"Maddest of Good Men"

"A SHORT, EASY AND COMPREHENSIVE METHOD OF PRAYER. Translated from the German. And published for a farther Promotion, Knowledge and Benefit of Inward Prayer, By a Lover of Internal Devotion."

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 of him.

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 God.

"Inward prayer is the nourishment of the soul," he wrote. "For one may pray without forming or uttering any words, without consideration or speculation of the mind . . . yea, without knowing the least thing in a manner relative to the outward senses. And this prayer is the Prayer of the Heart, the unutterable prayer, the most perfect of which is the fruit of Love, and the less perfect a sensibility of our indigencies . . .

"This love draws the presence of God into us ... It is the same as with a person living in the air and drawing it in with his breath without thinking that by it he lives and breathes, because he does not reflect upon it ... In one word, the prayer of the heart may be performed at all times, though the heart cannot think or speak at all times . . .

"O let us pray! Let us pray! Prayer is our only safety."

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