TOWARD
THE RISING SUN

BY

WILLIAM GAYLEY SIMPSON

With a biographical sketch by

JEROME DAVIS

Copyright 1935 – The Vanguard Press, Inc.

Renewed in 1962 by William Gayley Simpson

TO ALL HUMAN LIFE

THAT MANY WHO SEE MAY COME TO SEE YET FARTHER

AND HAVE MORE STRENGTH TO UNFOLD

ACCORDING TO THE BENT AND DIRECTION

THAT ARE WITHIN THEMSELVES

Contents

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
BY JEROME DAVIS
9

I. YEA TO LIFE
29

II. THE WAY TO ONE’S SPRING
35

III. OBSTACLES AND SEDUCTIONS
43

IV. A REGIMEN FOR
SPIRITUAL PREGNANCY
73

V. WHERE IS THE HANDFUL
OF STICKS?
89

BIBLIOGRAPHY
91

WILLIAM GAYLEY SIMPSON *

AMERICA is a land of action. Men are practical, and theories to receive social recognition must be translated into deeds so that all can see results. The United States has hardly produced any great prophets or individual mystics who have sacrificed everything they had in order to clothe their highest vision in their own flesh and blood. Perhaps it is not without significance that in the first half of the twentieth century we should find amongst us a man who, in his quest for truth and his determination to put his deepest insights and his surest convictions into practice, has not only broken resolutely with conformity to things as they are but has refused to worship at the shrine of achievement even when it is idealized as unselfish service.
Bill Simpson, as he has come to be known, is an American mystic who, whatever else may be said for or against him, has tried to follow the gleam of truth and inner conviction regardless of consequences. For him it is not enough to see: it is equally necessary to do what one sees. It is not enough to dream dreams and to see visions: it is equally necessary to struggle to make those dreams come true and to realize those visions on earth. And he challenges the reality and the value of any alleged service

* In the narrative parts of the following biographical sketch, I have tried as far as possible to use Bill Simpson’s own words, that the reader may get a truer picture of the man and his spirit

to humanity for the sake of which a man has to violate his integrity. He would say with Emerson:

He that feeds men serveth few,
He serves all who dares to be true.

Bill Simpson, the oldest of three children, was born July 23rd, 1892, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Almost entirely of Gaelic ancestry, he traces back on his mother’s side to hardy yeomen stock and on his father’s through a long line of scholars, schoolmasters, and ministers.
His early home-life seems to have been almost perfect. It was held up in many circles as the ideal. Often he himself has declared that he looked back upon it as the Kingdom of God in miniature. Sometimes when his mother could not understand the course which he was following, he would say to her that all he was doing was to take the love and the ideals which he had known within the limits of the family circle and to declare that henceforth in him they must be felt and applied without limit, to the ends of creation.
The life of the home centered in the Church. Bill’s early life was full of it. And even into his twenty-fifth year it commanded his loyalty and devotion, and he poured into its service all that he then had in him.
He finished high school shortly before he was sixteen. Lafayette was the ancestral college of his family, and he went there as a matter of course. Here he came under the “heretical” influence of Professor John M. Mecklin, now at Dartmouth College, through whom he first learned not to be afraid to think, not to be afraid to place question-marks against tradition, and to undress the saints. He graduated in 1912 with Phi Beta Kappa standing and as valedictorian of his class.
In his last year, he had decided that he must become a minister, but his conclusions about Jesus made any orthodox seminary out of the question. His parents were strongly opposed to his going to so radical an institution as Union Theological Seminary, then the storm-center of heresy trials in the Protestant Church, and most would have yielded to parental pressure, but not Bill Simpson. He realized that no school could help him which did not meet his intellectual problems with a love for truth and an open-mindedness as fearless as his own. He knew that he would have to go to some seminary like Union or abandon the ministry altogether.
He was graduated in 1915 with a magna cum laude. Wishing for a hard task and one where he could be of the greatest possible service to his fellow men, and having at that time almost no knowledge of the problems that menaced the life of mankind in the world of economics, politics, and international relations, he had expected to go to India or China as a missionary. But during the summer of 1915 he was unexpectedly confronted with a momentous decision. He was called to be the assistant in a church of millionaires in a college town, which would certainly have been a stepping-stone to preferment in his profession. But he also had the opportunity of going to a broken-down church, in one of the most sordid industrial districts of New Jersey, which could make no definite promise of any salary whatever. He decided to take the latter, and there are those who think that all he has done since was contained in that choice.
It was while minister of this church that he took his stand against the War and also gradually moved toward socialism. So much so, that when the men of his church went to the heads of the factories to solicit contributions toward the larger church building which had come to be needed, the reply was, “Get that man Simpson out of here and you can have all the money you want, but not a cent so long as you keep him.” Indeed, it gradually became evident that his radical protest against war on the one hand and against the iniquities of the economic order on the other was more than even most of his own church members could stand. Many of them withdrew, some who had been his staunchest supporters became his bitterest enemies. Agents of the Department of Justice came to listen to his sermons and stayed to warn him to stop such preaching, and to threaten him with imprisonment or secret abduction if he kept on. But he did keep on, until in the fall of 1918, feeling that the church was not his and that he had no right to break it up any further, he resigned. But in the resignation which he read both to his church people and to his presbytery, he declared that the Church was a prostitute and a Judas – a prostitute because it kept alive its body by selling its soul to those who secured power and money by the enslavement of men and women and children, and a Judas because it had betrayed Christ in going to war. And then gradually during the next two years he came to the conclusion that too many of the things which as a minister he had to believe and to do were in conflict with his deepest intuitions and convictions, that he could not be an honest man and be a minister at all. And so at last, in order to bring his life into conformity with his highest ideals, he went to the pains of getting unfrocked. If men ever listened to him again, he desired that it should not be on account of any human ordination, not because someone had laid hands on him and pronounced him a “reverend,” but because they could not escape the truth and the beauty which were in what he said.
From the time when he left the Church to the spring of 1919 he was associate director of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, now termed the American Civil Liberties Union. But the real significance of these months lies in the fact that it was then he read for the first time the life of St. Francis of Assisi. This came as the greatest challenge he had known up to this time. Here at last was a man who was not forever singing and praying and talking about love, but who really loved, deeply, widely, everything on earth, and to that love gave all that he had. For the sake of that love he literally stripped himself, as he believed Jesus before him had stripped himself, and like him became a penniless beggar, without family, home, or possessions. All this affected Bill Simpson like wine. For days he was drunk with it. The love of these men! And the deeds that came from them – their courage, their abandon, and the literal correspondence there was between what they saw and what they said, between what they said and what the did, till their very lives took on the light and the color of their vision! Bill Simpson never got away from it. Being the kind of man he was, it was probably inevitable that in the end he also should have to strip himself for love’s sake. But he was not ready to do it then. He was not equal to it. It was too sudden. It was too much. Moreover, he must take time to make very sure.
While making sure he decided to try out an idea which he had been turning over in his mind for some time. He was convinced that the capitalist system was a thing of stupidity and iniquity, and, though he did not believe in violence, he had thought that perhaps he might become a revolutionary organizer or agitator. In this connection he had wanted to find out first hand what men had to do in this country in order to make a living. So he resigned his position, and went to work with his hands. He picked coal in a breaker, and loaded it into cars down in a coal mine. He trimmed ore-cars in an iron mine, and narrowly escaped death from a fall of rock half a mile down in a copper mine. He made tires in Akron, operated a drill-press in Ford’s factory in Detroit, bunked in a box car while he sweated with pick and shovel in a railroad section-gang in the Rockies, worked in a department store in Chicago and was kept awake killing bed-bugs in one of that city’s fifteen-cent beds. During these months he came close to men of all sorts – trade unionists, socialists, I.W.W.’s. Of them all he admired most those who were most radical. And when he returned it was with his convictions about the capitalist system unaltered. But he returned with a new conviction – a profound conviction that even more than we needed a change of economic or political system, though this was needed desperately, we needed a new kind of man on this earth. And all the while – even in the dark depths of the mines – he had not been able to get away from St. Francis’ vision of what that new man might be. But still he was not ready.
So he accepted a job teaching in the Brookwood School, later to become the first resident labor college in America, but then only a radically idealistic, free lance, progressive school. His major course perhaps typifies his thinking at this time. It was entitled “Our Economic System and Its Challenge to Christianity.” But this year of teaching also was to prove for Bill Simpson a road which led nowhere. He had explored the Church as a field of Christian service, and had found it wanting. He had gone into the labor movement, only to find that it, too, needed changed lives as much as, or more than, a change in economic system. He was now to discover that this very idealistic school in which he was teaching, and which gave him his living, was supported on unearthed coal and steel
dividends,* which for him then was blood money. He felt that to remain in the school would involve violation of some of his highest ideals. And so, in spite of his love for many of his comrades in the school, and in spite of the urgent invitation to become its head, at the end of the year he resigned.
With this door also closed against him he found himself confronted squarely with the necessity of deciding what he was going to do about the new vision of life which had come to him through St. Francis, and Tolstoy, and Jesus. He realized at last that he could put it from him no longer, that it alone called forth the highest that was in him, that whether or not he could find any other to go with him, he must go. And so in the fall of 1920, after a month of solitude on an island in the St. Lawrence River, he returned home to give away everything that he possessed, his money, his clothes, his furniture, his books.

* This has no reference whatever to the sources of income of the present Brookwood Labor College

All he kept for himself was a single suit of clothes and his carpenter’s tools. And then he went to live in a foreign working-class quarter and made a gift of his labor, depending for his needs on what people wanted freely to give him.
After a time he began to speak on the streets (and often got arrested for it), and to young people in the city parks, or in churches, or in colleges. Many of the respectable people and the city authorities thought him unbalanced, but the students flocked to hear him, so that there came to be a small group living together in a little shanty, each man having a room to himself six feet square, with a board bunk for a bed, a wide shelf for a desk, and a store-box for a chair. The shanty they built themselves with materials given them by friends. They worked for people in the neighborhood, doing any kind of work they knew how to do. Sometimes they did carpentering or painting, sometimes they cut hair or sharpened knives, sometimes they dug ditches or chopped wood or scrubbed floors. They had a common purse, but usually there was very little in it. Sometimes it was quite empty. Sometimes they had to pick their coal from the ashes in the near-by city dump.
This was the kind of life to which Bill Simpson had been led by his uncompromising loyalty to truth as he saw it and by his unconquerable determination to follow the way of greatest love. One may disagree with much that he was doing at this time, but one must recognize that it was what seemed truest to his inner light and that he was absolutely fearless and uncompromising in his fidelity to it, cost what it might. For nine years he followed this austere way. Many college students were profoundly affected. Even a millionaire’s son gave up all his possessions to share the life of Bill Simpson.
But in 1927 it became evident that there was something wrong with his usually superb health. He seemed to require some kind of relaxation and change. Whereupon a large number of his friends, recognizing the situation and learning of the desire he had long felt to meet Gandhi, raised a fund to make it possible for him to go to India.
From the time he left San Francisco until he reached New York again he was never once in a hotel. In every country he visited he lived in native homes, and wherever he went he loved the people, whether they were Japanese, Chinese, Indian, or English. His experiences were many and varied. Once he traveled steerage lying in a crowded hold with a Japanese touching him on each side, and foot and head. He rolled on the floor with Kagawa’s little boy. He stayed at Itto-en (“House-of-One-Light”) on the edge of Kyoto, where a group of people, practicing Franciscan poverty but not celibacy, were gathered around Tenko Nishida, whose saintly life epitomizes and enshrines much of the highest wisdom of the East. With him Bill had very frank searching all-day talks which practically settled his long-growing conviction that the rejection of sex with which he had begun his venture of faith seven years before was wholly unsound. He was picked up on the streets of Singapore by a Mahomedan who was on his way to a large banquet being given to a notable Muslim missionary from India, and in the end found himself seated at the head table right beside the guest of honor. Attired in shorts, Gandhi hand-woven shirt and barefoot sandals, he marched and danced one night in the streets of Calcutta in an anniversary celebration of the Brahmo Samaj. He had a long talk with the poet Tagore, and for four days sat at the feet of Kshiti Mohan Sen, one of those great souls who sometimes hide themselves in a mantle of obscurity, who opened to him the treasures of Kabir and the songs of the other Sufi-like mystics who succeeded him, as probably no one else in the world could have done. Contact with this man, whose spirit is all light, helped to precipitate in Bill a spiritual crisis the exaltation of which brought him to a heightened and deepened realization of that which, more than her rivers or mountains, more than her temples or great men, India is – the realization that every man’s guru is within himself. And this realization not only freed him from the need to see Gandhi, he even felt commanded not to go to meet him, to remember rather and always that his guru (or, if you prefer, his God) and the answer to all his problems were within himself. This conviction impelled him to cancel all his arrangements with Gandhi and return to America and go on with his work. And this, accordingly, after taking four days to make sure, he finally did, his soul singing the while, “Thy guru is within thee,” and his spirit dancing in joy to the music of it. And in making this decision he always has felt that he did right.
After a short period for rest following his return from his trip (for physically it had proved rather a drain upon him), he went back to his little shanty located in a foreign quarter on the edge of Passaic for the final period of his life as a Franciscan. But within a year a son was born to him, and as this introduces a side of his experience which it would not have been easy to weave into the main theme of our story, it seems best to pause here while we bring this part of our narrative up to date.
The Franciscan sort of life to which Bill Simpson had dedicated himself had seemed to preclude any family responsibilities. And so, in spite of the fact that he was then in love with a girl who was as strong and idealistic in her way as he was in his, set celibacy before himself as his ideal. And yet, after two years, they married. How this came about he himself has recounted in his autobiographical pamphlet entitled A Spiritual Quest and Venture of Faith, concerning which John Haynes Holmes said, in publishing it, “We do not recall anything to compare with it in sheer sincerity and elevation of spirit since Tolstoy’s personal writings on the subject.” But in setting out together they pledged one another, in private and in public, that each must always be free to follow his highest light, even though in time it took them apart. After a year his wife, recognizing that she was not naturally Franciscan, withdrew to set up independently her little place in the hills of north Jersey, which Bill dreamed over with her and which, with his labor and his skill as carpenter and cabinet-maker, they transformed into the lovely place it became – for years the trysting-place of their closest friends and comrades. But even in these years their unity was deepest at those hours of common dedication in which they recognized that the highest they knew pointed them in ways that were different. They were nearest when outwardly they were apart.
By 1925 or 1926, largely under the influence of Carpenter and Whitman, Bill was coming to have grave doubts about the soundness of making celibacy an ideal. To do this was to stigmatize sex as evil, and really to despair of one of the most fundamental parts of human experience. His meeting Tenko Nishida of Tokyo, in 1927, on his way to India, to which we have already alluded, helped to settle his belief, which has only grown stronger since, in the essential sanctity of sex.
In consequence, some time after his return a son was born. In him both father and mother have ever recognized the lovely symbol of their closest unity.
There was no understanding beforehand as to how the child should be supported. Both were sure that it was right he should come, and seem to have trusted, simply, that the further steps would become clear as the time for taking them drew near.
And perhaps they did thus become clear, but probably they were not steps that were anticipated by either of them. For months before the baby came, and for months after, Bill left his work and stayed with his wife. During the entire first year or two he came finally, after one of the most costly struggles of his life, to the settled certainty that in the particular situation in which he found himself, to take the part of a husband and a father in the full and ordinary sense was quite incompatible with his chief work in life. Torn so long, as he had been, between two very strong pulls, the domestic and the creative, the personal and the social, he saw at last that he must again put his mission singly first, regardless of consequences, or – go to pieces. He must stake everything quite simply on the faith that even to his wife and son his chief gift was himself, his life; that apart from his integrity he was, and could be, nothing, even to them. . . . Since 1931 he and his wife have lived apart, and they have been virtually separated. And during this time, throughout which he has had to be almost wholly absorbed in working out a new orientation to life, he left support almost entirely to his wife.
Father and son see one another whenever circumstances permit. They were together three months during the summer of 1934 on the farm which Bill now has in the Catskill Mountains. To the little lad his father is “Dadda,” or often “Bill.” A friend who saw them together writes, “Between these two there is a rare camaraderie. It is evident every hour of the day how close they are to one another. Often, at the end of the evening meal, the little fellow would say, ‘Dadda, I want to sit on you.’ And Bill would tenderly fold him in his arms, pillowing the sleepy head on his chest. So they would have quiet communion for a little while before the boy was tucked into bed.”
At the present time Bill and his wife are cooperating in the care of the child. One feels that this experience has not yet come to a conclusion and that the final chapter about it cannot yet be written.
But now we must again pick up the main thread of our narrative.
Shortly after his return from India he went back to his shanty is Passaic to begin what was to prove to be his last effort, a very desperate one, to carry through the Franciscan sort of life on which he had set out eight years previously. But now all sorts of questionings and doubts began to press in upon him. He began to feel that the coat he had been trying to wear was not his coat. Whether it was too big for him or what, it did not fit him. It might have been Jesus’ coat, or St. Francis’ coat, but it was not his. Also, be became sure that if another man is lying in the gutter, even if he is being compelled to lie there, one does not necessarily help him best by lying down beside him. And again, it kept coming to him, “These people do not have ears for what I have to say. I do not belong here.” And at last he was too much shaken to carry on any longer, and found in the owner’s withdrawal of the further use of the lots on which his shanty had been built the final reason for leaving Passaic. But in his own soul he knew that it was the end of a period in his life, that he would never again try to live as he had tried to live there, that in the great idealistic venture of his youth, into which he had poured everything he had in him, he was beaten.
The period which followed was probably the most critical in Bill Simpson’s whole life thus far. He was exhausted and very much alone. He was in the worst of throes of finding and following faithfully his true path in relation to his wife and child. And just at this time when he most urgently needed inner certainty and strength, he was torn loose from all his old moorings. He found it necessary to question everything he had believed, even the ideals which had been dearest and the beliefs that had been surest. He could not stand the thought of mumbling old shibboleths in the face of disturbing facts, or of seeking peace, ostrich fashion, by burying his head and refusing to think. On the contrary, he was determined to find, if it existed, amid the shifting sands and seas of this universe some solid rock which nothing could overthrow. Only on such could he venture to build again. And out of all that he had believed and reached toward, whatever could be destroyed he believed he would be well-rid of. Therefore he fairly dipped himself into acid, and turned upon all his strongest positions the most murderous guns he could find – turned them upon the existence of God, on a moral order in the universe, the validity of the mystical experience, the Franciscan ideal, the teaching of Jesus, the ethics of non-violence and non-resistance, the principles of democracy, and the whole social philosophy based on belief in the equality of men, and of men and women. He passed, as it were, into solution, and for years he did not know whether anything would ever again crystallize into definite ideals and convictions. He did not know whether he would ever again have a way of his own, and see clearly in what direction it led, or find the strength to follow it if he saw it.
During this period, from about the fall of 1929 to the spring of 1932, he knocked about from one place to another, earning his way as a carpenter, securing as much time as he could for study and thought. At length he began to feel the need to live in the presence of the sea, or of great mountains, that he might have their vast quiet strength to draw upon. He longed to live close to the earth, away from the madness of cities, and to grow his own food with his own hands. And it was at this time that a friend, knowing of his need, gave him a farm near Prattsville, New York, high up in the Catskill Mountains. From then until the fall of 1933 he spent most of his time on this farm, in quiet work in the open air, and with his books, in constant thought. (For years his study was chiefly of Nietzsche, whom he read exhaustively, and whose essential message he came to believe agreed with that of Thoreau, and Whitman, and Blake, and Jesus.) What this place in the mountains has meant to him, no one will ever know but Bill Simpson. What would have happened without it even he does not know. For underneath the quiet surface of the simple life he led, a very desperate struggle went on, a struggle that he might become alive again, and well and whole; a struggle to hold himself together until a new sun rose upon him. It was the time when all his vital forces reached their lowest ebb. There were days when he wished only that he might go to sleep and be spared any awakening. It was a long cold dark night. But at last there were signs that the sun was coming, at first faint and doubtful, but then more and more unmistakable, and finally the sun himself, pouring his light over the hills, bringing ever clearer vision, sure convalescence, and a new joy. Until in the fall of 1933, after two and a half years of silence, he knew that he must again go out and speak – and again as before chiefly to young people.
At first glance what he has to say now is different from what he said five or ten years ago. And yet, if one looks more deeply, one sees that it is not so different after all. Certainly, he himself feels that he has in no sense turned his back on the message of love which bulked so large in his talks in the past; he only understands better now what true love is, has brought it into a more complete coordination with his thinking, and has carried it further. Without being less idealistic, he is more of a realist. He sees what as men we are and have to contend with in actually becoming what we have it in us to be. Also he feels now that there is nothing which could conceivably happen to him or be taken away from him that need disturb his certainty or cut off his inner source of strength.
Bill Simpson is not a social worker – nor a social reformer, at least not in any ordinary sense. He is a seeker of truth, and one who would fain follow whithersoever it may lead, no matter at what cost. He wants to see a nobler, grander species of man on this earth, and calls on men to spend themselves utterly for the realization of this end. As the first step in this direction he himself undertakes simply to incarnate his own vision in his own life. And he challenges other men to do the same thing, to find out what it is they themselves want most deeply, the profoundest most unappeasable yearning of their beings, and to set that free. He wants to see them stand forth before the world their simple naked selves, no matter what the cost to themselves or to others – to be out and out what most deeply they are.
It will be remembered that the greatest spiritual leaders from Jesus on down through the centuries have been accused of madness. Some there are who always claim that the sincere prophet is beside himself. One can disagree violently with Bill Simpson. One can feel that he has been unfair to his wife and home. One can quarrel with his ineffectiveness. But after all is said and done, one has to admire his faithfulness to the truth as he sees it. And who is there to say that America does not need this challenge? In an era when men are beginning to realize that the peoples of the world have bowed down and worshipped at the shrine of things; when it is becoming evident that materialistic standards result in a social kleptomania; and when at last all can see that capitalistic values are vanishing like snow in a spring thaw; who is there to say that Bill Simpson’s way of life does not have value for our time? When the son of a great religious leader in America, after listening to Bill Simpson, can say, “I have been more challenged by that man than by any other speaker I ever heard, even if I don’t agree with him,” it is a tribute which cannot be ignored.
The only values of life that are real, the only goals which are worth the cost of life itself are spiritual, not material. One cannot measure the value of a single life which is dedicated uncompromisingly, fearlessly, self-sacrificingly, to the highest truth which that individual is capable of apprehending. The philosophy of Bill Simpson as a whole is not mine. But I reverence a soul who is willing to risk his life in searching for truth, and who, as he finds it, so weaves it into the very fabric of his life, that he can say, in deed and in truth, “My life is my message.”
In closing this brief sketch I cannot perhaps do better than to quote the words in which Bill Simpson himself had recently summarized his own philosophy:
“I care about life. What I care about most is that I may find it, and that finding it I may arouse other men to a sense of the life which is in them also. I care that they should dig down to what most deeply they are, that without shame or apology or explanation but with heads thrown back, they should accept this, and avow it, and rest in it, as our fathers were taught to rest in the ‘will of God’ – which, psychologically speaking, is the same thing. I care that they should dare to stand forth before their fellows their naked selves. And this is enough. What happens to the Church, or Christianity, or Christian morality, or to ideas about God, really does not matter to me. Should they prove not to be a help but a hindrance to strong noble living, let them be sloughed off. After all, they never have been more than means.

But the end is life – rich, true, strong, varied, exalted life – on this earth.”

JEROME DAVIS

Yale University Divinity School,
New Haven, Connecticut,
December, 1934.