At the close of the great Tabernacle meeting on February 22, at which the Christian Catholic Church was organized, Dr. Dowie foreshadowed his second great departure, when he said:
I hope to build a little city to be called Zion, and hope some day to stand upon the dome of a Zion temple to hold from 10,000 to 20,000 persons, and I hope one day to look abroad over the lovely city and to bring visitors to look upon its beauties, its homes, colleges, schools, etc., and say, "This is Zion." But should I stand there with snow-white hair, and perhaps with bent back, aged and nearing the end, may I never say, "This is Zion that I have built," but say, as I do today, as we start out upon the enterprise, "This is Zion that God has built."
He had, in fact, in the spring of 1895, made an attempt to obtain a location for such a city near Blue Island, on the outskirts of Chicago to the southwest, and had secured options on more than five hundred acres of land there, but the project was prematurely revealed and prices in that neighborhood at once rose to a point where purchase on any large scale was made impossible. The plan of a separate Zion was therefore suspended for a time, and the two years following the organization of the Christian Catholic Church were sufficiently occupied with the work of a spiritual leader, in the propagation of the faith and the outlining of educational work.
But this plan was not abandoned, for, in spite of the generous testimony of so public-spirited a city-official and so practical a business man as C. F. Gunther to the beneficent sanitary and moral effect of Zion Healing Home No. 4 in the ward where he resided, a divine healer could not be persona grata to a community whose inherited traditions concerning medicine and the isolation and proclamation of contagious diseases were so severely assaulted. In the beginning of 1899 a Land and Investment Association was announced, for the purpose of receiving subscriptions to be put to the purchase of a site for the new city. Its location had been previously intrusted to two experienced business men of Chicago—H. Worthington Judd, who had for years carried on the real-estate and loan business in the Englewood outlier of the city, and Daniel Sloan, business manager for
