The Peace Mission Movement,
founded by the
Reverend MAJOR. J. DIVINE,
better known as
FATHER DIVINE,
at this time was well established in Philadelphia.
There was the Circle Mission Church, Home, and Training School of Pennsylvania, 764-772 South Broad Street in South Philadelphia; the Unity Mission Church, Home, and Training School, 907 North Forty-first Street in West Philadelphia; and the Nazareth Mission Church and Home, 1600-1614 West Oxford Street in North Philadelphia.
These were the churches at which religious services were held and which housed the members of the congregation on a donation-for-services-rendered basis, and offered low-cost meals to the public, as well as the services of a barber shop and dress shop.
Then there were the hotels in Philadelphia that offered accommodations, at rates comparable to the YMCA, to those of the general public who were willing to comply with the moral code of the Peace Mission Movement. These were the three-hundred-room Divine Lorraine Hotel at Broad Street and Fairmount Avenue, seven blocks north of City Hall, and the Divine Tracy Hotel near the University of Pennsylvania campus at Thirty-sixth and Chestnut Streets.
There were twelve sorority and fraternity homes and numerous small businesses.
The assessed valuation of the Philadelphia properties on which taxes were paid in 1957 was $885,000.
FATHER DIVINE moved HIS residence from New York City to Philadelphia in July of 1942 after an official delegation, headed by Judge Harry S. McDevitt, came to New York especially to extend to FATHER DIVINE the invitation to come Personally to the City of Brotherly Love and establish HIS Work and Mission there.
The powerful influence of FATHER DIVINE had been very evident world-wide and especially in New York State for a decade. HE became well-known to the public in 1931 while HE was carrying on HIS Work and Mission in Sayville, Long Island, New York. The influx of people into this small, quiet, fishing village alarmed and disturbed the townspeople. After their hostility precipitated a court case, FATHER DIVINE chose to move HIS residence to New York City, where HE could minister to the physical and spiritual needs of the masses that called upon HIM.
FATHER DIVINE changed the thinking and living of large numbers of people, so as to cultivate the climate of peace and goodwill between the races, make them industrious, independent, tax-paying citizens instead of consumers of tax dollars on the welfare rolls, and most stressfully to turn them from the selfishness, graft and greed of existentialism and the ruthless ideology of Socialism and Communism to the ideology of responsible, ardent patriots of America.
The appeal of FATHER DIVINE that initiated the Peace Mission Movement as an organization in the early thirties (see affidavits of John Lamb, Charles Calloway, Captain Millard J. Bloomer, John Henry Titus and Eugene Del Mar in Chapter 7) was as follows:
1. The love and benevolence of FATHER DIVINE supernaturally extended to whomever came within its radius;
2. The revelation to countless numbers that the long-awaited Second Coming of JESUS CHRIST was here and now in their time in the Person of FATHER DIVINE;
3. The simple living of the Teaching of JESUS CHRIST in all sincerity that automatically made Christianity practical and workable to solve individual, social, national and international problems.
This is what converted the masses to follow FATHER DIVINE.
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