Henry Wentworth Monk

He showed an inclination towards reading and writing at a young age, and when he was seven years old, his father scraped together enough funds to send him to Christ's Hospital in England to be formally educated.

A pivotal moment would come, when, in 1852, he decided he had discovered the "correct" interpretation of the Book of Revelation, after which he took a vow of poverty and left for Palestine as soon as his meager funds would allow.

He proposed marriage to a woman from March Settlement named Anna Greene, but was rejected (prompting his second extended trip to Palestine).

Monk was convinced that what Revelation was foretelling was the establishment of Palestine as a sort of global capital, which would serve two functions: firstly, a neutral ground where nations could settle their disputes via a permanent international tribunal, and secondly, a safe haven for the beleaguered Jews of the world.

He believed that the "rod of iron" mentioned was the international tribunal, and the "great light" that would "overwhelm Christendom" was the return of the Jews to Palestine, and its establishment as a world capital.

At the school, this type of behavior was supposedly not uncommon and, combined with the heavily religious curriculum, it produced many boys that harbored mystic Christian beliefs.

Monk was definitely one of them, and it would influence him throughout his life, most prominently in his belief in a divine event that brings an end to global suffering: the coming of the Kingdom of God.

He wrote that the Kingdom of God's coming would "immediately have the effect of arousing the millions of poverty-stricken Jews in Russia, and elsewhere, so that they would realize that the time has now arrived at last for the fulfillment of Divinely inspired prophecies in reference to the ultimate restoration of their own country."

During his stay in London, Monk had been greatly impressed with the results of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the fields of transportation and communication (he would later claim that the Bible had predicted the railroad and the telegraph).

For example, in 1872, a Board of Arbitration was convened in Switzerland to settle a dispute between the United States and Britain over losses of merchant ships during the American Civil War.

In some cases, he merely pointed out the poverty so many European Jews lived in, the antisemitism they had to endure on a daily basis, and the general injustices visited upon them in their countries of residence.

He also invoked moral responsibility, suggesting many times that in restoring the Jews to Palestine, the nations of Europe and North America would be atoning for all the injustices they had perpetrated on the Jewish people over the centuries.

As early as the 1870s, Monk wrote of the need for a modern port in Haifa and large-scale land reclamation if Palestine were to be settled by large numbers of Jews.

The closest he came to any sort of practical success was on March 23, 1896, when one George Moffat, an MP from Dalhousie, New Brunswick, put forth a motion (in response to Monk's copious letter to him and his colleagues) in Parliament to discuss Canadian sponsorship of an international tribunal, convened in Jerusalem.

Also, Abraham Lincoln, not long after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, showed sympathy for Monk's pleas to end the suffering of Russian and Turkish Jews by "restoring" them to Palestine.

In adult life, Monk demonstrated a general lack of perspective, never really abandoned his rather blind idealism, and, at times, had ideas that bordered on the insane.