Life and career
William Schuler Harris grew up in a Pennsylvania minister’s family, but his first employment was as a picker in the coal mines. A congregation in Wilkes-Barre recommended him for theological study at Wyoming Seminary. He completed his training in 1887, the year his father died, and received a licence to preach the following March. After a short appointment in Missouri he returned to Pennsylvania.
Harris married Emma Sands and raised five children while serving a succession of congregations. His years in the pulpit spanned a bitter division and eventual reunion within the Evangelical church. When his books were appearing in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was also serving churches in and around Harrisburg. His friend and fellow minister Edwin Bergstresser encouraged him to persist with writing allegory.
Work and ideas
Mr. World and Miss Church-Member, published in 1900, casts the claims of religion and worldly success as a courtship. Sermons by the Devil reverses another expectation of a church audience by giving the tempter the pulpit. Harris credited Paul Krafft with the illustrations. The conceit allowed writer and artist to present recognisable temptations as examples of precisely the conduct a malignant preacher might recommend.
Life in a Thousand Worlds takes the argument beyond the Earth. Its traveller encounters societies whose arrangements of work and privilege reveal the consequences of particular moral choices. On Mars the cruelty of a class system becomes an object lesson. The book appeared in 1905, during Harris’s appointment at Park Street in Harrisburg. His work as a parish minister and his writing about imaginary societies belonged to the same years.
