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Word of that powerful happening mightily multiplied the fold. Moving to Harlem at the depth of the Depression, Father Divine used the alms of his flock to support countless missions that offered generous meals for 150 and immaculate rooms for $2 a week, organized a chain of employment agencies to provide jobs and Divine guidance for the needy. Said a white social worker in Harlem during those years: "Father Divine rendered an inestimable service, and he did it with genuine goodness."
Smiting the Wicked. The flock had its tribulations. In 1941 an apostate sheep sued Father Divine to recover a $3,937 contribution, and a New York court found in her favor. In a moment of godly wrath, he threatened to "evaporate for 1,900 years" but instead moved to Philadelphia. He never forgave New York. Later, in the midst of a dry spell in 1950, he prophesied: "I will dry up your rivers and I will dry up your streams. This water shortage in New York City has been just a slight sketch and reflection of what I will do!" He lived to see his words come true with the drought of 1965.
Smiting the wicked became a habit. During World War II, he wrote a letter warning Japanese Emperor Hirohito: "Surrender or be totally annihilated and become extinct." Three months later the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. As Father Divine put it: "Things just don't happen. Things happen just."
The peak of ecstasy in the Kingdom of Peace came in 1949, when the evangelist made public his marriage to Edna Rose Ritchings, the comely 21-year-old daughter of a white Vancouver florist, his "Spotless Virgin Bride." The original Mother Divine, a Negro, had died six years earlier; her spirit, Father Divine explained, had passed into Rose's shapely form.
In recent years Father Divine had suffered from arteriosclerosis, and once-frequent pronouncements were seldom heard. But then, as one said: "Father has said everything there is to say about everything." He had, indeed. He even defined the Divinity: "God 'is repersonified and rematerialized. He rematerialates and he is rematerializatable. He repersonificates and he repersonifitizes."
Few among his followers wept over Father Divine's death last week. They knew well that he had only derepersonifitized, to rematerialate—who knows?—in 1,900 years.