read by the Dr.” This pattern continued in early 1925, as Bowman noted on January 11: “In aft[ternoon] went to Dr. Sadler’s forum. He read some of the accounts of supervisors of Series 666 (606?) and of sovereign visitors of the universe of nebulon (Nebadon)” and a week later on January 18, “In aft[ternoon] went to Dr. Sadler’s. He gave us the answers of 181 questions answered by ABC. Miss Williams and I stayed a while later and heard Mr. and Mrs. Sadler discuss this further,” and then on January 25, “Went to Dr. Sadler’s forum in aft[ternoon]—he read us some more messages from some of the extra-planetary beings.”21
The second set of diaries is from Martha and Harold Sherman. They note what paper was read on what date, the changes they noticed in the papers, their thoughts about the material, and their relationships with other Forum members. These Forum diaries total more than twelve hundred pages.22 The Shermans learned about the Urantia papers from an early Forumite, Harry Loose, a former Chicago policeman and detective. In 1921, while Loose was speaking on the Chautauqua Circuit on crime and criminology, Sherman interviewed him. After the meeting, the two men began to correspond with one another. Through this correspondence, Loose became Sherman’s spiritual mentor. Sherman learned from Loose that he and Loose had known each other over many lifetimes and “belonged to a special order of beings who incarnated on Earth periodically to perform important missions.”23 Sherman also learned from Loose that each of us was indwelt with a fragment of God that served as a spiritual guide. Sherman named his fragment Ara. He wrote down the inspirations he received from Ara into a little black book that his daughter Marcia discovered in the family home after his death.24
In 1941, Sherman and Loose met again in person. During this meeting, Loose told Sherman about the Urantia papers. Sherman became so interested in them that he and Martha moved from Hollywood to the Cambridge Apartment Hotel, across the street from the Sadlers on Diversey Parkway in Chicago, so that they could participate in the Forum. The Shermans began to attend the Forum regularly in May 1942. They spent the next few months walking across the street to the Sadlers’ home to read the entirety of the papers. At the annual Forum picnic in June 1942, Bill Sadler read a message from the Angels of Progress, who were in charge of the Urantia papers. The Shermans wrote that:
 
the message released the Forum from its duties of asking questions and direct responsibilities concerning the papers; it was stated emphatically that everyone was now on their own and that it would remain to be seen whether they would prove equal to the “test.” It emphasized unity and predicted there would be many human ideas on how this Forum should be run from now on.
 
Harold Sherman (1898–1987) earned his living as a creative writer. He wrote hundreds of short stories for boys, several juvenile sports books, adult novels, Broadway plays, radio and television scripts, Hollywood screenplays, and self-help books. He was a student of ESP (extrasensory perception) and metaphysics. Many of his books are still printed and sold today. Sherman believed that he had a mission to perform for humanity that was connected to his writing. His wife, Martha (1898–1998), was his partner, best friend, and soul mate. They had two daughters, Marcia and Mary.
Initially the Shermans were very close to Sadler and Christy (Lena had passed away three years earlier, in 1939). They had dinners together and the two Sadler men shared stories about celestial communications. In September 20, 1942, the Forum began a re-read of the Urantia papers starting with the first, “The Universal Father.” The Shermans described this paper as magnificent in hearing it for the second time because it meant “much more” due to the background they had from reading the entire book on their own. The next few papers they also found very inspiring.
The Shermans wrote that the Sadlers hosted Forum members at meetings every Sunday and Wednesday as well as every other Monday. It was a busy household both day and night. In 1942, the Forum meetings were still on Sundays from three to five in the afternoon. The group called the Seventy met every other Monday night. Bill Sadler’s class met every other Wednesday night. The every other Wednesday meeting was an open discussion.25
Attending the Forum was a positive experience for the Shermans into 1943. They noted in their diary on March 7 of that year after hearing Paper 25, “The Messenger Hosts of Space,” that “The latter part of this paper is especially interesting and beautiful, and will take much study, but fills one with an humble appreciation of the loving care and guidance that is planned for each individual in all the superuniverses.”26 In October of that year they read Paper 48, “The Morontia Life,” which described the worlds we go to after our life on Earth. The Shermans liked the paper’s description of how the universe was designed to help humans on their journey: “where there will be new creatures needing the wisdom and experiential knowledge of these spiritualized mortals, now members of the finaliter corps … that they in turn may start the sublime Paradise ascent.” The Shermans found this extremely moving, but thought the beautiful panoramic picture that the Urantia papers painted was in fact “beyond words.”27 The following week brought another paper, “The Inhabited Worlds.” In the discussion, Bill answered a question about physical handicaps slowing spiritual growth in a manner that the Shermans found magnificent and inspiring. William Sadler followed by saying that regardless of what man did on this planet, if he showed one glimmer of interest in spiritual survival, he would “be ticketed for the next world.”28
The Urantia papers’ evolution is noted in the Sherman diaries. On April 18, 1943, Bill read Paper 31, “The Corps of the Finality.” The Shermans found this paper challenging to follow but thought the ending was “profoundly impressive” because it disclosed that the author of the paper was an Ancient of Days in the superuniverse of Orvonton. They believed the paper had been revised three times: once in the early part of the Forum before 1934, again in 1934, and this final time in 1943. On December 12, 1943, Mr. Kellogg read Paper 57, “The Origin of Urantia.” In the Q & A, Sadler explained that they noted twelve planets even though only nine were known at the time the paper was written in the mid- to late 1920s. Ceres was discovered in 1801, Pluto in 1930, and Eres in 2005. All three were designated minor planets in 2006. This designation is still debated.29 Another example is from January 2, 1944, from Paper 58, “Life Establishment on Urantia.” Sadler told the Forum that the paper included new material about how much the heat of the sun would cost the people of Chicago if they had to pay for it in terms of kilowatt hours. It was a huge sum for that time—a hundred million dollars. The Shermans believed this information to be false and suspected that Sadler himself had supplied the statistics. They felt it was too materialistic for higher intelligences to be the author.30
The Shermans continued to question the subject matter and the portrayals they heard read in the papers. On March 26, 1944, they felt that Paper 70, “The Evolution of Human Government,” was not written from a spiritual perspective and contrasted with the more sublime earlier stories of human development. They believed that it reflected William Sadler’s superior attitude toward humanity.31 In October 1944, the Shermans wrote that several of the papers they heard were not particularly inspired and sounded as if a human had written them.32 This attitude shifted 180 degrees when Papers 99 through 102 were read in 1945. They were “profound,” the Shermans wrote, the “most inspiring, convincing, and soul-satisfying papers in the entire Book of Urantia. It seemed to us that the knowledge revealed in it was alone enough to lift the whole spiritual comprehension of humanity.”33 Their comments for Papers 103 were mixed. Those that had the greatest impact were on the Thought Adjuster, which The Urantia Book describes as the fragment of God that lives within our mind to lead us to perfection. They considered Paper 108 “Mission and Ministry of Thought Adjusters,” Paper 110 “Relation of Adjusters to Individual Mortals,” and Paper 111 “The Adjuster and the Soul” the most sublime literature on Earth because they appealed to a deeper sense of spiritual logic. These papers were read again after the summer break in September and the Shermans noted that a great deal of material had been added. The Shermans wrote that it appeared that some editorial license was being taken because the new material they heard had degenerated to “mere human expression.”34
In September 1942, Harold and Martha Sherman became two of the main adversaries for Sadler. They challenged Sadler’s approach in managing the Urantia papers project. At this time, Forum attendance was between thirty and fifty persons. Harold Sherman became disturbed by the way Sadler was running the Forum and began to voice his frustrations to other members. Many of them agreed with Sherman’s points, so a petition was drawn up by some of the members stating that they disagreed with Sadler’s plans for the organizing and publication of the book and asked for more input on the decision making for the text. Forty-eight members signed the petition, which Sherman then presented to Sadler.35
Not surprisingly, Sadler was furious at this challenge to his leadership after eighteen years on the project. He called each signer individually into his office for a private conversation. They each withdrew their names from the petition. He apparently told them that they were going against the revelators if they did not withdraw their names. This was too intimidating to ignore. The Shermans said that they were not given the opportunity to do so. Although the Shermans remained members of the Forum until 1947, from 1942 on, Sadler kept them at a distance.36 Sherman’s methodology and timing were flawed. The Forum had been working as a group for almost two decades with Sadler as its leader. Even though many Forum members agreed with the petition, none of them could maintain that attitude when Sadler questioned them. Sherman believed that the promotion of the Urantia papers was his destiny and that Sadler’s reluctance to advertise the papers seemed wrong. Sherman wrote in his diary, “I see the potentiality of all this happening and more, as though it were revealed to me, as it has been.” He wanted to promote The Urantia Book through “the channels of radio, stage and screen” and saw his doing so as his mission in life and for humanity.37 Sadler was adamant that there was to be no major publicity once the book was published. It was to grow quietly on a person-to-person basis as people referred it to their friends and family. Sherman, concerned about fulfilling his spiritual mission, remained upset when Sadler rebuffed his offer.
The Shermans mentioned that Sadler told the Forum that they no longer had to go pick up the papers at the contact’s home because the midway creatures were materializing them in the home at 533 Diversey Parkway. Sherman wrote that Sadler said that “a year and a half elapsed before the Jesus story started to come through, and then the papers began to appear which were unsigned, it being indicated that they were being written by midwayers.”39 The Shermans wondered if this was because Sadler claimed that the papers were materializing in his home and that he therefore no longer needed to pick them up from the subject.
Sherman also became suspicious that Sadler was editing the text, and a conversation with Christy only served to increase his suspicion. On June 3, 1942, Harold mentioned to Christy that there was no mention of psychic phenomena in the Book of Urantia, as he called it. Christy responded, “Harold, you know a lot about these things. Why don’t you write up an explanation of the way you think it ought to be and let us submit it? Maybe the Angels of Progress will okay it for the book.”39 Sherman wrote in his diary that he was shocked by Christy’s response. It caused him to wonder whether Sadler was writing up ideas on different subjects, asking the celestials for permission, and then adding them to the book. His suspicions were fueled when Clyde Bedell discovered that passages in the 1943 midwayer message resembled parts of Emery Reves’s book A Democratic Manifesto, published in 1942.
According to Urantia Foundation’s files, Wilfred Kellogg started writing the register of copyrights in October 1932 to obtain information on copyright laws. Initially, for copyright purposes, Wilfred Kellogg was designated as the author of The Urantia Book but transferred authorship to the Urantia Foundation when it was created on January 11, 1950.
On February 5, 1937, the printer R. R. Donnelley & Sons had given W. C. Kellogg a contract for ten thousand copies of “A Book on Psychology” of either 6 x 9 inches at 2,496 pages or 7 x 10 inches at 1,780 pages. On April 23, 1942, the proofing of Part I had been completed and the galleys returned so that changes could be made from Kellogg’s notes. The typesetting for the book was completed in 1948.40
On September 21, 1952, Bill Sadler read a message from the celestials that came to be known as the Publication Mandate. It stated that they could publish the book if they heard nothing from the revelatory beings by January 1, 1955. The message had several parts:
 
We regard The Urantia Book as a feature of the progressive evolution of human society. It is not germane to the spectacular episodes of epochal revolution, even though it may be apparently timed to appear in the wake of one such revolution in human society. The book belongs to the era immediately to follow the conclusion of the present ideological struggle. That will be the day when men will be willing to seek truth and righteousness. When the chaos of the present confusion has passed, it will be more readily possible to formulate the cosmos of a new and improved era of human relationships. And it is for this better order of affairs on earth that the Book has been made ready.
 
You must again study the times of Jesus on earth. You must carefully take note of how the kingdom of heaven was inaugurated in the world. Did it evolve slowly and unfold naturally? Or did it come with a sudden show of force and with spectacular exhibition of power? Was it evolutionary or revolutionary?
 
You must learn to possess your souls in patience. You are in association with a revelation of truth which is a part of the natural evolution of religion on this world. Over rapid growth would be suicidal. The book is being given to those who are ready for it long before the day of its world-wide mission.41
 
When there was no word from the celestials by January 1955, negotiations began with Donnally to print the ten thousand copies at a cost of $45,700. The book was published and arrived at the Sadlers’ home on Wednesday, October 12, 1955, a momentous day for the Forum members. Finally, after seventeen years, they could hold the book in their hands and take it home to read. Christy, who would be the last surviving Contact Commissioner, told the Forum members that:
 
We have been called to the great work of taking the first step of offering to mortal man a new light, a new revelation, of the love of God. The easy jog-trot religion of former days no longer suffices to meet the challenges of today. Following Jesus’ way of life calls for an act of complete commitment, a dedicated intention, a resolute purpose, a trumpet call to a life that will not compromise.42
 
Now that the book had been published, Christy explained, a new era of answering God’s call had arrived. It was time to envision how they could better the world, understand that God could speak to them, use their talents in a particular place of service, and be used to fulfill God’s vision for them.
Sadler said that he did not actually believe the revelatory power of the Urantia papers until 1936, when he read the descriptions of the apostle’s personalities and character in paper 139. As a psychiatrist, he felt that no human could have written the essays. This was eleven years after the process had begun and after the first drafts of all the papers had been received. Sadler wrote to his friend Jacques Weiss in 1964 that the people in the Forum were validating the process and most importantly his “job” had contributed to his belief in the papers:
 
I have steadfastly refused to be diverted from The Urantia Book and the Urantia revelation. That is my job.
 
One of the first communications we had from our midwayer friends at the time of the organization of Urantia Foundation warned us that efforts would be made to divert our attention and to get us occupied with irrelevant movements, cults, phenomena, etc.; that many matters would be brought to our attention to attempt to confuse, occupy, and bamboozle us. And the midwayers’ instructions to us said pay no attention, stay on the main line of Urantia revelation, and avoid all of these sidetracks. And that is what we are trying to do. But listen Brother Weiss, the Urantia revelation has nothing to do with all this mixed up and muddled human psychology. We have been given a bigger and better job which ought to keep us busy—which is surely keeping me busy and happy. The fact that your mind and my mind were open to receive the Urantia revelation suggests that this same openmindedness, if it weren’t dedicated to a single job, could be completely sidetracked by all this psychic phenomena which (interesting as it may be) has nothing to do with the important work that we have been given to do.43
 
With the book published, the Domestic Committee of the Urantia Book Brotherhood spent weeks compiling a list of famous people to whom to send copies of the book:
 
• Edward Teller (physicist, father of hydrogen bomb)
 
• Arthur Compton (physicist, worked on the Manhattan Project, taught at University of Chicago)
 
• Philip Wylie (nonfiction author, Hollywood screenwriter, and director of Leaner Marine Laboratory off Miami)
 
• Stuart Chase (American economist, theorist, and writer)
 
• Ralph Bunche (UN diplomat, political scientist, first African American to win Nobel Prize)
 
• Sholem Asch (Polish-born novelist and playwright, an American citizen)
 
• Jerald C. Brauer (dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School)
 
• C. S. Lewis (novelist, poet, academic, author of The Chronicles of Narnia)
 
• Walter Beldell Smith (U.S. Army general, Eisenhower’s chief of staff in 1944 and 1945)
 
• Charles P. Taft (founder of the World Council of Churches, son of President William Howard Taft, mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio)
 
• Anne Morrow Lindbergh (author, poet, aviator, wife of Charles Lindbergh)
 
• Justice Felix Frankfurter (Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court, helped found American Civil Liberties Union)
 
• Pearl S. Buck (American author and novelist, 1932 Pulitzer Prize winner)
 
• Eleanor Roosevelt (American politician, First Lady of the United States 1933 to 1945)
 
• Dwight D. Eisenhower (thirty-fourth president of the United States (1953–1961), U.S. Army general)
 
• Adlai Stevenson II (intellectual, governor of Illinois, presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956)
 
What these illustrious individuals thought of the book, if they even saw it, is not known. Nothing was heard from any except Pearl Buck’s secretary, who returned the book. From this point on, the Domestic Committee agreed that if someone had established a personal relationship with a famous person they would send the individual a book.44 This experiment confirmed what the celestials had told the Sadlers: that their best option would be a quiet strategy—person to person, no advertising, no church or material structure—and that it would take hundreds of years for the angels to bring those who were ready to the teachings.
 
____________
1   Built in 1908, their home at 533 Diversey Parkway (now home to Urantia Foundation), is listed in the American Institute of Architects Guide to Chicago. It is a large, impressive, beautifully ornamented three story building on a corner. It was designed by the firm of Frommann & Jebsen. Emil Henry Frommann (1860–1950) and Ernst Jebsen (1850–1917) founded their firm in 1882. They were also the architects of the Humboldt Park Receptory and Stables in 1895–1896, Schlitz Company Brewery corner taverns (they designed all of the buildings in Schlitz Row, one being Schubas Tavern at 3159 North Southport built in 1903). The architects were noted for their high degree of craftsmanship in traditional masonry. The AIA Guide describes the building this way: “Light years from the firm’s turgid, tourelled stone-front houses on Fullerton Ave. is this grand flat, the star of this graceless south-side stretch of Diversey Parkway. Lavish ornament grows out of the wall organically, recalling Art Nouveau and Jugendstil masters. The integration of the metal railing with the stone balcony is the jewel in the crown of this sculptured façade. The building’s a total square footage of 11,736 square feet with a coach house in the rear with two floors totaling 1,108 square feet.”
2   Carolyn Kendall, “The History of The Urantia Book Revelation,” draft manuscript, July 14, 2012, p. 6.
3   Part of a history represented to have been written by Sadler and used in the case Maaherra v. Urantia Foundation (http://urantiabook.org/archive/history/histumov.htm).
4   Sadler, A History, 7.
5   Kendall, “History,” 6.
6   Ibid.
7   The Phase 4 date should moved back because that the final type wasn’t approved until July 1951. It appears there was more editing of Part IV than oral history holds. This source of the revised date is from printing invoices and contracts located at Urantia Foundation Archives.
8   Part of a history represented to have been written by Sadler and used in the case Maaherra v. Urantia Foundation. http://urantiabook.org/archive/history/histumov.htm. Forum Pledge: We acknowledge our pledge of secrecy, renewing our promise not to discuss Urantia Revelations or their subject matter with anyone save active Forum members, and to take no notes of such matter as is read or discussed at the public sessions, or make copies or notes of what we personally read. (Copy of pledge text found in William S. Sadler, “History of the Urantia Movement,” draft typed by Marian Rowley (June 16, 1960) in author’s collection).
9   Kendall, “History,” chapter 4, 3.
10  Ibid. Chapter 2, 1.
11  William Sadler, Mind at Mischief, 382–83.
12  Kendall, “History,” chapter 2.
13  Ibid., Chapter 2, 4.
14  Ibid., Chapter 4.
15  Sadler, 1960 history draft, in author’s collection
16  Kendall, “History,” chapter 3,
17  Ibid., 3
18  Sadler, A History, 9.
19  Ibid., 8.
20  Carolyn Kendall, e-mail to author, April 10, 2013. In author’s collection. Carolyn Kendall, Clarence’s daughter, described his attendance: He attended meetings regularly all of 1925, and most of 1926. He only attended six meetings in 1927 due in part to his sister, Irene Rydell, coming to Chicago. Twelve meetings in 1928, twenty-five meetings in 1929. Fifteen meetings in 1930. Three meetings in 1931 (he got married that year and moved to Defiance, Ohio). No meetings in 1932 (the year I was born in the depth of the Depression). One meeting in 1933. His attendance at the Forum was very limited in the 1930s and early 1940s. He often met with his friend Albert Dyon and learned the latest news about the Forum. Our family moved to Chicago in August 1943. His attendance showing increased. By 1945 he was going to all the meetings on Sunday, and re-reading all the papers so he could join the Seventy. I came down with polio in August 1945, which kept the family at home for a few months. He attended all meetings he could until he retired in 1956, and every meeting afterward until his death in 1959.
21  Kendall, “The First Urantia Papers,” 4.
22  Saskia Raevouri, e-mail to author, May 9, 2013. The original Sherman diaries are available online:
http://archive.org/details/TheOriginalUrantiaNotebooksOfHaroldAndMarthaSherman.
23  Praamsma and Block, Sherman Diaries, vol 1, vii-viii.
24  Praamsma and Block, The ARA Messages, introduction, 4.
25  Praamsma and Block, Sherman Diaries, vol. 2, 223–24, 287.
26  Ibid., vol. 3, 81–82.
27  Ibid., vol. 3, 319.
28  Ibid., vol. 3, 326.
29  As of 2013, there are eight planets and three dwarf planets, totaling eleven.
30  Praamsma and Block, Sherman Diaries, vol. 4, 1.
31  Ibid., vol. 4, 62.
32  Ibid., vol. 4, 148.
33  Ibid., vol. 4, 248.
34  Ibid., vol. 4, 248–338.
35  “The Petition,” Urantia Book Sources and Resources, http://www.squarecircles.com/UrantiaMovementHistory/petition.htm.
36  Saskia Praamsma and Matthew Block have published five volumes of this diary. See vol 1, vii–ix.
37  Harold Sherman’s letter to Sadler, July 29, 1942, in Praamsma and Block, Sherman Diaries, 71–81.
38  Ibid., vol. 5, 27.
39  Ibid., vol. 2, 29.
40  Urantia Foundation, R.R. Donnelley & Sons Printing Files, Chicago, IL
41  “The Publication Mandate,” copy in author’s collection.
42  Kendall, “The Future: Divine Plans” (unpublished manuscript, 2012), 3.
43  Letter, William S. Sadler to Jacques Weiss, April 20, 1964.
44  Kendall, e-mail correspondence with author, April 2–6, 2014.

​Sadler’s second mentor when he was a youngster was a family friend, General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880). Wallace lived in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which was about fifty miles from Spencer. Wallace’s Ben-Hur was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and remained at the top of the best-seller list until Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was published in 1936. It has never been out of print. Between 1880 and 1912, Ben-Hur sold more than a million copies. Wallace allowed the young Sadler free access to his personal library, which housed Wallace’s large collection of history and religion books. Sadler told many people that he read Wallace’s history books while visiting him.

Wallace’s interest and questioning of religion could have influenced Sadler in giving him an example of how to approach the question of belief and faith. When Wallace was curious, he studied the Bible and wrote Ben-Hur as a truth-seeking exercise. Sadler would have been able to see how reading and writing was a way to come to terms with perplexing issues. Wallace reported that writing Ben-Hur sorted out his beliefs about God and Christ. He wrote in his autobiography, “When I had finished writing Ben-Hur, I said to myself with Balthazar (a character in the novel who was one of the three original wise men), “God only is so great. I had become a believer.”

This is an article that helps inform us about Wallace. He was a fascinating man and no doubt affected William Sadler deeply.

* * *
John Swanburg, “The Passion of Lew Wallace,” Slate online (March 26, 2013)
 
The Passion of Lew Wallace
The incredible story of how a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.
By John Swansburg|Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 5:30 AM
 
I.
Lew Wallace was making conversation with the other gentlemen in his sleeper car when a man in a nightgown appeared in the doorway. The train was bound for Indianapolis and the Third National Soldiers Reunion, where thousands of Union Army veterans planned to rally, reminisce, and march in a parade the New York Times would later describe as “the grandest street display ever seen in the United States.” It was Sept. 19, 1876, more than a decade since the Civil War had ended. Wallace had grayed a bit, but still wore the sweeping imperial moustache he’d had at the Battle of Shiloh. “Is that you, General Wallace?” the man in the nightgown asked. “Won’t you come to my room? I want to talk.”
Robert Ingersoll, also a veteran of Shiloh, was now the nation’s most prominent atheist, a renowned orator who toured the country challenging religious orthodoxy and championing a healthy separation of church and state. Wallace recognized him from earlier that summer, when he’d heard Ingersoll, a fellow Republican, make a rousing speech at the party’s nominating convention. Wallace accepted his invitation and suggested they take up a subject near to Ingersoll’s heart: the existence of God.
Ingersoll talked until the train reached its destination. “He went over the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell,” Wallace later recalled. “He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano.” The arguments had a powerful effect on Wallace. Departing the train, he walked the pre-dawn streets of Indianapolis alone. In the past he had been indifferent to religion, but after his talk with Ingersoll his ignorance struck him as problematic, “a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness.” He resolved to devote himself to a study of theology, “if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.”
But how to go about such a study? Wallace knew himself well enough to predict that a syllabus of sermons and Biblical commentaries would fail to hold his interest. He devised instead what he called “an incidental employment,” a task that would compel him to complete a thorough investigation of the eternal questions while entertaining his distractible mind. A few years earlier, he’d published a historical romance about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to modest success. His idea now was to inquire after the divinity of Christ by writing a novel about him.
It took four years, but in 1880, Wallace finished his incidental employment. He called it Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s one of the great if little known ironies in the history of American literature: Having set out to win another soul to the side of skepticism, Robert Ingersoll instead inspired a Biblical epic that would rival the actual Bible for influence and popularity in Gilded Age America—and a folk story that has been reborn, in one medium or another, in every generation since.
II.
The ongoing celebration of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary has focused thus far on the conflict’s traditional heroes. Ulysses S. Grant is the subject of a best-selling biography; Abraham Lincoln just won an Oscar. Lew Wallace is not one of those heroes. He lacked Grant’s training and instincts for war, and possessed nothing akin to Lincoln’s political genius or personal charm. Wallace was brave but overconfident on the battlefield, impatient and impertinent off of it. The Union’s two greatest generals, Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, both rebounded from early missteps—Sherman was so spooked after the Union’s defeat at First Bull Run that critics openly questioned his sanity. Wallace, however, couldn’t live down his early stumble, at Shiloh, and spent much of the war on its sidelines.  
Yet Wallace’s unlikely journey from disgraced general to celebrated author is as thrilling as any story of his era, and his fame in his own lifetime surpassed that of all but a handful of his comrades in arms. Few men participated so completely in the postbellum American experience. Wallace had a Zelig-like knack for insinuating himself into the defining moments of his day. A lawyer by training, he served on the tribunal that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators and presided over the one that convicted Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious prison camp at Andersonville, Ga., and the only Confederate executed for war crimes. During the disputed election of 1876, the Republican Party sent Wallace to oversee the original Florida recount. For his role in delivering the White House to Rutherford B. Hayes, he was rewarded with the governorship of the New Mexico territory. The duties of office included putting down a range war in Lincoln County; among the combatants was William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid. Initially charmed by the young gunslinger, Wallace once asked him for a demonstration of his marksmanship and was impressed by his handling of both six-shooter and rifle. He soon tired of the Kid’s homicidal antics, however, and put a $500 bounty on his head.

Billy the Kid, circa 1880.
His role in the life and death of Billy the Kid earned Wallace a bit part in the dime novels that burnished the outlaw’s legend, but it was nothing compared to the celebrity his own novel brought him. He had begun the book in his native Indiana, writing in the shade of what would come to be known as the Ben-Hur beech, and would finish it in Santa Fe. At night, after he’d wound down the territory’s affairs, he would retreat to a dismal back room of the adobe governor's palace and bar the doors and windows. Sitting at a rough pine table, he composed the novel’s eighth and final book by the light of a solitary lamp.
Wallace’s novel has since been eclipsed in the American imagination by a bronzed, bare-chested Charlton Heston, careening around the Holy Land in William Wyler's 1959 film adaptation of Ben-Hur, which won a record 11 Academy Awards and was a blockbuster hit for MGM. But the book was wildly popular in its day, selling perhaps as many as a million copies in its first three decades in print. The story of the Jewish hero Judah Ben-Hur, whose life Wallace ingeniously intertwined with that of Jesus Christ, captivated readers despite winning little affection from contemporary critics, who found its romanticism passé and its action pulpy. On a visit to Boston, home of the literary old guard, Wallace noted with pique that William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. all declined invitations to parties held in his honor. “Why did they not come?” he wrote to his wife Susan. “Would their presence have been too much of a sanction or endorsement for the wild westerner?”
Ben-Hur found admirers in other high places. Grant, who hadn't picked up a novel in a decade, read Ben-Hur in a single, 30-hour sitting. President James A. Garfield, a former professor of literature, devoured it nearly as fast, stealing chapters between meetings. He woke at 5:30 one morning so he could finish it in bed. "With this beautiful and reverent book you have lightened the burden of my daily life,” he wrote to Wallace later that same day. Ben-Hur’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, soon produced a Garfield Edition, with the president’s letter reproduced as a foreword; the lavishly illustrated two-volume set sold for a then astronomical $30.
The novel’s readership wasn’t confined to Union veterans. In an Indiana newspaper, the historian S. Chandler Lighty discovered Varina Davis’ account of reading Ben-Hur aloud to her father “from 10 o’clock until daybreak, both of us oblivious to the flight of time.” Her father was Jefferson Davis, the former Confederate president. Men and women on both sides of the Mason-Dixon could enjoy Wallace’s tale of martial virtue set safely in the distant past and embrace its message of Christly compassion triumphing over Old Testament vengeance. The story of Ben-Hur’s success is, in part, the story of how Americans put the divisions of the war behind them in the waning days of Reconstruction.
It’s also the story of how they welcomed a new era of economic opportunity. Among other things, Ben-Hur is a rags-to-riches story, in the mode of Wallace’s contemporary, Horatio Alger. Judah’s virtuousness is tested, and richly rewarded, throughout the novel. The Gospel of Matthew teaches that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. In Ben-Hur, Wallace suggests that piety brings with it prosperity—an alluring prospect to readers eager to take part in Gilded Age affluence.
Wallace himself had struggled financially through much of his life. His correspondence is full of enthusiastic accounts of railroad investments and mining prospects that never pan out; he patented unprofitable improvements to railway ties, automatic fans, and the fishing rod. But Ben-Hur opened the doors of opportunity. The novel so impressed President Garfield that he offered Wallace the position of minister plenipotentiary to the Ottoman Empire (annual salary: a princely $7,500) and encouraged him, when not attending to U.S. interests, to gather material for a new novel. By the time Wallace returned from Constantinople four years later, Ben-Hur had become Harper & Brothers’ top-selling title. A steady stream of royalty checks freed Wallace from the practice of law (“that most detestable of occupations,” he called it) and from his creditors. “I contemplate with great satisfaction the pains that will wrench his little pigeon heart when he hears that all my debts are paid,” Wallace wrote of one of them, his brother-in-law.

Wallace’s sketch of Samual Arnold.
Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, M0292
Wallace enjoyed his newfound wealth. He built the finest luxury apartment building in Indianapolis—the Blacherne, named for an imperial palace in Constantinople—and kept a grand apartment for himself. Next to his home in nearby Crawfordsville he erected an idiosyncratic study—Ben-Hur’s face peers out from a frieze above the entrance—where he could pursue his avocations. He played the violin and made his instruments by hand. He was also an accomplished visual artist. During the Lincoln conspiracy trial, Wallace passed the time making sketches of the accused, which he later used as the basis for a large oil painting. Having grown up in the woods of the Old Northwest, he was an avid outdoorsman, and spent much of his leisure time hunting and fishing at his newly acquired game preserve, Water Babble.
Yet for all the worldly comfort Ben-Hur brought its author, Wallace was restless. He wasn’t just a writer of romances; he was a romantic himself, with a chivalric sense of honor, and he was plagued by the blot left on his reputation by the Battle of Shiloh. That battle, in which 26,000 men were killed or wounded, scarred all of its participants. Robert Ingersoll, then a Union cavalryman, spent the first day corralling infantry as they fled the slaughter of the front lines; when a storm broke that evening, he wrote that the rain fell "slowly and sadly, as though the heavens were weeping for the dead." Even the usually imperturbable Grant was taken aback. Writing of Shiloh in his memoirs, he recalled a field “so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.” Shiloh wouldn’t be the bloodiest fight of the war, but it was the first to intimate the horrors to come, and it dispelled any hope of a quick end to hostilities. After Shiloh, Grant wrote, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”
It’s difficult to comprehend death on this scale; now try to imagine being blamed for it. On April 5, 1862, Lew Wallace had been the youngest major general in the Union Army, a promising if brash officer who’d fought ably during the early months of the conflict. But on April 6, when the Confederates attacked and nearly succeeded in overrunning Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, Wallace failed to bring his sorely needed troops to the field of battle, and he shouldered a heavy portion of the blame for the dire toll. He was rumored to have gotten lost on the short journey to Shiloh’s front lines—or worse, to have lost his nerve. Within a few months, he was relieved of his field command. He spent the rest of the war trying to win back the confidence of his superiors and the rest of his life trying to prove his innocence. In Ben-Hur, Wallace had written a novel that would help America forget the Civil War. But its author never could.
III.
One of Lew Wallace’s earliest memories was of hiding amid a hillside stand of ironweed and watching his father drill the local militia of Covington, Ind. The Sauk leader Black Hawk was doing battle with settlers in neighboring Illinois—where a young Abraham Lincoln had volunteered for service—but his campaign to win back his people’s land would soon be defeated, to the relief of Covington’s home guard. Though David Wallace was a West Point graduate, most of his men carried umbrellas and cornstalks in lieu of muskets during their training exercises. To his 5-year-old son, however, “nothing of military circumstances half so splendid and inspiring had ever taken place.”
The Wallaces were a prominent if not a wealthy family. David, a lawyer, would eventually serve a term as Indiana’s governor and move his family to the state capital. But Lew spent much of his boyhood in the country, on what was then still the American frontier. In his posthumously published autobiography, he describes a boy who would have been at home in Tom Sawyer’s gang, forever fleeing instructors and marching off to do imaginary battle with a sword made of old clapboards. In 1842, when Wallace learned of Texas’ War of Independence, he and a friend provisioned a canoe and set out down the White River to offer their services to James Bowie and Davy Crockett. Lew’s grandfather apprehended them a few miles downriver. Wallace was 15.
 

Lew Wallace’s wife, Susan.
Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, M0292
Though he disdained the schoolhouse, Wallace was from an early age an avid reader, consuming the works that would shape his literary sensibility and further whet his appetite for war. The romances of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Porter’s account of William Wallace’s heroism in the face of British oppression made him long for a chance to prove his own mettle. In the meantime, he would carry himself like a goodly knight. A neighbor described him as having “the bearing of a soldier and the manners of a courtier.” That courtly manner, and his striking good looks—tall, sinewy, with “a dark and beautiful face, correct in every line,” in the words of one admirer—would help him win the hand of Susan Elston, who married Wallace despite her father’s dim view of his prospects and memories of prior offences. As a boy, Wallace had snuck into the stately Elston home to behold two domestic items unfamiliar to him: a sofa and a piano.
With reluctance, Wallace followed his father into the legal profession, and he was preparing for the bar exam when the United States declared war with Mexico in 1846. The 19-year-old tried to complete his studies, but his mind was already in Matamoros. “Of what consequence was a license to practice law?” he wrote. “How petty the soul which could be screwed down to prefer a court to a camp!” In his autobiography, which unlike his fiction admits a touch of humor, he recalled appending a note to his hastily completed bar exam:
“Dear Sir,—I hope the foregoing answers will be to your satisfaction more than they are to mine; whether or not, I shall go to Mexico.”
A few days later, the examining judge replied:
“Dear Sir,—The court interposes no objection to your going to Mexico.”
“The communication was unaccompanied by a license,” Wallace wrote. He volunteered his services to the U.S. Army.
Wallace imagined the conquest of Mexico would be full of the “gallantries” he’d read about in novels. Instead, his regiment was ordered to garrison an unnamed camp at the mouth of the Rio Grande, across the river from a small Mexican smuggler’s outpost, which the soldiers called “Bagdad.” The camp was soon beset with an epidemic of diarrhea so fatal that the survivors ran out of wood for coffins. The men heard of Gen. Zachary Taylor’s victories from passing steamboats. But if Mexico failed to live up to Wallace’s romantic notions of war, it also failed to disabuse him of them.
IV.
When he returned from Mexico, Wallace hung a black-and-white shingle outside a small office in Covington advertising his services as a lawyer. Though he’d finally acquired a license to practice, business was not brisk. One day, Wallace accompanied a colleague to a tavern in nearby Danville, Ill. There the young lawyers met a man Wallace described as “the gauntest, quaintest, and most positively ugly man who had ever attracted me enough to call for study.” The man was engaged in a storytelling contest with several local lawyers, and, despite his rough aspect, was running away with the competition, exhausting all comers with a seemingly endless store of well-spun yarns. It was Wallace’s first glimpse of Abraham Lincoln.
By the time Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, Wallace’s fortunes had improved slightly. He had worked as a prosecutor, won election to the state Senate, and defected from the Democratic Party to the Republican, more out of a commitment to the Union, and a growing admiration for Lincoln, than any ardent abolitionist feeling. When Fort Sumter came under fire in April, Indiana’s Republican governor, Oliver P. Morton, called on Wallace to help him organize Indiana’s volunteers, a duty Wallace accepted on the condition that he might command one of the state’s six regiments once they’d been mustered. Morton agreed, and Wallace was commissioned a colonel. He was about to get his second taste of war, and his first chance to realize his dream of winning honor in the line of duty.
In a full-page illustration by Winslow Homer, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly in 1861, Wallace sits astride his horse in a pair of billowing trousers, an exotic-looking kepi perched on his head. He is wearing the uniform of the Zouave, elite units of the French Army that borrowed their tactics and uniform style from Algerian fighters. Zouaves moved swiftly, reloaded their weapons on the ground (as opposed to making a target of themselves standing up), and communicated by bugle calls rather than verbal orders, which could be drowned out in the din of war. According to Robert and Katharine Morsberger, Wallace’s most comprehensive biographers, he first encountered the Zouaves in a magazine article. The modified tactics must have pleased Wallace the tinkerer; the uniforms surely satisfied his taste for pageantry. When he’d taken command of the 11th Indiana volunteers, he’d resolved to train and outfit his men in the manner of the Zouave.

Lew Wallace in Zouave uniform, as depicted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, August 1861. Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, P0455
In June, before the war’s first major battle was fought at Bull Run, Wallace’s regiment was ordered to Cumberland, Md. to support Union activities in the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry, then in rebel hands. Alerted to the presence of a Confederate garrison in a nearby town, Wallace decided to put his Zouaves into action. After a 20-mile march under cover of darkness, the 11th Indiana surprised a small unit of Confederates holed up in the town of Romney, in what is now West Virginia. The regiment’s unfamiliar tactics “frightened the rebels and they all took to their heels like scared cats,” as one of Wallace’s men put it in a letter cited by Gail Stephens, a student of Wallace’s military career. The enemy withdrew after a brief skirmish, leaving behind their supplies and slaves. A Zouave who sustained minor injuries after being shot in the belt buckle represented the lone Union casualty.
The victory at Romney was of minor strategic value, but it was early evidence that the Union Army could hold its own against the vaunted rebels and, to Wallace, proof of his ability as a commander. A friend in Washington told Wallace that President Lincoln had spoken of his “splendid dash on Romney.” Harper’s Weekly sent an illustrator to make a series of drawings of the now famous 11th Indiana. Depicting scenes of after-hours horseplay—one Zouave bounds around camp on a pair stilts—they capture the innocence of that early moment in the war.

Harper’s Weekly drawings of Lew Wallace’s 11th Indiana Zouaves, made in 1861 after their successful raid on Romney, West Virginia.
In his autobiography, Wallace writes that the acclaim the Zouaves won at Romney “astonished nobody so much as ourselves.” But that has the ring of revisionist modesty. Wallace never lacked for confidence, even as an inexperienced volunteer. In the months that followed, he wrote to Susan despairing of the war’s progress (“defeat follows defeat—mismanagement after mismanagement”) and offering detailed explanations of how he would quickly bring the Confederacy to its knees were he in command.
After his success at Romney, Wallace was sent to the war’s western theater, where Grant was preparing for his invasion of Tennessee. Wallace was rising rapidly through the ranks—he was soon promoted to brigadier general—but was impatient for further glory and frequently unhappy with the role he was assigned in the campaign. After being left on guard duty during the army’s initial advance on Fort Donelson, Wallace grumbled to Grant’s aide-de-camp, a Captain Hillyer. “You are not going to be left behind,” Hillyer reassured him. “I know Gen. Grant's views. He intends to give you a chance to be shot in every important move.” Wallace’s eagerness to lead every charge would only make his disappearance at Shiloh that much harder to fathom.
V.
In the spring of 1862, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston found himself in an unenviable position. After a series of defeats at the hands of Grant, the rebels had been forced to yield central Tennessee and consolidate their forces in Corinth, Miss., home to a strategic railroad crossing. Johnston commanded a force about 40,000 strong; Grant, encamped 20 miles north on the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh Church, had 40,000 men of his own, though he was soon to be reinforced with 35,000 more from Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio. The dilemma before Johnston was whether to dig in at Corinth and wait for a superior Union army to advance, or to bring the fight to Grant while the odds were still close to even.

Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Johnston chose to attack, hoping the element of surprise would tilt the balance in the Confederates’ favor. The relative ease with which Grant had pushed the rebels out of Tennessee had certainly left him complacent. The Union general had decided against entrenching; despite being deep in enemy territory, Grant felt the initiative was his. He did, however, take the precaution of posting Lew Wallace and his 7,500 men 6 miles upriver, where they could keep an eye on the Union flank.
At dawn on the morning of April 6, a patrol of Federal scouts made an unhappy discovery: Thousands of men in gray uniforms advancing on Union soldiers who were just sitting down to breakfast. When word of the attack reached Grant, he ordered Wallace’s Third Division to help turn back the surging Confederates, who were overrunning the hastily assembled Union lines. But Wallace never showed.
Wallace’s detractors would later claim that he had simply lost his way in the Tennessee woods. The truth is more complicated. From Crump’s Landing, where he’d been stationed, there were two roads leading to the Union front: one that hugged the river to Pittsburg Landing, the other a so-called shunpike that led to Shiloh Church, where Sherman was camped. Having surveyed his position in the days prior to the Confederate attack, Wallace had judged the shunpike to be the most passable, and had ordered his cavalry to make further improvements to it in case he needed to march his division quickly to the front.
It was around 11 a.m. when Grant’s summons reached Wallace. Grant’s order, issued verbally and transcribed and delivered by an aide, was lost in the course of the battle; its contents would become the subject of acrimonious debate. Grant claimed that he ordered Wallace to march to Pittsburg Landing, via the river road. Wallace said the order simply instructed him to join up with the right of the Union lines. He took the shunpike.
In her thorough study of Wallace’s military career, Shadow of Shiloh (2010), Gail Stephens makes a compelling case that Wallace’s version of events is the most logical. Timothy B. Smith, a former Park Ranger at the battlefield and a historian who has written extensively on Shiloh, agrees. Wallace may have enjoyed playing armchair general-in-chief in his letters to Susan, but he was not in the habit of disobeying orders, and he’d never shown anything but an appetite for battle. (Grant had made good on his promise to put Wallace in the line of fire at Fort Donelson, and his poised performance had earned him another promotion, to major general, then the highest rank in the army.) Wallace had also made his preference for the shunpike known prior to the Confederate attack, alerting the commander of the neighboring division of his plans to use that road, though that information never reached Grant. It seems likely that either due to a mistaken assumption on Grant’s part (that Wallace would necessarily take the river road), or an omission on the part of his messenger, Wallace believed his orders were to join up with the Union army as quickly as possible, and he chose the road he believed best suited to that task.
What Wallace didn’t know was that by the time his men began marching, the Union army was no longer where he thought it was. Sherman’s position had been overrun, pushed back toward the river. Had Wallace marched to the end of the shunpike he’d have found himself behind enemy lines, cut off from the rest of the Union army. Impatient for Wallace to arrive, Grant sent an aide to speed his progress around 1:00. The aide found him on the shunpike, headed unwittingly toward the Confederate rear. Informed of the new disposition of Union forces, Wallace reversed course and marched his men to the new lines. He arrived as night was falling, too late to fire a shot in the first day’s fight.  
VI.
“Well, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman is said to have remarked to Grant on the night of April 6. “Yes,” Grant replied. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” With Wallace’s division finally in place, and Buell’s reinforcements having arrived overnight, Grant unleashed a vicious counterattack on April 7, pushing the rebels back over ground still littered with the dead and dying from the previous day’s fight. Realizing they were now outnumbered, the Confederates beat a retreat in the afternoon.


William T. Sherman (L) and Ulysses S. Grant (R).
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Shiloh was initially hailed as a Union triumph. Among the Confederate dead was Albert Sidney Johnston, who’d been shot while leading his men in a charge; he would be the highest-ranking officer on either side to be killed in action during the war. But as casualty figures made their way north, newspapers began to portray the battle as a scandalous failure. Questions arose regarding Grant’s competence; there were rumors he’d been drunk during the battle. Lincoln’s famous quip about Grant—“I can’t spare this man; he fights”—came in the wake of Shiloh, as members of Congress, and even the governor of Grant’s home state of Ohio, called for his head.
Grant’s career survived Shiloh; Wallace’s did not. The north needed someone to blame for the heavy casualties, which exceeded those of all the war’s previous battles combined. Wallace’s “dilatoriness” gave Grant cover for his own lack of preparedness, and he implicated Wallace in his official reports. The press, with the help of Grant’s staff, grabbed hold of the story of the missing division. Though Wallace received no official reprimand for his actions, by July he had been relieved of his field command. He spent the rest of 1862 and all of 1863 a general without an army—and worse, for Wallace, a soldier robbed of his honor.
He spent his idle time ill-advisedly, peppering the Union command with letters, maps, and affidavits in an attempt to clear his name. His superiors had other things to worry about, and largely ignored him. At one point Wallace demanded a court of inquiry to investigate his actions at Shiloh. He was only talked out of it by Sherman, who knew Wallace well enough to play expertly on his vanities.
“Keep quiet as possible and trust to opportunity for a becoming sequel to the brilliant beginning you had,” he wrote. “I do not think that Gen. Grant or any officer has unkind feelings toward you, [though some] may have been envious of your early and brilliant career.” Sherman prescribed a course of political expedience: “Avoid all controversies, bear patiently temporary reverses, get into the current events as quick as possible, and hold your horses for the last home stretch.”
VII.
Sherman was right. Wallace did get a chance at redemption in the last home stretch. In the summer of 1864, the Confederate general Jubal Early made a dash for Washington. Grant had left the city largely undefended as he tried to pin Lee down at Petersburg, Va. Wallace, then stationed in Baltimore, was the only man between 13,000 Confederates and the Union capital. Piecing together a rag-tag army of 6,000, he fought a hopeless battle at Monocacy Junction, yet managed in defeat to slow Early’s advance for a crucial day, buying time for Grant to send reinforcements. Were it not for Wallace’s stand, the capital might have fallen. A Navy warship had been idling near the Sixth Street docks to speed Lincoln to safety.
 
Grant praised Wallace’s actions and warmed to him personally. One day, he invited Wallace to visit him at his headquarters in Virginia. Wallace arrived on his horse Old John, a red bay with white feet and a piebald face. The horse was unusually tall and unusually fast. “Old John in full gallop looked like the incarnation of the wrath to come,” said a friend who had seen him in action. He was beloved by Wallace and by his men. At Fort Donelson, Old John had gone without forage for two days. Wallace’s soldiers crumbled up their hard tack, put it in their hats, and offered it to the general’s horse.
Grant and Wallace rode out to inspect a fort on the left of the Union lines. Grant, a gifted horseman, admired Old John and proposed a race back to camp. Wallace assented, but reined his horse in as the race began. “Let him out!” barked Grant, seeing that he was being afforded a handicap. Wallace did as he was ordered, and though Grant was in a furious gallop, Old John easily sprinted ahead. After a mile or two, Grant called a halt—and offered to buy Old John on the spot. Wallace refused. “Neither love nor money,” he said, “can buy Old John.”

The great chariot race from William Wyler’s 1959 film adaptation of Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston in the title role.
Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
An account of the impromptu race appeared in the Denver News on Feb. 19, 1905, a few days after Wallace had died. The article was written by J. Farrand Tuttle Jr., the son of the president of Wabash College (located in Wallace’s hometown of Crawfordsville) and a friend of the family. Wallace himself never wrote of the race. Perhaps, in a rare demonstration of tact, he realized it wasn’t to his advantage to brag of beating Grant at a favorite pastime. Or perhaps Tuttle was merely relaying a local legend, a story passed around the Wallace paddock.
Or maybe Wallace did write of the race, but only under the veil of fiction. In every incarnation—novel, play, the 1925 silent film, Wyler’s 1959 spectacle--Ben-Hur’s most celebrated scene has always been the chariot race between Judah and his friend-turned-rival Messala. Early in the story, Messala betrays his boyhood companion, accusing Judah of a crime he didn’t commit: the attempted murder of Judea’s Roman governor. After years of suffering in exile, Judah is afforded an opportunity to avenge himself in the arena. Though Messala is heralded as the greatest charioteer in the empire, he can’t contain the superior horsemanship of Judah, who rides to victory.    
It’s hard not to read some wish fulfillment into Judah’s triumph. In the wake of the chariot race, Judah is cleared of the charges that have tarnished his good name, and, having goaded Messala into betting heavily against him, his victory also wins him a fortune to rival the emperor’s. Whatever satisfaction Wallace may have felt racing Grant through the fields of Virginia, it did nothing to improve his reputation or finances. But Ben-Hur would indeed fulfill its author’s wishes, making him fantastically wealthy and dimming the memory of Shiloh—in the public imagination if not Wallace’s own.
VIII.
Ben-Hur wasn’t an immediate success. Sales were slow for the first few months as the book absorbed mixed reviews. With its story of a noble prince endeavoring to save his family and restore his good name (winning the heart of a humble but beautiful Jewess in the process), the novel resembled the romances Wallace had loved as a child, which had long since fallen out of critical favor. With its chariot race and sea battle, it shared something with the dime novels then enjoying wide popularity but no literary esteem. Always a lover of the bold stroke, Wallace had written out his final manuscript in purple ink, a color his critics would have found apt for some of the novel’s loftier passages.

Lew Wallace composes under the Ben-Hur beech. Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, M0292
Yet what the critics dismissed the reading public soon came to love. Tracking book sales in the 19th century is an inexact science, but the Morsbergers, Wallace’s biographers, estimate that Harper Brothers sold a million copies of the novel between 1880 and 1912; in 1913, Sears, Roebuck ordered a million more, at the time the largest book order ever placed. James David Hart’s The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950) cites a study conducted in 1893, which found that only three contemporary novels were held by more than 50 percent of public libraries. Ben-Hur was first among them, present in 83 percent of the collections surveyed. (The other two were Little Lord Fauntleroy and Ramona.) “If every American didn’t read the novel, almost everyone was aware of it,” Hart concludes.  
Carl Van Doren, in The American Novel (1921), credited Ben-Hur with winning “practically the ultimate victory over village opposition to the novel,” arguing that it was likely the first work of fiction many Americans ever read—or at least the second, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Howard Miller, a professor emeritus of history and religious studies at the University of Texas, has argued, if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel played a role in dividing the Union in the 1850s, “Wallace's Ben-Hur helped to reunite the nation in the years following Reconstruction.”
Wallace’s novel is about the visceral thrill of vengeance and the spiritual thrill of forgiveness. The chariot race is rightly the most famous scene in Wallace’s novel, a stirring set piece and a surprise if you’ve only ever seen the 1959 movie. In Wyler’s film, Messala outfits his chariot with vicious metal spikes that shred the wooden wheels of his competition. Hollywood’s Messala is a villain through and through, not only responsible for Judah’s exile, but a cheater in the arena too. But in the novel, Judah is the aggressor, running down Messala’s chariot, wrecking it from behind with "the iron-shod point of his axle" and leaving its driver to be trampled by oncoming horses. 
Having vanquished Messala in the Antioch arena, Judah sets out for Jerusalem to continue his campaign of retribution, a Jewish William Wallace bent on freeing Judea from its Roman oppressors. But when he arrives in the Holy Land he encounters a rabbi from Nazareth, a man promising not an earthly kingdom but a heavenly one. (Lest Judah have any doubt as to the truth of the rabbi’s teachings, the Nazarene cures his mother and sister of the leprosy they’ve conveniently contracted while wasting away in a Roman jail.) After witnessing Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, Judah lays down his sword and instead takes up the work of honoring Christ’s message of forbearance. The novel closes with Judah deciding to spend his vast wealth to finance a catacomb where Christian martyrs can be buried and venerated.
Offering the satisfaction of a revenge plot while preaching the gospel of compassion, Ben-Hur resonated with a country that was moving from vengeance to forgiveness itself. The National Soldiers Reunion that Wallace and Ingersoll attended in 1876, at the tail end of Reconstruction, was a strictly Union event, with speeches and parades honoring the North’s just cause. But at the Reunion held just two years later, in Cincinnati, blue mingled with gray: Joe Johnston, John Bell Hood, and Robert E. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh were among the invitees, and the order of the day was celebrating the heroism of combatants on both sides of the conflict. Ex-rebels were now in the halls of power as well. Wallace’s first official duty as minister to Turkey was to relieve his predecessor—Former Gen. James Longstreet, the trusted Lee lieutenant who had fought at Chickamauga, Antietam, and Gettysburg. After the war, Longstreet had joined the Republican Party and been embraced by his former enemies.

“Over the Deadline,” a painting by Lew Wallace based on testimony given at the trial of Andersonville commandant Henry Wirz. It was alleged that union prisoners who crossed the so-called “deadline” were shot by the guards.
Courtesy of General Lew Wallace Study and Museum
The details of Wallace’s interview with Longstreet are lost to history, but it’s likely the meeting was cordial. Wallace had presided over what would be the Union’s only act of retributive justice after Appomattox: the trial of Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville. If he had any misgivings about executing Wirz (whose degree of culpability for the camp’s atrocities has long been a matter of dispute), he didn’t record them. The drawing he made during the proceedings—of a Union soldier who’d been shot while trying to get a drink of clean water—suggests he was content to see the commandant hang. But by 1880 Wallace harbored no grudge against his former adversaries; on the contrary, ever the romantic, he held the sacrifices they made in high esteem. Speaking at the dedication of the Chickamauga battlefield, he described the Confederates as having made “an honest mistake.” He encouraged his audience to remember “not the cause, but the heroism it invoked.”
Wallace’s admiration for the heroes of the Lost Cause seeped into his novel. As the literary historian David S. Reynolds has noted, in Ben-Hur’s portrait of the Jewish people, readers in the American South could find a subjugated, slave-holding, and yet noble people sympathetically described. And indeed, despite being authored by a Union general, the book found an avid readership in the former Confederacy, making Ben-Hur among the first mass entertainments to transfix all corners of the reborn nation. One of the earliest fan letters Wallace received came from Paul Hamilton Hayne, a respected poet and editor and a Confederate veteran. “It is--me judice—a noble and very powerful prose poem!” Hayne wrote. “Simple, straightforward, but eloquent.”
Wallace was thrilled to learn that a former rebel had enjoyed his novel. In his reply to Hayne, he expressed delight at receiving such high praise from “the Singer of the South.” He then delicately asked the poet if he had any objections to Wallace’s publishing the letter. After his long string of financial failures, he was eager to join in the prosperity of the nascent Gilded Age, and hoped testimonials like Hayne’s would help him move copies.
For Wallace as for many Americans, the profit motive had extinguished any lingering sectional enmity. That Judah Ben-Hur finds Christ and wins a great fortune was surely not lost on the novel’s newly affluent readers, North and South. (The most popular of the many of novels of Christ that followed in Ben-Hur’s wake picked up this theme; In His Steps (1897) imagined a small town whose citizens earn spiritual and financial reward by constantly asking themselves “what would Jesus do?”)
Ben-Hur’s action-packed middle section undoubtedly accounted for much of its popularity, but the novel also benefitted greatly from its interpretation of the life of Christ, which opens and closes the novel. As Reynolds demonstrates in his study of American religious literature, Faith in Fiction (1981), Biblical novels had already begun to flourish in America by the time Wallace sat down to write Ben-Hur, books like David Ingraham’s epistolary novel The Prince of the House of David (1855) and William Ware’s Julian: Or, Scenes in Judea (1856). But Ben-Hur was among the first American novels to make Jesus a full-fledged character in its story.
Wallace was in some ways cautious in his treatment of Jesus: His speaking part is small, and the dialog is taken verbatim from the King James Bible. But in other ways Wallace was daring. At the outset of Judah’s trials, as he’s being marched off to slavery, a young man in Nazareth wordlessly offers the prisoner a drink of water:
“...looking up, [Judah] saw a face he never forgot—the face of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they had all the power of command and will.”
The scene is remarkable for having been created out of whole cloth; inventing occurrences in the life of Jesus simply wasn’t done in 19th-century Biblical fiction. It’s also notable for its detailed physical portrait of Christ, who is described as he’d rarely been before, in the Gospels or elsewhere. Wallace wrote of the pallor of Jesus’ complexion, the “reddish golden” highlights the sun leaves in that chestnut hair, and even the impressive length of his eyelashes. Iras, the novel’s femme fatale, derisively refers to Jesus as “the man with the woman’s face”—perhaps with a touch of jealousy.
Wallace was equally attentive to the geography, topography, and even flora and fauna of ancient Judea. (Rarely in American fiction has the camel been described so extravagantly.) He spent long hours researching the setting of his story, travelling to libraries in Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. When he later traveled to Jerusalem during his term as minister to Turkey, he congratulated himself on his accuracy: “At every point of the journey over which I traced [Judah’s] steps to Jerusalem, I found the descriptive details true to the existing objects and scenes.”
Wallace’s careful descriptions are not incidental to the novel’s appeal. He made the figure of Christ, and the times in which he lived, come alive for readers at a moment when faith was under assault, by the speeches of Robert Ingersoll, the writings of Charles Darwin, and the lingering trauma of the Civil War. “The horrors of battle and the magnitude of the carnage were difficult to put aside,” writes Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering (2008). “The force of loss left even many believers unable to abandon lingering uncertainties about God’s benevolence.” One of the only rivals to Ben-Hur’s popularity in the 19th century was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar (1868), which painted for its readers a detailed, and comforting, portrait of the heaven that awaited the thousands of dead soldiers. In Ben-Hur, Wallace gave readers a flesh-and-blood Jesus who walked through a realistically rendered landscape, reassuring the wavering reader of Christ’s divinity by making the case for his historicity.
Letters Wallace received from readers attest to the novel’s descriptive power. “The messiah appears before us as I always wished him depicted to men,” wrote a Roman Catholic priest. “The various descriptions surpassed in their attraction, glowing colors, and truthfulness all I have ever read before.” According to a contemporary newspaper account, pastors and school superintendents were fond of pointing out that “the most vivid picture of the Holy Land in the time of Christ was in Ben-Hur.” As a result, “no boy who went to Sunday school could have escaped the story if he tried.” (Teachers who ignored the novel may have done so at their peril. In Anne of Green Gables (1908), the young heroine sneaks Ben-Hur into her Canadian history class. “I had just got to the chariot race when school went in,” she later confesses. “I was simply wild to know how it turned out.”)

The novel had a strong effect on its readers, young and old. “I feel that I am a better man for having read it,” wrote Samuel Moore to the author, on the stationery of Moore, Morgan & Co, Wholesale Dry Goods and Notions of Lafayette, Ind. “In my knowledge of books it has but one superior, and that is The Book.” For others, it accomplished what even the Bible could not. Perhaps the most remarkable response Wallace received was from a man named George Parrish, a self-described “drunkard” who had lost everything to his addiction. “I had no future to hope for,” he wrote to Wallace from a YMCA in Kewanee, Ill. “No past but of which I was ashamed.” Ben-Hur, however, inspired Parrish to find religion, and recovery. “It seemed to bring Christ home to me as nothing else could,” he explained, and “resting on his strength, I stood up again in this community and was a man.” Parrish wrote that it had been a year since he read the novel, and he’d “faltered” not once in that time. “I want to thank you for that book,” he wrote to Wallace. “Thank you as a man who has come up from midnight into midday.”
 
IX.
As the novel’s popularity spread, theater companies hoping to bring Ben-Hur to Broadway besieged author and publisher with lucrative offers. But Wallace was reluctant. He worried that audiences would not permit a depiction of Christ on stage. (In 1879, a passion play in San Francisco had landed its star in jail, still wearing his halo.) But years of lobbying by the New York producers Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger eventually broke him down. The agreement between the parties stipulated that no actor would play the role of Jesus. He would instead be represented by a 25,000-candlepower light.

A poster for the stage adaptation of Ben-Hur.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
The play was a runaway hit, a fixture of Broadway and the regional theater for the next 20 years. And like the novel, it soon overcame any clerical objections. One clergyman wrote to Wallace of “the immense missionary work Ben-Hur has done. I am sure the author will receive the blessing of the Master of the Harvest for the countess souls his labor has garnered.” William Jennings Bryan called it “the greatest play on stage when measured by its religious tone and moral effect.” The evangelist Billy Sunday liked it so much that he volunteered his services as a spokesman.
And it wasn’t just a hit in New York; like the novel, it found a truly national audience. Regional theaters were so eager to host the show that they conducted renovations in order to accommodate the elaborate production. In the 1904-05 season alone it played in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Columbus, St. Louis, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Galveston, Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Birmingham, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, and the former Confederate capital, Richmond. If the novel had introduced many Americans to fiction-reading, the play introduced even more to the theater. Newspaper accounts of the traveling production describe audiences filled with first-timers, many of them devout churchgoers who’d previously been suspicious of the stage. Texas’ Howard Miller, an expert on the play, points to newspaper coverage of a 1907 performance in Toledo, Ohio. When the curtain fell after the crucifixion, many in the rapt audience failed to applaud—not because they hadn’t enjoyed the production, but because they weren’t accustomed to clapping for Christ.
Klaw and Erlanger had created an impressive spectacle, with a massive cast, a reverent treatment of the Christ story, and exhilarating interpretations of the novel’s action scenes. The chariot race was performed using real horses, which galloped on hidden treadmills—a not-unprecedented trick, but a breathtaking one nonetheless. As had been the case with its source, the play failed to impress critics (“the piece rises above the level of ordinary melodrama in only two or three scenes,” wrote the New York Times), but audiences couldn’t stay away. Miller notes that for many Americans, seeing Ben-Hur became an annual rite, akin to Christmastime pilgrimages to The Nutcracker today. Irving McKee, Wallace’s first biographer, estimated that by the time the show’s two-decade run came to an end, 20 million people had seen it.
Wallace was awestruck when he first saw the Ben-Hur stage sets. “My God,” he said. “Did I set all of this in motion?” What he had set in motion was an entertainment that had reached more Americans than perhaps any other story save the original tale of the Christ. Though he couldn’t know it, Ben-Hur’s success on stage augured its future as a blockbuster silent film in 1925 and feature film in 1959—few folk stories in American history have proved as durable. Wallace, however, remained convinced that his legacy had been written not under the Ben-Hur beech but on the road to Shiloh Church.
X.
In 1884, Century Magazine commissioned a series of firsthand accounts of Civil War battles. With his literary star on the rise, Wallace was asked to contribute one of the first, on Fort Donelson. His article appeared in December, alongside serial installments of Huckleberry Finn and William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. Whatever satisfaction Wallace took in keeping such august company was soon replaced by apprehension, however, when he learned that Grant, deeply in debt and suffering from cancer, had also agreed to write for the Century series after years of refusing to revisit the war. His subject would be Shiloh. Wallace’s ignominious role in the fight threatened to return to the national stage.

Lew Wallace.
Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images
Wallace wrote Grant imploring him to use the article as an occasion to absolve him of wrongdoing. The letter left no argument for his blamelessness unexplored. He reminded Grant that he’d fought bravely at Donelson and acted with dispatch to save Washington in 1864. He asked Grant to consider what motive he possibly could have had to “play you falsely that day.” He even suggested that had Grant’s aide, Rowley, not caught up to him on the shunpike, Wallace might have saved the day at Shiloh. In wistful detail, he painted a counterfactual history of April 6 in which he bravely charged the Confederate lines from the rear. It reads like a page out of one of his novels:
“The enemy had used the last of his reserves. I would have taken the bluff on which Sherman had been camped in the morning and without opposition affected my deployment. The first of the rebels struck would have been the horde plundering the sutlers and drinking in the streets of the camp. Their fears would have magnified my command …”
Not trusting that his letter would have its desired effect, Wallace also visited Grant to plead with him in person. His talent for horning in on history did not fail him. He arrived on the same day that Twain was paying a call to the former president, bearing an offer to publish his memoirs (and to pay his friend a handsome 70 percent royalty). “There’s many a woman in this land that would like to be in my place,” said Julia Grant when the two callers met in the parlor, “and be able to tell her children that she once sat elbow to elbow with two such great authors as Mark Twain and General Wallace.”
Only one of the great authors got his wish that day. Grant’s article not only failed to absolve Wallace, it reaffirmed his conviction that the Third Division had taken the wrong road and that its absence had cost the Union dearly on the first day of fighting. It was worse than perhaps even Wallace had dared to fear.
Shortly after the article was published, however, Grant had a change of heart. The widow of a general who had been killed in action at Shiloh had come across a letter from Wallace to her husband, dated April 5, 1862. It was the letter Wallace had sent to the commander of the neighboring division at Shiloh, announcing his plans to use the shunpike should trouble arise. It convinced Grant of what Wallace had long argued. The letter “modifies very materially what I have said, and what has been said by others, about the conduct of General Lew. Wallace at the battle of Shiloh,” Grant wrote. He still maintained that he’d ordered Wallace to take the river road, but allowed that his wishes may have been lost in the fog of war: “My order was verbal, and to a staff officer who was to deliver it to General Wallace, so that I am not competent to say just what order the general actually received.”
It was the vindication Wallace had longed for since 1862. But even this failed to satisfy him. The Century article, with its repetition of the standard account of Wallace’s mistakes, became the Shiloh chapter of Grant’s memoirs. The exoneration appeared as a footnote, one that Wallace worried would be ignored by most readers. Rightly, as it would turn out: A Blaze of Glory, Jeff Shaara’s recent novel of Shiloh, and The Man Who Saved the Union, H.W. Brands’ recent biography of Grant, both describe Wallace as having been lost on April 6.
Unsatisfied with Grant’s pardon, Wallace continued his efforts to clear his name, taking any chance he could get to refight the battle. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison tapped his fellow Hoosier to write his campaign biography, hoping to leverage some of Wallace’s celebrity for his presidential run. (“That is excellent,” wrote a waggish friend of Harrison’s when Wallace accepted the assignment. “He did so well on Ben-Hur that we can trust him with Ben Him.”) Wallace began the chapter on Harrison’s Civil War service with what he euphemistically called “the great Union victory” at Shiloh, taking a few pot shots at the high command before moving on to battles in which the subject of his biography actually took part. In April 1862, when Shiloh was fought, Benjamin Harrison was still practicing law in Indianapolis.
Wallace just couldn’t let the battle go. In a moving letter to Susan from the waning days of his appointment in Turkey, Wallace reflected on his long, varied career and looked forward to passing his final days “in the old man’s gown and slippers, helping the cat keep the fireplace warm.” He was proud of the diplomatic work he’d done, and pleased by Ben-Hur’s success. Only one cloud hung over his head: “Shiloh and its slanders! Will the world ever acquit me of them?” he wrote. “If I were guilty I would not feel them as keenly.”
XI.
In the spring of 1898, as tensions between the United States and Spain mounted, Lew Wallace sent a telegram to Secretary of War Russell Alger. He offered to raise a brigade, or even a division, of volunteer troops from the black population of the Midwest and lead them into battle himself. “The most magnificent regiments in the Turkish army consist of negroes,” he wrote. “I think it could be duplicated in our country.” Alger’s reply was prompt and polite, thanking the general for his “patriotic action in this matter.” But the McKinley administration had little need for a 71-year-old general. “In the event of war,” Alger wrote. “You will be duly notified.” Don’t telegram us, we’ll telegram you.

Lew Wallace’s study in Crawfordsville, Ind. Wallace built the study after the success of Ben-Hur. It’s now a museum.
Courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress
Wallace’s attempt to join the war effort may look like a publicity stunt, but his offer seems to have been made in earnest. As the Morsbergers document in their biography, Wallace used all of his political capital in an attempt to win a commission, sending a wave of friends in Washington to petition the McKinley administration on his behalf.
The Civil War was fading further into memory, and its events took on a rose-colored hue. Though Grant’s hard-nosed essay on Shiloh was a notable exception, Century Magazine’s “Battles and Leaders” series had tended toward the celebration of great men committing valorous acts. A new generation of young men now longed for a chance to demonstrate their courage in a war with Spain, and indeed a renewed martial spirit was likely a factor in Ben-Hur’s popularity in the last decade of the 19th century. Judah’s manly exploits appealed to Gilded Age Americans wary of what the historian Jackson Lears has termed “overcivilization”: the soft, domestic comforts of bourgeois metropolitan life in a country with a now-closed frontier.
Some of Wallace’s comrades-in-arms rejected post-war sentimentalism, perhaps none so completely as Ambrose Bierce, whose essay “What I Saw of Shiloh” (1881) described the battle in ghastly detail. He recalled the sight of a sergeant, still breathing “in convulsive, rattling snorts” despite having been shot through the skull. “I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain,” he wrote. To Bierce, death was “a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations.” But Wallace had never lost the romantic view of war that had taken hold of him as a boy. He had his doubts about America’s nascent imperialism, but if there was to be a fight, he wanted to be in the thick of it.
“How many there are who spend their youth yearning and fighting to write their names in history,” observes the narrator of A Prince of India, Wallace’s 1893 follow-up to Ben-Hur, “then spend their old age shuddering to read them there!" Wallace still shuddered at the way his name had been written into history, and he surely also saw the war with Spain as one final chance at a revision. When McKinley failed to commission him a general, he visited his local recruiting office and attempted to enlist as a private. “If I can not serve in the one capacity, I should be happy to serve in the other,” Wallace told the Indianapolis News, calling the rank of private “no less honorable” than that of major general. The recruiter, citing his age, turned him away.
XII.
Wallace died of stomach cancer on Feb. 15, 1905, at the age of 77. In the days following his death, nearly every newspaper in the country carried an obituary, many of them as lead stories that jumped to full-page spreads. The Cincinnati Enquirer announced the news with a headline overwrought even by fin de siècle standards, though not atypical of the coverage:
Ended
Is the Chariot Race
In Which He Drove Pegasus to Lasting Fame
And General Lew Wallace Succumbs to Death
Author of Ben-Hur Had Hoped to Be Restored
By the Gentler Agencies of Spring
But Failed to Muster the Necessary Strength
To Resist Winter’s Rigor and the Encroachment of Disease—Sketch of His Career
Some of these career sketches revisited the scandal of Shiloh, but the success of Ben-Hur was the dominant theme of most. “Throughout the rank and file of our steady churchgoing people the man who is ignorant of Ben-Hur, who cannot relay vividly every point of the chariot race, is set down as beyond the pale in both literature and religion,” wrote the New York Post. “Shakespeare and Milton are above the range of honest folk, the Bible they are often content to take at second hand, but Ben-Hur brings grandeur nearer our common dust.” 
Wallace is buried in his hometown of Crawfordsville, in a cemetery near Indiana Route 231. Over his grave stands a gaudy marker of which he surely would have approved—an obelisk draped in a granite rendering of Old Glory. His epitaph is a line taken from Ben-Hur: “I would not give one hour of life as a Soul for a thousand years of life as a man.”

Lew Wallace’s grave in Crawfordsville, Ind.
Photo by John Swansburg
That line is spoken by Balthazar, one of the three Wise Men who arrive in Bethlehem to herald the virgin birth, and, in Wallace’s novel, the man who shepherds Judah Ben-Hur toward a belief in Christ’s divinity. Wallace professed that writing the novel led him to his own belief in Christ, though he never joined a church. (“Not that churches are objectionable to me, but simply because my freedom is enjoyable,” he explained.) There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Wallace’s faith, and yet it’s hard to believe that he ever came to share Balthazar’s disdain for earthly endeavor. Few men in American history have made more of their time in this life, or been so concerned with the legacy they were leaving behind.
It would surely please Wallace to know that he achieved a kind of immortality in this world. Though his name is not well remembered today, his novel has never disappeared from the American landscape. Earlier this month, scholars convened at Rutgers for a daylong conference on the book, covering everything from its theology to its geology. This Easter weekend, the Ovation channel will air the American premiere of an excellent Canadian miniseries adaptation of Ben-Hur, starring, among others, Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey. MGM, meanwhile, has just bought a script for a new feature film version. In the item reporting MGM’s acquisition, Deadline Hollywood noted that scripts about Pontius Pilate, Noah, and two about Moses have lately attracted attention from powerbrokers like Brad Pitt, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg—attention that is sure to intensify in the wake of the record-setting ratings success of the History Channel’s The Bible miniseries. That Americans can’t resist a Biblical epic may seem intuitive in 2013, but it wasn’t in 1876. All of these productions owe something to Lew Wallace.
Wallace, in turn, surely owed some part of his literary success to his military failure. Unable to live up to his romantic ideal of the gallant soldier, he was left to imagine such a soldier in his fiction. In Judah Ben-Hur, he created the hero he wished he’d been at Shiloh, a paragon of strength and pluck.
Wallace returned to Shiloh several times after the war, surveying the land for new evidence to support his version of events. During one trip, made after Ben-Hur had won him fame and fortune, he found the tree next to which he’d camped one night. It had been a sapling then; it was now full-grown. Wallace broke a branch from its trunk and sent it off to Tiffany & Co., in New York, which outfitted it with an elegant ivory handle. Cane or scepter? A symbol of frailty or power? It could be either. Shiloh had laid Wallace low—and set him on his roundabout road to glory.

Lew Wallace with walking stick.
Courtesy of General Lew

There have been questions about how I could state that Dr. Sadler never studied with Dr. Freud. Here is the research I’ve done that led me to the conclusion that he didn’t meet or study with Freud. If anyone can find documented evidence that supports a different conclusion then I will consider changing my mind.

Dr. Freud started to become well known in the 1890s, after he coauthored Studies of Hysteria with Josef Breuer. Due to his fame, meticulous records were kept of all his correspondence, meetings, students, and appearances. Freud was a heavily scheduled man; the archives have all his appointment books, class lists, and records of his meetings. I was told by one of his archivists that no one had unnoted meetings with him. There are two main archives that house Dr. Freud’s papers. I contacted both of them during my research. Neither one had any record of Dr. Sadler corresponding, studying, or meeting with Dr. Freud or Anna Freud. Nor do Sadler’s travel records indicate he was ever in the same city as Freud.

On July 11, 2011, Keith Davies, at the Freud Museum in London, wrote me that they have no record of any contact between Dr. Sadler and Freud. This archive, on the grounds of where Freud lived the last year of his life (1938), contains Freud’s personal library and collection, Anna Freud’s personal library, an archive containing essential documentation on the life and work of Sigmund and Anna Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, a research library specializing in the history, theory and culture of psychoanalysis, and a large library of photographs.

On July 12, 2011, Harold Blum, MD, Executive Director of Sigmund Freud Archives, confirmed to me that there was no correspondence between Dr. Sadler and Dr. Freud in their collection. The Sigmund Freud Archives is dedicated to collecting, conserving, collating and making available for scholarly use all of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic and personal papers, his correspondence, photos, records, memorabilia, etc.

Carolyn Kendall wrote the following email on July 1, 2011. She said that Sadler told her that Freud never responded to his letters:

Interesting about the 1911 shipping dates. However, on my biographical list that Christy made up, it was in 1910 that he "studied in Leeds, England and Vienna, Austria."  I found a Sadler Timeline on line that listed the trip in 1911, with a note, "per Meredith Sprunger," and the whole timeline by Mullins.*

When I worked at 533, Doctor told me he had "sat at the feet" of Freud. And that Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were also his student/associates. I assumed he meant at the same time. I saw letters in the general files from Carl Jung and Anna Freud. He also said, "If you read Jung's book, you'll see that he moved farther away from Freud than I did."  He said that Anna and he met for a dinner when she came to America on a visit. She had been in her teens when he knew Freud. He said Freud would have nothing further to do with Sadler because he fell away over the issue of sex being the primary motivation in life. He said, "The old Jew would have nothing to do with me; he never answered my letters."  I assume that's why he didn't list Freud in his professional biography. He apparently told Meredith about Freud. Meredith often got four out of ten points wrong in what he wrote about Sadler and the early days.

*Sadler did not go to Europe until 1911. There is no record of his being in the same city as Freud in Europe or America. Nor is there any record of his being a student in the Freud archives. Freud traveled to the US only once in 1909 to speak at Clark University in Worcester, MA (Carl Jung came with Freud to lecture students on psychoanalysis).

Larry Bowman joined the First Urantia Society held in the Sadler’s home when he was 15 in 1954. First Urantia Society consisted of people who had been called the Forum. He started keeping a diary in January 1957. Larry said it was a closed group, meaning anyone who wanted to attend had to be interviewed by Dr. Sadler. In Larry’s diary there is one mention of Sadler stating he studied with Freud, Jung, and Adler:

"Saturday, June 27, 1959:

I was in attendance that day at the annual picnic at Pine Lodge, the Sadler family’s hilltop retreat that overlooked Lake Michigan at Beverly Shores, Indiana. My diary says there was no official count of how many were there, but “Christy said it was one of the largest crowds she had ever seen there. Practically all the regular members of [First Urantia Society] were there, as well as several people from the Culver, Indiana group [I don’t mention Meredith or Irene Sprunger specifically] and some from the Burches’ study group. …

… We finished up the evening by several of us sitting on the front porch watching the sun go down and listening to Dr. Sadler—the Great Man—talking of some of his experiences: his days with Freud, Adler, and Jung; his days with Thurston, the magician, as they exposed mediums and fakes. What a life he has had! What a man he is!"

Sadler said that he studied with Freud, Adler, and Jung; in other words he studied psychiatry professionally. This 1937 letter provides evidence that Sadler never studied with any of the three men he listed. This letter is also a good example of Sadler’s standing in the field of medicine: respected even though he was self-taught. Haven Emerson, a professor at Columbia University in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, wrote to Stuart Pritchard, the medical director of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, on March 29, 1937:

I made inquiries concerning Dr. William Sadler of Chicago and have the personal statement of Professor Adolf Meyer that Dr. Sadler would be a suitable person for carrying on an educational campaign among our general practitioners and introducing modern sound principles of psychiatry and mental hygiene into the work of the County Health Departments and medical practice locally.

Dr. Meyer further states that Dr. Sadler has never had any formal adequate training in psychiatry. He is what might be called a “one- man institute” of psychiatry but in his writing and his outlook he is entirely sound.

Had Sadler ever studied with Freud or Jung, Dr. Adler certainly would have known it and stated that fact to Dr. Meyer. Sadler clearly studied their work. But as of yet there is no proof that he studied with any of them. Sadler was respected enough by Dr. Adler to recommend him to teach general practitioners and the County Health Departments which does speak well of him. 

Another important aspect of Dr. Sadler’s comments about Freud and Jung is that he never listed in his professional biographies that he studied with them. Other evidence that questions whether Sadler’s studied with Freud comes from Carolyn Kendall and Marc Demarest. They both pointed out that when Sadler provided his professional credentials to the Chicago Medical Society for its 1922 History of Medicine and Surgery and Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago, he didn’t mention his relationship with any of the leading psychiatrists. Marc did some research on Sadler’s traveling schedule and the possibility meeting Freud. Sadler and Freud were not in European cities at the same time. Marc concluded the travel schedules do not support Sadler studying with Freud. This is what Sadler said in his professional biography:

The link to Marc’s piece on Sadler and Freud:

http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2011/04/sidebar-testable-facts.html

Without any evidence, or record of Sadler studying with Freud, the conclusion I came to is that he didn’t. We can try and ascertain why Dr. Sadler would make statements about Freud, Jung, and Adler that were not true. I think Sadler was an excellent storyteller and loved being an entertainer. We have heard from Forum members and his students that he told lots of stories. He loved this activity. I tried to find evidence of his studying with Freud and was unsuccessful. I concluded that Sadler, in his humanness, loved to spin a yarn to Forum members, students, and others. Do I find this dishonest or proof he was a liar? No. I think his motive was to entertain, not deceive. Dr. Sadler was a complex human being who appears to have understood the value of storytelling to entertain friends while being wise enough to tell the truth professionally. There is ample proof that Sadler was a highly respected person. The fact that Dr. Sadler was an excellent storyteller does not take away from his professional accomplishments, or more importantly, the eternal truths found in The Urantia Book.

The Sadlers and Eugenics:
A Footprint of 20th Century Science or an Impression of Eternal Truth?

It is our purpose carefully to examine the causes and influences which are at work among civilized peoples, which contribute more or less to a possible deterioration of the “stock” of the white races; and also to present an outline of those plans and propaganda which, in the opinion of the author, may tend to combat these deteriorating influences, and otherwise counter-work those conditions which we believe to interfere somewhat with normal human progress; and in subsequent treatises to present a more definite program which we believe will contribute immensely to the immediate improvement of the mental and moral fiber of the white races in general, and the American people in particular. ~William S. Sadler, Race Decadence (1922)[1]

This quotation that advocates eugenics is one of many written by William S. Sadler over the decades of his life, a belief also shared by his wife, Lena. The thesis of this paper is that examining and reconciling the Sadlers and their role in eugenics and race in The Urantia Book is best done with a dual concept--one that is aware of its time and also transcends time. This approach can aid us in understanding the disconnect between the questionable science of eugenics and the revelatory nature of The Urantia Book. Drs. Lena and William Sadler sought to disseminate knowledge about how to live a practical, healthy, faith-based life that was both of its time and ahead of its time. Their worldview, including eugenics, adheres to the mores of middle class, white Christians of early 20th century. On the transcendent level the Sadlers’ sought to elevate the lives of people by bringing them a better understanding of spiritual truth. With this in mind it remains for us to grapple with how to reconcile the information, mainly disproved science of its time, in The Urantia Book, and understand that Truth is indeed relative and expanding; it lives always in the present, achieving new expression in each generation of men—even in each human life. (79:8.8) This “dual nature” method can serve as an effective strategy in contemplating the nature of race, eugenics, the Sadlers, and The Urantia Book.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the role the Sadlers played in the eugenics movement and to point out possible problems that The Urantia Book’s writings on race may bring to its’ credibility in the near future. There is a great deal of ambiguity due to the fact that the Sadlers, who were undergoing a remarkable religious experience, were also part of a movement that marginalized whole populations “less than” they were.

The Sadlers were not leaders of the eugenics movement—meaning they did not originate new ideas—but they did disseminate the ideology by speaking at eugenics conferences and writing positively about sterilization of the unfit. William wrote about this topic in a way that mirrors what many other reformers were saying in the early 20th century until just before WWII: “If we should thus conscript our degenerates—sanely classify and properly employ, incarcerate, or sterilize them—within a very few decades most of our charities, which are dealing largely with problems resulting from feeblemindedness, would go out of business; most of our jails and brothels would be empty; our courts would languish for want of cases; and fully two-thirds of philanthropic and reformatory work having to do with poverty, vice, intemperance, delinquency, and crime would presently stop for want of the feebleminded grist which today keeps these mills of charity grinding.”[2] Eugenics offered a new scientific answer to guide humans into a new era of health, prosperity, and peace.

The Sadlers adopted their life philosophy, including eugenics, early in their work. At 27, William stated he had “settled my purpose for life,” which was “hungering and thirsting for knowledge how best to do that which God has entrusted to my hands.”[3] Both William and Lena lived their lives dedicated to what is termed as the “Social Gospel,” which was part of the Progressive movement in the early Twentieth Century. This was a time when the country was rapidly modernizing, and Christians sought new ways through the Social Gospel to lead a Christ-like life –seeking to substitute love for selfishness as the basis for human society, striving to be socially responsible, and exhibiting that one’s religious and social life were inseparable.

William expressed the Social Gospel tenets in many facets of his life: his ministry; his medical practice, as a general surgeon and psychiatrist; his authorship of forty-two books; his teachings as a college professor; lecturing at universities, churches, and professional clubs; as a speaker at Lyceum and Chautauqua meetings, lecturing to United States troops overseas; and most significantly, his leadership of the team whose decades-long stewardship of the Urantia papers project resulted in the publication of The Urantia Book. Lena, first trained as a nurse, then a doctor, served the Social Gospel tenets by illustrating more healthful ways to live and to ensure that poor women and children received health care and vital information on how to live a robust life. Her work was on the leading edge for women and children’s rights. In fact: she challenged the mores of the early 20th Century more than her husband.

Ruth Clifford Engs in The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia, notes that in American history the “rights of society” versus the “rights of the individual” has gone in and out of fashion. The hereditarian and eugenics movements in the early twentieth century forwarded the belief that the “good of society” was more important than the “rights of the individual.” They theorized that curtailing reproduction of the unfit would benefit humanity by reducing disease and the cost of charity and public welfare, a financial drain on the system. The legislation that resulted from the eugenics movement— mandatory sterilization of the mentally ill and disabled, criminals, prostitutes, and the poor, immigration restriction, marriage license requirements—was considered a humanitarian effort for the good of society.[4]

The action taken by the Sadlers in support of eugenics concurred with the idea that the rights of society took precedence over the rights of the individual. The belief that proper breeding of superior human stock would assist in erasing societal problems was a large concern for them. They believed that legislation would help solve these issues and they communicated that message using every means available to them.

Philosophy: The Progressive Era

The Progressive era was a period of political reform and social activism that spanned from the 1890s—1930s. The Progressives sought to remedy the problems that the Industrial Revolution brought as America transitioned from being a rural to an urban nation. The Progressives offered reform in many areas: local government, public education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, family life, and the food industry. Before the Civil War, working on your own farm or in some home-based business meant long hours, but your time was your own. After the war, the Industrial Revolution changed that paradigm; there was a loss of freedom and a loss of economic independence as people left the farm to work in the city factories to survive. The average factory workweek consisted of ten-hour days, five days a week, and a half-day on Saturday. Wages were so low that by the early 1900s, three out of five adult male workers did not earn enough money to support their family.[5]

Farmers’ self-sufficiency diminished during the 1870s through the 1890s. Crop price declines fueled agrarian discontent, as farmers’ incomes dramatically decreased. While the prices of agricultural products went down, the cost of living rose thirty-five percent between 1897 and 1913. The rural population in America doubled from 1860 to 1910, and the urban population grew sevenfold.[6]

When people left farms and moved to cities, the standard of living shifted from one of self-reliance and independence to one of stress, struggle, poverty, and dependence. Along with losing the “simple” life on the farm, these new urbanites lost their home life and many became destitute. This resulted in the deterioration in living standards for these recent arrivals; the communities they lived in were filthy, they were hungry, and they had no way out. The Progressives observed these new urban dwellers and perceived a decline in “moral and civic purity” in the city. They focused on social and economic reform to regain the moral ideal they perceived was missing within the urban landscape.[7] Industrialization and urbanization needed to be counter-balanced with a renaissance of social responsibility and a substitution of love for selfishness.

The growth of cities was unprecedented in the Progressive era. Chicago had a population of 300,000 in 1870. By 1890 it had over 1,100,000. Meanwhile 40% of rural American townships saw their population shrink between 1880 and 1890.[8] America was also experiencing an immigration boom; Chicago’s population was 48% foreign born by 1890.[9] Practitioners of the Social Gospel directed their moral outrage at the poverty, hunger, racism, segregation, and sexism that they observed in this new urban setting.  They turned their focus from individual sinners to communal wrongs in hopes of creating a better world.

The Sadlers lived and worked in Chicago, one of the main centers of this cultural shift of people moving from farm to city. Louis Menand wrote, “Chicago seems to have struck the social-scientific mind at the end of the nineteenth century as an animated simulacrum of social life, a sort of living textbook.”[10] William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis argued that Chicago was the most important city to shape the landscape and economy of America during the second half of the nineteenth century. Chicago also served as the gateway to the expansion of the west.[11]  Jane Addams, who started Hull House, and many other reform-minded individuals, called Chicago their home. They shared the Social Gospel’s belief that employing science, technology, expertise, and education was the best way to make the United States more socially responsible and more Christ-like in character.

Religion: The Social Gospel

The religious wing of the Progressive era was called the Social Gospel. According to historians Ronald C. White and C. Howard Hopkins, in The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America, the Social Gospel caused people to step outside the churches to intersect with political, social, and economic life in America to bring the total message of Christian salvation to urban society in new ways. Practitioners of the Social Gospel viewed living the Christian life as a “crusade for justice and righteousness in all areas of the common life.”[12]

Religious journals wrote to their parishioners about the problem. In 1912, the Presbyterian monthly, The Biblical World wrote an editorial entitled “The Social Gospel” where they outlined this social message:

The industrial struggle looks very dark. We often cry, “Who is sufficient for these things?” But wherever Christian men have tried to find the light they have found it. We dare not to despair. We are laborers together with God, and there is nothing too hard to accomplish with him.”[13]

Religious leaders around the country proclaimed eugenics as the way to bring the kingdom of God to earth. Kenneth C. MacArthur, pastor of the Federated Church in Sterling, Massachusetts and lecturer at Andover Newton Seminary, was an advocate for the Social Gospel, and spokesman for the American Eugenics Society. MacArthur asserted that decent Christians have a responsibility to use "every help which science affords" to prevent the "feebleminded and wrong-willed" from "pouring their corrupt currents into the race stream."[14]

In their sermons pastors schooled their congregations that the eugenics was the answer. Christine Rosen in Preaching Eugenics, argued that a surprising number of American ministers and preachers spoke about the eugenic philosophy from their pulpits. She cited the Social Gospel leader Reverend Washington Gladden’s 1926 statement that Christianity “must be a religion less concerned about getting men to heaven than about fitting them for their proper work on earth.”[15] Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary from 1918 to 1941, and founder of the Methodist Federation, shared MacArthur’s enthusiasm for applying eugenics for Social Service. In his 1928 article, "Is Christian Morality Harmful, Over-Charitable to the Unfit?" he encouraged Christians to help remove "the causes that produce the weak." Walter Taylor Sumner, dean of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Chicago from 1906 to 1915, instituted in 1912 his own system of inspection for prospective couples to ensure that they were "normal physically and mentally." John Haynes Holmes, Unitarian minister of New York’s Church of the Messiah, concurred (in 1913), encouraging his fellow members of the Liberal Ministers’ Association of New York "to perform nothing but health marriages."[16]

Charitable Christian organizations, like the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) missions, which served large numbers of poor, immigrant families and dealt with increasing crime rates in cities, turned to eugenics in an attempt to create a more manageable, wholesome future. They perceived eugenics as a way to reduce human suffering. The Sadlers’ worked in several of these SDA missions in San Francisco and downtown Chicago between 1898-1906, until they graduated from medical school.  William’s early writings for The Life Boat, the monthly newsletter he started as a young Seventh-day Adventist medical missionary, are full of his experiences with the poor in Chicago. His report from “The Workingman’s Home,” in 1898 illustrates his view of the inhabitants of this shelter:

A few evenings ago fifteen men, representing all classes of criminals and every form of vice, were converted at a single meeting. The after meeting the following hour, and during which time these men took their first stand for the night, was indeed a most inspiring scene. Visitors to the evening meetings of the Home will be forcibly impressed with the fact that the Gospel has not lost its power, it is still able to save the uttermost.[17]

This experience of viewing the shocking life of the poor demanded that the Sadlers find a way to relieve the suffering they observed. They believed, along with church leaders around the country, that Christians must turn their eyes to the future to bring the kingdom of God to the earth through eugenics, “Since the object of all social morality is the good of the human race, and since eugenics also has no other end in view, it is plain that social morality and eugenics are indissolubly connected.”[18]

Science: Eugenics

In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term eugenics, meaning “good in birth” or “noble in heredity.” That year he wrote Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its’ Development where the term eugenics was first used. He described it as “The study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.”[19] Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution played a role in eugenics as Galton stated, “it would be quite practical to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”[20] This would allow the “improving human stock” by giving “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”[21]

Eugenics held that the best way to improve human heredity was to promote reproduction of certain people with “positive” traits and reduce the reproduction of people who demonstrated “negative” traits. Galton asked, “Could not man actually take care of his own evolution?” He believed that heredity governed, not only physical traits, but also talent and character.[22] Eugenics was supported by many prominent people, including: Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Stopes, Woodrow Wilson, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling, and Sidney Webb, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Winston Churchill.

The eugenics movement became an underlying current in much of the health-reform movements in the early Progressive era. Prohibition, sexual purity, birth control, antiprostitution, pure food and drugs, and anti-disease campaigns all had eugenic elements to them.[23] Eugenics had many branches: Positive eugenics focused on promoting optimal mating and reproduction of those who were considered to have desirable or superior traits. The Fitter Families movement was a product of positive eugenics. Awards were given at state and county fairs for the most “perfect” family. Negative eugenics, which both William and Lena Sadler advocated, was concerned with the prevention of those with inferior or less desirable traits from having children. The Sadlers advocated sterilization of the unfit at eugenics conferences, in newspaper articles, and in their speeches to groups around the country.[24]

After World War II and the reality of the Nazis using the tenets of eugenics to justify genocide was discovered the tide turned against eugenic thought. Eugenics became associated with the Holocaust and racism and the public demonized and rejected what they concluded was a pseudoscience. Towards the end of the Cold War the trend began to shift from public concerns to private ones in the United States because “every individual has an inalienable right to those freedoms by virtue of being human.” By the late twentieth century the rights of the individual had triumphed as exemplified by Engs, the author of The Eugenics Movement, who affirmed the evolution of the belief to the point that those who are mentally ill have the “right to be homeless.” Until the 1960s, even scholars avoided the study of eugenics until Mark H. Haller’s Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, and Donald K. Picken’s, Eugenics and the Progressives, were published. In the current era, the new eugenics is driven by what Eng calls the demand for the “best product” which is finding perfect human specimens for egg and sperm donation. Donors are screened to ensure that there is no mental illness in their family history, they should be very attractive physically, be intelligent, and have an appealing personality, so the individual can have a mentally and physically healthy baby.[25]

The culture around the Sadlers saw eugenics commonly advocated. One of William Sadler’s earliest mentors was Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, who lived in the same area of Spencer, Indiana, as did the Sadler family. The message of containing people who presented danger to society was a theme in Ben Hur. Wallace used the conflict between “civilization” and “savagery” as the basis for the novel. The idea that there could be successive stages of dismantling of an evil empire into a new holy society runs throughout Ben Hur.[26] William, although a young pre-teen, would have been unconsciously aware of this cultural theme. Lena, being a Kellogg, living in Battle Creek near the Sanitarium run by her famous uncle, John Harvey Kellogg, would have been raised within a family culture that championed eugenics.

The Sadlers were most likely formally introduced to eugenics by John Harvey Kellogg, who was a big proponent. In fact, the ideas of “race betterment” were everywhere in the culture around them: in medical school; on the Chautauqua Circuit, and were topics of discussion in the newspapers they read and the medical meetings they attended. Many top universities trained their students in this science. In fact, by the 1920s, over 400 colleges and universities taught eugenics theory.[27] Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Berkeley offered classes in eugenics or offered the study of eugenics as part of a standard genetics course. Eugenics practitioners tended to be “middle to upper middle class, white, Anglo-Saxon, and educated.”[28]

Eugenics was an underlying concept in John Harvey Kellogg’s books on health reform, his medical practice, speeches, and his approach to educating his patients at Battle Creek. To further his support of eugenics, Kellogg organized the Race Betterment Society (RBF) in Battle Creek in 1906, in partnership with Charles Davenport and Irving Fisher. Kellogg was a proponent of eugenics in spite of the fact he adopted several non-white children. This is another example of the dual nature of this subject. Kellogg advocated for racial superiority while at the same time his family included mixed race children. Kellogg’s ideas of eugenics were broad; he suggested the use of alcohol, tobacco, tea and coffee, improper dress, and unhealthy foods, led to feeblemindedness, crime, insanity, and pauperism. Long after others had discarded the doctrine of acquired characteristics (transmission of environmentally influenced mental, moral, and so-called social traits to descendants), Kellogg continued to argue that these acquired characteristics would improve future generations. Until his death Kellogg asserted that positive changes in society (eliminating poverty and morally corrupt environments) would uplift future generations.[29] He also believed that segregation was necessary, because immigrants and non-whites would damage the gene pool.

Eugenics groups, such as the American Breeders Association (ABA), quantitatively sought to justify their point through graphs showing how many in the population were “defective” and should be sterilized for eugenics policies to succeed. In 1912, they released an official report citing their calculations that, “634,877 Americans were then under custodial care, and that “at least 3,000,000…were equally defective, and another 7,000,000, or nearly 10% of the total population…are of such inferior blood, and are so interwoven in kinship with those still more defective, that they are unfitted to become parents of useful citizens.”[30]

Both William and Lena were members of the American Eugenics Society (AES). The Society formed in 1922 after the Second International Conference on Eugenics was held in New York in 1921. Alexander Graham Bell was the honorary chair of the 1921 Congress. J.P. Morgan, Leon F. Whitney (son the Eli, inventor of the cotton gin), and Margaret Sanger, were some prominent early members. John Harvey Kellogg was on the Finance Board. The goals of the society were population control, genetics, and later medical eugenics. It advocated eugenic sterilization, segregation, and marriage-restriction laws for the mentally ill and disabled. Some of the Societies activities included proposing immigration restriction laws, a higher birth rate among the middle class, and advocated birth control for those of the for the poor and unfit.[31] William Sadler was listed as a member until 1956.[32]

At the time of AES’ formation there was no formal organization that was pursuing a broad political and educational agenda. Initially it was more of an advocacy group than a scientific organization. The group of prominent eugenicists that created the organization first called it the Eugenics Committee of the U.S.A. and changed the name to the AES in 1925.[33] The AES also backed legislation for immigration restriction laws, eugenic sterilization, marriage-restriction laws for the mentally ill and disabled, advocated birth control for the poor while at the same time calling for a higher birth rate among the middle class, and segregation of the unfit. The society ran into conflict when their executive secretary backed the Nazi Germany’s sterilization program in 1934. After this debacle AES took steps to become more “balanced” by advocating environmental reform programs to raise the socioeconomic level of the poor. In the 1950s, the AES began to focus its resources on hereditary defects and diseases, population problems, and genetic counseling. Continuing to respond to the changing political climate, AES became the Society for the Study of Social Biology in 1973. It is still an active group and publishes the journal, Social Biology.[34]

Albert Edward Wiggam was a leading publicist for eugenics and lectured on the Chautauqua Circuit. Both Sadlers spoke on the Chautauqua circuit as well and would have been familiar with Wiggam’s philosophy. Scholars have noted that Wiggam blended science with “statesmanship, morality, and religion.” Wiggam said that eugenics was “simply the projection of the Golden Rule down the stream of protoplasm.”[35] In 1930, while lecturing at the American Museum of Natural History, he said, “Civilization is making the world safe for stupidity.” In Wiggam’s Chautauqua speech he stated that eugenics was “the final program for the complete Christianization of mankind.” He stated in his 1923 best seller, The New Decalogue of Science:

God is still doing the same thing. However, in our day, instead of using tables of stone, burning bushes, prophecies and dreams to reveal His will, He has given men the microscope, the spectroscope, the telescope, the chemist’s test tube and the statistician’s curve in order to enable men to make their own revelations. These instruments of divine revelation have not only added an enormous range of new commandments—an entirely new Decalogue—to man’s moral codes, but they have supplied him with the techniques for putting the old ones into effect.[36]

This quote highlights one of the problems eugenics faced. It was not a real science. It was based on a theory that appealed to its proponents because it answered their desire for a plan to fix society. However, genetics was a field it was in its’ infancy and none of the eugenics policies had ever been scientifically tested. They were unsubstantiated theories stated as fact. Assuming theories are correct without testing them is bad scientific practice.

On May 29, 1915, before the U.S. declared war on April 6, 1917, William was quoted in The Ogden Standard, a local Utah newspaper, as saying that Americans would come out on top in World War I because we were not in the war we would not loose our best and brightest young men as breeding stock. Sadler was one of three eugenicists quoted in the full-page article. Sadler, also commented about the Europeans, “The coming generation may not only be two inches shorter in stature but a greater calamity—the next generations will be less intelligent, less possessed of an adventurous spirit and all-around clear sightedness, not to mention keenness of judgment and depth of reasoning. In other words, the price the next generation must pay will not only be the liquidation of the war debt but a setback in commercial, social artistic, and spiritual development, as the result of biological inferiority in the racial strains of the various peoples and nations concerned.”[37] 

The eugenics predictions profiled in The Ogden Standard were not realized. Americans did grow healthier post war but not due to the eugenic plans that were implemented. The war caused a terrible loss, but we did not shrink in stature—we grew. This was due to increases in public health reforms: vaccinations, motor-vehicle safety, safer workplaces, control of infectious diseases, decline in coronary heart diseases and strokes, safer and healthier foods, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, fluoridation of drinking water, and understanding the risks of tobacco use.[38]

The best illustration of William’s early advocacy of eugenics was in a letter he penned to the editor of the Journal of American Criminal Law and Criminology, on December 4, 1916, entitled, “Sterilization of the Unfit.” In this letter he lays out his thinking on the matter:

STERILIZATION OF THE UNFIT.

DEAR SIR: In response to your letter of the 26th of November concerning the question of sterilization, I am glad indeed to express myself, for it is one that lies very near my heart.

In the first place, let me say that I do not take any stock in this new agitation about the physician or surgeon letting defectives or degenerates die from lack of surgical operations, etc. I don't believe society should put the power of life and death into the hands of a single medical man. I believe it is the physicians business to save life, and if it afterwards develops that we have saved the lives of defectives and degenerates, then it is time for society to act for its own protection.

In a general way, I can most heartily approve of the proposed legislation as published in your November issue, page 611. I am exceedingly anxious that we shall not have a lot of half-baked, so-called eugenic legislation get on our statute books, like laws forbidding the marriage of cousins and laws compelling the examination of applicants for marriage license to ascertain if they are affected with venereal disease. That is not eugenic legislation. It is simply a form a hygienic legislation. We seem to forget that the gates of heredity are closed when conception takes place, that eugenic legislation must concern itself with the elimination of defective germ plasm, and I have long since come to the conclusion that sterilization is the only adequate remedy which modern society can employ to protect itself in the present emergency.

I am in favor of advocating a very conservative policy to begin with. * [sic] If a general survey should be attempted for purposes of inaugurating sterilization, I should be in favor of annually sterilizing only the most palpable ten per cent of the total number nominated. In this connection I have reference to a general sterilization program. I see no reason why we should delay a straight out and out sterilization program with reference to institutions to which delinquent and de- generate citizens are committed.

Segregation might be a temporary compromise and do some good, but I believe it is unfair to these defectives after we have allowed them to come into the world, to deprive them of their natural privileges and biological pleasures. I think they should be sterilized and allowed to get married and settle down and live after the natural order of mankind, that is, those who are outside of institutional custody.

I think it is time for society to wake up to the fact that we have long since succeeded in reversing the law of the jungle- the "Survival of the fittest," but modern civilization and Christianity have come so effectively to protect the weak against the strong that we are now face to face with a tragedy of modern civilization the biological jeopardy of the strong by the enormous and disproportionate increase and multiplication of the weak.

Society, philanthropy, Christianity, and more recently even medical science, are all conspiring together to save all the weak and defective members of society, to enable these weak children to attain manhood and womanhood, and to bring into existence large families, numbering from six to twelve children or more. At the same time the American college graduate is not quite reproducing himself. The physician of today who is engaged in the laudable work of saving babies, while he proves himself a blessing to this generation, is, unless society shall do something to curb the results of his work in the future, destined to become a curse to generations yet unborn. Some day men of medicine are going to grow weary of representing the spirit of modern society in this life saving work, unless society does something to prevent the continuous and increasing multiplication of the degenerate and defective offspring of these unnormal humans whose lives we men of medicine worked so hard to save.

Even our immigration laws are based on finances and education, and not on blood and taint. We should keep out of this country all classes who are eugenically unsound and let in the eugenically sound immigrant, whether he can read or write or has a dollar. We can teach him how to read and make money after he reaches our shores.

We have taken drugs away from these feeble-minded people and they are going to live their full lives. We even talk of nation-wide prohibition and so take away the opportunity of these feeble-minded folks from drinking themselves to death. I believe in the Harrison drug law. I am in favor of national temperance, but I want the public to wake up and see where some of our good philanthropic endeavors and well-meant reforms are leading us. 


When it comes to sterilization, I am interested in just one fundamental proposition, and that is feeble-mindedness with its second cousins, epilepsy and insanity. I am decidedly opposed to this agitation for the sterilization of criminals, paupers, prostitutes and inebriates. I believe that considerably more than 75 per cent of public prostitutes are feeble-minded. I believe that more than half of our criminals are feeble-minded, subnormal or otherwise falling in the category of moronism. I believe statistics bear out the assertion that almost 90 percent of our paupers belong to this group. As to the percent of feeble-minded among confirmed drunkards, I am not aware that we are in possession of anything reliable in the way of statistics.

Now, I am not in favor of sterilization for criminals if they are normal. I think we had better improve our social and educational system. Criminality, I do not believe, is inherited as such. I hold that it is feeblemindedness which is inherited. On the other hand, I do not believe prostitution, as with regards to its moral state, is an inheritance. I believe it is a case again of feeble-mindedness. If prostitutes are feeble-minded, sterilize them. If not, try to reform them. Here again I believe that the morals of society need reforming in the case of a so-called fallen woman who is not mentally defective to some degree.


I am heartily in favor of prison reform, temperance, rescue homes, and schools for backward children, but I am not in favor of spending the public money forever to build institutions and conduct schools for the defective classes while we do absolutely nothing to protect ourselves from their degenerate offspring, which we know are destined to follow in their foot steps.


I am exceedingly hopeful that the flood of eugenic legislation which is just about due, be kept out of fantastic tendencies and other lines of action that are not fundamentally sound as judged by the known laws of human inheritance. I find on lecturing on this subject to intelligent audiences, women's clubs, and other intelligent social clubs, that eugenics is so little understood that it is confused in the average mind with the subject of sex-hygiene on the one hand and so-called prenatal influence on the other.


What more urgent work could our state board of health take up than that of educating the layman along eugenic lines? Something must be done 'by agitation as well as legislation in view of our terrible state of ignorance. Just a few days ago I had more than a dozen individuals come up to me after a lecture who protested against my advocacy of sterilization because society did not have a right to unsex any-of its members, and that, please remember, after I had endeavored in the course of a lecture to explain just as far as I could without being indelicate that sterilization did not do this.


If we do have an effective sterilization law in this state, I hope it will include provision for making the performance of the operation, especially in the case of the female, a penal offense unless done in obedience to a court order. In the private practice of a surgeon, sterilization should be put in the same class with criminal abortions, in that they are not allowed except for therapeutic tic purposes, and then only upon adequate consultation. We want the sterilization of the female to prevent the birth of defectives and not to be used as a means for escaping maternity on the part of some of the biological slackers of our well-to-do American women who are able to bear children, but who are indifferent to their duties in this respect.

Our American social structure is at the present time thoroughly undermined. It will soon begin to totter, and sterilization is the only remedy I see which the decreasing strong has within its power to apply in its battle to resist the encroachments of the tremendously increasing weak and defective members of society.

And in closing, my dear doctor, I pledge every vestige of my influence and power to be used for the enactment of a sane, scientific, eugenic act for the State of Illinois.


(Signed) WILLIAM S. SADLER, M. D.

32 N. State St., Chicago, Ill., Dec. 4, 1916

This letter reflects William’s usual mindset, exemplified by his appeal for balance, caution, and a conservative approach, even while making a strong argument for a sterilization policy. In his famous letter to Ellen G. White, he demonstrated this same balance while he questioned the validity of her Testimonies. At the same time this letter shows a both a bias in his thinking about women and a lack of understanding why women became prostitutes. William writes that he believes that women who had sex out of wedlock were mentally ill. This is against type, because William was far ahead of his time when it came to his views about women. He grew up in a culture of Seventh-day Adventists who were proponents of women practicing medicine. Both William’s mother and wife were physicians. He clearly had no problem with women assuming such prominent careers. So he trusted their ability to succeed in a traditionally male dominated field. In fact, the Sadlers considered themselves equal partners in their medical profession. In the early 1900s, few men would have admitted this to be the case. The fact that he would argue that prostitutes were feebleminded shows that he did not understand that many women who became prostitutes did so out of an economic necessity due to low wages and limited job opportunities for girls migrating from farms to larger towns. Subsequent social research lending perspective and understanding to the reasons women became prostitutes was unavailable to him. He incorrectly assumed the reason had to be genetic.

William gave a paper at the Second Annual Conference of Eugenics held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, September 22-28, 1921. The purpose of this conference was “to discuss results of their research and their application to race improvement.” Henry Fairfield Osborn (a source author for Paper 64 “The Evolutionary Races of Color” in The Urantia Book) opened the conference. He stated, “Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer -- this must be the keynote of our future.”[39] The congress was divided into four sections, “Humans and Comparative Heredity,” “Eugenics and the Family,” “Human Racial Differences,” and “Eugenics and the State.” A total of 96 papers were presented over the week of the conference. Three hundred ninety three people attended from the United States, Britain, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, and France.[40]

The paper William delivered at the conference, “Endocrines, Defective Germ-Plasm, and Hereditary Defectiveness,” stated that his purpose was to “call the attention of the biologists and geneticists here assembled to the great dearth of practical knowledge in the realms of medicine regarding the role of hormones—those secretions of the so-called ductless glands or endocrine system.” He explained that he wanted to secure a consensus of opinion on endocrines. To accomplish this task he listed 1,000 persons whose opinions he wanted to know about the hormone system and heredity. He prepared ten questions and sent them out to zoologists, biologists, geneticists, eugenicists, neurologists, psychiatrists, as well as “educators, and others having large contact with feebleminded, defective and delinquent classes.” He found the answers proved his hypothesis that the opinion and information regarding the various phases of ductless gland knowledge in this country was indeed chaotic.[41] His point was that present medical knowledge was not adequate to help people who suffered from ductless gland dystrophy. He wrote, “Much less are we able to formulate precise opinions and suggest definite remedies with reference to this almost wholly unexplored and undeveloped field of hereditary mental defectiveness and the relation of endocrine disturbance to the defective germ-plasm which is the cause thereof.”[42]

William demonstrates his attitude towards this research in his closing paragraphs:

While, in humility, we should withhold our opinions until we have more knowledge, yet if I may be permitted to express my own views as the result of this study and from my own clinical experience, it would be to the effect that there is little help to be expected, in the near future, from endocrine therapy in the more marked cases of hereditary defectiveness, but I do believe that at some future time, when we shall have come into possession of a more complete knowledge regarding epilepsy, dementia praecox, and migraine or nervous sick headache, we can hope—after the differential classification of the disease now known by these single diagnostic names—I say that after this improvement in diagnostication, the development of endocrine therapy will afford the possibility of relief for certain types of individuals suffering from these disorders.

It is not the time to stir the emotions and arose false hopes in the public mind. This is the time for experimental work and the clinical testing out of facts and theories. This is the time to make our appeal to the experimental biologist and the practicing clinician to help us find facts and ascertain truths, and it is to be hoped that the public can be spared that exploitation which will cause the next generation to lose all faith in this matter. There is danger that ten thousand times more harm will be done the public by our present day monkey and goat gland transplantation than any good which may accrue to the individual who may become the possessor of such a transplanted gland.[43]

Prior to William speaking at the conference he had submitted this article to the Journal of Heredity in April 1921. Dr. Sewall Wright, Senior Animal Husbandman in Animal Genetics at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wrote Sadler back on May 14, 1921, to agree with his hypothesis that hormone disturbances could frequently determine heredity factors. Wright’s strength was in combining theoretical and experimental approaches, and “to apply novel mathematical and statistical methods to analyze problems in biology.”[44] In his response to William, Wright noted that the subject of hormones and heredity was of the greatest importance. He ends his letter by stating that the research seems to support Sadler’s interest in hormonal factors in determining heredity.[45] Sadler’s submission of this article to the journal may have been how he was invited to give his paper at the conference. It impressed Wright and that led to an invitation to present it later that year.

Lena did not write as much on eugenics as her husband did. Her one major speech occurred at the Third International Congress of Eugenics, “A Decade of Progress in Eugenics,” held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, August 21-23, 1932.  The delegates in attendance numbered 267, smaller than the previous congress due to the Depression. The conference’s goal was to “mark the advance made in the field of eugenics, both as a pure and as an applied science.” Charles Davenport, the American eugenics leader, served as president of the congress. In 1934, a publication of the proceeding, A Decade of Progress in Eugenics was 531 pages in length. The text received positive reviews from biologists and was considered, “a genuine contribution to a scientific eugenics.”[46]

Lena’s paper, “Is the Abnormal to Become Normal?” argued that society should treat “defectives,” but demand in return that they give something back: they should be sterilized. “If my profession continues to try to save every weak child that is born into the world; if we continue to serve the unfit baby in our welfare stations, dispensaries and clinics, and if this coddled, protected weakling grows to adolescence and shows” itself “manifestly defective” and “likely to produce only unfit individuals,” then society must tell the child, “we will do our full duty by you, but there must be no more like you.” She made the following statement:

Here we are coddling, feeding, training, and protecting this viper of 
degeneracy in our midst, all the while laying the flattering unction 
to our souls that we are a philanthropic, charitable, and thoroughly 
Christianized people. We presume to protect the weak and lavish 
charity with a free hand upon these defectives, all the while 
seemingly ignorant and unmindful of the fact that ultimately this 
monster will grow to such hideous proportions that it will strike us 
down, that the future descendants of the army of the unfit will 
increase to such numbers that they will overwhelm the posterity of 
superior humans and eventually wipe out the civilization we bequeath 
our descendants; and all this will certainly come to pass if we do 
not heed the handwriting on the wall and do something effectively to 
stay the march of racial degeneracy, for it is said that even now 
three-fourths of the next generation are being produced by the 
inferior one-fourth of this one. [47] 

She went on to argue other mainstream eugenic themes. She advocated a federal sterilization law, which she predicted would eventually eliminate 
most crime, insanity, feeblemindedness, moronism [sic], abnormal sex, and 
many other types of 'degeneracy. These are harsh words by today’s standards—especially for the mother of a son who was had been diagnosed as psychotic (this diagnosis will be explained later). Was she in denial that she had a son who was ill? At the time many of Lena’s colleagues would have been attending this conference. She may have felt too much pressure to pull out of such an important event. This is an example of the Sadlers, just like The Urantia Book, being of their time and transcending time. On one hand, Lena is sharing the thinking of her era by using discordant language against the unfit of which (by her own definition) her son was one. On the other hand, Lena demonstrated the supreme service by working to uplift people both physically and spiritually. Her work in the slums of Chicago allowed her compassion for those less fortunate and led her to be involved with educating the public via lectures and her untiring work with other medical women to improve health care for women and children. A few highlights from her resume show her achievements: she was Associate Director of the Chicago Institute of Research and Diagnosis (the Sadlers medical practice), Attending Gynecologist at Columbus Hospital and Women’s and Children’s Hospital, State Chairman of Public Health and Child Hygiene of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1924-1928 a Fellow of the American Medical Association, and the American College of Surgeons. Lena was one of the founders of the Chicago Council of Medical Women and served as its president in 1925-1926.[48] In her biography from the American Medical Women’s Association, her friend, Dr. Mary McKinnin-Harper, described Lena this way: “she lived so abundantly and productively, found time for successful homemaking and motherhood and for the cultivation of warm and enduring friendships. She had a talent for loyal friendship and her dependability, vivid personality, sympathetic and affectionate understanding, and spontaneous enthusiasm endeared her to many within and without her profession.”[49]

As part of their evangelizing eugenics as an aspect of the Social Gospel, both Sadlers’ wrote books and articles supporting the eugenic ideology. William authored The Truth About Heredity: A Concise Explanation of Heredity Written for the Layman, Long Heads and Round Heads; or What’s the Matter with Germany, and Race Decadence. In the Preface of Race Decadence, in 1922, Sadler wrote, “Important as is the health of the individual—personal hygiene, still more important is the health and vigor of the nation—race hygiene.”

In 1936, William published his opus, Theory and Practice of Psychiatry. At 1,231 pages it is by far his largest book. In the Glossary at the back of the book he defines eugenics as “The science which is concerned with improvement of the human stock through study of heredity.”[50] In Chapter 8 of this text “Hereditary Trends,” Sadler discusses how heredity is the base of all neurotic patterns and psychotic types of behavior. That, “in reality they have their origin in the nursery.”[51]

He begins by offering up the following statistics as an example of the landscape. Seven thousand babies are born every twenty-four hours in the United States. When they reach adulthood:

1 out of 25 will become insane,

4 out of 25 will become profoundly neurotic—subnormal,

4 out of 25 will be moderately neurotic,

4 out of 25 will be mildly neurotic, and

12 out of 25 will become fairly normal.[52]

These numbers, (unsourced; they appear to be from a book in the bibliography listed at the end of the chapter), make the argument that society had an enormous problem to confront. Data gathered showed that 10% of the population of New York was mentally defective. Even though William admits a few pages later that the results may be greatly overdrawn and the method for assembling this data is more or less uncritical—nevertheless he stated that taking family histories affirmed that mental instability and other personality disorders run in families. Therefore heredity appeared to be a factor in the 30 to 90 per cent range. He believed it was actually between 60 to 70 per cent. He also argued that even though the proof is far from satisfactory we should recognize that in a majority of cases where a truly feebleminded man mates with a feebleminded woman, practically all the children are feebleminded.[53]Again William assured his readers that sterilization would not interfere with the “biologic feelings and impulses of the individual” and that they could marry and live out natural lives, while “at the same time society could breathe more freely, knowing that no feebleminded offspring would result from such marriages between these defectives.”[54]

William believed that a national sterilization law enforced throughout the United States would result in eliminating a large amount of crime, insanity, feeblemindedness, moronism, abnormal sexuality, and degeneracy within 100 years. This would help eradicate a “troublesome factor in civilized society.”[55] He argued that the time had come to study heredity, and become students of race betterment, “before the racial deterioration which now looms in the not far distant future shall have, to further degree, undermined the stability and intellectual greatness of America and Americans.”[56] He ends this chapter with “The Eugenic Challenge:”

American conditions call for thoughtful consideration—for serious study; the problems of the hour challenge our immediate consideration. Our national life needs to be studied in the light of the rise and fall of other nations. We are but a young people, and now is the time in our adolescence as it were, carefully to take stock, earnestly to inquire into and recognize and recognize our fundamental defects, and then with patriotic courage and stalwart stamina to consecrate our hands to the task, and dedicate our minds to the cause, of turning back the swelling tide of moral decadence and mental defectiveness before this dire threat of degeneracy shall have time to assume more serious proportions, and before the racial deterioration which now looms in the not far distant future shall have, to further degree, undermined the stability and intellectual greatness of America and Americans.

The call now to the citizenship of our country is for the reading, thinking half to become students of the great problems of race betterment; to formulate their ideas, revise their opinions, reach sound conclusions, and then, in turn, to become teachers of the other, the unthinking and the careless, half which are driving on heedlessly toward racial decadence and possible national ruin.[57]

William’s theory of eugenics, propounded in the book, was criticized in a United Kingdom periodical, The Journal of Mental Science:

Does anyone really believe that a sterilization law enforced throughout the United States would result in less than one hundred years in ‘eliminating a large amount of crime, insanity, feeblemindedness, moronism, and abnormal sexuality, as well as many other forms of defectiveness and degeneracy? Thus within a century, our asylums, prisons and state hospitals would be partially emptied….’? And, ‘If we should thus conscript our degenerates—sanely classify and properly employ, incarcerate, or sterilize them—within a few decades most of our charities, which are dealing with problems resulting from feeblemindedness, would go out of business, since most of our jails and brothels would be empty.…?’[58]

Evidence that eugenics was a strong part of middle class American culture is the Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell. On May 2, 1927, the Supreme Court ruled on the lawfulness of sterilization in this case. The case supported the involuntary sterilization of people until the 1970s. It also serves an example of how women were persecuted in the Progressive era for being sexually active. Carrie Buck was a white teenager who had a child after her rape by a relative of her adopted parents. To protect those involved: the stigma of having a child out of wedlock, to save her adoptive parents from embarrassment and to spare the relative who raped her; Buck and her child were institutionalized by her parents in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in 1924. She was 18.

The doctors at the institution diagnosed her as “epileptic and feebleminded.” Years later she and her child were diagnosed as normal. Because Buck was considered feebleminded, Harry H. Laughlin and Arthur H. Estabrook at the Eugenics Record Office prepared a test case using Buck and asked that she be sterilized. Her guardian, R.G. Shelton, filed suit against the institution to prevent the surgery. After the Virginia Supreme Court held the circuit court’s decision that Buck be sterilized, it went the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, “for the protection and health of the state.”[59]

This decision was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics, that is, the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating “defectives” from the gene pool. The ruling was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes concluded his argument by infamously declaring, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”[60] This is another example of the eugenic thinking at the time that societies rights superseded the individuals as well as the fact that eugenics perceived women having sex out of wedlock was proof that they were mentally ill.

Negative eugenics remained a strong trend in the United States until the mid 1930s. By this time forty-one states had laws prohibiting marriage of the mentally ill and feebleminded; seventeen prohibited marriage between epileptics; and four prohibited the marriage of confirmed alcoholics.[61] It is estimated that about 600,000 people were sterilized by the 1960s due to eugenics laws. Many of these laws remain on the books in several states but are unenforced.[62]

In the early twentieth century William’s interest began to shift from treatment to the prevention of illness that he called the “mind cure.” In his mind the mental state of patients was paramount and he wanted to learn more about the mind-body connection of illness. This shift was likely influenced by two factors: 1. the fact that medicine was professionalizing and hospitals were demanding doctors and surgeons become licensed. William was not licensed as a surgeon and Columbia hospital (where he practiced) in 1930 required attending physicians become licensed; and 2. the fact that his son, Bill, was diagnosed as being mentally ill in the 1920s. It makes sense Bill’s father would want a better understanding of this area of medicine in order to better heal his only child. When Sadler began his self-directed study of psychiatry, eugenics would have been prominent in this field too. Ian Robert Dowbiggin in his book, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada 1880-1940, states that he found virtually no psychiatrist who did not at one time or another express a favorable opinion towards eugenics during the Progressive era.[63]

William’s focus on psychiatry was also a continuation of his original mission to educate people on health and preventive medicine. Throughout his life he blended his own methodology with other professionals’ ideas to bring enlightenment to people via lectures, articles, and books.[64] He complemented his outreach methods by his membership in numerous professional associations to keep informed on the state of his professions. There is ambiguity in this aspect of Williams’s life too. There have been charges that he had a habit of borrowing other people’s ideas and using them as his own in his books. In many instances this can be explained because several of his books were dictated from his Chautauqua speeches years after he first presented the information in his talks. He may not have remembered where he got the information years later. Additionally he was not trained to footnote his work because academic publishers did not require footnotes in books until the mid 1950s.[65] He was writing for a popular audience, which would have had little if any awareness or concern about the rules about citing sources. In other more troubling examples, William did not cite all of his sources, omitting any reference in his bibliographies to books he used most, some of which he lifted large amounts of clinical histories from other authors—word for word—making it appear that they were his own. William’s use of sources will be another problem for those of us who care about The Urantia Book as it brings up the question of his ethics.

One of the main challenges for William and Lena regarding their belief in eugenics was the mental illness in their own family. Their only child was mentally ill, which is substantiated by his military medical records on file at the National Personnel and Records Center. In March 1924, Bill ran away from home, aged 16 ½, and joined the Marines under an assumed name, Winston Stefan Stevens (note his initials were still WSS). To enlist, he lied about his name, his year of birth (stating his birth year as 1904 instead of 1907), and where he lived. He even found a man, “Arthur A. Hawkins” from New Orleans to swear that he was Winston Stefan Stevens’ uncle. Hawkins stated that Winston was born in LaGrange, Illinois, on December 15, 1904, and that both of Winston’s parents were dead.[66]

It is not known what date Lena and William discovered the whereabouts of their only child. However, the records show that in 1927, Bill requested that his name be changed to the correct one, William Samuel Sadler, Jr., and his military records show this was done. There are sworn statements in his military records file from his father, William, his uncle, Wilfred Kellogg, and a close family friend, Christy Christensen, stating that he was indeed Bill, Jr. After four years of service, Bill was discharged from the service in February 1928.

On June 20 of 1932, Bill again left home without telling his family where he was going and reenlisted in the Marines in Washington, DC. Four days later on June 27, 1932, Bill was brought unconscious to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Washington, DC. The Report Of Medical Survey in his military file diagnosed him as in a “Constitutional Psychopathic State (Inadequate Personality)” on July 1, 1932. The medical report tells a tragic story. Arriving unconscious at the military hospital, Bill remained in that state for 2 more days. “Chemical analysis and later admission by the patient confirmed veronal poisoning. This was a suicide attempt.” The report goes on to relate information that Doctor Sadler gave them about his son: “The patient is known to have previously contemplated suicide, been seclusive [sic] and manneristic [sic], refusing at time to talk, and on one occasion remaining in bed for 3 days, in an apparent catatonic stupor. The recent poisoning episode is believed to be culmination of his conflicts resulting from his mental trends and personality make up.” Since William had the desire to care for his son and was financially able the Marines granted him custody of his son for treatment. Bill was discharged from the marines because he was not “considered suitable material for retention in the Marine Corps.”[67]

How did the fact of having a mentally ill son affect the Sadlers’ attitude towards eugenics? There is no evidence that it changed their thinking. Lena delivered her paper at the eugenics conference weeks after her son’s suicide attempt. It is hard to imagine that this episode would not have generated some serious soul searching on their part. This is an irrefutable example of them acting upon their dual nature: they believed that eugenics would solve the problems they saw in society but they could not bring themselves to act within their own family.

Lastly and briefly, there is the issue of race not being a reality at all. Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan report in Race and Genetic Revolution, that in June 2000 during a Rose Garden ceremony, President Bill Clinton, flanked by genome sequencers Francis Collins and Craig Venter, announced the completion of a draft sequence of the human genome, the complete sequence of human DNA. Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Venter, then President of Celera Genomics, emphasized that their work confirmed that human genetic diversity cannot be captured by the concept of race, and also showed that all humans have genome sequences that are 99.9% identical. At the White House celebration Venter said “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” A year later, Collins wrote “those who wish to draw precise racial boundaries around certain groups will not be able to use science as a legitimate justification.”[68]

Dr. Michael Yudell, researcher in the Molecular Laboratories at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where his work focused on genome policy and also a Health Policy Analyst at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, has spent his life studying how biologists and geneticists shaped the concept of race in the 20th century. His conclusion: “It must be stated that the genetic claims of racial difference advocated by eugenicists—from differences in intelligence to disease rates to musicality—have all been shown to be false.”[69]

Conclusion

The Sadlers sought to make the world a better place through advocating eugenic change in the Progressive era. They sincerely believed that eugenics would increase human happiness and lead us toward new spiritual truth. At the same time they were advocating for a program without adequate scientific proof. This can be understood within the context of their history as we place them in their time. As physicians they were dedicated to confronting the problems associated with modernity. They believed that salvation lay with embracing scientific solutions; as primitive as that may seem by today’s standards. This idea was part of Chicago’s culture as evidenced by the motto of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, “Science finds. Industry applies. Man conforms. Science discovers, Genius invents, Industry applies and Man adapts himself to or is molded by new things.” As Rosen points out in Preaching Eugenics, “liberal religious leaders allowed their worldviews to be molded by the promise of the new science of eugenics.”[70]

The problem of race and The Urantia Book can hamper the dissemination of the book if we do not come to understand the larger implications moving forward. We have in The Urantia Book a series of quotes about race that is reflective of the early 20th century thinking of a certain socio-economic class. An ideology that has been proven incorrect. In addition the Sadler’s acceptance of eugenics will be connected to the text of the book through Matthew Block’s source studies and Saskia Raevouri’s compilation of The Sherman Diaries. Their evidence for the sources for The Urantia Book is compelling and demands our attention and study (see Appendix).[71] This may seem a trivial issue or easily explainable, but as Block continues to expand and publish his work it will remain challenging to the book’s future.

How can we use this meeting to move the conversation about race and The Urantia Book forward? Do we need to harmonize the evolving findings of science and the evolving insights of religion with eternal truth? If so, then we can discuss what that would that look like in relation to this problem. Do the current genomic conceptions of race make the book’s statements appear to be simply outdated ideas from the science of that time?

If we are to be judged by our fruits wouldn’t it be more powerful to admit that the race arguments in the book are not authoritative—but the artistic triumph of truth of cosmic relationships, universe facts, and spiritual values are transcendent? If we try to argue that what the book states about race is true and it must be seen with spiritual eyes for comprehension, are we resorting to what the book says is “backward thinking philosophy?” Separating facts from cosmic truth allows us to be faith led and accept the possible ambiguity of the text. The fact that the science in The Urantia Book may be updated by current scientific discoveries does not change the spiritual truth it presents. The spiritual value is transcendent as the material facts evolve.

Notes:

[1] William S. Sadler, Race Decadence: An Examination of the Causes of Racial Degeneracy in the United States Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. (1922): v.


[2] William S. Sadler, The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry St. Louis: The C.V. Mosby Company (1936): 158


[3] Letter from William S. Sadler to Ellen and Willie White, July 18, 1902, E.G. White Estate Archives, Silver Spring Maryland.


[4] Engs, xv.


[5] Tim McNeese, The Progressive Movement: Advocating Social Change, New York: Chelsea House (2008): 32-33.


[6] Hofstadler, 173.


[7] Richard Hofstadter, The Age Of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. Alfred A. Knopf (1959): 5.


[8] Bateman, Bradley W. “The Social Gospel and the Progressive Era.” Divining America, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. January 18, 2012 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/socgospel.htm


[9] http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=160


[10] Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2001): 319.


[11] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, W. W. Norton & Co (1991): xv-xviii.


[12] Ronald C. White and C.Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America Philadelphia: Temple University (1976): xvii.


[13] “The Social Gospel,” The Biblical World, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sept. 1912): 151


[14] Rosen, Christine, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement New York: Oxford University Press (2004): 125-127


[15] Ibid.


[16] Ibid.


[17] William S. Sadler, “The Workingman’s Home,” The Life Boat Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 1898)


[18] W.R. Inge, “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics,” Birth Control Review 4 (June 1920): 9.


[19] Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development New York: Dutton (1907): 17.


[20] Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences, London: Macmillan (1869): I


[21] Daniel J. Kevles, In The Name Of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, New York: Knopf (1985): ix.


[22] Ibid. 3-4.


[23] Ruth Clifford Engs, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (2005): xiv.


[24] Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. © 2003 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. XXX


[25] Engs, xv. See Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press (1963) and Donald K. Picken’s, Eugenics and the Progressives Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press (1968).


[26] Blake Allmendinger, “Toga Toga,” in Remapping the American West, edited by Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, Berkeley: University of California Press (1999): 32-49. This essay discusses all the works of Lew Wallace and how they were inspired by the west.


[27] Stephen Jones, “Zoology 61: Teaching eugenics at WSU,” http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/index.php?id=627


[28] Ibid. 64.


[29] Ruth Clifford Engs, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia, Philadelphia: WB Saunders Co. (1992): 140, 523.


[30] Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress Held at the University of London, July 24-30, 1912 (London: Chas. Knight &Co, Ltd.): 464.


[31] Ruth Clifford Engs, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (2005): 7. For further reading see Maurice Bigelow, “A Brief History of the American Eugenics Society,” (1946); Mark H. Haller, Eugenics (1984); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (1985); Barry Mehler “The history of the American Eugenics Society, 1921-1940” (1988).


[32] Katharine O’Keefe, American Eugenics Society, 1922-1994 (February 3, 1993): 328 http://www.all.org/abac/contents.txt


[33] http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.575.06.Am3-ead.xml


[34] Engs, p. 7-8.


[35] Ibid, 59.


[36] Albert Edward Wiggam, The New Decalogue of Science Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company (1923): 17-18.


[37] “The Great European Military Struggle Is Sure to Deplete the Physically Fit of Every Nation Engaged Thus Appreciably Reducing the Physical Proportions Of the Coming Generation,” The Ogden Standard (May 29, 1915)


[38] “ The Ten Greatest Health Achievements—United States, 1900-1999” Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on April 2, 1999: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6019a5.htm?s_cid=mm6019a5_w


[39] Henry Fairfield Osborn, Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory of Man, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1928): ?


[40] Ruth Clifford Engs, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (2005): 202.


[41] William S. Sadler, “Endocrines, Defective Germ-Plasm, and Hereditary Defectiveness,” in Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress in Eugenics, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company (1923): 341-350.


[42] Ibid. 349


[43] Ibid., 350


[44] Letter from Sewall Wright to Dr. William S. Sadler, May 14, 1921, found at the American Philosophical Society and in the author’s collection. Abstract and Background Notes on the Sewall Wright Papers, 1885-1988, American Philosophical Society, http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.Ms.Coll.60-ead.xml;query=William%20Sadler;brand=default;hit.rank=1 His work helped to reorient evolutionary biology and genetics along more rigorous, quantitative lines. Sewall taught at the University of Chicago beginning in 1926, after working for the U.S.D.A. In 1943, he was a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley as the Hitchcock Professor. Then became a Fulbright Professor at the University of Edinburgh in 1949-1950. He finished his career at the University of Wisconsin until he retired in 1960.


[45] Letter from Sewall Wright to Dr. William S. Sadler, May 14, 1921, found at the American Philosophical Society and in the author’s collection.


[46] Ruth Clifford Engs, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (2005): 213.


[47] Lena K. Sadler, “Is the Abnormal to Become Normal?” in A Decade of Progress in Eugenics, Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Co., 1934), p. 198.


[48] Biography of Dr. Lena Sadler in the archives of the American Medical Women’s Association at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA


[49] Ibid.


[50] William S. Sadler, Theory and Practice of Psychiatry. St Louis: The C.V. Mosby Company (1936): 1173.


[51] Ibid., 149.


[52] Ibid. 149.


[53] Ibid 149-153.


[54] Ibid, 157.


[55] Ibid.


[56] William S. Sadler, The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry, St. Louis: The C.V. Mosby Company (1936): 158


[57] Ibid. 158


[58] Book review by H.T. Charmichael in Journal of Mental Science (1937): 83: 225-227.


[59] 274 U.S. 200, at 270


[60] 274 U.S. 200, at 270.


[61] Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada 1880-1940 New York: Cornell University (1997): 76


[62] Ruth Clifford Engs, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (2005): 56.


[63] Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress Held at the University of London, July 24-30, 1912 (London: Chas. Knight &Co, Ltd.): x.


[64] Vonne Meussling, 44.


[65] In an exchange with Princeton history professor Dr. Anthony Grafton, author of The Footnote: A Curious History, and this author, asking about the history of footnotes in books, Grafton responded that even university presses did not insist on footnotes when a book was aimed at a large readership in the early 1900s to the mid 1950s. He gave the example of R.R. Palmer’s, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, published by Princeton University Press in the 1950s, which sold about 90,000 copies. The university did not require him to have footnotes. Grafton believes that Sadler was following standard practice in not using footnotes. This is not to excuse Sadler’s use of the work of others without acknowledgment but to express what the norm was during his era.


[66] William S. Sadler, Jr. Military Personnel Records file in author’s collection.


[67] “Report Of Medical Survey” dated July 1, 1932, in William Samuel Sadler, Jr.’s Military Records from the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, MO. Copies in the author’s collection.


[68] Sheldon Krimsky, Kathleen Sloan, eds., Race and Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture New York: Columbia University Press (2011): 25


[69] Michael Yudell, “A Short History of the Race Concept,” Council for Responsible Genetics website: http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/Projects/CurrentProject.aspx?projectId=8


[70] Rosen, p. 184-185.


[71] See Matthew Block, “Race In Context: Perspectives on Race in The Urantia Book,” from Wrightwood Series #2, available on www.SquareCircles.com. 

Clarifications and Further Thought on Dr. Sadler and The Urantia Book

by Sioux Oliva, March 5, 2015

This essay is intended to clarify some misrepresentations and other thoughts being fielded about my book, Dr. Sadler and The Urantia Book: The Historic Origins of a Spiritual Revelation in the 20th Century. A few people have stated that my book is harmful to The Urantia Book and are stating arguments that are not in the book. I’ve been a reader of The Urantia Book for 40 years. It is the most important book I own. My book is a biography/history based upon primary sources. Part I is a biography of the Sadlers. Part II delves into the possibility that Dr. Sadler was the “contact” for the papers’ appearance.

My book is not intended to be the last word on the history of The Urantia Book. It was intended to start a conversation. As an historian I research, analyze, and interpret the past. I use primary source documents—those created at the time of the event, such as government and institutional records, and unpublished manuscripts such as personal diaries and letters—rather than secondary sources that are written after an event has occurred, or provide secondhand accounts of that event, person or topic. Secondary sources relate to or discuss information originally presented elsewhere. It is important that social scientists have an open mind in our research and not let a theory drive us to conclusions not supported by the evidence. We historians follow the scientific method: we start with a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and then write up the results. Books like mine are not meant to be definitive—hypotheses are put into the world so they can be tested and discussed. The Urantia Book states that the scientific method is an intellectual yardstick to measure material achievements and physical achievements—it is useless in evaluating spiritual realities and religious experiences. (195:7.1) We engage in scholarly reflections of the book’s origin because it allows us to be involved in the ongoing interpretation, development, and understanding of our history.

Sacred texts are not history books; they are books of faith. Several years ago I began to research the life of Dr. Sadler that led me to rethink the origin story of The Urantia Book. I thought it was important that I do my own original research about Dr. Sadler since I knew little about his life aside from oral history stories. When I started this project, I believed the origin story that an unnamed Sleeping Subject or “contact” was responsible for the Urantia papers’ appearance. To dig out the history, I went to dozens of archives to examine documents about the lives of William and Lena; their son, Bill; and Christy Christensen. To compliment this research I studied what scholars had written about faith and read histories of the writing of other religious texts. I began to understand that there is a pattern in how God reaches down to humans. I saw that sacred texts, like The Urantia Book, are not history books, they are books of faith. Facts are different than truth. Facts don’t have a quarrel with religious faith like theories do. The religious value of The Urantia Book is not dependent on the origin story or its science or history being factually correct. The power of the teachings is that they lead us into a place of greater spiritual insight.

There is no evil in postulating Dr. Sadler was the contact for the Urantia Papers. After years of research and thinking about the origin story it occurred to me that Dr. Sadler could have been the contact for the Urantia papers for reasons stated in my book. I postulated that the “official” origin story might have been a way for Dr. Sadler to protect himself from unwanted inquiry and career-ending scrutiny so he could he complete the revelatory work he was destined to do. I don’t argue in my book that he was in any way dishonest or that The Urantia Book is invalid if the origin story is different than what I used to believe. I don’t think such is the case. In Dr. Sadler and The Urantia Book there is no information stating that the Sadlers were of questionable character. It is made clear that were both accomplished individuals. Dr. Sadler’s experience with The Urantia Book is one he could not explain. He said that even if he told us everything he knew, we wouldn’t understand, because he didn’t. It is possible that the origin story evolved over time as a way to protect the process of completing the fifth epochal revelation. There is no evil in the origin story being different that what we first thought. We each have the freedom to decide for ourselves what makes sense. Anthropologist Charlotte E. Hardman noted that, “movement, change, imagination, and debate are essential in the formation of [religious] traditions.” The deep spiritual truths of The Urantia Book hold no matter who was the human contact.

There is no fear in analyzing facts. Some readers have voiced concern that my book will harm The Urantia Book. A scholarly book like mine will not harm those who seek the truth. In fact, it appears that the academic approach can be helpful in drawing people to the book. Several non-Urantia Book readers have written me to say that they bought The Urantia Book after reading my book. Why? Because they found the story compelling and it motivated them to read further. The only statements about my book harming the revelation are from Urantia Book readers who fear my book has more power than it does. The power of the spirit to inspire and draw one closer is one we cannot predict.

The mystery behind the origin of The Urantia Book remains. God reaches down to this planet in many mysterious ways. We will never know who was the contact or what happened in the inditing of The Urantia Book. We are all just speculating. My conclusions were the result of looking through the primary source documents and reading histories of other sacred texts to see how scholars described the manner in which God reaches down to his children through the written word. It turned out that there are documented patterns explaining how these texts are written. I believe that The Urantia Book fits within some of these patterns; in others it is unique. What is important is that we hold the mystery, think critically, and build our faith. As Bill Sadler, Jr. said in one of his lectures:

The book is not a religion. This book is a cosmology, a philosophy, metaphysics, a theology. Anything which is in a written language in not religion. That should be very, very clear.

Dr. Sadler, in “Consideration of Some Criticisms of The Urantia Book” (under answer number 12) wrote:

The Urantia Book is an attempt to unify present-day scientific knowledge and religious truth. The main purpose of the Urantia papers is to help the average person to a better understanding of Jesus’ religion. This means an emphasis on the religion of Jesus as contrasted to the religion about Jesus.

The model of Jesus’ religion is the one for all human beings. According to The Urantia Book our religious faith helps the mortal personality to respond under trying intellectual ad testing social situations. It helps us maintain faith in ultimate victory when all else seems lost, helps us have an unswerving trust in God despite contrary demonstrations of logic and intellectual sophistries.

Nuance in belief is a good thing. Thinking through our origin story can aid our spiritual faith; it allows us to separate fact from value. It helps us see that a book is a thing where faith is a real living activity. Rick Hamlin is the editor of Guideposts, a Christian magazine that recounts how peoples’ faith in God has helped them through personal challenges. When Rick found out that I was writing about Dr. Sadler and the origin story he urged me to carry on, saying, “Origin stories -- scholarship like yours -- can also be terrifically helpful to belief.  I find that the more I look into biblical scholarship, the more it informs and aids my faith.  It gives nuance to belief, which is a good thing.  Origin stories are good for us all. KEEP IT UP.”

Humans and celestials aided each other in the writing of The Urantia Book. The partnership between the superhuman and human beings in the writing of The Urantia Book was an act of extraordinary validation for us. Humans were respected enough to participate in the creation of an epochal revelation by asking questions, reading the revised papers, and asking more questions. This was not just a lecture from the celestials; it was a give and take—a series of questions and answers—that brought the book forth. As Dr. Sadler was told, “no questions, no papers.” In a way it can be likened to the Socratic method where a form of inquiry and discussion by the Forum members helped to stimulate their critical thinking and illuminate ideas for the revelation. Critics of my work have voiced a belief that if human hands touched the text then it is invalid. I differ. I see the writing of The Urantia Book was a co-creative act between human beings and celestials. These two groups worked on the Urantia papers from 1924-1942, to bring us the revelation that we have today. In this way humans contributed in bringing enlightened spiritual truth to the planet. The questions they asked conditioned the responses they were given. That type of co-creativity exists all over this planet in small and large ways. Who can say that Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, The Beatles, and countless other extraordinary writers and artists around the globe were/are not in a creative partnership with God in their endeavors? Even Jesus said, “Of myself, I can do nothing.” To quote The Urantia Book, “The best music of Urantia is just a fleeting echo of the magnificent strains heard by the celestial associates of your musicians, who left but snatches of these harmonies of morontia forces on record as the musical melodies of sound harmonics.” (550.5) 44:1.14. Dr. Sadler may or may not have been the contact for these papers, although my research leads me to believe that he was. The contact person is not what ultimately matters; it is the values the teachings bring to our lives. Separating facts from spiritual truth opens the way for a deepening of faith. That way genuine spiritual faith can carry us onward into eternity.