Word: kelpius
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When Antiquarian E. Gordon Alderfer saw these words on the title pages of two battered little books in the Pennsylvania Historical Society archives, his scholar's heart leaped up. Here was the long-neglected major work of one of the first mystics in America-Johannes Kelpius. Last week, titled A Method of Prayer (Harper; $1.50), Kelpius' little classic of devotion was made available to "seekers" of an age that had barely heard...
German-born Johannes Kelpius was only 21 when he landed in the U.S. as leader of a company of about 40 men who came in 1694 to wait for the millennium they thought was imminent. Cultured, sensitive "Magister" Kelpius settled his little commune in the wilderness which is now a part of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. For more than 14 years they lived together in huts and caves, praying, composing hymns and drawing inspiration from Kelpius' single-minded effort to pierce the mystery of reality...
History and legend have both been unkind. Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier wrote of "painful Kelpius . . . maddest of good men . . . weird as a wizard, over arts forbid." But before the day when he died in his garden at only 35, Kelpius had succeeded in giving his followers something of his vision of a life sustained in its every moment by communion with...
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