THE MAN WHO DIED: A NARRATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE DUTCH FISHERMAN, LOU, AND HIS GROUP.

Early in spring, 1968, a man who had, in the last twenty years of his life, claimed to be immortal, died in a Belgian village. Lou was certainly not the only man on earth with such an exalted conception of himself. Had he not found so many people who believed every word he said and who wanted to live according to his teachings, Lou would probably have been only one more case for the psychiatrists studying the behavior of megalomaniacs. He believed to have penetrated to depths of insight where his fellow human beings could not go; yet, he always demonstrated a keen sense of humor which appealed to the common man. This quality shrouded his absolutism and what could be called mild intolerance. Looking at him in retrospect, it seems probable that he won his sell-assurance in the course of his gospel years. In a historical sense, he was the product of the small Protestant sects which had been formed by people for whom the Dutch Reformed Church was not orthodox enough. Between the two world wars there have been active dozens of these splinter-sects in the Netherlands, one of the biggest of those sects being the so called Pentecostal movement.