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168 page printout
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
**** ****
This file, its printout, or copies of either
are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
**** ****
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
A Study of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a
Shield to Privilege
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
**** ****
Copyright, 1918 by Upton Sinclair
VANGUARD PRINTINGS
First -- January, 1927
Second -- April, 1927
Third -- June, 1928
**** ****
OFFERTORY
This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new
point of view -- as a Source of Income and a Shield to
Privilege. I have searched the libraries through, and
no one has done it before. If you read it, you will see
that it needed to be done. It has meant 25 years of
thought and a year of investigation. It contains the
facts.
I am giving my time and energy, in return for one
thing which you may give me -- the joy of speaking a
true word and getting it heard.
Note to fifth edition, 1926: "The Profits of
Religion" was first published early in 1917. The
present edition represents a sale of over 60,000
copies, without counting a dozen translations. In this
edition a few errors have been corrected, but otherwise
the book has not been changed. The reader will
understand that references to the World War are of the
date 1917, prior to America's enterance.
This book is the first of a series of volumes, an
economic interpertation of culture, which now includes
"The Brass Check," "The Goose-step," "The Goslings,"
and "Mammonart."
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
1
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................ 4
Bootstrap-Lifting ........................................... 4
Religion .................................................... 7
BOOK ONE -- page 8
The Church of the Conquerors
The Priestly Lie ............................................. 8
The Great Fear .............................................. 10
Slave Regina ................................................ 12
Fresh Meat .................................................. 13
Priestly Empires ............................................ 14
Prayer-Wheels ............................................... 16
The Holy Inquisition ........................................ 19
Hell-Fire ................................................... 21
BOOK TWO -- page 23
The Church of Good Society
The Rainmakers .............................................. 23
The Babylonian Fire-God ..................................... 25
The Medican-Men ............................................. 26
The Canonization of Incompetence ............................ 28
Gibson's Preservative ....................................... 29
The Elders .................................................. 31
Church History .............................................. 34
Land and Livings ............................................ 35
Graft in Tail ............................................... 37
Bishops and Beer ............................................ 38
Anglicanism and Alcohl ...................................... 40
Dead Cats ................................................... 42
Suffer Little Children ...................................... 44
The Court Circular .......................................... 47
Horn-Blowing ................................................ 48
Trinty Corpretation ......................................... 50
Spiritual Interpretation .................................... 52
BOOK THREE -- page 54
The Church of the Servant-Girls
Charity ..................................................... 55
God's Armor ................................................. 57
Thanksgiving ................................................ 60
The Holy Roman Empire ....................................... 61
Temporal Power .............................................. 63
Knights of Slavery .......................................... 64
Priests and Police .......................................... 67
The Church Militant ......................................... 68
The Church Triumphant ....................................... 70
God in the Schools .......................................... 72
The Menace .................................................. 73
King Coal ................................................... 75
The Unholy Alliance ......................................... 78
Secret Service .............................................. 79
Tax Exemption ............................................... 80
"Holy History" .............................................. 82
Das Centrum ................................................. 84
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
BOOK FOUR -- page 85
The Church of the Slaves
Face of Caesar .............................................. 86
Deutschland uber Alles ...................................... 87
Der Tag ..................................................... 88
King Cotton ................................................. 90
Witches and Women ........................................... 91
Moth and Rust ............................................... 93
To Lyman Abbott ............................................. 95
The Octopus ................................................. 97
The Industral Shelley ....................................... 98
The Outlook for Graft ...................................... 101
Clerical Camouflage ........................................ 103
The Jungle ................................................. 105
BOOK FIVE -- page 107
The Church of the Merchants
The Head Merchant .......................................... 107
"Herr Beeble" .............................................. 108
holy oil ................................................... 110
Rhetorical Black-Hanging ................................... 113
The Great American Fraud ................................... 114
Riches in Glory ............................................ 117
Captivating Ideals ......................................... 118
Spook Hunting .............................................. 120
Running the Rapids ......................................... 121
Birth Control .............................................. 123
Sheep ...................................................... 124
BOOK SIX -- page 126
The Church of the Quacks
Tabula Rasa ................................................ 126
The Book of Mormon ......................................... 127
Holy Rolling ............................................... 129
Bible Prophecy ............................................. 131
Koreshanity ................................................ 132
Mazdazan ................................................... 134
Black Magic ................................................ 135
Mental malpractice ......................................... 137
Science and Wealth ......................................... 139
New Nonsense ............................................... 141
"Dollars Want Me" .......................................... 143
Spirtual Financering ....................................... 145
The Graft of Grace ......................................... 147
BOOK SEVEN -- page 149
The Church of the Social Revolution
Christ and Caesar .......................................... 150
Locust and Wild Honey ...................................... 151
Mother Earth ............................................... 153
The Soap Box ............................................... 155
The Church Machine ......................................... 157
The Church Redeemed ........................................ 159
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
The Desire of Nations ...................................... 161
The Knowable ............................................... 162
Nature's insurgent Son ..................................... 163
The New Morality ........................................... 165
Enovi ...................................................... 167
**** ****
INTRODUCTORY
BOOTSTRAP-LIFTING
Bootstrap-lifting? says the reader.
It is a vision I have seen: upon a vast plain, men and women
are gathered in dense throngs, crouched in uncomfortable and
distressing positions, their fingers hooked in the straps of
their boots. They are engaged in lifting themselves; tugging and
straining until they grow red in the face, exhausted. The
perspiration streams from their foreheads, they show every
symptom of distress; the eyes of all are fixed, not upon each
other, nor upon their bootstraps, but upon the sky above. There
is a look of rapture upon their faces, and now and then, amid
grunts and groans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.
I approach one and say to him, "Friend, what is this you are
doing?"
He answers, without pausing to glance at me, "I am
performing spiritual exercises. See how I rise?"
"But," I say, "you are not rising at all!"
Whereat he becomes instantly angry. "You are one of the
scoffers!"
"But friend," I protest, "don't you feel the earth under
your feet?"
"You are a materialist!"
"But, friend, I can see --"
"You are without spiritual vision!"
And so I move on among the sweating and groaning hordes.
Being of a sympathetic turn of mind, I cannot help being
distressed by the prevalence of this singular practice among so
large a portion of the human race. How, is it possible that none
of them should suspect the futility of their procedure? Or can it
really be that I am uncomprehending? That in some way they are
actually getting off the ground, or about to get off the ground?
Then I observe a new phenomenon: a man gliding here and
there among the bootstrap-lifters, approaching from the rear and
slipping his hands into their pockets. The position of the
spiritual exercisers greatly facilitates his work; their eyes
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
being cast up to heaven, they do not see him, their thoughts
being occupied, they do not heed him; he goes through their
pockets at leisure, and transfers the contents to a bag he
carries, and then moves on to the next victim. I watch him for a
while, and finally approach and ask, "What are you doing, sir?"
He answers, "I am picking pockets."
"Oh," I say, puzzled by his matter-of-course tone. "But -- I
beg pardon -- are you a thief?"
"Oh, no," he answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the
Wholesale Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."
"I see," I reply. "And these people let you --"
"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."
I turn, following his glance, and observe another person
approaching -- a stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple
robes, moving with slow dignity. He gazes about at the sweating
and grunting hordes; now and then he stops and lifts his hand in
a gesture of benediction, and proclaims in rolling tones,
"Blessed are the Bootstrap-lifters, for theirs is the kingdom of
Heaven." He moves on, and after a bit stops and announces again,
"Man doth not live. by bread alone, but by every word that cometh
out of the mouth of the prophets and priests of Bootstrap-
lifting.
Watching a while longer, I see this majestic one approach
the agent of the Wholesale Pickpocket's, Association. The agent
greets him as a friend, and proceeds to transfer to the pockets
of his capacious robes a generous share of the loot which he has
collected. The majestic one does not cringe, nor does he make any
effort to hide what is going on. On the contrary he cries aloud,
"It is more blessed to give than to receive!" And again he cries,
"The laborer is worthy of his hire!" And a third time he cries,
yet more sternly, "Render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar's!" And the Bootstrap-lifters pause long enough to answer:
"Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this
law!" Then they renew their straining and tugging.
I step up, and in timid tones begin, "Reverend sir, will you
tell me by what right you take this wealth?"
Instantly a frown comes upon his face, and he cries in a
voice of thunder, "Blasphemer!" And all the Bootstrap-lifters
desist from their lifting, and menace me with furious looks.
There is a general call for a policeman of the Wholesale
Pickpockets' Association; and so I fall silent, and slink away in
the throng, and thereafter keep my thoughts to myself.
Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange
and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-
lifting impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on
foot; a long time ago -- no man can recall how far back -- the
Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with
spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best
essays in support of the practice. Now their propaganda is
everywhere triumphant, -- and year by year we see an increase in
the rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the
cult. The ground is covered with stately temples of various
designs, all of which I am told are consecrated to Bootstrap-
lifting, I come to where a group of people are occupied in laying
the corner-stone of a new white marble structure; I inquire and
am informed it is the First Church of Bootstrap-lifters,
Scientist. As I stand watching, a card is handed to me, informing
me that a lady will do my Bootstrap-lifting at five dollars per
lift.
I go on to another building, which I am told is a library
containing volumes in defense of the Bootstrap-lifters, published
under the auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets. I enter, and
find endless vistas of shelves, also several thousand current
magazines and papers. I consult these -- for my legs have given
out in the effort to visit and inspect all phases of the
Bootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that hardly a week passes
that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if
I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and
ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies,
the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting. There
are the Holy Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests are fed by
Transubstantiation; the established Anglican Bootstrap-lifters,
whose priests live by "livings"; the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters,
whose preachers practice total immersion in Standard Oil. There
are Yogi Bootstrap-lifters with flowing robes of yellow silk;
Theosophist Bootstrap-lifters with green and purple auras; Mormon
Bootstrap-lifters, Mazdaznan Bootstrap-lifters, Spiritualist and
Spirit-Fruit, Millerite and Dowieite, Holy Roller and Holy
Jumper, Comd-to-glory Negro, Billy Sunday base-ball and Salvation
Army bassdrum Bootstrap-lifters. There are the thousand varieties
of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic and
transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme Bootstrap-
lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters with half
a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift" and
"optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden
Bootstrap-litters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar
per volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian
professors of collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at
several thousand dollars per year each. There are the Nietz-
schean Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves to the Superman,
and the art-for-art's-sake, neo-Pagan Bootstrap-lifters, who lift
themselves down to the Ape.
Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of
all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of
Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic
that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and
less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and
give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when
the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a
year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school
Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the
priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect,
many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not
reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is
to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation,
that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply
their immemorial role with less chance of interference.
RELIGION
The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to
impugn the sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul.
No; I admit the honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All
I ask of the preacher is that he shall make an effort to practice
his doctrine. Let him be tormented like Don Quixote; let him go
mad like Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar and be devoured
by worms like Simeon Stylites -- on these terms I grant to any
dreamer the right to hold himself above economic science.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange
motions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry,
and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he
is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And
this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we
to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use
of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see
asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers
of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become
hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind
twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What
I say is -- Bootstrap-lifting!
It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two
senses, one good and the other bad. Morality means the will to
righteousness, or it means Anthony Comstock; democracy means the
rule of the people, or it mean's Tammany Hall. And so it is with
the word "Religion." In its true sense Religion is the most
fundamental of the soul's impulses, the impassioned love of life,
the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and further
it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that
sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very
nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing
it, I would make clear that I hold it beyond assailment.
But we are denied the pleasure of using the word in that
honest sense, because of another Which has been given to it. To
the ordinary man "Religion" means, not the soul's longing for
growth, the "hunger and thirst after righteousness," but certain
forms in which this hunger has manifested itself in history, and
prevails today throughout the world; that is to say, institutions
having fixed dogmas and "revelations," creeds and rituals, with
an administering caste claiming supernatural sanction. By such
institutions the moral strivings of the race, the affections of
childhood and the aspirations of youth are made the prerogatives
and stock in trade of ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the
thesis of this book that "Religion" in this sense is a source of
Income to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of
oppression and exploitation.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
If by my jesting at "Bootstrap-lifting" I have wounded some
dear prejudice of the reader, let me endeavor to speak in a more
persuasive voice. I am a man who has suffered, and has seen the
suffering of others; I have devoted my life to analyzing the
causes of the suffering, to find out if it be necessary and
foreordained, or if by any chance there be a way of escape for
future generations. I have found that the latter is the case; the
suffering is needless, it can with ease and certainty be banished
from the earth. I know this with the knowledge of science -- in
the same way that the navigator of a ship knows his latitude and
longitude, and the point of the compass to which he must steer in
order to reach the port.
Come, reader, let us put aside prejudice, and the terrors of
the cults of the unknown. The power which made us has given us a
mind, and the impulse to its use; let us see what can be done
with it to rid the earth of its ancient evils. And do not be
troubled if at the outset this book seems to be entirely
"destructive." I assure you that I am no crude materialist, I am
not so shallow as to imagine that our race will be satisfied with
a barren rationalism. I know that the old symbols came out of the
heart of man because they corresponded to certain needs of the
heart of man. I know that new symbols will 'be found,
corresponding more exactly to the needs of our time. If here I
set to work to tear down an old and ramshackled building, it is
not from blind destructfulness, but as an architect who means to
put a new and sounder structure in its place. Before we part
company, I shall submit the blue print of that new home of the
spirit.
BOOK ONE
THE CHURCH OF THE CONQUERORS
I saw the Conquerors riding by
With trampling feet of horse and men:
Empire on empire like the tide
Flooded the world and ebbed again;
A thousand banners caught the sun,
And cities smoked along the plain,
And laden down with silk and gold
And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.
Kemp
THE PRIESTLY LIE
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of
lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no
conception of natual forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this
event as the act of an individual intelligence. Today we read
about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and
Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all
these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight
of the fact that they were originally meant with entire
seriousness -- that not merely did ancient man believe in them,
but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence
was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who
slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and
night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the
phenomena, it was the science of early times.
Men imagined supernatural powers such as they could
comprehend. If the lightning god destroyed a hut, obviously it
must be because the owner of the hut had given offense; so the
owner must placate the god, using those means which would be
effective in the quarrels of men -- presents of roast meats and
honey and fresh fruits, of wine and gold and jewels and women,
accompanied by friendly words and gestures of submission. And
when in spite of all things the natural evil did not cease, when
the people continued to die of pestilence, then came the
opportunity of hysterical or ambitious persons to discover new
ways of penetrating the mind of the god. There would be dreamers
of dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of
the entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds;
there would be burning bushes and stone tables on mountain-tops,
and inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands.
There would arise special castes of men and women, learned in
these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally
emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves
aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and
entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles
in ways favorable to themselves and their order; they would
proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking
with him in the night-time, receiving his messages and angels,
acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in dealing
punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of
laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes to
distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to
impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects,
architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and
dancing, candles and incense and bells and gongs:
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full-voiced choir below,
In service high and anthem clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and complicated
forms, the Priestly Lie. There are a score of great religions in
the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its
priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens
and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundrbds of
milliohs of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with
more or less heartiness -- and each is a mighty fortress of
Graft.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
There will be few readers of this book who have not been
brought up under the spell of some one of these systems of
Supernaturalism; who have not been taught to speak with respect
of some particular priestly order, to thrill with awe at some
particular sacred rite, to seek respite from earthly woes in some
particular ceremonial spell. These things are woven into our very
fibre in childhood; they are sanctified by memories of joys and
griefs, they are confused with spiritual struggles, they become
part of all that is most vital in our lives. The reader who
wishes to emancipate himself from their thrall will do well to
begin with a study of the beliefs and practices of other sects
than his own -- a field where he is free to observe and examine
without fear of sacrilege. Let him look into Madame Blavatsky's
"Secret Doctrine," or her "Isis Unveiled" -- encyclopedias of the
fantastic inventions which terror and longing have wrung out of
the tortured soul of man. Here are mysteries and solemnities,
charms and spells, illuminations and transmigrations, angels and
demons, guides, controls and masters -- all of wnich it is
permissible to refuse to support with gifts. Let the reader then
go to James Freeman Clarke's "Ten Great Religions," and realize
how many billions of humans have lived and died in the solemn
certainty that their welfare on earth and in heaven depended upon
their accepting certain ideas and practicing certain rites, all
mutually exclusive and incompatible, each damning the others and
the followers of the others. So gradually the realization will
come to him that the test of a doctrine about life and its
welfare must be something else than the fact that one was born to
it.
THE GREAT FEAR
It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant,
nor that his ignorance made him a prey to dread. The traces of
his mental suffering will inspire in us only pity and sympathy;
for Nature is a grim school-mistress, and not all her lessons
have yet been learned. We have a right to scorn and anger only
when we see this dread being diverted from its true function, a
stimulus to a Search for knowledge, and made into a means of
clamping down ignorance upon the mind of the race. That this has
been the deliberate policy of institutionalized Religion no
candid student can deny.
The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion,
ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed
by it -- and that it cultivates the source from which its
nourishment is derived. "The fear of divine anger," says Prof.
Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent through the entire religious
literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In the words of Tabi-utul-
Enlil, King of ancient Nippur:
Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god is full of mystery -- who can understand it?
He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.
In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the
Hebrew scriptures: the only difference being that the Hebrews
combined all their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the
thousand wives; and the Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear
are with Him," cries Job. "How then can any man be just before
God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? Behold, even
the moon hath no brightness, and the stars are not pure in His
sight: How much less man, that is a worm? And the son of man,
which is a worm?" He goes on, in his lyrical rapture, "Sheol is
naked before Him, and Destruction bath no covering. ... The
pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at His rebuke. ...
The thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is
some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter the
fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical
perversion of the facts of life, and a preparation of the mind
for the seeds of Priestcraft.
The Book of Job has been called a "Wisdom-drama": and what
is the denouncement of this drama, what is ancient Hebrew
wisdom's last word about life? "Wherefore I abbor myself," says
Job, "and repent in dust and ashes." The poor fellow has done
nothing; we have been told at the beginning that he "was perfect
and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." But the
Sabeans and the Chaldeans rob him, and "the fire of God" falls
from heaven and burns up his sheep and his servants, and "a great
wind from the wilderness" kills his sons and daughters, and then
his body becomes covered with boils -- a phenomenon caused in
part by worry, and the consequent nervous indigestion, but mainly
by excess of starch and deficiency of mineral salts in the diet.
Job, however, has never heard of the fasting cure for disease,
and so he takes him a potsherd to scrape himself withal, and he
sits among the ashes -- a highly unsanitary procedure enforced by
his religious ritual. So naturally he feels like a worm, and
abhors himself, and cries out: "I know that Thou canst do all
things, and that no purpose of Thine can be restrained." By which
utter, unreasoning humility he succeeds in appeasing the Great
Fear and his friends make a sacrifice of seven bullocks and seven
rams -- a feast for a whole temple-ful of priests -- and then
"the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had 'before. ... And after
this Job lived an hundred and forty-years, and saw his sons and
his sons' sons, even four generations."
You do not have to look very deeply into this "Wisdom-drama"
to find out whose wisdom it is. Confess your own ignorance and
your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the
sacred Caste, 'the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you
pardon and respite -- in exchange for fresh meat. Here are verses
from a psalm of the ancient Babylonians, which "heathen" chant is
identical in spirit and purpose with the utterances of Job:
The Sin that I have wrought, I know not;
The unclean that I have eaten, I know not;
The offense into which I have walked, I know not. ...
The lord, in the wrath of his heart, hath regarded me;
The god, in the anger of his heart, hath surrounded me;
A goddess, known or unknown, hath wrought me sorrow. ...
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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I sought for help, but no one took my hand;
I wept, but no one harkened to me.
The feet of my goddess I kiss, I touch them;
To the god, known or unknown, I utter my prayer;
O god, known or unknown, turn thy countenance, accept my
sacrifice;
O goddess, known or unknown, look mercifully on me, accept
my sacrifice!
SALVE REGINA!
And now let the reader leap three thousand years of human
history, of toil and triumph of the intellect of man; and instead
of a Hebrew manuscript or a Babylonian brick there confronts him
a little publication, printed on a modern rotary press in the
capital of the United States of America, bearing the date of
October, 1914, and the title "Salve Regina." In it we find "a
beautiful prayer," composed by the late cardinal Rampolla; we are
told that "Plus X attached to it an indulgence of 100 days, each
time it is piously recited, applicalble to the souls in
purgatory."
O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, cast a glance from Heaven,
where thou sittest as Queen, upon this poor sinner, your servant.
Thou conscious of his unworthiness.... he blesses and exalts thee
from his whole heart as the purest, the most beautiful and the
most holy of creatures. He blesses they holy name. He blesses thy
sublime prerogatives as real Mother of God, ever Virgin,
conceived without stain of sin, as co-Redemptress of the human
race. He blesses the Eternal Father who chose you, etc. He
blesses the Incarnate Word, etc. He blesses the Divine Spirit,
etc. He blesses, exalts and thanks the most august Trinity, etc.
O Virgin, holy and merciful ... be pleased to accept this little
homage of your servant, and obtain for him also from your divine
Son pardon for his sins, Amen.
And then, looking more closely, we discover the purpose of
this "beautiful prayer," and of the neat little paper which
prints it. "Salve Regina" is raising funds for the "National
Shrine of the Immaculate Conception," a home for more priests,
and Catholic ladies who desire to collect for it may receive
little books which they are requested to return within three
months. Pius X writes a letter of warm endorsement, and sets an
example by giving four hundred dollars "out of his poverty" --
or, to be more precise, out of the poverty of the pitiful
peasantry of Italy. There is included in the paper a form of
bequest for "devoted clients of Our Blessed Mother," and at the
top of the editorial page the most alluring of all baits for the
loving hearts of the flock -- that the names of deceased
relatives and friends may be written in the collection books and
will be transferred to the records of the Shrine, and these
persons "will share in all its spiritual benefits." In the day's
of Job it was with threats of boils and poverty that the Priestly
lie maintained itself; but in the case of this blackest of all
Terrors, transplanted to our free Republic from the heart of the
Dark Ages, the wretched victims see before their eyes the glare
of flames, and hear the shrieks of their loved ones writhing in
torment through uncounted ages and eternities.
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FRESH MEAT
In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I
sought earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but
candor compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the
pig and the bear -- he was vegetarian when he could not help it.
The advocates of the reform insist that meat as a diet causes
muddy brains and dulled nerves; but you would certainly never
suspect this from a study of history. What you find in history is
that all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the strongest
and cleverest get it. Everywhere you find the subject classes
living in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh
they rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of liberty,
our millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and geese and
turkeys, and hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but
save everything for the summer-boarder or the buyer from the
city. It would not be too much to say of the cultural records of
early man that they all have to do, directly or indirectly, with
the reserving of fresh meat to the masters. In J.T. Trowbridge's
cheerful tale of the adventures of Captain Seaborn, we are told
by the cannibal priest how idol-worship has ameliorated the
morals of the tribe --
For though some warriors of renown
Continue anthropopbagous,
'Tis rare that human flesh goes down
The low-caste man's aesophagus!
I suspect that we should have to go back to the days of the
cave-man to find the first lover of the flesh-pots who put a
taboo upon meat, and promised supernatural favors to all who
would exercise self-control, and instead of consuming their meat
themselves, would bring it and lay it upon the sacred griddle, or
altar, where the god might come in the night-time and partake of
it. Certainly, at any rate, there are few religions of record in
which such devices do not appear. The early laws of the Hebrews
are more concerned with delicatessen for the priests than with
any other subject whatever. Here, for example, is the way to make
a Nazarite:
He shall offer his offering up to the Lord, one he lamb of
the first year without blemish for a burnt offering, and one ewe
lamb of the first year without blemish for a sin offering, and
one ram without blemish for peace offerings, and a basket of
unleavened bread, cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, and
wafers of unleavened bread anointed with oil, and their meat
offerings.
And the law goes on to instruct the priests to take certain
choice parts and "wave them for a wave offering before the Lord:
this is holy for the priest." What was done with the other
portions we are not told; but earlier in this same "Book of
Numbers" we 'find the general law that
Every offering of all the holy things of the children of
Israel, which they bring unto the priest, shall be his. And every
man's hallowed things shall be his: whatsoever any man giveth to
the priest, it shall be his.
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In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the
priests of Ceylon first present the gifts to the god, and then
eat them. Among the Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must
bring four new robes to the priests; if they do this, the priests
wear the robes; if they fail to do it, the dead man appears naked
before the judgment-throne. The devotees are instructed that "he
who performs this rite succeeds in both worlds, and obtains a
firm footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists, the followers
give alms to the monks, and are told specifically what advantages
will thereby accrue to them. In the Aitareyo Brahmanam of the
Rig-Veda we read
He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is
born from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the
nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge),
the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and is absorbed into
the deity.
Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the
hoama, or juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a
god. Among the Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the
sacred juice is that of the grape, and the priest is not allowed
to throw away what is left of it, but is ordered "reverently to
consume it." In as much as the priest is the sole judge of how
much good sherry wine he shall consecrate previous to the
ceremony, it is to be expected that the priests of this cult
should be lukewarm towards the prohibition movement, and should
piously refuse to administer their sacrament with unfermented and
uninteresting grape-juice.
PRIESTLY EMPIRES
In every human society of which we have record there has
been one class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the
"hewers of wood and drawers of water"; and there has been
another, much smaller, class which has done the directing. To
belong to this latter class is to work also, but with the head
instead of the hands; it is also to enjoy the good things of
life, to live in the best houses, to eat the best food, to have
choice of the most desirable women; it is to have leisure to
cultivate the mind and appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and
distinctions, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and
tastes, to be revered and regarded -- in short, to have Power.
How to get this Power and to hold it has been the first object of
the thoughts of men from the beginning of time.
The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is
uncertain, for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed
with it. It will be found that empires based upon military force
alone, however cruel they may be, are not permanent, and
therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when
resistance is paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that the
race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds and
even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all priestly
empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the
priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.
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Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:
Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the
Aztecs.
Such was the crafty policy of the priests, who, by
reserving to themselves the business of instruction, were
enabled to mould the young and plastic mind according to
their own wills, and to train it early to implicit reverence
for religion and its ministers.
The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of
this teaching:
To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed
for the maintenance of the priests. The estates were
augmented by the policy or devotion of successive princes,
until, under the last Montezuma, they had swollen to an
enormous extent, and covered every district of the empire.
And this concerning the frightful system of human
sacrifices, whereby the priestly caste maintained the prestige of
its divinities:
At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486,
the prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the
purpose, were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two
miles long. The ceremony consumed several days, and seventy
thousand captives are said to have perished at the shrine of this
terrible deity.
The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of
the priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:
The ultimate sources of all law being the deity
himself, the original legal tribunal was the place where the
image or symbol of the god stood. A legal decision was an
oracle or omen, indicative of the will of the god. The power
thus lodged in the priests of Babylonia and Assyria was
enormous. They virtually held in their hands the life and
death of the people.
And of the business side of this vast religious system:
The temples were the natural depositories of the legal
archives, which in the course of centuries grew to veritably
enormous proportions' Records were made of all decisions;
the facts were set forth, and duly attested by witnesses.
Business and marriage contracts, loans and deeds of sale
were in like manner drawn up in the presence of official
scribes, who were also priests. In this way all commercial
transactions received the written sanction of the religious
organization. The temples themselves -- at least in the
large centers -- entered into business relations with the
populace. In order to maintain the large household
represented by such an organization as that of the temple of
Enlil of Nippur, that of Ningirsu at Lagasb, that of Marduk
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at Babylon, or that of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings of
land were required which, cultivated by agents for the
priests, or farmed out with stipulations for a gobdly share
of the produce, secured an income for the maintenance of the
temple officials. The enterprise of the temples was expanded
to the furnishing of loans at interest -- in later periods,
at 20 percent -- to barter in slaves, to dealings in lands,
besides engaging labor for work of all kinds directly needed
for the temples. A large quantity of the business documents
found in the temple archives are concerned with the business
affairs of the temple, and we are justified in including the
temples in the large centers as among the most important
business institutions of the country. In financial or
monetary transactions the position of the temples was not
unlike that of national banks....
And so on. We may venture the guess that the learned
professor said more in that last sentence than he himself
intended, for his lectures were delivered in that temple of
plutocracy, the University of Pennsylvania, and paid out of an
endowment which specifies that "all polemical subjects shall be
positively excluded!"
PRAYER-WHEELS
These priestly empires exist in the world today. If we wish
to find them we have only to ask ourselves: What countries are
making no contribution to the progress of the race? What
countries have nothing to give us, whether in art, science, or
industry?
For example, Gervaise tells us of the Talapoins, or priests
of Siam, that "they are exempted from all public charges, they
salute nobody, while everybody prostrates himself before them.
They are maintained at the public expense." In the same way we
read of the Negroes of the Caribbean islands that "their priests
and priestesses exercise an almost unlimited power." Miss
Kingsley, in her "West African Studies," tells us that if we
desire to understand the institutions of this district, we must
study the native's religion.
For his religion has so firm a grasp upon his mind that
it influences everything he does. It is not a thing apart,
as the religion of the Europeans is at times. The African
cannot say, "Oh, that is all right from a religious point of
view, but one must be practical." To be practical, to get on
in the world, to live the day and night through, he must be
right in the religious point of view, namely, must be on
working terms with the great world of spirits around him.
The knowledge of this spirit world constitutes the religion
of the African, and his customs and ceremonies arise from
his idea of the best way to influence it.
Or consider Henry Savage Landor's account of Thibet:
In Lhassa and many other sacred places fanatical
pilgrims make circumambulations, sometimes for miles and
miles, and for days together, covering the entire distance
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lying flat upon their bodies. ... From the ceiling of the
temple hang hundreds of long strips, katas, offered by
pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so many flying prayers
when hung up -- for mechanical praying in every way is
prominent in Thibet. ... Thus instead of having to learn by
heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to
stuff the entire prayer-book into a prayer-wheel, and
revolze it while repeating as fast as you can four words
meaning, "O God, the gem emerging from the lotus-flower."
... The attention of the pilgrims is directed to a large
box, or often a big bowl, where they may deposit whatever
offerings they can spare, and it must be said that their
religious ideas are so strongly developed that they will
dispose of a considerable portion of their money in this
fashion. ... The Lamas are very clever in many ways, and
have a great hold over the entire country. They are ninety
percent of them unscrupulous scamps, depraved in every way
and given to every sort of vice. So are the women Lamas.
They live and sponge on the credulity and ignorance of the
crowds: it is to maintain this ignorance, upon which their
luxurious life depends, that foreign influence of every kind
is strictly kept out of the country.
THE BUTCHER-GODS
In this last sentence we have summed up the fundamental fact
about institutionalized religion. Wherever belief and ritual have
become the means of livelihood of a class, all innovation will of
necessity be taken as an attack upon that class, it will be
literally a crime -- robbing the priests of their age-long
privileges. And of course they will oppose the robber -- using
every weapon of terrorism, both of this world and the next. They
will require the submission, not merely of their own people, but
of their neighbors, and their jealousy of rival priestly castes
will be a cause of wars. The story of the early days of mankind
is a sickening record of torture and slaughter in the name of ten
thousand butcher-gods.
Thus, for example, we read in the Hebrew religious records
how the priests were engaged in establishing the prestige of a
fetish called "the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated
this fetish and wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god.
And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had
looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people
fifty thousand and three score and ten men; and the people
lamented, because the Lord had smitten many of the people
with a great slaughter. And the men of Beth-shemesh said,
Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God?
This terrible old Hebrew divinity said of himself that he
was "a jealous god." Throughout the time of his sway he issued
through his ministers precise instructions for the most revolting
cruelties, the extermination of whole nations of men, women and
children, whose sole offense was that they did not pay tribiite
to Jehovah's priests. Thus, for example, the chief of his
prophets, Moses, called the people together, and with all
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solemnity, and with many warnings, handed down ten commandments
graven upon stone tablets; he went on to set forth how the people
were to set upon and rob their neighbors, and gave them these
blood-thirsty instructions:
When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land
whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many
nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and
the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and
the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and
mightier than thou; And when the Lord thy God shall deliver
them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy
them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy
unto them: ... But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall
destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut
down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.
For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord
thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto
himself, above all people that are upon the face of the
earth.
The records of this Jehovah are full of similar horrors. He
sent his chosen people out to destroy the Midianites, and they
slew all the males, but this was not sufficient, and Moses was
wroth, and commanded them to kill all the married women, and to
take the single women "for themselves." We are told that sixteen
thousand single women were spared, of whom "the Lord's tribute
was thirty and two!" In the Book of Joshua we read that he had an
interview with a supernatural personage called "the captain of
the Lord's host," and how this captain had given to him a magic
spell which would destroy the city of Jericho. The city should be
accursed, "even it and all that are therein, to the Lord"; every
living thing except one traitor-harlot was to be slaughtered, and
all the wealth of the city reserved to the priestly caste. This
was carried out to the letter, except that "Achan, the son of
Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah,
took of the accursed thing" -- that is, he hid some gold and
silver in his tent; whereupon the army met with a defeat, and
everybody knew that something was wrong, and Joshua rent his
clothes and fell to the earth upon his face before the ark of the
Lord, and got another message from Jehovah, to the effect that
the guilty man should be burned with fire, "he and all that he
hath."
And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of
Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold,
and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and
his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had: and they brought
them unto the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, Why hast thou
troubled us? the Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel
stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had
stoned him with stones.
We have no means of knowing what was the character af the
unfortunate inhabitants of the city of Jericho, nor of the
Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of
the victims of Jehovah. To be sure, we are told by the Hebrew
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priests that they sacrificed their children to their gods; but
then, consider what we should believe about the Hebrew religion,
if we took the word of rival priestly castes! Consider, for
example, that in this 20th century we saw an orthodox Jew tried
in a Russian court of law for having made a sacrifice of
Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a
considerable part of the intelligence and idealism of Russia. We
know in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture and
all of the scientific knowledge of Spain, that the Huguenots had
most of the conscience and industry of France: and we know that
they were massacred or driven out to death by the priestly castes
of the Middle Ages.
THE HOLY INQUISITION
Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those medieval
times, so that we may know what we ourselves have escaped. In the
15th century there was established in Europe the cult of a three-
headed god, whose priests had won lordship over a continent. They
were enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt; they sold to
the rich the license to commit every possible crime, and they
held the poor in ignorance and degradation. Among the
comparatively intelligent and freedom-loving people of Bohemia
there arose a great reformer, John Huss, himself a priest,
protesting against the corruptions of his order. They trapped him
into their power by means of a "safe-conduct" -- which they
repudiated because no promise to a heretic could have validity.
They found him guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine that
a priest who committed crimes could not give absolution for the
crimes of others; and they held an auto de fe -- which means a
"sentence of faith." As we read in Lea's "History of the
Inquisition":
The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund (the
Emperor and his nobles, the great officers of the empire with
their insignia, the prelates in their splendid robes. While mass
was sung, Huss, as an excommunicate, was kept waiting at the
door; when brought in he was placed on an elevated bench by a
table on which stood a coffer containing priestly vestments.
After some preliminaries, including a sermon by the Bishop of
Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the events of that day
would confer on him immortal glory, the articles of which Huss
was convicted were recited. In vain he protested that he believed
in transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in
polluted hands. He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on his
persisting the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of
this he continued to utter protests. The sentence was then read
in the name of the council, condemning him both for his written
errors and those which had been proven by witnesses. He was
declared a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic who did not
desire to return to the Church; his books were ordered to be
barned, and himself to be degraded from the priesthood and
abandoned to the secular court. Seven bishops arrayed him in
priestly garb and warned him to recant while yet there was time.
He turned to the crowd, and with broken voice declared that he
could not confess the errors which he never entertained, lest he
should lie to God, when the bishops interrupted him, crying that
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they had waited long enough, for he was obstinate in his herecy.
He was degraded in the usual manner, stripped of his sacerdotal
vestments, his fingers scraped; but when the tonsure was to be
disposed of, an absurd quarrel arose among the bishops as to
whether the head should be shaved with a razor or the tonsure be
destroyed with scissors. Scissors won the day, and a cross was
cut in his hair. Then on his head was placed a conical paper cap,
a cubit in height, adorned with painted devils and the
inscription, "This is the heresiarch."
The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which
he was conducted by two thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louis
at their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates,
and cardinals. The route followed was circuitous, in order that
he might be carried past the episcopal palace, in front of which
his books were burning, whereat he smiled. Pity from man there
was none to look for, but he sought comfort on high, repeating to
himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon
us!" and when he came in sight of the stake he fell on his knees
and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and said that
he would gladly do so if there were space, A wide circle was
formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to custom, had been
providently empowered to take advantage of final weakening, came
forward, saying, "Dear sir and master, if you will recant your
unbelief and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly
hear your confession; but if you will not, you know right well
that, according to canon law, no one can administer the sacrament
to a heretic." To this Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am
not a mortal sinner." His paper crown fell off and he smiled as
his guards replaced it. He desired to take leave of his keepers,
and when they were brought to him he thanked them for their
kindness, saying that they had been to him rather brothers than
jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German,
telling them that he suffered for errors which he did not hold,
and he was cut short. When bound to the stake, two cartloads of
fagots and straw were piled up around him, and the palsgrave and
vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could
save himself, but only repeated that he had been convicted by
false witnesses on errors never entertained by him. They clapped
their hands and then withdrew, and the executioners applied the
fire. Twice Huss was heard to exclaim, "Christ Jesus, Son of the
living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing up and
blowing the flames and smoke into his face cheeked further
utterances, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to move
while one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy
was over; the sorely-tried soul had escaped from its tormentors,
and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him
the praise that no philosopher of old had faced death with more
composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity. No
faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle.
Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the
executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be
reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him.
With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and
thrown into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was
dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the
spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which
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they reverenced as relics of their martyr. The next day thanks
were returned to God in a solemn procession in which figured
Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen
cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all the
clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had
delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left
Constance, feeling that his work was done.
HELL-FIRE
If shch a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it
would only be in some remote and wholly savage place, such as
the, mountains of Hayti, or the Solomon Islands. It could no
longer happen in any civilized country; the reason being, not any
abatement of the pretensions of the priesthood, but solely the
power of science, embodied in the physical arm of a secular
State. The advance of that arm the Church has fought
systematically, in every country, and at every point. To quote
Buckle: "A careful study of the history of religious toleration
will prove that in every Christian country where it has been
adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy by the authority of
the secular classes." The wolf of superstition has been driven
into its lair, but it has backed away snarling, and it still
crouches, watching for a chance to spring. The Church which
burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that
the earth moves round the sun -- that same Church, in the name of
the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the
firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of
this book, it will be solely because of the police. Not being
allowed to burn me here, the clergy will vent their holy
indignation by sentencing me to eternal burning in a future world
which they have created, and which they run to suit themselves.
It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be
exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any
nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the
power of institutionalized religion. Those peoples which are
wholly under the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and
Koreans, Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the
intellectual life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos
and Turks, who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther
on the way are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a
flashlight of the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number,
Patrick MadGill:
The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest,
who always told the people if they did not pay their debts
they would burn for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of
eternity will make you sorry for the debts that you did not
pay," said the priest. "What is eternity?" he would ask in a
solemn voice from the altar steps. "If a man tried to count
the sands on the sea-shore and took a million years to count
every single grain, how long would it take him to count them
all? A long time, you'll say. But that time is nothing to
eternity. Just think of it! Burning in hell while a man,
taking a million years to count a grain of sand, counts all
the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did not pay
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Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within the
letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the
letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened, and
no one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it
meant.
There is light in Ireland today, and hope for an Irish
culture; the thing to be noted is that it comes from two
movements, one for agricultural cooperation and the other for
political independence -- both of them definitely and
specifically non-religious. This same thing, has been true of the
movements which have helped on happier nations, such as the
republics of France and America, which have put an end to the
power of the priestly caste to take property by force, and to
dominate the mind of the child without its parents' consent.
This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has
apparently not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may
owe a duty to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned,
even though it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents.
It is still permitted, that parents should terrify their little
ones with images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal
brimstone and sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the
teaching of devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic
campaigns and systematically to infect whole cities full of men,
women and children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city
where I write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their
knees, even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning,
sobbing, screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my
morning paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women
in Los Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the
Living God," upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their
neighbors. The police officers testified that the accused claimed
to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this
possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and
barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling,"
about which the newspapers did not go into details. And again, a
week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,
and found tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged
to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft.
Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve
failed, and the "high priest" was called in, which decreed a
whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have
deserved to be whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake
had been made -- it was another woman who was the witch. And
again in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly serious news
item, telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and found
on his pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of
the head of Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his
neighbors to witness the miracle, and declared that while he was
not superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have
happened by chance, and he knew what it was intended to signify
-- he would buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his
support of the war!
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And this is the world in which our scientists and men of
culture think that the battle of the intellect is won, and that
it is no longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting
"Religion"!
BOOK TWO
THE CHURCH OF GOOD SOCIETY
Within the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert
By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,
Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,
And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.
Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts
Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts --
A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,
To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls
Sterling
THE RAINMAKERS
I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens
to be the Church in which I was brought up. Reading this
statement, some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I
search my heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as for back
as I can remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice
every Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were
chanted in my childish ears! I take up the book of ritual, done
in artistocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old
worn volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I
endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the
volume -- not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a
landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used
as a source of income and a shield to privilege.
In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician
ruled the field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common
Prayer," I discover that there is at least one spot out of which
he has been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets
to stand still, or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good
Society" has discovered astronomy! But if any astronomer
attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy,
let him at least stop to consider my "economic interpretation" of
the phenomenon -- the fact that the heavenly bodies affect the
destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient
emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as
astrologer.
But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a
difference! Has any utmost precision of barometer been able to
drive the priest out of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even
in the most civilized of countries; not in that most decorous and
dignified of institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church of
America! I study with care the passage wherein the clergyman
appears as controller of the fate of crops. I note a chastened
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caution of phraseology; the Church will not repeat the experience
of the sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons to bringing
water, and then could not make them stop! The spell invokes
"moderate rain and showers"; and as an additional precaution
there is a counterspell against "excessive rains and floods": the
weather-faucet being thus under exact control.
I turn the pages of this "Book of Common Prayer," and note
the remnants of magic which it contains. There are not many of
the emergencies of life with which the priest is not authorized
to deal; not many natural phenomena for which he may not claim
the credit. And in case anything should have been overlooked,
there is a blanket order upon Providence: "Graciously hear us,
that those evils which the craft or subtilty of the devil or man
worketh against us, be brought to nought!" I am reminded of the
idea which haunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories about the
hero who was allowed three wishes that would come true. I could
never understand why the hero did not settle the matter once for
all -- by wishing that everything he wished might come true!
Most of these incantations are harmless, and some are
amiable; but now and then you come upon one which is sinister in
its implications. The volume before me happens to be of the
Church of England, which is even more forthright in its
confronting of the Great Magic. Many years ago I remember talking
with an English army officer, asking how he could feel sure of
his soldiers in case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him
that the men had relatives among the workers, and might some time
refuse to shoot them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the
military had worked out its technique with care. He would never
think of ordering his men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he
would first start the spell of discipline to work, he would march
them round the block, and get them in the swing, get their blood
moving to military music, then, when he gave the order, in they
would go. I have never forgotten the gesture, the animation with
which he illustrated their going -- I could hear the grunting of
bayonets in the flesh of men. The social system prevailing in
England has made necessary the perfecting of such military
technique; also, you discover, English piety has made necessary
the providing of a religious sanction for it. After the job has
been done and the bayonets have been wiped clean, the company is
marched to church, and the officer kneels in his family pew, and
the privates kneel with the parlor-maids, and the clergyman
raises his hands to heaven and intones: "We bless thy Holy Name,
that it hath pleased Thee to appease the seditious tumults which
have been lately raised up among us!"
And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killers
-- he even takes part in their bloody work. In the Home Office of
the British Government I read (vol 40, page 17) how certain
miners were on strike against low wages and the "truck" system,
and the Vicar of Abergavenny put himself at the head of the
yeomanry and the Greys. He wrote the Home Office a lively account
of his military operations. All that remained was to apprehend
certain of the strikers, "and then I shall be able to return to
my Clerical duties." Later he wrote of the "sinister influences"
which kept the miners from returning to their work, and how he
had put half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.
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THE BABYLONIAN FIRE-GOD
So we come to the most important of the functions of the
tribal god, as an ally in war, an inspirer to martial valour.
When in ancient Babylonia you wished to overcome your enemies,
you went to the shrine of the Fire-god, and with awful rites the
priest pronounced incantations, which have been preserved on
bricks and handed down for the use of modern Churches. "Pronounce
in a whisper, and have a bronze image therewith," commands the
ancient text, and runs on for many strophes in this fashion:
Let them die, but let me live!
Let them be put under a bin, but let me prosper!
Let them perish, but let me increase!
Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!
O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among the gods,
Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.
This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand years ago.
Since then, the world has moved on --
Three thousand years of war and peace and glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams --
And in one of the world's leading nations the people stand up and
bare their heads, and sing to their god to save their king and
punish those who oppose him, --
O Lord our God, arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On him our hopes we fix,
God save us all.
Recently, I understand, it has become the custom to omit
this stanza from the English national anthem; but it is clear
that this is because of its crudity of expression, not because of
objection to the idea of praying to a god to assist one nation
and injure others; for the same sentiment is expressed again and
again in the most carefully edited of prayer-books:
Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and counfound their
devices. Defend us, Thy humble servants in all assaults of
our enemies. Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish
and overcome all his enemies.
There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O
God.
Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-called
civilized nation today. Behind every battle-line in Europe you
may see the priests of the Babylonian Fire-god with their bronze
images and their ancient incantations; you may see magic spells
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being wrought, magic standards sanctified, magic bread eaten and
magic wine drunk, fetishes blessed and hoodoos lifted, eternity
ransacked to find means of inciting soldiers to the mood where
they will "go in." Throughout all civilization, the phobias and
manias of war have thrown the people back into the toils of the
priests, and that church which forced Galileo to recant under
threat of torture, and had Ferrer shot beneath the walls of the
fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of religion."
THE MEDICINE-MEN
Andrew D. White tells us that:
It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great
plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased
proportion of the landed and personal property of every
European country was in the hands of the church. Well did a
great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences age the harvests
of the ministers of God."
And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as
banifiers of epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit
to rebunke the upstart teachers of impious and atheistical
inoculation, and scourge the people back into His fold as in the
good old days of Moses and Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in his
immensely learned and half-suppressed work, "The Analysis of
Religious Belief," quotes some missionaries to the Ftji
islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the
subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a "disease-maker,"
who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they
blew horns to frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The
missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the
affliction -- and thereby revealed that they stood upon the same
intellectual level as the heathen they were supposed to instruct!
It appeared that the natives had been at war with their
neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist;
they had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as
punishment for savage presumption!
And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of
Common Prayer" of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I
remember as a child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by the
prevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread three
times a day; and there came an amiable clerical gentleman and
recited the service proper to such pastoral calls: "Take
therefore in good part the visitation of the Lord!" And again,
when my mother was ill, I remember how the clergyman read out in
church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness, "in mind, body
or estate." I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaning of
these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize that
the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in
front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his
tenements might bring in their rentals promptly, so that his
little "flyer" in cotton might prove successful; so that the
children in his mills might work with greater speed.
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Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by
incantations, and he answered, "Yes, if you use a little
strychnine with it." And that would seem to be the attitude of
the present-day Anglican church-member; he calls in the best
physician he knows, he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and
after that he thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have a
chance. It makes the women happy, and after all, there are a lot
of things we don't yet know about the world. So he repairs to the
family pew, and recites over the Venerable prayers, and
contributes his mite to the maintenance of an institution which,
14 Sundays every year, proclaims the terrifying menaces of the
Athanasian Creed:
Whoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the Catholick faith. Which faith,
except one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he
shall perish everlastingly.
For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be
explained that the "Catholick faith" here referred to is not the
Roman Catholic, but that of the Church of England and the
Protestant Episcopal Church of America. This creed of the ancient
Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacing precision
-- 44 paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae, closing with the final
doom: "This is the Catholick faith: which except a man believe
faithfully, he cannot be saved."
You see, the founders of this august institution were not
content with cultural complacency; what they believed they
believed really, with their whole hearts, and they were ready to
act upon it, even if it meant burning their own at the stake.
Also, they know the ceaseless impulse of the mind to grow; the
terrible temptation which confronts each new generation to
believe that which is reasonable. They met the situation by
setting out the true faith in words which no one could mistake.
They have provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also
the "Thirty-nine Articles" -- which are 39 separate and binding
guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal Church
shall be either a man of inferior mentality, or else a sophist
and hypocrite. How desperate some of them have become in the face
of this cruel dilemma is illustrated by the tale which is told of
Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford: that when he was required
to recite the "Apostles' Creed" in public, he would save himself
by inserting the words "used to" between the words "I believe,"
saying the inserted words under his breath, thus, "I used to
believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Perhaps the
eminent divine never did this; but the fact that his students
told it, and thought it funny, is sufficient indication of their
attitude toward their "Religion." The son of William George Ward
tells in his biography how this leader of the "Tractarian
Movement" met the problem with cynicism which seems almost
sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are justified in
deception; and then lie like a trooper!"
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THE CANONIZATION OF INCOMPETENCE
The supreme crime of the church today is that everywhere and
in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth
of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it
canonizes incompetence. Consider the power of the Church of
England and its favorite daughter here in America; consider their
prestige with the press and in politics, their hold upon
literature and the arts, their control of education and the minds
of children, of charity and the lives of the poor: consider all
this, and then say what it means to society that such a power
must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction
and falsehood. "So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be;" runs the church's formula; and this per se and a
priori, of necessity and in the nature of the case.
Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record
of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of
science, even the most remote from theological concern. Here is
the Reverend Edward Massey, preaching in 1772 on "The Dangerous
and Sinful Practice of Inoculation"; declaring that Job's
distemper was probably confluent smallpox; that he had been
inoculated doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by
Providence for the punishment of sin; and that the proposed
attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation." Here are the
Scotch clergy of the middle of the 19th century denouncing the
use of chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking "to avoid
one part of the primeval curse on woman." Here is Bishop
Wilberforce of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of
natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of
God"; it "contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its
creator"; it "is inconsistent with the fullless of His glory"; it
is "a dishonoring view of nature." And the Bishop settled the
matter by asking Huxley whether he was descended from an ape
through his grandmother or grandfather.
Think what it means, friends of progress, that these
ecclesiastical figures should be set up for the reverence of the
populace, and that every time mankind is to make an advance in
power over Nature, the pioners of thought have to come with crow-
bars and derricks and heave these figures out of the way! And you
think that conditions are changed today? But consider syphilis
and gonorrhea, about which we know so much, and can do almost
nothing; consider birth-control, which we are sent to jail for so
much as mentioning! Consider the divorce reforms for which the
world is crying -- and for which it must wait, because of St.
Paul! Realize that up to date it has proven impossible to
persuade the English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister! That when the war broke upon England the whole
nation was occupied with a squabble overthe disestablishment of
the church of Wales! Only since 1888 has it been legally possible
for an unbeliever to hold a seat in Parliament; while up to the
present day men are tried for blasphemy and convicted under the
decisions of Lord Hale, to the effect that "it is a crime either
to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian
religion or to hold them up to contempt or ridicule." Said Mr.
Justice Horridge, at the West Riding Assizes, 1911: "A man is not
free in any public place to use common ridicule on subjects which
are sacred.
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The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London,
is "to preserve the standard of outward decency." And you will
find that the one essential to prosecution is always that the
victim shall be obscure and helpless; never by any chance is he a
duke in a drawing-room. I will record an utterance of one of the
obscure victims of the Britsh "standard of outward decency," a
teacher of mathematics named Holyoake, who presumed to discuss in
a public hall the starvation of the working classes of the
country. A preacher objected that he had discussed "our duty to
our neighbor" and neglected "our duty to God"; whereupon the
lecturer replied: "Our national Church and general religious
institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about twenty
million pounds annually. Worship being thus expensive, I appeal
to your heads and your pockets whether we are not too poor to
have a God. While our distress lasts, I think it would be wise to
put deity upon halt pay." And for that utterance the unfortunate
teacher of mathematics served six months in the common Gaol of
Gloucester!
While men were being tried for publishing the "Freethinker",
the Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you
wish to know what an established church can do by way of setting
up dullness in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old
Man's" 'Writings on theological and religious questions. Read his
"Juventus Mundi," in the course of which he establishes a mystic
connection between the trident of Neptune and the Christian
Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that the writer of Genesis was
an inspired geologist! This writer of Genesis points out in
Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in an orderly
succession of times: First, the water population; secondly, the
air population; thirdly, the land population of animals;
fourthly, the land population consummated in man." And it seems
that this division and sequence "is understood to have been so
affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a
demonstrated conclusion and established fact." Hence we must
conclude of the writer of Genesis that "his knowledge was
divine"! Consider that this was actually published in one of the
leading British monthlies, and that it was necessary for
Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that so far is it
from being true that "a fourfold division and orderly sequence"
of water, air and land animals "has been affirmed in our time by
natural science," that on the contrary, the assertion is
'directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is
acquainted with the elements of natural science." The
distribution of fossils proves that land animals originated
before sea-animals and there has been such a mixing of land, sea
and air animals as utterly to destroy the reputation of both
Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine knowledge of
Geology.
GIBSON'S PRESERVATIVE
I have a friend, a well-known "scholar," who permits me the
use of his extensive library. I stand in the middle and look
about me, and see in the dim shadows walls lined from floor to
ceiling with decorous and grave-looking books, bound for the most
part in black, many of them fading to green with age. There are
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literally thousands of such, and their theme is the pseudo-
science of "divinity." I close my eyes, to make the test fair,
and walk to the shelves and put out my hand and take a book. It
proves to be a modern work, "A History of the English Prayer-book
in Relation to the Doctrine of the Eucharist." I turn the pages
and discover that it is a study of the variations of one minute
detail of church doctrine. This learned divine -- he has written
many such works, as the advertisements inform us -- fills up the
greater part of his pages with foot-notes from hundreds of
authorities, arguments over supernatural subtleties. I will give
one sample of these footnotes -- asking the reader to be patient:
I add the following valuable observation, of Dean
Goode: ("On Eucharist," II p. 757. See also Archbishop Ware
in Gibson's "Preservative," vol X, Chap II) "One great point
for which our divines have contended, in opposition to
Romish errors, has been the reality of that presence of
Christ's Body and Blood to the soul of the believer which is
affected through the operation of the Holy Spirit
notwithstanding the absence of that Body and Blood in
Heaven. Like the Sun, the Body of Christ is both present and
absent; present, really and truly present, in one sense --
that is, by the soul being brought into immediate communion
with -- but absent in another sense -- that is, as regards
the contiguity of its substance to our bodies. The authors
under review, like the Romanists, maintain that this is not
a Real Presence, and assuming their own interpretation of
the phrase to be the only true one, press into their service
the testimony of divines who, though using the phrase, apply
it in a sense the reverse of theirs. The ambiguity of the
phrase, and its misapplication by the Church of Rome, have
induced many of our divines to repudiate it," etc.
Realize that of the work from which this "valuable
observation" is quoted, there are at least two volumes, the
second volume containing not less than 757 pages! Realize that in
Gibson's "Preservative" there are not less than ten volumes of
such writings! Realize that in this 20th century a considerable
portion of the memtal energies of the world's greatest empire is
devoted to that kind of learning!
I turn to the date upon the volume, and find that it is
1910. I was in England within a year of that time, and so I can
tell what was the condition of the English people while printers
were making and papers were reviewing and book-stores were
distributing this work of ecclesiastical research. I walked along
the Embankment and saw the pitiful wretches, men, women and
sometimes children, clad in filthy rags starved white and frozen
blue, soaked in winter rains and shivering in winter winds,
homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors of divinity,
unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative." I walked on Hempstead
Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns out
for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror,
for I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These
creatures were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were
some new grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could
only shamble; they could not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a
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hand-organ playing, and turned away -- the things they did in
their efforts to dance were not to be watched. And then I went
out into the beautiful English country, cultured and charming
ladies took me in swift, smooth motor-cars, and I saw the pitiful
hovels and the drink-sodden, starch-poisoned inhabitants -- slum-
populations everywhere, even on the land! When the newspaper
reporters came to me, I said that I had just come from Germany,
and that if ever England found herself at war with that country,
she would regret that she had let the bodies and the minds of her
people rot; for which expression I was severely taken to task by
more than one British divine.
The bodies -- and the minds; the rot of the latter being the
cause of the former. All over England in that year of 1910, in
thousands of schools, rich and poor, and in the greatest centers
of learning, men like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead
languages and dead sciences and dead arts; sending them out to
life with no more conception of the modern world than a monk of
the Middle Ages; sending them out with minds made hard and
inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to progress,
contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this
terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and
disciplined by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The
awful muddle that was in England during the first two years of
the war has not yet been told in print; but thousands know it,
and some day it will be written, and it will finish forever the
prestige of the British ruling caste. They rushed off an
expedition to Gallipoli, and somebody forgot the water-supply,
and at one time they had 95,000 cases of dysentery!
They always "muddle through," they tell you; that is the
motto of their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle
through" -- they had to come to America for help. As I write, our
Congress is voting billions and tens of billions of dollars, and
a million of the best of our young manhood are being taken from
their homes -- because in 1910 the mind of England was occupied
with Dean Goode "On Eucharist," and the ten volumes of Gibson's
"Preservative."
THE ELDERS
What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the
aged. It means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in
the church, but in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the
army and navy. For a test I look up the list of bishops of the
Church of England in Witaker's Almanac; it appears that there are
40 of these functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the
suffragans; and that the total salary paid to them amounts to
more than $900,000 a year. This, it should be understood, does
not include the pay of their assistants, nor the cost of
maintaining their religious estaplishments; it does not include
any private incomes which they or their wives may possess, as
members of the privileged classes of the Empire. I look up their
ages in Who's Who, and I find that there is only one below 53:
the oldest of them is 91, while the average age of the goodly
company is 70. There have been men in history who have retained
their flexibility of mind, their ability to adjust themselves to
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new circumstances at the age of 70, but it will always be found
that these men were trained in science and practical affairs,
never in dead languages and theology. One of the oldest of the
English prelates, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated
to a newspaper reporter that he worked 17 hours a day, and had no
time to form an opinion on the labor question.
And now -- here is the crux of the argument -- do these aged
gentlemen rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally
nothing of their own power; they could not make their own
episcopal robes, they could not even cook their own episcopal
dinners. They have to be maintained in all their comings and
goings. Who supports them, and to what end?
The roots of the English Church are in the English land
system, which is one of the infamies of the modern world. It
dates from the days of William the Norman, who took possession of
Britain with his sword, and in order to keep possession for
himself and his heirs, distributed the land among his nobles and
prelates. In those days, you understand, a high ecclesiastic was
a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his predatory nature
under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and archbishops of
William wore armor and had their troops of knights like the
barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the
same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English
chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their
bishopricks, abbots of their abbacies." Green tells us that "the
dependence of the church on the royal power was strictly
enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron." And what
was this homage? The bishop knelt before William, bareheaded and
without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord, I become liege man of
yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith
and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."
The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she
has held, and always on the same condition -- that she shall be
"liege man for life and limb and earthly regard." In this you
have the whole story of the Church of England, in the 20th
century as in the llth. The balance of power has shifted from
time to time; old families have lost the land and new families
have gotten it; but the loyalty and homage of the church have
been held by the land, as the needle of the compass is held by a
mass of metal. Some 250 years ago a popular song gave the general
impression --
For this is law that I'll maintain
Until my dying day, sir:
That whatsoever king shall reign
I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!
So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories
and Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every
injustice that profits the owning class. And always among
themselves you find them intriguing and squabbling over the
dividing of the spoils; always you find them enjoying leisure and
ease, while the people suffer and the rebels complain. One can
pass down the corridor of English history and prove this
statement by the words of Englishmen from every single
generation. Take the 14th century; the "Good Parliament" declares
that:
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Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to
benefices of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned
hardly obtain one of twenty. God gave the sheep to be
pastured, not to be shaven and shorn.
And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers
Plowman --
But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets,
A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land,
Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor,
A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord,
And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup.
He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy.
Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands
Away to the Orders that have no pity;
Money rains upon their altars.
There where such parsons be living at ease
They have no pity on the poor; that is their "charity."
Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad,
But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all
And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of Your Rule.
Another step through history, and in the early part of the
16th century here is Simon Fish, addressing King Henry the Eighth
in the "Supplicacyon for the Beggars," complaining of the
"strong, puissant and counterfeit holy and ydell" which "are now
increased under your sight, not only into a great nombre, but
ynto a kingdoms."
They have begged so importunatly that they have gotten ynto
their honds more than a part of all youre Realme. The goodliest
lordships, manors, londs, and territories, are theyres. Besides
this, they have the tenth part of all the corne, medowe, pasture,
grasse, woole, coltes, calves, lambes, pigges, gese and chikens.
Ye, and they looke so narrowly uppon theyre proufittes, that the
poore wyves must be countable to thym of every tenth eg, or elles
she gettith not her rytes at ester, shal be taken as an heretike.
... Is it any merveille that youre people so compleine of
povertie? The Turke nowe, in your tyme, shulde never be abill to
get so moche grounde of christendome ... And whate do al these
gredy sort of sturdy, idell, holy theves? These be they that have
made an hundredth thousand idell hores in your realme. These be
they that catche the pokkes of one woman, and bere them to an
other.
The petitioner goes on to tell how they steal wives and all
their goods with them, and if any man protest they make him a
heretic. "so that it maketh him misshe that he had not done it."
Also they take fortunes for masses and then don't say them. "If
the Abbot of Westminster shulde sing every day as many masses for
his founders as he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkes
were too few." The petitioner suggests that the king shall "tie
these holy idell theves to the cartes, to be whipped naked about
every market towne till they will fall to labours!"
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CHURCH HISTORY
King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he
took away the property of the religious orders for the expenses
of his many wives and mistresses, and forced the clergy in
England to forswear obedience to the Pope and make his royal self
their spiritual head. This was the beginning of the Anglican
Church, as distinguished from the Catholic; a beginning of which
the Anglican clergy are not so proud as they would like to be.
When I was a boy, they taught me what they called "church
history," and when they came to Henry the Eighth they used him as
an illustration of the fact that the Lord is sometimes wont to
choose evil men to carry out His righteous purposes. They did not
explain why the Lord should do this confusing thing, nor just how
you were to know, when you saw something being done by a
murderous adulterer, whether it was the Will of the Lord or of
Satan; nor did they go into details as to the motives which the
Lord had been at pains to provide, so as to induce his royal
agent to found the Anglican Church. For such details you have to
consult another set of authorities-- the victims of the
plundering.
When I was in college my professor of Latin was a gentleman
with bushy brown whiskers and a thundering voice of which I was
often the object -- for even in my early days I had the habit of
persisting in embarrassing questions. This professor was a devout
Catholic, and not even in dealing with ancient Romans could he
restrain his propaganda impulses. Later on in life, he became
editor of the "Catholic Encyclopedia," and now when I turn its
pages, I imagine that I see the bushy brown whiskers, and hear
the thundering voice: "Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I tell you
it is so!"
I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about
King Henry the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of
England; he is ready with an "economic interpretation," as
complete as the most rabid muckraker could desire! It appears
that the king wanted a new wife, and demanded that the Pope
should grant the necessary permission; in his efforts to browbeat
the Pope into such betrayal of duty, King Henry threatened the
withdrawal of the "annates" and the "Peter's pence." Later on he
forced the clergy to declare that the Pope was "only a foreign
bishop," and in order to "stamp out overt expression of
disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of terror."
In Anglican histories, you are assured that all this was a
work of religious reform, and that after it the Church was the
pure vehicle of God's grace. There were no more "holy idle
thieves," holding the land of England and plundering the poor.
But get to know the clergy, and see things from the inside, and
you will meet some one like the Archbishop of Cashell, who wrote
to me of his intimates.
I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do
than to eat, drink and grow fat, rich and die; which
laudable example I propose for the remainder of my days to
follow.
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If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray
reports of that period, the 18th century, which he knew with
peculiar intimacy:
I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and
gracious King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman
for 5000 pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he
would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was
he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands of
consecration? As I peep into George II's St. James, I see
crowds of cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies
of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their
laps; that godless old king wakening under his canopy in his
Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.
Discoursing about what? -- About righteousness and judgment?
Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in
German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the
clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because
the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics
would not listen to him!
LAND AND LIVINGS
And how is it in the 20th century? Have conditions been much
improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote
Robert Buchanan; a poet who spoke for the people and who
therefore has still to be recognized by English critics. He
writes of the "Now Rome," by which he means present-day England:
The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of Men!
You see, the land system of England remains -- the changes
having been for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep
the Saxon peasantry contented, so he left them their "commons";
but in the 18th century these were nearly all filched away. We
saw the same thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and
from the same motive -- because developing capitalism needs cheap
labor, whereas people who have access to the land will not slave
in mills and mines. In England, from the time of Queen Anne to
that of William and Mary, the parliaments of the landlords passed
some four thousand separate acts, whereby more than seven million
acres of the common land were stolen from the people. It has been
calculated that these acres might have supported a million
families; and ever since then England has had to feed a million
paupers all the time.
As an old song puts the matter:
Why prosecute the man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
And let the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose?
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In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native
oak in British soil: some of them direct descendants of the
Normans, others children of the court favorites and panders who
grew rich in the days of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts.
Seven men own practically all the land of the city and county of
London, and collect tribute from seven millions of people. The
estates are entailed -- that is, handed down from father to
oldest son automatically; you cannot buy any land, but if you
want to build, the landlord gives you a lease, and when the lease
is up, he takes possession of your buildings. The tribute which
London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a year. So
absolute is the right of the landowner that he can sue for
trespass the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he
imposes on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of
yards from the shore.
And in this graft, of course the church has its share. Each
church owns land -- not merely that upon which it stands, but
farms and city lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral
owns large tracts; so do the schools and universities in which
the clergy are educated. The income from the holdings of a church
constitutes what is called a "living"; these livings, which vary
in size, are the prerogatives of the younger sons of the ruling
families, and are intrigued and scrambled for in exactly the
fashion which Thackeray describes in the 18th century.
About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of
great landowners; one noble lord alone disposes of 56 such plums;
and needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who
favor radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself --
autocratic to the poor, easy-going to members of his own class,
and cynical concerning the grafts of grace.
In one English village which I visited the living was worth
700 pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent had
a large family, he lived there. In another place the living was
worth a thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate,
himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the
King's birthday, to preach a sermon; the rest of the time he
spent in Paris. It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was
proposed compelling absentee pluralists -- that is, clergymen
holding more than one "living" -- to furnish curates to do their
work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with
strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting
against it without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp
saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergy would rather part
with 38 of their 39 articles than with one 39th of their income.
There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England.
They are the sons of the less influential ruling families, and of
the clergy, they have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and
possess the one essential qualification, that they are gentlemen.
Their average price is 250 pounds a year; their function was made
clear to me when I attended my first English tea-party. There was
a wicker table, perhaps a foot and a half square, having three
shelves, one below the other -- on the top layer the plates and
napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the lowest the cake.
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Said the hostess, "Will you pass the curate, please?" I looked
puzzled, and she pointed. "We call that the curate, because it
does the work of a curate."
GRAFT IN TAIL
As one of Americas head muck-rakers, I found that I was
popular with the British ruling classes; they found my books
useful in their campaigns against democracy, and they were
surprised and disconcerted when they found I did not agree with
their interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption in
American polities; surely I must know that in England they had no
such evils! I explained that they did not have to; their graft,
to use their own legal phrase, was "in tail"; the grafters had,
as a matter of divine right, the things which in America they had
to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate a
"Millionaire's Club," for admission to which the members paid in
cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as
their birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself,
it is merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England
has even more than America. When I explained this, my popularity.
with the British ruling classes vanished quickly.
As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she
realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about
herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of
the libel laws, which have as their first principle "the greater
the truth, the greater the libel." Englishmen read with
satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my
attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as
they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England,
the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought.
their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our
American senators have done; they have bought the political
parties with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have
taken over the press, whether by outright purchase like
Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy -- both of which methods
we Americans know. Within the last decade or two another group
has been coming into control; and not merely is this the same
class of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same
individuals. These are the big moneylenders, the international
financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist
system. These gentlemen make the world their home -- or, as
Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit
themselves to all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and
Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris,
democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews
wherever they are.
And of course in buying the English government, these new
classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the
world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They
have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of
the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant
of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for
the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant,
who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one agent
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without rival -- the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy of
the Almighty awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal Life.
Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the dust! I
can see in my memory the sight that thrilled my childhood -- my
grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial robes,
stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest, and
pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:
"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose
sins thou dost retain, they are retained!"
BISHOPS AND BEER
For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond
mines of South Africa -- wanted them more firmly governed and
less firmly taxed than could be arranged with the Old Man of the
Boers. So the armies of England were sent to subjugate the
country. You might think they would have had the good taste to
leave the lowly Jesus out of this affair -- but if so, you have
missed the essential point about established religion. The
bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for the populace to
revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing upon, some
enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests and
deacons to earn their "living." During the Boer war the blood-
lust of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the
dignified monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When
the pastors of Switzerland issued a collective protest against
cruelties to women and children in the South African
concentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishop of
Winchester who was brought forward to make reply. Nowadays all
England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian
glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of
Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the
nation "virile"; nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was
God's way of making "noble natures."
The British God had other ways of improving nations -- for
example, the opium traffic. The British traders had been raising
the poppy in India and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had
made perhaps a hundred million "noble natures" by this method;
and also they were making a hundred million dollars a year. The
Chinese, moved by their new "virility," undertook to destroy some
opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use
British battleships to punish and subdue them. Was there any
difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless
this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most
devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of
the clergy, and wrote in his diary:
I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is
terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless,
unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history; and
Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years, than the
heathens have shed of Christian blood in two centuries.
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That was in 1843; for 70 years thereafter pious England
continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and
only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought
to an end. Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the
church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a
letter to the Anti-Opium Society:
Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England
and China can never meet on a common ground. China views the
whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a
fiscal.
And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so
the English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town
and country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers
are clamoring for restriction -- and what prevents? Head and
front of the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has
been the Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of
the early temperance movement, declares that "among its
supporters I cannot recall one Church of England minister of
influence." When Asquith brought in his bill for restriction of
the traffic in beer, he was confronted with petitions signed by
members of the clergy, protesting against the act. And what was
the basis of their protest? That beer is a food and not a poison?
Yes, of course; but also that there was property invested in
brewing it. Three hundred and thirty-two clergy of the diocese of
Peterborough declared:
We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the
present bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave
injustice as amounting to a confiscation of private property,
spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent people, and
provoking deep and widespread resentment, which must do harm to
our cause and hinder our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even more
plainspoken petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time
facilities for research have not enabled me to find the text, In
Prof. Henry C. Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question,"
We read:
It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr.
Asquith's temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through
the opposition of clergymen who had invested their savings
in brewery stock, the profits of which might have been
lessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was
sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no
prohibition legislation should, ever be passed without providing
for compensation to the owners of the industry. Today, all over
America, appeals are being made to the people to eat less grain;
the grain is being shipped to England, some of it to be made into
beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the Archbishop of
York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices, and in
his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his
church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time
economy!
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ANGLICANISM AND ALCOHOL
This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar
to British radicals; they see it at work in every election -- the
publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson
confuses them with spirituality. There are two powerful societies
in England employing this deadly combination -- the "Anti-
Socialist Union" and the "Liberty and Property Defense League."
If you scan the list of the organizers, directors and subsidizers
of these satanic institutions, you find Tory politicians and
landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy, and large-
scale dealers in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting
called by the "Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to
a denunciation of Socialism by W.H. Mallock, a master sophist of
Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a
dozen members of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary
of the Federated Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine,
Spirit, and Beer Trade Association, and three or four other
alcoholic magnates.
In every public library in England and many in America you
will find an assortment of pamphlets published by these
organizations, and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which
the stock misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some
of these writings are brutal -- setting forth the ethics of
exploitation in the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the
English clergyman who supplied for capitalist depredation a basis
in pretended natural science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he
cannot get subsistence from his parents, and if society does
not want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he
is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no cover for him. She
tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own
orders.
Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the 19th century;
but it was found that for some reason this failed to stop the
growth of Socialism, and so in our time the clerical defenders of
Privilege have grown subtle and insinuating. They inform us now
that they have a deep sympathy with our fundamental purposes;
they burn with pity for the poor, and they would really and truly
wish happiness to everyone, not merely in Heaven, but right here
and now. However, there are so many complications -- and so they
proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist bug-a-boos. Here for
example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D.D., expounding "The Ethics
of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:
Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of
hands to another may be inspired by the same passions as
have blinded the present holders to their own highest good,
and may be accompanied with injustice as extreme as has been
manifested by the rich and powerful.
And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D.D., an especially popular
clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on
wage-slavery:
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The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines
run through them, of which this is one. Where God has been
so patient, it is not for us to be impatient.
And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University,
a clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and
bringing us back to the faith of our fathers:
The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social
arrangements, but to personal vices.
I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just
what, if anything, he would have the church do about the evils of
our time. I find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop
of Durham, as being the proper sort for clergymen to preach.
Bishop Westcott, whether he is talking to a high society
congregation, or to one of workingmen, shows "an exquisite sense
of knowing always where to stop." So I consulted the Bishop's
volume, "The Social Aspects of Christianity" and I see at once
why he is popular with the anti-Socialist propagandists --
neither I nor any other man can possibly discover what he really
means, or what he really wants done.
I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe
if I kept on the good Bishop's tail, I might in the end find
something a plain man could understand; so I got the beautiful
two-volume "Life of Brooke Westcott, by his Son". -- and there I
found an exposition of the social purposes of bishops! In the
year 1892 there was a strike in Durham, which is in the coal
country; the employers tried to make a cut in wages, and some
10,000 men walked out, and there was a long and bitter struggle,
which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much consultation and
correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at last the masters
and men were got together, with the Bishop as arbitrator, and the
dispute was triumphantly settled -- how do you suppose? On the
basis of a 10 percent reduction in wages!
I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than
the naivete with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the
story of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came
out from the conference "all smiles, and well satisfied with the
result of his day's work." As for his followers, they were in
ecstasies; they "seized and waltzed one another around on the
carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flower show ball.
Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer ourselves
hoarse." The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more
communication on episcopal stationery -- an order to all his
clergy to "offer their humble and hearty thanks to God for our
happy deliverance from the strike by which the diocese has been
long afflicted." Strange to say, there were a few varlets in
Durham who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop,
and one of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in
which he made reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life.
The biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-
hearted that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal
coach, and so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast
if he had been permitted to. A curious condition in English
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society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but
was not permitted to; while the working people, who didn't want
to live on tea and toast, were compelled to!
DEAD CATS
For more than 100 years the Anglican clergy have been
fighting with every resource at their command the liberal and
enlightened men of England who wished to educate the masses of
the people. In 1807 the first measure for a national school-
system was denounced by the Arch-bishop of Canterbury as
"derogatory to the authority of the Church." As a counter-
measure, his supporters established the "National Society for
Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the
Established Church"; and the founder of the organization, a
clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and
insisted that the children of the workers "should not be taught
beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council
of Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the
Archbishops, setting forth the decree of "their lordships" that
"the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of
the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and
precepts of revealed religion." In 1850 a bill for secular
education was denounced as presenting to the country "a choice
between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870, Forster,
author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the parsons
were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into
savages."
As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the
struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies, some
enthusiasts endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian
baptism conferred emancipation upon Negroes who accepted it;
whereupon the Bishop of London laid down the formula of
exploitation: "Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do
not make the least alteration of civil property."
Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious,
spoke of the cultured classes of England:
In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest
political controversies of the last 50 years, whether they
affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce,
whether they affected religion, whether they affected the
bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject
they touched, these leisured classes, these educated
classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.
The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes,"
for he belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of
the record will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform
measures which Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the
Reform Bill of 1832. It opposed all the social reforms of Lord
Shaftesbury. This noble-hearted Englishman complained that at
first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to
the end only a few. He expressed himself as distressed and
puzzled "to find support from infidels and non-professors;
opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers."
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And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House
of Bishops voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law.
The House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; the House of
Bishops opposed Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the
end, Concerning this establishment Lord Shaftesbury, himself the
most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase: "this vast
aquarium full of cold-blooded life." He told the Bishops that he
would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform,
because he knew that they would never begin. Another member of
the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russell, has written of
their record and adventures:
They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the
bloody penal code; they were the resolute, opponents of
every political or social reform; and they had their reward
from the nation outside Parliament. The Bishop of Bristol
had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could
not keep an engagement to preach lest the congregation
should stone him. The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped
with his life after preaching at St. Bride's, Fleet Street.
Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for his primary
visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a
circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the
mob. On the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and
Winchester were burnt in effigy close to their own palace
gates. Archbishop Howley's chaplain complained that a dead
cat had been thrown at him, when the Archbishop -- a man of
apostolic meekness -- replied: "You should be thankful that
it was not a live one."
people had reason for this conduct -- as you will always
find they have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote
another member of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel,
who gives "an instance of the procedure of Church and State about
this period":
In 1832 six agricultural laborers in South Dorsetshire,
led by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of
9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in
the neighborhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An
appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who
decided that they must work for whatever their masters chose
to pay them. The parson, who had at first promised his help,
now turned against them, and the masters promptly reduced
the wage to 7s., with a threat of further reduction.
Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for which all
seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to
the assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them into
submission. The judge determined to convict them, and
directed that they should be tried for mutiny under an act
of George III, specially passed to deal with the naval
mutiny at the Nore. The grand jury were landowners, and the
petty jury were farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen
of the prevailing type. The judge summed up as follows: "Not
for anything that you have done, or that I can prove that
you intend to do, but for an example to others I consider it
my duty to pass the sentence of seven years' penal
transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and
every one of you."
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SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in
children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by
them, He did not consider them superfluous. "Of such is the
Kingdom of Heaven," He said; and His Church is the inheritor of
this tradition -- "feed my lambs." There were children in Great
Britain in the early part of the 19th century, and we may see
what was done with them by turning to Gibbin's "Industrial
History of England":
Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands,
who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily
capacities, exactly as did the slave owners of the American
markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of
their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere
slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to
feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their
places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the
parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one
idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every 20 sane
children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than
that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been
disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings
from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and
cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by
exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly
applied to force continued work. Children were often worked 16
hours a day, by day and by night.
In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting
the labor of children 9 years of age to 14 hours a day. This
would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have
won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by
Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was
interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will
of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose
function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.C., to
teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic
order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince.
worshiper of the gods" ... so begins the oldest legal code which
has come down to us, from 2250 B.C.; and the coronation service
of the English Church is made whole out of the same thesis. The
duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to
divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is
implicit in the church's every ceremony, and explicit in many of
its creeds. In the Litany the people petition for "increase of
grace to hear meekly Thy Word"; and here is this "Word," as
little children are made to learn it by heart. If there exists in
the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know
where to find it.
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My duty towards my neighbor is. ... To honor and obey
the King, and all that are put in authority under him; To
submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual
pastors, and masters: To order myself lowly and reverently
to all my betters. ... Not to covet nor desire other men's
goods; But to learn and labor truly to get mine own living,
and to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall
please God to call me.
A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British
writers was Hannah More. She and her sister went to live in the
coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the
starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in
which they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly
known as "Little Hell." In this place 200 people were crowded
into 19 houses. "There is not one creature in it that can give a
cup of broth if it would save: a life." In one winter 18 perished
of "a putrid fever," and the clergyman "could not raise a six-
pence to save a life."
And what did the Pious sisters make of all this? From cover
to cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social
protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a
day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a
proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular
woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be
sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had
asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a
famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like
flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them
her pious self. "In suffering by the scarcity, you have but
shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the
advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered
no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place she
explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
be grateful to the rich!
Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has
been permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to
unite all ranks of people together, to show the poor how
immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show
both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.
It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages
you derive from the government and constitution of this
country -- to observe the benefits flowing from the
distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high
to so liberally assist the low.
It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by
this pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night and
burned an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic
consequence, for one of the "common people" known as Robert "was
overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear at Sunday School
next day. This fall from grace occasioned intense remorse in
Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his mind for many months,"
records Martha More, "and despair seemed at length to take
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possession of him." Hannah had some conversation with him, and
read him some suitable passages from "The Rise and Progress." "At
length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give
him comfort."
Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in
any way unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the
letters of Shelley how his father tormented him with Archdeacon
Paley's "Evidences" as a Cure for Atheism. This eminent churchman
wrote a book, which he himself ranked first among his writings,
called "Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Laboring
Classes of the British Public." In this book he not merely proved
that religion "smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a
prospect which makes all earthly distinctions nothing"; he went
so far as to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British
exploiters were less fortunate than those to whom they paid a
shilling a day.
Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition
of the laboring part of mankind must be so called) imposes,
are not hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a
pleasure. It is an exercise of attention and contrivance,
which whenever it is successful, produces satisfaction. ...
This is lost among abundance.
And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a
philanthropist as Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter
of Bible societies and foreign missions, a champion of the
antislavery movement, and also of the ruthless "Combination
Laws," which denied to British wage-slaves all chance of
bettering their lot. Wilberforce published a "Practical View of
the System of Christianity," in which he told unblushingly what
the Anglican establishment is for. In a chapter which he
described as "the basis of all polities," he explained that the
purpose of religion is to remind the poor
That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by
the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to
discharge its duties, and contentedly to bear its
inconveniences; that the objects about which worldly men
conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest; that the
peace of mind, which Religion offers indiscriminately to all
ranks, affords more true satisfaction than all the expensive
pleasures which are beyond the poor man's reach; that in
this view the poor have the advantage; that if their
superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also
exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes
are happily exempted; that, "having food and raiment, they
should be therewith content," since their situation in life,
with all its evils, is better than they have deserved at the
band of God; and finally that all human distinctions will
soon be done away, and the true followers of Christ will
all, as children of the same Father, be alike admitted to
the possession of the same heavenly inheritance. Such, are
the blessed effects of Christianity on the temporal well-
being of political communities.
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THE COURT CIRCULAR
The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted
intact to the soil of America. When King George the Third lost
the sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely
inspired church lost the control of the clergy across the seas;
but this revolution was purely one of Church politics -- in
doctrine and ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America"
remained in every way Anglican. The little children of our free
republic are taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself
lowly and reverently to all my betters." The only difference is
that instead of being told "to honor and obey the King," they are
told "to honor and obey the civil authority."
It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the
same in Boston. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves
with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and
imitation English clothes -- so in their Heaven they have
provided an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many
Americans realize the treason to democracy they are committing
when they allow their children to be taught a symbolism and
liturgy based upon absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book --
not the English, but the sturdy, independent, democratic American
hymn-book. I have not opened it for 20 years, yet the greater
part of its contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my
own name. I read:
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy Sea;
Cherubim and seraphim bowing down before Thee,
Which wert, and art, and ever more shall be!
One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal
imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find
that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king,"
"throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn
begins --
Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;
To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.
And the second --
Christ, whose glory fills the skies --
And the third --
Lord of all being, throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star.
There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons
look up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills
as they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same
ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous,
greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious,
punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless
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round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No
member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he
wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family -- not even
the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his
mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low
society.
This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried
weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off
in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:
The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain:
His blood-red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?
This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men
on earth; utterly simple and honest -- he would not even let
anyone praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he
answered, quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good
save one, that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with
deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments
upon him in conventional, courtly style:
The company of angels
Are praising Thee on high;
And mortal men, and all things
Created, make reply:
All Glory, laud and honor,
To Thee, Redeemer, King. ...
The impression a modern man gets from all this is the
unutterable boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more
painful occupation than that of the saints -- casting down their
golden crowns around the glassy sea -- unless it be that of the
Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching
these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous
compliments!
But one can understand that such things are necessary in a
monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good
Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely
the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few
can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time
going through costly formalities -- not because they enjoy it,
but because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about
them and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is
allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presence, as at the
horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.
HORN-BLOWING
I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied
it from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout boy; one of
my earliest recollections -- I cannot have been more than 4 years
of age -- is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the
choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I
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remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this
fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it
reverently." When I was 13, I attended service, of my own
volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during
the 40 days of Lent; at the age of 15 I was teaching Sunday-
school, It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth Avenue
and 20th Street, New York; and those who know the city will
understand that this is a peculiar location -- precisely half way
between the homes of some of the oldest and most august of the
city's aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy of the
city's slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church, and
occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei
gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully
cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made
for them -- as all the rest of the world is made for them; the
populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.
The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman;
orthodox, yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could
not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the
rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor,
visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little
kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and
Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school,
where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health
of their souls.
I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it
would be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be
Jonah and the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing
down the walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably
entertaining, but they seemed to me futile, not to the point.
There were little morals tagged to them, but these lacked
relationship to the lives of little slum-boys. Be good and you
will be happy, love the Lord and all will be well with you; which
was about as true and as practical as the procedure of the
Fijians, blowing horns to drive away a pestilence.
I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the
papers, and watching polities and business. I followed the fates
of my little slum-boys -- and what I saw was that Tammany Hall
was getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the
panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty thieves --
all these were paying the policeman and the politician for a
chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into trouble,
as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who consoled
them in prison -- but it was the Tammany leader who saw the judge
and got them out. So these boys got their lesson, earlier in life
than I got mine -- that the church was a kind of amiable fake, a
pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was Tammany.
I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of
Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they
did nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to
investigate, I discovered the reason -- that their incomes came
from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were
contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the
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corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it
appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei
gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but
none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against
which they were blowing their religious horns!'
So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it
was and is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and
essential part of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its
ethical and cultural and artistic features, however sincerely
they might be meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a
bait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submission to
their exploiters. And as I went on probing into the secret life
of the great Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies
to the world, I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I
met, not sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation
-- until the venerable institution which had once seemed
dignified and noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.
TRINITY CORPORATION
There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a
towering brown-stone Edifice, one of the most beautiful and most
famous churches in America. As a child I have walked through its
church yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its
gravestones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it
seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the
world's infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning,
this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at
noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to
listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my
young soul; and what is it in reality?
The story was told some 10 years ago by Charles Edward
Russell. Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it
is one of the great landlords of New York. In the early days it
bought a number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has
grown up around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at
anywhere from 40 to 100 million dollars, The true amount has
never been made public; to quote Russell's words:
The real owners of the property are the communicants of
the church. For 94 years none of the owners has known the
extent of the property, nor the amount of the revenue
therefrom, nor what is done with the money. Every attempt to
learn even the simplest fact about these matters has been
baffled. The management is a self perpetuating body, without
responsibility and without supervision.
And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of
this great corporation, which is simply the English land system
complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long
periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease
expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum.
Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them
into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total
of $50 a month. The houses were not built for tenements, they
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have no conveniences, they are not fit for the habitation of
animals. The article, in Everybody's Magazine for July, 1908,
gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief. To
quote the writer again:
Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever
Trinity is an owner. Gladly would I give to such a
charitable and benevolent institution all possible credit
for a spirit of improvement manifested anywhere, but I can
find no such manifestation. I have trampled the 8th Ward day
after day with a list of Trinity properties in my hand, and
of all the tenement houses that stand there on Trinity land,
I have not found one that is not a disgrace to civilization
and to the City of New York.
It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided
over this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have
shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what
devilish utterances were some day to proceed from the lips of the
little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as
the bishop's attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church!
Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect, even to the
most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way!
Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For while the
bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the
sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported,
that the bishop's wife had been robbed of $50,000 worth of
jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the doctrine of
Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess $50,000 worth of
jewels, or that she should be setting the bloodhounds of the
police on the trail of a human being. I asked my clergyman friend
about it, and remember his patient explanation -- that the bishop
had to know all classes and conditions of men; his wife had to go
among the rich as well as the poor, and must be able to dress so
that she would not be embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was
making it his life-work to raise a million dollars for the
beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral; and this of course
compelled him to spend much time among the rich!
The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there
had to be cathedrals -- despite the fact that both St. Stephen
and St. Paul had declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples
made with hands." In the 25 years which have passed since that
time the good Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but the
mighty structure which is a monument to his visitations among the
rich towers over the city from its vantage-point on Morningside
Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and
knowing what I know about the men who contributed its funds, and
about the general functions of the churches of the Metropolis of
Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it were built, like
the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the skulls of human
beings.
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SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION
There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual
functions of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the
outset that they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian
rebel, who was crucified as a common criminal because, as they
said, "He stirreth up the people." An embarrassing "Savior" for
the Church of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to
fix him up and make him respectable.
I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day
Saturday I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole
potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the
roof of apartment-houses; but on Saturday night I went into a tub
and was lathered and scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in a
newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tie and a
slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me impotent
for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing
my part of the duties of Good Society. And all church-members go
through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of
them steal potatoes and throw mud all week -- and then take a hot
bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety. In
this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub
and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder -- to turn him
from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-window divinity.
The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out
and crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they
nail him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with
me to the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the
nails, of gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled
sledges! Here is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and
scholarly volume, published by the exclusive house of Scribner,
and written by the Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I
carried in the stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His Relation
to the Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry Codman
Potter, D.D., L.L.D.,D.C.L. -- a course of lectures delivered
before the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University,
under the endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the
Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the
deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at
Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:
Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he
denounced pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He
did not abhor the company of rich men; he sought it. He did
not invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of
expenditure.
And do you think that the late Bishop of J.P. Morgan and
Company stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a
driver of golden nails? In the course of this book there will
march before us a long line of the clerical retainers of
Privilege, on their way to the New Golgotha to crucify the
carpenter's son: the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of
the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop
of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires' club, the Pastor of
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the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven,
the Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try
the weight of their jewelled sledges -- books, sermons,
newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches -- wherewith they
pound their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and
feet of the proletarian Christ.
Here, for example, is Rev. F.G. Peabody, Professor of
Christian Morals at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written
several books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the
most rabid of the carpenter's denunciations of the rich, and
says:
Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message
as this, a teaching so slightly distinguished from the
curbstone rhetoric of a modern agitator, can be an adequate
reproduction of the scope and power of the teaching of
Jesus?
The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a
gentleman; he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of
universities where gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of
Christian Morals proceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus'
actions; demonstrating therefrom that there are three proper uses
to be made of great wealth: first, for almsgiving -- "The poor ye
have always with you!"; second, for beauty and culture -- buying
wine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other objects de
virtu; and third, "stewardship," "trustee-ship" -- which in plain
English is "Big Business."
I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can
imagine he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the
proletarian Founder emerging all new and respectable under the
brush of this capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all
his own for reading the scriptures; he tells us that when there
are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretation is that
"the more spiritual is to be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes
Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor." Another puts it; "Blessed are
the poor in spirit." The first one is crude and literal; the
second must be what Jesus meant! In other words, the professor
and his church have made for their economic masters a treacherous
imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a quality of
submissiveness impotence and futility, which they call by the
name of "spirituality." This virtue they exalt above all others,
and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus everything
which has relation to the realities of life!
So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer
chair at Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social
Question," and explaining:
The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its
radicalism, but in its externalism. It proposes to
accomplish by economic change what can be attained by
nothing less than spiritual regeneration.
And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of
New York, warning us:
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It is necessary to remember that something more than
material and temporal considerations are involved. There are
things of more importance to the purposes of God and to the
welfare of humanity than economic readjustments and social
amelioration.
And again:
Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing
upon clergy and laity alike, to address their religious energies
too exclusively to those tasks whereby human life may be made
more abundant and wholesome materially. ... We need constantly to
be reminded that spiritual things come first.
There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and
gentlemen for whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the
vestrymen and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and
black kid gloves and shiny tophats; the ladies of Good Society
with their Easter costumes in pastel shades, their gracious
smiles and their sweet intoxicating odors. I picture them as I
have seen them at St. George's, where that aged wild boar,
Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the collection plate; at
Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in old-fashioned
carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin statues of
insolence; at St. Thomas' where you might see all the "Four
Hundred" on exhibition at once; at St. Mary the Virgin's, where
the choir paraded through the aisles, swinging costly incense
into my childish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alone with
nose upturned, carrying on his back a jewelled robe for which
some adoring female had paid $60,000. "Spiritual things come
first?" Ah, yes! "Seek first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled
robes shall be added unto you!" And it is so dreadful about the
French and German Socialists, who, as the "Churchman" reports,
"make a creed out of materialism." But then, what is this I find
in one issue of the organ of the "Church of Good Society"?
Business men contribute to the Y.M.C.A. because they
realize that if their employees are well cared for and
religiously influenced, they can be of greater service in
business!
Who let the material cat out of the spiritual bag?
BOOK THREE
THE CHURCH OF THE SERVANT-GIRLS
Was it for this -- that prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet,
And with hard, overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
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Was it for this -- that men should make
Thy name a fetter on men's necks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
And women withered out of sex?
Was it for this -- that slaves should be --
Thy word was passed to set men free?
Swinburne.
CHARITY
As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent
and self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there
must be at home a large number of other women who live sterile
and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their
luckier sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings;
they have emotions -- or, in religious parlance, "souls;" it is
necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating
the property of their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming
enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New
York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the
other, St. Patrick's, for the servant-girls. The latter is
located on Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide
with the homes of the Vanderbilts the interest of the crowds of
sight-seers. Now, early every Sunday morning, before "Good
Society" has opened its eyes, you may see the devotees of the
Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each with a little
black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do inside? What
are they taught about life? This is the question to which we have
next to give attention.
Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan. traction and insurance
magnate of New York, favored me with his justification of his own
career and activities. He mentioned his charities, and speaking
as one man of the world to another, he said: "The reason I put
them into the hands of Catholics is not religious, but because I
find they are efficient in such matters. They don't ask
questions, they do what you want them to do, and do it
economically."
I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the
remark -- like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and
his mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.
When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long
hours and improper working-conditions which drove him to
desperation; they do not ask if police and politicians are
getting a rake-off from the saloon, or if traction magnates are
using it as an agency for the controlling of votes; they do not
plunge into prohibition movements or good government campaigns --
they simply take the man in, at a standard price, and the patient
slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and then turn him out
for society to make him drunk again. That is "charity," and it is
the special industry of Roman Catholicism. They have been at it
for a thousand years, cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes
-- "plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder and sudden
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death." Yet -- puzzling as it would seem to anyone not religious
-- there were never so many messes, never so many different kinds
of messes, as now at the end of the thousand years of charitable
activity!
But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider,
building and rebuilding his web across a doorway; like soldiers
under the command of a ruling class with a "muddling through"
tradition --
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have
messes to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away
quickly without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this
service, no matter what their personal religious beliefs or lack
of beliefs may be. Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-
mill, every coal-mine or other place of industrial danger, you
will find a Catholic hospital, with its slave-sisters and
attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking" near Pittsburgh, I went
to one of these places to ask information as to the frequently of
industrial accidents and the fate of the victims. The "Mother
Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These
concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as a matter of
business it would not do for us to talk about them."
Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And
precisely as it is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it
is with the work of vote getting, the elaborate system of
policemen and saloon-keepers and ward-heelers which the Catholic
machine controls. This industry of vote-getting is a
comparatively new one; but the Church has been handling the
masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned this new
way of "democracy," and has established her supremacy over all
rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the
confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual
machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has
the supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host
really believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to
table-rappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings
in order to bolster their hope of the survival of personality
after death!
So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance
have been driven to a more or less reluctant alliance with the
Papacy. The Church is here, and her followers are here, before
the war several hundred thousand of them pouring into the country
every year. It is no longer possible to do without Catholics in
America; not merely do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal
mined, and dishes washed, but franchises have to be granted,
traffic-schedules adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police
trained and strikes crushed. Under our native political system,
for these purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes
belong to people of a score of nationalities -- Irish and German
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and Italian and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and
Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church
can handle these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and
editors and politicians familiar with all these languages?
Considering how complex is the service, the price is
extremely moderate -- the mere actual expenses of the campaign,
the cost of red fire and torch-light, of liquor and newspaper
advertisements. The rest may come out of the public till, in the
form of exemption from taxation of church buildings and lands, a
share of the public funds for charities and schools, the control
of the police for saloon-keepers and district leaders, the
control of police-courts and magistrates, of municipal
administrations and boards of education, of legislatures and
governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our
sacred self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme Court
Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige,
some cabinet-members and legislators and justices to attend High
Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholic prelates and
dignitaries.
You think this is empty rhetoric -- you comfortable, easy-
going, ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic
shades, absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless
intelligence" -- while the world about you slides down into the
pit! You ladies of Good Society, practicing your "sweet little
charities," pursuing your "dear little ideals," raising your
families of one or two lovely children -- while Irish and French-
Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Hungarians are breeding
their dozens and scores, and preparing to turn you out of your
country!
GOD'S ARMOR
You remember "Bishop Blougram's Apology," Browning's study
of the psychology of a modern Catholic ecclesiastic. He is not
unaware of modern thought, this bishop; he is a man of culture,
who wants to have beauty about him, to be a "cabin passenger":
There's power in me and will to dominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else;
In many ways I need mankind's respect,
Obedience, and the love that's born of fear.
He wishes that he had faith -- faith in anything; he
understands that faith is all-important --
Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat.
But you cannot get faith just by wishing for it --
But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn!
He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade for truth,
but he asks what there would be in it for him --
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State the facts,
Read the text right, emancipate the world --
The emancipated world enjoys itself
With scarce a thank-you. Blougram told it first
It could not owe a farthing, -- not to him
More than St. Paul!
So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasily conscious
of the contempt of intellectual people.
I pine among my million imbeciles
(You think) aware some dozen men of sense
Eye me and know me, whether I believe
In the, last winking virgin as I vow,
And am a fool, or disbelieve in her,
And am a knave.
But, as he says, you have to keep a tight hold upon the
chain of faith, that is what
Gives all the advantage, makes the difference,
With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule.
We are their lords, or they are free of us,
Just as we tighten or relax that hold.
So he continues, but not with entire satisfaction, in his
role of shepherd to those whom he calls "King Bomba's lazzaroni,"
and "ragamuffin saints."
I wonder into a Catholic bookstore and look to see what
Bishop Blougram is doing with his lazzaronu and his ragamuffin
saints here in this new country of the far West. It is easy to
acquire the information, for the saleswoman is polite and the
prices fit my purse. America is going to war, and Catholic boys
are being drafted to be trained for battle; so for ten cents I
obtain a firmly bound little pamphlet called "God's Armor, a
Prayer Book for Soldiers." It is marked "Copyright by the G.R.C.
Central-Verein," and bears the "Nihil Obstat" of the "Censor
Theolog," and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes Josephus,
Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici" -- which last you may at first fail
to recognize as a well known city on the Mississippi River. Do
you not feel the spell of ancient things, the magic of the past
creeping over you, as you read those Latin trade-marks? Such is
the Dead Hand, and its cunning, which can make even St. Louis
sound mysterious!
In this booklet I get no information as to the commercial
causes of war, nor about the part which the clerical vote may
have played throughout Europe in supporting military systems, I
do not even find anything about the sacred cause of democracy,
the resolve of a self-governing people to put an end to feudal
rule. Instead I discover a soldier-boy who obeys and keeps
silent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip of terrors
both of body and soul. Poor, pitiful soldier-boy, marking
yourself with crosses, performing genuflexions, mumbling magic
formulas in the trenches -- how many billion of you have been led
out to slaughter by the greeds and ambitions of your religious
masters, since first this accursed Antichrist got its grip upon
the hearts of men!
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I quote from this little book:
Start this day by lifting up your heart to God. Offer
yourself to Him, and beg grace to spend the day without sin.
Make the sign of the cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost, behold me in Thy Divine Presence. I adore
Thee and give Thee thanks. Grant that all I do this day be
for Thy Glory, and for the salvation of my immortal soul.
During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your
prayers need not be long nor read from a book. Learn a few
of these short ejaculations by heart and frequently repeat
them. They will serve to recall God to your heart and will
strengthen you and comfort-you.
You remember a while back about the prayer-wheels of the
Tibetans. The Catholic religion was founded before the Tibetan,
and is less progressive; it does not welcome mechanical devices
for saving labor. You have to use your own vocal apparatus to
keep yourself from hell; but the process has been made as
economical as possible by kindly dispensations of the Pope. Thus,
each time that you say "My God and my all," you get fifty days
indulgence; the same for "My Jesus, mercy," and the same for
"Jesus, my God, I love Thee above all things." For "Jesus, Mary,
Joseph," you get 300 days -- which would seem by all odds the
best investment of your spare breath.
And then come prayers for all occasions: "Prayer before
Battle"; "Prayer for a Happy Death"; "Prayer in Temptation";
"Prayer before and after Meals"; "Prayer when on Guard"; "Prayer
before a long March"; "Prayer of Resignation to Death"; "Prayer
for Those in their Agony" -- I cannot bear to read them, hardly
to list them. I remember standing in a cathedral "somewhere in
France" during the celebration of some special Big Magic. There
was brilliant white light, and a suffocating strange odor, and
the thunder of a huge organ, and a clamor of voices, high, clear
voices of young boys mounting to heaven, like the hands of men in
a pit reaching up, trying to climb over the top of one another.
It sent a shudder into the depths of my soul. There is nothing
left in the modern world which can carry the mind so far back
into the ancient nightmare of an anguish and terror which was
once the mental life of mankind, as these Roman Catholic
incantations with their frantic and ceaseless importunity. They
have even brought in the sex-spell; and the poor, frightened
soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the night with a prostitute,
now prostrates himself before a holy Woman-being who is lifted
high above the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of
awe and affection which his mother brought to him in early
childhood. Read over the phrases of this "Litany of the Blessed
Virgin":
Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Mother of God. Holy Virgin
of Virgins. Mother of Christ. Mother of divine grace. Mother
most pure. Mother most chaste. Mother inviolate. Mother
undefiled. Mother most amiable. Mother most admirable.
Mother of good counsel. Mother of our Creator. Mother of our
Savior. Virgin most prudent. Virgin most venerable. Virgin
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most renowned. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful.
Virgin most faithful. Mirror of justice. Seat of wisdom.
Cause of our joy. Spiritual vessel. Vessel of honor.
Singular vessel of devotion. Mystical rose. Tower of David.
Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the covenant. Gate of
heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick. Refuge of sinners.
Comforter of the afflicted. Help of Christians. Queen of
Angels. Queen of Patriarchs. Queen of Prophets. Queen of
Apostles. Queen of Martyrs. Queen of Confessors. Queen of
Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queen conceived without
original sin. Queen of the most holy Rosary. Queen of Peace,
Pray for us.
THANKSGIVING
For another five cents -- how cheaply a man of insight can
obtain thrills in this fantastic world! -- I purchase a copy of
the "Messenger of the Sacred Heart," a magazine published in New
York, the issue for October, 1917. There are pages of
advertisements of schools and colleges with strange titles:
"Immaculata Seminary," "Holy Cross Academy," "Holy Ghost
Institute," "Ladycliff," "Academy of Holy Child Jesus." The
leading article is by a Jesuit, on "The Spread of the Apostleship
of Prayer among the Young"; and then "Sister Clarissa" writes a
poem telling us "What are Sorrows"; and then we are given a story
called "Prayer for Daddy"; and then another Jesuit father tells
us about "The Hills that Jesus Loved." A third father tells us
about the "Eucharistic Propaganda"; and we learn that in July,
1917, it distributed 11,699 beads, and caused the expenditure of
57,714 hours of adoration, and then the faithful are given a form
of letter which they are to write to the Honorable Baker,
Secretary of War, imploring him to intimate to the French
government that France should withdraw from one of her advances
in civilization, and join with medieval America in exempting
priests from being drafted to fight for their country. And then
there is a "Question Box" -- just like the Hearst newspapers,
only instead of asking whether she should allow him to kiss her
before he has told her that he loves her, the reader asks what is
the Pauline Privilege, and what is the heroic Act, and is Robert
a saint's name, and if food remains in the teeth from the night
before, would it break the fast to swallow it before Holy
Communion. (No, I am not inventing this.)
I quoted the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and pointed
out how deftly the Church has managed to slip in a prayer for
worldly prosperity. But the Catholic Church does not show any
squeamishness in dealing with its "million imbeciles," its
"rough, purblind mass." There is a department of the little
magazine entitled "Thanksgiving," and a statement at the top that
"the total number of Thanksgivings for the months is 2,143,911."
I am suspicious of that, as of German reports of prisoners taken;
but I give the statement as it stands, not going through the list
and picking out the crudest, but taking them as they come,
classified by states:
GENERAL FAVORS: For many of these favors Mass and
publication were promised, for others the Badge of Promoter's
Cross was used, for others the prayers of the associates has been
asked.
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Alabama -- Jewelry found, relief from pain, protection
during storm.
Alaska -- Safe return, goods found.
Arizona -- Two recoveries, suitable boarding place, illness
averted, safe delivery.
British Honduras -- Successful operation.
California -- Seventeen recoveries, six situations, two
successful examinations, house rented, stocks sold, raise in
salary, return to religious duties, sight regained, medal won,
Baptism, preservation from disease, contract obtained, success in
business, hearing restored, Easter duty made, happy death,
automobile sold, mind restored, house found, house rented,
successful journey, business sold, quarrel averted, return of
friends, two successful operations.
And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic
machine is harvesting the price day by day -- harvesting with
that ancient fervor which the Latin poet described as "auri sacra
fames." As Christopher Columbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: "Gold
is a wonderful thing. By means of gold we can even get souls into
Paradise."
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
The system thus self-revealed you admit is appalling in its
squalor; but you say that at least it is milder and less perilous
than the Church which burned Giordano Bruno and John Huss. But
the very essence of the Catholic Church is that it does not
change; semper eadem is its motto: the same yesterday, today and
forever -- the same in Washington as in Rome or Madrid -- the
same in a modern democracy as in the Middle Ages. The Catholic
Church is not primarily a religious organization; it is a
political organization, and proclaims the fact, and defies those
who would shut it up in the religious field. The Rev. S.B. Smith,
a Catholic doctor of divinity, explains in his "Elements of
Ecclesiastical Law":
Protestants contend that the entire power of the Church
consists in the right to teach and exhort, but not in the
right to command, rule, or govern; whence they infer that
she is not a perfect society or sovereign state. This theory
is false; for the Church, as was seen, is vested Jure divino
with power, (1) to make laws; (2) to define and apply them
(potestas judicialis); (3) to punish those who violate her
laws (potestas coercitiva).
And this is not one scholar's theory, but the formal and
repeated proclamation of infallible Popes. Here is the "Syllabus
of Errors," issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in
substance that
The state has not the right to leave every man free to
profess and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.
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It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical
power shall require the permission, of the civil power in
order to the exercise of its authority.
Then in the same Syllabus the rights and powers of the
Church are affirmed in substance:
She has the right to require the state not to leave
every man free to profess his own religion.
She has the right to exercise her power without the
permission or consent of the state.
She has the right of perpetuating the union of church
and state.
She has the right to require that the Catholic religion
shall be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of
all others.
She has the right to prevent the state from granting
the public exercise of their own worship to persons
immigrating from it.
She has the power of requiring the state not to permit
free expression of opinion.
You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You
who think that liberty of conscience is the basis of
civilization, ought at least to know what the Catholic Church has
to say about the matter. Here is Mgr. Segur, in his "Plain Talk
About Protestantism of Today," a book published in Boston and
extensively circulated by American Catholics:
Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is
likewise the soul of modern rationalism and philosophy. It
is one of those impossibilities which only the levity of a
superficial reason can regard as admissible. But a sound
mind that does not feed on empty words, looks upon this
freedom of thought only as simply absurd, and, what is more,
as sinful.
You take the liberty of thinking, nevertheless; you feel
safe because the Law will protect you. But do you imagine that
this "Law" applies to your Catholic neighbors? Do you imagine
that they are bound by the restraints that bind yon? Here is Pope
Leo XIII, in his Encyclical of 1890 -- and please remember that
Leo XIII was the 'beau ideal' of our capitalist statesmen and
editors, as wise and kind and gentle-souled a Pope as ever
roasted a heretic. He says:
If the laws of the state are openly at variance with
the laws of God -- if they inflict injury upon the Church --
or set at naught the authority of Jesus Christ which is
vested in the Supreme Pontiff, then indeed it becomes a duty
to resist them, a sin to render obedience.
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And consider how many fields there are in which the laws of
a democratic state do and forever must contravene the "laws of
God" as interpreted by the Catholic Church. Consider for example,
that the Pope, in his decree 'Ne Temere,' has declared that
Catholics who are married by civil authorities or by Protestant
clergymen will be living in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in
the same way, the problems of education, burial, prison
discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain,
religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To the above list, as
given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such as birth
control, which have arisen since his time.
What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of
expressions of that intention, set forth in the boldest and
haughtiest and most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal
Manning, in the Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name
of the Pope:
I acknowledge on civil power; I am the subject of no
prince; I claim more than this -- I claim to be the supreme
judge and director of the consciences of men -- of the
peasant that tills the field, and of the prince that sits
upon the throne; of the household of privacy, and the
legislator that makes laws for kingdoms; I am the sole, last
supreme judge of what is right and wrong.
TEMPORAL POWER
What this means is, that here in our American democracy the
Catholic Church is a rebel; a prisoner of war who bides his time,
watching for the moment to rise in revolt, and meantime making no
secret of his intentions. The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true
believers in America, instructed them as to their attitude in
captivity:
The Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution
and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile
legislation, protected against violence by the common laws
and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and
act without hindrance. Yet, through all this is true, it
would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in
America is to be sought the type of the most desirable
status of the church, or that it would be universally lawful
or expedient for state and church to be, as in America,
dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you
is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous
growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity
with which God has endowed His Church. ... But she would
bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty,
she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of the
public authority.
Accordingly, here is Father Phelan of St. Louis, addressing
his flock in the "Western Watchman," June 27, 1913:
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Tell us we are Catholics first and Americans or
Englishmen afterwards; of course we are. Tell us, in the
conflict between the church and the civil government we take
the side of the church; of course we do. Why, if the
government of the United States were at war with the church,
we would say, tomorrow, To hell with the government of the
United States; and if the church and all the governments of
the world were at war, we would say, To hell with all the
governments of the world. ... Why is it that in this
country, where we have only seven percent of the population,
the Catholic Church is so much feared? She is loved by all
her children and feared by everybody. Why is it that the
Pope has such tremendous power? Why, the Pope is the ruler
of the world. All the emperors, all the kings, all the
princes, all the presidents of the world, are as these altar
boys of mine. The Pope is the ruler of the world.
You recall what I said at the outset about Power; the
ability to control the lives of other men, to give laws and moral
codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and regarded.
Here is a man swollen to bursting with this Power. Dressed in his
holy robes, with his holy incense in his nostrils, and the faces
of the faithful gazing up at him awe-stricken, hear him proclaim:
The Church gives no bonds for her good behavior. She is
the judge of her own rights and duties, and of the rights
and duties of the state.
And lest you think that an extreme example of ultramontanist
arrogance, listen to the Boston "Pilot," April 6, 1912, speaking
for Cardinal O'Connell, whose official organ it is:
It must be borne in mind that even though Cardinals
Farley, O'Connell and Gibbons are at heart patriotic
Americans and members of an American hierarchy, yet they are
as cardinals foreign princes of the blood, to whom the
United States, as one of the great powers of the world, is
under an obligation to concede the same honors that they
receive abroad.
Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American man-of-
war, he would be entitled to the salutes and to naval honors
reserved for a foreign royal personage, and at any official
entertainment at Washington the Cardinal will outrank not
merely every cabinet officer, the speaker of the house and
the vice-president, but also the foreign ambassadors, coming
immediately next to the chief magistrate himself.
Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal
personage not of sovereign rank visits New York it is his duty to
make the first call on Cardinal Farley.
KNIGHTS OF SLAVERY
Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly
Jesus. And what is their attitude towards their brothers in God,
the rank and file of the membership, whose pennies greese the
wheels of the ecclesiastical machine? His Holiness, the Pope,
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sent over a delegate to represent him in America, and at the
convention of the Federation of Catholic Societies held in New
Orleans in November, 1910, this gentleman, Diomede Falcono,
delivered himself on the subject of Capital and Labor. We have
heard the slave-code of the Anglican disciples of Jesus, the
revolutionary carpenter; now let us hear the slave-code of his
Roman disciples:
Human society has its origin from God and is
constituted of two classes of people, the rich and the poor,
which respectively represent Capital and Labor.
Hence it follows that according to the ordinance of
God, human society is composed of superiors and subjects,
masters and servants, learned and unlettered, rich and poor,
nobles and plebeians.
And lest this should not be clear enough, the Pope sent a
second representative, Mgr. John Bonzano, who, speaking at a
general meeting of the German Catholic Central-Verein, St. Louis,
1917, declared:
One of the worst evils that may grow out of the
European war is the spreading of the doctrine of Socialism,
and the Catholic Church must be ready to counteract such
doctrines. We must be ready to prevent the spread of
Socialism and to work against it. As I understand, you have
a society of wealthy people in St. Louis ready for such a
campaign. You have experienced leaders who are masters in
their kind of work. They are always insistent to show that
this wealth was and is in close touch with the Church, and
therefore it will not fail.
This, you perceive, is the complete thesis of the present
book, which therefore no doubt will be entitled to the 'Nihil
Obstat" of the "Censor Theolog", and the "Imprimatur" of
"Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti, Ludovici." No wonder that
the "experienced leaders" of America, our captains of industry
and exploiters of labor, are forced, whatever their own faith may
be, to make use of this system of subjection. A few years ago we
read in our papers how a Jewish millionaire of Baltimore was
presenting a fortune to the Catholic Church, to be used in its
war upon Socialism. The late Mark Hanna, the shrewdest and most
far-seeing man that Big Business ever brought into power, said
that in 20 years there would be two parties in America, a
capitalist and a socialist; and that it would be the Catholic
Church that would save the country from Socialism. That prophecy
was widely quoted, and sank into the souls of our steel and
railway and money magnates; from which time you might see, if you
watched political events, a new tone of deference to the Roman
Hierarchy on the part of our ruling classes. Today you cannot get
an expression of opinion hostile to Catholicism into any
newspaper of importance. The Associated Press does not handle
news unfavorable to the Church, and from top to bottom, the
politician takes off his hat when the Sacred Host goes by. Said
Archbishop Quigley, speaking before the children of the Mary
Sodality:
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I'd like to see the politician who would try to rule
against the church in Chicago. His reign would be short
indeed.
PRIESTS AND POLICE
And how is it in our national capital, the palladium of our
liberties? As a means of demonstrating the power of the church
and the subservience of our politicians, the Catholics have
invented what they call the "Cardinal's Day Mass": An elaborate
procession of high ecclesiastics, dressed in gorgeous robes and
jewels, through the streets of Washington, accompanied by a small
army of policemen, paid by non-Catholic taxpayers. The Cardinal
seats himself upon a throne, and our political rulers make
obeisance before him. On Sunday, January 14, 1917, there were
present at this political mass the following personages: Four
cabinet members and their wives; the speaker of the House; a
large group of senators and representatives; a general of the
army and his wife; an admiral of the navy and his wife; the Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court and his wife, and another Justice of
the Supreme court and his wife.
And understand that the church makes no secret of its
purpose in conducting such public exhibitions. Here is the pious
Pope Leo XIII again, in his Encyclical of Nov. 1, 1885:
All Catholics must make themselves felt as active
elements in daily political life in the countries where they
live. They must penetrate, wherever possible, in the
administration of civil affairs; must constantly exert the
utmost vigilance and energy to prevent the usages of liberty
from going beyond the limits fixed by God's law. All
Catholics should do all in their power to cause the
constitutions of states and legislation to be modeled on the
principles of the true Church.
And following these instructions, the Catholics are
organized for political work. There are the various Catholic
Societies, such as the Knights of Columbus, secret, oath-bound
organizations, the military arm of the Papal Power. These
societies boast some three million members, and control not less
than that many votes. The one thing that you can be certain about
these votes is that on every public question, of whatever nature,
they will be cast on the side of ignorance and reaction. Thus, it
was the influence of the Catholic Societies which put upon our
national statute books the infamous law providing five years
imprisonment and $5,000 fine for the sending through the mail of
information about the prevention of conception. It is their
influence which keeps upon the statute books of New York state
the infamous law which permits divorce only for infidelity, and
makes it "collusion" if both parties desire the divorce. It is
these societies which, in every city and town in America, are
pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards so that
the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get
Catholics into the public schools and on school-boards, so that
children may not hear about Galilee, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have
Catholics in control of police and on magistrates benches, so
that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or
punished.
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You are shocked at this, you think it a vulgar jest,
perhaps; but during a period of "vice raids" in New York I was
told by a captain of police, himself a Catholic, that it was a
common thing for them to get priests in their net. "Of course,"
the official added, good-naturedly, "we let them slip out." I
understand that he had to do that; for the Pope, in his "Motu
Proprio" decree, has forbidden Catholics to bring a priest into
court for any civil crime whatsoever; he has forbidden Catholic
policemen to arrest, Catholic judges to try, and Catholic law-
makers to make laws affecting any priest of the Church of Rome.
And of course we know, upon the authority of a cardinal, that the
Pope is "the sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and
wrong." He has held that position for a thousand years and more;
and wherever you consult the police records throughout the
thousand years, you find the same entries concerning Catholic
ecclesiastics. I turn to Riley's "Illustrations of London Life
from Original Documents," and I find in the year 1385 a certain
chaplain, whose name is considerately suppressed, had a breviary
stolen from him by a loose woman, because he has not given her
any money, either on that night or the one previous. In 1320 John
de Sloghtre, a priest, is put in the tower "for being found
wandering about the city against the peace," and Richard Heyring,
a priest, is indicted in the ward of Farringdon and in the ward
of Crepelgate "as being a bruiser and nightwalker." That this has
been going on for 600 years is due, not to any special corruption
of the Catholic heart, but to the practice of clerical celibacy,
which is contrary to nature, a transgression of fundamental
instinct. It should be noted that the purpose of this
transgression, which pretends to be spiritual, is really
economic; it was the means whereby the church machine built up
its power through the Middle Ages. The priests had children then,
as they have them today; but these children not being recognized,
the church machine remained the sole heir of the property of its
clergy.
THE CHURCH MILITANT
Knowing what we know today, we marvel that it was possible
for Germany to prepare through so many years for her assault on
civilization, and for England to have slept through it all. In
exactly the same way, the historian of a generation from now will
marvel that America should have slept, while the New Inquisition
was planning to strangle her. For we are told with the utmost
explicitness precisely what is to be done. We are to see wiped
out these gains of civilization for which our race has bled and
agonized for many centuries; the very gains are to serve as the
means of their own destruction! Have we not heard Pope Leo tell
his faithful how to take advantage of what they find in America
-- our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our
open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy.
We see the army being organized and drilled under our eyes;
and we can read upon its banners its purpose proclaimed. Just as
the Prussian military caste had its slogan "Deutschland ueber
Alles!" so the Knights of Slavery have their slogan: "Make
America Catholic"
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Their attitude to democratic institutions is attested by the
fact that none of their conventions ever fails in its resolutions
to "deeply deplore the loss of the temporal power of Our Father.
the Pope." Their subjection to priestly domination is indicated
by such resolutions as this, bearing date of May 13, 1914:
The Knights of Columbus of Texas in annual convention
assembled, prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, present
filial regards with assurances of loyalty and obedience to
the Holy See and request the Papal blessing.
On June 10, 1912, one T.J. Carey of Palestine, Texas, wrote
to Archbishop Bonzano, the Apostolic Delegate: "Must I, as a
Catholic, surrender my political freedom to the Church? And by
this I mean the right to vote for the Democratic, Socialist, or
Republican parties when and where I please?" The answer was: "You
should submit to the decisions of the Church, even at the cost of
sacrificing political principles." And to the same effect Mgr.
Preston, in New York City, Jan. 1, 1888: "The man who says, 'I
will take my faith from Peter, but I will not take my politics
from Peter,' is not a true Catholic."
Such is the Papal machine; and not a day passes that it does
not discover some new scheme to advance the Papal glory; a
"Catholic battle-ship" in the United States navy; Catholic
chaplains on all ships of the navy; Catholic holidays -- such as
Columbus Day -- to be celebrated by all Protestants in America;
thirty million dollars worth of church property exempted from
taxation in New York City; mission bells to be set up at the
expense of the state of California; state support for parish
schools -- or, if this cannot be had, exemption of Catholics from
taxation for school purposes. So on through the list which might
continue for pages.
More than anything else, of course, the Papal machine is
concerned with education, or rather, with the preventing of
education. It was in its childish days that the race fell under
the spell of the Priestly Lie; it is in his childish days that
the individual can be most safely snared. Suffer little children
to come, unto the Catholic priest, and he will make upon their
sensitive minds an impression which nothing in after life can
eradicate. So the mainstay of the New Inquisition is the parish-
school, and its deadliest enemy is the American school system.
Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus, in his
book, "The Rights of Our Little Ones:"
Catholic parents cannot, in conscience, send their
children to American public schools, except for very grave
reasons approved by the ecclesiastical authorities. --
While state education removes illiteracy and puts a
limited amount of knowledge within the reach of all it
cannot be said to have a beneficial influence an
civilization in general.
The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education,
even in case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essential
physical and moral education are sufficiently provided for.
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And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church
is fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is necessary; as
"America," the organ of the Jesuits, explains:
Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at
taxing the school buildings, which creates hardships to the
parochial and other private schools. Now it is the free text
book law that puts a double burden on the Catholics. Then
again it is the unwise extension of the compulsory school
age that forces children to be in school until they are 16
to 18 years old.
And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools,
hear Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking before the children
of the Mary Sodalily in the Holy Name Parish-School;
Within 20 years this country is going to rule the
world. Kings and emperors will pass away, and the democracy
of the United States will take their place. The West will
dominate the country, and what I have seen of the Western
parochial schools has proven that the generation which
follows us will be exclusively Catholic. When the United
States rules the world the Catholic Church will rule the
world.
THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT
The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church
were to rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that
there have to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics
might be preferable to rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at
least do not fail to consider what history has to tell about
priestly government. We do not have to use our imaginations in
the matter, for there was once a Golden Age such as Archbishop
Quigley dreams of, when the power of the church was complete,
when emperors and princes paid homage to her, and the civil
authorities made haste to carry out her commands. What was the
condition of the people in those times? We are told by Lea, in
his "History of the Inquisition" that:
The moral condition of the laity was unutterably
depraved. Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the
Inquisition and its methods, and so long as faith was
preserved, crime and sin was comparatively unimportant
except as a source of revenue to those who sold absolution.
As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and purgatory would
be emptied if enough money could be found. The artificial
standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the Virgin
to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no
matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but
that he has the absolute power to bind and loose souls.
There are many wicked Popes plunged in hell, but all their
lawful acts on earth are accepted and confirmed by God, and
all priests who are not heretics administer true sacraments,
no matter how depraved they may be. Correctness of belief
was thus the sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate
consideration. How completely under such a system religion
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and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of
Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians,
but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of
persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were
admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly
exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy
name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest
of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable
offense was persistence in some trifling error of belief,
such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the
example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and
debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions
of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right
and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen
a society more vile than that of Europe in the 14th and 15th
centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us
with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of
chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbrock and of Tauler show
us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the
mass of the population was plunged into the depths of
sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law.
For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were
accountable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity
were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he
proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit
of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal
immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone
from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their
narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but
Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells
us that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence
everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds,
quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery,
gambling, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the
poor, rape, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he
illustrates his statement with the fact that in the
territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there
occurred no less than 1,400 murders committed in the
bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other
similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his
Crusaders to destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and
cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to
the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St.
Denis admits was much better than his Christian foes. The
same writer, moralizing over the disaster at Agincourt,
attributes it to the general corruption of the nation.
Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorderly
lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and
treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and
ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The
Church, set up by God as a model and protector of the
people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops,
through the basest and most criminal of motives, were
habitual accepters of persons; they, annointed themselves
with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there
was in them nothing of holy, of pure, or even of decent.
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GOD IN THE SCHOOLS
But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us
take a modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its
will. Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people
are turning against the clerical machine; and if you ask why,
turn to Rafael Shaw's "Spain From Within":
On every side the people see the baleful hand of the
Church, interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic
life, ordering the conditions of employment, draining them
of their hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies
established and maintained in the interest of the Religious
Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children's
education, hindering them in the exercise of their
constitutional rights, and deliberately ruining those of
them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly
dictation. Riots suddenly broke out in Barcelona; they are
instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in
Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the
mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits.
The consumos cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are
financially interested in their continuance.
We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the
state cannot justly enforce compulsory education even in case of
utter illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain?
There was an official investigation of school conditions, the
report appearing in the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909.
In 1857 there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of
schools in each of the 79 provinces: this requirement being below
the very low standards prevailing at that time in other European
countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four provinces had
the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of
increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch
up. Seventy-five percent of the population were wholly
illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government
schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and a half
dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools
were nearly all "nuns' schools," which taught only needle-work
and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and
disgusting."
As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister
of Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth
as follows:
More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and
many of these are absolutely destitute of hygienic
conditions. There are schools mixed up with hospitals, with
cemeteries, with slaughter houses, with stables. One school
forms the entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed
on the master's table while the last responses are being
said. There is a school into which the children cannot enter
until the animals have been sent out to pasture. Some are so
small that as soon as the warm weather begins the boys faint
for want of air and ventilation. One school is a manure-heap
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in process of fermentation, and one of the local authorities
has said that in this way the children are warmer in winter.
One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in
Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when
there is a bull-fight in the town.
These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish
educator by the name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he
called a "modern school," in which the pupils should be taught
science and common sense. He drew, of course, the bitter hatred
of the Catholic hierarchy, which saw in the spread of his
principles the end of their mastery of the people. When the
Barcelona insurrection took place, they had Ferrer seized upon a
charge of having been its instigator; they had him tried in
secret before a military tribunal, convicted upon forged
documents, and shot beneath the walls of the fortress of
Montjuich. The case was thoroughly investigated by William
Archer, one of England's leading critics, a man of scrupulous
rectitude of mind. His conclusion is that Ferrer was absolutely
innocent of the charges against him, and that his execution was
the result of a clerical plot. Of Ferrer's character Archer
writes:
Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have
quoted form a pretty complete revelation. From first to last
we see in him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible
idealist. His ideals are narrow, and his devotion to them
fanatical; but it is devoid, if not of egoism, at any rate
of self-interest and self-seeking. As he shrank from
applying the money entrusted him to ends of personal luxury,
so also he shrank from making his ideas and convictions
subserve any personal ambition or vanity.
THE MENACE
There are, of course, many people in America who will not
rest idle while their country falls into the condition of Spain.
There are anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out
lecturers to discuss the Church and its records; and this is
exasperating to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy,
and any criticism of it as blasphemy. So we have opportunity to
observe the working out of the doctrine that the Church is
superior to the civil law.
On June 12, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein,
Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J.
Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The
Catholics of the town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the
place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the
town, Father O'Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the
lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate Crowley was
surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was
six feet three in size, he was beaten almost to death. At the
trial which followed it developed that Father O'Connor and also
his brother, a judge on the Supreme Bench, were accessories
before the fact.
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Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military
societies, with their uniforms and their armories, are not
maintained for nothing. As Archbishop Quigley declared before the
German Catholic Central Verein:
We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all
at the beck and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what
the church authorities tell them to do. With these bodies of
loyal Catholics ready to step into the breach at any time
and present an unbroken front to the enemy we may feel
secure.
And so, on the evening of April 15, 1914, a group of
Catholics entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado,
overpowered a police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon,
an anti-Catholic lecturer. They bound and gagged him, took him to
a lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing
happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev.
William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case the
assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to
punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a
Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:
It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ
for the purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress
the law of the Church under the pretext of observing the
civil law.
There are papers published to warn Americans against the
plotting of this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has
a circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights
of Slavery do not enjoy reading it. Year after year they have
marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the mails
-- so far, in vain. They caused an obscenity prosecution, which
failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were blown up
with dynamite. At the present time there is a "Catholic Truth
Society" with a publication called "Truth," to oppose the anti-
Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course -- except
when the agents who collect the $2 subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors -- promising
absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of
those who "come across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of
the American Federation of Catholic Societies" for September,
1915, I find a record of the ceasless plotting to bar criticism
of the Catholic Church from the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany
Catholic congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge
St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the Federation's "law
committee," points out the difficulties in the way of such
legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion,
because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science,
Mormonism, and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks
the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they
can slip into the present law the words "scurrilous and
slanderous"; he hopes that this much can be done without the
American people catching on!
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you
want to start an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste,
therefore, to restate the main thesis of this book. It is not the
New Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary
Privilege. It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes
use of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.
You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the
universal corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to
the "ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and
Liberty" and you will see how reformers 20 years ago explained
our political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered
that the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were
the most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there
was a political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a
captain of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, and
taking some public privilege in return. So we came to realize
that political corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.
And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of
Superstition in America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a
democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the
poor foreigner who troubles us. Our human magic would win him --
our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our open-
handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We
should break down the Catholic machine, and not all the priests
in the hierarchy could stop us -- were it not for the Steel Trust
and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the
Traction Trust and the Money Trust -- those masters of America
who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-
governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant,
inert, physically, mentally and morally helpless!
No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is
not the pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering
cathedrals; it is not the $2 contributions for the salvation of
souls which support the Catholic Truth Society and the Mary
Sodality and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and
all the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda. These
help, of course; but the main sources of growth are, first, the
subsidies of industrial exploiters, the majority of whom are non-
Catholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted as
payment for votes by politicians who are creatures and puppets of
Big Business.
KING COAL
The proof of these statements is written all over the
industrial life of America. I will stop long enough to present an
account of one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement
that if space permitted I could present the same sort of proof
for a dozen other industries which I have studied -- the steel-
mills of Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the
glass-works of Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the
cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of
Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of
Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.
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In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of
enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and
other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some
12- or 15,000 in number, come from all the nations of Europe and
Asia, and their fate is that of the average wage-slave. I do not
ask anyone to take my word, but present sworn testimony, taken by
the United States Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914.
Here is the way the Italian miners live, as described in a
doctor's report:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are
habitable, and 46 simply awful; they are disreputably
disgraceful. I have had to remove a mother in labor from one
part of the shack to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis,
former superintendent of the Sociological Department of the
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company:
The C.F.&I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and
dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings
and are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings.
And the people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty.
Frequently the population is so congested that whole
families are crowded into one room; eight persons in one
small room was reported during the year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the
bosses whom the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as
most uncouth, ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most
brutal set of men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his
weights, and applies for the protection which the law of the
state allows him. What happens then?
"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language
of the super he was getting too smart."
"And he got what?"
"He got it in the neck, generally."
And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on
strike, in the words of the Commission's report:
Five strikers, one boy, and 13 women and children in
the strikers' tent colony were shot to death by militiamen
and guards employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and
burned to death when these militiamen and guards set fire to
the tents in which they made their homes.
And now, what is the position of education in such camps?
The Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the
school building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were
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four teachers, the next three, and the next only two. The teacher
of the primary grade had 120 children enrolled, 90 percent of
whom could not speak a word of English.
Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was
overcrowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
around there.
And as to the political use made of this deliberately
cultivated ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson
testified that the companies controlled all elections and all
nominations:
Election returns from the two or three counties in
which the large companies operate show that in the precincts
in which the mining camps are located the returns are nearly
unanimous in favor of the men or measures approved by the
companies, regardless of party.
And now comes the all-important question. What of the
Catholic Church and these evils? The majority of these mine-
slaves are Catholics, it is this Church which is charged with
their protection. There are priests in every town, and in nearly
every camp. And do we find them lifting their voices in behalf of
the miners, protesting against the starving and torturing of 30-
or 40,000 human beings? Do we find Catholic papers printing
accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic journalists
on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defending the
strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their troubles?
We do not!
Through the long agony of the 14 months strike, I know of
just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say
for the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached
the strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text
that "Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as
a "scab" and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively,
thinking of his church superiors. My informant, a union miner,
laughed. "We made him!" he said.
I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls
and could not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max
Eastman, reporting the strike in the "Masses," tells of an
interview with a Catholic sister.
"Has the Church done anything to try to help these
people, or to bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it
the most useless thing in the world to attempt it," she
replied.
The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene,
and several clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore
testimony to the outrages which were being committed against the
strikers; but of all the Catholic priests in the district not one
appeared -- not one! Several Protestant clergymen testified that
they had been driven from the coal-camps -- not because they
favored the unions, but because the companies objected to having
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their workers educated at all; but no one ever heard of the
Catholic Church having trouble with the operators. To make sure
on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who
watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:
The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies
very cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps. The
impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor
what good the Church does, but I know of no instance, during the
Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or place, when the
Catholic Church has taken any special interest in the cause of
the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially the men, quit the
church during the coal-strike.
THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE
Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of
all power, political, social, and religious, is economic
exploitation. To all other powers and all other organizations it
speaks in these words: "Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us,
and you will be destroyed." It has spoken to the Catholic Church,
for 1,600 years the friend and servant of every ruling class; and
the Church has hastened to fit itself into the situation,
continuing its pastoral role as shepherd to the wage-slave vote.
In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is
"Democratic"; so in the Blaine campaign it was possible for a
Republican clergyman to describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and
Rebellion." But the Holy Office was shrewd and socially
ambitious, and the Grand Old Party was desperately in need of
votes, so under the regime of Mark Hanna, the President-Maker,
there began a rapproachment between Big Business and the New
Inquisition. Under Hanna the Catholic Church got representation
in the Cabinet; under him the Cardinal's Mass became a government
institution, a Catholic College came to the fore in Washington,
and Catholic prelates were introduced in the role of eminent
publicists, their reactionary opinions on important questions
being quoted with grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was
Mark Hanna himself who founded the National Civic Federation,
upon whose executive committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops
might work hand in glove with Catholic labor-leaders for the
chloroforming of the American working-class. Hanna's biographer
naively calls attention to the President-maker's popularity among
Catholics, high and low, and the support they gave him.
"Archbishop Ireland was in frequent correspondence with him, and
used his influence in Mr. Hanna's behalf."
And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under
Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the
most pliant tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White
House since the days of the Slave Power. President Taft was
himself a Unitarian; yet it was under his administration that the
Catholic Church achieved one of its dearest ambitions, and broke
into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can imagine the powers of the
time in conference. It is desired to pack the Court against the
possibility of progress; it is desired to find men who will stand
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like a rock against change -- and who better than those who have
been trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for
doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that Hereditary
Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property
rights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part of an infallible
Pope!
Under this Taft administration the country was governed by
the strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a
combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the
leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt"
Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish
Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the
draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the
tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its
burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of
the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish
Secretary of the Interior. And of course under such an
administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides.
Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic
ecclesiastics were accorded public honor, and Catholic favor
became a means to political advancement. You might see a hard-
swearing old political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon, taking his
cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and betaking
himself to the "Cardinal's Day Mass," to bend his stiff knees and
bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate on a
throne. You might see an emissary of the United States government
proceeding to Rome, prostrating himself before the Pope, and
paying over $7,000,000 of our taxes for lands which the filthy
and sensual friars of the Philippine Islands had filched from the
wretched serfs of that country and which the wretched serfs had
won back by their blood in a revolution.
SECRET SERVICE
This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue,
made the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical
thought. Because the popular magazines were opposing the
plundering of the country, a bill was introduced into Congress to
put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the
President himself devoted all his power to forcing the passage of
this bill. At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped
by every sort of persecution. I was at that time in intimate
touch with the "Appeal to Reason," and I know that scarcely a
month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some
new "regulation" especially designed to limit its circulation. I
recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to
Washington with a trunk-full of letters from subscribers who
complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to
them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic
Attorney General and Sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken
the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.
From my personal knowledge I can say that under the
administration of President Taft the Roman Catholic Church and
the Secret Service of the Federal Government worked hand in hand
for the undermining of the radical movement in America. Catholic
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lecturers toured the country, pouring into the ears of the public
vile slanders about the private morality of Socialists; while at
the same time government detectives, paid out of public funds
spent their time seeking evidence for these Catholic lecturers to
use, I know one man, a radical labor-leader, whose morals
happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician,
and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from
accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen
others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one case --
myself -- a man was asking a divorce from his wife, and whose
mail was opened for months.
This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme
reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no
charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our
political police evidently thought it likely that a man who was
not living with his wife might have something to hide; so for
months my every move was watched and all my mail intercepted. In
such a case one might at first suspect one's private opponent;
but it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for
any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened, but the
mail of all my relatives and friends -- people residing in places
as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile
of a government official to whom I complained about this matter:
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer
was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the methods of
the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence
if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with
the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be
convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case,
the matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad to live;
when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft
administration had been repudiated at the polls. and the Secret
Service of the government was no longer at the disposal of the
Catholic machine.
TAX EXEMPTION
Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and
everywhere recognized as one of the main pillars of American
capitalism. It has some 15,000 churches, 14,000,000 communicants,
and property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon this property
it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national; which means,
quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to church, but who
do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of Catholicism. We pay to
have streets paved and lighted and cleaned in front of Catholic
churches; we pay to have thieves kept away from them, fires put
out in them, records preserved for them -- all the services of
civilization given to them gratis, and this in a land whose
constitution provides that Congress (which includes all state and
municipal legislative bodies) "Shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion." When war is declared, and our sons
are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and friars,
priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of
religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the status of
"conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only
teach justice and humanity, decency and truth.
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In defence of this taz-exemption graft, the stock answer is
that the property is being used for purposes of "education" or
"charity." It is a school, in which children are being taught
that "liberty of conscience is a most pestiferous error, from
which arises revolution, corruption, contempt of sacred things,
holy institutions, and laws." (Plus IX). It is a "Homes of
Refuge, to which wayward girls are committed by Catholic
magistrates, and in which they are worked 12 hours a day in a
laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a "parish-house," in
which a celibate priest lives under the care of an attractive
young "house-keeper." Or it is a nunnery, in which young girls
are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their
sisters' plates to teach them humility, and taught to lie before
the altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their
"Superiors" walk upon their bodies to impress the religious
virtues. "I was a teacher in the Catholic schools up to a very
recent period," writes the woman friend who tells me of these
customs, "and I know about the whole awful system which endeavors
to throttle every genuine impulse of the human will."
Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim
of "religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In
every large city of America you will find acres of land owned by
the Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some
institution: but as time goes on and property values increase,
the church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to
cash in the profits of its investment, precisely as does any
other real estate speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history
of Romanism you find it at this same game, doing business under
the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy name of Christ. Read
the letter which the Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope
in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their boundless
graft. In Joseph McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits" appears
a summary:
A remarkable account is given of the worldly property
of the fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the
wealth of Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep,
besides cattle and other property. They own six large sugar
refineries, worth from 500,000 to 1,000,000 crowns each, and
making an annual profit of 100,000 crowns each, while all
the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own only three
small refineries. They have immense farms, rich silver
mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet
they continually intrigue for legacies -- a woman has
recently left them 70,000 crowns -- and they refuse to pay
the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this
authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at
Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to
engage in commerce and Jesuit writers still gravely maintain
that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be
added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidized by
the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only
five or six Jesuits to each of their establishments, and
that they conducted only ten colleges.
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"HOLY HISTORY"
And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be
taken away from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of
procedure. Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and
if the letter is not published, go and see the editor and ask
why; so you will learn something about the partnership between
Superstition and Big Business!
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in
any large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the
Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the
ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new
Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that
graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each
paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's
crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's
cap and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera company.
The Los Angeles "Examiner," the only paper in the city with a
pretence to radicalism, terns loose its star-writer -- one of
those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West
"rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G.O.P.
convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch
square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic
festivity; and does it faze him? It does not! He is a newspaper
man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the
assignment and write like the devil. To read him now you might
think be had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and
he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail
symbolically picturing the holy history of the Roman
Catholic Church in the inexorable progress of its immense
structure, which rises from the rock of Peter, with its
beacons of faith and devotion piercing the fog of doubt and
fear which surrounds the world and the worldly, was the
ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, whereby
Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed in his diocese of
Monterey and Los Angeles.
And then a month later, comes another occasion of state --
the Twenty-third Annual Banquet of the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write
a little essay to make clear the sociological significance of
that function; explaining first a nation-wide organization which
has been proven by congressional investigation and by the
publication of its secret documents to be a machine for the
corruption of our political life; and then exhibiting our "City
of the Angels," from which all Angels have long since fled; a
city in the first crude stage of land speculation, without order,
dignity or charm; a city of real estate agents, who exist by
selling climate to new arrivals from the East, a city whose
intellectual life is "boosting," whose standards of truth are
those of the horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of
temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern
California and the East. This device is effective in the winter-
time; but last June, when for five days the temperature went to
over 110, and several times 114 -- the Los Angeles space was left
empty!
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In the same way, there is a rule that our earthquake shocks
are never mentioned, unless they destroy whole towns. On the
afternoon of January 26, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of
violence sufficient to lift a barn over a church-steeple and
deposit if in the pastor's front yard. That evening a friend of
mine in Los Angeles called up the office of the "Times" to make
inquiry; and although they are only 13 miles away, and have a
branch office and a special correspondent in Pasadena, the answer
was that they had heard nothing about the cyclone! And next
morning I made a careful search of their columns. On the front
page I read: "Fourth Blizzard of Season Raging in East"; also:
"Another Earthquake in Guatemala." But not a line about the
Pasadena cyclone. That there was plenty of space in that issue,
you may judge from the fact that there were 20 headlines like the
following -- many of them representing full page and half page
illustrated "write-ups":
Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California;
The Bright Side of Sunshine Land; Come to California;
Southland's Arms Outstretched in Cordial Invitation to the
East; Flower Stands Make Gay City Streets; Southland Climate
Big Manufacturing Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los
Angeles' Beautiful Homes; Nymphs Knit and Bathe at Ocean's
Sunny Beach; etc.
Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are
making money hand over fist. It is all the more delightful,
because we are putting our souls into it, we are lending our
money to the government and saving the world for Democracy! Our
labor unionists have been driven to other cities, and our Mexican
agitators and I.W.W's are in jail, so in the gilt ball-room of
our palatial six-dollar-a-day hotel the 400 masters of our
prosperity meet to pat themselves on the back, and they invite
the new Catholic bishop to come and confer the grace of God upon
their eating.
The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times" -- the labor-
hating, labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times" --
and here is the episcopal picture on the front page, the arms
stretched four columns wide in oratorical beneficence. How the
shepherd of Jesus does love the Merchants and Manufacturers! How
his eloquence is poured out upon them! "You represent, gentlemen,
the largest and the most civilizing secular body in the country.
You, are the pioneers of American civilization. ... I am glad to
be among you; glad that my lines have fallen in this glorious
land by the sunset sea, and honored to meet in intimate
acquaintance the big men who have raised here in a few years a
city of metropolitan proportions."
And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian
of Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them about the coming
class-war. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and
respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on
the other a demagogue speaking about the tyranny of capitalists
and usurers." And then, of course, the inevitable religious tag:
"How will men obey you, if they believe not in God, who is the
author of all authority?" At which, according to the "Times,"
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"prolonged applause and cheers" from the Merchants and
Manufacturers! The editor of the "Times" goes back to his office,
and inspired by this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader" with
the statement that: "We have no proletariat in America!"
DAS CENTRUM
In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy
Alliance, this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association, we have to go to Europe, where the
arrangement has been working for a thousand years. In Europe
today we see the whole world in conflict with a band of criminals
who have been able to master the minds and lives of a hundred
million highly civilized people. As I write, the Junker
aristocracy is at bay, but there comes a Holy Father to its
rescue, with the cross of Jesus up-lifted, and a series of pleas
of mercy, written in Vienna, edited in Berlin, and sent out from
Rome. The Holy Father loves all mankind with a tender and
touching love; his heart bleeds at the sight of bloodshed and
suffering, and he pleads the sacred cause of peace and earth and
good will toward men. --
But what was the Holy Father doing through the 43 years that
the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the world?
How was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and good-
will? He is, you understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge of
what is right and wrong," and his followers obey him with the
utmost promptness and devotion -- they express themselves as
"prostrate at his feet." And when the masters of Prussia came to
him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation into the
world's greatest military empire" -- what did the Roman Church
answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause
of peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not. To
Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna
in America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the
minds of the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our
cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish
you with votes, so that you may rule the state and do what you
will."
You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we
know the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of
the Jukerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the
Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the anti-
Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its
lesson, and would never-more oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We
know how this bargain was carried out; we have the records of the
'Centrum,' the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies
were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia was
erected. Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the
Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was
beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout
its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors, gallery of the
Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against the
torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the
deputies of the Holy Father's Political Party screaming their
rage like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic
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Church organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were
called, to scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary
movement. The Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for
the management of these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious
and benevolent Leo XIII:
"They must pay special and principal attention to piety
and morality, and their internal discipline must be directed
precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely
lose their special character, and come to be very little
better than those societies which take no account of
Religion at all."
It is so hard, you see, to keep a man 'thinking about piety
and morality while he is starving! I am quoting from the
Encyclical Letter on "The Condition of Labor," issued in 1891,
and, addressed "to our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs
Primates, Archbishops and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace
and Communion with the Apostolic See." The purpose of the letter
is "to refute false teaching," and the substance of its message
is:
This great labor question cannot be solved except by
assuming as a principle that private property must be held
Sacred and inviolable.
And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as
frank as any used in the present book:
The chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by
legal enactment and policy, of private property. Most of all
it is essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep
the multitude within the line of duty; for if all may justly
strive to benefit their condition, yet neither justice nor
the common good allows any one to seize that which belongs
to another, or, under the pretext of futile and ridiculous
equality, to lay hands on other peoples, fortunes.
And this, you understand, in lands where rapine and
conquest, class-tyranny and priestly domination have been the
custom since the dawn of history; in which no property-right can
possibly trace back to any other basis than force. In Austria,
for example -- Austria, the leader and guardian of the Holy
Alliance -- Austria, which had no Reformation, no Revolution, no
Kultur-kampf -- Austria, in which the income of the Catholic
Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words, Austria is still to a
large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was Austria which began
the war -- began it in a religious quarrel, with a Slav people
which does not acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of the
world, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church. So of
course today when Austria is learning the bitter lesson that they
who draw the sword shall perish by the sword, the heart of the
Holy Father is wrung with grief, and he sends out these eloquent
peace-notes, written in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And at the
same time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced to
prison for life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!
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It is a curious thing to observe -- the natural instinct
which, all over the world, draws Superstition and Exploitation
together. This war, which is hailed as a war against autocracy,
might almost as accurately be described as a war against the
clerical system. Wherever in the world you find the Papal power
strong, there you find sympathy with the Prussian infamy and
there you find German intrigue. In Spain, for example; in Ireland
and Quebec, and many priests were shot at the outset, and
Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice that he
pleads in vain with the Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved
Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The Kaiser
allows the hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace
settlement; and meantime the law forbidding the presence of the
Jesuits in Germany has been repealed, and all over the world the
propagandists of this order are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger
Casement was raised a Catholic, and so also "Jim" Larkin, the
Irish labor-leader who is touring America denouncing the Allies.
The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beat conscription in
Austria, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery among the
ignorant peasant-soldiers from Sicily which caused the breaking
of the Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct that,
in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New York was
campaigning for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish suddenly
forgot their ancient horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's Journal"
published nine articles favoring Socialism in a single issue;
while even "The Tablet," the diocesan paper, began to discover
that the Socialists were not such bad fellows after all. The same
"Tablet" which a few years ago allowed Father Belford to declare
that Socialists were mad dogs who should be "stopped with a
bullet"!
P.S. The reader will be interested to know that for the
statements on a previous page, Upton Sinclair was described as a
"scoundrel" by a former prime minister of the Austrian Empire,
and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a court trial
was awarded damages of 500,000 crown -- about $7 in American
money,
BOOK FOUR
THE CHURCH OF THE SLAVERS
See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
And merrily from night to morn
We chant his praise and worship him --
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!
A wondrous god! most fit for those
Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;
Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
Hell's burning incense fills the air,
And Death attests in street and lane
The hideous glory of his reign.
-- Buchanan
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FACE OF CAESAR
The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in
producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis
by Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various
Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much
better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon
an inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary
product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry,
drama and fiction of a whole people for something like 1,000
years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove
anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to
do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and
wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the
direct orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the
Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.
They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most
dangerous form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and
see what men have done with his little joke about the face of
Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead. As for
Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up;
when he ordered, "Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly
what he said. The Roman official stamp which he put upon the
gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the
Reformation on.
In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were
suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself
knew about it, he denounced the princely robbers and the priestly
land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which he was a
master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever is done
about it -- until at last the miserable peasants attempted to
organize and win their own rights. Their demands do not seem to
us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of
electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the
right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction
of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and -- that
universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England,
Mexico or 16th century Germany -- the restoration to the village
of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of slaves
asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline
sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would
drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with
spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist
without inequalities, etc.
And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned
upon them and denounced them to the princes; he issued
proclamations which might have been the instructions of Mr. John
Wanamaker to the police-force of his "City of Brotherly Love":
"One cannot answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to
hit him with the fist until blood flows from the nose." He issued
a letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants,"
which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue
Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this
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well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a
sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of Methodist
Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled
about the severity of their repression, for it will save many
souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes
set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable
wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the
Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and
militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar, Prof.
Rauschenbusch, puts it:
The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were
from 1517 to 1525, when the whole nation was in commotion,
and a great revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping
every class and every higher interest one step nearer to its
ideal of life. ... The Lutheran Reformation had been most
truly religious and creative when it embraced the whole of
human life and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and
movements. When it became "religious" in the narrow sense,
it grew scholastic and spiny, quarrelsome, and impotent to
awaken high enthusiasm and noble life.
DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES
As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church
became the state church of Prussia, and Bible-worship and Devil-
terror played their part, along with the Mass and the
Confessional, in building up the Junker dream. A court official
-- the Oberhofprediger -- was set up, and from that time on the
Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick
the Great, the ancestral genius was an Atheist and a scoffer, but
he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If
my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the
ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with
Jocular approval how he kept them from thinking:
He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal
of pains with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to
them; and for the rest expects to be obeyed by them, as by
his Sergeants and Corporals. Indeed, the reverend men feel
themselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants, Corporals,
and Captains, to whom obedience is the rule, and discontent
a thing not to be indulged in by any means.
So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided
Silesia and Poland. His successors ordered all the Protestant
sects into one, so that they might be more easily controlled;
from which time the Lutheran Church has been a department of the
Prussian state, in some cases a branch of the municipal
authority.
In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded
their liberty, it was an ultra-pious king of Prussia who sent his
troops and shot them down -- precisely as Luther had advised to
shoot down the peasants. At this time the future maker of the
German Empire rose in the Landtag and made his bow before the
world; a young Prussian land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck by name,
he shook his fist in the face of the new German liberalism, and
incidentally of the new German infidelity:
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Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no
state erected upon any other foundation can permanently
exist.
The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintained this
tradition of his line. It was his custom to tour the Empire in a
train of blue and white cars, carrying as many costumes as any
stage favorite, most of them military; with him on the train went
the Prussian god, and there was scarcely a performance at which
this god did not appear, also in military costume. After the
failure of the "Kultur-kampf," the official Lutheran religion was
ordered to make friends with its ancient enemy, the Catholic
Church. Said the Kaiser:
I make no difference between the adherents of the
Catholic and Protestant creeds. Let them both stand upon the
foundation of Christianity, and they are both bound to be
true citizens and obedient subjects. Then the German people
will be the rock of granite upon which our Lord God can
build and complete his work of Kultur in the world.
And here is the oath required of the Catholic clergy, upon
their admission to equality of trustworthiness with their
Protestant confreres:
I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his
Royal Majesty -- and his lawful successors in the government
-- as my most gracious King and Sovereign; promote his
welfare according to my ability; prevent injury and
detriment to him; and particularly endeavor carefully to
cultivate in the minds of the people under my care a sense
of reverence and fidelity towards the King, love for the
Fatherland, obedience to the laws, and all those virtues
which in a Christian denote a good citizen; and I will not
suffer any man to teach or act in a contrary spirit. In
particular I vow that I will not support any society or
association, either at home or abroad, which might endanger
the public security, and will inform His Majesty of any
proposal made, either in my diocese or elsewhere, which
might prove injurious to the State.
And later on this heaven-guided ruler conceived the scheme
of a Berlin-Baghdad railway, for which he needed one religion
more; he paid a visit to Constantinople, and made another debut
and produced another god -- with the result that millions of
Turks are fighting under the belief that the Kaiser is a convert
to the faith of Mohammed!
DER TAG
All this was, of course, in preparation for the great event
to which all good Germans looked forward -- to which all German
officers drank their toasts at banquets -- the Day.
This glorious day came, and the field-gray armies marched
forth, and the Pauline-Lutheran God marched with them. The
Kaiser, as usual, acted as spokesman:
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Remember that the German people are the chosen of God.
On me, the German emperor, the spirit of God has descended.
I am His sword, His weapon and His viceregent, Woe to the
disobedient and death to cowards and unbelievers.
As to the Prussian state religion, its attitude to the war
is set forth in a little book written by a high clerical
personage, the Herr Consistorialrat Dietrich Vorwerk, containing
prayers and hymns for the Lord God of Battles:
Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do thou work
daily death and tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in
merciful long-suffering each bullet and each blow which
misses its mark. Lead us not into the temptation of letting
our wrath be too tame in carrying out Thy divine judgment.
Deliver us and our ally from the Infernal Enemy and his
servants on earth. Thine is the kingdom, the German land;
may we, by the aid of Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the fame
and the glory.
It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetrated the
great masterpiece of humor of the war -- the hymn in which he
appeals to that God who keeps guard over Cherubim, Seraphim, and
Zeppelins. You have to say over the German form of these words in
order to get the effects of their delicious melody --
"Cherubinen, Seraphinen, Zeppelinen!" And lest you think that
this too-musical clergyman is a rare avis, turn to the little
book which has been published in English under the same title as
Herr Vorwerk's "Hurrah and Hallelujah." Here is the Reverend S.
Lehmann:
Germany is the center of God's plans for the world.
Germany's fight against the whole world is in reality the
battle of the spirit against the whole world's infamy,
falsehood and devilish cunning.
And here is Pastor K. Koenig:
It was God's will that we should will the war.
And Pastor J. Rump:
Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in
humanity. We fight for the cause of Jesus within mankind.
And here is an eminent theological professor:
The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the
war is the German God. Not the national God such as the
lower nations worship, but "our God," who is not ashamed of
belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart.
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KING COTTON
It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to
denounce the Prussian system; my only purpose is to show that
Bible-worship, precisely as saint-worship or totem-worship,
delivers the worshiper up to the Slavers. This truth has held in
America, precisely as in Prussia. During the middle of the last
century there was fought out a mighty issue in our free republic;
and what was the part played in this struggle by the Bible-cults?
Hear the testimony of William Lloyd Garrison: "American
Christianity is the main pillar of American slavery." Hear Parker
Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church before we could
reach the dreadful institution at all."
In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which
represented the churches of the South as well as the North,
passed by a unanimous vote a resolution to the effect that
"Slavery is utterly Inconsistent with the law of God, which
requires, us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But in a
generation the views of the entire South, including the
Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What was the reason?
Had the "law of God" been altered? Had some new "revelation" been
handed down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that a Yankee by
the name of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take the seeds
out of short staple cotton. The cotton crop of the South
increased from 4,000 bales in 1791 to 450,000 in 1820 and
5,400,000 in 1860.
There was a new monarch King Cotton, and his empire depended
upon slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn
of history, he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he
wanted was right and holy. From one end of the South to the other
the pulpits rang with the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to
servants shall he be to his brethren." The learned Bishop
Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery," gave the standard
interpretation of this text:
The Almighty, foreseeing the total degradation of the
Negro race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under the
descendants of Sham and Jepheth, doubtless because he judged
it to be their fittest condition.
I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from
defenses of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus
Christ -- and not only from the South, but from the North. For it
must be understood that leading families of Massachusetts and New
York owed their power to Slavery; their fathers had brought
molasses from New Orleans and made it into rum, and taken it to
the coast of Africa to be exchanged for slaves for the Southern
planters. And after this trade was outlawed, the slave-grown
cotton had still to be shipped to the North and spun; so the
traders of the North must have divine sanction for the Fugitive
Slave law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The slavery
of the Negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in
the Old and New Testaments." Here is the "True Presbyterian," of
New York, giving the decision of a clerical man of the world:
"There is no debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise,
and it may continue through the Millennium."
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And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in
arms against those who presumed to interfere with this divine
institution, the men of God of the South called down blessings
upon their armies in words which, with the proper change of
names, might have been spoken in Berlin in 1914.! Thus Dr.
Thornwell, one of the leading Presbyterian divines in the South:
"The triumph of Lincoln's principles is the death-knell of
slavery. ... Let us crush the serpent in the egg." And the
Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: "The war is a war against
slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against the Word,
Providence and Government of God." I read in the papers, as I am
writing, how the clergy of Germany are thundering against
President Wilson's deceleration that country must become
democratic. Here is a manifesto of the German Evangelical League,
made public on the 400th anniversary of the Reformation:
We especially warn against the heresy, promulgated from
America, that Christianity enjoins democratic institutions,
and that they are an essential condition of the kingdom of
God on earth.
In exactly the same way the religious bodies of the entire
South, united in an address to Christians throughout the world,
early in the year 1863:
The recent proclamation of the President of the United
States, seeking the emancipation of the slaves of the South,
is in our judgment occasion of solemn protest on the part of
the people of God.
WITCHES AND WOMEN
To whatever part of the world you travel, to whatever page
of history you turn, you find the endowed and established clergy
using the word of God in defense of whatever form of slave-
driving may then be popular and profitable. Two or three hundred
years ago it was the custom of Protestant divines in England and
America to hang poor old women as witches; only 150 years ago we
find John Wesley, founder of Methodism, declaring that "the
giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible."
And if you investigate this witch-burning, you will find that it
is only one aspect of a blot upon civilization, the Christian
Mythology. You see, there were two Hebrew legends -- one that
woman was made out of a man's rib, and the other that she ate an
apple; therefore in modern England a wife must be content with a
legal status lower than domestic servant.
Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims is this --
that Christianity has promoted chivalry and respect for
womanhood. In ancient Greece and Rome the woman was the equal and
helpmate of man; we read in Tacitus about the splendid women of
the Germans, who took part in public councils, and even fought in
battles. Two thousand years before the Christian era we are told
by Maspero that the Egyptian woman was the mistress of her house;
she could inherit equally with her brothers, and had full control
of her property. We are told by Paturet that she was "juridically
the equal of man, having the same rights and being treated in the
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same fashion." But in present-day England, under the common law,
woman can hold no office of trust or power, and her husband has
the sole custody of her person, and of her children while minors.
He can steal her children, rob her of her clothing, and beat her
with a stick provided it is no thicker than his thumb. While I
was in London the highest court handed down a decision on the law
which does not permit a woman to divorce her husband for
infidelity, unless it has been accompanied by cruelty; a man had
brought his mistress into his home and compelled his wife to work
for and wait upon her, and the decision was that this was not
cruelty in the meaning of the law!
And if you say that this enslavement of Woman has nothing to
do with religion -- that ancient Hebrew fables do not control
modern English customs -- then listen to the Vicar of Crantock,
preaching at St. Crantock's, London, Aug. 27, 1905, and
explaining why women must cover their heads in church:
(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then
Eve.
(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but
the woman of the man.
(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the
woman, but the woman for the man.
(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory
of God, but woman is the glory of man.
(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but
the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.
(6) The marriage relation, As the Church is subject to
Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands.
(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is
Christ, but the head of the woman is man.
I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by
these ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy
which cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling
classes. In the city where I write, three clergymen are being
sent to jail for six months for protesting against the use of the
name of Jesus in the wholesale slaughter of men. Now, I am
backing this war, I know that it has to be fought, and I want to
see it fought as hard as possible; but I want to leave Jesus out
of it, for I know that Jesus did not believe in war, and never
could have been brought to support a war, I object to clerical
cant on the subject; and I note that an eminent theological
authority, "Billy" Sunday, appears to agree with me; for I find
him on the front page of my morning paper, assailing the three
pacifist clergymen, and making his appeal not to Jesus, but to
the blood-thirsty tribal deity of the ancient Hebrews:
I suppose they think they know more than God Almighty,
who commanded the sun to stand still while Joshua won the
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battle for the Lord; more than the God who made Samson strong so
he could slay thousands of his nation's enemies in a righteous
cause.
Right you are, Billy! And if the capitalist system continues
to develop unchecked, we shall some day see it dawn upon the
masters of the world how wasteful it is to permit the
superannuated workers to perish by slow starvation. So much more
sensible to make use of them! So we shall have a Bible defence of
cannibalism; we shall hear our evangelists quoting Leviticus:
"They shall eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters." Or
perhaps some of our leisure-class ladies might make the discovery
that the flesh of working-class babies is relished by pomeranians
and poodles. If so, the Billy Sundays of the 21st century may
discover the text: "Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy
little ones against the stones."
MOTH AND RUST
It is especially interesting to notice what happens when the
Bible texts work: against the interests of the Slavers and their
clerical retainers. Then they are null and void -- and no matter
how precise and explicit and unmistakable they may be! Take for
example the Sabbath injunction: "Six days shalt thou labor and do
all that thou hast to do." Karl Marx records of the pious England
of his time that
Occasionally in rural districts a day-laborer is
condemned to imprisonment for desecrating the Sabbath by
working in his front garden. The same laborer is punished
for breach of contract if he remains away from his metal,
paper or glass works on the Sunday, even if it be from a
religious whim. The orthodox Parliament will hear nothing of
Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the process of expanding
capital.
Or consider the attitude of the Church in the matter of
usury. Throughout ancient Hebrew history the money-lender was an
outcast; both the law and the prophets denounced him without
mercy, and it was made perfectly clear that what was meant was,
not the taking of high interest, but the taking of any interest
whatsoever. The early church fathers were explicit, and the
Catholic Church for a thousand years consigned money-lenders
unhesitatingly to hell. But then came the modern commercial
system, and the money-lenders became the masters of the world!
There is no more amusing illustration of the perversion of human
thought than the efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape from
the dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had trapped them.
Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuit of
the 18th century, a doctor of the Church, now worshiped as St.
Alphonsus, presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental
usury"; concluding that, if the borrower pay interest of his own
free will, the lender may keep it. In answer to the question
whether the lender may keep what the borrower pays, not out of
gratitude, but out of fear that otherwise loans will be refused
to him in future, Ligouri says that "to be usury, it must be paid
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by reason of a contract, or as justly due; payment by reason of
such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual
price." Again the great saint and doctor tells us that "it is not
usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of
regaining the principal!" Could the house of J.P. Morgan and
Company ask more of their ecclesiastical department?
The reader may think that such sophistication are now out of
date; but he will find precisely the same knavery in the efforts
of present-day Slavers to fit Jesus Christ into the system of
combatitive commercialism. Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a
carpenter's son, a thoroughly class-conscious proletarian. He
denounced the exploiters of his own time with ferocious
bitterness, he drove the money-changers out of the temple with
whips, and he finally died the death of a common criminal. If he
had foreseen the whole modern cycle of capitalism and wage-
slavery, he could hardly have been more precise in his
exhortations to his followers to stand apart from it. But did all
this avail him? Not in the least!
I place upon the witness-stand an exponent of Bible-
Christianity whom all readers of our newspapers know well: a
scholar of learning a publicist of renown; once pastor of the
most famous church in Brooklyn; now editor of our most
influential religious weekly; a liberal both in theology and
politics; a modernist, an advocate of what he calls industrial
democracy. His name is Lyman Abbott, and he is writing under his
own signature in his own magazine, his subject being "The Ethical
Teachings of Jesus." Several times I have tried to persuade
people that the words I am about to quote were actually written
and published by this eminent doctor of divinity, and people have
almost refused to believe me. Therefore I specify that the
article may be found in the "Outlook," the bound volumes of which
are in all large libraries: volume 94, page 576. The words are as
follows, the italics being Dr. Abbott's, not mine:
My radical friend declares that the teachings of Jesus
are not practicable, that we cannot carry them out in life,
and that we do not pretend to do so. Jesus, he reminds us,
said, 'Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth;' and
Christians do universally lay up for themselves treasures
upon earth; every man that owns a house and lot, or a share
of stock in a corporation, or a life insurance policy, or
money in a savings bank, has laid up for himself treasure
upon earth. But Jesus did not say, "Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth." He said, "Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth
corrupt and where thieves break through and steal." And no
sensible American does. Moth and rust do not get at Mr.
Rockefeller's oil wells, nor at the Sugar Trust's sugar, and
thieves do not often break through and steal a railway or an
insurance company or a savings bank. What Jesus condemned
was hoarding wealth.
Strange as it may sound to some of the readers of this book,
I count myself among the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. His
example has meant more to me than that of any other man, and all
the experiences of my revolutionary life have brought me nearer
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to him. Living in the great Metropolis of Mammon, I have felt the
power of Privilege, Its scourge upon my back, its crown of thorns
upon my head. When I read that article in the "Outlook," I felt
just as Jesus himself would have felt; and I sat down and wrote a
letter --
TO LYMAN ABBOTT
This discovery of a new method of interpreting the Bible is
one of such very great interest and importance that I cannot
forbear to ask space to comment upon it. May I suggest that Dr.
Abbott elaborate this exceedingly fruitful plea, and write us
another article upon the extent to which the teachings of the
Inspired Word are modified by modern conditions, by the progress
of invention and the scientific arts? The point of view which Dr.
Abbott takes is one which had never occurred to me before, and I
had therefore been completely mistaken as to the attitude of
Jesus on the question. Also I have, like Dr. Abbott, many radical
friends who are still laboring under error.
Jesus goes on to bid his hearers: "Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin."
What an apt simile is this for the "great mass of American
wealth," in Dr. Abbott's portrayal of it! "It is serving the
community," he tells us; "it is building a railway to open a new
country to settlement by the homeless; it is operating a railway
to carry grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed
millions of the East," etc. Incidentally, it is piling up
dividends for its pious owners; and so everybody is happy -- and
Jesus, if he should come back to earth, could never know that he
had left the abodes of bliss above.
Truly, there should be a new school of Bible interpretation
founded upon this brilliant idea. Jesus says, "Therefore when
thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the
hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may
have glory of men." Verily not; for of what avail are trumpets
compared with the millions of copies of newspapers which daily go
forth to tell Mr. Rockefeller's benefactions? How transitory are
they, compared with the graven marble or granite which Mr.
Carnegie sets upon the front of each of his libraries!
There is a paragraph, "Neither shalt thou swear by the head,
because thou canst not make one hair white or black." I have
several among my friends who are Quakers; presumably Dr. Abbott
has also; and he should not fail to point out to them the changes
which scientific discovery has wrought in the significance of
this command against swearing, We can now make our hair either
white or black, or a combination of both. We can make it a
brilliant peroxide golden; we could, if pushed to an extreme,
make it purple or green. So we are clearly entitled to swear all
we please by our head.
Nor should we forget to examine other portions of the Bible
according to this method. "Look not upon the wine when it is
red," we are told. Thanks to the activities of that Capitalism
which Dr. Abbott praises so eloquently, we now make our beverages
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in the chemical laboratory, and their color is a matter of
choice. Also, it should be pointed out that we have a number of
pleasant drinks which are not wine at all -- "high-balls" and
"gin rickeys" and "peppered punches" -- also vermouth and creme
de menthe and absinthe, which I believe are green in hue, and
therefore entirely safe.
Then there are the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not make
unto thee any graven Image." See how completely our understanding
of this command is changed, so soon as we realize that we are
free to make images of molten metal! And that we may with
impunity bow down to them and worship them and serve them --
even, for instance, a Golden Calf!
"The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it
thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter,
they manservant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within
thy gates" This again, it will be noted, is open to new
interpretations. It specifies maidservants, but does not prevent
one's employing as many married women as he pleases. It also says
nothing about the various kinds of labor-saving machinery which
we have now taught to work for us -- sail-boats, naphtha
launches, yachts, automobiles, private cars -- all of which may
be busily occupied during the seventh day of the week. The men
who run these machines -- the guides, boatmen, stokers, pilots,
chauffeurs, and engineers -- would all indignantly resent being
regarded as "servants,," and so they do not come under the
prohibition any more than the machines.
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not
covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his
maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy
neighbor's." I read this paragraph over for the first time in
quite a while, and I came with a jolt to its last words. I had
been intending to point out that it said nothing about a
neighbor's automobile, nor a neighbor's oil wells, sugar trusts,
insurance companies and savings banks, The last words, however,
stop one off abruptly. One is almost tempted to imagine that the
Divine intelligence must have foreseen Dr. Abbott's ingenious
method of interpretation, and taken this precaution against him.
And this was a great surprise to me -- for, truly, I had not
supposed it possible that such an interpretation could have been
foreseen, even by Omniscience itself. I will conclude this
communication by venturing the assertion that it could not have
been foreseen by any other person or thing, in the heavens above,
on the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. Dr. Abbott
may accept my congratulations upon having achieved the most
ingenious and masterful exhibition of casuistical legerdemain
that it has ever been my fortune to encounter in my readings in
the literatures of some 30 centuries and seven different
languages.
And I will also add that I respectfully challenge Dr. Abbott
to publish this letter. And I announce to him in advance that if
he refuses to publish it, I will cause it to be published upon
the first page of the "Appeal to Reason," where it will be read
by some 500,000 Socialist, and by them set before several million
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followers of Jesus Christ, the world's first and greatest
revolutionist, whom Dr. Lyman Abbott has traduced and betrayed by
the most amazing piece of theological knavery that it has ever
been my fortune to encounter.
THE OCTOPUS
Dr. Lyman Abbott published this letter! In his editorial
comment thereon he said that he did not know which of two
biblical injunctions to follow: "Answer not a fool according to
his folly, lest thou be thought like unto him"; or "Answer a fool
according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." I
replied by pointing out a third text which the Reverend Doctor
had possibly overlooked: "He that calleth his neighbor a fool
shall be in danger of hell-fire." But the Reverend Doctor took
refuge in his dignity, and I bided my time and waited for that
revenge which comes sooner or later to us muck-rakers. In this
case it came speedily, The story is such a perfect illustration
of the functions of religion as oil to the machinery of graft
that I ask the reader's permission to recite it at length.
For a couple of decades the political and financial life of
New England has been dominated by a gigantic aggregation of
capital, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. It is a
"Morgan" concern; its popular name, "The New Haven," stands for
all the railroads of six states, nearly all the trolley-lines and
steamship-lines, and a group of the most powerful banks of Boston
and New York. It is controlled by a little group of insiders, who
followed the custom of railroad-wrecking familiar to students of
American industrial life; buying up new lines, capitalizing them
at fabulous sums, and unloading them on the investing public;
paying dividends out of capital, "passing" dividends as a means
of stock manipulation, accumulating surpluses and cutting
"melons" for the insiders, while at the same time crushing labor
unions, squeezing wages, and permitting rolling-stock and
equipment to go to wreck.
All these facts were perfectly well known in Wall Street,
and could not have escaped the knowledge of any magazine editor
dealing with current events. In eight years the "New Haven" had
increased its capitalization 1,501 percent, and what that meant,
any office boy in "the Street" could have told. What attitude
should a magazine editor take to the matter?
At that time there were still two or three free magazines in
America. One of them was Hampton's and the story of its wrecking
by the New Haven criminals will some day serve in school text-
books as the classic illustration of that financial piracy which
brought on the American social revolution. Ben Hampton had bought
the old derelict "Broadway Magazine," with 12,000 subscribers,
and in four years, by the simple process of straight truth-
telling, had built up for it a circulation of 440,000. In two
years more he would have had a million; but in May, 1911, he
announced a series of articles dealing with the New Haven
management.
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The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, were so
exact that they read today like the reports of the Interstate
Commerce Commission, dated three years later. A representative of
the New Haven called upon the editor of Hampton's with a proof of
the first article -- obtained from the printer by bribery -- and
was invited to specify the statements to which he took exception"
in the presence of witnesses he went over the article line by
line, and specified two minor errors, which were at once
corrected. At the end of the conference he announced that if the
article were published, Hampton's Magazine would be "on the rocks
in 90 days."
Which threat was carried out to the letter. First came a
campaign among the advertisers of the magazine, which lost an
income of thousands of dollars a month, almost over night. And
then came a campaign among the banks -- the magazine could not
get credit. Anyone familiar with the publishing business will
understand that a magazine which is growing rapidly has to have
advances to meet each month's business. Hampton undertook to
raise the money by selling stock; whereupon a spy was introduced
into his office as bookkeeper, his list of subscribers was
stolen, and a campaign was begun to destroy their confidence.
It happened that I was in Hampton's office in the summer of
1911, when the crisis came. Money had to be had to pay for a huge
new edition; and upon a property worth two millions of dollars,
with endorsements worth as much again, it was impossible to
borrow $30,000 in the city of New York. Bankers, personal friends
of the publisher, stated quite openly that word had gone out that
any one who loaned money to him would be "broken." I myself sent
telegrams to everyone I knew who might by any chance be able to
help; but there was no help, and Hampton retired without a dollar
to his name, and the magazine was sold under the hammer to a
concern which immediately wrecked it and discontinued
publication.
THE INDUSTRIAL SHELLEY
Such was the fate of an editor who opposed the "New Haven."
And now, what of those editors who supported it? Turn to "The
Outlook, a Weekly Journal of Current Events," edited by Lyman
Abbott -- the issue of Dec. 25th, 1909 years after Christ came
down to bring peace on earth and good-will toward Wall Street.
You will there find an article by Sylvester Baxter entitled "The
Upbuilding of a Great Railroad." It is the familiar "slush"
article which we professional writers learn to know at a glance.
"Prodigious," Mr. Baxter tells us, has been the progress of the
New Haven; this was "a masterstroke," that was
"characteristically sagacious." The road had made "Prodigious
expenditures," and to a noble end: "Transportation efficiency
epitomizes the broad aim that animated these expenditures and
other constructive activities." There are photographs of bridges
and stations -- "vast terminal improvements," "a masterpiece of
modern engineering," "the highest, greatest and most
architectural of bridges." Of the official under whom these
miracles were being wrought -- President Mellen -- we read:
"Nervously organized, of delicate sensibility, impulsive in
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utterance yet with an extraordinarily convincing power for
vividly logical presentation." An industrial Shelley, or a
Milton, you perceive; and all this prodigious genius poured out
for the general welfare! "To study out the sort of transportation
service best adapted to these ends, and then to provide it in the
most efficient form possible, that is the life-task that
President Mellen has set himself."
There was no less than 16 pages of these raptures -- quite a
section of a small magazine like the "Outlook." "The New Haven
ramifies to every spot where industry flourishes, where business
thrives." "As a purveyor of transportation it supplies the public
with just the sort desired." "Here we have the new efficiency in
a nutshell." In short, here we have what Dr. Lyman Abbott means
when he glorifies "the great mass of American wealth." "It is
serving the community; it is building a railway to open a new
country to settlement by the homeless; it is operating a railway
to carry grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed
millions of the, east," etc. The unfed millions -- my typewriter
started to write "underfed millions" -- are humbly grateful for
these services, and hasten to buy copies of the pious weekly
which tells about them.
The "Outlook" runs a column of "current events" in which it
tells what is happening in the world; and sometimes it is
compelled to tell of happenings against the interests of "the
great mass of American wealth." The cynical reader will find
amusement in following its narrative of the affairs of the New
Haven during the five years subsequent to the publication of the
Baxter article.
First came the collapse of the road's service; a series of
accidents so frightful that they roused even clergymen and
chambers of commerce to protest. A number of the "Outlook's"
subscribers are New Haven "commuters," and the magazine could not
fail to refer to their troubles. In the issue of Jan. 4, 1913,
three years and 10 days after the Baxter rhapsody, we read:
The most numerous accidents on a single road since the
last fiscal year have been, we believe, those on the New
Haven. In the opinion of the Connecticut Commission, the
Westport wreck would not have occurred if the railway
company had followed the recommendation of the Chief
Inspector of Safety Appliances of the Interstate Commerce
Commission in its report on a similar accident at Bridgeport
a year ago.
And by June 28, matters had gone farther yet; we find the
"Outlook" reporting:
Within a few hours of the collision at Stamford, the
wrecked Pullman car was taken away and burned. Is this
criminal destruction of evidence?
This collapse of the railroad service started a clamor for
investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which of
course brought terror to the bosoms of the plunderers. On Dec.
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20, 1913, we find the "Outlook" "putting the soft pedal" on the
public indignation. "It must not be forgotten that such a road as
the New Haven is, in fact if not in terms, a National possession,
and as it goes down or up, public interests go down or up with
it." But in spite of all pious admonitions, the Interstate
Commerce Commission yielded to the public clamor, and an
investigation was made -- revealing such conditions of rottenness
as to shock even the clerical retainers of Privilege. "Securities
were inflated, debt was heaped upon debt," reports the horrified
"Outlook;" and when its hero, Mr. Mellen -- its industrial
Shelley, "nervously organized" -- admitted that he had no
authority as to the finances of the road and no understanding of
them, but had taken all his orders from Morgan, the "Outlook"
remarks, deeply wounded: "A pitiable position for the president
of a great railway to assume." A little later, when things got
hotter yet, we read:
In the search for truth the Commissioners had to
overcome many obstacles, such as the burning of books,
letters and documents, and the obstinacy of witnesses, who
declined to testify until criminal proceedings were begun.
The New Haven system has more than 300 subsidiary
corporations in a web of entangling alliances, many of which
were seemingly planned, created and manipulated by lawyers
expressly retained for the purpose of concealment or
deception.
But do you imagine even that would sicken the pious jackals
of their offal? If so, you do not know the sturdiness of the
pious stomach. A compromise was patched up between the government
and the thieves who were too big to be prosecuted; this bargain
was not kept by the thieves, and President Wilson declared in a
public statement that the New Haven administration had "broken an
agreement deliberately and solemnly entered into," in a manner to
the President "inexplicable and entirely without justification."
Which, of course, seemed to the "Outlook" dreadfully impolite
language to be used concerning a "National possession"; it
hastened to rebuke President Wilson, whose statement was "too
severe and drastic."
A new compromise was made between the government and the
thieves who were too big to be prosecuted, and the stealing went
on. Now, as I work over my book, the President takes the
railroads for was use, and reads tom Congress a message proposing
that the securities based upon the New Haven swindles, together
with all the mess of other railroad swindles shall be sanctified
and secured by dividends paid out of the Public purse. New Haven
securities take a big jump; and the "Outlook," needless to say,
is enthusiastic for the President's policy. Here is a chance for
the big thieves to baptize themselves -- or shall we say to have
the water in their stocks made "holy"? Says our pious editor, for
the government to take property without full compensation "would
be contrary to the whole spirit of America."
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THE OUTLOOK FOR GRAFT
Anyone familiar with the magazine world will understand that
such crooked work as this, continued over along period, is not
done for nothing. Any magazine writer would know, the instant he
saw the Baxter article, that Baxter was pals by the New Haven,
and that the "Outlook" was paid by the New Haven. Generally he
has no way of proving such facts, and has to sit in silence; but
when his board bill falls due and his landlady is persistent, he
experiences a direct and earnest hatred of the crooks of
journalism who thrive at his expense. If he is a Socialist, he
looks forward to the day when he may sit on a Publications' Graft
Commission with access to all magazine books which have not yet
been burned!
In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the price --
thanks to the labors of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Needless to say; you will not find the facts recorded in the
columns of the Outlook; you might have read it line by line from
the palmy days of Mellen to our own, and you would have got no
hint of what the Commission revealed about magazine and newspaper
graft. Nor would you have got much more from the great
metropolitan dailies, which systematically "played down" the
expose, omitting all the really damaging details. You would have
to go to the reports of the commission -- or to the files of
"Pearson's Magazine," which is out of print and not found in
libraries!
According to the New Haven's books, and by the admission of
its own officials, the road was spending more than $400,000 a
year to influence newspapers and magazines in favor of its
policies. (President Mellen stated that this was relatively less
than any other railroad in the country was spending). There was a
professor of the Harvard Law School, going about lecturing to
boards of trade, urging in the name of economic science the
repeal of laws against railroad monopolies -- and being paid for
his speeches out of railroad funds! There was a swarm of
newspaper reporters, writing on railroad affairs for the leading
papers of New England, and getting $25 weekly, or $200 or $300 on
special occasions. Sums had been paid directly to more than a
thousand newspapers -- $3,000 to the Boston "Republic," and when
the question was asked "Why?" the answer was, "That is Mayor
Fitzgerald's paper." Even the ultra-respectable "Evening
Transcript," organ of the Brahmins of culture, was down for $144
for typing, mimeographing and sending out "dope" to the country
press. There was an item of $381 for 15,000 "Prayers"; and when
asked about that President Mellen explained that it referred to a
pamphlet called "Prayers from the Hills," embodying the yearnings
of the back-country people for trolley-franchises to be issued to
the New Haven. Asked why the pamphlet was called "Prayers," Mr.
Mellen explained that "there was lots of biblical language in
it."
And now we come to the "Outlook"; after five years of
waiting, we catch our pious editors with the goods on them! There
appears on the pay-roll of the New Haven, as one of its regular
press-agents, getting sums like $500 now and then -- would you
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think it possible? -- Sylvester baxter! And worse yet, there
appears an item of 933.64 to the "Outlook," for a total of 9,716
copies of its issue of Dec. 25th, 1,909 years after Christ came
to bring peace on earth and good will towards Wall Street!
The writer makes a specialty of fair play, even when dealing
with those who have never practiced it towards him. He wrote a
letter to the editor of the "Outlook," asking what the magazine
might have to say upon this matter. The reply, signed by Lawrence
F. Abbott, President of the "Outlook" Company, was that the
"Outlook" did not know that Mr. Baxter had any salaried
connection with the New Haven, and that they had paid him for the
article at the usual rates. Against this statement must be set
one made under oath by the official of the New Haven who had the
disbursing of the corruption fund -- that the various papers
which used the railroad material paid nothing for it, and "they
all knew where it came from." Mr. Lawrence Abbott states that
"the New Haven Railroad bought copies of the 'Outlook' without
any previous understanding or arrangement as anybody is entitled
to buy copies of the 'Outlook.'" I might point out that this does
not really say as much as it seems to; for the President of every
magazine company in America knows without any previous
understanding or arrangement that any time he cares to print an
article such as Mr. Baxter's, dealing with the affairs of a great
corporation, he can sell 10,000 copies to that corporation. The
late unlamented Elbert Hubbard wrote a defense of the Rockefeller
slaughter of coal-miners, published it in "The Fra," and came
down to New York and unloaded several tons at 26 Broadway; he did
the same thing in the case of the copper strike in Michigan, and
again in the case of "The Jungle" -- and all this without the
slightest claim to divine inspiration or authority!
Mr. Abbott answers another question: "We certainly did not
return the amount to the railroad company." Well, a sturdy
conscience must be a comfort to its possessor. The President of
the "Outlook" is in the position of a pawnbroker caught with
stolen goods in his establishment. He had no idea they were
stolen; and we might believe it, if the thief were obscure. But
when the thief is the most notorious in the city -- when his
picture has been in the paper a thousand times? And when the
thief swears that the broker knew him? And when the broker's shop
is full of other suspicious goods? Why did the "Outlook"
practically take back Mr. Spahr's revelations concerning the
Powder barony of Delaware? Why did it support so vigorously the
Standard Oil ticket for the control of the Mutual Life Insurance
Company -- and with James Stillman, one of the heads of Standard
Oil, president of Standard oil's big bank in New York, secretly
one of its biggest stockholders!
Also, why does the magazine refuse to give its readers a
chance to judge its conduct? Why is it that a search of its
columns reveals no mention of the revelations concerning Mr.
Baxter -- not even any mention of the $400,000 slush fund of this
paragon of transportation virtues? I asked that question in my
letter, and the president of the "Outlook" Company for some
reason failed to notice it. I wrote a second time, courteously
reminding him of the commission; and also of another, equally
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significant -- he had not informed me whether any of the editors
of the "Outlook," or the officers or directors of the Company,
were stockholders in the New Haven. His final reply was that the
questions, seem to him "wholly unimportant"; he does not know
whether the "Outlook" published anything about the Baxter
revelations, nor does he know whether any of the editors or
officers or directors of the "Outlook" Company are or ever have
been stockholders of the New York, New Haven and Hartford
Railroad Company. The fact "would not in the slightest degree
affect either favorably or unfavorably our editorial treatment of
that corporation." Caesar's wife, it appears, is above suspicion
-- even when she is caught in a brothel!
CLERICAL CAMOUFLAGE
I Have seen a photograph from "Somewhere in France," showing
a wayside shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary, innocent and
loving, with her babe in her arms. If you were a hostile aviator,
you might sail over and take pictures to your heart's content,
and you would see nothing but a saintly image; you would have to
be on the enemy's side, and behind the lines, to make the
discovery that under the image had been dug a hole for a machine-
gun. When I saw that picture, I thought to myself -- there is
capitalist Religion!
You see, if cannon and machine-guns are out in the open,
they are almost instantly spotted and put out of action; and so
with magazines like "Leslie's Weekly," or "Munsey's," or the
"North American Review," which are frankly and wholly in the
interest of Big Business. If an editor wishes really to be
effective in holding back progress, he must protect himself with
a camouflage of piety and philanthropy, he must have at his
tongue's end the phrases of brotherhood and justice, he must be
liberal and progressive, going a certain cautious distance with
the reformers, indulging in carefully measured fair play --
giving a dime with one hand, while taking back a dollar with the
other!
Let us have an illustration of this clerical camouflage.
Here are the wives and children of the Colorado coal-miners being
shot and burned in their beds by Rockefeller gun-men, and the
press of the entire country in a conspiracy of silence concerning
the matter. In the effort to break down this conspiracy, Bouck
White, Congregational clergyman, author of "The Call of the
Carpenter," goes to the Fifth Avenue Church of Standard Oil and
makes a protest in the name of Jesus. I do not wish to make
extreme statements, but I have read history pretty thoroughly,
and I really do not know where in 1,900 years you can find an
action more completely in the spirit and manner of Jesus than
that of Bouck White. The only difference was that whereas Jesus
took a real whip and lashed the money-changers, White politely
asked the pastor to discuss with him the question whether or not
Jesus condemned the holding of wealth. He even took the
precaution to write a letter to the clergyman announcing in
advance what he intended to do! And how did the clergyman prepare
for him? With a sword of truth and the armor of the spirit? No --
but with two or three dozen strong-arm men, who flung themselves
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upon the Socialist author and hurled him out of the church. So
violent were they that several of White's friends, also one or
two casual spectators, were moved to protest; what happened then,
let us read the New York "Sun," the most bitterly hostile to
radicalism of all the metropolitan newspapers. Says the "Sun's"
report:
A police billy came crunching against the bones of
Lopez's legs. It struck him as hard as a man could swing it
eight times. A fist planted on Lopez's jaw knocked out two
teeth. His lip was torn open. A blow in the eye made it
swell and blacken instantly. A minute later Lopez was
leaning against the church with blood running to the
doorsill.
And now, what has the clerical camouflage to say on this
proceeding? Does it approve it? Oh no! It was "a mistake," the
"Outlook" protests; it intensifies the hatred which these
extremists feel for the church. The proper course would have been
to turn the disturber aside with a soft answer; to give him some
place, say in a park, where be could talk his head off to people
of his own sort, while good and decent Christians continued to
worship by themselves in peace, and to have the children of their
mine-slaves shot and burned in their beds. Says our pious editor:
The true way to repress cranks is not to suppress them;
it is to give them an opportunity to air their theories
before any who wish to learn, while forbidding them to
compel those to listen who do not wish to do so.
Or take another case. Twelve years ago the writer made an
effort to interest the American people in the conditions of labor
in their packing-plants. It happened that incidentally I gave
some facts about the bedevilment of the public's meat-supply, and
the public really did care about that. As I phrased it at the
time, I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in
the stomach. There was a terrible clamor, and Congress was forced
to pass a bill to remedy the evils. As a matter of fact this bill
was a farce, but the public was satisfied, and soon forgot the
matter entirely. The point to be noted here is that so far as
concerned the atrocious miseries of the working-people, it was
not necessary even to pretend to do anything. The slaves of
Packing-town went on living and working as they were described as
doing in "The Jungle," and nobody gave a further thought to them.
Only the other day I read in my paper -- while we are all making
sacrifices in a "War for Democracy" -- that Armour and Company
had paid a dividend of 21 percent, and Swift and Company a
dividend of 35 percent.
This prosperity they owe in good part to their clerical
camouflage. Listen to our pious "Outlook," engaged in counter-
mining "The Jungle." The "Outlook" has no doubt that there are
genuine evils in the packing-plants; the conditions of the
workers ought of course to be improved;
BUT --
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To disgust the reader by dragging him through every
conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid
excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail
and brothel -- all this is to over-reach the object. ...
Even things actually terrible may become distorted when a
writer screams them out in a sensational way and in a high
pitched key. ... More convincing if it were less hysterical.
Don't you see what these clerical crooks are for?
THE JUNGLE
A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were
killed and half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish
chattel slavery and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a
thorough study of both these industrial systems, and I freely
admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage
slave is better than that of the chattel slave. The wage slave is
free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his
starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the
distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the policeman's
club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and
he has the candle of hope to light him to his death-bed. But
excepting this consideration, and taking the circumstances of the
wage slave from the material point of view alone, I hold it
beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of 1860
was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the
Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was the Southern master's real
concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be
kept physically sound: but it is nobody's business to care
anything about the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave
were valuable property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a
happy out-door life, and medical attention if they fell ill. But
the children of the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the canning-
factory are raised in a city slum, and never know what it is to
have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or rest --
We are weary in our cradles
From our mother's toil untold;
We are born to hoarded weariness
As some to hoarded gold.
The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale
capital industry in its final flowering! I quote from "The
Jungle":
Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut
up in foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies
to live. Tonight in Chicago there are ten thousand men,
homeless and wretched, willing to work and begging for a
chance, yet starving, and fronting with terror the awful
winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand
children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives
in the effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred
thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor,
struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones! There
are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless,
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waiting for death to take them from their torments! There
are a million people, men and women and children, who share
the curse of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can
stand and see, for just enough to keep them alive; who are
condemned till the end of their days to monotony and
weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt
and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice! And then
turn over the page with me, and gaze upon the other side of
the picture.
There are a thousand -- ten thousand, maybe -- who are
the masters of these slaves, who own their toil. They do
nothing to earn what they receive, they do not even have to
ask for it -- it comes to them of self, their only care is
to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in luxury
and extravagance -- such as no words can describe, as makes
the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick
and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of
shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for
horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets,
for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies.
Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in
ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful
and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the
lives of their fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the
nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the humin race, it
is all theirs -- it comes to them; just as all the springs
pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and
the rivers into the ocean -- so, automatically and
inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them. The
farmer tills the soil, the minor digs in the earth, the
weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone; the
clever man invents, the shrewd man directs. the wise man
studies, the inspired man sings -- and all the results, the
products of the labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into
one stupendous stream and poured into their laps!
This is the system. It is the crown and culmination of all
the wrongs of the ages; and in, proportion to the magnitude of
its exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical
camouflage which has been organized in its behalf. Beyond all
question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been
made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this blood-thirsty
system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a blasphemy beyond
the power of art to express. Read the man's words, furious as
those of any modern agitator that I have heard in 20 years of
revolutionary experience: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth! -- Sell that ye have and give alms -- Blessed are ye poor,
for yours is the kingdom of Heaven! -- Woe unto you that are
rich, for ye have received your consolation! -- Verily, I say
unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of
Heaven! -- Woe unto you also, you lawyers! -- Ye serpents, ye
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"
"And this man" -- I quote from "The Jungle" again -- "they
have made into the high-priest of property and smug
respectability, a divine sanction of all the horrors and
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abominations of modern commercial civilization! Jewelled images
are made of him, sensual priests burn incense to him, and modern
pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung from the toil of
helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit in
cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors
of dusty divinity!"
BOOK FIVE
THE CHURCH OF THE MERCHANTS
Mammon led them on --
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavements, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. ... Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
Milton
THE HEAD MERCHANT
Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandists never
weary of telling us. Business is the basis of our material lives,
and consequently of our culture. Businessmen contort our polities
and dictate our laws; businessmen own our newspapers and direct
their policy; businessmen sit on our school boards, and endow and
manage our universities. The Reformation was a revolt of the
newly-developing merchant classes against the tyrannies and
abuses of feudal clericalism: so in all Protestant Christianity
one finds the spirit, ideals, and language of Trade. We have
shown how the symbolism of the Anglican Church is of the palace
and the throne; in the same way that of the non-conformist sects
may be shown to be of the counting-house. In the view of the
middle-class Britisher, the nexus between man and man is cent
percent; and so in their Sunday services the worshipers sing such
hymns as this --
Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousand fold shall be;
Then gladly will we give to Thee,
Who givest all.
The first duty of every man under the competitive system is
to secure the survival of his own business; so on the Sabbath,
when he comes to deal with eternity, he is practical and
explicit:
Nothing is worth a thought beneath
But how I may escape the death
That never, never dies;
How make mine own election sure,
And when I fail on earth secure
A mansion in the skies.
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Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figures God as
a mighty Conqueror --
Marching as to war
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before --
so the preacher to the trader figures the divinity as a glorified
Merchant keeping books. The Head Merchant has a monopoly in His
line; He knows all His reviles' secrets, so there is no getting
ahead of Him, and nothing to do but obey His Word, as revealed
through His clerical staff. The system is oily with protestations
of divine love; but when you read the comments of Luther upon
Calvin and of Calvin upon Luther, you understand that this love
is confined to the inside of each denomination. And even so
restricted, there is not always enough to go around. Recently I
met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked, "I see by the
papers that you have just finished a church building." "Yes," he
answered; "and I have had three offers of a new church." I did
not see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so
successful with this one?" The reply was, "They always take it
for granted that you want to change when you've finished a new
building, because you make so many enemies!"
The businessman puts up the money to build the church, he
puts up the money to keep it going; and the first rule of a
businessman is that when he puts up the money for a thing he
"runs" that thing. Of course he sees that it spreads his own
views of life, it helps to maintain his tradition. In the days of
Anu and Baal we heard the proclamation of the divine right of
Kings; in these days of Mammon we hear the proclamation of the
divine right of Merchants. Some 15 years ago the head of our Coal
Trust announced during a great strike that the question would be
settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom
has given control of the property interests of this country." And
on that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever their
denominations, Catholic, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists,
Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath doctrines are alike, as
their week-day practices are alike; whether it is Rockefeller
shooting his Bayonne oil-workers and burning alive the little
children of his miners; or smooth John Wanamaker, paying
starvation wages to department-store girls and driving them to
the streets; or that clergyman who, at a gathering of society
ladies, members of the "Law and Order League" of Denver, declared
in my hearing that if he could have his way he would blow up the
home of every coal-striker with dynamite; or the Rev. R.A.
Torrey, Dean of the Bible institute of Los Angeles, who refused
to employ union labor on the million dollar building of the
Institute, declaring that "the Church cannot afford to have any
dealings with a band of fire-bugs and murderers!"
"HERR BEEBLE"
The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants'
and Manufacturer Association is to justify the processes of
trade, and to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of
frugality, humility, and loyalty to the profit system. The depths
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of sociological depravity to which some of the agents of this
Association have sunk is difficult of belief. Twelve years ago I
was invited to address the book-sellers of New York, in company
with a well-known clergyman of the city, the Reverend Madison C.
Peters. This gentleman's address made such an impression upon me
that I recall it even at this 'distance: a string of jokes spoken
with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with
commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it
was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant
to His Son." Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which
the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor
of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so
ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism means free
love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so
dishonest that he garbed the i in s of this "Herr Beeble," making
him say something quite different from what he had meant to say.
I could name several clergymen of various denominations who have
stooped to that device against the Socialists; including the
Catholic Father Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and should
be stopped with bullets.
Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's
pulpit-slang used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy;
and when I grew up, and came into the Socialist movement --
behold, here he was, chief inquisitor of the capitalist Holy
Office. I had a friend, a man who saved my life at a time when I
was practically starving, and to whom therefore I owe my survival
as a writer; this friend had been a clergyman in a Middle Western
state, and had preached Jesus as he really was, and so was hated
and feared like Jesus. It happened that he was unhappily married,
and permitted his wife to divorce him so that he might marry the
woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the organized
hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils with
poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he
applied his imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel
under the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were
reading the story of Jesus and the Magdalene transmitted through
the personality of a he-goat. Of late years this clerical author
has turned his energies to necrophobia and militarism, making
millions out of motion-picture incitements to hatred and terror.
The pictures were made here in Southern California, and friends
in the business have described to me the pious propagandist in
the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarms of cute and
playful little movie-girls.
Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D.,
D.C.L., L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical
Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor of Syracuse University, a
branch of the Mental Munitions Department of the Standard Oil
Company; his function being to manufacture intellectual weapons
and explosives to be used in defense of the Rockefeller fortune.
It is generally not expected that the makers of ruling-class
munitions should face the dirty and perilous work of the
trenches; but 10 years ago, during a raid by an active squad of
muckrake-men, Chancellor Day astonished the world by rushing to
the front with both arms full of star-shells and bombs. He
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afterwards put the history of this gallant action into a volume,
"The Raid on Prosperity"; and if you want the real thrill of the
class-war, here is where to get it!
The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; an
enthusiast and dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whom the ordinary
human virtues have been fused absorbed, transformed and
sublimated into a new supreme virtue of loyalty to Exploitation,
patriotism for Profiteering. He began life as a working-man, he
tells us, in the good old American fashion of hustle for
yourself; but he differed from other Americans in that he had an
instant, intuitive recognition of the intellectual and moral
excellence of Plutocracy. The first time he met a rich man, he
quivered with rapture, he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So
very quickly he was recognized as a proper person to have charge
of a Mental Munitions Works; and the ruling classes proceeded to
pin medals upon the bosom of his academic robes -- D.D., S.T.D.,
LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D.
The Chancellor knows the masters of our Profit System, those
"consummate geniuses of manufacture and trade by which the earth
has yielded up her infinite treasures." And having been at the
same time in intimate daily communion with the Almighty, he can
tell us the Almighty's attitude towards these prodigies. "God has
made the rich of this world to serve Him. ... He has shown them a
way to have this world's goods and to be rich towards God. ...
God wants the rich men. ... Christ's doctrines have made the
world rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches." Also the
Chancellor knows our great corporations, and gives us the
Almighty's views about them; they mean that "the forces with
which God built the universe have been put into the hands of
man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy
given to Socialism is appalling. It is insanity." We learn that
the income tax is "a doctrine suited to the Dark Ages, only no
age ever has been dark enough." Somebody raises the issue of
"tainted money," and the Chancellor disposes of this matter also.
As a Deputy of Divinity, he settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul
permitted meat offered to idols to be eaten in the fear of God."
And then, to make assurances doubly sure, he settles it with
plain human logic; and you are astonished to see how simple under
his handling, the complex problem becomes -- how clear and clean-
cut is the distinction he draws for you:
Every boy knows that one cannot take stolen good
without being a partaker with the thief. But the proceeds of
recognized business are quite a different thing.
HOLY OIL
And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenon of
Protestant Christianity at the beginning of the 20th century. For
the benefit of posterity I explain that "Billy" is a baseball
player turned Evangelist, who has brought to the cause of God the
crowds and uproar of the diamond; also the commercial spirit of
America's most popular institution. He travels like a circus,
with all the press-agent work and newspaper hurrah; he conducts
what are called "revivals," in an enormous "tabernacle" built
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especially for him in each city. I cannot better describe the
Billy Sunday circus than in the words of a certain Sidney C.
Tapp, who brought suit against the evangelist for $100,000
damages for the theft of the ideas of a book. Says Mr. Tapp in
his complaint:
The so-called religious awakening or "trail-hitting" is
produced by an appeal to the emotions and in stirring up the
senses by a combination of carrying the United States flag
in one hand and the Bible in the other, singing, trumpeting,
organ playing, garrulous and acrobatic feats of defendant,
by defendant in his talk leaping from the rostrum to the top
of the pulpit, lying prone on the floor of the rostrum on
his stomach in the presence of the vast audience and from
thence into a pit to shake hands with the so-called "trail-
hitters" and the vulgar use of plaintiff's thoughts
contained in said books. Said harangues and vulgarisms of
said defendant and horns, drums, organs and singing by said
choir and vast audience which are assembled by means of said
newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit
of free and copious flow of money through religious and
patriotic excitement produced by and through the vulgarisms,
scurrility, buffoonery, obscenity and profanity of defendant
pretending to be in the interest of the cause of religion
through what he denominates "hitting the trail," the real
object being to induce a religious frenzy and enthusiasm
which he announces in advance is to result in large
audiences composed of thousands of people generously
contributing vast sums of money on the last day and night of
the so-called revival which is invariably appropriated by
the defendant and through which scheme and device defendant
has become enormously wealthy.
As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, and twice each
day he holds forth to a crowd of 10,000 or 15,000; in addition
the newspapers print literally pages of his utterances. The
entire Protestant clergy for a score of miles around has been
hitched to his triumphal chariot, and driven captive through the
streets. Here in this dignified city of Pasadena, home of
millionaire brewers and chewing-gum kings, all the churches have
been plastered for weeks with cloth signs: "This Church is
Cooperating in the Sunday Campaign." To give a sample of the
intellectual level of the performance, here is what Billy has to
say about modern thought:
All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all
this sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathsome, higher
criticism, wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out
of a beer-mug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!
Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the
platform and smile while Billy thus slangs the devil; and being
themselves, poor fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd,
they watch and see how he does it, and then return to their own
churches and try the same stunt; so the manners of the baseball
diamond spread like a contagion. I open my morning paper, and
find a picture of an intense-looking clerical gentleman, the Rev.
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J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the Baptist Temple. He is
discussing certain slanderous rumors which he has heard about
Billy Sunday, and he offers $10,000 reward to anyone who can
prove these things; though, as he says,
The dirty, low-down, contemptible, weazen-brained, impure-
hearted, shrivelled-soled, gossiping devils do not deserve to be
noticed. ... Scandal-mongers, gossip-lovers, reputation-
destroyers, hypocritical. black-hearted, green-eyed slanderers.
... Corrupt, devil-possessed, vile debauches. ... Immoral, sin-
loving, vice-practicing, ... underhanded sneaks. ... Carrion-
lozzing buzzards and foul-smelling skunks.
You will be prepared after this to hear that when the
Socialists were near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman
preached a sermon in support of the candidate of "Booze, Gas and
Railroads."
In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected
youth of our streets from drinking, gambling and whoring, no one
could wish him anything but success; but his besotted ignorance,
his childish crudity of mind, make it impossible that he could
have any success except of a delusive nature. He is utterly
devoid of a social sense; utterly unaware of the existence of the
forces of capitalism which are causing depravity 10 times as fast
as all the evangelists in creation can remedy it. So he is
precisely like the Catholics with their "charity," cleaning up
loathsome and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and never
stopping to ask why such messes continue to come into existence.
More than that, I question whether the spirit of
commercialism which he fosters does not help the development of
evil more than his preaching hinders it. The newspapers always
report the cost of the tabernacle, and of the "free-will
offering," which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in
each "campaign." In each city the expenses are guaranteed by men
who are generally the most sinister exploiting forces of the
community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits their homes,
and is in every way one of the crowd. After the big silk strike
in Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included,
all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it
was freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the
radical union involvement. This was never denied by Sunday
himself, and his whole campaign was conducted off that basis.
Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich
young man, perhaps a thousand times as rich as any that lived in
Palestine. This young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I
do to inherit eternal life? And Billy told him to keep the
commandments -- "Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not
steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy
mother." The young man answered: "All these have I kept from my
youth up." And Billy said. "Yet lackest thou one thing; sell all
that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have
treasure in heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this
he was very sorrowful, for he was very rich.
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No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in
Palestine. What happened in New York is that Billy said, "I am
delighted to meet you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller
said, "Come be my guest at my palace in the Pocantico Hills; and
then we will go together and you may preach submission to my
wage-slaves in the oil-factories at Bayonne and elsewhere." And
Billy went to the palace, and went and preached to the wage-
slaves, telling them to beware the "stinking Socialists," and to
concentrate their attention on the saving of their souls; so the
rich man was delighted, and he sent for all the newspaper
reporters to come to his office at 26 Broadway, and told them
what a great and useful man Billy Sunday is. As the New York
"Times" tells about it:
Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has
never been charged with having an excess of verbally expressed
enthusiasm on any subject. But he talked for an hour and a half
about the evangelist. He was full of the subject of Billy Sunday.
"Billy did New York a lot of good," he said. He went on to tell
of 187 meetings held in 100 different factories, attended by
50,000 men. "That's good work," And he expressed his satisfaction
with Sunday's theology: "He believes the Bible from cover to
cover and that is good enough for me." The Sunday campaign had
cost $200,000, and "If it had stooped here, if it was not kept
up, it would be poor business; a poor dividend on the $200,000
and the work invested. But we expect to get dividends in the next
year."
Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house!
RHETORICAL BLACK-HANGING
It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend large-
scale merchants while they live, but to bury them when they die,
and to place the seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning
this aspect of Bootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an
earnest hater of shams, William Makepeace Thackeray:
I think the part which pulpits play in the death of
kings is the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying
eulogies, the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening
flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and
sycophancies -- all uttered in the name of Heaven, in our
State churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been
sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad,
wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his
common-places; his apparatus of rhetorical black=hanging.
...
And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England,
but to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall
Street. Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western
railroads, died; and standing over his coffin, a Methodist
clergyman, afterwards Bishop, preached a sermon of fulsome
flattery, wherein he likened young Leland to the boy Christ. In
the year 1904 there passed from his earthly reward in
Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout his
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lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew
Stanley Quay was his name, and the New York "Nation," having no
clerical connections, was free to state the facts about him:
He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the
press, got his grip on the public service, including even
the courts; imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and
upon the last three Presidents -- making the latter provide
for the offal of his political machine, which even
Pennsylvania could no longer stomach -- and all without
identifying his name with a single measure of public good,
without making a speech or uttering a party watchword,
without even pretending to be honest, but solely because,
like Judas, be carried the bag and could buy whom he would.
Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was
expressed by a Presbyterian divine the Reverend Dr. J.S. Ramsey,
who stood over the coffin of "Matt," and without cracking a smile
declared that he had been "a statesman who was always on the
right side of every moral question!"
In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our
political corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged, to no church,
but had backed them all, understanding the main thesis of this
book as clearly as the writer of it. In his home city of
Cleveland the eulogy upon him was pronounced by Bishop Leonard,
in St. Paul's Episcopal Church; while in the United States Senate
the service was performed by the Chaplin, the Rev. Edward Everett
Hale. This is a name well-known in American letters, as in
American religious life; it was borne by a benevolent old
gentleman, a Unitarian and a liberal, who organized "Lend-a-Hand
Clubs" and such like amiabilities. "Do You Love This old Man?"
the signs in the street-cars used to ask when I was a boy; and I
promptly answered "Yes" -- for my mother took the "Ladies' Home
Journal," and I swallowed the sentimental dish-water set out for
me. But when I read the Rev. Edward's funeral oration over the
Irrev. Mark, I loved neither of them any longer. "This whole-
soled child of God," cried the Rev. Edward, "who believed in
success, and knew how to succeed by using the infinite powers!"
You perceive that the Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club agrees
with this book, that the "infinite powers" in America are the
powers that prey!
THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD
Among the most loathsome products of our native commercial
greed is the patent medicine industry. "The Great American
Fraud," as its historian has called it. In 1907 this historian
wrote:
Gullible America will spend this year some $75,000,000
in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of
this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an
appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment
of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart
depressants to insidious stimulants; and, far in excess of
all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited
by the skillfullest of advertising bunco men, is the basis
of the trade.
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One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes: habit-
forming laxatives, headache powders full of acetanilid, soothing-
syrups and catarrh-cures full of opium and cocaine, cock-tails
subtly disguised as "bitters. "sarsaparillas," and "tonics." He
shows how the fake testimonials are made up and exploited; how
the confidential letters, telling the secret troubles of men and
women, are collected by tens and hundreds of thousands and
advertised and sold -- so that the victim, as he begins to lose
faith in one fake, finds another at hand, fully informed as to
his weakness. He quotes the amazing "Red Clause" in the contract
which the patent-medicine makers have with thousands of daily and
weekly papers, whereby the makers are able to control the press
of the country and prevent legislation against the "Great
American Fraud."
There are a thousand religious papers in America, weekly and
monthly; and what is their attitude on this question? Mr. Adams
tells us:
Whether because church-going people are more trusting,
and therefore more easily befooled than others, or from some
more obscure reason, many of the religious papers fairly
reek with patent medicine fakes.
He gives us many pages of specific instances:
Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancer vampires. He
is a patron and prop of religious journalism. It is his
theory that the easiest prey is to be found among readers of
church papers. Moreover he has learned from his father-in-
law (who built a small church out of blood-money) to
capitalize his own sectarian associations, and when
confronted recently with a formal accusation he replied,
with an air of injured innocence, that he was a regular
attendant at church, and could produce an endorsement from
his minister.
And here is the "Church Advocate," of Harrisburg, Pa., which
publishes quack advertisements disguised as editorials. One of
them Mr.Adams paraphrases.
As Dr. Smith is, on the face of his own statements, a
self-branded swindler and rascal, you run no risk in
assuming that the Rev. C.H. Forney, D.D., L.L.D., in acting
as his journalistic support-for-pay is just such another as
himself!
And again:
Will the editor of the "Baptist Watchman" of Boston explain
by what phenomenon of logic or elasticity of ethics he accepts
the incubations of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of Liquozone, of
Actina, that marvelous two-ended mechanical appliance which
"cures" deafness at one terminus and blindness at the other, and
all with a little oil of mustard?
And again:
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The "Christian observer" of Louisville replied to a
protesting subscriber, suggesting that the "Collier"
articles were written in a spirit of revenge because
"Collier's" could not get patent medicine advertising. When
I asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse for his foundation for
the charge, he said that one of the typewriters must have
written the letter! Doubtless also the same highly
responsible typewriter imitated the signature with startling
fidelity to Dr. Converse's handwriting!
And here is -- would you think it possible? -- our "Church
of Good Society"! It has an organ in Chicago called the "Living
Church," most dignified and decorous. You have to study quite a
while to ascertain what denomination it belongs to; it will not
tell you directly, for the Anglican pose is that it is the church
Elect from every nation,
Yet one o'er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord one Faith, one Birth;
One holy name blesses,
Partakes holy food,
And toward one she presses,
With every grace endued.
And this one holy institution was found setting at its peak
the black flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the modern
commercial pirate -- "Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:
The editors and publishers of the "Living Church"
assume no responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.
And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's
champion labor-baiter, the late C.W. Post, that his "Grapenuts"
would prevent appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in
such cases!
And here is the "Christian Endeavor World," organ of one of
the most powerful non-sectarian religious bodies in the country.
Some one wrote complaining of its medical advertising, and the
answer was:
To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not
publishing any fraudulent or unworthy medical advertising. ...
Trusting that you will be able to understand that we are acting
according to our best and sincerest judgment, I remain, yours
very truly, The Golden Rule Company, George W. Coleman, Business
Manager.
Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud"
remarks:
Assuming that the business management of the "Christian
Endeavor World" represents normal intelligence, I would like
to ask whether it accepts the statement that a pair of
"magic foot drafts" applied to the soles of the feet will
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cure any and every kind of rheumatism in any part of the
body? Further, if the advertising department is genuinely
interested in declining "fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I
would call their attention to the ridiculous claims of Dr.
Shoop's medicines, which "cure" almost every disease; to two
hair removers, one an "Indian Secret," the other an
accidental discovery," both either fakes or dangerous; to
the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a
positive Cure for catarrh," in all its stages to "Syrup of
Figs," which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna;
to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical
constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's oil Cure
for cancer, "particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates
suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other
matter, which for the sake of decency I do not care to
detail in these columns, appear in recent issues of the
"Christian Endeavor World."
RICHES IN GLORY
There came recently to Los Angeles a "world-famous
evangelist," known as "Gipsy" Smith. There was a shirt-waist
strike at the time, and the girls were starving, and they sent a
delegation to this evangelist to ask for help. They told him how
they were mistreated, exposed to insults, driven to sell their
virtue because their wage would not support life; and to their
plea he made answer: "Get Jesus in your hearts, and these
questions will take care of themselves"!
So we see the most important of the many services which the
Churches perform for the merchants -- taking the revolutionary
hope of Jesus, for a kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting
it into a dream of a golden harp in an uncertain future. To
appreciate the fullness of this betrayal, take the prayer which
Jesus dictated -- so simple, direct and practical: "Give us this
day our dally bread," and put it beside the hymns which the
slave-congregations are trained to sing. In my neighborhood is a
one-roomed building with a plate glass front, upon which I
observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters the
sign "Glory Mission." I approach him, and he drops his work and
welcomes me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I
answer that I am. I have to shout the good tidings into his ear,
as he is very deaf. He presents me with his card, which shows
that he bears the title of "Reverend, also the sobriquet of
"Mountain Missionary." I ask him to permit me to examine the
hymn-book which he uses in his work, and with touching eagerness
he presses upon me a well-worn volume bearing the title "Waves of
Glory." I seat myself and note down a few of the baits it sets
out for hungry wage slaves:
O, there's a plenty. 0, there's a plenty,
There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!
Riches in glory, riches in glory,
Royal supply our wants exceed!
Feasting, I'm feasting,
I'm feasting with my Lord!
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Beautiful robes, beautiful robes,
Beautiful robes we then shall wear!
Jerusalem the golden,
With milk and honey blest!
Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem,
I'll be there, I'll be there!
Blest Canaan land, bright canaan land,
I love to be in Canaan land!
Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
As on the highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me!
In the sweet bye and bye
We shall meet on that beautiful shore --
I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the
I.W.W. who was executed a few years ago in Utah, and who used
this tune in his little red book of revolutionary chants:
You will eat, bye and bye
In the glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die!
CAPTIVATING IDEALS
In one of the writer's earlier novels. "Prince Hagen," the
hero is a Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold," who leaves his
diggings in the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into
our superior civilization. The thing that impresses him most is
what he Calls "the immortality idea." The person who got that up
was a world-genius, he exclaims. "If you can once get a man to
believing in immortality, there is no more left for you to
desire; you can take everything he owns -- you can skin him alive
if it pleases you -- and he will bear it all with perfect good
humor."
And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung --
or the effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to
hear that view of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth
in the language of scholarship and culture? Would you like to
know how an ecclesiastical authority, equipped with every tool of
modern learning, would set about voicing the idea that the
function of the teaching of Heaven is to chloroform the poor, so
that the rich may continue to rob them in security?
Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of
scholarship, dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges
Chatterton-Hill, of the University of Geneva. Its title is "The
Sociological Value of Christianity," and from cover to cover it
is a warning to the rich of the danger they run in giving up
their religion and ceasing to support its priests. It explains
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how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded in making the
individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which are
indispensable for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as
indispensable for the individual welfare." The learned professor
makes plain just what he means by "individual suffering,
individual sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism;
and the advantage of Christianity is that it makes you think that
by submitting, to these horrors, you are profiting your own soul.
"By making individual salvation depend on the acceptance of
suffering, on the voluntary sacrifice of egotistical interests
Christianity adapts the individual to society." And this, as the
professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a world in
which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only means
of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
sacrifice ... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful
ideal." And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used
for this purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never
ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness
of suffering -- of that suffering which a weak and sickly
humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could."
You get this, you "blanket-stiff," you "husky," or "wop," or
whatever you are -- you disinherited of the earth, you
proletarians who have only your labor-power to sell. you weak and
sickly ones who are condemned to elimination? There has come, let
us say, a period of "over-production"; you have raised too much
food, and therefore you are starving, you have woven too much
cloth, and therefore you are naked, you have finished the world
for your masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way.
As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it, "Your suppression
imposes itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of
the Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process, by
captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal!" The priest
will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with candle-light
and images, your ears with sweet music and soothing words; and so
you will perish without raising a finger! "Here," reflects the
professor, "we see how magnificently the teaching of Jesus
applies to all classes of society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist
the embarrassing fact that so many of those, who survive under
the capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think
that troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he
carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical
wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out
of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. "Inequality
signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but the standard
whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the standard of the
moral law."
The laws which govern the biological evolution of man
are known, but those which govern his moral nature cannot be
known; the moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and
hence is not subject to the law of inequality!
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As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost
as wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted
with the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for
teaching the Copernican view of the universe; that infallible
Popes had again and again condemned this heresy ex cathedra. Said
the eloquent cardinal:
Scriptures says the sun moves and the earth is
stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is
comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these
opposite statements is the truth till we know what motion
is?
SPOOK HUNTING
Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian
professors realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is never
far from the thoughts of any of them -- for, of course, no man
can look at the present system and not wonder how the poor stand
it, and more especially why they stand it. There have been many
thinking men who have given up the miracle-business quite
cheerfully, but have stood appalled at the idea of letting the
lower classes find out the truth. You note that idea continually
in the writings of Professor Goldwin Smith, who was a
Freethinker, but also a bourgeois publicist, with a deep sense of
responsibility to the money-masters of the world. He was about as
honest a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was the
'beau ideal' of the New York "Evening Post," which indicates his
point of view. He wrote:
It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a
future state, for a short measure of happiness here, has
materially helped to reconcile the less favored members of
the community to the inequalities of the existing order of
things.
When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course
called "Practical Ethics," under a professor by the name of
Hyslop. The course differed from most of the forty that I tried,
in that it gave evidence that the professor was accustomed to
read the morning paper. He had learned that American politics
were rotten: his idea of "Practical Ethics" was to outline in
elaborate detail a complete scheme of constitutional changes
which would make it impossible for the "boss" to control the
government. I think I must have been born with a charm against
bourgeois thought, for the good professor never fooled me an
instant; I remember I used to smile at the idea of how quickly
the "boss" would brush through his constitutional cobwebs. The
reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity -- and of
course long before they could be put into practice, the
politicians would be ready with devices to make them of no
effect.
Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to
hunting spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he
is a determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he
may really have bagged some spooks. All I wish to point out here
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is the method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to
support the spook-hunting industry. The very same argument as we
got from the University of Geneva and the University of Toronto!
Says our head spook-hunter:
There has been no belief that exercised so much power
upon the poor as that in a future life, The politicians, men
of the world, have known this so well as to postpone the day
of political judgment by it for many years.
And again:
The Church, having lost all its battles with science,
and having abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its
fundamental beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and
the laboring classes. ... The spiritual ideal of life has
gone out of the masses as well as the classes, and nothing
is left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.
And again, more menacingly yet:
The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution
that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and immortality.
What is to be done about this? The question answers itself:
Step up, ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the
Physical Research hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as to
the cost of milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!
You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the
Wholesale Pickpockets' Association making use of their
incantations. You admired my ability to sling language, but not
my taste; and you certainly did not think that I would back my
rhetoric with facts. But what do these quotations mean, unless
they mean what I have said? Are not these three professors men of
culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of learning you
can find in our present-day society?
And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position
of the young student of the working-class, who goes to these
books and discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for
a snare. Who discovers that professors of ethics, practical or
impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in
collecting funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds,
they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the minds of
the poor! Do you wonder that such young students conclude that
bourgeois thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are
prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the
temple of truth?
RUNNING THE RAPIDS
And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what
it means to society that practically all its moral teaching
should be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean,
straight thinking? That all the intellectual prestige of the
Church should be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and
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deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in the most
terrific social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to
picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of
Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in
the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead;
and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over
it, and into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and
rushes you along with the speed of a race-horse. With ever sense
alert you watch for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your
paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion draw the
canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail to do it,
over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings
go down stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and
not seen for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the
voyage of life, for the whole of society and for every
individual. The paddle which would save us from the rocks is
experimental science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who
has no paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and
murmurs words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when
he sees an especially formidable obstruction -- a war, or the
gonococcus, or the I.W.W. -- he casts a holy wafer upon the
foaming torrent.
And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you
could gave yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go
overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into
the trenches in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud,
because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and
kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find
yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free
yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to law-
courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman bureaucrat,
who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of
gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry than
to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course
those who think him a voice of God can form no conception of the
dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome
sex-conversation, you will be as apt to find them among the
Ashantees or the Kamchaldals as among the followers of the
Apostle to the Gentiles.
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by
this Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you
from a second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal
desire. You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that
would be "collusion!" you listen while your intimate friends
recite the pitiful and shameful details of your domestic
misfortune, under the cross-questioning of lawyers who have
suppressed for the time whatever decent instincts they may
possess, and follow blindly the details of a prescribed
procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and truth. The
next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by law has
been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold
copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the
intimate details of where you slept and where your wife slept and
what you saw your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic
jackals, who scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your
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dead love. And in the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone
through this horror for nothing -- the august court with its
Roman Catholic judge throws out your petition, its suspicions
having been excited by the fact that when you discovered your
domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a civilized person,
with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a sultan in Turkey,
or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
BIRTH CONTROL
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical
questions by minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an
unmitigated curse to the race. The armory of science is full of
weapons which might be used to slay the monsters of disease and
vice -- but these weapons are not allowed to be employed,
sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider the misery which is
piling itself up in the slums of our great cities -- the
degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying as
never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they
can not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects
to this operation, and so the law does not make use of this
knowledge. There exists a simple, and practically costless method
of preventing conception, which would enable us to check the
blind and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods
instead of as animals; consider the festering mass of misery in
the slums of our great cities; consider the millions of
terrified, poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured
infant after another, struggling desperately to feed and care for
them, and seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are
born -- until finally the mother, worn out with the Sisphean
labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider
how many women, in their agony and despair, make use of the
methods of the primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of
fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated that in the United
States alone there are a million abortions every year; and
consider that all this hideous mass of suffering -- a bloody
European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper
correspondent -- might be avoided by the use of a simple
sterilizing formula, which we are not permitted to give! The
Federation of Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the
statute-books of the nation, and of all the states as well; the
whole power of police and courts and jails is at the service of
religious bigots, and a young girl is sent to prison and forcibly
fed with a tube through the nose for telling poverty-ridden slum-
women how to keep from becoming pregnant!
And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges
and district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and
doctors who perpetrated this infamy under a so-called "reform"
administration in New York City -- and what do you find? The
first thing you find is that they themselves, one and all,
practice birth-control with their wives or their mistresses, The
second thing you find is that the statute-books are crowded with
other laws which they make no pretense of enforcing; for example,
the law which forbids the saloons to be open on Sunday -- which
law they take the liberty of understanding to mean that the
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saloons shall not have their front door open on Sunday. You will
find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos;
they are afraid of the religious vote -- and even more they are
afraid of the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers
and landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if
the women of the slums were to cease to breed, So once more we
discover the wolf in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of
Tradition-worship; hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden
aunts and grandmothers, who repeat the instructions which God
gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
earth." As if God were as blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and
could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full of all
fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and
a modern East Side tenement-room, with an oil stove and no
windows and no water-closet, and the price of cabbage 7c a pound!
SHEEP
There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches
in America. They own more than a billion dollars' worth of
property, and in the West and South they dominate the
intellectual life of the country. I do not wish to be unfair in
what I say of them. They are far more democratic than the
Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the liquor traffic
and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly derived
from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are honestly
seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor for
progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran
scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and
they cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and
foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain
things because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in
certain ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world
3,000 years ago, but which now are known only to history.
You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow
the example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick,
all the rest will leap when they come to the spot, even though
the stick may have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist
explains this seeming foolishness by the fact that sheep once
lived in high mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly
rushing herds; when the leader leaped across an abyss, the others
had to leap, without waiting to see in the dust and confusion.
Now there are no mountains and no enemies, but the sheep still
jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still sews buttons
at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred years
ago all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad
builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to
overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled by
mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in
spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete
protection against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat
meat on Friday, because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that
day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's
sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox
Baptist requires total immersion in a climate quite different
from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy
fresh air and exercise on the Sabbath.
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In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air
life, tending sheep and working the fields; so it was an
excellent thing for them to rest from labor one day of the week,
and to gather in temples to hear the reading of the best
literature of their time. But nowadays the city slave spends his
week-days shut up in an office, poring over a ledger, or in a
sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously, therefore,
the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the open
air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we
human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern
statute-books, and if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and
tries to play baseball, we send a policeman and take him to jail,
and next morning he is fined $5, and probably loses his job.
In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and
enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there
are tennis courts built and paid for out of public funds, my own
included; yet I cannot use these tennis courts on Sunday, because
of the ancient Hebrew taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the
swimming pool in the park is closed to me, the library is closed
nearly all day. If I enquire about it, I am told that it is
desirable that city employees should have one days' rest a week;
but when I ask why it might not be possible to relay the
employees, so that they might all have one, or even two days'
rest a week, and still give the public their rights on Sunday,
there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when
their peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law
enforces a general boredom, the public may be more disposed to
endure the boredom of sermons.
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but
moving pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan
rule, the picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits
"sacred concerts" -- which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany,
has come to mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a
free rein to the imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the
obscenities of Anna Held and Gaby Deslys -- while we bar the
greatest moralists of our times, such as Ibsen and Brieux.
I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because
of an experience which once befell me. In the second decade of
this century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American
democracy, whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and
forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship, I
was made to serve a sentence of 18 hours in the state prison of
Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly
arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly
clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile,
duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full of vermin
-- in a building housing some 500 wretches, black and white, 30
of them serving life-terms under circumstances which never
permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the
sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise court of their prison,
and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one another, but
ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their cells
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with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a
sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the pious city of
Wilmington, with no less than 91 churches! The writer was
informed that he would return to this institution regularly every
week unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a
private club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful
punishment by making the discovery that at the Wilmington Country
Club it was the custom of the leading officials of the city and
state to play golf every Sunday, and by threatening to employ
detectives and have these mighty ones arrested and sent to their
own prison. Which shows again the importance of understanding the
relationship of Superstition and Big Business!
BOOK SIX
THE CHURCH OF THE QUACKS
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking --
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
Clough.
TABULA RASA
Nature have given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon
which to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our
intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been
taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom.
I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the
climate. I find that what freedom means in the West is the
ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new,
fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new
cult around it, and earn a living out of it.
My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to
the Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and
found myself in a nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three
generations or so ago some odd character hit upon the discovery
that the Christian churches had let the devil snare them into
resting on the first day of the week, whereas the Bible states
distinctly that the Lord "rested on the seventh day." So here is
a million dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients
and employees, and on Friday at sundown the silence of death
settles upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of
Saturday, when everything comes suddenly to life again, and there
is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I
used to call "sterilized dancing" -- the men pairing with men and
the women with women.
They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up
with their eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways,
because, as not all the city shares their delusions, there are
some stores open every day of the week. But then you discover
that the Sanitarium is training "medical missionaries" to send to
Africa, and is teaching these supposed-to-be-scientists that
evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and not proven anyhow!
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You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this
establishment alone in his office, and he will smile and admit
that of course it is not necessary to take all Bible phrases
literally; but you know how it is -- there are different levels
of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know how it is. You have an
institution founded upon a certain dogma, and run by means of
that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing things. It
is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the
patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay
high prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetables
of them, which you think more important than teaching abstract
notions about their being descended from monkeys. Also you can
manufacture vegetarian foods for them, and build up an enormous
business -- so obtaining that Power which is, the thing desired
of men.
This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I
could cite a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of
another sect, the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive
Methodists, Bible-worshipers, not content with the King James
version, but going back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a
"University," located in one of the most beautiful spots that
Nature ever made; an institution with 75 students. A couple of
years ago I happened to meet the "president," who was a preacher
with grease on the ample expanse of his black broadcloth waist-
coat, and a speech full of the commonest grammatical errors, such
as "you was" and "I seen." The past year witnessed a split, and
the founding of a brand new church and "University" -- because
one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so much that the
students got no chance to study; also because he sent home a rich
man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her
fleshly nature.
And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality,
taking you back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A
lady friend of mine, generously blessed with this world's good's,
asks me have I seen the hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies,
'Didn't you know there was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a
cave, and never has anything to do with the world. He has no
books; he contemplates spiritually." I picture my friend with her
large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies, drawing up at
the door of this hermit's cave. "He received you?" I ask. "Yes,
he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh,
how he stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my
friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to
her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite
physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.
THE BOOK OF MORMON
Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of
a still stranger cult.
On the morning of September 22, 1827, the Angel of the Lord
delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a
"backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the
appearance of gold," As we know from the scriptures, it is the
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habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and
to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life;
so, as devout believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In this
case the plates were written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the
Angel thoughtfully provided Joseph Smith. Jr., with Urim and
Thummim.. two magic stones with which to read the records. They
proved to deal with a mystery which has haunted the minds of
Bible students for centuries -- the fate of the "lost ten tribes
of Israel," who were now revealed to have been the ancestors of
the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a new
religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general;
so, on April 6, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N.Y., there was
formally launched the "Church of the Latter Day saints." Smith
turned over to his followers his translation of the miraculous
plates, called "The Book of Mormon"; obviously like the books
which we already know are the revealed word of God. But, on
chance that this might not be sufficient, we were offered in the
preface two documents, the "Testimony of Three Witnesses," and
the "Further Testimony of Eight Witnesses." The latter being the
shorter, may be quoted:
Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and
people, unto whom this work shall come: That Joseph Smith
Jr., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the
plates of which hath been spoken which have the appearance
of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath
translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also saw
the engravings there on, all of which has the appearance of
ancient work and of curious workmanship. And this we bear
record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has
shewn unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a
surety that the said Smith hath got the plates of which we
have spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to
witness that which we have seen, and we lie not, God bearing
witness of it.
Christian Whitmer
Jacob Whitmer
Peter Whitmer, Jr.
John Whitmer
Hiram Page
Joseph Smith, Sr.
Hyrum Smith
Saml. H. Smith
The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints
bore out the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its
divine origin; it was persecuted as the saints of old were
persecuted, and its followers proceeded to massacre the nearby
unbelieving populations, just as the divinely guided Hebrews had
done. Driven from place to place, they built at Nauvoo, Ill., a
beautiful temple, according to plans revealed in a vision,
exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where they
have a magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers.
The United States government, not being entirely Biblical,
objected to their practice of allowing the patriarchs of the
tribe to have as many wives as they could support; the government
confiscated the church's property, and forced it to conceal the
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practice of polygamy, as is done by elderly church members in
other parts of the country. Recently the head of the church, who
bears the title of "Prophet, Seer and Revelator," was persuaded
to permit an examination of one of its secret plates, the "Book
of Abraham," by egyptologists, who found that it was ordinary
Egyptian hieroglyphics, not "reformed," but containing prayers to
the sun-god. But this will of course make no difference to the
devout followers of Joseph -- any more than it has made to devout
Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that
the Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and
that the four gospels date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries after
Christ.
HOLY ROLLING
All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults, some
of them pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely
grotesque. Thus, for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who
founded the "Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed
himself up in scarlet and purple robes with stars on. Through his
Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Company he became enormously
wealthy; he finally announced himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I
remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to New York, and P.T.
Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white elephant never made such a
sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis overwhelmed the old
prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and his tabernacle
and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the rule of
all religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting
up, and suing one another in the law-courts.
Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers,"
ghastly sects which cultivate the religious hysterias, and have
spread like a plague among the women of our lonely prairie farms
and desert ranches. The "Holy Rollers," who call themselves the
"Apostolic Church," have a meeting place here in Pasadena, and
any Sunday evening at nine o'clock you may see the Saints of the
Lord taking possession of the worshipers, causing moans and
shrieks and convulsions; you may see a woman holding her hands
aloft for 17 minutes by the watch making chattering sounds like
an ape. This is called "talking in tongues" and is a sign of the
presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come back at 11 in the
evening, you will find the entire congregation, men and women,
prostrate on the floor, or hanging over the benches; and maybe a
child moaning in terror, having a devil cast out.
You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw
yourself into these convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust."
which is "Published Monthly (D.V.) in the interest of Elim Faith
Work and Bible Training School." Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The
Pentecostal Baptism." and tells the story of her experiences. She
"Camped on the Word of God," she declares.
I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the
mission told me, "You can go down to the mission and stay
there all day. There is plenty of wood, and you can stay
there all night." I went down, and there was plenty of "let
go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got
wonderfully loosed. ...
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Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God
told me it was mine. What was there left for me to pray
about. He spoiled my praying and I took up praising. I
praised God that He who worked in the Upper Room was working
the same in me. I praised, and I praised, and I praised. The
devil said to me, "That's mechanical." I said, "I'll praise
You Lord, and if You want real praise, You'll have to put
the wind in the sails."
That's the way I came through. One morning I was just
getting out of bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the
enemy likes to call it, began to come. The Lord said, "Let
it babble!" I let. The babble increased, and by night I was
up to my neck. I let. I still let. That's all, Someone else
does the work and it does not tire you.
And here is another paper. "Meat in Due Season: published
monthly, or as often as the Lord leads." The editor quotes the
Bible, "Call upon the name of the Lord," and explains that "Call
means call." The word appears to have a special meaning to these
pentecostal persons -- it means working yourself into a frenzy of
agitation; as the editor puts it, "You must lay hold of the horns
of the altar." He goes on to exhort -- the italics being his:
Pray as if your very life depended upon it! The first few
minutes seemingly all the powers of hell will contend every word,
the next few, relief in a measure will come, more liberty in
calling. In a very little while you will be dead to the room.
dead to the chair, dead to everyone around you, dead to all and
tremendously alive to your desperate need and emptyness; this
conviction will grow as you increase palling upon Him. It maybe
you'll weep, it maybe you'll perspire, it maybe your clothing
will be deranged, it maybe your throat will get sore. Never for a
moment let your mind rest on the condition of your person. Open
your mouth and God has promised to fill it. Ask persistently
until the very floor seems to sink beneath you and the fountains
of the deep, of your heart let loose. Like David, "pour out your
soul" like one would pour water out of a bucket. I have seen
hundreds get through right at this point. When self-thought
reticence, decorum, reserve, propriety and dignity had all been
thrown to the four winds of heaven. Self was then obliterated and
consciousness of person gone, Draw near to God and He will draw
near to you saith the scripture, but you must draw near to Him
first.
These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a
sect which originated in England, but was driven by persecution
to the New World. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society
of True Believers in Christ's Second Coming," and were founded by
Ann Lee who variously termed herself the "Female Christ," the
"Holy Comforter," and the "God-anointed Woman." They might be
termed the suffragettes of religion, for they pray always to "Our
Father and Mother, which are in heaven." They were taught the
convenient doctrine that their Founder had "spiritual
illumination," so that any evidence of the senses used against
her might deceive. She governed through terror, holding that by
her mental powers she could inflict torment upon any of her
followers. Fortunately she taught absolute celibacy, and so there
are how only about a thousand of her disciples.
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BIBLE PROPHECY
This far western country swarms with those fanatics who
await the return of Christ, and find the Bible chronology
positive evidence that he is coming on a specified day. Seldom do
I give a lecture on Socialism that some eager old lady does not
come up to me and point out how futile are my hopes, because the
Millennium will come before the Revolution. Several times I have
come on an item in the newspapers, telling of a group of people,
sometimes whole villages, selling their goods and going out into
the fields to shout and sing and pray. expecting the vision of
the Lord and His Angels in the skies. I have in my hand a
pamphlet entitled "Shekineh: The Glory of God in Israel, Facts
Mathematically Foretold, the Soon Coming of Our Blessed Lord." It
is earnestly, yearningly written, in that spirit of feeble-minded
affectionateness which the Bible-sects seem to encourage:
Now dear reader you see that these problems tell a
wonderful story which I know are the Eternal Truths of God.
Jesus is soon coming. I believe that from now on we can say,
next week perhaps our blessed Lord will return, Yet the time
may not end till the close of the A.M. year, which will be
March 20, 1897. But let us take up the sickle of God, etc.
Oh, my Christian friends, live near the Blessed Christ, and
gain eternal life through Jesus Our Lord!
In the public library I find another pamphlet entitled "The
Our Race," which proves that the "lost ten tribes of Israel" are
not the American Indians, but the Irish! And here is a
publication of the "Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society,"
declaring:
The great pyramid in Egypt is a witness to all the
events of the ages and of our day. The pyramid's downward
passage under "a Draconis" symbolizes the course of Sin. Its
first ascending passage symbolizes the Jewish Age. Its Grand
Gallery symbolizes the Gospel Age. Its upper step symbolizes
the approaching period of tribulation and anarchy,
"Judgment" upon Christendom.
It is a Sunday morning, and I sit in the California sunshine
revising this manuscript, when a decorous-looking young man
approaches, having a sack over his shoulder. "From the Bible-
students," he says politely, and hands me a little paper, "The
Bible Students' Monthly: an Independent, Unsectarian Religious
Newspaper, Specially devoted to the Forwarding of the Laymen's
Home Missionary Movement for the Glory of God and Good of
Humanity." The leading article is headed "The Fall of Babylon;
Ancient Babylon a Type -- Mystic Babylon the, Antitype: Why
Christendom must Suffer -- the Final Outcome." A note explains:
The following article is extracted from Pastor
Russell's posthumous volume entitled "The Finished Mystery,"
the 7th in the series of his Studies in the Scriptures and
published subsequently to his death. Pastor Russell held the
distinction of being the most fearless and powerful writer
of modern times on ecclesiastical subjects. In this
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posthummis volume, which is called "his last legacy to the
Christians on earth," is found a thorough exposition of
every verse in the entire book of Revelations and also an
elucidation of the obscure prophecy of Ezekiel. The book
contains 608 pages, handsomely bound in embossed cloth.
Pastor Russell used to publish a two-column sermon in some
hundreds of Sunday newspapers, together with a presentment of his
features -- solemn, stiff, white-whiskered, set off with a
"choker" and a black broadcloth coat. There are five million such
faces in America, but if you have an impulse to despair for your
country, remember that it produced Mark Twain and Artemus Ward,
as well as Pastor Russell and the Moody and Sankey hymn-book. I
quote one passage from "The Finished Mystery," in order that the
reader may know what it means to "hold the distinction of being
the most fearless and powerful writer of modern times on
ecclesiastical subjects." Pastor Russell does not approve of the
Methodists, and he quotes twelve verses of Revelation, line by
line and phrase by phrase, showing how the evil course and
downfall of the Wesleyan system were divinely foretold. Thus:
"But that they should be tormented five months." -- In
symbolic time, 150 years -- 5X30=150. (Ezek. 4:6.) Wesley
became the first Methodist in 1723. (Rev. 9:1..) When the
Methodist denomination, with all the others, was cast off
from favor in 1878 (Rev. 3,14) its powers to torment men by
preaching what Presbyterians describe as "Conscious misery,
eternal in duration" came to an end legally, and to a large
extent actually. -- Rev. 9:10.
P.S. A few months pass, and while this book is going to
press, "The Finished Mystery" is suppressed by the
government and several score "Bible Students" are landed in
jail for sedition.
KORESHANITY
Such are the beliefs built on the Bible. But there are other
ancient writings with strange nomenclature and ritual and
symbolism, calculated to impress the unlettered; also our
prophets have imaginations of their own, and can invent
nomenclature and ritual and symbolism never seen in heaven nor on
earth before. Thus there is Dr. Newo Newi New, who called himself
"Archbishop of the Newthot Church," and gathered about him a
harem of devoted females in San Francisco, and was landed in jail
for using the mails to defraud. Or there is "Oahspe, the Cosmic
Bible," a work of brand-new revelations with a brand-new view of
the universe and all things therein:
The reader soon discovers that he must radically revise
not only his ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the order and
significance of names and titles commonly applied to the
Transcendental Brethren. The great provinces of Etheria are
presided over by chiefs, chosen for their superior
development in wisdom and love. For our solar system to
cross one of these provinces requires about 3,000 years, and
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between them are belts of high Etherian light which take
several years to pass over, The passage of each province is
a cycle of earthly history, and the crossings are called
Dawns of Dan.
And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed by the Lord
to Dr. C.R. Teed of Chicago in the year 1889. This new seer took
the name of Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, "the Shepherd from
Joseph, the Stone of Israel, the Sun-Man; the illuminating center
of the Son of man," and went out on the streets of the city to
preach that the earth is a hollow sphere with the stars inside.
The street urchins of the pork-packing metropolis threw stones at
him, and the irreverent newspapers took up his adventures, with
the result that followers gathered, and now there is a
flourishing colony in Florida, with a dignified magazine called
"The Flaming Sword;" and a collection of propaganda volumes: "The
Cellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of Koreshan Universology and
the New Geodesy"; "The Immortal Manhood, the laws and Processes
of its Attainment in the Flesh"; "The Great Red Dragon, by Lord
Chester"; "The Coming of the Shepherd from Joseph, The Standing
of the Great Ensign, by Koresh." The Religio-science" of this
Chicago revelator is based, first upon some precise measurements
of the earth which prove that its surface is concave; and second
upon some philological discoveries very much resembling puns.
Thus the "cross of Christ" is explained in a sense of the word
more common among horse-breeders than among theologians:
The highest characteristic of the alchemical law is the
cross of Christ with sensual man. The cross means that the
Lord God, in order to perpetuate his own being, descends
into the race of sensuality.
And again, when someone asks about meteors:
The word Heaven means things heaved up, that is, heaved
up from their material basis, the earth; thus, the meteors
which fall to the earth are composed of metallic, mineral,
and geological substances, being materialized or actually
created in the atmosphere by an alchemico-organic process
from zones or belts periodically open, which precipitate
their contents in the form or shape of meteors."
And perhaps I ought also to quote the "Indicia of Human
progress," by "Berthaldine, Matrona." I don't know what a
"Matrona" is -- unless it is a female matron. This female matron
tells me that now is the "Time of Restitution," and explains that
"the prolification of the human race has reach a fruition of the
adultery of the truth and good of the Lord with the fallacies and
evils of the mortal hells." ... We have come, it seems, to the
"age of Pisces," which is "one of the greatest radical
prolification"; and what we now need is the "power of
polarization," so that we may join the "White Horse Army of the
Most High," which is the organization of the "Aquarian age,"
proclaimed by Koresh on January 15, 1891.
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MAZDAZNAN
And here is another and even more startling revelation from
Chicago, given to a seer by the name of Dr. Otoman Printe of
Adusht Ha'nish, prophet of the Sun God, Prince of Peace, Manthra
Magi of Temple El Katman, Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and
Envoy of Mazdanan living, Viceroy-Elect and International Head of
Master-Thot. If you had happened to live near the town of
Mendota, Illinois, and had known the German grocer-boy named Otto
Hanisch, you might at first have trouble in recognizing him
through this transmogrification. I have traced his career in the
files of the Chicago newspapers, and find him herding sheep,
setting type, preaching prestidigitation, mesmerism, and fake
spiritualism, joining the Mormon Church, then the "Christian
Catholic Church in Zion" and then the cult of Brighouse, who
claimed to be Christ returned. Finally he sets himself up in
Chicago as a Persian Magus, teaching Yogi breathing exercises and
occult sex-lore to the 'elegant society ladies of the pork-
packing metropolis. The Sun God, worshiped for two score
centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on
Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at which his
disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms -- "the white and pinkish for
males, the blue-tinted for females." He wears a long flowing robe
of pale grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid
shoes, and he sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner
Studies," price $5 per volume, with information on such subjects
as:
The Immaculate Conception and its Repetition; The
Secrets of Lovers Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates;
Magnetic Attraction and Electric Mating.
A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jail for
six months; but that does not harm his cult, which now has a
temple in Chicago, presided over by a lady called Kalantress and
Evangelist; also a "Northern Stronghold" in Montreal, an Embassy"
In London, an "International Aryana" in Switzerland, and
"Centers" all over the America. At the moment of going to press,
the prophet himself is in flight, pursued by a warrant charging
him with improper conduct with a number of young boys in a Los
Angeles hotel.
I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a
farrago of every kind of ancient mysticism -- paper and binding
from the Bible, illustrations from the Egyptian, names from the
Zoroastrian, health rules from the Hindoos, laws from the
Confucians -- price $10 per volume. Would you like to discover
your 17 senses, to develop them according to the Ga-Llama
principle, and to share the "expansion of the magnetic circles"?
Here is the way to do it:
Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one
exhalation, speak slowly:
Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto
Truth hidden by the vase of dazzling light.
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Again inhale for four seconds, and breathe out the
following sentence upon one exhalation as before:
Soften the radiation of Thy Illuminating Splendor, that
I may behold Thy True Being.
I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of
the prophet's arriving there. He takes the front page with the
captivating headline: "Women Didn't Think Till They Put On
Corsets." The Interview tells about his mysteriousness, his
aloofness, his bird-like-diet, and his personal beauty. "Despite
his 73 years, Ha'nish evidences no sign of age. His keen blue
eyes showed no sign of wavering. There were no wrinkles on his
face, and his walk was that of a man of 40." The humor of this
becomes apparent when we mention that at Halnish's trial, three
or four years ago, he was proven to be 35 years old!
Being thus warned as to the accuracy of American journalism,
we shall not be taken in by the repeated statements that the
Mazdaznan prophet is a millionaire. But there is no doubt that he
is wealthy; and as all Americans wish to be wealthy, I will quote
his formula of prosperity his method of accomplishing what might
be called the Individual Revolution:
When hungry and you do not know where to get your next
piece of bread, do not despair. Thy Father, all-loving, has
provided you will everything that will meet all cases of
emergency. Place your teeth tightly together, with tongue
pressing against the lower teeth and lips parted. Breathe in
close lips immediately, exhaling through the nostrils.
Breathe again: if saliva forms in your mouth, hold your
breath so you can swallow it first before you exhale. You
thus take out of the air the metal-substance contained
therein: you can even taste the Iron which yon convert into
substance required for making the blood. Should you feel
that, although you have sufficient Iron in the blood, there
is a lack of copper and zinc and silver, place upper teeth
over lower, keep lower lip tightly to lower teeth. now
breathe and you can even taste the metals named. Then should
you feel you need more gold element for your brain
functions, place your back teeth together just as if yon
were to grind the back teeth, taking short breaths only. You
will then learn to know that there is gold and silver all
around us. That our bodies are filled with quite a quantity
of gold.
BLACK MAGIC
What all this means is that we have a continent, with a
hundred million half-educated people, materially prosperous, but
spiritually starving; so any man who possesses personality, who
looks in any way strange and impressive, or has hunted up old
books in a library, and can pronounce mysterious words in a
thrilling voice -- such a man can find followers. Anybody can do
it with any doctrine, from anywhere, Persia or Patagonia. Peking
Pompei. I would be willing to wager that if I cared to come out
and announce that I had had a visit from God last night, and to
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devote such literary and emotional power as I possess to
communicating a new revelation, I could have a temple, a
university, and a million dollars within five years at the
outside. And if at the end of five years I were to announce that
I had played a joke on the world, some one of my followers would
convince the faithful that I had been an agent of God without
knowing it, and that the leadership had now been turned over to
him.
I would not be understood as believing that all our cults
are undiluted fakery, for that would be doing injustice to some
earnest people. There are, in this country, many followers of the
Persian reformer, Abbas Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and
who have what I am inclined to think is the purest and most
dignified religion in existence. There was a man named Jacob
Beilhardt, who founded a cult in Illinois with the painful name
of "Spirit Fruit Colony," who nevertheless was a man of spiritual
insight, a true mystic; he was honest, and so he failed, and died
of a broken heart. Also there are the Christian Scientists and
the Theosophists, so exasperating that one would like to throw
them into the rubbish-heap, who yet compel us to sift over their
mountains of chaff for the grains of truth which will bear fruit
in future.
While we western races have been exploring the natural world
and perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo students have been
exploring the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and
Lodge and Janet and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us
today they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtless they have
hints of other things, upon which our scientists have not yet
come. I have friends, perfectly sane and competent people, who
tell me that they can see auras, and use this ability as a means
of judging character. Shall I say there are no auras, simply
because I do not happen to have this gift of seeing them? In the
same way, having read Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living," I am
not ready to ridicule the claim of the Yogi adepts, that they are
able to project some kind of astral body, and to communicate with
one another from distant places. But granting such occult powers
in a world of economic strife, what follows? Simply new floods of
charlatanism, elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and
metaphysics for the deluding and plundering of the credulous.
I have seen the thing working itself out in one case known
to me. A young man had a gift of mental healing; I know, because
I saw it work; but it did not always work, and that was annoying.
He was penniless and had a taste for power, and to eke out his
erratic endowment he got himself books of Eastern lore, and day
by day as I watched him I could see him becoming more and more
impressive, mysterious and forbidding. 'Today he is a full-sized
wonder-worker, with the language of a dozen mystic cults at his
tongue's end, and the reverent regard of many wealthy ladies. I
have never tried to break through his guard, but I feel certain
that he is a deliberate charlatan.
This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible.
Just as the manufacturer of honest foods is driven out by the
adulterator, so the worker of miracles drives out the sincere
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investigator. As a result we have here in America a plague of
Eastern cults, with "swamis" using soft yellow robes and soft
brown eyes to win the souls of idle society ladies. These
teachers of ancient Hindoo lore despise us as a race of
barbarians; but they stay -- whether because of love of man or
woman, I do not pretend to say.
There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and
institutes and temples and colonies, and a doctrine as complex
and detailed and fantastic as that of the Roman Catholics. I have
already referred to the writings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway
Russian army officer's daughter, whose career reads like a tale
out of the Arabian Nights. And there is Annie Besant, who was
once an ardent worker in the Social-democratic Federation; H.M.
Hyndman tells us his dismay when she went to India and walked in
a procession between two white bulls! Here in California is
Madame Tingley, with a colony and a host of followers in a
miniature paradise. Men work at money-lending or manufacturing
sporting-goods, and when they get old and tired they make the
thrilling discovery that they have souls; the theosophists
cultivate these souls and they leave their money to the soul-
cause, and there are law-suits and exposes in the newspapers.
For, you see, there is ferocious rivalry in the game of
cultivating millionaire souls; there are slanders and feuds, just
as in soulless affairs. "Don't have anything to do with Madame
Tingley," whispers a Theosophist lady to my wife; and when my
wife in all innocence inquires, "Why not?" the awe-stricken
answer comes, "She practices Black magic!"
Let me add that I do not say that she practices black magic.
I do not believe that she could practice it, even if she wanted
to -- I do not believe in black magic. My purpose is merely to
show how theosophists quarrel: going back to the days of Anu and
Baal and the bronze image of the Babylonia fire-god:
Let them die, but let me live!
Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!
Let them perish, but let me increase!
Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!
MENTAL MALPRACTICE
This is the other side of the fair shield of religious
faith. Why, if there be a power which loves and can be persuaded
to aid us, may there not also be a power which hates, and can be
persuaded to destroy? No religion has ever been able to answer
this, and therefore none has ever been able to escape from devil-
terrors. Even Jesus was pursued by Satan, and the Holy Catholic
Church has its ceremonies for the exorcising of demons, and a
most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our friends the
Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of all evil,
their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that
they are perfect in God -- yet tormented by a squalid phobia
called "Mental Malpractice," or "Malicious Animal Magnetism."
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Christian Science is the most characteristic of American
religious contributions. Just as Billy Sunday is the price we pay
for failing to educate our baseball players, so Mary Baker Glover
Patterson Eddy is the price we pay for failing to educate our
farmer's daughters.
That she had a power to cure disease I do not doubt, because
I have a little of it myself. At first my opinion was that her
"Science" made its way by curing the imaginary ailments of the
idle rich. If a person has nothing to do but think that he is
sick, you can work easy miracles by persuading him to think that
he is well; and if he has nothing to do but think that he is
well, he will help you to build marble churches and maintain
propaganda societies. But recently I have experimented with
mental healing -- enough to satisfy myself that the subconscious
mind which controls our physical functions can be powerfully
influenced by the will.
I told the story of some of these experiments in Hearst's
Magazine for April, 1914. Suffice it here to say that if you will
lay your hands upon a sick person, forming a vivid mental picture
of the bodily changes you desire, and concentrating the power of
your will upon them, you may be surprised by the results,
especially if you possess anything in the way of psychic gifts.
You do not have to adopt any theories, you do not have to do it
in the name of any divinity, ancient or modern; the only bearing
of such ideas is that they serve to persuade people to make the
experiment, and to make it with persistence and intensity. So it
has come about that "Meracles" of healing are associated with
"faith", and so it comes about that scientists are apt to flaunt
the subject. But read of the work of Janet and Charcot and their
followers at the 'salpetriere;' they have proven that all kinds
of seeming-organic ailments may be entirely hysterical in nature,
and may be cured by the simplest form of suggestion.
Understanding this, you may find it more easy to credit the fact
that cripples do sometimes throw away their crutches in the
grotto of Lourdes. For my part, I can believe that Jesus
performed all the miracles of healing attributed to him --
including the raising up of people pronounced to be dead by the
ignorance of that time. I am convinced that in the new science of
psychoanalysis we have a universe as vast as the universe of the
atom or of the stars.
The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they
have mixed it up with metaphysics and divinity, and built some
four or five hundred churches, and printed the Mother Church
alone knows how many million pamphlets and books. I once invested
three of my hard-earned dollars for a copy of the Eddy Bible, and
let myself be stunned and blinded by the flapping of metaphysical
wings. With the passing of the years I have come to understand
the use of mystical words as a form of suggestion, often highly
potent. But what interests us in this Book is not the technique
of mental healing, but the use of this, and all other secrets of
life, for the buttressing of privilege. Christian Science is a
Yankee religion, and practical; it will remove your hang-nail
down your floating kidney, and enable you to hustle and make
money. We saw in our politics the growth of a Party of the Full
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Dinner-Pail; contemporaneous therewith, and corresponding
thereto, we see in our religious life the development of a
'Church of the Full Pocket-Book.
The rank and file of practitioners are sincere, hard-working
devotees; but they are controlled by big businessmen in Boston.
This church machine does not issue cheap editions of "Science and
Health, With Key to the Scriptures," to relieve the suffering of
the proletariat; no -- the work is copyrighted, in all its
varying and contradictory editions, and the price is from three
to seven-fifty, according to binding. The poor use the churches
but the rich run them. And we have no nonsense about charity, we
don't worry about the poor who fester in our city slums; because
poverty is a product of Mortal Mind, and we offer to all men a
way to get rich. You may come to our marble churches and hear
people testify how through the power of Divine Mind they were
enabled to anticipate a rise in the stock-market. If you don't
avail yourself of the opportunity, the fault is yours, and yours
also the punishment.
As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholic
hierarchy is a Bolshevik democracy in comparison. The Church is
controlled by an absolutely irresponsible self-perpetuating body
of five men, who alone dictate its policy. I have in my hand a
letter from a Christian Science healer who was listed as an
"authorized practitioner," and who withdrew from the Church
because of its attitude on public questions. He sends me a copy
of his correspondence with the editors of the "Christian Science
Monitor," containing a detailed analysis of the position of that
paper on such issues as the Ballinger land-frauds. He writes:
I am thoroughly convinced now that the policy of the
Church is consciously plutocratic. The only recommendation I
have heard of the latest appointee to the Board of Directors
is that he is one of the richest men in the movement.
After the Titanic disaster, Senator La Follette brought in a
carefully drawn bill to compel steamship companies to provide
life-boats and trained crews. The "Christian Science Monitor"
opposed this bill; and when my correspondent cited the fact, he
brought out a quaint bit of metaphysical logic, as follows:
One would prefer to travel on a vessel without a single
boat, rather than on some other vessels which were loaded
down with life-boats, where the government of Mind was not
understood!
SCIENCE AND WEALTH
The truth is that the brand of Mammon was on our Yankee
religion from the day of its birth. In the first edition of her
new Bible "Mother" EddY dropped the hint to her readers: "Men of
business have said this science was of great advantage from a
secular point of view." And in her advertisements she threw aside
all pretense, declaring that her work "Affords an opportunity to
acquire a profession by which one can accumulate a fortune." When
her pupils did accumulate, she boasted of their success; nor did
she neglect her own accumulating.
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It has been a dozen years since I looked into this cult; in
order to be sure that it has not been purified in the interim, I
proceed to a street corner in my home city, where is a stand with
a sign: "Christian Science Literature." I take four sample copies
of a magazine, the "Christian Science Sentinel," published by the
Mother Church in Boston, and turn to the "Testimonials of
Healing." In the issue of August 11, 1917, Mary C. Richards of
St. Margarets-on-Thames, England, testifies: "Through a number of
circumstances unnecessary to relate, but proving conclusively
that the result came not from man but from God, employment was
found." In the issue of December 2, 1916, Frances Tuttle of
Jersey City, N.J., testifies how her sister was successfully
treated for unemployment by a scientist practitioner. "Every
condition was beautifully met" In the same issue Fred D. Miller
of Los Angeles, Calif., testifies: "Soon after this wonderful
truth came to me, Divine Love led me to a new position with a
responsible firm. The work was new to me, but I have given entire
satisfaction, and my salary has been advanced twice in less than
a year." In the issue of January 27, 1917, Eliza Fryans of
Agricola, Miss., testifies how she cured her little dog of snake-
bite and removed two painful corns from her own foot. In the
issue of August 4, 1917, Marcia E. Gaier, of Everett, Wash.,
testifies how it suddenly occurred to her that because God is
All, she would drop her planning and outlining in regard to real
estate properties, "upon which for nine months all available
material methods were tried to no effect." The result was a
triumph of "Principle."
While working in the yard one morning and gratefully
communing with God, the only power, I suddenly felt that I
should stop working and prepare for visitors on their way to
look at the property. I obeyed this very distinct command,
and in about an hour I greeted two people who had searched
almost the entire city for just what we had to offer. They
had been directed to our place by what to material sense
would seem an accident, but we know it was the divine law of
harmony in its universal operation.
After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, in a
Christian Science lecture at Kansas City, Mo., should proclaim:
My friends, do you know that since the world began
Christian Science is the only system which has intelligently
related religion to business? Christian Science shows that
since all ideas belong to Mind, God, therefore all real
business belongs to Him.
As I said, these people have the new-old power of mental
healing. They blunder along with it blindly, absurdly, sometimes
with tragic consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the
pill-doctors know nothing about this power, and regard it with
contempt mingled with fear; so of course the hosts of sufferers
whom the pill-doctors cannot help flock to the healers of the
"Church of Christ, Scientist." According to the custom of those
who are healed by "faith," they swallow line, hook, and sinker,
creed, ritual, metaphysics and divinity. So we see in 20th-
century America precisely what we saw in B.C. 20th-century
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Assyria -- a host of worshipers, giving their worldly goods
without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of fanatics and
partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise of graft, and
harvesting that thing desired of all men, power over the lives
and destinies of others.
And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one
another's Mortal Minds, they drive one another out, they snarl
over the spoils like a pack of hungry animals. Listen to the
Mother, denouncing one of her students -- a perfectly amiable and
harmless youth whose only offense was that he had gone his own
way and was healing the sick for the benefit of his own pocket-
book:
Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot
out the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy
virtue, put out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent,
befouling thy track with the trophies of thy guilt -- I say,
Behold the "cloud" no bigger than a man's hand already
rising on the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty
head the hailstones of doom.
And again:
The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental
method with the torture of individuals, is repeating
history, and will fall upon his own sword, and it shall
pierce him through. Let him remember this when, in the dark
recesses of thought, be is robbing, committing adultery and
killing. When he is attempting to turn friend away from
friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is
clipping the thread of life and giving to the grave youth
and its rainbow hues; when he is turning back the reviving
sufferer to his bed of pain, clouding his first morning
after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hoar shall
point to the tyrant's fate, who falls at length upon the
sword of justice.
NEW NONSENSE
In a certain city of America is a large building given up
entirely to the whims of pretty ladies. Its floors are not floors
but "Promenades," and have walls of glass behind which, as you
stroll, you see bonnets from Paris and opera cloaks from London,
furs from Alaska and blankets from Arizona, diamonds from South
Africa and beads from the Philippines, grapes from Spain and
cherries from Japan, fortune-tellers from Arabia and dancing-
masters from Petrograd and "naturopaths" from Vienna. There are
73 shops, by actual count, containing everything that could be
imagined or desired by a pretty lady, whether for her body, or
for that vague stream of emotion she calls her "soul." One of the
73 shops is a "Metaphysical Library," having broad windows, and
walls in pastel tints, and pretty vases with pink flowers, and
pretty gray wicker chairs in which the reader will please to be
seated, while we probe the mysteries of an activity widely spread
throughout America, called "New Thought."
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We begin with a shelf of magazines having mystical titles:
Azoth; Master Mind; Aletheian; Words of Power; Qabalah;
Comforter; Adept; Nautilus; True Word; Astrological Bulletin
Unity; Uplift; Now. And then come shelves of pretty pamphlets,
alluring to the eye and the purse; also shelves of imposing-
looking volumes containing the lore and magic of a score of races
and two score of centuries -- together with the very newest
manifestations of Yankee hustle and graft.
As in the case of Christian Science, these New Thoughters
have a fundamental truth, which I would by no means wish to
depreciate. It is a fact that the mysterious Source of our being
is infinite, and that we are only at the beginning of our
thinking about it. It is a fact that by appeal to it we can
perform seeming miracles of mental and moral regeneration; we can
stimulate the flow of nervous energy and of the blood, thus
furthering the processes of bodily healing. But the fact that God
is Infinite and Omnipotent does not bar the fact that He has
certain ways of working, which He does not vary; and that it is
our business to explore and understand these ways, instead of
setting our fancies to work imagining other ways more agreeable
to our semi-mentality.
Thus, for example, if we want to bread, it is God's decree
that we shall plant wheat and harvest it, and grind and bake and
distribute it. Under conditions prevailing at the moment, it
appears to be His decree that as shall store the wheat in
elevators, and ship it in freight cars, and buy it through a
grain exchange, with capital borrowed from a national bank; in
other words, that our daily bread shall be the plaything of
exploiters and speculators, until such a time as we have the
intelligence to form an effective political party and establish
Industrial Democracy. But when you come to study the ways of God
in the literature of the New Thought, do you find anything about
the Millers' Trust and the Bakers' Trust and how to expropriate
these agencies of starvation? You do not!
What you find is Bootstrap-lifting; you find gentlemen and
lady practitioners shutting their eyes and lifting their hands
and pronouncing Incantations in awe-inspiring voices -- or in
Capital Letters and LARGE TYPE: "God is infinite, God is All-
Loving, GOD WILL PROVIDE. Bread is coming to you! Bread is coming
to you!! BREAD IS COMING, TO YOU!!!"
You think this is exaggeration? If so, it is because you
have never entered the building of the pretty ladies, and sat in
the gray wicker chairs of the metaphysical library. One of the
highest high-priestesses of the cults of New Nonsense is a lady
named Elizabeth Towne, editor of "The Nautilus"; and Priestess
Elizabeth tells you:
I believe the idea that money wants you and will help
you to the right mental condition. Be a pot of honey and let
it come.
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I look over this Priestess' magazine, and find it full of
testimonials and advertisements for the conjuring of prosperity.
"Are you in the success sphere?" asks one exhorter; the next
tells you "How to enter the silence. How to manifest what you
desire. The secret of advancement." Another tells: "How a Failure
at Sixty Won Sudden Success; From Poverty to $40,000 a year -- a
Lesson for Old and Young Alike." The lesson, it appears, is to
pay $3.00 for a book called "Power of Will." And here is another
book:
Master Key: Which can unlock the Secret Chamber of
Success, can throw wide the doors which seem to bar men from
the Treasure House of Nature, and bids those enter and
partake Who are Wise enough to Understand and broad enough
to Weigh the Evidence, firm enough to Follow their Own
Judgment and Strong enough to Make the Sacrifice Exacted.
"DOLLARS WANT ME"
I turn to the shelves of pamphlets. Here is a pretty one
called "All Sufficiency in All Things," published by the "Unity
School of Christianity," in Kansas City; it explains that God is
God, not merely of the soul, but also of the Kansas City
stockyards.
This divine Substance is ever abiding within us, and
stands ready to manifest itself in whatever form you and I
need or wish, just as it did in Elisha's time. It is the
same yesterday, today and forever. Abundant Supply by the
manifestation of the Father within us, from within outward,
is as much a legitimate outcome of the Christ life or
spiritual understanding as is bodily healing. ... "Knowing
that I am God -- all of God, Good, all of Good. I am life. I
am Health. I am Supply. I am the Substance."
And here is W.W. Atkinson of Chicago, author of a work
called "Mind Power." Would you like to be an Impressive
Personality? Mr. Atkinson will tell you exactly how to do it; he
will give you the secret of the Magnetic Handclasp, of the
Intense, Straight-in-the-eye Look; he will tell you what to say,
he will write out "for you Incantations which you may pronounce
to yourself, to convince yourself that you have Power, that the
INDWELLING PRESENCE with all its MIGHT is yours. Mr. Atkinson
rebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellow Bootstrap-
lifters to employ these arts for money-making; you notice that
his magazine, "Advanced Thought," does not decline the
advertisements of such too-practical practitioners.
Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace
Wattles, who tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a Genius," and in
another pamphlet "How to Get What You Want." The thing for you to
do is --
Saturate your mentality through and through with the
knowledge that YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. ... Look upon
the peanut-stand merely as the beginning of the department
store, and make it grow; you can.
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And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of
acquisitiveness:
Hold this consciousness and say with deep, earnest
feeling: I CAN succeed! All that is possible to any one is
possible to me. I AM success. I do succeed, for I am full of
the Power of Success.
Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the
treadmill of the capitalist system -- a "soda-jerker," a
"counter-jumper," a bookkeeper for the Steel Trust. His chances
of rising in life are one in 10,000; but he comes to the
Metaphysical Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a
pamphlet by Henry Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarian
clergyman, and then an extra-high Bootstrap-lifter in San
Francisco, an Honorary Vice-President of the International New
Nonsense Alliance. Mr. Brown will tell our soda-jerker or
counter-jumper exactly how to elevate himself by mental
machinery. All calculations of probabilities are delusions of the
senses; if you have faith, you can move, not merely mountains,
but Riker-Hegeman's Macy's, or the Steel Trust. "How to Promote
Yourself" is the title of one of Mr. Brown's pamphlets, in which
he explains that --
Your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by
your faith. A doubt cuts the connection.
A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its 30th
edition, bears the thrilling title of "Dollars Want Me!" In it
Mr. Brown lays claim to being a pioneer:
I believe that this little monograph is the first
utterance of the thought that each individual has the
ability so to radiate his mental forces that he can cause
the Dollars to feel him, love him, seek him, and thus draw
at will all things needed for his unfoldment from the
universal supply.
"What are Dollars?" asks our author; and answers:
Dollars are manifestations of the One Infinite
Substance as you are, but, unlike you, they are not Self-
Conscious. They have no power till you give them power. Make
them feel this through your thought-vibrations as you feel
the importance of your work. They will then come to you to
be used.
"What is Poverty?" Mr. Brown asks, and answers himself:
Poverty is a mental condition. It can be cured only by
the Affirmation of Power to cure: I am a part of the One,
and, in the One, I possess all! Affirm this and patiently
wait for the manifestation. You have sown the thought seed.
And our author goes on to hand out packages of these
thought-seeds -- "Affirmations" as they are called, in the jargon
of the New Conjuring:
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I desire a deep consciousness of financial freedom.
I desire that the flow of prosperity become equalized.
I desire a greater consciousness of my power to attract the
dollar.
The Indwelling Power cares for my purse.
I own whatever I desire.
I can afford to use dollars for my happiness.
I always have a good bank account. I actually see it.
My one idea of the law is to use, use, USE.
SPIRITUAL FINANCIERING
If the symbolism of the Episcopal Church is of the palace,
and that of the non-conformist sects of the counting-house, that
of the International New Nonsense Alliance is of Wall Street and
the "ticker." What is your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?"
asks William Morris Nichols in the publication of the "'Now'
Folks," San Francisco:
Is it low or high? Is your credit with the Bank of the
Universe good or poor? If you draw a spiritual draft are you
sure of its being honored?
If you can answer that last question affirmatively, you
are on the road to become a Master in Spiritual
Financiering.
Have you an account with the First (and only) Bank of
Spirit? If not, then you should at once open one therewith.
For no one can afford to keep less than a large deposit of
spiritual funds with that Bank.
And how do you proceed to open your account? It is very
simple:
Intend the mind in the direction indicated by your
desire. Seek for the Light and Guidance by which you may
open up the way for your Spiritual Substance, which governs
material supply, to reach you and make you as rich as you
ought to be, in freedom and happiness. All this you can, and
when in earnest, will do.
I turn over the advertisements of this publication of the
"'Now' Folk." One offers "The Business Side of New Thought."
Another offers "The Book Without an If," with your money back IF
you are not satisfied! Another offers land in Bolivia for $2 an
acre. Another quotes Shakespeare: "Tis the mind that makes the
body rich." Another offers two copies of the "Phrenological Era"
for 10 cents.
There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which
cannot find dupes among the readers of this New Nonsense. One
notice commands:
Stop! A Revelation! A Book has been written entitled
"Strands of Gold", or "From Darkness into Light!"
Another announces:
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The Most Wonderful Book of the Ages: The Aquarian
Gospel of Jesus the Christ, Transcribed from the Book of
God's Remembrance, the Akashic Records.
And here is an advertisement published in Mr. Atkinson's
paper:
Numerology: the Universal Adjuster! Do you know: What
you appear to be to others? What you really are? What you
want to be? What would overcome your present and future
difficulties? Write to X, Philosopher. You will receive full
particulars of his personal work which is dedicated to your
service. No problem is too big or too small for Numerology.
Understanding awaits you.
And looking in the body of the magazine, you find this
Philosopher imparting some of this Understanding. Would you like,
for example, to understand why America entered the War? Nothing
easier. The vowels of the Words United States of America are
uieaeoaeia, which are numbered 2951561591, which added make 45,
or 4 plus 5 equals 9. You might not at first see what that has to
do with the War -- until the Philosopher points out that "9 in
the number of completion, indicating the end of a cosmic cycle."
That, of course, explains everything.
And here is a work on what you perhaps thought to be a dead
science, Astrology. It is called "Lucky Hours for Everybody: A
True System of Planetary Hours by Prof. John B. Early. Price One
Dollar" It teaches you things like this:
Saturn's negative hours are especially good for all
matters relating to gold-mining. ... The Sun negative rules
the emerald, the musical note D sharp, and the number four.
The lunar hours are a good time to deal in public
commodities, and to hire servants of both sexes. ...
A recent lady visitor informed me that she had made
several vain attempts to transact important business in the
hours ruled by Jupiter, usually held to be fortunate, while
she was nearly always fortunate in what she began in the
hours ruled by Saturn. Upon investigation I found her name
was ruled by the Sun negative, and that she had Capricorn
with Saturn therein as her ascendant at birth, which
explains.
And finally, here is a London "scientist," reported in the
"Weekly Unity" of Kansas City, who proves his mental power over
two-horse power oil engines which fail to act. "Going a little
apart, he came back in a few minutes and said: 'The engine is all
right now and will work satisfactory,' and without any further
difficulty it did." We are told how Dr. Rawson gave a
demonstration of his method to a newspaper reporter the other
day. Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he apparently
became absorbed in deep contemplation and said aloud: "There is
no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter;
all is spirit and manifestation of spirit."
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You might at first find difficulty in believing what can be
accomplished by "demonstrations" such as this; not merely are
two-horse power oil engines made to work, but the whole gigantic
machine of Prussian militarism is prevented from working. You may
recall how Arthur Machen's magazine story of the Angels of Mons
was taken up and made into a Catholic legend over-night; now here
is a New-Nonsense legend, complete and perfect, going the rounds
of our Nonsense magazines:
London, Dec. 14. -- Shell-proof and bullet-proof
soldiers have been discovered on the European battle-fronts.
Heroes with "charmed lives" are being made every day,
according to Frederick L. Rawson, a London scientist, who
insists he has found the miraculous way by which they are
developed. He calls it "audible treatment." "Practical
utilization of the powers of God by right thinking," is the
agency through which Dr. Rawson declares he can so treat a
man that he will not be harmed when hundreds of men are
being shot dead beside him. This amazing treatment includes
a new type of prayer. It is being administered to hundreds
of men audibly, and to hundreds more by letter. Nothing
since the war began has aroused so much talk of modern
miracles as have many of the statements of Dr. Rawson....
At the taking of a wood there were 500 yards of "No
Man's Land" to be crossed. Our troops could not get across.
Then Capt. _______ who practices this method of prayer,
treated them for an hour before they started, and not a man
was knocked out. He was the only officer left out of 80 in
his brigade. He simply held out the fact that man is
spiritual and perfect and could not be touched. A bullet
fired from a revolver only five yards away hit him over the
chest, tore his shirt and went out at the shoulder, But it
never penetrated his chest. He was frequently in a hail of
shells and bullets which did not touch him.
THE GRAFT OF GRACE
All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religions
in a world of commercial competition. It happens not merely to
Christian Science and New Thought religions, Mazdaznan and
Zionist, Holy Roller and Mormon religions, but to Catholic and
Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Methodist and Baptist religions.
For you see, when you are with the wolves you must bowl with
them; when you are competing with fakers you must fake. The
ordinary Christian will read the claims of the New Thought fakers
with contempt; but have I not shown the Catholic Church
publishing long lists of money-miracles? Have I not shown the
Church of Good Society, our exclusive and aristocratic Protestant
Episcopal communion, pretending to call rain and to banish
pestilence, to protect crops and win wars and heal those who are
"sick in estate" -- that is, who are in business trouble?
The reader will say that I am a cynic, despising my fellows;
but that is not so. I am an economic scientist, analyzing the
forces which operate in human societies. I blame the prophets and
priests and healers for their fall from idealism; but I blame
still more the competitive wage-system, which presents them with
the alternative to swindle or to starve.
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For, you see, the prophet has to have food. He has
frequently got, along with almost none, and with only a rag for
clothing; in Palestine and India, where the climate is warm, a
sincere faith has been possible for short periods. But the modern
prophet who expects to influence the minds of men has to have
books and newspapers; he will find a telephone and a typewriter
and postage-stamps hardly to be dispensed with, also in Europe
and America some sort of a roof over his meeting place. So the
prophet is caught, like all the rest of us, in the net of the
speculator and the landlord. He has to get money, and in order to
get it he has to impress those who already have It -- people
whose minds and souls have been deformed by the system of
parasitism and exploitation.
So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he
becomes a martyr, and founds a church which becomes a church of
charlatans. I care not how sincere, how passionately proletarian
a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or
later befalls him in a competitive society -- to be the founder
of an organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit
of wolves. That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it befell Ignatius
Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Fox and John Calvin and John
Wesley.
A friend of mine who has made a study of "Spiritualism"
describes to me the conditions in that field. The mediums are
people, mostly women, with a peculiar gift; whether we believe in
the survival of personality, or whether we call it telepathy,
does not alter the fact that they have a rare and special
sensitiveness, a new faculty which science must investigate. They
come, poor people mostly -- for the well-to-do will seldom give
their time to exacting and wearisome experiments. They come,
wearing frayed and thin clothing, shivering with cold, obviously
undernourished: and their survival depends upon their producing
"phenomena" -- which phenomena are capricious, and will not come
at call. So, what more natural than that mediums should resort to
faking? That the whole field should be reeking with fraud, and
science should be held back from understanding an extraordinary
power of the subconscious mind?
Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies have been
telling us about the wondrous powers of a mulatto-woman, a
manicurist at the city's most fashionable hotel. The other day,
out of curiosity, my wife and I went; the moment the "medium"
opened her mouth my wife recognized her as the person who has
been trying for several months to get me on the telephone to tell
me how the spirit of Jack London is seeking to communicate with
me! The seance was a public one, a gathering composed, half of
wealthy and cultured society-women, and half of confederates,
people with the dialect and manners of a vaudeville troupe. A
megaphone was set in the middle of the floor, the room was made
dark, a couple of hymns were sung, and then the spirit of Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke through the megaphone with Bowery
accent, and gave communications from relatives and friends of the
various confederates. "Jesus is with us," said Dr. Holmes. "The
spirit of Jesus bids you to study spiritualism." And then came
the voice of a child: "Mamma! Mamma!" "It is little Georgie!"
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cried Dr. Holmes; and one of the society ladies started, and
answered, and presently burst into tears. A marvelous piece of
evidence -- especially when you recall that the story of this
mother's bereavement had been published in all the papers a
couple of months before!
And this kind of swindling is going on every night in every
city of America. It goes on wholesale for months every summer at
Lily Dale in New York State, where the spiritualists hold their
combination of Chautauqua and Coney Island. And the same thing is
going on in the field of mental healing, and of all other
"occult" forces and powers, whether real or imaginary. It is
going on with new spiritual fervors, new moral idealisms, new
poetry, new music, new painting, new sculpture. The faker, the
charlatan is everywhere -- using the mental and moral and
artistic forces of life as a means of delivering himself from
economic servitude. Everywhere I turn I see it -- credulity being
exploited, and men of practical judgment, watching the game and
seeing through it, made hard in their attitude of materialism.
How many men I know who sit by in sullen protest while their
wives drift from one new quackery to another, wasting their
income seeking health and happiness in futile emotionalism! How
many kind and sensitive spirits I know --
both men and women -- who pour their treasures of faith and
admiration into the laps of hierophants who began by fooling all
mankind and indeed by fooling themselves!
In each one of the cults of what I have called the "Church
of the Quakes," there are thousands, perhaps millions of entirely
sincere, self-sacrificing people. They will read this book -- if
anyone can persuade them to read it -- with pain and anger;
thinking that I am mocking at their faith, and have no
appreciation of their devotion. All that I can say is that I am
trying to show them how they are being trapped, how their fine
and generous qualities are being used by exploiters of one sort
or another; and how this must continue, world without end, until
there is order in the material affairs of the race, until justice
has been established as the law of man's dealing with his
fellows.
BOOK SEVEN
THE CHURCH OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION
They have taken the tomb of oar Comrade Christ --
Infidel hordes that believe not in man;
Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,
But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.
They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,
They have buried him deep under steel and stone --
But we come leading the great Crusade
To give our Comrade back to his own.
Waddell
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CHRIST AND CAESAR
In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning
Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain
and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time;
and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto
thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and
to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship
me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said
"Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would
have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he
chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death
of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his
church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian
gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except
women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted
catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.
But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one
defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces
which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again,
to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new
revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous
power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed
the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself,
suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so
that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory
of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for
their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off
laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from
Jesus 300 years before; he had got the world's greatest religion.
How complete and swift was his success you may judge from the
fact that 50 years later we find the Emperor Valentinian
compelled to pass an edict limiting the donations of emotional
females to the church in Rome!
From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in
this book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the
days of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna,
Christ and Caesar have been one, and the Church has been the
shield and armor of predatory economic might. With only one
qualification to be noted: that the Church has never been able to
suppress entirely the memory of her proletarian Founder. She has
done her best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his
words out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so
far as to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims
may not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.
'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!
But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one
incessant struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled
themselves with the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on
the Mount, and of that bitterly class-conscious proletarian,
James, the brother of Jesus.
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And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has
given life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on
the hearts of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and
fervor which has been poured into it by generation after
generation of poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and die
like Jesus as criminals, and are revered like Jesus as founders
and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers were
bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their own time. St.
Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of office,
exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil, was persecuted by the
Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor
Theodosius; St. Cyrian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was
exiled and finally martyred. In the same way most of the heretics
whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were proletarian
rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres, the founders of the
orders which gave it life for century after century, were men who
sought to return to the example of the carpenter's son. Let us
hear a Christian scholar on this point, Prof. Rauschenbusch:
The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of
the Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by
democratic and communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the
greatest doctrinal reformer before the reformation; but his
eyes, too, were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the
Roman Church by joining in a great national and patriotic
movement against the alien domination and extortion of the
Church. The Bohemian revolt, made famous by the name of John
Huss, was quite as much political and social as religious.
Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a religious
prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo de
Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's
mercy. Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his
ill-gotten wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the
restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence. It
is significant that the dying sinner found it easy to assent
to the first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible
to concede the last.
LOCUST AND WILD HONEY
This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time
long before Jesus; it seems to have been inherited in the
religious character of the Jews -- that stubborn independence,
that stiff-necked insistence on the right of a man to interview
God for himself and to find out what God wants him to do; also
the inclination to find that God wants him to oppose earthly
rulers and their plundering of the poor. What is it that gives to
this Bible the vitality it has today? Its literary style? To say
that is to display the ignorance of the cultured; for elevation
of style is a by-product of passionate conviction: it is what the
Jewish writers had to say, and not the way they said it. that has
given them their hold upon mankind. Was it their insistence upon
conscience, their fear of God as the beginning of wisdom? But
that same element appears in the Babylonian psalms, which are as
eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews, yet are read
only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful presence of
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divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians had
that far more than the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their
religious books. Or was it the love of man for all things living,
the lesson of charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress?
The gentle Buddha had that, and that is long before Christ; also
his priests had metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John
the Apostle or Thomas Aquinas.
No, there, is one thing and one only which distinguishes the
Hebrew sacred writings from all others and that is their
insistent note of proletarian revolt, their furious denunciation
of exploiters, and of luxury and wantonness, the vices of the
rich. Of that note the Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian
writing contain not a trace, and the Egyptian hardly enough to
mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it; but the true, natural-
born rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They were rebels
against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today in
Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood
which spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, through John the
Baptist and Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through
Marx and Lassalle and Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and
Morris Hillquit and Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the Joseph
Fels endowment.
The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire
was 20 percent; the laws of Hanu permitted 24 percent, while the
laws of the Egyptians only stepped in to prevent more than 100
percent. But listen to this Hebrew law:
If thy brother be waxen poor and fallen in decay with
thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a
stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take
thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that
thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.
And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants,
and commanding that at the end of 50 years all debtors shall have
their debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note
that this is not the raving of agitators, the demand of a
minority party; it is the law of the Hebrew land.
There has been of late a great deal of new discovery
concerning the early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as
follows:
The land-mark law, which strictly forbids encroachments
upon peasant rights; consideration for the foreigner;
additional sanitary and food laws; tithe regulations on
behalf of widows, orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those who
have no economic independence should eat and be satisfied;
that loans should be given cheerfully, not only without any
interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. To
withhold a loan because the year of release is at hand in
which the principal is no longer recoverable, is described
as a grave sin. When you are compelled to free your slaves,
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you must give them sufficient capital to embark upon some
industry which shall prevent their falling back into
slavery. A number of holidays are insisted upon. There must
be no more crushing of the poor out of existence, for God
cares for these people who have been driven to poverty, and
they shall never cease out of the land. Howbeit there shall
be no poor with you, for the Lord will bless you, if you
will obey these laws.
But then prosperity came, and culture, which meant contact
with the capitalist ideas of the heathen empires. The Jews fell
from the stern justice of their fathers; and so came the
prophets, wild-eyed men of the people, clad in camel's hair and
living upon locusts and wild honey, breaking in upon priests and
kings and capitalists with their furious denunciations. And
always they incited to class war and social disturbance. I quote
Conrad Noel again:
Nathan and Gad had been David's political advisers,
Abijah had stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elipah had resisted
Ahab, Elisha had fanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders
against the misrule of the king of Israel, Isaiah denounces
the landlords and the usurers, Micah charges them with
blood-guiltiness; Jeremiah and the latter prophets, though
they strike a more intimate note of personal repentance,
strike it as the prelude to that national restoration for
which they hunger as exiles.
The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old
Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the 19th century
thundered against the "Christian" employers of Lancashire, and
told them their houses were cemented with the blood of little
children, so Isaiah cries against his generation: "Your governing
classes companion with thieves; behold you build up Sion with
blood." Their ceremonial and their Sabbath keeping are an
abomination to God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide
mine eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood." The poor man
is robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house to
house and field to field that ye may dwell alone in the midst of
the land." "Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your
doing from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well,
seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead
for the widow. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord.
Though your sins be blood-colored, they shall be as white as
snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If
ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.
But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword.
MOTHER EARTH
And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators,
following the same tradition, possessed by the same dream as the
ancient Hebrew prophets. I have mentioned Emma Goldman; it may be
that the reader is not familiar with her writings, and does not
realize how very Biblical she is, both in point of view and
style. Let me quote a few sentences from a recent issue of her
paper, "Mother Earth," on the subject of our ruling classes and
their social responsibility:
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Yes, you idle rich, you may howl about what we mean to
do to you! Your riches are rotten and your fine clothes are
falling from your backs. Your stocks and bonds are so
tainted that the ink on them should turn to acid and eat
holes in your pockets and your skins. You have piled up your
dirty millions, but what wages have you paid to the poor
devils of farm hands you have robbed? And do you imagine
they won't remember it when the revolution comes? You loll
on soft couches and amuse yourselves with your mistresses;
you think your art "it" and the world is yours. You send
militiamen and shoot down our organizers, and we are
helpless. But wait, comrades, our time is coming.
Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of
this tirade is now in jail, where she can no longer defy the laws
of good taste. They always put the ancient prophets in jail; that
is the way to know a prophet when you meet him. Let me quote
another prophet who is now behind bars -- Alexander Berkman, in
his "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist," discussing the same subject
of plutocratic pretension:
Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who
gave it to you? Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can
you go all the way back and show there is no flaw anywhere
in your title? I tell you that the beginning and the root of
your wealth is necessarily in injustice. And why? Because
Nature did not make this man rich and that man poor from the
start. Nature does not intend for one man to have capital
and another to be a wage-slave. Nature made the earth to be
cultivated by all. The idea we Anarchists have of the rich
is of highwaymen, standing in the street and robbing every
one that passes.
Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I.W.W. Hear what he
has to say in a pamphlet addressed to the harvest-hands he is
seeking to organize:
How much farther do you plutes expect to go with your
grabbing? Do you want to be the only people left on earth?
Why else do you drive out the workers from all share in
Nature, and claim everything for yourselves? The earth was
made for all rich and poor alike; where do you get your
title deeds to it? Nature gave everything for all men to use
alike; it is only your robbery which makes your so-called
"ownership.", Capital has no rights, The land belongs to
Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.
Or take Eugene V. Debs, three time candidate of the
Socialist Party for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:
The propertied classes are like people who go into a
public theater and refuse to let anyone else come in,
treating as private property what is meant for social use.
If each man would take only what he needs, and leave the
balance to those who have nothing, there would be no rich
and no poor. The rich man is a thief.
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I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I
know that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and
Gene Debs may read this book, and I don't want them to close it
in the middle and throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to
explain my poor joke; the sentiments I have been quoting are not
those of our modern agitators, but of another group of ancient
ones. The first is not from Emma Goldman, nor did I find it in
"Mother Earth." I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by
orthodox authorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus. It
is exactly what he wrote -- save that I have put it into modern
phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order that
those familiar with the Bible might read it without suspicion.
The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman,
but in those of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early
fathers who lived 374-407. The third is not from the pen of "Big
Bill" but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church,
340-397, and the fourth is not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil
of the Greek Church, 329-379. And if the reader objects to my
having fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the
Christian Church, which has been fooling him for 1,600 years?
THE SOAP BOX
This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to
the other as the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in
the direct line of the Christian tradition: written by a man who
was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and
soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high
places; a man who thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more
devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever
lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in all that he says
and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of
peace on earth and good will toward men.
I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book
written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner
of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss
the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a
word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time
the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and
respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem. The way
to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what
we did with the early church fathers -- translate him into
American. This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will
not be necessary to disguise the Bible style, and we may follow
the text exactly. Let me try the 23rd chapter of Matthew,
omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew
casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St.
Alphonus to find a parallel:
Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech,
saying, The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the
Fifth Avenue churches; and it would be all right if you were
to listen to what they preach, and do that; but don't follow
their actions, for they never practice what they preach.
They load the backs of the working-classes with crushing
burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a
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burden, and everything they do is for show. They wear frock-
coats and silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the
speakers' table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, and
they occupy the best pews in the churches, and their doings
are reported in all the papers; they are called leading
citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be called
leading citizens, for the only useful man is the man who
produces. (Applause). And whoever exalts himself shall be
abased, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.
Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics,
hypocrites! for you shut up the kingdom of Heaven against
men; you don't go in yourself and you don't let others go
in. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Presbyterians,
hypocrites! for you foreclose mortgages on widows' houses,
and for a pretense you make long prayers. For this you will
receive the greater damnation! Woe unto you, doctors of
divinity and Methodists, hypocrites! for you send
missionaries to Africa to make one convert, and when you
have made him, he is twice as much a child of hell as
yourselves. (Applause). Woe unto you, blind guides, with
your subtleties of doctrine, your transubstantiation and
consubstantiation and all the rest of it; you fools and
blind! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Episcopalians,
hypocrites! for you drop your checks into the collection-
plate and you pay no heed to the really important things in
the Bible, which are justice and mercy and faith in
goodness. You blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow
a camel! (Laughter). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe yourselves and dress in
immaculate clothing but within you are full of extortion and
excess. You blind high churchmen, clean first your hearts,
so that the clothes you wear may represent you. Woe unto
you, doctors of divinity and Baptists, hypocrites! for you
are like marble tombs which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
Even so you appear righteous to men, but inside you are full
of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto you, doctors
of divinity and Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect
statues to dead reformers, and put wreathes upon the tombs
of old-time martyrs. You say, if we had been alive in those
days, we would not have helped to kill those good men. That
ought to show you how to treat us at present. (Laughter).
But you are the children of those who killed the good men;
so go ahead and kill us too! You serpents, you generation of
vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell?
At this point, according to the report published in the
Jerusalem "Times," a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and
notified him that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but
one of his followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely
clubbed. Jesus was taken to the station-house followed by a
riotous throng, and held upon a charge of disorderly conduct.
Next morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared
against him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months on
Blackwell's Island, remarking that from this time on he proposed
to make an example of those soap-box orators who persist in using
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threatening and abusive language. Just as the prisoner was being
led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the
Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he
is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being
charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day
explosion.
THE CHURCH MACHINE
The Catholic of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we
would have a sign of Thee" -- meaning that they wanted him to do
some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came
from God. He answered by calling them an evil and adulterous
generation -- which is exactly what I have said about the Papal
machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other
book-worshipers of his time accused him of violating the sacred
commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to
them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man
for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx
at them -- "This people honoreth me with their lips, but their
heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of the
respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own
class in the places where they gathered -- the public houses --
the churchly scandal-mangers called him "a man gluttonous and a
wine-bibber, a friend, of publicans and sinners" -- precisely as
in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having
their meetings in the back-rooms of saloons, and precisely as
they still denounce us as free-lovers and Atheists.
But the longing for justice between man and man, which is
the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the
human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined
within the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing
organs in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of
Mammon is more widespread, more concentrated and more
systematized than ever before in history -- even in these days of
Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to
preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the
Church -- Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J.
Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but
their voices are not silenced, they are like the leaven, to which
Jesus compared the kingdom of God -- a woman took it and hid it
in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The Young
theological students read, and some of them understand; I know
three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church,
and are preaching straight social revolution -- and the scribes
and the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.
In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the
servant and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of
Mammon. Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and
administering property. And it is not alone the Catholic Church
which is in politics, seeking favors from the state -- the
exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of
ministers from military service, free transportation for them and
their families on the railroads, the control of charity and
education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday -- so
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on through a long list. As the churches have to be built with
money, you find that in them the rich possess the control and
demand the deference, while the poor are humble, and in their
secret hearts jealous and bitter,' in other words, the class
struggle is in the churches as everywhere else in the world, and
the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is
coming in industry.
It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of
ministers are proletarians eking out their existence upon a
miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to
the wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic
Church that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working
class, and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the
Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a
priest who does not carry out the political orders of his
superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class instead
of for his Pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are
defying their bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious
movement for an Irish Republic.
What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection
to the exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job.
And if you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers,
you would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of
them slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of
them must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either
fools or hypocrites, They have caught enough of the spirit of
their time not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-
makers and Witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that
they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even
that they are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other
demigods. But they are part of a machine, and the old men and the
rich men who run the machine have laid down the law. Those who
find themselves tempted to think, remember suddenly that they
have wives and children; they have only one profession, they have
been unfitted for any other by a life-time of study of dead
things, as well as by the practice of altruism.
But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift
wings -- it may be here before this book sees the light. And who
knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which
we saw in Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burned their
holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as citizens
and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of
exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into
dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. All
those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe nonsense,
because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly
realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any
man can go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly
run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of $10
or $15. Do you not think that there may be some who will choose
freedom and self-respect on those terms?
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And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who Join
the church because it is a part of the regime of respectability,
a way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and
obtain promotion, to get customers if you are a tradesman, to
extend your practice if you are a professional man? And what
about the millions who go to church because they are poor, and
because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one way to keep
the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for the
children, to get charity if you fall into need; in short, to
acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who stand
together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent, contented
in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them?
THE CHURCH REDEEMED
Do I mean that I expect to see the Church -- all churches --
perish and pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church
answers one of the fundamental needs of man. The Social
Revolution will abolish poverty and parasitism, it will make
temptations fewer, and the soul's path through life much easier;
but it will not remove the necessity of struggle for individual
virtue, it will only clear the way for the discovery of newer and
higher types of virtue. Men will gather more than ever in
beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one another;
but the places in which they gather will be places swept clean of
superstition and tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the
Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its
abuses, so the Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its
defense of parasitism and exploitation. I will record the
prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be
denying that the Church ever opposed Socialism -- true Socialism;
just as today they deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo,
ever burned men for teaching that the earth moves around the sun,
ever sold the right to commit crime, ever gave away the New World
to Spain and Portugal, ever buried newly-born infants in the
cellars of nunneries.
The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian,
Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their
formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that
refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment
and freedom will leave it without followers. But in the great
religions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be
sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of
old, will preach the living word of God. In many churches today
we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Even in
the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the
books of the "Sillon," and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The
Saint," and you will see a genuine and vital protest against the
economic corruption of the Church. In America, the "Knights of
Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a "War
for Democracy," and even to compete with the Y.M.C.A. in the
training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.
This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit
of modern common sense is shown most interestingly in the
Salvation Army. William Booth was a man with a great heart, who
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took his life into his hands and went out with a bass-drum to
save the lost souls of the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but
he persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus --
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.
Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum
population. He had not wanted to engage in charity and material
activities; he feared hypocrisy and corruption. But in his
writings he lets us see how utterly impossible it is for a man of
real heart to do anything for the souls of the slum-dwellers
without at the same time helping their diseased and hunger-racked
bodies. So the Salvation army was forced into useful work -- old
clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm colonies
-- until today the bare list of the various kinds of enterprises
it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done with the
money of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to authority,
but no one can deny that it is better than "Gibson's
Preservative," and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves
with port.
And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even
greeter. Here and there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto
his job and preaching the proletarian Jesus; while even the great
Fifth Avenue churches are making attempts at "missions" and
"settlements" in the slums. The more vital churches are gradually
turning themselves into societies for the practical betterment of
their members. Their clergy are running boys clubs and sewing-
schools for girls, food conservation lectures for mothers, social
study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and psalm-singing
along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always before
the clergyman's face -- that with prayer-meetings and psalm-
singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
educational societies and social reforms he thrives.
And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the
churches, like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy
and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs,
they are forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to
engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end
of this -- any more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval
in politics and industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary
thought can see the main outlines of the future. We see that in
these new church activities the clergy are inspired by things
read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers.
They are responding to the actual, instant needs of their boys in
the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have an effect
upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl
who leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a
munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates,
will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the
clergyman who helps in Y.M.C.A. work in France, or in Red Cross
organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist
forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to
adjust means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and
social solidarity by the method which modern educators most favor
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-- by doing. Also he will have absorbed a mass of ideas in news
despatches from over the world. He is forced to read these
despatches carefully, because the fate of his own boys is
involved; and we Socialists will see to it that the despatches
are well filled with propaganda!
THE DESIRE OF NATIONS
So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught
in the great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal
which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in
dismay: the Church of the future, the Church redeemed by the
spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join.
They call us materialists, and say that we think about nothing
but the belly -- and that is true, in a way; because we are the
representatives of a starving class, which thinks about its belly
precisely as does any individual who is raving with hunger. But
give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of
Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the body," and
then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls;
whereas at present we are led to despise the very word
"spiritual," which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and
poseurs.
We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious
to us. We would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency
and self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if
there were in the world institutions conducted by men and women
of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true
morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not
of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not upon
superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what
truth is and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth
inspire. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers we
see in the churches today, the Jewetts who say they used to
believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather than
trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift
to train them ourselves -- we amateurs, not knowing much about
children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against
organized wrong.
It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent,
yet it is a fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need
it just as badly as any of the rest of our pitifully groping
race. That we need it is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in
our midst -- the schisms which waste the greater part of our
activities, and which are often the result of personal jealousies
and petty vanities. To lift men above such weakness, to make them
really brothers in a great cause -- that is the work "personal
religion" in the true and vital sense of the words.
We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth
of the of new church of Humanity; but our children will see it,
and the dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it
with fervor and conviction. lines from "The Desire of Nations,"
by Edwin Markham in which he tells of the new Redeemer who is at
hand:
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And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
To every heart he will its own dream be;
one moon has many phantoms in the sea.
Out of the North the moons will cry to men:
"Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
"Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
"Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"
And social architects who build the State,
Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
"Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"
THE KNOWABLE
The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker
the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the
microscope and the telescope, of the new psychology and the new
sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in
ancient Mythologies. And even if this were not so, the business
of the thinker is to follow the facts. The history of all
philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The infant opens
and cries for it; but those in charge do not give it to him, and
so after a while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his
mother's breast and takes a drink of milk.
Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable
for him to be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He
demands the knowledge immediately and finally, and invents
innumerable systems and creeds. He makes himself believe them,
with fire and torture makes other men believe them; until
finally, in the confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him
to investigate his instruments, and he makes the discovery that
his tools are inadequate, and all their products worthless. His
mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite; his
knowledge is relative, while the First Cause is absolute.
This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of
modern philosophy. In his famous "antinomies," he proved four
propositions: first, that the universe is limitless in time and
space; second, that matter is composed of simple, indivisible
elements; third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, that
there must be an absolute or first cause. And having proven these
things, he turned round and proved their opposites, with
arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows these
demonstrations and understands them, takes all his metaphysical
learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.
It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must be
clear, that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates,
you can prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the
fourth dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down,
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hindside foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this
condition, you take another flight, and come back the way you
were before. So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose of
Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman and Professor Chatterton-
Hill; it serves hysterical women like "Mother" Eddy; it serves
the Newthoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it
serves the charlatans and mytagogs who wish to befuddle the wits
of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a
bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the mention of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that
it is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the
ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist
who lays down a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a
Christian.
How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into
an Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a
capital letter like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison,
making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read
the books of the "Positivests," and attended their imitation
church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction from them.
In the midst of their dogmatic pronouncements I found myself
remembering how the egg falls apart and reveals the chicken, how
the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly. The spirit of man
is a breaker of barriers, and its seems a futile occupation to
set limits upon the future. our business is not to say what men
will know 10,000 years from now, but to content ourselves with
the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a
procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an
act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while
In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust
is automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to
justify his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that
there is worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that
there is order in creation. laws which can be discovered,
processes which can be applied. Just as the babe trusts life when
it gropes for its mother's breast, so the most skeptical of
scientists trusts it when he declares that water is made of two
parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets it down for a
certainty that this will always be so -- that he is not being
played with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H2O to
behave like water, and tomorrow like benzine.
NATURE'S INSURGENT SON
Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with
each bit of knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the
life becomes a new thing. Consider, for example, what a different
place the world became to the man who discovered that the force
which laid the forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warm a
cave and make wild grains nutritious! In other words, man can
create life, he can make the world and himself into that which
his reason decides it ought to be. The means by which he does
this is the most magical of all the tools he has invented since
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his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of
experimental science -- and when one considers that this weapon
has been understood and deliberately employed for but two or
three centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the
beginning of human evolution.
To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned
and deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
product -- that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set
this forth with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of
Man." We are, at this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous
transition stage, as a child playing with explosives. This child
has found out how to alter his environment in many startling
ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, nor to
what purpose. He finds that certain things are uncomfortable, and
these he proceeds immediately to change. Discovering that grain
fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of drunkards;
discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared
in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that
it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that
captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession
of empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption,
and fall into ruins again.
This is nature's way; she produces without limit, groping
blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It
takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a
million million men to produce one idea -- algebra, or the bow
and arrow, or democracy. Nature's present impulse appears as a
rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will
emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her
blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son";
but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old
blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of
defective eye-sight; they are furnished with glasses, and the
breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child
would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the
name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.
What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans,
exposing our sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so
wasteful, because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a
scientific breeding which will prevent the unfit from getting a
chance at life. We can replace instinct by self-discipline. We
can substitute for the regime of "Nature red in tooth and claw
with ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what he wishes
to be and how to set about to be it, Whether this can happen,
whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great
triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into
the melting pot is a question being determined by an infinitude
of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely such a
contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who
has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to
perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvelous
new tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact
knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life
of the race.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
164
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
THE NEW MORALITY
Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new
powers; driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of
Pragmatism call the 'elan vital.' Whenever this impulse has its
way, there is an emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is
one of distress. So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and
the final goal is a condition of free and constantly accelerating
growth, in which joy is enduring.
That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can
say. It is a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet
may fall upon the earth and wipe out all man's labors. But on the
other hand, it is a conceivable thing that man may some day learn
to control the movements of comets, and even of starry systems.
It seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself
master of the forces of his immediate environment --
The untamed giants of nature shall bow down --
The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
From mockery and destruction, and he turned
Unto the making of the soul of man.
It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his
food from the elements without the slow processes of agriculture;
it is conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at
present prey upon his body, and so put an end to death. It is
certain that he will ascertain the laws of heredity, and create
human qualities as he has created the spurs of the fighting-cocks
and the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what genius is,
and the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be
recognized. In the new science of psycho-analysis he has already
begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into
the light of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy
which the psychic researchers are accumulating, he is beginning
to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which may come
to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars, and of
the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are
disclosing.
All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the
way of their realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and
submission, the old habits of repine and hatred which man has
brought with him from his animal past. These make him a slave, a
victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden
of the soul is the task of the modern thinker.
The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches
that man is the master, or shall become so; that there is no law,
save the law of his own being, no cheek upon his will save that
which he himself imposes.
The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true
pleasure is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.
The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that
there is no authority above reason; no possibility of such
authority, because if such were to appear, reason would have to
judge it, and accept or reject it.
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
165
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches
that there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there
can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an
airplane. The business of an airplane is to keep his machine
aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist
is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action
which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility
or hypocrisy tomorrow.
The new morality, like all things in a world of strife, is
fighting for existence, using its own weapons, which are reason
and love. Obviously it can use no others, without self-
destruction; yet it has to meet enemies who fight with the old
weapons of force and fraud. Whether it will prevail is more than
any prophet can say. Perhaps it is too much to ask that it should
succeed -- this insolent effort of the pygmy man to leap upon the
back of his master and fit a bridle into his mouth. Perhaps it is
nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, the scientists and
poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race. Perhaps the nerve
of the pygmy will fail him at the critical moment, and he will
fall from the back of his master, and under his master's hoofs.
The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see
plainly, and as scientists we can proclaim it -- the human race
is in a swift current of degeneration, which a new morality alone
can check. The struggle is at its height in our time; if it
fails, if the fiber of the race continues to deteriorate, the
soul of the race to be eaten out by poverty and luxury, by
insanity and disease, by prostitution. crime and war -- then
mankind will slip back into the abyss, the untamed giants of
Nature will resume their ancient sway, and the tides, the tempest
and the lightning will sweep the earth clean again. I do not
believe that this calamity will befall us. I know that in the
diseased social body the forces of resistance are gathering --
the Socialist movement, in the broad sense -- the activities of
all who believe in the possibility of reconstructing society upon
a bases of reason, justice and love. To such people this book
goes out: to the truly religious people, those who hunger and
thirst after righteousness here and now, who believe in
brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear the pain and
ridicule and privation for the sake of its ultimate achievement.
From the edge of harsh derision,
From discord and defeat,
From doubt and lame division,
We pluck the fruit and eat;
And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet. ...
O sorrowing hearts of slaves,
We heard you beat from far!
We bring the light that saves,
We bring the morning star;
Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things
are....
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
166
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
ENVOI
I have come to the end of my task; but one question troubles
me. I think of the "young men and maidens meek" who will read
this book, and I wonder what they will make of it. We have had a
lark together; we have gone romping down the vista of the ages,
swatting every venerable head that showed itself, beating the
dust out of ancient delusions. You would like all your life to be
that kind of lark; but you may not find it so, and perhaps you
will suffer disillusionment and vexation.
I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they
have nearly all been gallant and honest, but they have not all
been wise, and therefore not so happy as they might have been. In
the course of time I have formulated to myself the peril to which
young radicals are exposed. We see so much that is wrong in
ancient things, it gets to be a habit with us to reject them. We
have only to know that a thing is old to feel an impulse to
impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are tempted to welcome
anything which can prove itself to be unprecedented. There is a
common type of radical whose aim in life is to be several jumps
ahead of mankind; whose criterion of conduct is that it shocks
the bourgeois. If you do not know that type, you may find him --
and her -- in the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the
newest red chemicals, smoking the newest brand of cigarettes, and
discussing the newest form of 'psycopathia sexualis.' After you
have watched them a while, you realize that these ultra-new
people have fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy,
the non sequitur, and likewise to the oldest form of slavery,
which is self-indulgence.
If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon
ignorance, and cultivated by greed, it is also true that much in
the old moral codes is based upon facts which will not change so
long as man is what he is -- a creature of impulses, good and
bad, wise and foolish, selfish and generous, and compelled to
make choice between these impulses; so long as he is a material
body and a personal consciousness, obliged to live in society and
adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would like to say
to young radicals -- if there is any way to say it without
seeming a prig -- is that in choosing their own path through
life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor,
but wisdom and judgement and hard study.
It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to
repeat over and over the blunders of the past, the blunders of
tyranny and slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the
ancient societies; and surely it is a poor way to begin by
repeating in our own persons the most ancient blunders of the
moral life. To light the fires of lust in our hearts, and let
them smoulder there, and imagine we are trying new experiments in
psychology! Who does not know the radical woman who demonstrates
her emancipation from convention by destroying her nerves with
nicotine? Who does not know the genius of revolt who demonstrates
his repudiation of private property by permitting his lady loves
to support him? Who does not know the man who finds in the
phrases of revolution the most effective devices for the seducing
of young girls?
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
167
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the
conclusion that there is anything in it to spare you the duty of
getting yourself moral standards and holding yourself to them. On
the contrary, because your task is the highest and hardest that
man has yet undertaken -- for this reason you will need standards
the most exacting ever formulated. Let me quote some words from a
teacher you will not accuse of holding to the slave-moralities:
Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I
hear, and not that thou hast escaped a yoke.
Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke?
Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall
your eye tell me: free to what?
Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang
thy will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own judgie,
and avenger of thy law?
Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of
thy law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into the
Icy breath of isolation.
Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emerge into the
sunlight of knowledge, to take control of a world, and to make it
over, not according to the will of any gods, but according to the
law in our own hearts. For that task we have need of all the
resources of our being; of courage and high devotion, of faith in
ourselves and our comrades, of clean, straight thinking, of
discipline both of body and mind. We go to this task with a
knowledge as old as the first moral impulse of mankind -- the
knowledge that our actions determine the future of life, not
merely for ourselves but for all the race. For this is one of the
laws of the ancient Hebrews which modern science has not
repealed, but on the contrary has reinforced with a thousand
confirmations -- that the sins of the fathers are visited upon
the children unto the third and fourth generations.
I get letters from the readers of my books; nearly always
they are young people, so I feel like the father of a large
family. I gather them now about my knee, and pronounce upon them
a benediction in the ancient patriarchal style. Children and
grandchildren of my hopes, for ages men suffered and fought, so
that the world might be turned over to you. Now the day is
coming, the glad new day which blinds us with the shinning of its
wings; it is coming so swiftly that I am afraid of it. I thought
we should have more time to get ready for the taking over of the
world! But the old managers of it went insane, they took to
tearing each other's eyes out, and now they lie dead about us.
So, whether we will or not, we have to take charge of the world;
we have to decide what to do with it, even while we are doing it.
Let us not fail, young comrades; let us not write on the scroll
of history that mankind had to go through yet new generations of
wars and tumults and enslavements, because the youth of the
international revolution could not lift themselves above those
ancient personal vices which wrecked the fair hopes of their
fathers -- bigotry and intolerance, vindictiveness and vanity,
and malice and all uncharitableness!
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
168

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