THE GENESIS OF A MODERN PROPHET 315
doctrine and the practice of divine healing held their camp just across the way. In November of that year he took a more substantial house a short distance away in Edgerton Avenue, and about the same time announced that the work in Chicago would no longer be carried on as a branch of the International Divine Healing Association, but as a divine healing personal mission; that he found his attempt to carry on the work while allowing his fellow-believers to remain in the churches churches not only apathetic, but sometimes bitterly antipathetic was con- ducive to failure; and that the time was arriving for a separate organization.
In April, 1894, his Sunday services had become so well attended that he transferred them to the Central Music Hall down-town. In the next month he removed his home in to a more commodious house a few doors away in Edgerton Avenue, which soon became known as Divine Healing Home No. I. This designation was the logical conclusion of a sermon delivered July 29, 1894, on the subject "Salvation from Sin and Sickness," in which Dr. Dowie said :
The time has come to put divine healing on the aggressive and not on the
defensive I deny that this gate of divine healing has ever been closed,
or that the gifts of healing have been taken away.
At the same time the old home on Sixty-second Street was reopened as Home No. 2, and in the fall of the same year the old home in Edgerton Avenue, together with the house adjoin- ing, was reopened as Home No. 3. In the summer the Sunday meetings were transferred to Battery D, which proving unsuit- able, they were taken back in the fall to the old tabernacle until a larger one could be prepared on Stony Island Avenue, near Sixty-second Street. This new house of worship, which would seat fifteen hundred, was opened in June, 1895, as Tabernacle No. 2. At the same time Dr. Dowie severed all connection with the International Divine Healing Association. As he was the founder and the inspirer of this association, its various branches preferred reorganization as branches of the Chicago undertak- ing to the loss of their old leader, and, the center of influence having been transferred to the United States, this reorganization but formally recognized the fact.
