The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition by Upton Sinclair
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| Table of Contents | |
| Section | Page |
| Start of eBook | 1 |
| OFFERTORY | 1 |
| THE COURT CIRCULAR | 45 |
| INDEX | 168 |
| B | 168 |
| C | 168 |
| D | 169 |
| E | 169 |
| F | 169 |
| G | 169 |
| H | 169 |
| I | 169 |
| J | 169 |
| K | 169 |
| L | 169 |
| M | 169 |
| N | 169 |
| O | 170 |
| P | 170 |
| Q | 170 |
| R | 170 |
| S | 170 |
| T | 170 |
| V | 170 |
| W | 170 |
| Y | 170 |
OFFERTORY
This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a newpoint of view—as a Source of Income anda Shield to Privilege. I have searched the librariesthrough, and no one has done it before. If youread it, you will see that it needed to be done.It has meant twenty-five years of thought and a yearof investigation. It contains the facts.
I publish the book myself, so that it may be availableat the lowest possible price. I am giving mytime and energy, in return for one thing which youmay give me—the joy of speaking a true wordand getting it heard.
Note to fifth edition, 1926: “The Profitsof Religion” was first published early in 1917.The present edition represents a sale of over 60,000copies, 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 WorldWar are of the date 1917, prior to America’sentrance.
This book is the first of a series of volumes, aneconomic interpretation of culture, which now includes“The Brass Check,” “The Goose-step,”“The Goslings,” and “Mammonart.”
* * * * *
#Contents#
#Introductory#
Bootstrap-lifting
Religion
#Book One: The Church of the Conquerors#
The Priestly Lie
The Great Fear
Salve Regina!
Fresh Meat
Priestly Empires
Prayer-wheels
The Butcher-Gods
The Holy Inquisition
Hell-fire
#Book Two: The Church of Good Society#
The Rain Makers
The Babylonian Fire-God
The Medicine-men
The Canonization of Incompetence
Gibson’s Preservative
The Elders
Church History
Land and Livings
Graft in Tail
Bishops and Beer
Anglicanism and Alcohol
Dead Cats
“Suffer Little Children” The Court-circular
Horn-blowing
Trinity Corporation
Spiritual Interpretation
#Book Three: The Church of the Servant Girls#
Charity
God’s Armor
Thanksgivings
The Holy Roman Empire
Temporal Power
Knights of Slavery
Priests and Police
The Church Militant
The Church Triumphant
God in the Schools
The Menace
King Coal
The Unholy Alliance
Secret Service
Tax Exemption
Holy History
Das Centrum
#Book Four: The Church of the Slavers#
The Face of Caesar
Deutschland ueber Alles
Der Tag
King Cotton
Witches and Women
Moth and Rust
To Lyman Abbott
The Octopus
The Industrial Shelley
The Outlook for Graft
Clerical Camouflage
The Jungle
#Book Five: The Church of the Merchants#
The Head Merchant
“Herr Beeble” Holy Oil
Rhetorical Black-hanging
The Great American Fraud
Riches in Glory
Captivating Ideals
Spook Hunting
Running the Rapids
Sheep
#Book Six: The Church of the Quacks#
Tabula Rasa
The Book of Mormon
Holy Rolling
Bible Prophecy
Koreshanity
Mazdaznan
Black Magic
Mental Malpractice
Science and Wealth
New Nonsense
“Dollars Want Me!” Spiritual Financiering
The Graft of Grace
#Book Seven: The Church of the Social Revolution#
Christ and Caesar
Locusts and Wild Honey
Mother Earth
The Soap Box
The Church Machine
The Church Redeemed
The Desire of Nations
The Knowable
“Nature’s Insurgent Son” The NewMorality
Envoi
* * * * *
#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, crouchedin uncomfortable and distressing positions, theirfingers hooked in the straps of their boots. Theyare engaged in lifting themselves; tugging and straininguntil they grow red in the face, exhausted. Theperspiration streams from their foreheads, they showevery symptom of distress; the eyes of all are fixed,not upon each other, nor upon their boot-straps, butupon the sky above. There is a look of raptureupon their faces, and now and then, amid grunts andgroans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.
I approach one and say to him, “Friend, whatis this you are doing?”
He answers, without pausing to glance at me, “Iam performing spiritual exercises. See how Irise?”
“But,” I say, “you are not risingat all!”
Whereat he becomes instantly angry. “Youare one of the scoffers!”
“But, friend,” I protest, “don’tyou 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 helpbeing distressed by the prevalence of this singularpractice among so large a portion of the human race.How is it possible that none of them should suspectthe futility of their procedure? Or can it reallybe that I am uncomprehending? That in some waythey are actually getting off the ground, or aboutto get off the ground?
Then I observe a new phenomenon: a man glidinghere and there among the bootstrap-lifters, approachingfrom the rear and slipping his hands into their pockets.The position of the spiritual exercisers greatly facilitateshis work; their eyes being cast up to heaven, theydo not see him, their thoughts being occupied, theydo not heed him; he goes through their pockets atleisure, and transfers the contents to a bag he carries,and then moves on to the next victim. I watchhim for a while, and finally approach and ask, “Whatare you doing, sir?”
He answers, “I am picking pockets.”
“Oh,” I say, puzzled by his matter-of-coursetone. “But—I beg pardon—areyou a thief?”
“Oh, no,” he answers, smilingly, “Iam the agent of the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association.This is Prosperity.”
“I see,” I reply. “And thesepeople let you—”
“It is the law,” he says. “Itis also the gospel.”
I turn, following his glance, and observe anotherperson approaching—a stately figure, cladin scarlet and purple robes, moving with slow dignity.Ha gazes about at the sweating and grunting hordes;now and then he stops and lifts his hands in a gestureof benediction, and proclaims in rolling tones, “Blessedare the Bootstrap-lifters, for theirs is the kingdomof Heaven.” He moves on, and after a bitstops and announces again, “Man doth not liveby bread alone, but by every word that cometh outof the mouth of the prophets and priests of Bootstrap-lifting.”
Watching a while longer, I see this majestic one approachthe agent of the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association.The agent greets him as a friend, and proceeds totransfer to the pockets of his capacious robes a generousshare of the loot which he has collected. Themajestic one does not cringe, nor does he make anyeffort to hide what is going on. On the contraryhe cries aloud, “It is more blessed to give thanto receive!” And again he cries, “Thelaborer is worthy of his hire!” And a thirdtime he cries, yet more sternly, “Render untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s!”And the Bootstrap-lifters pause long enough to answer:“Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our heartsto keep this law!” Then they renew their strainingand tugging.
I step up, and in timid tones begin, “Reverendsir, will you tell me by what right you take thiswealth?”
Instantly a frown comes upon his face, and he criesin a voice of thunder, “Blasphemer!” Andall the Bootstrap-lifters desist from their lifting,and menace me with furious looks. There is a generalcall for a policeman of the Wholesale Pickpockets’Association; and so I fall silent, and slink awayin the throng, and thereafter keep my thoughts tomyself.
Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousandstrange and incredible and terrifying manifestationsof the Bootstrap-lifting impulse. There is, Idiscover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long timeago—no man can recall how far back—theWholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the easewith which a man’s pockets could be rifled whilehe was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and theybegan offering prizes for the best essays in supportof the practice. Now their propaganda is everywheretriumphant, and year by year we see an increase inthe rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priestsof the cult. The ground is covered with statelytemples of various designs, all of which I am toldare consecrated to Bootstrap-lifting. I cometo where a group of people are occupied in laying thecorner-stone of a new white marble structure; I inquireand am informed it is the First Church of Bootstrap-lifters,Scientist. As I stand watching, a card is handedto me, informing me that a lady will do my Bootstrap-liftingat five dollars per lift.
I go on to another building, which I am told is alibrary containing volumes in defense of the Bootstrap-lifters,published under the auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets.I enter, and find endless vistas of shelves, alsoseveral thousand current magazines and papers.I consult these—for my legs have given outin the effort to visit and inspect all phases of theBootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that hardlya week passes that some one does not start a new cult,or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-timesI could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, theservices and rituals, the litanies and liturgies,the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.There are the Holy Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priestsare fed by Transubstantiation; the established AnglicanBootstrap-lifters, whose priests live by “livings”;the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters, whose preachers practicetotal immersion in Standard Oil. There are YogiBootstrap-lifters with flowing robes of yellow silk;Theosophist Bootstrap-lifters with green and purpleauras; Mormon Bootstrap-lifters, Mazdaznan Bootstrap-lifters,Spiritualist and Spirit-Fruit, Millerite and Dowieite,Holy Roller and Holy Jumper, Come-to-glory negro,Billy Sunday base-ball and Salvation Army bass-drumBootstrap-lifters. There are the thousand varietiesof “New Thought” Bootstrap-lifters; themystic and transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and JacobBoehme Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-artBootstrap-lifters with half a million magazineletsat two bits apiece; the “uplift” and “optimist,”the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden Bootstrap-lifterswith a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar pervolume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian andKantian professors of collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-liftingat several thousand dollars per year each. Thereare the Nietzschean Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselvesto the Superman, and the art-for-art’s-sake,neo-Pagan Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves downto the Ape.
Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priestsof all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayersand exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishingcharacteristic that they do very little lifting attheir own bootstraps, and less at any other man’s.Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicatetug, of a purely symbolical character: as whenthe Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifterscomes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; orwhen the Sunday-school Superintendent of the BaptistBootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Coloradomine-slaves. But for the most part the priestsand preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtilyerect, many of them being so swollen with prosperitythat they could not reach their bootstraps if theywanted to. Their role in life is to exhort othermen to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, thatthe agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Associationmay ply their immemorial role with less chance ofinterference.
#Religion#
The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I meanto impugn the sincerity of all who preach the supremacyof the soul. No; I admit the honesty of the heroesand madmen of history. All I ask of the preacheris that he shall make an effort to practice his doctrine.Let him be tormented like Don Quixote; let him gomad like Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar andbe devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites—onthese terms I grant to any dreamer the right to holdhimself above economic science.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strangenotions about himself. He is humiliated by hissimian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature,to persuade himself that he is not limited by itsweaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And thisimpulse may be harmless, when it is genuine.But what are we to say when we see the formulas ofheroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?What are we to say when we see asceticism preachedto the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of therich? What are we to say when we see idealismbecome hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritageof mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-crueltyand greed? What I say is—Bootstrap-lifting!
It is the fate of many abstract words to be used intwo senses, one good and the other bad. Moralitymeans the will to righteousness, or it means AnthonyComstock; democracy means the rule of the people, orit means Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word“Religion”. In its true sense Religionis 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 thatsense every thinking man must be religious; in thatsense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force,the very nature of our being. In that sense Ihave no thought of assailing it, I would make clearthat I hold it beyond assailment.
But we are denied the pleasure of using the word inthat honest sense, because of another which has beengiven 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 manifesteditself in history, and prevails today throughout theworld; that is to say, institutions having fixed dogmasand “revelations”, creeds and rituals,with an administering caste claiming supernaturalsanction. By such institutions the moral strivingsof the race, the affections of childhood and the aspirationsof youth are made the prerogatives and stock in tradeof ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the thesisof this book that “Religion” in this senseis a source of income to parasites, and the naturalally of every form of oppression and exploitation.
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 sufferingof others; I have devoted my life to analyzing thecauses of the suffering, to find out if it be necessaryand fore-ordained, or if by any chance there be away of escape for future generations. I havefound that the latter is the case; the suffering isneedless, it can with ease and certainty be banishedfrom the earth. I know this with the knowledgeof science—in the same way that the navigatorof a ship knows his latitude and longitude, and thepoint of the compass to which he must steer in orderto reach the port.
Come, reader, let us put aside prejudice, and theterrors of the cults of the unknown. The powerwhich made us has given us a mind, and the impulseto its use; let us see what can be done with it torid the earth of its ancient evils. And do notbe troubled if at the outset this book seems to beentirely “destructive”. I assure youthat I am no crude materialist, I am not so shallowas to imagine that our race will be satisfied witha barren rationalism. I know that the old symbolscame out of the heart of man because they correspondedto certain needs of the heart of man. I knowthat new symbols will be found, corresponding moreexactly to the needs of our time. If here I setto work to tear down an old and ramshackle building,it is not from blind destructfulness, but as an architectwho means to put a new and sounder structure in itsplace. Before we part company I shall submitthe blue print of that new home of the spirit.
* * * * *
#Book one#
#The Church of the Conquerors#
I saw the Conquerors riding by
With tramplingfeet of horse and men:
Empire on empire like the tide
Flooded the worldand ebbed again;
A thousand banners caught the sun,
And cities smokedalong the plain,
And laden down with silk and gold
And heaped uppillage groaned the wain.
Kemp.
* * * * *
#The Priestly Lie#
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a boltof lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror.He had no conception of natural forces, of laws ofelectricity; he saw this event as the act of an individualintelligence. To-day we read about fairies anddemons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thorand Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we thinkof all these as pretty fancies, play-products of themind; losing sight of the fact that they were originallymeant with entire seriousness—that not merelydid ancient man believe in them, but was forced tobelieve in them, because the mind must have an explanationof things that happen, and an individual intelligencewas the only explanation available. The storyof the hero who slays the devouring dragon was notmerely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter;it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, itwas the science of early times.
Men imagined supernatural powers such as they couldcomprehend. If the lightning god destroyed ahut, obviously it must be because the owner of thehut had given offense; so the owner must placate thegod, using those means which would be effective inthe quarrels of men—presents of roast meatsand honey and fresh fruits, of wine and gold and jewelsand women, accompanied by friendly words and gesturesof submission. And when in spite of all thingsthe natural evil did not cease, when the people continuedto die of pestilence, then came the opportunity forhysterical or ambitious persons to discover new waysof penetrating the mind of the god. There wouldbe dreamers of dreams and seers of visions and hearersof voices; readers of the entrails of beasts and interpretersof the flight of birds; there would be burning bushesand stone tablets on mountain-tops, and inspired wordsdictated to aged disciples on lonely islands.There would arise special castes of men and women,learned in these sacred matters; and these priestlycastes would naturally emphasize the importance oftheir calling, would hold themselves aloof from thecommon herd, endowed with special powers and entitledto special privileges. They would interpret theoracles in ways favorable to themselves and their order;they would proclaim themselves friends and confidantsof the god, walking with him in the night-time, receivinghis messengers and angels, acting as his deputiesin forgiving offenses, in dealing punishments and inreceiving gifts. They would become makers of lawsand moral codes. They would wear special costumesto distinguish them, they would go through elaborateceremonies to impress their followers, employing allsensuous effects, architecture and sculpture and painting,music and poetry and dancing, candles and incenseand 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 ecstacies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and complicatedforms, the Priestly Lie. There are a score ofgreat religions in the world, each with scores orhundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, itscomplicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells.Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds ofmillions of “true believers”; each damnsall the others, with more or less heartiness—andeach is a mighty fortress of Graft.
There will be few readers of this book who have notbeen brought up under the spell of some one of thesesystems of Supernaturalism; who have not been taughtto speak with respect of some particular priestlyorder, to thrill with awe at some particular sacredrite, to seek respite from earthly woes in some particularceremonial spell. These things are woven intoour very fibre in childhood; they are sanctified bymemories of joys and griefs, they are confused withspiritual struggles, they become part of all thatis most vital in our lives. The reader who wishesto emancipate himself from their thrall will do wellto begin with a study of the beliefs and practicesof other sects than his own—a field wherehe is free to observe and examine without fear ofsacrilege. Let him look into Madame Blavatsky’s“Secret Doctrine”, or her “IsisUnveiled”—encyclopedias of the fantasticinventions which terror and longing have wrung outof the tortured soul of man. Here are mysteriesand solemnities, charms and spells, illuminationsand transmigrations, angels and demons, guides, controlsand masters—all of which it is permissibleto refuse to support with gifts. Let the readerthen go to James Freeman Clarke’s “TenGreat Religions”, and realize how many billionsof humans have lived and died in the solemn certaintythat their welfare on earth and in heaven dependedupon their accepting certain ideas and practicing certainrites, all mutually exclusive and incompatible, eachdamning the others and the followers of the others.So gradually the realization will come to him thatthe test of a doctrine about life and its welfaremust be something else than the fact that one was bornto it.
#The Great Fear#
It was not the fault of primitive man that he wasignorant, nor that his ignorance made him a prey todread. The traces of his mental suffering willinspire in us only pity and sympathy; for Nature isa grim school-mistress, and not all her lessons haveyet been learned. We have a right to scorn andanger only when we see this dread being diverted fromits true function, a stimulus to a search for knowledge,and made into a means of clamping down ignorance uponthe mind of the race. That this has been thedeliberate policy of institutionalized Religion nocandid student can deny.
The first thing brought forth by the study of anyreligion, ancient or modern, is that it is based uponFear, born of it, fed by it—and that itcultivates the source from which its nourishment isderived. “The fear of divine anger”,says Prof. Jastrow, “runs as an undercurrentthrough the entire religious literature of Babyloniaand Assyria.” In the words of Tabi-utul-Enlil,King of ancient Nippur:
Who is there that can grasp the will ofthe gods in heaven?
The plan of a god is full of mystery—whocan understand it?
He who is still alive at evening is deadthe next morning.
In an instant he is cast into grief, ina moment he is crushed.
And that cry might be duplicated from almost any pageof the Hebrew scriptures: the only differencebeing that the Hebrews combined all their fears intoone Great Fear. “The fear of the Lord isthe beginning of wisdom,” we are told by Solomonof the thousand wives; and the Psalmist repeats it.“Dominion and fear are with Him,” criesJob. “How then can any man be just beforeGod? Or how can he be clean that is born of awoman? Behold, even the moon hath no brightness,and the stars are not pure in His sight: Howmuch less man, that is a worm? And the son ofman, which is a worm?” He goes on, in his lyricalrapture, “Sheol is naked before Him, and Destructionhath no covering.... The pillars of heaven trembleand are astonished at His rebuke. ... The thunderof His power who can understand?” That all thisis some of the world’s great poetry does notin the least alter the fact that it is an abasem*ntof the soul, an hysterical perversion of the factsof life, and a preparation of the mind for the seedsof Priestcraft.
The Book of Job has been called a “Wisdom-drama”:and what is the denouement of this drama, what isancient Hebrew wisdom’s last word about life?“Wherefore I abhor myself,” says Job, “andrepent in dust and ashes.” The poor fellowhas done nothing; we have been told at the beginningthat he “was perfect and upright, and one thatfeared God, and eschewed evil.” But theSabeans and the Chaldeans rob him, and “thefire of God” falls from heaven and burns up hissheep and his servants, and “a great wind fromthe wilderness” kills his sons and daughters;and then his body becomes covered with boils—aphenomenon caused in part by worry, and the consequentnervous indigestion, but mainly by excess of starchand deficiency of mineral salts in the diet.Job, however, has never heard of the fasting cure fordisease, and so he takes him a potsherd to scrapehimself withal, and he sits among the ashes—ahighly unsanitary procedure enforced by his religiousritual. So naturally he feels like a worm, andabhors himself, and cries out: “I knowthat Thou canst do all things, and that no purposeof Thine can be restrained.” By which utter,unreasoning humility he succeeds in appeasing the GreatFear, and his friends make a sacrifice of seven bullocksand seven rams—a feast for a whole templefulof priests—and then “the Lord gaveJob twice as much as he had before.... And afterthis Job lived an hundred and forty years, and sawhis 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 yourown ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourselfutterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepersof the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite—inexchange for fresh meat. Here are verses froma psalm of the ancient Babylonians, which “heathen”chant is identical in spirit and purpose with theutterances of Job:
The Sin that I have wrought, I know not;
The unclean that I have eaten, I knownot;
The offense into which I have walked,I know not....
The lord, in the wrath of his heart, hathregarded me;
The god, in the anger of his heart, hathsurrounded me;
A goddess, known or unknown, hath wroughtme sorrow....
I sought for help, but no one took myhand;
I wept, but no one harkened to me....
The feet of my goddess I kiss, I touchthem;
To the god, known or unknown, I uttermy prayer;
O god, known or unknown, turn thy countenance,accept my sacrifice;
O goddess, known or unknown, look mercifullyon me, accept my sacrifice!
#Salve Regina!#
And now let the reader leap three thousand years ofhuman history, of toil and triumph of the intellectof man; and instead of a Hebrew manuscript or a Babylonianbrick there confronts him a little publication, printedon a modern rotary press in the capital of the UnitedStates of America, bearing the date of October, 1914,and the title “Salve Regina”. Init we find “a beautiful prayer”, composedby the late cardinal Rampolla; we are told that “PiusX attached to it an indulgence of 100 days, each timeit is piously recited, applicable to the souls inpurgatory.”
O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, casta glance from Heaven, where thou sittest as Queen,upon this poor sinner, your servant. Thoughconscious of his unworthiness.... he blesses andexalts thee from his whole heart as the purest, themost beautiful and the most holy of creatures.He blesses thy holy name. He blesses thysublime prerogatives as real Mother of God, everVirgin, conceived without stain of sin, as co-Redemptressof the human race. He blesses the Eternal Fatherwho chose you, etc. He blesses the IncarnateWord, etc. He blesses the Divine Spirit,etc. He blesses, exalts and thanksthe most august Trinity, etc. O Virgin, holyand merciful.... be pleased to accept this littlehomage of your servant, and obtain for him alsofrom your divine Son pardon for his sins, Amen.
And then, looking more closely, we discover the purposeof this “beautiful prayer”, and of theneat little paper which prints it. “SalveRegina” is raising funds for the “NationalShrine of the Immaculate Conception”, a homefor more priests, and Catholic ladies who desire tocollect for it may receive little books which theyare requested to return within three months.Pius X writes a letter of warm endorsem*nt, and setsan example by giving four hundred dollars “outof 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 alluringof all baits for the loving hearts of the flock—thatthe names of deceased relatives and friends may bewritten in the collection books, and will be transferred
to the records of the Shrine, and these persons “willshare in all its spiritual benefits”. Inthe days of Job it was with threats of boils and povertythat the Priestly Lie maintained itself; but in thecase of this blackest of all Terrors, transplantedto our free Republic from the heart of the Dark Ages,the wretched victims see before their eyes the glareof flames, and hear the shrieks of their loved oneswrithing in torment through uncounted ages and eternities.#Fresh Meat#
In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism,I sought earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eatingrace; but candor compelled me to admit that man waslike the monkey and the pig and the bear—hewas vegetarian when he could not help it. Theadvocates of the reform insist that meat as a dietcauses muddy brains and dulled nerves; but you wouldcertainly 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 cleverestget it. Everywhere you find the subject classesliving in the midst of animals which they tend, butwhose flesh they rarely taste. Even in modernAmerica, sweet land of liberty, our millions of tenantfarmers raise chickens and geese and turkeys, andhardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but saveeverything for the summer-boarder or the buyer fromthe city. It would not be too much to say ofthe cultural records of early man that they all haveto do, directly or indirectly, with the reserving offresh meat to the masters. In J.T. Trowbridge’scheerful tale of the adventures of Captain Seaborn,we are told by the cannibal priest how idol-worshiphas ameliorated the morals of the tribe—
For though some warriors of renown
Continue anthropophagous,
’Tis rare that human flesh goesdown
The low-casteman’s aesophagus!
I suspect that we should have to go back to the daysof the cave-man to find the first lover of the flesh-potswho put a taboo upon meat, and promised supernaturalfavors to all who would exercise self-control, andinstead of consuming their meat themselves, wouldbring it and lay it upon the sacred griddle, or altar,where the god might come in the night-time and partakeof it. Certainly, at any rate, there are fewreligions of record in which such devices do not appear.The early laws of the Hebrews are more concerned withdelicatessen for the priests than with any other subjectwhatever. Here, for example, is the way to makea Nazarite:
He shall offer his offering up to theLord, one he lamb of the first year without blemishfor a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb of thefirst year without blemish for a sin offering,and one ram without blemish for peace offerings, anda basket of unleavened bread, cakes of fine flourmingled with oil, and wafers of unleavened breadanointed with oil, and their meat offerings.
And the law goes on to instruct the priests to takecertain choice parts and “wave them for a waveoffering before the Lord: this is holy for thepriest.” What was done with the other portionswe are not told; but earlier in this same “Bookof Numbers” we find the general law that
Every offering of all the holy thingsof the children of Israel, which they bring untothe priest, shall be his. And every man’shallowed things shall be his: whatsoever any mangiveth to the priest, it shall be his.
In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley thatthe priests of Ceylon first present the gifts to thegod, and then eat them. Among the Parsees, whena man dies, the relatives must bring four new robesto the priests; if they do this, the priests wear therobes; if they fail to do it, the dead man appearsnaked before the judgment-throne. The devoteesare instructed that “he who performs this ritesucceeds in both worlds, and obtains a firm footingin both worlds.” Among the Buddhists, thefollowers give alms to the monks, and are told specificallywhat advantages will thereby accrue to them. Inthe Aitareyo Brahmanam of the Rig-Veda we read
He who, knowing this, sacrifices accordingto this rite, is born from the womb of Agni andthe offerings, participates in the nature ofthe Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge),the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and isabsorbed into the deity.
Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinksthe haoma, or juice of a plant, considered to be botha plant and a god. Among the Episcopalians, acontemporary Christian sect, the sacred juice is thatof the grape, and the priest is not allowed to throwaway what is left of it, but is ordered “reverentlyto consume it.” In as much as the priestis the sole judge of how much good sherry wine he shallconsecrate previous to the ceremony, it is to be expectedthat the priests of this cult should be lukewarm towardsthe prohibition movement, and should piously refuseto administer their sacrament with unfermented anduninteresting grape-juice.
#Priestly Empires#
In every human society of which we have record therehas been one class which has done the hard and exhaustingwork, the “hewers of wood and drawers of water”;and there has been another, much smaller class whichhas done the directing. To belong to this latterclass is to work also, but with the head instead ofthe hands; it is also to enjoy the good things oflife, to live in the best houses, to eat the bestfood, to have choice of the most desirable women; itis to have leisure to cultivate the mind and appreciatethe arts, to acquire graces and distinctions, to givelaws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes,to be revered and regarded—in short, tohave Power. How to get this Power and to holdit has been the first object of the thoughts of menfrom the beginning of time.
The most obvious method is by the sword; but thismethod is uncertain, for any man may take up a sword,and some may succeed with it. It will be foundthat empires based upon military force alone, howevercruel they may be, are not permanent, and thereforenot so dangerous to progress; it is only when resistanceis paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that therace can be subjected to systems of exploitation forhundreds and even thousands of years. The ancientempires were all priestly empires; the kings ruledbecause they obeyed the will of the priests, taughtto them from childhood as the word of the gods.
Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:
Terror, not love, was the spring ofeducation with the Aztecs....Such was the craftypolicy of the priests, who, by reserving to themselvesthe business of instruction, were enabled tomould the young and plastic mind according to theirown wills, and to train it early to implicit reverencefor religion and its ministers.
The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvestof this teaching:
To each of the principal temples, landswere annexed for the maintenance of the priests.The estates were augmented by the policy or devotionof successive princes, until, under the lastMontezuma, they had swollen to an enormous extent,and covered every district of the empire.
And this concerning the frightful system of humansacrifices, whereby the priestly caste maintainedthe prestige of its divinities:
At the dedication of the temple ofHuitzilopochtli, in 1486, the prisoners, whofor some years had been reserved for the purpose,were ranged in files, forming a procession nearlytwo miles long. The ceremony consumed severaldays, and seventy thousand captives are saidto have perished at the shrine of this terribledeity.
The same system appears in Professor Jastrow’saccount of the priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:
The ultimate source of all law beingthe deity himself, the original legal tribunalwas the place where the image or symbol of thegod stood. A legal decision was an oracle oromen, indicative of the will of the god.The power thus lodged in the priests of Babyloniaand Assyria was enormous. They virtuallyheld 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 depositoriesof the legal archives, which in the course ofcenturies grew to veritably enormous proportions.Records were made of all decisions; the factswere set forth, and duly attested by witnesses.Business and marriage contracts, loans and deedsof sale were in like manner drawn up in the presenceof official scribes, who were also priests.In this way all commercial transactions receivedthe written sanction of the religious organization.The temples themselves—at least in the largecentres—entered into business relationswith the populace. In order to maintainthe large household represented by such an organizationas that of the temple of Enlil of Nippur, thatof Ningirsu at Lagash, that of Marduk at Babylon, orthat of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings of landwere required which, cultivated by agents forthe priests, or farmed out with stipulationsfor a goodly share of the produce, secured anincome for the maintenance of the temple officials.The enterprise of the temples was expanded to thefurnishing of loans at interest—inlater periods, at 20%—to barter inslaves, to dealings in lands, besides engaginglabor for work of all kinds directly needed for thetemples. A large quantity of the businessdocuments found in the temple archives are concernedwith the business affairs of the temple, andwe are justified in including the temples inthe large centres as among the most important businessinstitutions of the country. In financialor monetary transactions the position of thetemples was not unlike that of national banks....
And so on. We may venture the guess that thelearned professor said more in that last sentencethan he himself intended, for his lectures were deliveredin that temple of plutocracy, the University of Pennsylvania,and paid out of an endowment which specifies that “allpolemical 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 progressof the race? What countries have nothing to giveus, whether in art, science, or industry?
For example, Gervaise tells us of the Talapoins, orpriests of Siam, that “they are exempted fromall public charges, they salute nobody, while everybodyprostrates himself before them. They are maintainedat the public expense.” In the same waywe read of the negroes of the Caribbean islands that“their priests and priestesses exercise an almostunlimited power.” Miss Kingsley, in her“West African Studies”, tells us thatif we desire to understand the institutions of thisdistrict, we must study the native’s religion.
For his religion has so firm a graspupon his mind that it influences everything hedoes. It is not a thing apart, as the religionof the Europeans is at times. The African cannotsay, “Oh, that is all right from a religiouspoint of view, but one must be practical.”To be practical, to get on in the world, to livethe day and night through, he must be right inthe religious point of view, namely, must be on workingterms with the great world of spirits around him.The knowledge of this spirit world constitutesthe religion of the African, and his customsand ceremonies arise from his idea of the bestway to influence it.
Or consider Henry Savage Lander’s account ofThibet:
In Lhassa and many other sacred placesfanatical pilgrims make circumambulations, sometimesfor miles and miles, and for days together, coveringthe entire distance lying flat upon their bodies....From the ceiling of the temple hang hundredsof long strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to thetemple, and becoming so many flying prayers whenhung up—for mechanical praying inevery way is prominent in Thibet.... Thusinstead of having to learn by heart long and variedprayers, all you have to do is to stuff the entireprayer-book into a prayer-wheel,
and revolve it while repeating as fast as you can
four words meaning, “O God, the gem emergingfrom the lotus-flower.” ... The attentionof the pilgrims is directed to a large box, or oftena big bowl, where they may deposit whatever offeringsthey can spare, and it must be said that their religiousideas are so strongly developed that they will disposeof a considerable portion of their money in this fashion....The Lamas are very clever in many ways, and have agreat hold over the entire country. They areninety per cent of them unscrupulous scamps, depravedin every way and given to every sort of vice.So are the women Lamas. They live and sponge onthe credulity and ignorance of the crowds; it is tomaintain this ignorance, upon which their luxuriouslife depends, that foreign influence of every kindis strictly kept out of the country.#The Butcher-Gods#
In this last sentence we have summed up the fundamentalfact about institutionalized religion. Whereverbelief and ritual have become the means of livelihoodof a class, all innovation will of necessity be takenas an attack upon that class; it will be literallya crime-robbing the priests of their age-long privileges.And of course they will oppose the robber—usingevery weapon of terrorism, both of this world andthe next. They will require the submission, notmerely of their own people, but of their neighbors,and their jealousy of rival priestly castes will bea cause of wars. The story of the early daysof mankind is a sickening record of torture and slaughterin the name of ten thousand butcher-gods.
Thus, for example, we read in the Hebrew religiousrecords how the priests were engaged in establishingthe prestige of a fetish called “the ark”;and how the people of one tribe violated this fetishand wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god. Andhe smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they hadlooked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote ofthe people fifty thousand and three score and ten men;and the people lamented, because the Lord had smittenmany of the people with a great slaughter. Andthe men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able to standbefore this holy Lord God?
This terrible old Hebrew divinity said of himselfthat he was “a jealous god”. Throughoutthe time of his sway he issued through his ministersprecise instructions for the most revolting cruelties,the extermination of whole nations of men, women andchildren, whose sole offense was that they did notpay tribute to Jehovah’s priests. Thus,for example, the chief of his prophets, Moses, calledthe people together, and with all solemnity, and withmany warnings, handed down ten commandments gravenupon stone tablets; he went on to set forth how thepeople were to set upon and rob their neighbors, andgave them these blood-thirsty instructions:
When the Lord thy God shall bring theeinto the land whither thou goest to possess it,and hath cast out many nations before thee, theHittites, and the Girgash*tes, and the Amorites,and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites,and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightierthan thou; And when the Lord thy God shall deliverthem before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterlydestroy them; thou shalt make no covenant withthem, nor shew mercy unto them: ...But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroytheir altars, and break down their images, and cutdown their groves, and burn their graven imageswith fire. For thou art a holy people untothe Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hathchosen 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 allthe married women, and to take the single women “forthemselves”. We are told that sixteen thousandsingle women were spared, of whom “the Lord’stribute was thirty and two!” In the Book ofJoshua we read that he had an interview with a supernaturalpersonage called “the captain of the Lord’shost”, and how this captain had given to hima magic spell which would destroy the city of Jericho.The city should be accursed, “even it and allthat are therein, to the Lord”; every livingthing except one traitor-harlot was to be slaughtered,and all the wealth of the city reserved to the priestlycaste. This was carried out to the letter, exceptthat “Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi,the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of theaccursed thing”—that is, he hid somegold and silver in his tent; whereupon the army metwith a defeat, and everybody knew that something waswrong, and Joshua rent his clothes and fell to theearth upon his face before the ark of the Lord, andgot another message from Jehovah, to the effect thatthe guilty man should be burned with fire, “heand 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 hissons, 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? theLord shall trouble thee this day. And allIsrael stoned him with stones, and burned them withfire, after they had stoned him with stones.
We have no means of knowing what was the characterof the unfortunate inhabitants of the city of Jericho,nor of the Hittites and the Girgash*tes and the Amoritesand all the rest of the victims of Jehovah. Tobe sure, we are told by the Hebrew priests that theysacrificed 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 twentieth centurywe saw an orthodox Jew tried in a Russian court oflaw for having made a sacrifice of Christian babies;nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a considerablepart of the intelligence and idealism of Russia.We know in the same way that the Moors had most ofthe culture and all of the scientific knowledge ofSpain, that the Huguenots had most of the conscienceand industry of France; and we know that they weremassacred or driven out to death by the priestly castesof the Middle Ages.#The Holy Inquisition#
Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in thosemediaeval times, so that we may know what we ourselveshave escaped. In the fifteenth century therewas established in Europe the cult of a three-headedgod, whose priests had won lordship over a continent.They were enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt;they sold to the rich the license to commit everypossible crime, and they held the poor in ignoranceand degradation. Among the comparatively intelligentand freedom-loving people of Bohemia there arose agreat reformer, John Huss, himself a priest, protestingagainst the corruptions of his order. They trappedhim into their power by means of a “safe-conduct”—whichthey repudiated because no promise to a heretic couldhave validity. They found him guilty of havingtaught the hateful doctrine that a priest who committedcrimes could not give absolution for the crimes ofothers; and they held an auto de fe—whichmeans a “sentence of faith.” As weread in Lea’s “History of the Inquisition”:
The cathedral of Constance was crowdedwith Sigismund (the Emperor) and his nobles,the great officers of the empire with their insignia,the prelates in their splendid robes. Whilemass was sung, Huss, as an excommunicate, was keptwaiting at the door; when brought in he was placedon an elevated bench by a table on which stooda coffer containing priestly vestments.After some preliminaries, including a sermonby the Bishop of Lodi, in which he assured Sigismundthat the events of that day would confer on himimmortal glory, the articles of which Huss wasconvicted were recited. In vain he protestedthat he believed in transubstantiation and inthe validity of the sacrament in polluted hands.He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on hispersisting the beadles were told to silence him, butin spite of this he continued to utter protests.The sentence was then read in the name of thecouncil, condemning him both for his writtenerrors and those which had been proven by witnesses.He was declared a pertinacious and incorrigibleheretic who did not desire to return to the Church;his books were ordered to be burned, and himself tobe degraded from the priesthood and abandonedto the secular court. Seven bishops arrayedhim in priestly garb and warned him to recantwhile yet there was time. He turned to the crowd,and with broken voice declared that he could not confessthe errors which he never entertained, lest he shouldlie to God, when the bishops interrupted him, cryingthat they had waited long enough, for he was obstinatein his heresy. He was degraded in the usualmanner, stripped of his sacerdotal vestments,his fingers scraped; but when the tonsure wasto be disposed of, an absurd quarrel arose among thebishops as to whether the head should be shaved witha razor or the tonsure be destroyed with scissors.Scissors won the day, and a cross was cut inhis hair. Then on his head was placed aconical paper cap, a cubit in height, adornedwith painted devils and the inscription, “Thisis the heresiarch.”
The place of execution was a meadownear the river, to which he was conducted bytwo thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louisat their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles,prelates, and cardinals. The route followed wascircuitous, in order that he might be carriedpast the episcopal palace, in front of whichhis books were burning, whereat he smiled.Pity from man there was none to look for, buthe sought comfort on high, repeating to himself, “ChristJesus, Son of the living God, have mercy uponus!” and when he came in sight of the stakehe fell on his knees and prayed. He wasasked if he wished to confess, and said that hewould gladly do so if there were space. A widecircle was formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who,according to custom, had been providently empoweredto take advantage of final weakening, came forward,saying, “Dear sir and master, if you willrecant your unbelief and heresy, for which you mustsuffer, I will willingly hear your confession;but if you will not, you know right well that,according to canon law, no one can administerthe sacrament to a heretic.” To this Hussanswered, “It is not necessary: I am nota mortal sinner.” His paper crownfell off and he smiled as his guards replacedit. He desired to take leave of his keepers,and when they were brought to him he thanked themfor their kindness, saying that they had beento him rather brothers than jailers. Thenhe commenced to address the crowd in German,telling them that he suffered for errors which hedid not hold, and he was cut short. Whenbound to the stake, two cartloads of fa*gots andstraw were piled up around him, and the palsgraveand vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure.Even yet he could save himself, but only repeatedthat he had been convicted by false witnesseson errors never entertained by him. Theyclapped their hands and then withdrew, and theexecutioners applied the fire. Twice Huss washeard to exclaim, “Christ Jesus, Son of the livingGod, have mercy upon me!” then a wind springingup and blowing the flames and smoke into hisface checked further utterances, but his headwas seen to shake and his lips to move whileone might twice or thrice recite a paternoster.The tragedy was over; the sorely-tried soul hadescaped from its tormentors, and the bitterestenemies of the reformer could not refuse to himthe praise that no philosopher of old had faceddeath with more composure than he had shown in hisdreadful extremity. No faltering of the voicehad betrayed an internal struggle. PalsgraveLouis, seeing Huss’s mantle on the armof one of the executioners, ordered it throwninto the flames lest it should be reverenced as arelic, and promised the man to compensate him.With the same view the body was carefully reducedto ashes and thrown into the Rhine, and eventhe earth around the stake was dug up and cartedoff; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the spotand carried home fragments of the neighboring clay,which they reverenced as relics of their martyr.The next day thanks were returned to God in asolemn procession in which figured Sigismundand his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteencardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops,and all the clergy of the council. A few dayslater Sigismund, who had delayed his departurefor Spain to see the matter concluded, left Constance,feeling that his work was done.
#Hell-Fire#
If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today,it would only be in some remote and wholly savageplace, such as the mountains of Hayti, or the SolomonIslands. It could no longer happen in any civilizedcountry; the reason being, not any abatement of thepretensions of the priesthood, but solely the powerof science, embodied in the physical arm of a secularState. The advance of that arm the church hasfought systematically, in every country, and at everypoint. To quote Buckle: “A carefulstudy of the history of religious toleration willprove that in every Christian country where it hasbeen adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy bythe authority of the secular classes.”The wolf of superstition has been driven into itslair, but it has backed away snarling, and it stillcrouches, watching for a chance to spring. TheChurch which burned John Huss, which burned GiordanoBruno for teaching that the earth moves round thesun—that same church, in the name of thesame three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer tothe firing-squad; if it does not do the same thingto the author of this book, it will be solely becauseof the police. Not being allowed to burn me here,the clergy will vent their holy indignation by sentencingme to eternal burning in a future world which theyhave created, and which they run to suit themselves.
It is a fact, the significance of which cannot beexaggerated, that the measure of the civilizationwhich any nation has attained is the extent to whichit has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion.Those peoples which are wholly under the sway of thepriesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans, Siameseand Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectuallife does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoosand 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 MacGill:
The merchant was a great friend ofthe parish priest, who always told the peopleif they did not pay their debts they would burnfor ever and ever in hell. “The fires ofeternity will make you sorry for the debts thatyou did not pay,” said the priest.“What is eternity?” he would ask in asolemn voice from the altar steps. “Ifa man tried to count the sands on the sea-shoreand took a million years to count every singlegrain, how long would it take him to count them all?A long time, you’ll say. But that time isnothing to eternity. Just think of it!Burning in hell while a man, taking a millionyears to count a grain of sand, counts all thesand on the sea-shore. And this because you didnot pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, hislawful debts within the letter of the law.”That concluding phrase, “within the letterof 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 to-day, and hope for anIrish culture; the thing to be noted is that it comesfrom two movements, one for agricultural co-operationand the other for political independence—bothof them definitely and specifically non-religious.This same thing has been true of the movements whichhave helped on happier nations, such as the republicsof France and America, which have put an end to thepower 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 hasapparently not yet occurred to any legislature thatthe State may owe a duty to the child to protect itsmind from being poisoned, even though it has the misfortuneto be born of poisoned parents. It is still permittedthat parents should terrify their little ones withimages of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstoneand sulphur; it is permitted to found schools forthe teaching of devil-doctrines; it is permitted toorganize gigantic campaigns and systematically to infectwhole cities full of men, women and children withhell-fire phobias. In the American city whereI write one may see gatherings of people sunk upontheir knees, even rolling on the ground in convulsions,moaning, sobbing, screaming to be delivered from suchtorments. I open my morning paper and read ofthe arrest of five men and seven women in Los Angeles,members of a sect known as the “Church of theLiving God”, upon a charge of having disturbedthe peace of their neighbors. The police officerstestified that the accused claimed to be possessedof the divine spirit, and that as signs of this possessionthey “crawled on the floor, grunted like pigsand barked like dogs.” There were “otheracts, even more startling”, about which the newspapersdid not go into details. And again, a week ortwo later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,and found tied to a bed-post, being whipped by a man.She belonged to a religious sect which had found her
guilty of witchcraft. Another woman was aboutto shoot her, but this woman’s nerve failed,and the “high priest” was called in, whodecreed a whipping. The victim explained to thepolice that she would have deserved to be whippedhad she really been a witch, but a mistake had beenmade—it was another woman who was the witch.And again in the Los Angeles “Times” Iread a perfectly serious news item, telling how acertain man awakened one morning, and found on hispillow where his head had lain a perfect reproductionof 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, heknew that such a thing could not have happened bychance, and he knew what it was intended to signify—hewould buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent inhis support of the war!And this is the world in which our scientists andmen of culture think that the battle of the intellectis won, and that it is no longer necessary to spendour energies in fighting “Religion!”
* * * * *
#Book two#
#The Church of Good Society#
Within the House of Mammon his priesthoodstands alert
By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendorsgirt,
Knowing, for faiths departed, his ownshall still endure,
And they be found his chosen, untroubled,solemn, sure.
Within the House of Mammon the goldenaltar lifts
Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costlyincense drifts—
A dust of old ideals, now fragrant fromthe coals,
To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell thedeath of souls.
Sterling.
* * * * *
#The Rain Makers#
I begin with the Church of Good Society, because ithappens to be the Church in which I was brought up.Heading this statement, some of my readers suspectedme of snobbish pride. I search my heart; yes,it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I canremember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, thattwice every Sunday those melodious and hypnotizingincantations were chanted in my childish ears!I take up the book of ritual, done in aristocraticblack leather with gold lettering, and the old wornvolume brings me strange stirrings of recollectedawe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigialemotions and to see the volume—not as amessage from God to Good Society, but as a landmarkof man’s age-long struggle against myth and dogmaused as a source of income and a shield to privilege.
In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magicianruled the field. But today, as I examine this“Book of Common Prayer”, I discover thatthere is at least one spot out of which he has beencleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planetsto stand still, or to comets to go away. The“Church of Good Society” has discoveredastronomy! But if any astronomer attributes thisto his instruments with their marvelous accuracy,let him at least stop to consider my “economicinterpretation” of the phenomenon—thefact that the heavenly bodies affect the destiniesof mankind so little that there has not been sufficientemolument to justify the priest in holding on to hisjob as astrologer.
But when you come to the field of meteorology, whata difference! Has any utmost precision of barometerbeen able to drive the priest out of his prerogativesas rainmaker? Not even in the most civilized ofcountries; not in that most decorous and dignifiedof institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church ofAmerica! I study with care the passage whereinthe clergyman appears as controller of the fate ofcrops. I note a chastened caution of phraseology;the church will not repeat the experience of the sorcerer’sapprentice, who set the demons to bringing water,and then could not make them stop! The spellinvokes “moderate rain and showers”; andas an additional precaution there is a counter-spellagainst “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 withwhich the priest is not authorized to deal; not manynatural phenomena for which he may not claim the credit.And in case anything should have been overlooked,there is a blanket order upon Providence: “Graciouslyhear us, that those evils which the craft or subtiltyof the devil or man worketh against us, be broughtto nought!” I am reminded of the idea whichhaunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories aboutthe hero who was allowed three wishes that would cometrue. I could never understand why the hero didnot settle the matter once for all—by wishingthat everything he wished might come true!
Most of these incantations are harmless, and someare amiable; but now and then you come upon one whichis sinister in its implications. The volume beforeme happens to be of the Church of England, which iseven more forthright in its confronting of the GreatMagic. Many years ago I remember talking withan English army officer, asking how he could feelsure of his soldiers in case of labor strikes; didit never occur to him that the men had relatives amongthe workers, and might some time refuse to shoot them?His answer was that he was aware of it, the militaryhad worked out its technique with care. He wouldnever think of ordering his men to fire upon a mobin cold blood; he would first start the spell of disciplineto work, he would march them round the block, andget them in the swing, get their blood moving to militarymusic; then, when he gave the order, in they wouldgo. I have never forgotten the gesture, the animationwith which he illustrated their going—Icould hear the grunting of bayonets in the flesh ofmen. The social system prevailing in Englandhas made necessary the perfecting of such militarytechnique; also, you discover, English piety has madenecessary the providing of a religious sanction forit. After the job has been done and the bayonetshave been wiped clean, the company is marched to church,and the officer kneels in his family pew, and theprivates kneel with the parlor-maids, and the clergymanraises his hands to heaven and intones: “Webless thy Holy Name, that it hath pleased Thee toappease the seditious tumults which have been latelyraised up among us!”
And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless thekillers—he even takes part in their bloodywork. In the Home Office Records of the BritishGovernment I read (vol. 40, page 17) how certain minerswere on strike against low wages and the “truck”system, and the Vicar of Abergavenny put himself atthe head of the yeomanry and the Greys. He wrotethe Home Office a lively account of his military operations.All that remained was to apprehend certain of thestrikers, “and then I shall be able to returnto my Clerical duties.” Later he wrote ofthe “sinister influences” which kept theminers from returning to their work, and how he hadput half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.
#The Babylonian Fire-god#
So we come to the most important of the functionsof the tribal god, as an ally in war, an inspirerto martial valour. When in ancient Babyloniayou wished to overcome your enemies, you went to theshrine of the Fire-god, and with awful rites the priestpronounced incantations, which have been preservedon bricks and handed down for the use of modern churches.“Pronounce in a whisper, and have a bronze imagetherewith,” commands the ancient text, and runson for many strophes in this fashion:
Let them die, but let me live!
Let them be put under a ban, but let meprosper!
Let them perish, but let me increase!
Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!
O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among thegods,
Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.
This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand yearsago. Since then, the world has moved on—
Three thousand years of war and peaceand glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and goldenschemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams—
And in one of the world’s leading nations thepeople stand up and bare their heads, and sing totheir god to save their king and punish those whooppose 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 toomit this stanza from the English national anthem;but it is clear that this is because of its crudityof expression, not because of objection to the ideaof praying to a god to assist one nation and injureothers; for the same sentiment is expressed againand again in the most carefully edited of prayer-books:
Abate their pride, assuage theirmalice, and confound their devices.
Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all assaultsof our enemies.
Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish andovercome all
hisenemies.
There is none other that fighteth for us, but onlyThou, O God.
Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-calledcivilized nation today. Behind every battle-linein Europe you may see the priests of the BabylonianFire-god with their bronze images and their ancientincantations; you may see magic spells being wrought,magic standards sanctified, magic bread eaten andmagic wine drunk, fetishes blessed and hoodoos lifted,eternity ransacked to find means of inciting soldiersto the mood where they will “go in”.Throughout all civilization, the phobias and maniasof war have thrown the people back into the toilsof the priest, and that church which forced Galileoto recant under threat of torture, and had Ferrer shotbeneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich, isrejoicing 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, hadpassed, an immensely increased proportion ofthe landed and personal property of every Europeancountry was in the hands of the Church. Well dida great ecclesiastic remark that “pestilencesare the harvests of the ministers of God.”
And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogativeas banishers of epidemics. Who knows what daythe Lord may see fit to rebuke the upstart teachersof impious and atheistical inoculation, and scourgethe people back into His fold as in the good old daysof Moses and Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in hisimmensely learned and half-suppressed work, “TheAnalysis of Religious Belief”, quotes some missionariesto the Fiji islanders, concerning the ideas of thesebenighted heathen on the subject of a pestilence.It was the work of a “disease-maker”, whowas burning images of the people with incantations;so they blew horns to frighten this disease-makerfrom his spells. The missionaries undertook toexplain the true cause of the affliction—andthereby revealed that they stood upon the same intellectuallevel as the heathen they were supposed to instruct!It appeared that the natives had been at war withtheir neighbors, and the missionaries had commandedthem to desist; they had refused to obey, and God hadsent the epidemic as punishment for savage presumption!
And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the“Book of Common Prayer” of our most decorousand cultured of churches. I remember as a littlechild lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by theprevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hotbread three times a day; and there came an amiableclerical gentleman and recited the service properto such pastoral calls: “Take thereforein good part the visitation of the Lord!” Andagain, when my mother was ill, I remember how theclergyman read out in church a prayer for her, specifyingall sickness, “in mind, body or estate”.I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaningof these words passed over my childish head; I didnot realize that the elderly plutocrat in black broadclothwho knelt in the pew in front of me was invoking theaid of the Almighty so that his tenements might bringin their rentals promptly; so that his little “flyer”in cotton might prove successful; so that the childrenin his mills might work with greater speed.
Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow byincantations, and he answered, “Yes, if youuse a little strychnine with it.” And thatwould seem to be the attitude of the present-day Anglicanchurch-member; he calls in the best physician he knows,he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and afterthat he thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord havea chance. It makes the women happy, and afterall, there are a lot of things we don’t yet knowabout the world. So he repairs to the familypew, and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributeshis mite to the maintenance of an institution which,fourteen Sundays every year, proclaims the terrifyingmenaces of the Athanasian Creed:
Whoever will be saved, before all thingsit 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 maybe explained that the “Catholick faith”here referred to is not the Roman Catholic, but thatof the Church of England and the Protestant EpiscopalChurch of America. This creed of the ancientAlexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacingprecision—forty-four paragraphs of metaphysicalminutiae, closing with the final doom: “Thisis the Catholick faith: which except a man believefaithfully, he cannot be saved.”
You see, the founders of this august institution werenot content with cultured complacency; what they believedthey believed really, with their whole hearts, andthey were ready to act upon it, even if it meant burningtheir own at the stake. Also, they knew the ceaselessimpulse of the mind to grow; the terrible temptationwhich confronts each new generation to believe thatwhich is reasonable. They met the situation bysetting out the true faith in words which no one couldmistake. They have provided, not merely the Creedof Athanasius, but also the “Thirty-nine Articles”—whichare thirty-nine separate and binding guarantees thatone who holds orders in the Episcopal Church shallbe either a man of inferior mentality, or else a sophistand hypocrite. How desperate some of them havebecome in the face of this cruel dilemma is illustratedby the tale which is told of Dr. Jowett, of BalliolCollege, Oxford: that when he was required torecite the “Apostle’s Creed” inpublic, 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, andthe Holy Ghost.” Perhaps the eminent divinenever did this; but the fact that his students toldit, and thought it funny, is sufficient indicationof their attitude toward their “Religion.”The son of William George Ward tells in his biographyhow this leader of the “Tractarian Movement”met the problem with cynicism which seems almost sublime:“Make yourself clear that you are justified indeception; and then lie like a trooper!”
#The Canonization of Incompetence#
The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhereand in all its operations and influences it is onthe side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains,it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.Consider the power of the Church of England and itsfavorite daughter here in America; consider their prestigewith the press and in politics, their hold upon literatureand the arts, their control of education and the mindsof children, of charity and the lives of the poor:consider all this, and then say what it means to societythat such a power must be, in every new issue thatarises, on the side of reaction and falsehood.“So it was in the beginning, is now, and evershall be,” runs the church’s formula; andthis per se and a priori, of necessity and in thenature of the case.
Turn over the pages of history and read the damningrecord of the church’s opposition to every advancein every field of science, even the most remote fromtheological concern. Here is the Reverend EdwardMassey, preaching in 1772 on “The Dangerous andSinful Practice of Inoculation”; declaring thatJob’s distemper was probably confluent small-pox;that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil;that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishmentof sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent themis “a diabolical operation”. Hereare the Scotch clergy of the middle of the nineteenthcentury denouncing the use of chloroform in obstetrics,because it is seeking “to avoid one part ofthe primeval curse on woman”. Here is BishopWilberforce of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: “Theprinciple of natural selection is absolutely incompatiblewith the word of God”; it “contradictsthe revealed relation of creation to its creator”;it “is inconsistent with the fulness of Hisglory”; it is “a dishonoring view of nature”.And the Bishop settled the matter by asking Huxleywhether he was descended from an ape through his grandmotheror grandfather.
Think what it means, friends of progress, that theseecclesiastical figures should be set up for the reverenceof the populace, and that every time mankind is tomake an advance in power over Nature, the pioneersof thought have to come with crow-bars and derricksand heave these figures out of the way! And youthink that conditions are changed to-day? Butconsider syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we knowso 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 iscrying—and for which it must wait, becauseof St. Paul! Realize that up to date it has provenimpossible to persuade the English Church to permita man to marry his deceased wife’s sister!That when the war broke upon England the whole nationwas occupied with a squabble over the disestablishmentof the church of Wales! Only since 1888 has itbeen legally possible for an unbeliever to hold a
seat in Parliament; while up to the present day menare tried for blasphemy and convicted under the decisionsof Lord Hale, to the effect that “it is a crimeeither to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrinesof the Christian religion or to hold them up to contemptor ridicule.” Said Mr. Justice Horridge,at the West Riding Assizes, 1911: “A manis not free in any public place to use common ridiculeon subjects which are sacred.”The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutorin London, is “to preserve the standard of outwarddecency.” And you will find that the oneessential to prosecution is always that the victimshall be obscure and helpless; never by any chanceis he a duke in a drawing-room. I will recordan utterance of one of the obscure victims of theBritish “standard of outward decency”,a teacher of mathematics named Holyoake, who presumedto discuss in a public hall the starvation of theworking classes of the country. A preacher objectedthat he had discussed “our duty to our neighbor”and neglected “our duty to God”; whereuponthe lecturer replied: “Our national Churchand general religious institutions cost us, upon accreditedcomputation, about twenty million pounds annually.Worship being thus expensive, I appeal to your headsand your pockets whether we are not too poor to havea God. While our distress lasts, I think it wouldbe wise to put deity upon half pay.” Andfor that utterance the unfortunate teacher of mathematicsserved six months in the common Gaol at Gloucester!
While men were being tried for publishing the “Free-thinker”,the Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone.And if you wish to know what an established churchcan 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 courseof which he establishes a mystic connection betweenthe trident of Neptune and the Christian Trinity!Read his efforts to prove that the writer of Genesiswas an inspired geologist! This writer of Genesispoints 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 “isunderstood to have been so affirmed in our time bynatural science that it may be taken as a demonstratedconclusion and established fact.” Hencewe must conclude of the writer of Genesis that “hisknowledge was divine”! Consider that thiswas actually published in one of the leading Britishmonthlies, and that it was necessary for ProfessorHuxley to answer it, pointing out that so far is itfrom being true that “a fourfold division andorderly sequence” of water, air and land animals“has been affirmed in our time by natural science”,that on the contrary, the assertion is “directlycontradictory to facts known to everyone who is acquaintedwith the elements of natural science”. Thedistribution of fossils proves that land animals originatedbefore sea-animals, and there has been such a mixingof land, sea and air animals as utterly to destroythe reputation of both Genesis and Gladstone as possessinga 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 inthe dim shadows walls lined from floor to ceiling withdecorous and grave-looking books, bound for the mostpart in black, many of them fading to green with age.There are literally thousands of such, and their themeis the pseudo-science of “divinity”.I close my, eyes, to make the test fair, and walkto the shelves and put out my hand and take a book.It proves to be a modern work, “A History ofthe English Prayer-book in Relation to the Doctrineof the Eucharist”. I turn the pages anddiscover that it is a study of the variations of oneminute detail of church doctrine. This learneddivine—he has written many such works,as the advertisem*nts inform us—fills upthe greater part of his pages with foot-notes fromhundreds of authorities, arguments and counter-argumentsover supernatural subtleties. I will give onesample of these footnotes—asking the readerto be patient:
I add the following valuable observation,of Dean Goode: ("On Eucharist”, IIp 757. See also Archbishop Ware in Gibson’s“Preservative”, vol. N, Chap II) “Onegreat point for which our divines have contended,in opposition to Romish errors, has been thereality of that presence of Christ’s Bodyand Blood to the soul of the believer which is affectedthrough the operation of the Holy Spirit notwithstandingthe absence of that Body and Blood in Heaven.Like the Sun, the Body of Christ is both present andabsent; present, really and truly present, inone sense—that is, by the soul beingbrought into immediate communion with—butabsent in another sense—that is, as regardsthe contiguity of its substance to our bodies.The authors under review, like the Romanists,maintain that this is not a Real Presence, andassuming their own interpretation of the phraseto be the only true one, press into their servicethe testimony of divines who, though using thephrase, apply it in a sense the reverse of theirs.The ambiguity of the phrase, and its misapplicationby the Church of Rome, have induced many of ourdivines to repudiate it, etc.”
Realize that of the work from which this “valuableobservation” is quoted, there are at least twovolumes, the second volume containing not less than757 pages I Realize that in Gibson’s “Preservative”there are not less than ten volumes of such writing!Realize that in this twentieth century a considerableportion of the mental energies of the world’sgreatest empire is devoted to that kind of learning!
I turn to the date upon the volume, and find thatit is 1910. I was in England within a year ofthat time, and so I can tell what was the conditionof the English people while printers were making andpapers were reviewing and book-stores were distributingthis work of ecclesiastical research. I walkedalong the Embankment and saw the pitiful wretches,men, women and sometimes children, clad in filthyrags, starved white and frozen blue, soaked in winterrains and shivering in winter winds, homeless, hopeless,unheeded by the doctors of divinity, unpreserved byGibson’s “Preservative”. I walkedon Hampstead Heath on Easter day, when the populationof the slums turns out for its one holiday; I walked,literally trembling with horror, for I had never seensuch sights nor dreamed of them. These creatureswere hardly to be recognized as human beings; theywere some new grotesque race of apes. They couldnot walk, they could only shamble; they could notlaugh, they could only leer. I saw a hand-organplaying, and turned away—the things theydid 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, smoothmotor-cars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and the drink-sodden,starch-poisoned inhabitants—slum-populationseverywhere, even on the land! When the newspaperreporters came to me, I said that I had just comefrom Germany, and that if ever England found herselfat war with that country, she would regret that shehad let the bodies and the minds of her people rot;for which expression I was severely taken to taskby more than one British divine.
The bodies—and the minds; the rot of thelatter being the cause of the former. All overEngland in that year of 1910, in thousands of schools,rich and poor, and in the greatest centres of learning,men like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead languagesand dead sciences and dead arts; sending them outto life with no more conception of the modern worldthan a monk of the Middle Ages; sending them out withminds made hard and inflexible, ignorant of science,indifferent to progress, contemptuous of ideas.And then suddenly, almost overnight, this terrifiedpeople finds itself at war with a nation ruled anddisciplined’ by modern experts, scientists andtechnicians. The awful muddle that was in Englandduring the first two years of the war has not yetbeen told in print; but thousands know it, and someday it will be written, and it will finish foreverthe prestige of the British ruling caste. Theyrushed off an expedition to Gallipoli, and somebodyforgot the water-supply, and at one time they had ninety-fivethousand cases of dysentery!
They always “muddle through”, they tellyou; that is the motto of their ruling caste.But this time they did not “muddle through”—theyhad to come to America for help. As I write, ourCongress is voting billions and tens of billions ofdollars, and a million of the best of our young manhoodare being taken from their homes—becausein 1910 the mind of England was occupied with DeanGoode “On Eucharist”, and the ten volumesof Gibson’s “Preservative”.
#The Elders#
What the Church means in human affairs is the ruleof the aged. It means old men in the seats ofauthority, not merely in the church, but in the law-courtsand in Parliament, even in the army and navy.For a test I look up the list of bishops of the Churchof England in Whitaker’s Almanac; it appearsthat there are 40 of these functionaries, includingthe archbishops, but not the suffragans; and thatthe total salary paid to them amounts to more thannine hundred thousand dollars a year. This, itshould be understood, does not include the pay oftheir assistants, nor the cost of maintaining theirreligious establishments; it does not include any privateincomes which they or their wives may possess, asmembers of the privileged classes of the Empire.I look up their ages in Who’s Who, and I findthat there is only one below fifty-three; the oldestof them is ninety-one, while the average age of thegoodly company is seventy. There have been menin history who have retained their flexibility ofmind, their ability to adjust themselves to new circ*mstancesat the age of seventy, but it will always be foundthat these men were trained in science and practicalaffairs, never in dead languages and theology.One of the oldest of the English prelates, the Archbishopof Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporterthat he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no timeto form an opinion on the labor question.
And now—here is the crux of the argument—dothese aged gentlemen rule of their own power?They do not! They do literally nothing of theirown power; they could not make their own episcopalrobes, they could net even cook their own episcopaldinners. They have to be maintained in all theircomings and goings. Who supports them, and towhat end?
The roots of the English Church are in the Englishland system, which is one of the infamies of the modernworld. It dates from the days of William theNorman, who took possession of Britain with his sword,and in order to keep possession for himself and hisheirs, distributed the land among his nobles and prelates.In those days, you understand, a high ecclesiasticwas a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his predatorynature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots andarchbishops of William wore armor and had their troopsof knights like the barons and the dukes. Williamgave them vast tracts, and at the same time he gavethem orders which they obeyed. Says the Englishchronicler, “Stark he was. Bishops he strippedof their bishopricks, abbots of their abbacies”.Green tells us that “the dependence of the churchon the royal power was strictly enforced. Homagewas exacted from bishop as from baron.”And what was this homage? The bishop knelt beforeWilliam, bareheaded and without arms, and swore:“Hear my lord, I become liege man of yours forlife and limb and earthly regard, and I will keepfaith and loyalty to you for life and death, God helpme.”
The lands which the church got from William the Norman,she has held, and always on the same condition—thatshe shall be “liege man for life and limb andearthly regard”. In this you have the wholestory of the church of England, in the twentieth centuryas in the eleventh. The balance of power hasshifted from time to time; old families have lostthe land and new families have gotten it; but the loyaltyand homage of the church have been held by the land,as the needle of the compass is held by a mass ofmetal. Some two hundred and fifty years ago apopular 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 vicarof Bray, sir!
So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they areTories and Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries,friends of every injustice that profits the owningclass. And always among themselves you find themintriguing and squabbling over the dividing of thespoils; always you find them enjoying leisure andease, while the people suffer and the rebels complain.One can pass down the corridor of English historyand prove this statement by the words of Englishmenfrom every single generation. Take the fourteenthcentury; the “Good Parliament” declaresthat
Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs areappointed to benefices of a thousand marks, whilethe poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty.God gave the sheep to be pastured, not to beshaven and shorn.
And a little later comes the poet of the people, PiersPlowman—
But now is Religion a rider, a roamerthrough the streets,
A leader at the love-day, a buyer of theland,
Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor,
A heap of hounds at his back, as tho hewere a lord;
And if his servant kneel not when he bringshis cup,
He loureth on him asking who taught himcourtesy.
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 atease
They have no pity on the poor; that istheir “charity”.
Ye hold you as lords; your lands are toobroad,
But there shall come a king and he shallshrive you all
And beat you as the bible saith for breakingof your Rule.
Another step through history, and in the early partof the sixteenth century here is Simon Fish, addressingKing Henry the Eighth, in the “Supplicacyonfor the Beggars”, complaining of the “strong,puissant and counterfeit holy and ydell” which“are now increased under your sight, not onlyinto a great nombre, but ynto a kingdome.”
They have begged so importunatly thatthey have gotten ynto their hondes more thana therd part of all youre Realme. The goodliestlordshippes, maners, londes, and territories, aretheyres. Besides this, they have the tenthpart of all the corne, medowe, pasture, grasse,wolle, coltes, calves, lambes, pigges, gese andchikens. Ye, and they looke so narowly uppontheyre proufittes, that the poore wyves must becountable to thym of every tenth eg, or elles she gettithnot her rytes at ester, shal be taken as an heretike....Is it any merveille that youre people so compleineof povertie? The Turke nowe, in your tyme,shulde never be abill to get so moche groundeof christendome.... And whate do al these gredysort of sturdy, idell, holy theves? These be theythat have made an hundredth thousand idell horesin your realme. These be they that catchethe pokkes of one woman, and here them to another.
The petitioner goes on to tell how they steal wivesand all their goods with them, and if any man protestthey make him a heretic, “so that it makethhim wisshe that he had not done it”. Alsothey take fortunes for masses and then don’tsay them. “If the Abbot of west-minstershulde sing every day as many masses for his foundersas he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkeswere too few.” The petitioner suggeststhat the king shall “tie these holy idell thevesto the cartes, to be whipped naked about every markettowne till they will fall to laboure!”
#Church History#
King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely,but he took away the property of the religious ordersfor the expenses of his many wives and mistresses,and forced the clergy in England to forswear obedienceto the Pope and make his royal self their spiritualhead. This was the beginning of the AnglicanChurch, as distinguished from the Catholic; a beginningof which the Anglican clergy are not so proud as theywould like to be. When I was a boy, they taughtme what they called “church history”,and when they came to Henry the Eighth they used himas an illustration of the fact that the Lord is sometimeswont to choose evil men to carry out His righteouspurposes. They did not explain why the Lord shoulddo this confusing thing, nor just how you were toknow, when you saw something being done by a murderousadulterer, whether it was the will of the Lord or ofSatan; nor did they go into details as to the motiveswhich the Lord had been at pains to provide, so asto induce his royal agent to found the Anglican Church.For such details you have to consult another set ofauthorities—the victims of the plundering.
When I was in college my professor of Latin was agentleman with bushy brown whiskers and a thunderingvoice of which I was often the object—foreven in those early days I had the habit of persistingin embarrassing questions. This professor wasa devout Catholic, and not even in dealing with ancientRomans could he restrain his propaganda impulses.Later on in life he became editor of the “CatholicEncyclopedia”, and now when I turn its pages,I imagine that I see the bushy brown whiskers, andhear the thundering voice: “Mr. Sinclair,it is so because I tell you it is so!”
I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knowsall about King Henry the Eighth, and his motives infounding the Church of England; he is ready with an“economic interpretation”, as completeas the most rabid muckraker could desire! Itappears that the king wanted a new wife, and demandedthat the Pope should grant the necessary permission;in his efforts to browbeat the Pope into such betrayalof duty, King Henry threatened the withdrawal of the“annates” and the “Peter’spence”. Later on he forced the clergy todeclare that the Pope was “only a foreign bishop”,and in order to “stamp out overt expressionof disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reignof terror”.
In Anglican histories, you are assured that all thiswas a work of religious reform, and that after itthe Church was the pure vehicle of God’s grace.There were no more “holy idell theves”,holding the land of England and plundering the poor.But get to know the clergy, and see things from theinside, and you will meet some one like the Archbishopof Cashell, who wrote to one of his intimates:
I conclude that a goodbishop has nothing more to do than to
eat, drink and growfat, rich and die; which laudable
example I proposefor the remainder of my days to follow.
If you say that might be a casual jest, hear whatThackeray reports of that period, the eighteenth century,which he knew with peculiar intimacy:
I read that Lady Yarmouth (my mostreligious and gracious King’s favorite)sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600 pounds.(She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not bemade a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Washe the only prelate of his time led up by suchhands for consecration? As I peep into GeorgeII’s St. James, I see crowds of cassockspushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court;stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; thatgodless old king yawning under his canopy in hisChapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.Discoursing about what?—About righteousnessand judgment? Whilst the chaplain is preaching,the king is chattering in German and almost asloud as the preacher; so loud that the clergymanactually burst out crying in his pulpit, because thedefender of the faith and the dispenser of bishopricswould not listen to him!
#Land and Livings#
And how is it in the twentieth century? Haveconditions been much improved? There are greatEnglishmen who do not think so. I quote RobertBuchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and whotherefore has still to be recognized by English critics.He writes of the “New Rome”, by whichhe means present-day England:
The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel’dpriest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher’ssword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of Men!
You see, the land system of England remains—thechanges having been for the worse. William theConqueror wanted to keep the Saxon peasantry contented,so he left them their “commons”; but inthe eighteenth century these were nearly all filchedaway. We saw the same thing done within the lastgeneration in Mexico, and from the same motive—becausedeveloping capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas peoplewho have access to the land will not slave in millsand mines. In England, from the time of QueenAnne to that of William and Mary, the parliamentsof the landlords passed some four thousand separateacts, whereby more than seven million acres of thecommon land were stolen from the people. It hasbeen calculated that these acres might have supporteda million families; and ever since then England hashad 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?
In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like thenative oak in British soil: some of them directdescendants of the Normans, others children of thecourt favorites and panders who grew rich in the daysof the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts. Sevenmen own practically all the land of the city and countyof London, and collect tribute from seven millionsof people. The estates are entailed—thatis, 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 leaseis up, he takes possession of your buildings.The tribute which London pays is more than a hundredmillion dollars a year. So absolute is the rightof the land-owner that he can sue for trespass thedriver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposeson fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred ofyards from the shore.
And in this graft, of course, the church has its share.Each church owns land—not merely that uponwhich it stands, but farms and city lots from whichit derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts;so do the schools and universities in which the clergyare educated. The income from the holdings ofa church constitutes what is called a “living”;these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogativesof the younger sons of the ruling families, and areintrigued and scrambled for in exactly the fashionwhich Thackeray describes in the eighteenth century.
About six thousand of these “livings”are in the gift of great land owners; one noble lordalone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and needlessto say, he does not present them to clergymen who favorradical land-taxes. He gives them to men likehimself—autocratic to the poor, easy-goingto members of his own class, and cynical concerningthe grafts of grace.
In one English village which I visited the livingwas worth seven hundred pounds, with the use of afine mansion; as the incumbent had a large family,he lived there. In another place the living wasworth a thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired acurate, himself appearing twice a year, on Christmasday and on the King’s birth-day, to preach asermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris.It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was proposedcompelling absentee pluralists—that is,clergymen holding more than one “living”—tofurnish curates to do their work; it might be interestingto note that this law met with strenuous clericalopposition, the house of Bishops voting against itwithout a division. Thus we may understand thesharp saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergywould rather part with thirty-eight of their thirty-ninearticles than with one thirty-ninth 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 Oxfordor Cambridge, and possess the one essential qualification,that they are gentlemen. Their average priceis two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their functionwas made clear to me when I attended my first Englishtea-party. There was a wicker table, perhapsa foot and a half square, having three shelves, onebelow the other—on the top layer the platesand napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the lowestthe cake. Said the hostess, “Will you passthe curate, please?” I looked puzzled, and shepointed. “We call that the curate, becauseit does the work of a curate.”
#Graft in Tail#
As one of America’s head muck-rakers, I foundthat I was popular with the British ruling classes;they found my books useful in their campaigns againstdemocracy, and they were surprised and disconcertedwhen they found I did not agree with their interpretationof my writings. I had told of corruption in Americanpolitics; surely I must know that in England theyhad no such evils! I explained that they didnot have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase,was “in tail”; the grafters had, as amatter of divine right, the things which in Americathey had to buy. In America, for instance, wehad a Senate, a “Millionaire’s Club”,for admission to which the members paid in cash; butin England the same men came to the same position astheir birth-right. Political corruption is notan 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 Britishruling classes vanished quickly.
As a matter of fact, England is more like Americathan she realizes; her British reticence has kepther ignorant about herself. I could not carryon my business in England, because of the libel laws,which have as their first principle “the greaterthe truth, the greater the libel”. Englishmenread 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 lordsof coal and iron and shipping and beer, have boughttheir way into the landed aristocracy for cash, justas our American senators have done; they have boughtthe political parties with campaign gifts, preciselyas in America; they have taken over the press, whetherby outright purchase like Northcliffe, or by advertisingsubsidy—both of which methods we Americansknow. Within the last decade or two another grouphas been coming into control; and not merely is thisthe same class of men as in America, it frequentlyconsists of the same individuals. These are thebig money-lenders, the international financiers whoare the fine and final flower of the capitalist system.These gentlemen make the world their home—or,as Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They knowhow to fit themselves to all environments; they areCatholics in Rome and Vienna, country gentlemen inLondon, bons vivants in Paris, democrats in Chicago,Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews wherever theyare.
And of course, in buying the English government, thesenew classes have bought the English Church. Skepticsand men of the world as they are, they know that theymust have a Religion. They have read the storyof the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotineis always over their thoughts; they see the giantof labor, restless in his torment, groping as in anightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who canblind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him tohis couch of slumber? There is but one agent,without rival—the Keeper of the Holy Secrets,the Deputy of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver andWithholder of Eternal Life. Tremble, slave!Fall down and bow your forehead in the dust!I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled mychildhood—my grim old Bishop, clad in hisgorgeous ceremonial robes, stretching out his handsover the head of the new priest, and pronouncing thatmost 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 thediamond mines of South Africa—wanted themmore firmly governed and less firmly taxed than couldbe arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. Sothe armies of England were sent to subjugate the country.You might think they would have had the good tasteto leave the lowly Jesus out of this affair—butif so, you have missed the essential point about established
religion. The bishops, priests, and deacons areset up for the populace to revere, and when the robber-classesneed a blessing upon some enterprise, then is theopportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons toearn their “living.” During the Boerwar the blood-lust of the English clergy was so extremethat writers in the dignified monthly reviews feltmoved to protest against it. When the pastorsof Switzerland issued a collective protest againstcruelties to women and children in the South Africanconcentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishopof Winchester who was brought forward to make reply.Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shudderingat Prussian glorification of war; but no one mentionsBishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boerwar as a means of keeping the nation “virile”;nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God’sway of making “noble natures”.The British God had other ways of improving nations—forexample, the opium traffic. The British tradershad been raising the poppy in India and selling itsjuice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps ahundred million “noble natures” by thismethod; and also they were making a hundred milliondollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new“virility,” undertook to destroy some opium,and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessaryto use British battle-ships to punish and subdue them.Was there any difficulty in persuading the establishedchurch of Jesus to bless this holy war? Therewas not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devoutof Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitudeof the clergy, and wrote in his diary:
I rejoice that this cruel and debasingopium war is terminated. We have triumphedin one of the most lawless, unnecessary, andunfair struggles in the records of history; andChristians have shed more heathen blood in two years,than the heathens have shed of Christian bloodin two centuries.
That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter piousEngland continued to force the opium traffic uponprotesting China, and only in the last two or threeyears has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughoutthe long controversy the attitude of the church wassuch that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a letterto the Anti-Opium Society:
Opium is a subject in the discussionof which England and China can never meet ona common ground. China views the whole questionfrom a moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.
And just as the Chinese people were poisoned withopium, so the English people are being poisoned withalcohol. Both in town and country, labor is soddenwith it. Scientists and reformers are clamoringfor restriction;—and what prevents?Head and front of the opposition for a century, standinglike a rock, has been the Established Church.The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early temperancemovement, declares that “among its supporters
I cannot recall one Church of England minister ofinfluence.” When Asquith brought in hisbill for the restriction of the traffic in beer, hewas confronted with petitions signed by members ofthe clergy, protesting against the act. And whatwas the basis of their protest? That beer isa food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but alsothat there was property invested in brewing it.Three hundred and thirty-two clergy of the dioceseof Peterborough declared:We do strongly protest against themain provisions of the present bill as creatingamongst our people a sense of grave injusticeas amounting to a confiscation of private property,spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent people,and provoking deep and widespread resentment, whichmust do harm to our cause and hinder our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even moreplainspoken petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; butwar-time facilities for research have not enabledme to find the text. In Prof. Henry C. Vedder’s“Jesus Christ and the Social Question,”we read:
It was authoritatively stated a shorttime ago that Mr. Asquith’s temperancebill was defeated in Parliament through the oppositionof clergymen who had invested their savings inbrewery stock, the profits of which might have beenlessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer,was sufficient to put through Parliament a provisionthat no prohibition legislation should ever be passedwithout providing for compensation to the owners ofthe industry. Today, all over America, appealsare being made to the people to eat less grain; thegrain is being shipped to England, some of it to bemade into beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Gracethe Archbishop of York, comes to America to urge usto increased sacrifices, and in his first newspaperinterview takes occasion to declare that his churchis not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-timeeconomy!
#Anglicanism and Alcohol#
This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfullyfamiliar to British radicals; they see it at workin every election—the publican confusingthe voters with spirits, while the parson confusesthem with spirituality. There are two powerfulsocieties in England employing this deadly combination—the“Anti-Socialist Union” and the “Libertyand Property Defense League.” If you scanthe lists of the organizers, directors and subsidizersof these satanic institutions, you find Tory politiciansand landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy,and large-scale dealers in drunkenness. I attendedin London a meeting called by the “Liberty andProperty Defense League,” to listen to a denunciationof Socialism by W.H. Mallock, a master sophistof Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishopand half a dozen members of the Anglican clergy, togetherwith the secretary of the Federated Brewers’Association, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, andBeer Trade Association, and three or four other alcoholicmagnates.
In every public library in England and many in Americayou will find an assortment of pamphlets publishedby these organizations, and scholarly volumes endorsedby them, in which the stock misrepresentations ofSocialism are perpetuated. Some of these writingsare brutal—setting forth the ethics of exploitationin the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the Englishclergyman who supplied for capitalist depredationa basis in pretended natural science. Said thisshepherd of Jesus:
A man who is born into a world alreadypossessed, if he cannot get subsistence fromhis parents, and if society does not Want hislabor, has no claim of right to the smallest portionof food, and in fact has no business to be where heis. At Nature’s mighty feast thereis no cover for him. She tells him to begone, and will quickly execute her own orders.
Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenthcentury; but it was found that for some reason thisfailed to stop the growth of Socialism, and so inour time the clerical defenders of Privilege havegrown subtle and insinuating. They inform us nowthat they have a deep sympathy with our fundamentalpurposes; they burn with pity for the poor, and theywould really and truly wish happiness to everyone,not merely in Heaven, but right here and now.However, there are so many complications—andso they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialistbug-a-boos. Here for example, is the Rev. JamesStalker, D.D., expounding “The Ethics of Jesus,”and admonishing us extremists:
Efforts to transfer money and propertyfrom one set of hands to another may be inspiredby the same passions as have blinded the presentholders to their own highest good, and may beaccompanied with injustice as extreme as has everbeen manifested by the rich and powerful.
And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D.D., an especiallypopular clerical author, gives us this sublime utteranceof religion on wage-slavery:
The world is full ofmysteries, but some clear lines run
through them, of whichthis is one. Where God has been so
patient, it is not forus 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 humanmisery is due, not to social
arrangements, but topersonal vices.
I study Professor Flint’s volume in the effortto find just what, if anything, he would have thechurch do about the evils of our time. I findhim praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop ofDurham, as being the proper sort for clergymen topreach. Bishop Westcott, whether he is talkingto a high society congregation, or to one of workingmen,shows “an exquisite sense of knowing always whereto stop.” So I consulted the Bishop’svolume, “The Social Aspects of Christianity”and I see at once why he is popular with the anti-Socialistpropagandists—neither I or any other mancan possibly discover what he really means, or whathe really wants done.
I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thoughtmaybe if I kept on the good Bishop’s trail,I might in the end find something a plain man couldunderstand; so I got the beautiful two-volume “Lifeof Brooke Westcott, by his Son”—andthere I found an exposition of the social purposesof bishops! In the year 1892 there was a strikein Durham, which is in the coal country; the employerstried to make a cut in wages, and some ten thousandmen walked out, and there was a long and bitter struggle,which wrung the episcopal heart. There was muchconsultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery,and at last the masters and men were got together,with the Bishop as arbitrator, and the dispute wastriumphantly settled—how do you suppose?On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!
I know nothing quainter in the history of Englishgraft than the naivete with which the Bishop’sbiographer and son tells the story of this episcopalventure into reality. The prelate came out fromthe conference “all smiles, and well satisfiedwith the result of his day’s work.”As for his followers, they were in ecstacies; they“seized and waltzed one another around on thecarriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flowershow ball. Hats and caps are thrown into theair, and we cheer ourselves hoarse.” TheBishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one morecommunication on episcopal stationery—anorder to all his clergy to “offer their humbleand hearty thanks to God for our happy deliverancefrom the strife by which the diocese has been longafflicted.” Strange to say, there were afew varlets in Durham who did not appreciate the servicesof the bold Bishop, and one of them wrote and circulatedsome abusive verses, in which he made reference tothe Bishop’s comfortable way of life. Thebiographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-heartedthat he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopalcoach, and so ascetic that he would have lived ontea and toast if he had been permitted to. A curiouscondition in English society, where the Bishop wouldhave lived on tea and toast, but was not permittedto; while the working people, who didn’t wantto live on tea and toast, were compelled to!
#Dead Cats#
For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergyhave been fighting with every resource at their commandthe liberal and enlightened men of England who wishedto educate the masses of the people. In 1807 thefirst measure for a national school-system was denouncedby the Archbishop of Canterbury as “derogatoryto the authority of the Church.” As a counter-measure,his supporters established the “National Societyfor Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrinesof the Established Church”; and the founder ofthe organization, a clergyman, advocated a barn asa good structure for a school, and insisted that thechildren of the workers “should not be taughtbeyond their station.” In 1840 a Committee
of the Privy Council on Education was appointed, butbowed to the will of the Archbishops, setting forththe decree of “their lord-ships” that “thefirst purpose of all instruction must be the regulationof the thoughts and habits of the children by thedoctrine and precepts of revealed religion.”In 1850 a bill for secular education was denouncedas presenting to the country “a choice betweenHeaven or Hell, God or the Devil.” In 1870,Forster, author of the still unpassed bill, wrote thatwhile the parsons were disputing, the children ofthe poor were “growing into savages.”As with Education, so with Social Reform. Duringthe struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies,some enthusiasts endeavored to establish the doctrinethat Christian baptism conferred emancipation uponnegroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of Londonlaid down the formula of exploitation: “Christianityand the embracing of the gospel do not make the leastalteration 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 thelast fifty years, whether they affected the franchise,whether they affected commerce, whether theyaffected religion, whether they affected the badand abominable institution of slavery, or what subjectthey touched, these leisured classes, these educatedclasses, these titled classes have been in thewrong.
The “Great Commoner” did not add “thesereligious classes “, for he belonged to thereligious classes himself; but a study of the recordwill supply the gap. The Church opposed all thereform measures which Gladstone himself put through.It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It opposedall the social reforms of Lord Salisbury. Thisnoble-hearted Englishman complained that at firstonly a single minister of religion supported him,and to the end only a few. He expressed himselfas distressed and puzzled “to find support frominfidels and non-professors; opposition or coldnessfrom religionists or declaimers.”
And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894the House of Bishops voted solidly against the Employers’Liability Law. The House of Bishops opposed HomeRule, and beat it; The House of Bishops opposed Womans’Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerningthis establishment Lord Salisbury, himself the mostdevout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase:“This vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life.”He told the Bishops that he would give up preachingto them about ecclesiastical reform, because he knewthat they would never begin. Another member ofthe British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russel, haswritten of their record and adventures:
They were defenders of absolutism,slavery, and the bloody penal code; they werethe resolute opponents of every political orsocial reform; and they had their reward from thenation outside parliament. The Bishop of Bristolhad his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop ofLondon could not keep an engagement to preachlest the congregation should stone him.The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his lifeafter preaching at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street.Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for hisprimary visitation, was insulted, spat upon,and only brought by a circuitous route to theDeanery, amid the execrations of the mob. On the5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchesterwere burnt in effigy close to their own palacegates. Archbishop Howley’s chaplaincomplained that a dead cat had been thrown athim, when the Archbishop—a man of apostolicmeekness—replied: “You shouldbe thankful that it was not a live one.”
The people had reason for this conduct—asyou will always find they have, if you take the troubleto inquire. Let me quote another member of theEnglish ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives“an instance, of the procedure of Church andState about this period”:
In 1832 six agricultural labourersin 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 neighbourhood.The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal wasmade to the chairman of the local bench, who decidedthat they must work for whatever their masterschose to pay them. The parson, who had atfirst promised his help, now turned against them,and the masters promptly reduced the wage to7s., with a threat of further reduction. Lovelessthen formed an agricultural union, for which allseven were arrested, treated as convicts, andcommitted to the assizes. The prison chaplaintried to bully them into submission. The judgedetermined to convict them, and directed that theyshould be tried for mutiny under an act of GeorgeIII, specially passed to deal with the navalmutiny at the Nore. The grand jury werelandowners, and the petty jury were farmers;both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailingtype. The judge summed up as follows: “Notfor anything that you have done, or that I canprove that you intend to do, but for an exampleto others I consider it my duty to pass the sentenceof seven years’ penal transportation acrossHis Majesty’s high seas upon each and everyone of you.”
#Suffer Little Children#
The founder of Christianity was a man who specializedin children. He was not afraid of having Hisdiscourses disturbed by them, He did not considerthem superfluous. “Of such is the Kingdomof Heaven”, He said; and His Church is the inheritorof this tradition—“feed my lambs”.There were children in Great Britain in the early partof the nineteenth century, and we may see what wasdone with them by turning to Gibbin’s “IndustrialHistory of England”:
Sometimes regular traffickers wouldtake the place of the manufacturer, and transfera number of children to a factory district, andthere keep them, generally in some dark cellar,till they could hand them over to a mill owner inwant of hands, who would come and examine theirheight, strength, and bodily capacities, exactlyas did the slave oweners in the American markets.After that the children were simply at the mercyof their oweners, nominally as apprentices, butin reality as mere slaves, who got no wages,and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clotheproperly, because they were so cheap and their placescould be so easily supplied. It was oftenarranged by the parish authorities, in orderto get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot shouldbe taken by the mill owener with every twentysane children. The fate of these unhappy idiotswas even worse than that of the others.The secret of their final end has never beendisclosed, but we can form some idea of theirawful sufferings from the hardships of the othervictims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hoursof their labor were only limited by exhaustion,after many modes of torture had been unavailinglyapplied to force continued work. Childrenwere often worked sixteen hours a day, by dayand by night.
In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposedlimiting the labor of children nine years of age tofourteen hours a day. This would seem to havebeen a reasonable provision, likely to have won theapproval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposedby Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen.It was interfering with freedom of contract, and thereforewith the will of Providence; it was anathema to anestablished Church, whose function was in 1819, asit is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.C., to teach thedivine origin and sanction of the prevailing economicorder. “Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi,the exalted prince, worshipper of the gods”... so begins the oldest legal code which has comedown to us, from 2250 B.C.; and the coronation serviceof the English church is made whole out of the samethesis. The duty of submission, not merely todivinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlordand divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in thechurch’s every ceremony, and explicit in manyof its creeds. In the Litany the people petitionfor “increase of grace to hear meekly Thy Word”;and here is this “Word,” as little childrenare made to learn it by heart. If there existsin the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics,I do not know where to find it.
My duty towards my neighbour is ...To honour and obey the King, and all that areput in authority under him; To submit myselfto all my governours, teachers, spiritual pastors,and masters: To order myself lowly and reverentlyto all my betters.... Not to covet nor desireother men’s goods; But to learn and labourtruly to get mine own living, and to do my dutyin that state of life, unto which it shall pleaseGod to call me.
A hundred years ago one of the most popular of Britishwriters was Hannah More. She and her sister Marthawent to live in the coal-country, to teach this “catechism”to the children of the starving miners. The “MendipAnnals” is the title of a book in which theytell of their ten years’ labors in a villagepopularly known as “Little Hell.”In this place two hundred people were crowded intonineteen houses. “There is not one creaturein it that can give a cup of broth if it would savea life.” In one winter eighteen perishedof “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 “MendipAnnals” no single word of social protest, noteven of social suspicion. That wages of a shillinga day might have anything to do with moral degenerationwas a proposition beyond the mental powers of England’smost popular woman writer. She was perfectlycontent that a woman should be sentenced to death forstealing butter from a dealer who had asked what thewoman thought too high a price. When there camea famine, and the children of these mine-slaves weredying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy becauseGod had sent them her pious self. “In sufferingby the scarcity, you have but shared in the commonlot, with the pleasure of knowing the advantage youhave had over many villages in your having sufferedno scarcity of religious instruction.” Andin another place she explained that the famine wascaused by God to teach the poor to be grateful tothe rich!
Let me remind you that probably thatvery scarcity has been permitted by an all-wiseand gracious Providence to unite all ranks ofpeople together, to show the poor how immediatelythey are dependent upon the rich, and to show bothrich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.It has also enabled you to see more clearly theadvantages you derive from the government andconstitution of this country—to observethe benefits flowing from the distinction ofrank and fortune, which has enabled the high toso liberally assist the low.
It appears that the villagers wereentirely convinced by this pious reasoning; forthey assembled one Saturday night and burnedan effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led toa tragic consequence, for one of the “commonpeople,” known as Robert, “was overtakenby liquor,” and was unable to appear atSunday School next day. This fall from grace occasionedintense remorse in Robert. “It preyeddreadfully upon his mind for many months,”records Martha More, “and despair seemedat length to take possession of him.” Hannahhad some conversation with him, and read himsome suitable passages from “The Rise andProgress”. “At length the Almightywas pleased to shine into his heart and givehim comfort.”
Nor should you imagine that this saintlystupidity was in any way unique in the Anglicanestablishment. We read in the letters ofShelley how his father tormented him with ArchdeaconPaley’s “Evidences” as a cure foratheism. This eminent churchman wrote abook, which he himself ranked first among hiswritings, called “Reasons for Contentment, addressedto the Labouring Classes of the British Public.”In this book he not merely proved that religion“smooths all inequalities, because it unfoldsa prospect which makes all earthly distinctionsnothing”; he went so far as to prove that,quite apart from religion, the British exploiters wereless fortunate than those to whom they paid ashilling a day.
Some of the conditions which poverty(if the condition of the labouring part of mankindmust 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 philanthropistas Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporterof Bible societies and foreign missions, a championof the anti-slavery movement, and also of the ruthless“Combination Laws,” which denied to Britishwage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot.Wilberforce published a “Practical View of theSystem of Christianity”, in which he told unblushinglywhat the Anglican establishment is for. In a chapterwhich he described as “the basis of all politics,”he explained that the purpose of religion is to remindthe poor
That their more lowly path has beenallotted to them by the hand of God; that itis their part faithfully to discharge its duties,and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that theobjects about which worldly men conflict so eagerlyare not worth the contest; that the peace ofmind, which Religion offers indiscriminatelyto all ranks, affords more true satisfactionthan all the expensive pleasures which are beyondthe poor man’s reach; that in this view the poorhave the advantage; that if their superiors enjoymore abundant comforts, they are also exposedto many temptations from which the inferior classesare happily exempted; that, “having foodand raiment, they should be therewith content,”since their situation in life, with all its evils,is better than they have deserved at the handof God; and finally, that all human distinctionswill soon be done away, and the true followersof Christ will all, as children of the same Father,be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenlyinheritance. Such are the blessed effects ofChristianity on the temporal well-being of politicalcommunities.
THE COURT CIRCULAR
The Anglican system of submission has been transplantedintact to the soil of America. When King Georgethe Third lost the sovereignty of the colonies, thebishops of his divinely inspired church lost the controlof the clergy across the seas; but this revolutionwas purely one of Church politics—in doctrineand ritual the “Protestant Episcopal Churchof America” remained in every way Anglican.The little children of our free republic are taughtthe same slave-catechism, “to order myself lowlyand reverently to all my betters.” Theonly difference is that instead of being told “tohonour and obey the King,” they are told “tohonour and obey the civil authority.”
It is the Church of Good Society in England, and itis the same in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,Washington, Charleston. Just as our ruling classeshave provided themselves with imitation English schoolsand imitation English manners and imitation Englishclothes—so in their Heaven they have providedan imitation English monarch. I wonder how manyAmericans realize the treason to democracy they arecommitting when they allow their children to be taughta 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 twenty years, yet the greaterpart of its contents is as familiar to me as the syllablesof my own name. I read:
Holy, holy, holy! All the saintsadore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns aroundthe glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim bowing down beforeThee,
Which wert, and art, and ever more shallbe!
One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus outof royal imagery. I turn at random to the partheaded “General,” and find that there ishardly one hymn in which there is not “king,”“throne,” or some image of homage andflattery. The first hymn begins—
Ancient of days, Who sittest, thronedin glory;
To Thee all knees are bent, all voicespray.
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 goodBritons look up, and about which they read with exactlythe same thrills as they read the Court Circular.The two courts have the same ethical code and thesame manners; their Sovereigns are jealous, greedyof attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious,punctilious and precise; their existence consistingof an endless round of ceremonies, and they beingincapable of boredom. No member of the Royal Familycan escape this regime even if he wishes; and no morecan any member of the Holy Family—not eventhe meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter’swife for his mother, and showed all his earthly daysa preference for low society.
This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he nevercarried weapons, he could not bear to have so muchas a human ear cut off in his presence. But seehow 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 unpretentiousmen on earth; utterly simple and honest—hewould not even let anyone praise him. When someone called him “good Master,” he answered,quickly, “Why callest thou me good? Thereis none good save one, that is, God.” Butthis simplicity has been taken with deprecation byhis church, which persists in heaping complimentsupon 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 honour,
To Thee, Redeemer, King....
The impression a modern man gets from all this isthe unutterable boredom that Heaven must be.Can one imagine a more painful occupation than thatof the saints—casting down their goldencrowns around the glassy sea—unless itbe that of the Triumvirate itself, compelled to sitthrough eternity watching these saints, and listeningto their mawkish and superfluous compliments!
But one can understand that such things are necessaryin a monarchy; they are necessary if you are goingto 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 timegoing through costly formalities—not becausethey enjoy it, but because of its effect upon thepopulace, which reads about them and sees their picturesin the papers, and now and then is allowed to catcha glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the horse-show,or the opera, or the coaching-parade.
#Horn-blowing#
I know the Church of Good Society in America, havingstudied it from the inside. I was an extraordinarilydevout little boy; one of my earliest recollections—Icannot have been more than four years of age—isof carrying a dust-brush about the house as the choir-boycarried the golden cross every Sunday morning.I remember asking if I might say the “Lord’sprayer” in this fascinating play; and my mother’sreply: “If you say it reverently.”When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my ownvolition and out of my own enthusiasm, every singleday during the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteenI was teaching Sunday-school. It was the Churchof the Holy Communion, at Sixth Avenue and TwentiethStreet, New York; and those who know the city willunderstand that this is a peculiar location—preciselyhalf way between the homes of some of the oldest andmost august of the city’s aristocracy, and someof the vilest and most filthy of the city’sslums. 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 themanner they so carefully cultivate, gracious, yetinfinitely aloof. The service was made for them—asall the rest of the world is made for them; the populacewas 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 haveever known. He could not bear to have the churchremain entirely the church of the rich; he would gopersistently into the homes of the poor, visiting theold slum women in their pitifully neat little kitchens,and luring their children with entertainments andChristmas candy. They were corralled into theSunday-school, where it was my duty to give them whatthey needed for the health of their souls.
I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sundayit would be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sundayit would be Jonah and the Whale, and next Sunday itwould be Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho.These stories were reasonably entertaining, but theyseemed to me futile, not to the point. Therewere little morals tagged to them, but these lackedrelationship to the lives of little slum-boys.Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord and allwill be well with you; which was about as true andas practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowinghorns to drive away a pestilence.
I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. Iwas reading the papers, and watching politics andbusiness. I followed the fates of my little slum-boys—andwhat I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them.The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the pandersand the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty thieves—allthese were paying the policeman and the politicianfor a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boysgot into trouble, as they were continually doing, itwas the clergyman who consoled them in prison—butit was the Tammany leader who saw the judge and gotthem out. So these boys got their lesson, evenearlier in life than I got mine—that thechurch 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 ladiesof Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticedthat they did nothing practical about it; and gradually,as I went on to investigate, I discovered the reason—thattheir incomes came from real estate, traction, gasand other interests, which were contributing the mainpart of the campaign expenses of the corrupt Tammanymachine, and of its equally corrupt rival. Soit appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen,aus dem Ei gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously,perhaps, but none the less effectively, in spreadingthe pestilence against which they were blowing theirreligious horns!
So little by little I saw my beautiful church forwhat it was and is: a great capitalist interest,an integral and essential part of a gigantic predatorysystem. I saw that its ethical and cultural andartistic features, however sincerely they might bemeant by individual clergymen, were nothing but abait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submissionto their exploiters. And as I went on probinginto the secret life of the great Metropolis of Mammon,and laying bare its infamies to the world, I saw theattitude of the church to such work; I met, not sympathyand understanding, but sneers and denunciation—untilthe venerable institution which had once seemed dignifiedand noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.
#Trinity Corporation#
There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Streeta towering brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautifuland most famous churches in America. As a childI have walked through its church yard and read thequaint and touching inscriptions on its grave-stones;when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, itseemed to me a sublime thing that here in the veryheart of the world’s infamy there should beraised, like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternityand 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 Trinityto my young soul; and what is it in reality?
The story was told some ten years ago by Charles EdwardRussell. Trinity Corporation is the name of theconcern, and it is one of the great landlords of NewYork. In the early days it bought a number offarms, and these it has held, as the city has grownup around them, until in 1908 their value was estimatedat anywhere from forty to a hundred million dollars.The true amount has never been made public; to quoteRussell’s words:
The real owners of the property arethe communicants of the church. For 94 yearsnone of the owners has known the extent of theproperty, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom,nor what is done with the money. Every attemptto learn even the simplest fact about these mattershas been baffled. The management is a selfperpetuating body, without responsibility andwithout supervision.
And the writer goes on to describe the business policyof this great corporation, which is simply the Englishland system complete. It refuses to sell theland, but rents it for long periods, and the tenantbuilds the house, and then when the lease expires,the Corporation takes over the house for a nominalsum. Thus it has purchased houses for as lowas $200, and made them into tenements, and rentedthem to the swarming poor for a total of fifty dollarsa month. The houses were not built for tenements,they have no conveniences, they are not fit for thehabitation of animals.
The article, in Everybody’s Magazine for July,1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyondbelief. To quote the writer again:
Decay, neglect and squalor seem tobrood wherever Trinity is an owner. Gladlywould I give to such a charitable and benevolentinstitution all possible credit for a spirit of improvementmanifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation.I have tramped the Eighth Ward day after day witha list of Trinity properties in my hand, and of allthe tenement houses that stand there on Trinityland, I have not found one that is not a disgraceto civilization and to the City of New York.
It happens that I once knew the stately prelate whopresided over this Corporation of Corruption.I imagine how he would have shivered and turned pale
had some angel whispered to him what devilish utteranceswere some day to proceed from the lips of the littlecherub with shining face and shining robes who actedas the bishop’s attendant in the stately ceremonialsof the Church! Truly, even into the goodly companyof the elect, even to the most holy places of the temple,Satan makes his treacherous way! Even under theconsecrated hands of the bishop! For while thebishop was blessing me and taking me into the companyof the sanctified, I was thinking about what the papershad reported, that the bishop’s wife had beenrobbed of fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels!It did not seem quite in accordance with the doctrineof Jesus that a bishop’s wife should possessfifty thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that sheshould be setting the bloodhounds of the police onthe train of a human being. I asked my clergymanfriend about it, and remember his patient explanation—thatthe bishop had to know all classes and conditionsof men: his wife had to go among the rich aswell as the poor, and must be able to dress so thatshe would not be embarrassed. The Bishop at thistime was making it his life-work to raise a milliondollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral;and this of course compelled him to spend much timeamong the rich!The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thoughtthere had to be cathedrals—despite thefact that both St. Stephen and St. Paul had declaredthat “the Lord dwelleth not in temples made withhands.” In the twenty-five years whichhave passed since that time the good Bishop has passedto his eternal reward, but the mighty structure whichis a monument to his visitations among the rich towersover the city from its vantage-point on MorningsideHeights. It is called the Cathedral of St. Johnthe Divine; and knowing what I know about the menwho contributed its funds, and about the general functionsof the churches of the Metropolis of Mammon, it wouldnot seem to me less holy if it were built, like themonuments of ancient ravagers, out of the skulls ofhuman beings.
#Spiritual Interpretation#
There remains to say a few words as to the intellectualfunctions of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let usrealize at the outset that they do their preachingin the name of a proletarian rebel, who was crucifiedas a common criminal because, as they said, “Hestirreth up the people.” An embarrassing“Savior” for the church of Good Society,you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up andmake him respectable.
I remember something analogous in my own boyhood.All day Saturday I ran about with the little streetrowdies, I stole potatoes and roasted them in vacantlots, I threw mud from the roofs of apartment-houses;but on Saturday night I went into a tub and was latheredand scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in a newlybrushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tieand a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which
made me impotent for mischief. Thus I was takenand paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of theduties of Good Society. And all church-membersgo through this same performance; the oldest and mostvenerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud allweek—and then take a hot bath of repentanceand put on the clean clothing of piety. In thissame way their ministers of religion are occupied toscrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder—toturn him from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-windowdivinity.The man who really lived, the carpenter’s son,they take out and crucify all over again. Asa young poet has phrased it, they nail him to a jeweledcross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me tothe New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; takethe nails of gold in your hands, try the weight ofthe jeweled sledges! Here is a sledge, in theform of a dignified and scholarly volume, publishedby the exclusive house of Scribner, and written bythe Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train Icarried in the stately ceremonials: “TheCitizen 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 beforethe sons of our predatory classes at Yale University,under the endowment of a millionaire mining king,founder of the Phelps-Dodge corporation, which theother day carried out the deportation from their homesof a thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona.Says my Bishop:
Christ did not denounce wealth anymore than he denounced pauperism. He didnot abhor money; he used it. He did not abhorthe company of rich men; he sought it. He didnot invariably scorn or even resent a certainprofuseness of expenditure.
And do you think that the late Bishop of J.P.Morgan and Company stands alone as an utterer of scholarlyblasphemy, a driver of golden nails? In the courseof this book there will march before us a long lineof the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their wayto the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter’sson: the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacherof the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust,the Archbishop of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires’Club, the Pastor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, theReligious Editor of the New Haven, the Sunday-schoolSuperintendent of Standard Oil. We shall trythe weight of their jewelled sledges—books,sermons, newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches—wherewiththey pound their golden nails of sophistry into thebleeding hands and feet of the proletarian Christ.
Here, for example, is Rev. F.G. Peabody, Professorof Christian Morals at Harvard University. Prof.Peabody has written several books on the social teachingsof Jesus; he quotes the most rabid of the carpenter’sdenunciations of the rich, and says:
Is it possible that so obvious andso limited a message as this, a teaching so slightlydistinguished from the curbstone rhetoric ofa modern agitator, can be an adequate reproductionof 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 churchattended by gentlemen, of universities where gentlemenare educated. So the Professor of Christian Moralsproceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus’actions; demonstrating therefrom that there are threeproper uses to be made of great wealth: first,for almsgiving—“The poor ye have alwayswith you!”; second, for beauty and culture—buyingwine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other#objets de vertu#; and third, “stewardship,”“trusteeship”—which in plainEnglish is “Big Business.”
I have used the illustration of soap and hot water;one can imagine he is actually watching the scrubbingprocess, seeing the proletarian Founder emerging allnew and respectable under the brush of this capitalistprofessor. The professor has a rule all his ownfor reading the scriptures; he tells us that whenthere are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretationis that “the more spiritual is to be preferred.”Thus, one gospel makes Jesus say: “Blessedare ye poor.” Another puts it: “Blessedare the poor in spirit.” The first oneis crude and literal; obviously the second must bewhat Jesus meant! In other words, the professorand his church have made for their economic mastersa 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 itsname they cut from the record of Jesus everythingwhich has relation to the realities of life!
So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummerchair at Harvard, writing on “Jesus Christ andthe Social Question,” and explaining:
The fallacy of the Socialist programis not in its radicalism, but in its externalism.It proposes to accomplish by economic changewhat can be attained by nothing less than spiritualregeneration.
And here is “The Churchman,” organ ofthe Episcopalians of New York, warning us:
It is necessary to remember that somethingmore than material and temporal considerationsare involved. There are things of more importanceto the purposes of God and to the welfare ofhumanity than economic readjustments and social amelioration.
And again:
Without doubt there is a strong temptationtoday, bearing upon clergy and laity alike, toaddress their religious energies too exclusivelyto those tasks whereby human life may be mademore abundant and wholesome materially.... Weneed constantly to be reminded that spiritualthings come first.
There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies
and gentlemen for whom these comfortable sayings areprepared: the vestrymen and pillars of the Church,with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shinytophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Eastercostumes in pastel shades, their gracious smiles andtheir sweet intoxicating odors. I picture themas I have seen them at St. George’s, where thataged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used topass the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, wherethey drove downtown in old-fashioned carriages withgrooms and footmen sitting like twin statues of insolence;at St. Thomas’, where you might see all the“Four Hundred” on exhibition at once; atSt. Mary the Virgin’s, where the choir paradedthrough the aisles, swinging costly incense into mychildish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alonewith nose upturned, carrying on his back a jewelledrobe for which some adoring female had paid sixtythousand dollars. “Spiritual things comefirst?” Ah, yes! “Seek first thekingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall be addedunto you!” And it is so dreadful about the Frenchand 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 organof the “Church of Good Society”?Business men contributeto the Y.M.C.A. because they realize
that if their employesare well cared for and religiously
influenced, they canbe of greater service in business!
Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?
* * * * *
#Book three#
#The Church of the Servant-girls#
Was it for this—that prayerslike these
Should spend themselves aboutthy feet,
And with hard, overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves ofmen should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
Was it for this—that men shouldmake
Thy name a fetter on men’snecks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
And women withered out ofsex?
Was it for this—that slavesshould 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 creaturesthat you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be at homea large number of other women who live sterile andempty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning upafter their luckier sisters. But these “domestics”also are human beings; they have emotions—or,in religious parlance, “souls;” it is necessaryto provide a discipline to keep them from appropriatingthe property of their mistresses, also to keep themfrom becoming #enceinte.# So it comes about that thereare two cathedrals in New York: one, St. Johnthe Divine, for the society ladies, and the other,
St. Patrick’s, for the servant-girls. Thelatter is located on Fifth Avenue, where its toweringwhite spires divide with the homes of the Vanderbiltsthe 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 theIrish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, eachwith a little black prayer-book in her hand. Whatis it they do inside? What are they taught aboutlife? This is the question to which we have nextto give attention.Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurancemagnate of New York, favored me with his justificationof his own career and activities. He mentionedhis charities, and, speaking as one man of the worldto another, he said: “The reason I put theminto the hands of Catholics is not religious, butbecause I find they are efficient in such matters.They don’t ask questions, they do what you wantthem to do, and do it economically.”
I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implicationsof the remark—like Agassiz when some onegave him a fossil bone, and his mind set to work toreconstruct the creature.
When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if itwas long hours and improper working-conditions whichdrove him to desperation; they do not ask if policeand politicians are getting a rake-off from the saloon,or if traction magnates are using it as an agency forthe controlling of votes; they do not plunge intoprohibition movements or good government campaigns—theysimply take the man in, at a standard price, and thepatient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober,and then turn him out for society to make him drunkagain. That is “charity,” and itis the special industry of Roman Catholicism.They have been at it for a thousand years, cleaningup loathsome and unsightly messes—“plague,pestilence and famine, battle and murder and suddendeath.” Yet—puzzling as it wouldseem to anyone not religious—there werenever so many messes, never so many different kindsof messes, as now at the end of the thousand yearsof charitable activity!
But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider,building and rebuilding his web across a door-way;like soldiers under the command of a ruling classwith a “muddling through” tradition—
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
And so of course all magnates and managers of industrywho have messes to be cleaned up, human garbage-heapsto be carted away quickly and without fuss, turn tothe Catholic Church for this service, no matter whattheir personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefsmay be. Somewhere in the neighborhood of everysteel-mill, every coal-mine or other place of industrialdanger, you will find a Catholic hospital, with itsslave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was“muck-raking” near Pittsburgh, I wentto one of these places to ask information as to thefrequency of industrial accidents and the fate of thevictims. The “Mother Superior” receivedme with a look of polite dismay. “Theseconcerns pay us!” she said. “You mustsee that as a matter of business it would not do forus to talk about them.”
Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law.And precisely as it is with the work of nursing andalmsgiving, so it is with the work of vote-getting,the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepersand ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls.This industry of vote-getting is a comparatively newone; but the Church has been handling the masses forso many centuries that she quickly learned this newway of “democracy,” and has establishedher supremacy over all rivals. She has the schoolsfor training the children, the confessional for controllingthe women; she has the intellectual machinery, thepurgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She hasthe supreme advantage that the rank and file of hermighty host really believe what she teaches; theydo not have to listen to table-rappings and flounderthrough swamps of automatic writings in order to bolstertheir hope of the survival of personality after death!
So it comes about that our captains of industry andfinance have been driven to a more or less reluctantalliance with the Papacy. The Church is here,and her followers are here, before the war severalhundred thousand of them pouring into the country everyyear. It is no longer possible to do withoutCatholics in America; not merely do ditches have tobe dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes washed,but franchises have to be granted, tariff-schedulesadjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police trainedand strikes crushed. Under our native politicalsystem, for these purposes millions of votes are needed;and these votes belong to people of a score of nationalities—Irishand German and Italian and French-Canadian and Bohemianand Mexican and Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian.Who but the Catholic Church can handle these polyglothordes? Who can furnish teachers and editors andpoliticians familiar with all these languages?
Considering how complex is the service, the priceis extremely moderate—the mere actual expensesof the campaign, the cost of red fire and torch-lights,of liquor and newspaper advertisem*nts. The restmay come out of the public till, in the form of exemptionfrom taxation of church buildings and lands, a shareof the public funds for charities and schools, thecontrol of the police for saloon-keepers and districtleaders, the control of police-courts and magistrates,of municipal administrations and boards of education,of legislatures and governors; with a few higher officesnow and then, to flatter our sacred self-esteem, asenator or a justice on the Supreme Court Bench; andon state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige,some cabinet-members and legislators and justices toattend High Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholicprelates and dignitaries.
You think this is empty rhetoric—you comfortable,easy-going, ultra-cultured Americans? You professorsin your classic shades, absorbed in “the passionlesspursuit of passionless intelligence”—whilethe world about you slides down into the pit!You ladies of Good Society, practicing your “sweetlittle charities,” pursuing your “dearlittle ideals,” raising your families of oneor two lovely children—while Irish andFrench-Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Hungariansare breeding their dozens and scores, and preparingto turn you out of your country!
#God’s Armor#
You remember “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,”Browning’s study of the psychology of a modernCatholic ecclesiastic. He is not unaware of modernthought, this bishop; he is a man of culture, who wantsto have beauty about him, to be a “cabin passenger”:
There’s power in me and will todominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else;
In many ways I need mankind’s respect,
Obedience, and the love that’s bornof 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 thereforeburn!
He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade fortruth, but he asks what there would be in it for him—
State the facts,
Read the text right, emancipate the world—
The emancipated world enjoys itself
With scarce a thank-you. Blougramtold it first
It could not owe a farthing,—notto him
More than St. Paul!
So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasilyconscious 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 uponthe chain of faith, that is what
Gives all the advantage, makes the difference,
With the rough, purblind mass we seekto rule.
We are their lords, or they are free ofus,
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 “KingBomba’s lazzaroni,” and “ragamuffinsaints.”
I wander into a Catholic bookstore and look to seewhat Bishop Blougram is doing with his lazzaroni andhis ragamuffin saints here in this new country ofthe far West. It is easy to acquire the information,for the saleswoman is polite and the prices fit mypurse. America is going to war, and Catholicboys are being drafted to be trained for battle; sofor ten cents I obtain a firmly bound little pamphletcalled “God’s Armor, a Prayer Book forSoldiers.” It is marked “Copyrightby the G.R.C. Central-Verein,” and bearsthe “Nihil Obstat” of the “CensorTheolog.” and the “Imprimatur” of“Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti.Ludovici”—which last you may at firstfail to recognize as a well-known city on the MississippiRiver. Do you not feel the spell of ancient things,the magic of the past creeping over you, as you readthose Latin trade-marks? Such is the Dead Hand,and its cunning, which can make even St. Louis soundmysterious!
In this booklet I get no information as to the commercialcauses of war, nor about the part which the clericalvote may have played throughout Europe in supportingmilitary systems. I do not even find anythingabout the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve ofa self-governing people to put an end to feudal rule.Instead I discover a soldier-boy who obeys and keepssilent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the gripof terrors both of body and soul. Poor, pitifulsoldier-boy, marking yourself with crosses, performinggenuflexions, mumbling magic formulas in the trenches—howmany billions of you have been led out to slaughterby the greeds and ambitions of your religious masters,since first this accursed Antichrist got its gripupon the hearts of men!
I quote from this little book:
Start this day well by lifting up yourheart to God. Offer yourself to Him, andbeg grace to spend the day without sin. Makethe sign of the cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father,Son, and Holy Ghost, behold me in Thy DivinePresence. 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 frequentlyto God. Your prayers need not be long norread from a book. Learn a few of these shortejacul*tions by heart and frequently repeat them.They will serve to recall God to your heart and willstrengthen you and comfort you.
You remember a while back about the prayer-wheelsof the Thibetans. The Catholic religion was foundedbefore the Thibetan, and is less progressive; it doesnot welcome mechanical devices for saving labor.You have to use your own vocal apparatus to keep yourselffrom hell; but the process has been made as economicalas possible by kindly dispensations of the Pope.Thus, each time that you say “My God and myall,” you get fifty days indulgence; the samefor “My Jesus, mercy,” and the same for“Jesus, my God, I love Thee above all things.”For “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” you get threehundred days—which would seem by all oddsthe best investment of your spare breath.
And then come prayers for all occasions: “Prayerbefore Battle”; “Prayer for a Happy Death”;“Prayer in Temptation”; “Prayer beforeand after Meals”; “Prayer when on Guard”;“Prayer before a long March”; “Prayerof Resignation to Death”; “Prayer for Thosein their Agony”—I cannot bear toread them, hardly to list them. I remember standingin a cathedral “somewhere in France” duringthe celebration of some special Big Magic. Therewas brilliant white light, and a suffocating strangeodor, and the thunder of a huge organ, and a clamorof voices, high, clear voices of young boys mountingto heaven, like the hands of men in a pit reachingup, 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 cancarry the mind so far back into the ancient nightmare
of anguish and terror which was once the mental lifeof mankind, as these Roman Catholic incantations withtheir frantic and ceaseless importunity. Theyhave even brought in the sex-spell; and the poor,frightened soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the nightwith a prostitute, now prostrates himself before aholy Woman-being who is lifted high above the shamesof the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe andaffection which his mother brought to him in earlychildhood. Read over the phrases of this “Litanyof the Blessed Virgin”:Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Motherof God. Holy Virgin of Virgins. Motherof Christ. Mother of divine grace. Mothermost pure. Mother most chaste. Motherinviolate. Mother undefiled. Mothermost amiable. Mother most admirable. Motherof good counsel. Mother of our Creator. Motherof our Savior. Virgin most prudent.Virgin most venerable. Virgin most renowned.Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful.Virgin most faithful. Mirror of justice.Seat of wisdom. Cause of our joy. Spiritualvessel. Vessel of honor. Singular vesselof devotion. Mystical rose. Tower of David.Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark ofthe covenant. Gate of heaven. MorningStar. 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. Queenof Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queenconceived without original sin. Queen ofthe most holy Rosary. Queen of Peace, Prayfor us.
#Thanksgivings#
For another five cents—how cheaply a manof insight can obtain thrills in this fantastic world!—Ipurchase a copy of the “Messenger of the SacredHeart”, a magazine published in New York, theissue for October, 1917. There are pages of advertisem*ntsof schools and colleges with strange titles:“Immaculata Seminary”, “Holy CrossAcademy”, “Holy Ghost Institute”,“Ladycliff”, “Academy of Holy ChildJesus”. The leading article is by a Jesuit,on “The Spread of the Apostleship of Prayeramong the Young”; and then “Sister Clarissa”writes a poem telling us “What are Sorrows”;and then we are given a story called “Prayerfor Daddy”; and then another Jesuit father tellsus about “The Hills that Jesus Loved”.A third father tells us about the “EucharisticPropaganda”; and we learn that in July, 1917,it distributed 11,699 beads, and caused the expenditureof 57,714 hours of adoration; and then the faithfulare given a form of letter which they are to writeto the Honorable Baker, Secretary of War, imploringhim to intimate to the French government that Franceshould withdraw from one of her advances in civilization,and join with mediaeval America in exempting priestsfrom being drafted to fight for their country.And then there is a “Question Box”—justlike the Hearst newspapers, only instead of askingwhether she should allow him to kiss her before hehas told her that he loves her, the reader asks whatis the Pauline Privilege, and what is the heroic Act,and is Robert a saint’s name, and if food remainsin the teeth from the night before, would it breakthe fast to swallow it before Holy Communion.(No, I am not inventing this.)
I quoted the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, andpointed out how deftly the Church has managed to slipin a prayer for worldly prosperity. But the CatholicChurch does not show any squeamishness in dealingwith its “million imbeciles”, its “rough,purblind mass”.
There is a department of the little magazine entitled“Thanksgiving”, and a statement at thetop that “the total number of Thanksgivings forthe month is 2,143,911.” I am suspiciousof that, as of German reports of prisoners taken;but I give the statement as it stands, not going throughthe list and picking out the crudest, but taking themas they come, classified by states:
General favors: Formany of these favors Mass and publication werepromised, for others the Badge of Promoter’sCross was used, for others the prayers of the Associateshad been asked.
Alabama—Jewelryfound, relief from pain, protection during
storm.
Alaska—Safereturn, goods found.
Arizona—Tworecoveries, suitable boarding place, illness
averted, safe delivery.
British Honduras—Successfuloperation.
California—Seventeen recoveries,six situations, two successful examinations,house rented, stocks sold, raise in salary, returnto religious duties, sight regained, medal won,Baptism, preservation from disease, contract obtained,success in business, hearing restored, Easterduty made, happy death, automobile sold, mindrestored, house found, house rented, successfuljourney, business sold, quarrel averted, returnof friends, two successful operations.
And for all these miraculous performances the Catholicmachine is harvesting the price day by day—harvestingwith that ancient fervor which the Latin poet describedas “auri sacra fames”. As ChristopherColumbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: “Goldis a wonderful thing. By means of gold we caneven get souls into Paradise.”
#The Holy Roman Empire#
The system thus self-revealed you admit is appallingin its squalor; but you say that at least it is milderand less perilous than the Church which burned GiordanoBruno and John Huss. But the very essence ofthe Catholic Church is that it does not change; #sempereadem# is its motto: the same yesterday, todayand forever—the same in Washington as inRome or Madrid—the same in a modern democracyas in the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church isnot primarily a religious organization; it is a politicalorganization, and proclaims the fact, and defies thosewho would shut it up in the religious field. TheRev. S.B. Smith, a Catholic doctor of divinity,explains in his “Elements of EcclesiasticalLaw”:
Protestants contend that the entirepower of the Church consists in the right toteach and exhort, but not in the right to command,rule, or govern; whence they infer that she isnot a perfect society or sovereign state. Thistheory is false; for the Church, as was seen,is vested #Jure divino# with power, (1) to makelaws; (2) to define and apply them #(potestasjudicialis)#; (3) to punish those who violateher laws #(potestas coercitiva)#.
And this is not one scholar’s theory, but theformal and repeated proclamation of infallible popes.Here is the “Syllabus of Errors”, issuedby Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in substancethat
The state has not theright to leave every man free to
profess and embracewhatever religion he shall deem true.
It has not the rightto enact that the ecclesiastical power
shall require the permissionof the civil power in order to
the exercise of itsauthority.
Then in the same Syllabus the rights and powers ofthe Church are affirmed in substance:
She has the right torequire the state not to leave every
man free to professhis own religion.
She has the right toexercise her power without the
permission or consentof the state.
She has the right ofperpetuating the union of church and
state.
She has the right torequire that the Catholic religion
shall be the only religionof the state, to the exclusion of
all others.
She has the right toprevent the state from granting the
public exercise of theirown worship to persons immigrating
from it.
She has the power ofrequiring 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 basisof civilization, ought at least to know what the CatholicChurch has to say about the matter. Here is Mgr.Segur, in his “Plain Talk About Protestantismof Today”, a book published in Boston and extensivelycirculated by American Catholics:
Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism;it is likewise the soul of modern rationalismand philosophy. It is one of those impossibilitieswhich only the levity of a superficial reasoncan regard as admissable. But a sound mind,that does not feed on empty words, looks upon thisfreedom of thought only as simply absurd, and,what is more, as sinful.
You take the liberty of thinking, nevertheless; youfeel safe because the Law will protect you. Butdo you imagine that this “Law” appliesto your Catholic neighbors? Do you imagine thatthey are bound by the restraints that bind #you#?Here is Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical of 1890—andplease remember that Leo XIII was the #beau ideal#of our capitalist statesmen and editors, as wise andkind and gentle-souled a pope as ever roasted a heretic.He says:
If the laws of the state are openlyat variance with the laws of God—ifthey inflict injury upon the Church—or setat naught the authority of Jesus Christ whichis vested in the Supreme Pontiff, then indeedit becomes a duty to resist them, a sin to renderobedience.
And consider how many fields there are in which thelaws of a democratic state do and forever must contravenethe “laws of God” as interpreted by theCatholic Church. Consider for example, that thePope, in his decree #Ne Temere#, has declared thatCatholics who are married by civil authorities orby Protestant clergymen will be living in “filthyconcubinage”! Consider, in the same way,the problems of education, burial, prison discipline,blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain, religiousendowments, vows of celibacy. To the above list,as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, suchas birth control, which have arisen since his time.
What the Church means is to rule. Her literatureis full of expressions of that intention, set forthin the boldest and haughtiest and most uncompromisingmanner. For example, Cardinal Manning, in thePro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name ofthe Pope:
I acknowledge no civil power; I amthe subject of no prince; I claim more than this—Iclaim to be the supreme judge and director ofthe consciences of men—of the peasant thattills the field, and of the prince that sits uponthe throne; of the household of privacy, andthe legislator that makes laws for kingdoms;I am the sole, last supreme judge of what isright and wrong.
#Temporal Power#
What this means is, that here in our American democracythe Catholic Church is a rebel; a prisoner of warwho bides his time, watching for the moment to risein revolt, and meantime making no secret of his intentions.The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true believers inAmerica, instructed them as to their attitude in captivity:
The Church amongst you, unopposed bythe Constitution and government of your nation,fettered by no hostile legislation, protectedagainst violence by the common laws and the impartialityof the tribunals, is free to live and act withouthindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it wouldbe very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in Americais to be sought the type of the most desirable statusof the church, or that it would be universally lawfulor expedient for state and church to be, as inAmerica, dissevered and divorced. The factthat Catholicity with you is in good condition,nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, isby all means to be attributed to the fecundity withwhich God has endowed His Church—But shewould bring forth more abundant fruits if, inaddition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor ofthe laws and patronage of the public authority.
Accordingly, here is Father Phelan of St. Louis, addressinghis flock in the “Western Watchman”, June27,1913:
Tell us we are Catholics first andAmericans or Englishmen afterwards; of coursewe are. Tell us, in the conflict betweenthe church and the civil government we take the sideof the church; of course we do. Why, if thegovernment of the United States were at war withthe church, we would say tomorrow, To hell withthe government of the United States; and if thechurch and all the governments of the world were atwar, we would say, To hell with all the governmentsof the world....Why is it that in this country,where we have only seven per cent of the population,the Catholic church is so much feared? Sheis 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. Allthe emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all thepresidents of the world, are as these altar boysof 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, togive laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes,to be revered and regarded. Here is a man swollento bursting with this Power. Dressed in his holyrobes, with his holy incense in his nostrils, andthe faces of the faithful gazing up at him awe-stricken,hear him proclaim:
The Church gives nobonds for her good behavior. She is the
judge of her own rightsand duties, and of the rights and
duties of the state.
And lest you think that an extreme example of ultramontanistarrogance, 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 eventhough Cardinals Farley, O’Connell andGibbons are at heart patriotic Americans and membersof an American hierarchy, yet they are as cardinalsforeign princes of the blood, to whom the UnitedStates, as one of the great powers of the world,is under an obligation to concede the same honorsthat they receive abroad.
Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visitan American man-of-war, he would be entitledto the salutes and to naval honors reserved fora foreign royal personage, and at any official entertainmentat Washington the Cardinal will outrank not merelyevery cabinet officer, the speaker of the house andthe vice-president, but also the foreign ambassadors,coming immediately next to the chief magistratehimself.
Incidentally, it maybe mentioned that when a royal
personage not of sovereignrank visits New York it is his
duty to make the firstcall on Cardinal Farley.
#Knights of Slavery#
Such is the worldly station of these apostles of thelowly Jesus. And what is their attitude towardstheir brothers in God, the rank and file of the membership,whose pennies grease the wheels of the ecclesiasticalmachine? His Holiness, the Pope, sent over a delegateto represent him in America, and at a convention ofthe Federation of Catholic Societies held in New Orleansin November, 1910, this gentleman, Diomede Falconio,delivered himself on the subject of Capital and Labor.We have heard the slave-code of the Anglican disciplesof Jesus, the revolutionary carpenter; now let us hearthe slave-code of his Roman disciples:
Human society has itsorigin from God and is constituted of
two classes of people,the rich and the poor, which
respectively representCapital and Labor.
Hence it follows that according tothe ordinance of God, human society is composedof superiors and subjects, masters and servants,learned and unlettered, rich and poor, nobles andplebeians.
And lest this should not be clear enough, the Popesent a second representative, Mgr. John Bonzano,who, speaking at a general meeting of the German CatholicCentral-Verein, St. Louis, 1917, declared:
One of the worst evils that may growout of the European war is the spreading of thedoctrine of Socialism, and the Catholic Churchmust be ready to counteract such doctrines. Wemust be ready to prevent the spread of Socialism andto work against it. As I understand, youhave a society of wealthy people in St. Louisready for such a campaign. You have experiencedleaders who are masters in their kind of work.They are always insistent to show that this wealthwas and is in close touch with the Church, andtherefore it will not fail.
This, you perceive, is the complete thesis of thepresent book, which therefore no doubt will be entitledto the “Nihil Obstat” of the “CensorTheolog.”, and the “Imprimatur” of“Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti.Ludovici.” No wonder that the “experiencedleaders” of America, our captains of industryand exploiters of labor, are forced, whatever theirown faith may be, to make use of this system of subjection.A few years ago we read in our papers how a Jewishmillionaire of Baltimore was presenting a fortune tothe Catholic Church, to be used in its war upon Socialism.The late Mark Hanna, the shrewdest and most far-seeingman that Big Business ever brought into power, saidthat in twenty years there would be two parties inAmerica, a capitalist and a socialist; and that itwould be the Catholic church that would save the countryfrom Socialism. That prophecy was widely quoted,and sank into the souls of our steel and railway andmoney magnates; from which time you might see, if youwatched political events, a new tone of deference tothe Roman Hierarchy on the part of our ruling classes.Today you cannot get an expression of opinion hostileto Catholicism into any newspaper of importance.The Associated Press does not handle news unfavorableto the Church, and from top to bottom, the politiciantakes off his hat when the Sacred Host goes by.Said Archbishop Quigley, speaking before the childrenof the Mary Sodality:
I’d like to seethe 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 palladiumof our liberties? As a means of demonstratingthe power of the church and the subservience of ourpoliticians, the Catholics have invented what theycall the “Cardinal’s Day Mass”:An elaborate procession of high ecclesiastics, dressedin gorgeous robes and jewels, through the streetsof Washington, accompanied by a small army of policemen,paid by non-Catholic taxpayers. The Cardinalseats himself upon a throne, and our political rulersmake obeisance before him. On Sunday, January14, 1917, there were present at this political massthe following personages: Four cabinet membersand their wives; the speaker of the House; a largegroup of senators and representatives; a general ofthe army and his wife; an admiral of the navy andhis wife; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court andhis wife, and another Justice of the Supreme Courtand his wife.
And understand that the church makes no secret ofits purpose in conducting such public exhibitions.Here is the pious Pope Leo XIII again, in his Encyclicalof Nov. 1, 1885:
All Catholics must make themselvesfelt as active elements in daily political lifein the countries where they live. They mustpenetrate, wherever possible, in the administrationof civil affairs; must constantly exert the utmostvigilance and energy to prevent the usages of libertyfrom going beyond the limits fixed by God’slaw. All Catholics should do all in theirpower to cause the constitutions of states andlegislation to be modeled on the principles ofthe true Church.
And following these instructions, the Catholics areorganized for political work. There are the variousCatholic Societies, such as the Knights of Columbus,secret, oath-bound organizations, the military armof the Papal Power. These societies boast somethree million members, and control not less than thatmany votes. The one thing that you can be certainabout these votes is that on every public question,of whatever nature, they will be cast on the side ofignorance and reaction. Thus, it was the influenceof the Catholic Societies which put upon our nationalstatute books the infamous law providing five yearsimprisonment and five thousand dollars fine for thesending through the mail of information about theprevention of conception. It is their influencewhich keeps upon the statute-books of New York statethe infamous law which permits divorce only for infidelity,and makes it “collusion” if both partiesdesire the divorce. It is these societies which,in every city and town in America, are pushing andplotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so thatthe public may not have a chance to read scientificbooks; to get Catholics into the public schools andon school-boards, so that children may not hear aboutGalileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in controlof police and on magistrates benches, so that priestswho are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished.
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, himselfa Catholic, that it was a common thing for them toget priests in their net. “Of course,”the official added, good-naturedly, “we letthem slip out.” I understood that he hadto do that; for the Pope, in his “Motu Proprio”decree, has forbidden Catholics to bring a priestinto court for any civil crime whatsoever; he has forbiddenCatholic policemen to arrest, Catholic judges to try,and Catholic law-makers to make laws affecting anypriest of the Church of Rome. And of course weknow, upon the authority of a cardinal, that the Popeis “the sole, last, supreme judge of what isright and wrong.” He has held that positionfor a thousand years and more; and wherever you consultthe police records throughout the thousand years, youfind the same entries concerning Catholic ecclesiastics.I turn to Riley’s “Illustrations of LondonLife from Original Documents,” and I find inthe year 1385 a certain chaplain, whose name is consideratelysuppressed, had a breviary stolen from him by a loosewoman, because he has not given her any money, eitheron that night or the one previous. In 1320 Johnde Sloghtre, a priest, is put in the tower “forbeing found wandering about the city against the peace”,and Richard Heyring, a priest, is indicted in theward of Farringdon and in the ward of Crepelgate “asbeing a bruiser and nightwalker.” That thishas been going on for six hundred years is due, notto any special corruption of the Catholic heart, butto the practice of clerical celibacy, which is contraryto 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 builtup its power through the Middle Ages. The priestshad children then, as they have them today; but thesechildren not being recognized, the church machine remainedthe sole heir of the property of its clergy.
#The Church Militant#
Knowing what we know today, we marvel that it waspossible for Germany to prepare through so many yearsfor her assault on civilization, and for England tohave slept through it all. In exactly the sameway, the historian of a generation from now will marvelthat America should have slept, while the New Inquisitionwas planning to strangle her. For we are toldwith the utmost explicitness precisely what is to bedone. We are to see wiped out these gains of civilizationfor which our race has bled and agonized for manycenturies; the very gains are to serve as the meansof their own destruction! Have we not heard PopeLeo tell his faithful how to take advantage of whatthey find in America—our easy-going trust,our quiet certainty of liberty, our open-handed andopen-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy?
We see the army being organized and drilled underour eyes; and we can read upon its banners its purposeproclaimed. Just as the Prussian military castehad its slogan “Deutschland ueber Alles!”so the Knights of Slavery have their slogan:“Make America Catholic!”
Their attitude to democratic institutions is attestedby the fact that none of their conventions ever failsin its resolutions to “deeply deplore the lossof the temporal power of Our Father, the Pope.”Their subjection to priestly domination is indicatedby such resolutions as this, bearing date of May 13th,1914:
The Knights of Columbus of Texas inannual convention assembled, prostrate at thefeet of Your Holiness, present filial regardswith assurances of loyalty and obedience to theHoly See and request the Papal blessing.
On June 10th, 1912, one T.J. Carey of Palestine,Texas, wrote to Archbishop Bonzano, the ApostolicDelegate: “Must I, as a Catholic, surrendermy political freedom to the Church? And by thisI mean the right to vote for the Democratic, Socialist,or Republican parties when and where I please?”The answer was: “You should submit to thedecisions of the Church, even at the cost of sacrificingpolitical principles.” And to the sameeffect Mgr. Preston, in New York City, Jan, 1,1888: “The man who says, ’I will takemy faith from Peter, but I will not take my politicsfrom Peter,’ is not a true Catholic.”
Such is the Papal machine; and not a day passes thatit does not discover some new scheme to advance thePapal glory; a “Catholic battle-ship”in the United States navy; Catholic chaplains on allships of the navy; Catholic holidays—suchas Columbus Day—to be celebrated by allProtestants in America; thirty million dollars worthof church property exempted from taxation in New YorkCity; mission bells to be set up at the expense ofthe state of California; state support for parishschools—or, if this cannot be had, exemptionof Catholics from taxation for school purposes.So on through the list which might continue for pages.
More than anything else, of course, the Papal machineis concerned with education, or rather, with the preventingof education. It was in its childish days thatthe race fell under the spell of the Priestly Lie;it is in his childish days that the individual canbe most safely snared. Suffer little childrento come unto the Catholic priest, and he will makeupon their sensitive minds an impression which nothingin after life can eradicate. So the mainstayof the New Inquisition is the parish-school, and itsdeadliest enemy is the American school system.Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society ofJesus, in his book, “The Rights of Our LittleOnes”:
Catholic parents cannot,in conscience, send their children
to American public schools,except for very grave reasons
approved by the ecclesiasticalauthorities.
While state education removes illiteracy and putsa limited amount of knowledge within the reach ofall, it cannot be said to have a beneficial influenceon civilization in general.
The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education,even in case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essentialphysical and moral education are sufficiently providedfor.
And so, at all times and in all places, the CatholicChurch is fighting the public school. Eternalvigilance 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 andother private schools. Now it is the free textbook law that puts a double burden on the Catholics.Then again it is the unwise extension of thecompulsory school age that forces children tobe in school until they are 16 to 18 years old.
And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholicschools, hear Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speakingbefore the children of the Mary Sodality in the HolyName Parish-School:
Within twenty years this country isgoing to rule the world. Kings and emperorswill pass away, and the democracy of the UnitedStates will take their place. The West will dominatethe country, and what I have seen of the Westernparochial schools has proved that the generationwhich follows us will be exclusively Catholic.When the United States rules the world the CatholicChurch will rule the world.
#The Church Triumphant#
The question may be asked, What of it? What ifthe Church were to rule? There are not a fewAmericans who believe that there have to be rich andpoor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be preferableto rule by Socialists. Before you decide, atleast do not fail to consider what history has totell about priestly government. We do not haveto use our imaginations in the matter, for there wasonce a Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreamsof, when the power of the church was complete, whenemperors and princes paid homage to her, and the civilauthority 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 wasunutterably depraved. Uniformity of faithhad been enforced by the Inquisition and itsmethods, and so long as faith was preserved, crimeand sin was comparatively unimportant exceptas a source of revenue to those who sold absolution.As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and purgatorywould be emptied if enough money could be found.The artificial standard thus created is seenin a revelation of the Virgin to St. Birgitta,that a Pope who was free from heresy, no matter howpolluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but thathe 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 acceptedand confirmed by God, and all priests who arenot heretics administer true sacraments, no matterhow depraved they may be. Correctness ofbelief was thus the sole essential; virtue wasa wholly subordinate consideration. Howcompletely under such a system religion and moralscame to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of PiusII, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians,but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct resultof the system of persecution embodied in theInquisition. Heretics who were admittedto be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminatedin the name of Christ, while in the same holy namethe orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilestof crimes for a few coins. When the onlyunpardonable offence was persistence in sometrifling error of belief, such as the povertyof Christ; when men had before them the exampleof their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debaucheryand contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions ofmorality were destroyed and the confusion between rightand wrong became hopeless. The world hasprobably never seen a society more vile thanthat of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinateus with their pictures of the artificial courtesiesof chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and ofTauler show us that spiritual life survived in somerare souls, but the mass of the population wasplunged into the depths of sensuality and themost brutal oblivion of the moral law. Forthis Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthoodwere accountable, and that, in comparison with them,the laity were holy. What was that state of comparativeholiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes,for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketchof universal immorality which nothing could purifybut fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclersdo not often pause in their narrations to dwellon 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 describethe prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies,adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine,thievery, robbery, gambling, whor*dom, debauchery,avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness,and similar vices, and he illustrates his statementwith the fact that in the territory of Ghent,within the space of ten months, there occurredno less than fourteen hundred murders committedin the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns,and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jeansans Peur led his Crusaders to destruction atMicopolis, their crimes and cynical debaucheryscandalized even the Turks, and led to the sternrebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk ofSt. Denis admits was much better than his Christianfoes. The same writer, moralizing over thedisaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the generalcorruption of the nation. Sexual relations,he says, were an alternation of disorderly lustand of incest; commerce was nought but fraud andtreachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes,and ordinary conversation was a succession ofblasphemies. The Church, set up by God asa model and protector of the people, was falseto all its obligations. The bishops, throughthe basest and most criminal of motives, were habitualaccepters of persons; they annointed themselves withthe last essence extracted from their flocks, and therewas in them nothing of holy, of pure, of wise,or even of decent.
#God in the Schools#
But that, you may say, was a long time ago. Ifso, let us take a modern country in which the CatholicChurch has worked its will. Until recently, Spainwas such a country. Now the people are turningagainst the clerical machine; and if you ask why,turn to Rafael Shaw’s “Spain From Within”:
On every side the people see the balefulhand of the Church, interfering or trying tointerfere in their domestic life, ordering theconditions of employment, draining them of theirhard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies establishedand maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders,placing obstacles in the way of their children’seducation, hindering them in the exercise of theirconstitutional rights, and deliberately ruiningthose of them who are bold enough to run counterto priestly dictation. Riots suddenly breakout in Barcelona; they are instigated by theJesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco;it is dragged into it solely in defense of the minesowned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits.The consumes cannot be abolished because the Jesuitsare financially interested in their continuance.
* * * * *
We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that“the state cannot justly enforce compulsoryeducation, even in case of utter illiteracy.”How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? Therewas an official investigation of school conditions,the report appearing in the “Heraldo de Madrid”for November, 1909. In 1857 there had been passeda law requiring a certain number of schools in eachof the 79 provinces: this requirement being belowthe very low standards prevailing at that time inother European countries. Yet in 1909 it wasfound that only four provinces had the required numberof elementary schools, and at the rate of increasethen prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catchup. Seventy-five per cent of the population werewholly illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages hadno government schools at all. The government owednearly a million and a half dollars in unpaid salariesto the teachers. The private schools were nearlyall “nuns’ schools”, which taughtonly needle-work and catechism; the punishments prevailingin them were “cruel and disgusting.”
As to the location of the schools, a report of theMinister of Education to the Cortes, the Parliamentof Spain, sets forth as follows:
More than 10,000 schools are on hiredpremises, and many of these are absolutely destituteof hygienic conditions. There are schoolsmixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughterhouses, with stables. One school forms the entranceto a cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master’stable while the last responses are being said.There is a school into which the children cannotenter until the animals have been sent out topasture. Some are so small that as soonas the warm weather begins the boys faint for wantof air and ventilation. One school is a manure-heapin process of fermentation, and one of the localauthorities has said that in this way the childrenare warmer in winter. One school in Catalunaadjoins the prison. Another, in Andalusia,is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when thereis a bull-fight in the town.
These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanisheducator by the name of Francesco Ferrer. Hefounded what he called a “modern school”,in which the pupils should be taught science and commonsense. He drew, of course, the bitter hatredof the Catholic hierarchy, which saw in the spreadof his principles the end of their mastery of thepeople. When the Barcelona insurrection took place,they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of having beenits instigator; they had him tried in secret beforea 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 scrupulousrectitude of mind. His conclusion is that Ferrerwas absolutely innocent of the charges against him,and that his execution was the result of a clericalplot. Of Ferrer’s character Archer writes:
Fragmentary though they be, the utteranceswhich 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 isdevoid, if not of egoism, at any rate of self-interestand self-seeking. As he shrank from applyingthe money entrusted him to ends of personal luxury,so also he shrank from making his ideas and convictionssubserve any personal ambition or vanity.
#The Menace#
There are, of course, many people in America who willnot rest idle while their country falls into the conditionof Spain. There are anti-Catholic propagandasocieties, which send out lecturers to discuss theChurch and its records; and this is exasperating todevout believers, who regard the Church as holy, andany criticism of it as blasphemy. So we haveopportunity to observe the working out of the doctrinethat the Church is superior to the civil law.
On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little townof Oelwein, Iowa, a former priest of the CatholicChurch, named Jeremiah J. Crowley, to deliver a lectureexposing the Papal propaganda. The Catholics ofthe town made efforts to intimidate the owner of theplace in which the lecture was to be given; the priestof the town, Father O’Connor, preached a sermonfuriously denouncing the lecturer; and after the lecturethe unfortunate Crowley was surrounded by a mob ofmen, women and boys, and although he was six feetthree in size, he was beaten almost to death.At the trial which followed it developed that FatherO’Connor and also his brother, a judge on theSuperior Bench, were accessories before the fact.
Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholicmilitary societies, with their uniforms and theirarmories, are not maintained for nothing. AsArchbishop Quigley declared before the German CatholicCentral Verein:
We have well ordered and efficientorganizations, all at the beck and nod of thehierarchy and ready to do what the church authoritiestell them to do. With these bodies of loyalCatholics ready to step into the breach at any timeand present an unbroken front to the enemy wemay feel secure.
And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a groupof Catholics entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado,overpowered a police guard and seized the Rev. OtisL. Spurgeon, an anti-Catholic lecturer. Theybound and gagged him, took him to a lonely woods, andbeat him to insensibility. The same thing happenedto the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev.William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. Ineach case the assailants avowed themselves Knightsof Columbus, and efforts to punish them failed, becauseno jury can be got to convict a Catholic, fightingfor his Pope against a godless state. The mostpious Leo XIII has laid down:
It is an impious deed to break thelaws of Jesus Christ for the purpose of obeyingthe magistrates, or to transgress the law ofthe Church under the pretext of observing the civillaw.
There are papers published to warn Americans againstthe plotting of this political Church. One ofthem, “The Menace,” has a circulation ofmore than a million; and naturally the Knights of Slaverydo not enjoy reading it. Year after year theyhave marshalled their power to have this paper barredfrom the mails—so far, in vain. Theycaused an obscenity prosecution, which failed; sofinally the press rooms of the paper were blown upwith dynamite. At the present time there is a“Catholic Truth Society” with a publicationcalled “Truth”, to oppose the anti-Catholiccampaign; and that is all right, of course—exceptwhen the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptionsto this publication make use of Untruth in their labors—promisingabsolution and salvation to the families, dead andliving, of those who “come across” withsubscriptions. In the “Bulletin of the AmericanFederation of Catholic Societies” for September,1915, I find a record of the ceaseless plotting tobar criticism of the Catholic Church from the mails.Fitzgerald, a Tammany Catholic congressman, proposesa 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 thePapal plotters will be accomplished if they can slipinto the present law the words “scurrilous andslanderous”; he hopes that this much can bedone without the American people catching on!
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 thesisof this book. It is not the New Inquisition whichis our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege.It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makesuse of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep’sclothing.
You remember how, when Americans first awakened tothe universal corruption of our politics, we usedto attribute it to the “ignorant foreign vote.”Turn to Lecky’s “Democracy and Liberty”and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explainedour 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 politicalboss paying bribes on election day, there was a captainof industry furnishing the money for the bribes, andtaking some public privilege in return. So wecame to realize that political corruption is merelya by-product of Big Business.
And when we come to probe this problem of the spreadof Superstition in America, this amazing renascenceof Romanism in a democracy, we find precisely thesame phenomenon. It is not the poor foreignerwho troubles us. Our human magic would win him—oureasy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty,our open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-metdemocracy. We should break down the Catholicmachine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy couldstop us—were it not for the Steel Trustand the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the LiquorTrust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust—thosemasters of America who do not want citizens, freeand intelligent and self-governing, but who want theslave-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 buildthe towering cathedrals; it is not the two-dollarcontributions for the salvation of souls which supportthe Catholic Truth Society and the Knights of Columbusand the Holy Name Society and the Mary Sodality andthe National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception andall the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda.These help, of course; but the main sources of growthare, first, the subsidies of industrial exploiters,the majority of whom are non-Catholic, and second,the privilege of public plunder granted as paymentfor votes by politicians who are creatures and puppetsof Big Business.
#King Coal#
The proof of these statements is written all overthe industrial life of America. I will stop longenough to present an account of one industry, askingthe reader to accept my statement that if space permittedI could present the same sort of proof for a dozenother industries which I have studied—thesteel-mills of Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factoriesof Chicago, the glass-works of Southern Jersey, thesilk-mills of Paterson, the cotton-mills of NorthCarolina, the woolen-mills of Massachusetts, the lumber-campsof Louisiana, the copper-mines of Michigan, the sweat-shopsof New York.
In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a groupof enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellersand other Protestant exploiters. The men whowork these mines, some twelve or fifteen thousandin number, come from all the nations of Europe andAsia, and their fate is that of the average wage-slave.I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present sworntestimony, taken by the United States Commission onIndustrial Relations in 1914. Here is the waythe Italian miners live, as described in a doctor’sreport:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, ofwhich eight are habitable, and forty-six simplyawful; they are disreputably disgraceful.I have had to remove a mother in labor from one partof the shack to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis,former superintendent of the Sociological Departmentof the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company:
The C.F. & I. Company now own and renthovels, shacks and dug-outs that are unfit forthe habitation of human beings and are littleremoved from the pig-sty make of dwellings. Andthe people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty.Frequently the population is so congested thatwhole families are crowded into one room; eightpersons in one small room was reported duringthe year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say aboutthe bosses whom the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendentsas a whole impressed me as most
uncouth, ignorant, immoral,and in many instances, the most
brutal set of men thatI have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed ofhis weights, and applies for the protection whichthe law of the state allows him. What happensthen?
“When a man askedfor a checkweighman, in the language of
the super he was gettingtoo 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’sreport:
Five strikers, one boy, and thirteenwomen and children in the strikers’ tentcolony were shot to death by militiamen and guardsemployed by the coal companies, or suffocated andburned to death when these militiamen and guardsset fire to the tents in which they made theirhomes.
And now, what is the position of education in suchcamps? The Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher,testified that the school building was dilapidatedand unfit. One year there were four teachers,the next three, and the next only two. The teacherof the primary grade had a hundred and twenty childrenen-rolled, ninety per cent of whom could not speaka word of English.
Every little bench wasseated with two or three. It was
over-crowded entirely,and she could hardly get walking room
around there.
And as to the political use made of this deliberatelycultivated ignorance, former United States SenatorPatterson testified that the companies controlledall elections and all nominations:
Election returns from the two or threecounties in which the large companies operateshow that in the precincts in which the miningcamps are located the returns are nearly unanimousin favor of the men or measures approved by the companies,regardless of party.
And now comes the all-important question. Whatof the Catholic Church and these evils? The majorityof these mine-slaves are Catholics, it is this Churchwhich is charged with their protection. Thereare priests in every town, and in nearly every camp.And do we find them lifting their voices in behalfof the miners, protesting against the starving andtorturing of thirty or forty thousand human beings?Do we find Catholic papers printing accounts of theLudlow massacre? Do we find Catholic journalistson the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defendingthe strikers, Catholic novelists writing books abouttheir troubles? We do not!
Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike,I know of just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre,who had a word to say for the strikers. One ofthe first stories I heard when I reached the strike-fieldwas of a priest who had preached on the text that“Idleness is the root of all evil,” andhad been reported as a “scab” and madeto shut up. “Who made him?” I asked,naively, thinking of his, church superiors. Myinformant, a union miner, laughed. “#We# madehim!” he said.
I talked with another priest who was prudently savingsouls and could not be interested in questions ofworldly greed. Max Eastman, reporting the strikein the “Masses”, tells of an interviewwith a Catholic sister.
“Has the Churchdone anything to try to help these people,
or to bring about peace?”we asked. “I consider it the most
useless thing in theworld to attempt it,” she replied.
The investigating committee of Congress came to thescene, and several clergymen of the Protestant Churchappeared and bore testimony to the outrages whichwere being committed against the strikers; but of allthe Catholic priests in the district not one appeared—notone! Several Protestant clergymen testified thatthey had been driven from the coal-camps—notbecause they favored the unions, but because the companiesobjected to having their workers educated at all; butno one ever heard of the Catholic Church having troublewith the operators. To make sure on this pointI wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who watchedthe whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant inthe First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:
The Catholic Church seemed to get alongwith the companies very cordially. The Churchwas permitted in all the camps. The impressionwas abroad that this was due to favoritism. Ihonor what good the Church does, but I know ofno instance, during the Colorado coal-strikeor at any other time or place, when the CatholicChurch has taken any special interest in thecause of the laboring men. Many Catholics, especiallythe men, quit the church during the coal-strike.
#The Unholy Alliance#
Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate sourceof all power, political, social, and religious, iseconomic exploitation. To all other powers andall other organizations it speaks in these words:“Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us, andyou will be destroyed.” It has spoken tothe Catholic Church, for sixteen hundred years thefriend and servant of every ruling class; and the Churchhas hastened to fit itself into the situation, continuingits pastoral role as shepherd to the wage-slave vote.
In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is “Democratic”;so in the Elaine campaign it was possible for a Republicanclergyman to describe the issue as “Rum, Romanismand Rebellion.” But the Holy Office wasshrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old Partywas desperately in need of votes, so under the regimeof Mark Hanna, the President-Maker, there began arapprochement between Big Business and the New Inquisition.Under Hanna the Catholic Church got representationin the Cabinet; under him the Cardinal’s Massbecame a government institution, a Catholic Collegecame to the fore in Washington, and Catholic prelateswere introduced in the role of eminent publicists,their reactionary opinions on important questionsbeing quoted with grave solemnity by a prostitute press.It was Mark Hanna himself who founded the NationalCivic Federation, upon whose executive committee Catholiccardinals and archbishops might work hand in glovewith Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming ofthe American working-class. Hanna’s biographernaively calls attention to the President-maker’spopularity among Catholics, high and low, and thesupport they gave him. “Archbishop Irelandwas in frequent correspondence with him, and usedhis influence in Mr. Hanna’s behalf.”
And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continuedunder Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower inthe days of Taft, the most pliant tool of the forcesof evil who has occupied the White House since thedays of the Slave Power. President Taft was himselfa Unitarian; yet it was under his administration thatthe 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 possibilityof progress; it is desired to find men who will standlike a rock against change—and who betterthan those who have been trained from childhood inthe idea of a divine sanction for doctrine and morals?After all, what is it that Hereditary Privilege wantsin America? A Roman Catholic code of propertyrights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part ofan infallible Pope!
Under this Taft administration the country was governedby the strangest legislative alliance our historyever saw; a combination of the Old Guard of the RepublicanParty with the leaders of the Tammany Democracy ofNew York. “Bloody shirt” Foraker,senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those IrishCatholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shotdown in the draft-riots! By this unholy combinationa pledge to reduce the tariff was carried out by abill which greatly increased its burdens; by thiscombination the public lands and resources of thecountry were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievishSecretary of the Interior. And of course undersuch an administration the cause of “Religion”made tremendous strides. Catholic officials wereappointed to public office, Catholic ecclesiasticswere accorded public honors, and Catholic favor becamea means to political advancement. You might seea hard-swearing old political pirate like “UncleJoe” Cannon, taking his cigar out of the cornerof his blasphemous mouth and betaking himself to the“Cardinal’s Day Mass”, to bend hisstiff knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head beforea jeweled prelate on a throne. You might seean emissary of the United States government proceedingto Rome, prostrating himself before the Pope, andpaying over seven million dollars of our taxes forlands which the filthy and sensual friars of the PhilippineIslands had filched from the wretched serfs of thatcountry and which the wretched serfs had won back bytheir blood in a revolution.
#Secret Service#
This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholicintrigue, made the most determined efforts to preventthe spread of radical thought. Because the popularmagazines were opposing the plundering of the country,a bill was introduced into Congress to put them outof business by a prohibitive postal tax; the Presidenthimself devoted all his power to forcing the passageof this bill. At the same time the Socialistpress was handicapped by every sort of persecution.I was at that time in intimate touch with the “Appealto Reason”, and I know that scarcely a monthpassed that the Post Office Department did not inventsome new “regulation” especially designedto limit its circulation. I recall one occasionwhen I met the editor on his way to Washington witha trunkful of letters from subscribers who complainedthat their postmasters refused to deliver the paperto them; and later on this same editor was prosecutedby a Catholic Attorney General and sentenced to prisonfor seeking to awaken the people concerning the Moyer-Haywoodcase.
From my personal knowledge I can say that under theadministration of President Taft t the Roman CatholicChurch and the Secret Service of the Federal Governmentworked hand in hand for the undermining of the radicalmovement in America. Catholic lecturers touredthe country, pouring into the ears of the public vileslanders about the private morality of Socialists;while at the same time government detectives, paidout of public funds, spent their time seeking evidencefor these Catholic lecturers to use. I know oneman, a radical labor-leader, whose morals happenedto approach those of the average capitalist politician,and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandalfrom accepting the Socialist nomination for President.I know a dozen others who were shadowed and spiedupon; I know one case—myself—aman who was asking a divorce from his wife, and whosemail was opened for months.
This subject is one on which I naturally speak withextreme reluctance. I will only say that my opponentin the suit made no charge of misconduct against me;but those in control of our political police evidentlythought it likely that a man who was not living withhis wife might have something to hide; so for monthsmy every move was watched and all my mail intercepted.In such a case one might at first suspect one’sprivate opponent; but it soon became evident that thisnet was cast too wide for any private agency.Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail ofall my relatives and friends—people residingin places as far apart as California and Florida.I recall the bland smile of a government officialto whom I complained about this matter: “Ifyou have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.”My answer was that a study of many labor cases hadtaught me the methods of the agent provocateur.He is quite willing to take real evidence if he canfind it; but if not, he has familiarized himself withthe affairs of his victim, and can make evidence whichwill 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 attackon Big Business, the Taft administration had beenrepudiated at the polls, and the Secret Service ofthe government was no longer at the disposal of theCatholic machine.
#Tax Exemption#
Today the Catholic Church is firmly established andeverywhere recognized as one of the main pillars ofAmerican capitalism. It has some fifteen thousandchurches, fourteen million communicants, and propertyvalued at half a billion dollars. Upon this propertyit pays no taxes, municipal, state or national; whichmeans, quite obviously, that you and I, who do notgo to church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the publiccosts of Catholicism. We pay to have streets pavedand lighted and cleaned in front of Catholic churches;we pay to have thieves kept away from them, firesput out in them, records preserved for them—all
the services of civilization given to them gratis,and this in a land whose constitution provides thatCongress (which includes all state and municipal legislativebodies) “shall make no law respecting an establishmentof religion.” When war is declared, andour sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholicmonks and friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted.They are “ministers of religion”; whereaswe Socialists may not even have the status of “conscientiousobjectors.” We do not teach “religion”;we only teach justice and humanity, decency and truth.In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stockanswer is that the property is being used for purposesof “education” or “charity”.It is a school, in which children are being taughtthat “liberty of conscience is a most pestiferouserror, from which arises revolution, corruption, contemptof sacred things, holy institutions, and laws.”(Pius IX). It is a “House of Refuge”,to which wayward girls are committed by Catholic magistrates,and in which they are worked twelve hours a day ina laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a“parish-house”, in which a celibate priestlives under the care of an attractive young “house-keeper”.Or it is a nunnery, in which young girls are heldagainst their will and fed upon the scraps from theirsisters’ plates to teach them humility, and taughtto lie before the altar, prostrate in the form ofa cross, while their “Superiors” walkupon their bodies to impress the religious virtues.“I was a teacher in the Catholic schools upto a very recent period,” writes the woman friendwho tells me of these customs, “and I know aboutthe whole awful system which endeavors to throttleevery genuine impulse of the human will.”
Concerning a large part of this church property, theclaim of “religious” use has not eventhe shadow of justification. In every large cityof America you will find acres of land owned by theCatholic machine, and supposed to be the future siteof some institution; but as time goes on and propertyvalues increase, the church decides to build on acheaper site, and proceeds to cash in the profitsof its investment, precisely as does any other realestate speculator. Everywhere you turn in thehistory of Romanism you find it at this same game,doing business under the cloak of philanthropy andin the holy name of Christ. Read the letter whichthe Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope in1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and theirboundless graft. In McCabe’s “CandidHistory of the Jesuits” appears a summary:
A remarkable account is given of theworldly 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 cattleand other property. They own six large sugarrefineries, worth from half a million to a millioncrowns each, and making an annual profit of 100,000crowns each, while all the other monks and clergyof Mexico together own only three small refineries.They have immense farms, rich silver mines, largeshops and butcheries, and do a vast trade.Yet they continually intrigue for legacies—awoman has recently left them 70,000 crowns—andthey refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them.It is piquant to add to this authoritative descriptionthat the Jesuit congregation at Rome were stillperiodically forbidding the fathers to engagein commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely maintainthat the society never engaged in commerce. Itshould be added that the missionaries were stillheavily subsidized by the King of Spain, thatthere were (the Bishop says) only five or sixJesuits to each of their establishments, andthat they conducted only ten colleges.
#"Holy History"#
And if you think this tax-exemption privilege shouldbe taken away from the church grafters, let me suggesta course of procedure. Write a letter about itto your daily newspaper; and if the letter is notpublished, go and see the editor and ask why; so youwill learn something about the partnership betweenSuperstition and Big Business!
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaperin any large American city dares to attack the emolumentsof the Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictionsupon 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 heraldit as an important social event. Each paper hasthe picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd’scrook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidalfool’s cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfita grand opera company. The Los Angeles “Examiner”,the only paper in the city with a pretense to radicalism,turns loose its star-writer—one of thosejournalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West“rodeo” one day, and a society elopementthe next, and a G.O.P. convention the next; and alwayswith his picture, one inch square, at the head of hiseffusion. He takes in the Catholic festivity;and does it phaze him? It does not! He isa newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him tohell, he would take the assignment and write like thedevil. To read him now you might think he hadbeen reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, andhe bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
Solemnly magnificent, every brilliantdetail symbolically picturing the holy historyof the Roman Catholic Church in the inexorableprogress of its immense structure, which risesfrom the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith anddevotion piercing the fog of doubt and fear whichsurround the world and the worldly, was the ceremonyyesterday at the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, wherebyBishop John J. Cantwell was installed in hisdiocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.
And then, a month later, conies another occasion ofstate—the twenty-third Annual Banquet.the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association
of Los Angeles. I should have to write a littleessay to make clear the sociological significanceof that function; explaining first, a nation-wideorganization which has been proven by congressionalinvestigation and by the publication of its secretdocuments to be a machine for the corruption of ourpolitical life; and then exhibiting our “Cityof the Angels”, from which all Angels have longsince fled; a city in the first crude stage of landspeculation, without order, dignity or charm; a cityof real estate agents, who exist by selling climateto new arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectuallife is “boosting”, whose standards oftruth are those of the horse-trade. Its newspaperspublish a table of temperatures, showing the dailycontrast between Southern California and the East.This device is effective in the winter-time; but lastJune, when for five days the temperature went to over110, and several times 114—the Los Angelesspace was left empty!In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quakeshocks are never mentioned, unless they destroy wholetowns. On the afternoon of Jan. 26th, 1918, acyclone hit Pasadena, of violence sufficient to lifta barn over a church-steeple and deposit it in thepastor’s front yard. That evening a friendof mine in Los Angeles called up the office of the“Times” to make inquiry; and although theyare only thirteen miles away, and have a branch officeand a special correspondent in Pasadena, the answerwas that they had heard nothing about the cyclone!And next morning I made a careful, search of theircolumns. On the front page I read: “FourthBlizzard of Season Raging in East”; also:“Another Earthquake in Guatemala”.But not a line about the Pasadena cyclone. Thatthere was plenty of space in that issue, you may judgefrom the fact that there were twenty headlines likethe following—many of them representingfull page and half page illustrated “write-ups”:
Where Spring is January;Wealth Waits in California; The
Bright Side of SunshineLand; Come to California:
Southland’s ArmsOutstretched in Cordial Invitation to the
East; Flower StandsMake Gay City Streets; Southland Climate
Big Manufacturing Factor;Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los
Angeles’ BeautifulHomes; 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 allthe more delightful, because we are putting our soulsinto it, we are lending our money to the governmentand saving the world for Democracy! Our laborunionists have been driven to other cities, and ourMexican agitators and I.W.W.’s are in jail;so, in the gilt ball-room of our palatial six-dollar-a-dayhotel the four hundred masters of our prosperity meetto pat themselves on the back, and they invite thenew Catholic bishop to come and confer the grace ofGod upon their eating.
The Bishop comes; and I take up the “Times”—thelabor-hating, labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing“Times”—and here is the episcopalpicture on the front page, the arms stretched fourcolumns wide in oratorical beneficence. How theshepherd of Jesus does love the Merchants and Manufacturers!How his eloquence is poured out upon them! “Yourepresent, gentlemen, the largest and the most civilizingsecular body in the country. You are the pioneersof American civilization.... I am glad to beamong you; glad that my lines have fallen in thisglorious land by the sunset sea, and honored to meetin intimate acquaintance the big men who have raisedhere in a few years a city of metropolitan proportions.”
And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities asguardian of Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tellthem about the coming class-war. “On theone side a statesman preaching patience and respectfor vested rights, strict observance of public faith;on the other a demagog speaking about the tyrannyof capitalists and usurers.” And then,of course, the inevitable religious tag: “Howwill men obey you, if they believe not in God, whois the author of all authority?” At which, accordingto the “Times”, “prolonged applauseand cheers” from the Merchants and Manufacturers!The editor of the “Times” goes back tohis office, and inspired by this episcopal eloquencewrites a “leader” with the statement that:“#We have no proletariat in America!#”
#Das Centrum#
In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of thisUnholy Alliance, this union of Superstition and theMerchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association,we have to go to Europe, where the arrangement hasbeen working for a thousand years. In Europeto-day we see the whole world in conflict with a bandof criminals who have been able to master the mindsand lives of a hundred million highly civilized people.As I write, the Junker aristocracy is at bay, andsoon to have its throat cut; but there comes a HolyFather to its rescue, with the cross of Jesus uplifted,and a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna,edited in Berlin, and sent out from Rome. TheHoly Father loves all mankind with a tender and touchinglove; his heart bleeds at the sight of bloodshed andsuffering, and he pleads the sacred cause of peaceon earth and good-will toward men.
But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-threeyears that the Potsdam gang were preparing for theirassault on the world? How was the Holy Fathermanifesting his love of peace and good will? Heis, you understand, the “sole, last, supremejudge of what is right and wrong,” and his followersobey him with the utmost promptness and devotion—theyexpress 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 intothe world’s greatest military empire”—whatdid the Roman Church answer? Did it speak boldly
for the gentle Jesus, and the cause of peace on earthand good-will towards men? No, it did not.To Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it saidto Mark Hanna in America: “Give us honorsand prestige; give us power over the minds of theyoung, so that we may plunder the poor and build ourcathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return wewill furnish you with votes, so that you may rulethe state and do what you will.”You think there is exaggeration in that statement?Why, we know the very names of the prelates with whomthe master-cynic of the Junkerthum made his “deal.”He had tried the method of the Kultur-kampf, and hadfailed; but before he repealed the anti-Catholic laws,he made sure that the Church had learned its lesson,and would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste.We know how this bargain was carried out; we havethe record of the Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany,whose hundred deputies were the solid rock upon whichthe military regime of Prussia was erected. Nota battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which theBlack Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-childwas beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisitiondid not shout its “Hoch!” The writer satin the visitors’ gallery of the Reichstag whenthe Socialists were protesting against the torturingof miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard thedeputies of the Holy Father’s political partyscreaming their rage like jaguars in a jungle night.All over Europe the Catholic Church organized fakelabor unions, the “yellows,” as they werecalled, to scab upon the workers and undermine therevolutionary movement. The Holy Father himselfissued precise instructions for the management ofthese agencies of betrayal. Hear the most piousand benevolent Leo XIII:
“They must pay special and principalattention to piety and morality, and their internaldiscipline must be directed precisely by theseconsiderations; otherwise they entirely losetheir special character, and come to be very littlebetter than those societies which take no accountof Religion at all.”
It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking aboutpiety and morality while he is starving! I amquoting from the Encyclical Letter on “The Conditionof Labor,” issued in 1891, and addressed “toour Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates,Archbishops and Bishops of the Catholic World in Graceand Communion with the Apostolic See.”The purpose of the letter is “to refute falseteaching,” and the substance of its messageis:
This great labor questioncannot be solved except by
assuming as a principlethat private property must be held
sacred and inviolable.
And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in languageas frank as any used in the present book:
The chief thing to be secured is thesafe-guarding, by legal enactment and policy,of private property. Most of all it is essentialin these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitudewithin the line of duty; for if all may justly striveto benefit their condition, yet neither justice northe common good allows any one to seize that whichbelongs to another, or, under the pretext offutile and ridiculous equality, to lay handson other peoples’ fortunes.
And this, you understand, in lands where rapine andconquest, class-tyranny and priestly domination havebeen the custom since the dawn of history; in whichno property-right can possibly trace back to any otherbasis 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 $625,000a year! In other words, Austria is still to alarge extent a “Priestly Empire;” and itwas Austria which began the war—began itin a religious quarrel, with a Slav people which doesnot acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of theworld, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church.So of course to-day, when Austria is learning thebitter lesson that they who draw the sword shall perishby the sword, the heart of the Holy Father is wrungwith grief, and he sends out these eloquent peace-notes,written in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And atthe same time his private chaplain is convicted andsentenced to prison for life as Austria’s Master-Spyin Rome!
It is a curious thing to observe—the naturalinstinct which, all over the world, draws Superstitionand Exploitation together. This war, which ishailed as a war against autocracy, might almost asaccurately be described as a war against the clericalsystem. Wherever in the world you find the Papalpower strong, there you find sympathy with the Prussianinfamy and there you find German intrigue. InSpain, for example; in Ireland and Quebec, and inthe Argentine. The treatment of Belgium was alittle too raw—too many priests were shotat the outset, and so Cardinal Mercier denounces theGermans; but you notice that he pleads in vain withthe Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved Austria,and against the godless kingdom of Italy. TheKaiser allows the hope of restoration of the temporalpower at the peace settlement; and meantime the lawforbidding the presence of the Jesuits in Germanyhas been repealed, and all over the world the propagandistsof this order are working for the Kaiser. SirRoger Casem*nt was raised a Catholic, and so also“Jim” Larkin, the Irish labor-leader whois touring America denouncing the Allies.The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beatconscription in Australia, and it was Catholic propagandaof treachery among the ignorant peasant-soldiers fromSicily which caused the breaking of the Italian lineat Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct worked
that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist partyin New York was campaigning for immediate peace, theCatholic Irish suddenly forgot their ancient horrors.The Catholic “Freeman’s Journal”published nine articles favoring Socialism in a singleissue; while even “The Tablet,” the diocesanpaper, began to discover that the Socialists were notsuch bad fellows after all. The same “Tablet”which a few years ago allowed Father Belford to declarethat Socialists were mad dogs who should be “stoppedwith a bullet”!P. S. The reader will be interestedto know that for the statements on page 155,Upton Sinclair was described as a “scoundrel”by a former prime minister of the Austrian Empire,and brought suit against the gentleman, and after acourt trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns—about$7 in American money.
* * * * *
#Book four#
#The Church of the Slavers#
Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
The eye-balls fierce, thefeatures grim!
And merrily from night to morn
We chaunt his praise and worshiphim—
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 incensefills the air,
And Death attests in street and lane
The hideous glory of his reign.
—Buchanan
* * * * *
#Face of Caesar#
The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogmain producing mental paralysis, and the use of thismental paralysis by Economic Exploitation. Fromthat standpoint the various Protestant sects are betterthan the Catholic, but not much better. The Catholicsstand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an InspiredWord; but since this Word is the entire literary product,history and biography, science and legislation, poetry,drama and fiction of a whole people for somethinglike a thousand years, it is possible by judiciousselection of texts to prove anything you wish to proveand to justify anything you wish to do. The “HolyBook” being full of polygamy, slavery, rapeand wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulersunder the direct orders of God, it was a very simplematter for the Protestant Slavers to construct a Bibledefense of their system.
They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony,that most dangerous form of utterance. If hecould come back to life, and see what men have donewith his little joke about the face of Caesar on theRoman coin, I think he would drop dead. As forPaul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsensein his make-up; when he ordered, “Servants obeyyour masters,” he meant exactly what he said.The Roman official stamp which he put upon the gospelof Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers fromthe Reformation on.
In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germanywere suffering the most atrocious and awful misery;Luther himself knew about it, he had denounced theprincely robbers and the priestly land-exploiterswith that picturesque violence of which he was a master.But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever isdone about it—until at last the miserablepeasants attempted to organize and win their own rights.Their demands do not seem to us so very criminal aswe read them today; the privilege of electing theirown pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the rightto hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reductionof exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor,and—that universal cry of peasant communeswhether in Russia, England, Mexico or sixteenth centuryGermany—the restoration to the villageof lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hearnothing of slaves asserting their own rights, andtook refuge in the Pauline sociology: If theyreally wished to follow Christ, they would drop thesword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do withspiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly societycannot exist without inequalities, etc.
And when the peasants went on in spite of this, heturned upon them and denounced them to the princes;he issued proclamations which might have been theinstructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the police-forceof his “City of Brotherly Love”: “Onecannot answer a rebel with reason, but the best answeris to hit him with the fist until blood flows fromthe nose.” He issued a letter: “Againstthe Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants,”which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin,Fifth Avenue Pastor of Standard Oil: “Theass needs to be beaten, and the populace needs tobe controlled with a strong hand. God knew thiswell, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox’stail, but a sword.” He implored these rulers,after the fashion of Methodist Chancellor Day of theUniversity of Syracuse: “Do not be troubledabout the severity of their repression, for it willsave many souls.” With such pious exhortationsin their ears the princes set to work, and slaughtereda hundred thousand of the miserable wretches; theycompletely aborted the social hopes of the Reformation,and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery andmilitarism for four centuries. As a church scholar,Prof. Rauschenbusch, puts it:
The glorious years of the LutheranReformation were from 1517 to 1525, when thewhole nation was in commotion, and a great revolutionarytidal wave seemed to be sweeping every classand every higher interest one step nearer to its idealof life.... The Lutheran Reformation hadbeen most truly religious and creative when itembraced the whole of human life and enlistedthe enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements.When it became “religious” in the narrowsense, it grew scholastic and spiny, quarrelsome,and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and noblelife.
#Deutschland ueber Alles#
As a result of Luther’s treason to humanity,his church became the state church of Prussia, andBible-worship and Devil-terror played their part,along with the Mass and the Confessional, in buildingup the Junker dream. A court official—theOberhofprediger—was set up, and from thattime on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminalsin Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestralgenius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believeddevoutly in religion for his subjects. He said:“If my soldiers were to begin to think, not onewould remain in the ranks.” And Carlyle,instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocularapproval how he kept them from thinking:
He recognizes the uses of Religion;takes a good deal of pains with his PreachingClergy; will suggest texts to them; and for therest expects to be obeyed by them, as by his Sergeantsand Corporals. Indeed, the reverend men feelthemselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants,Corporals, and Captains, to whom obedience isthe rule, and discontent a thing not to be indulgedin by any means.
So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederickraided Silesia and Poland. His successors orderedall the Protestant sects into one, so that they mightbe more easily controlled; from which time the LutheranChurch 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 statesdemanded their liberty, it was an ultra-pious kingof Prussia who sent his troops and shot them down—preciselyas Luther had advised to shoot down the peasants.At this time the future maker of the German Empirerose in the Landtag and made his bow before the world;a young Prussian land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck byname, he shook his fist in the face of the new Germanliberalism, and incidentally of the new German infidelity:
Christianity is thesolid basis of Prussia; and no state
erected upon any otherfoundation can permanently exist.
The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintainedthis tradition of his line. It was his customto tour the Empire in a train of blue and white cars,carrying as many costumes as any stage favorite, mostof them military; with him on the train went the Prussiangod, and there was scarcely a performance at whichthis god did not appear, also in military costume.After the failure of the “Kultur-kampf,”the official Lutheran religion was ordered to makefriends with its ancient enemy, the Catholic Church.Said the Kaiser:
I make no difference between the adherentsof the Catholic and Protestant creeds. Letthem both stand upon the foundation of Christianity,and they are both bound to be true citizens andobedient subjects. Then the German people willbe the rock of granite upon which our Lord God canbuild 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 trustworthinesswith their Protestant confreres:
I will be submissive, faithful andobedient to his Royal Majesty,—andhis lawful successors in the government,—asmy most gracious King and Sovereign; promote hiswelfare according to my ability; prevent injuryand detriment to him; and particularly endeavorcarefully to cultivate in the minds of the peopleunder my care a sense of reverence and fidelitytowards the King, love for the Fatherland, obedienceto the laws, and all those virtues which in a Christiandenote a good citizen; and I will not suffer any manto teach or act in a contrary spirit. In particularI vow that I will not support any society orassociation, either at home or abroad, whichmight endanger the public security, and willinform His Majesty of any proposal made, eitherin my diocese or elsewhere, which might prove injuriousto the State.
And later on this heaven-guided ruler conceived thescheme of a Berlin-Bagdad railway, for which he neededone religion more; he paid a visit to Constantinople,and made another debut and produced another god—withthe result that millions of Turks are fighting underthe belief that the Kaiser is a convert to the faithof Mohammed!
#Der Tag.#
All this was, of course, in preparation for the greatevent to which all good Germans looked forward—towhich all German officers drank their toasts at banquets—theDay.
This glorious day came, and the field-gray armiesmarched forth, and the Pauline-Lutheran God marchedwith them. The Kaiser, as usual, acted as spokesman:
Remember that the German people arethe chosen of God. On me, the German emperor,the spirit of God has descended. I am Hissword, His weapon and His viceregent. Woe to thedisobedient and death to cowards and unbelievers.
As to the Prussian state religion, its attitude tothe war is set forth in a little book written by ahigh clerical personage, the Herr ConsistorialratDietrich Vorwerk, containing prayers and hymns forthe soldiers, and for the congregations at home.Here is an appeal to the Lord God of Battles:
Though the warrior’s bread bescanty, do Thou work daily death and tenfoldwoe unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful long-sufferingeach bullet and each blow which misses its mark.Lead us not into the temptation of letting our wrathbe too tame in carrying out Thy divine judgment.Deliver us and our ally from the Infernal Enemyand his servants on earth. Thine is thekingdom, the German land; may we, by the aidof Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the fame and the glory.
It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetratedthe great masterpiece of humor of the war—thehymn in which he appeals to that God who keeps guardover Cherubim, Seraphim, and Zeppelins. You haveto say over the German form of these words in orderto get the effect of their delicious melody—“Cherubinen,Seraphinen, Zeppelinen!” And lest you thinkthat this too-musical clergyman is a rara avis, turnto the little book which has been published in Englishunder the same title as Herr Vorwerk’s “Hurrahand Hallelujah.” Here is the Reverend S.Lehmann:
Germany is the center of God’splans for the world. Germany’s fightagainst the whole world is in reality the battleof the spirit against the whole world’s infamy,falsehood and devilish cunning.
And here is Pastor K. Koenig:
It was God’s willthat we should will the war.
And Pastor J. Rump:
Our defeat would meanthe defeat of His Son in humanity. We
fight for the causeof Jesus within mankind.
And here is an eminent theological professor:
The deepest and most thought-inspiringresult of the war is the German God. Notthe national God such as the lower nations worship,but “our God,” who is not ashamed of belongingto us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart.
#King Cotton#
It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days,to denounce the Prussian system; my only purpose isto show that Bible-worship, precisely as saint-worshipor totem-worship, delivers the worshipper up to theSlavers. This truth has held in America, preciselyas in Prussia. During the middle of the lastcentury there was fought out a mighty issue in ourfree republic; and what was the part played in thisstruggle by the Bible-cults? Hear the testimonyof William Lloyd Garrison: “American Christianityis the main pillar of American slavery.”Hear Parker Pillsbury: “We had almost toabolish the Church before we could reach the dreadfulinstitution at all.”
In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly,which represented the churches of the South as wellas of the North, passed by a #unanimous# vote a resolutionto the effect that “Slavery is utterly inconsistentwith the law of God, which requires us to love ourneighbor as ourselves.” But in a generationthe views of the entire South, including the PresbyterianChurch, had changed entirely. What was the reason?Had the “law of God” been altered?Had some new “revelation” been handeddown? Nothing of the kind; it was merely thata Yankee by the name of Eli Whitney had perfected amachine to take the seeds out of short staple cotton.The cotton crop of the South increased from four thousandbales in 1791 to four hundred and fifty thousand in1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in 1860.
There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empiredepended upon slaves. According to the customof monarchs since the dawn of history, he hired theministers of God to teach that what he wanted was rightand holy. From one end of the South to the otherthe pulpits rang with the text: “Cursedbe Canaan; a servant to servants shall he be to hisbrethren.” The learned Bishop Hopkins, inhis “Bible View of Slavery”, gave thestandard interpretation of this text:
The Almighty, forseeing the total degredationof the Negro race, ordained them to servitudeor slavery under the descendants of Shem andJapheth, doubtless because he judged it to betheir fittest condition.
I might fill the balance of this volume with citationsfrom defenses of the “peculiar institution”in the name of Jesus Christ—and not onlyfrom the South, but from the North. For it mustbe understood that leading families of Massachusettsand New York owed their power to Slavery; their fathershad brought molasses from New Orleans and made itinto rum, and taken it to the coast of Africa to beexchanged for slaves for the Southern planters.And after this trade was outlawed, the slave-growncotton had still to be shipped to the North and spun;so the traders of the North must have divine sanctionfor the Fugitive Slave law. Here is the Bishopof Vermont declaring: “The slavery of thenegro race appears to me to be fully authorized bothin the Old and New Testaments.” Here inthe “True Presbyterian”, of New York,giving the decision of a clerical man of the world:“There is no debasem*nt in it. It mighthave existed in Paradise, and it may continue throughthe Millenium.”
And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the Southrose in arms against those who presumed to interferewith this divine institution, the men of God of theSouth called down blessings upon their armies in wordswhich, with the proper change of names, might havebeen spoken in Berlin in August, 1914. Thus Dr.Thornwell, one of the leading Presbyterian divinesof the South: “The triumph of Lincoln’sprinciples is the death-knell of slavery.... Letus crush the serpent in the egg.” And theReverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: “Thewar is a war against slavery, and is therefore treasonablerebellion against the Word, Providence and Governmentof God.” I read in the papers, as I amwriting, how the clergy of Germany are thundering againstPresident Wilson’s declaration that that countrymust become democratic. Here is a manifesto ofthe German Evangelical League, made public on thefour hundredth anniversary of the Reformation:
We especially warn against the heresy,promulgated from America, that Christianity enjoinsdemocratic institutions, and that they are anessential condition of the kingdom of God onearth.
In exactly the same way the religious bodies of theentire South united in an address to Christians throughoutthe world, early in the year 1863:
The recent proclamation of the Presidentof the United States, seeking the emancipationof the slaves of the South, is in our judgmentoccasion of solemn protest on the part of thepeople of God.
#Witches and Women#
To whatever part of the world you travel, to whateverpage of history you turn, you find the endowed andestablished clergy using the word of God in defenseof whatever form of slave-driving may then be popularand profitable. Two or three hundred years agoit was the custom of Protestant divines in Englandand America to hang poor old women as witches; onlya hundred and fifty years ago we find John Wesley,founder of Methodism, declaring that “the givingup of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of theBible.” And if you investigate this witch-burning,you will find that it is only one aspect of a blotupon civilization, the Christian Mysogyny. Yousee, there were two Hebrew legends—onethat woman was made out of a man’s rib, andthe other that she ate an apple; therefore in modernEngland a wife must be content with a legal statuslower than a domestic servant.
Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims isthis—that Christianity has promoted chivalryand respect for womanhood. In ancient Greeceand Rome the woman was the equal and helpmate of man;we read in Tacitus about the splendid women of theGermans, who took part in public councils, and evenfought in battles. Two thousand years beforethe Christian era we are told by Maspero that theEgyptian woman was the mistress of her house; she couldinherit equally with her brothers, and had full controlof her property. We are told by Paturet thatshe was “juridically the equal of man, havingthe same rights and being treated in the same fashion.”But in present-day England, under the common law,woman can hold no office of trust or power, and herhusband has the sole custody of her person, and ofher children while minors. He can steal her children,rob her of her clothing, and beat her with a stickprovided it is no thicker than his thumb. WhileI was in London the highest court handed down a decisionon the law which does not permit a woman to divorceher husband for infidelity, unless it has been accompaniedby cruelty; a man had brought his mistress into hishome and compelled his wife to work for and wait uponher, and the decision was that this was not crueltyin the meaning of the law!
And if you say that this enslavement of Woman hasnothing to do with religion—that ancientHebrew fables do not control modern English customs—thenlisten to the Vicar of Crantock, preaching at St.Crantock’s, London, Aug. 27th, 1905, and explainingwhy women must cover their heads in church:
(1) Man’s priorityof 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 womanfor the man.
(4) Results in creation.The man is the image of the glory
of God, but woman isthe glory of man.
(5) Woman’s priorityin 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 wivesbe to their husbands.
(7) The headship ofman and woman. The head of every man is
Christ, but the headof the woman is man.
I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justifiedby these ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendoma clergy which cannot be persuaded to cite them atthe demand of ruling classes. In the city whereI write, three clergymen are being sent to jail forsix months for protesting against the use of the nameof Jesus in the wholesale slaughter of men. Now,I am backing this war. I know that it has tobe fought, and I want to see it fought as hard as possible;but I want to leave Jesus out of it, for I know thatJesus did not believe in war, and never could havebeen brought to support a war. I object to clericalcant on the subject; and I note that an eminent theologicalauthority, “Billy” Sunday, appears to agreewith me; for I find him on the front page of my morningpaper, assailing the three pacifist clergymen, andmaking his appeal not to Jesus, but to the blood-thirstytribal diety of the ancient Hebrews:
I suppose they think they know morethan God Almighty, who commanded the sun to standstill while Joshua won the battle for the Lord;more than the God who made Samson strong so he couldslay thousands of his nation’s enemies in a righteouscause.
Right you are, Billy! And if the capitalist systemcontinues to develop unchecked, we shall some daysee it dawn upon the masters of the world how wastefulit is to permit the superannuated workers to perishby slow starvation. So much more sensible to makeuse of them! So we shall have a Bible defenseof cannibalism; we shall hear our evangelists quotingLeviticus: “#They shall eat the flesh oftheir own sons and daughters.#” Or perhaps someof our leisure-class ladies might make the discoverythat the flesh of working-class babies is relishedby pomeranians and poodles. If so, the Billy Sundaysof the twenty-first century may discover the text:“#Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheththy little ones against the stones.#”
#Moth and Rust#
It is especially interesting to notice what happenswhen the Bible texts work against the interests ofthe Slavers and their clerical retainers. Thenthey are null and void—and no matter howprecise and explicit and unmistakable they may be!Take for example the Sabbath injunction: “Sixdays shalt thou labor and do all that thou hast todo.” Karl Marx records of the pious Englandof his time that
Occasionally in rural districts a day-laboureris condemned to imprisonment for desecratingthe Sabbath by working in his front garden.The same labourer is punished for breach of contractif he remains away from his metal, paper or glassworks on the Sunday, even if it be from a religiouswhim. The orthodox Parliament will hear nothingof Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the processof expanding capital.
Or consider the attitude of the Church in the matterof usury. Throughout ancient Hebrew history themoney-lender was an outcast; both the law and theprophets denounced him without mercy, and it was madeperfectly clear that what was meant was, not the takingof high interest, but the taking of any interest whatsoever.The early church fathers were explicit, and the CatholicChurch for a thousand years consigned money-lendersunhesitatingly to hell. But then came the moderncommercial system, and the money-lenders became themasters of the world! There is no more amusingillustration of the perversion of human thought thanthe efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape fromthe dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had trappedthem.
Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuitof the eighteenth century, a doctor of the Church,now worshipped as St. Alphonsus, presenting a longand elaborate theory of “mental usury”;concluding that, if the borrower pay interest of hisown free will, the lender may keep it. In answerto the question whether the lender may keep what theborrower pays, not out of gratitude, but out of fearthat otherwise loans will be refused to him in future,Ligouri says that “to be usury, it must be paidby reason of a contract, or as justly due; paymentby reason of such a fear does not cause interest tobe paid as an actual price.” Again the greatsaint and doctor tells us that “it is not usuryto exact something in return for the danger and expenseof regaining the principal!” Could the houseof J. P. Morgan and Company ask more of their ecclesiasticaldepartment?
The reader may think that such sophistications arenow out of date; but he will find precisely the sameknavery in the efforts of present-day Slavers to fitJesus Christ into the system of competitive commercialism.Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a carpenter’sson, a thoroughly class-conscious proletarian.He denounced the exploiters of his own time with ferociousbitterness, he drove the money-changers out of thetemple with whips, and he finally died the death ofa common criminal. If he had forseen the wholemodern cycle of capitalism and wage-slavery, he couldhardly have been more precise in his exortations tohis followers to stand apart from it. But didall this avail him? Not in the least!
I place upon the witness-stand an exponent of Bible-Christianitywhom all readers of our newspapers know well:a scholar of learning, a publicist of renown; oncepastor of the most famous church in Brooklyn; noweditor of our most influential religious weekly; aliberal both in theology and politics; a modernist,an advocate of what he calls industrial democracy.His name is Lyman Abbott, and he is writing underhis own signature in his own magazine, his subjectbeing “The Ethical Teachings of Jesus”.Several times I have tried to persuade people thatthe words I am about to quote were actually writtenand published by this eminent doctor of divinity, andpeople have almost refused to believe me. ThereforeI 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 bold face being Dr. Abbott’s, not mine:
My radical friend declares that theteachings of Jesus are not practicable, thatwe cannot carry them out in life, and that wedo not pretend to do so. Jesus, he reminds us,said, ‘Lay not up for yourself treasuresupon earth;’ and Christians do universallylay up for themselves treasures upon earth; everyman that owns a house and lot, or a share ofstock in a corporation, or a life insurance policy,or money in a savings bank, has laid up for himselftreasure upon earth. But Jesus did not say,“Lay not up for yourselves treasures uponearth.” He said, “Lay not up foryourselves treasures upon earth where moth andrust doth corrupt and where thieves break throughand steal.” And no sensible Americandoes. Moth and rust do not get at Mr. Rockefeller’soil wells, nor at the Sugar Trust’s sugar, andthieves do not often break through and steal arailway or an insurance company or a savingsbank. What Jesus condemned was hoardingwealth.
Strange as it may sound to some of the readers ofthis book, I count myself among the followers of Jesusof Nazareth. His example has meant more to methan that of any other man, and all the experiencesof my revolutionary life have brought me nearer tohim. Living in the great Metropolis of Mammon,I have felt the power of Privilege, its scourge uponmy back, its crown of thorns upon my head. WhenI read that article in the “Outlook”,I felt just as Jesus himself would have felt; andI sat down and wrote a letter—
#To Lyman Abbott#
This discovery of a new method of interpreting theBible is one of such very great interest and importancethat I cannot forbear to ask space to comment uponit. May I suggest that Dr. Abbott elaborate thisexceedingly fruitful lea, and write us another articleupon the extent to which the teachings of the InspiredWord are modified by modern conditions, by the progressof invention and the scientific arts? The pointof view which Dr. Abbott takes is one which had neveroccurred to me before, and I had therefore been completelymistaken as to the attitude of Jesus on the question.Also I have, like Dr. Abbott, many radical friendswho are still laboring under error.
Jesus goes on to bid his hearers: “Considerthe lilies of the field, how they grow; they toilnot, neither do they spin.” What an aptsimile is this for the “great mass of Americanwealth,” in Dr. Abbott’s portrayal ofit! “It is serving the community,”he tells us; “it is building a railway to opena new country to settlement by the homeless; it isoperating a railway to carry grain from the harvestsof the West to the unfed millions of the East,”etc. Incidentally, it is piling up dividendsfor its pious owners; and so everybody is happy—andJesus, if he should come back to earth, could neverknow that he had left the abodes of bliss above.
Truly, there should be a new school of Bible interpretationfounded upon this brilliant idea. Jesus says,“Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do notsound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do inthe synagogues and in the streets, that they may haveglory of men.” Verily not; for of whatavail are trumpets, compared with the millions ofcopies of newspapers which daily go forth to tell ofMr. Rockefeller’s benefactions? How transitoryare they, compared with the graven marble or granitewhich Mr. Carnegie sets upon the front of each ofhis libraries!
There is the paragraph, “Neither shalt thouswear by thy head, because thou canst not make onehair white or black.” I have several amongmy friends who are Quakers; presumably Dr. Abbotthas also; and he should not fail to point out to themthe changes which scientific discovery has wroughtin the significance of this command against swearing.We can now make our hair either white or black, ora combination of both. We can make it a brilliantperoxide golden; we could, if pushed to an extreme,make it purple or green. So we are clearly entitledto swear all we please by our head.
Nor should we forget to examine other portions ofthe Bible according to this method. “Looknot 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 beveragesin the chemical laboratory, and their color is a matterof choice. Also, it should be pointed out thatwe have a number of pleasant drinks which are not wineat all—“high-balls” and “ginrickeys” and “peppered punches”;also #vermouthe and creme de menthe and absinthe#,which I believe, are green in hue, and therefore entirelysafe.
Then there are the Ten Commandments. “Thoushalt not make unto thee any graven image.”See how completely our understanding of this commandis changed, so soon as we realize that we are freeto make images of molten metal! And that we maywith impunity bow down to them and worship them andserve them—even, for instance, a GoldenCalf!
“The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lordthy God; in it thou shalt not do any work,thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant,nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor the strangerthat is within thy gates.” This, again,it will be noted, is open to new interpretations.It specifies maidservants, but does not prevent one’semploying as many married women as he pleases.It also says nothing about the various kinds of labor-savingmachinery which we have now taught to work for us—sail-boats,naptha launches, yachts, automobiles, and privatecars—all of which may be busily occupiedduring the seventh day of the week. The men whorun these machines—the guides, boatmen,stokers, pilots, chauffeurs, and engineers—wouldall indignantly resent being regarded as-"servants”,and so they do not come under the prohibition any morethan the machines.
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house,thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, norhis manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, norhis ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”I read this paragraph over for the first time in quitea while, and I came with a jolt to its last words.I had been intending to point out that it said nothingabout a neighbor’s automobile, nor a neighbor’soil wells, sugar trusts, insurance companies and savingsbanks. The last words, however, stop one of-abruptly.One is almost tempted to imagine that the Divine Intelligencemust have foreseen Dr. Abbott’s ingenious methodof interpretation, and taken this precaution againsthim. And this was a great surprise to me—for,truly, I had not supposed it possible that such aninterpretation could have been foreseen, even by Omniscienceitself. I will conclude this communication byventuring the assertion that it could not have beenforeseen by any other person or thing, in the heavensabove, on the earth beneath, or the waters under theearth. Dr. Abbott may accept my congratulationsupon having achieved the most ingenious and masterfulexhibition of casuistical legerdemain that it hasever been my fortune to encounter in my readings inthe literatures of some thirty centuries and sevendifferent languages.
And I will also add that I respectfully challengeDr. Abbott to publish this letter. And I announceto him in advance that if he refuses to publish it,I will cause it to be published upon the first pageof the “Appeal to Reason”, where it willbe read by some five hundred thousand Socialists,and by them set before several million followers ofJesus Christ, the world’s first and greatestrevolutionist, whom Dr. Lyman Abbott has traduced andbetrayed by the most amazing piece of theologicalknavery that it has ever been my fortune to encounter.
#The Octopus#
Dr. Lyman Abbott published this letter! In hiseditorial comment thereon he said that he did notknow which of two biblical injunctions to follow:“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lestthou be thought like unto him”; or “Answera fool according to his folly, lest he be wise inhis own conceit”. I replied by pointingout a third text which the Reverend Doctor had possiblyoverlooked: “He that calleth his neighbora 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 whichcomes sooner or later to us muck-rakers. In thiscase it came speedily. The story is such a perfectillustration of the functions of religion as oil tothe machinery of graft that I ask the reader’spermission to recite it at length.
For a couple of decades the political and financiallife of New England has been dominated by a giganticaggregation of capital, the New York, New Haven andHartford Railroad. It is a “Morgan”concern; its popular name, “The New Haven”,stands for all the railroads of six states, nearlyall the trolley-lines and steamship-lines, and a groupof the most powerful banks of Boston and New York.It is controlled by a little group of insiders, whofollowed the custom of rail-road-wrecking familiarto students of American industrial life: buyingup new lines, capitalizing them at fabulous sums, andunloading them on the investing public; paying dividendsout of capital, “passing” dividends asa means of stock manipulation, accumulating surplusesand cutting “melons” for the insiders,while at the same time crushing labor unions, squeezingwages, and permitting rolling-stock and equipmentto go to wreck.
All these facts were perfectly well known in WallStreet, and could not have escaped the knowledge ofany magazine editor dealing with current events.In eight years the “New Haven” had increasedits capitalization 1501 per cent; and what that meant,any office boy in “the Street” could havetold. What attitude should a magazine editortake to the matter?
At that time there were still two or three free magazinesin America. One of them was Hampton’s,and the story of its wrecking by the New Haven criminalswill some day serve in school text-books as the classicillustration of that financial piracy which broughton the American social revolution. Ben Hamptonhad bought the old derelict “Broadway Magazine”,with twelve thousand subscribers, and in four years,by the simple process of straight truth-telling, hadbuilt up for it a circulation of 440,000. Intwo years more he would have had a million; but inMay, 1911, he announced a series of articles dealingwith the New Haven management.
The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, wereso exact that they read today like the reports ofthe Interstate Commerce Commission, dated three yearslater. A representative of the New Haven calledupon the editor of Hampton’s with a proof ofthe first article—obtained from the printerby bribery—and was invited to specify thestatements to which he took exception; in the presenceof witnesses he went over the article line by line,and specified two minor errors, which were at oncecorrected. At the end of the conference he announcedthat if the articles were published, Hampton’sMagazine would be “on the rocks in ninety days.”
Which threat was carried out to the letter. Firstcame 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 amongthe banks—the magazine could not get credit.Anyone familiar with the publishing business willunderstand that a magazine which is growing rapidlyhas 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 campaignwas begun to destroy their confidence.
It happened that I was in Hampton’s office inthe summer of 1911, when the crisis came. Moneyhad to be had to pay for a huge new edition; and upona property worth two millions of dollars, with endorsem*ntsworth as much again, it was impossible to borrow thirtythousand dollars in the city of New York. Bankers,personal friends of the publisher, stated quite openlythat word had gone out that any one who loaned moneyto him would be “broken”. I myselfsent telegrams to everyone I knew who might by anychance be able to help; but there was no help, andHampton retired without a dollar to his name, and themagazine was sold under the hammer to a concern whichimmediately wrecked it and discontinued publication.
#The Industrial Shelley#
Such was the fate of an editor who opposed the “NewHaven”. And now, what of those editorswho supported it? Turn to “The Outlook,a Weekly Journal of Current Events,” editedby Lyman Abbott—the issue of Dec. 25th,nineteen hundred and nine years after Christ came downto bring peace on earth and good-will toward WallStreet. You will there find an article by SylvesterBaxter entitled “The Upbuilding of a Great Railroad.”It is the familiar “slush” article whichwe professional writers learn to know at a glance.“Prodigious”, Mr. Baxter tells us, hasbeen the progress of the New Haven; this was “amasterstroke”, that was “characteristicallysagacious”. The road had made “prodigiousexpenditures”, and to a noble end: “Transportationefficiency epitomizes the broad aim that animatedthese expenditures and other constructive activities.”There are photographs of bridges and stations—“vastterminal improvements”, “a masterpieceof modern engineering”, “the highest,greatest and most architectural of bridges”.Of the official under whom these miracles were beingwrought—President Mellen—we read:“Nervously organized, of delicate sensibility,impulsive in utterance, yet with an extraordinarilyconvincing power for vividly logical presentation.”An industrial Shelley, or a Milton, you perceive;and all this prodigious genius poured out for thegeneral welfare! “To study out the sortof transportation service best adapted to these ends,and then to provide it in the most efficient formpossible, that is the life-task that President Mellenhas set himself.”
There was no less than sixteen pages of these raptures—quitea section of a small magazine like the “Outlook”.“The New Haven ramifies to every spot whereindustry flourishes, where business thrives.”“As a purveyor of transportation it suppliesthe public with just the sort desired.”“Here we have the new efficiency in a nutshell.”In short, here we have what Dr. Lyman Abbott meanswhen he glorifies “the great mass of Americanwealth”. “It is serving the community;it is building a railway to open a new country tosettlement by the homeless; it is operating a railwayto carry grain from the harvests of the West to theunfed millions of the East,” etc.The unfed millions—my typewriter startedto write “underfed millions”—arehumbly grateful for these services, and hasten to buycopies of the pious weekly which tells about them.
The “Outlook” runs a column of “currentevents” in which it tells what is happeningin the world; and sometimes it is compelled to tellof happenings against the interests of “thegreat mass of American wealth”. The cynicalreader will find amusem*nt in following its narrativeof the affairs of the New Haven during the five yearssubsequent to the publication of the Baxter article.
First came the collapse of the road’s service;a series of accidents so frightful that they rousedeven clergymen and chambers of commerce to protest.A number of the “Outlook’s” subscribersare New Haven “commuters”, and the magazinecould not fail to refer to their troubles. Inthe issue of Jan. 4th, 1913, three years and ten daysafter the Baxter rhapsody, we read:
The most numerous accidents on a singleroad since the last fiscal year have been, webelieve, those on the New Haven. In theopinion of the Connecticut Commission, the Westportwreck would not have occurred if the railway companyhad followed the recommendation of the ChiefInspector of Safety Appliances of the InterstateCommerce Commission in its report on a similaraccident at Bridgeport a year ago.
And by June 28th, matters had gone farther yet; wefind the “Outlook” reporting:
Within a few hours ofthe collision at Stamford, the wrecked
Pullman car was takenaway and burned. Is this criminal
destruction of evidence?
This collapse of the railroad service started a clamorfor investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission,which of course brought terror to the bosoms of theplunderers. On Dec. 20,1913, we find the “Outlook”“putting the soft pedal” on the publicindignation. “It must not be forgottenthat such a road as the New Haven is, in fact if notin terms, a National possession, and as it goes downor up, public interests go down or up with it.”But in spite of all pious admonitions, the InterstateCommerce Commission yielded to the public clamor,and an investigation was made—revealingsuch conditions of rottenness as to shock even the
clerical retainers of Privilege. “Securitieswere inflated, debt was heaped upon debt”, reportsthe horrified “Outlook”; and when itshero, Mr. Mellen—its industrial Shelley,“nervously organized, of delicate sensibility”—admittedthat he had no authority as to the finances of theroad and no understanding of them, but had taken allhis orders from Morgan, the “Outlook”remarks, deeply wounded: “A pitiable positionfor the president of a great railway to assume.”A little later, when things got hotter yet, we read:In the search for truth the Commissionershad to overcome many obstacles, such as the burningof books, letters and documents, and the obstinacyof witnesses, who declined to testify until criminalproceedings were begun. The New Haven systemhas more than three hundred subsidiary corporationsin a web of entangling alliances, many of whichwere seemingly planned, created and manipulatedby lawyers expressly retained for the purposeof concealment or deception.
But do you imagine even that would sicken the piousjackals of their offal? If so, you do not knowthe sturdiness of the pious stomach. A compromisewas patched up between the government and the thieveswho were too big to be prosecuted; this bargain wasnot kept by the thieves, and President Wilson declaredin a public statement that the New Haven administrationhad “broken an agreement deliberately and solemnlyentered into,” in a manner to the President “inexplicableand entirely without justification.” Which,of course, seemed to the “Outlook” dreadfullyimpolite language to be used concerning a “Nationalpossession”; it hastened to rebuke PresidentWilson, whose statement was “too severe anddrastic.”
A new compromise was made between the government andthe thieves who were too big to be prosecuted, andthe stealing went on. Now, as I work over thisbook, the President takes the railroads for war use,and reads to Congress a message proposing that thesecurities based upon the New Haven swindles, togetherwith all the mass of other railroad swindles, shallbe sanctified and secured by dividends paid out ofthe public purse. New Haven securities take abig jump; and the “Outlook”, needlessto say, is enthusiastic for the President’spolicy. Here is a chance for the big thieves tobaptize themselves—or shall we say to havethe water in their stocks made “holy”?Says our pious editor, for the government to takeproperty without full compensation “would becontrary to the whole spirit of America.”
#The Outlook for Graft#
Anyone familiar with the magazine world will understandthat such crooked work as this, continued over a longperiod, is not done for nothing. Any magazinewriter would know, the instant he saw the Baxter article,that Baxter was paid by the New Haven, and that the“Outlook” also was paid by the New Haven.Generally he has no way of proving such facts, andhas to sit in silence; but when his board bill fallsdue and his landlady is persistent, he experiencesa direct and earnest hatred of the crooks of journalismwho 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 bookswhich have not yet been burned!
In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of theprice—thanks to the labors of the InterstateCommerce Commission. Needless to say, you willnot find the facts recorded in the columns of the Outlook;you might have read it line by line from the palmydays of Mellen to our own, and you would have gotno hint of what the Commission revealed about magazineand newspaper graft. Nor would you have got muchmore from the great metropolitan dailies, which systematically“played down” the expose, omitting allthe really damaging details. You would have togo to the reports of the Commission—or tothe files of “Pearson’s Magazine”,which is out of print and not found in libraries!
According to the New Haven’s books, and by theadmission of its own officials, the road was spendingmore than four hundred thousand dollars a year toinfluence newspapers and magazines in favor of itspolicies. (President Mellen stated that this was relativelyless than any other railroad in the country was spending).There was a professor of the Harvard Law School, goingabout lecturing to boards of trade, urging in thename of economic science the repeal of laws againstrailroad monopolies—and being paid for hisspeeches out of railroad funds! There was a swarmof newspaper reporters, writing on railroad affairsfor the leading papers of New England, and gettingtwenty-five dollars weekly, or two or three hundredon special occasions. Sums had been paid directlyto more than a thousand newspapers—$3,000to the Boston “Republic”, and when thequestion 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 $144for typing, mimeographing and sending out “dope”to the country press. There was an item of $381for 15,000 “Prayers”; and when asked aboutthat President Mellen explained that it referred toa pamphlet called “Prayers from the Hills”,embodying the yearnings of the back-country peoplefor trolley-franchises to be issued to the New Haven.Asked why the pamphlet was called “Prayers”,Mr. Mellen explained that “there was lots ofbiblical language in it.”
And now we come to the “Outlook”; afterfive years of waiting, we catch our pious editorswith the goods on them! There appears on thepay-roll of the New Haven, as one of its regular press-agents,getting sums like $500 now and then—wouldyou think it possible?—Sylvester Baxter!And worse yet, there appears an item of $938.64 tothe “Outlook”, for a total of 9,716 copiesof its issue of Dec. 25th, nineteen hundred and nineyears after Christ came to bring peace on earth andgood will towards Wall Street!
The writer makes a specialty of fair play, even whendealing with those who have never practiced it towardshim. He wrote a letter to the editor of the “Outlook”,asking what the magazine might have to say upon thismatter. The reply, signed by Lawrence F. Abbott,President of the “Outlook” Company, wasthat 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 usualrates. Against this statement must be set onemade under oath by the official of the New Haven whohad the disbursing of the corruption fund—thatthe various papers which used the railroad materialpaid nothing for it, and “they all knew whereit came from.” Mr. Lawrence Abbott statesthat “the New Haven Railroad bought copies ofthe ‘Outlook’ without any previous understandingor arrangement as anybody is entitled to buy copiesof the ’Outlook’.” I might pointout that this does not really say as much as it seemsto; for the President of every magazine company inAmerica knows without any previous understanding orarrangement that any time he cares to print an articlesuch as Mr. Baxter’s, dealing with the affairsof a great corporation, he can sell ten thousand copiesto that corporation. The late unlamented ElbertHubbard wrote a defense of the Rockefeller slaughterof coal-miners, published it in “The Fra,”and came down to New York and unloaded several tonsat 26 Broadway; he did the same thing in the case ofthe copper strike in Michigan, and again in the caseof “The Jungle”—and all thiswithout the slightest claim to divine inspiration orauthority!
Mr. Abbott answers another question: “Wecertainly did not return the amount to the railroadcompany.” Well, a sturdy conscience mustbe a comfort to its possessor. The Presidentof the “Outlook” is in the position ofa pawnbroker caught with stolen goods in his establishment.He had no idea they were stolen; and we might believeit, if the thief were obscure. But when the thiefis the most notorious in the city—whenhis 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 suspiciousgoods? Why did the “Outlook” practicallytake back Mr. Spahr’s revelations concerningthe Powder barony of Delaware? Why did it supportso vigorously the Standard Oil ticket for the controlof the Mutual Life Insurance Company—andwith 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 readersa chance to judge its conduct? Why is it thata search of its columns reveals no mention of therevelations concerning Mr. Baxter—not evenany mention of the $400,000 slush fund of its paragonof transportation virtues? I asked that questionin my letter, and the president of the “Outlook”Company for some reason failed to notice it. I
wrote a second time, courteously reminding him ofthe omission; and also of another, equally significant—hehad not informed me whether any of the editors ofthe “Outlook”, or the officers or directorsof the Company, were stockholders in the New Haven.His final reply was that the questions seem to him“wholly unimportant”; he does not knowwhether the “Outlook” published anythingabout the Baxter revelations, nor does he know whetherany of the editors or officers or directors of the“Outlook” Company are or ever have beenstockholders of the New York, New Haven and HartfordRailroad Company. The fact “would not inthe slightest degree affect either favorably or unfavorablyour editorial treatment of that corporation.”Caesar’s wife, it appears is above suspicion—evenwhen she is caught in a brothel!#Clerical Camouflage#
I have seen a photograph from “Somewhere inFrance”, showing a wayside shrine with a statueof the Virgin Mary, innocent and loving, with herbabe in her arms. If you were a hostile aviator,you might sail over and take pictures to your heart’scontent, and you would see nothing but a saintly image;you would have to be on the enemy’s side, andbehind the lines, to make the discovery that underthe 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 theopen, they are almost instantly spotted and put outof action; and so with magazines like “Leslie’sWeekly”, or “Munsey’s”, orthe “North American Review”, which arefrankly and wholly in the interest of Big Business.If an editor wishes really to be effective in holdingback progress, he must protect himself with a camouflageof piety and philanthropy, he must have at his tongue’send the phrases of brotherhood and justice, he mustbe liberal and progressive, going a certain cautiousdistance with the reformers, indulging in carefullymeasured fair play—giving a dime with onehand, 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-minersbeing shot and burned in their beds by Rockefellergun-men, and the press of the entire country in aconspiracy of silence concerning the matter. Inthe effort to break down this conspiracy, Bouck White,Congregational clergyman, author of “The Callof the Carpenter”, goes to the Fifth AvenueChurch of Standard Oil and makes a protest in the nameof Jesus. I do not wish to make extreme statements,but I have read history pretty thoroughly, and I reallydo not know where in nineteen hundred years you canfind an action more completely in the spirit and mannerof Jesus than that of Bouck White. The only differencewas that whereas Jesus took a real whip and lashedthe money-changers, White politely asked the pastorto discuss with him the question whether or not Jesuscondemned the holding of wealth. He even took
the precaution to write a letter to the clergymanannouncing in advance what he intended to do!And how did the clergyman prepare for him? Withthe sword of truth and the armor of the spirit?No—but with two or three dozen strong-armmen, who flung themselves upon the Socialist authorand hurled him out of the church. So violent werethey that several of White’s friends, also oneor two casual spectators, were moved to protest; whathappened then, let us read in the New York “Sun”,the most bitterly hostile to radicalism of all themetropolitan newspapers. Says the “Sun’s”report:A police billy came crunching againstthe bones of Lopez’s legs. It struckhim as hard as a man could swing it eight times.A fist planted on Lopez’s jaw knocked out twoteeth. His lip was torn open. A blowin the eye made it swell and blacken instantly.A minute later Lopez was leaning against thechurch with blood running to the doorsill.
And now, what has the clerical camouflage to say onthis proceeding? Does it approve it? Ohno! It was “a mistake”, the “Outlook”protests; it intensifies the hatred which these extremistsfeel for the church. The proper course wouldhave been to turn the disturber aside with a softanswer; to give him some place, say in a park, wherehe could talk his head off to people of his own sort,while good and decent Christians continued to worshipby themselves in peace, and to have the children oftheir mine-slaves shot and burned in their beds.Says our pious editor:
The true way to repress cranks is notto suppress them; it is to give them an opportunityto air their theories before any who wish tolearn, while forbidding them to compel those tolisten who do not wish to do so.
Or take another case. Twelve years ago the writermade an effort to interest the American people inthe conditions of labor in their packing-plants.It happened that incidentally I gave some facts aboutthe bedevilment of the public’s meat-supply,and the public really did care about that. AsI phrased it at the time, I aimed at the public’sheart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.There was a terrible clamor, and Congress was forcedto pass a bill to remedy the evils. As a matterof fact this bill was a farce, but the public was satisfied,and soon forgot the matter entirely. The pointto be noted here is that so far as concerned the atrociousmiseries of the working-people, it was not necessaryeven to pretend to do anything. The slaves ofPackingtown went on living and working as they weredescribed as doing in “The Jungle”, andnobody gave a further thought to them. Only theother day I read in my paper—while we areall making sacrifices in a “War for Democracy”—thatArmour and Company had paid a dividend of twenty-oneper cent, and Swift and Company a dividend of thirty-fiveper cent.
This prosperity they owe in good part to their clericalcamouflage. Listen to our pious “Outlook”,engaged in countermining “The Jungle”.The “Outlook” has no doubt that there aregenuine evils in the packing-plants; the conditionsof the workers ought of course to be improved; but—
To disgust the reader by dragging himthrough every conceivable horror, physical andmoral, to depict with lurid excitement and withoffensive minuteness the life in jail and brothel—allthis is to overreach the object.... Even thingsactually terrible may become distorted when a writerscreams them out in a sensational way and in ahigh pitched key.... More convincing ifit were less hysterical.
Don’t you see what these clerical crooks arefor?
#The Jungle#
A four years’ war was fought in America, a millionmen were killed and half a continent was devastated,in order to abolish chattel slavery and put wage slaveryin its place. I have made a thorough study ofboth these industrial systems, and I freely admit thatthere is one respect in which the lot of the wageslave is better than that of the chattel slave.The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing afew drops of blood from his starving body, he maypossess himself of machinery for the distributionof his ideas. Taking his chances of the policeman’sclub and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations,and so he has the candle of hope to light him to hisdeath-bed. But excepting this consideration, andtaking the circ*mstances of the wage slave from thematerial point of view alone, I hold it beyond questionthat the average lot of the chattel slave of 1860was preferable to that of the modern slave of the BeefTrust, the Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. Itwas the Southern master’s real concern, hisbusiness interest, that the chattel slave should bekept physically sound; but it is nobody’s businessto care anything about the wage slave. The childrenof the chattel slave were valuable property, and sothey got plenty to eat, and a happy outdoor life, andmedical attention if they fell ill. But the childrenof the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the canning-factoryare raised in a city slum, and never know what itis to have enough to eat, never know a feeling ofsecurity 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-scalecapitalist industry in its final flowering! Iquote from “The Jungle”:
Here in this city tonight, ten thousandwomen are shut up in foul pens, and driven byhunger to sell their bodies to live. Tonightin Chicago there are ten thousand men, homelessand wretched, willing to work and begging for a chance,yet starving, and fronting with terror the awful wintercold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousandchildren wearing out their strength and blastingtheir lives in the effort to earn their bread!There are a hundred thousand mothers who areliving in misery and squalor, struggling to earnenough to feed their little ones! There area hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless,waiting for death to take them from their torments!There are a million people, men and women andchildren, who share the curse of the wage-slave;who toil every hour they can stand and see, forjust enough to keep them alive; who are condemnedtill the end of their days to monotony and weariness,to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt anddisease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice!And then turn over the page with me, and gazeupon the other side of the picture. Thereare a thousand—ten thousand, maybe—whoare the masters of these slaves, who own theirtoil. They do nothing to earn what theyreceive, they do not even have to ask for it—itcomes to them of itself, their only care is todispose of it. They live in palaces, they riotin luxury and extravagance—such asno words can describe, as makes the imaginationreel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick andfaint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pairof shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spendmillions for horses and automobiles and yachts,for palaces and banquets, for little shiny stoneswith which to deck their bodies. Their lifeis a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentationand recklessness, in the destroying of useful andnecessary things, in the wasting of the labor and thelives of their fellow-creatures, the toil andanguish of the nations, the sweat and tears andblood of the human race! It is all theirs—itcomes to them; just as all the springs pour intostreamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and therivers into the ocean—so, automaticallyand inevitably, all the wealth of society comesto them. The farmer tills the soil, theminer 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 theresults, the products of the labor of brain andmuscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream andpoured into their laps!
This is the system. It is the crown and culminationof all the wrongs of the ages; and in proportion tothe magnitude of its exploitation, is the hypocrisyand knavery of the clerical camouflage which has beenorganized in its behalf. Beyond all question,the supreme irony of history is the use which hasbeen made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God ofthis blood-thirsty system; it is a cruelty beyond alllanguage, a blasphemy beyond the power of art to express.Read the man’s words, furious as those of anymodern agitator that I have heard in twenty yearsof revolutionary experience: “Lay not upfor yourselves treasures on earth!—Sellthat ye have and give alms!—Blessed areye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!—Woeunto you that are rich, for ye have received yourconsolation!—Verily, I say unto you, thata rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom ofHeaven!—Woe unto you also, you lawyers!—Yeserpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escapethe damnation of hell?”
“And this man”—I quote from“The Jungle” again—“theyhave made into the high-priest of property and smugrespectability, a divine sanction of all the horrorsand abominations of modern commercial civilization!Jewelled images are made of him, sensual priests burninsense to him, and modern pirates of industry bringtheir dollars, wrung from the toil of helpless womenand children, and build temples to him, and sit incushioned seats and listen to his teachings expoundedby doctors of dusty divinity!”
* * * * *
#Book five#
#The Church of the Merchants#
Mammon ledthem on—
Mammon, the least erected spirit thatfell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looksand thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven’s pavement,trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.... Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil maybest
Deserve the precious bane.
Milton.
* * * * *
#The Head Merchant#
Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandistsnever weary of telling us. Business is the basisof our material lives, and consequently of our culture.Business men control our politics and dictate ourlaws; business men own our newspapers and direct theirpolicy; business men sit on our school boards, andendow and manage our universities. The Reformationwas a revolt of the newly-developing merchant classesagainst the tyrannies and abuses of feudal clericalism:so in all Protestant Christianity one finds the spirit,ideals, and language of Trade. We have shown howthe symbolism of the Anglican Church is of the palaceand the throne; in the same way that of the non-conformistsects may be shown to be of the counting-house.In the view of the middle-class Britisher, the nexusbetween man and man is cent per cent; and so in theirSunday services the worshippers sing such hymns asthis:
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 competitivesystem 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.
Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figuresGod as a mighty Conqueror—
Marching as to war
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before—
so the preacher to the trader figures the divinityas a glorified Merchant keeping books. This HeadMerchant has a monopoly in His line; He knows allHis rivals’ secrets, so there is no getting aheadof Him, and nothing to do but obey His Word, as revealedthrough His clerical staff. The system is oilywith protestations of divine love; but when you readthe comments of Luther upon Calvin and of Calvin uponLuther, you understand that this love is confinedto the inside of each denomination. And evenso restricted, there is not always enough to go around.Recently I met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom Iremarked, “I see by the papers that you havejust finished a church building.” “Yes,”he answered; “and I have had three offers ofa new church.” I did not see the connection,and asked, “Because you were so successful withthis one?” The reply was, “They alwaystake it for granted that you want to change when you’vefinished a new building, because you make so manyenemies!”
The business man puts up the money to build the church,he puts up the money to keep it going; and the firstrule of a business man is that when he puts up themoney for a thing he “runs” that thing.Of course he sees that it spreads his own views oflife, it helps to maintain his tradition. Inthe days of Anu and Baal we heard the proclamationof the divine right of Kings; in these days of Mammonwe hear the proclamation of the divine right of Merchants.Some fifteen years ago the head of our Coal Trustannounced during a great strike that the questionwould be settled “by the Christian men to whomGod in His Infinite Wisdom has given control of theproperty interests of this country”. Andon that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatevertheir denominations, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist,Methodist, Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath doctrinesare alike, as their week-day practices are alike;whether it is Rockefeller shooting his Bayonne oil-workersand burning alive the little children of his miners;or smooth John Wanamaker, paying starvation wages todepartment-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 couldhave his way he would blow up the home of every coal-strikerwith dynamite; or the Rev. R.A. Torrey, Deanof the Bible institute of Los Angeles, who refusedto employ union labor on the million dollar buildingof the Institute, declaring that “the Churchcannot afford to have any dealings with a band offire-bugs and murderers!”
#"Herr Beeble"#
The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants’and Manufacturers’ Association is to justifythe processes of trade, and to preach to clerks andemployees the slave-virtues of frugality, humility,and loyalty to the profit system. The depths ofsociological depravity to which some of the agentsof this Association have sunk is difficult of belief.Twelve years ago I was invited to address the book-sellersof New York, in company with a well-known clergymanof the city, the Reverend Madison C. Peters.This gentleman’s address made such an impressionupon me that I recall it even at this distance:a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-firesmartness, and simply reeking with commercialism.I could not describe it better than to say that itwas on the ethical level of the “Letters ofa Self-Made Merchant to His Son”. Again,I attended a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalistend was taken by another famous clergyman, pastorof the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill.He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove thatSocialism means free love, he quoted a writer by thename of “Herr Beeble”; he was so dishonestthat he garbled the writings of this “Herr Beeble”,making him say something quite different from whathe had meant to say. I could name several clergymenof various denominations who have stooped to thatdevice against the Socialists; including the CatholicFather Belford, who says that we are mad dogs andshould be stopped with bullets.
Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman’spulpit-slang used to be the talk of New York whenI was a boy; and when I grew up, and came into theSocialist movement—behold, here he was,chief inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office.I had a friend, a man who saved my life at a timewhen I was practically starving, and to whom thereforeI owe my survival as a writer; this friend had beena clergyman in a Middle Western state, and had preachedJesus as he really was, and so was hated and fearedlike Jesus. It happened that he was unhappilymarried, and permitted his wife to divorce him sothat he might marry the woman he loved; for which unheardof crime the organized hypocrisy of America fell uponhim like a thousand devils with poisoned whips.The Reverend Dixon’s holy rage was fired; heapplied his imagination to my friend’s story,producing a novel under the title of “The OneWoman”; and it is as if you were reading thestory of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted throughthe personality of a he-goat. Of late years thisclerical author has turned his energies to negrophobiaand militarism, making millions out of motion-pictureincitements to hatred and terror. The pictureswere made here in Southern California, and friendsin the business have described to me the pious propagandistin the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarmsof 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 EpiscopalChurch, who offers himself as comic relief in ourClerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor ofSyracuse University, a branch of the Mental MunitionsDepartment of the Standard Oil Company; his functionbeing to manufacture intellectual weapons and explosivesto be used in defense of the Rockefeller fortune.It is generally not expected that the makers of ruling-classmunitions should face the dirty and perilous workof the trenches; but ten years ago, during a raid byan active squad of muckrake-men, Chancellor Day astonishedthe world by rushing to the front with both arms fullof star-shells and bombs. He afterwards put thehistory of this gallant action into a volume, “TheRaid on Prosperity”; and if you want the realthrill of the class-war, here is where to get it!
The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; anenthusiast and dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whomthe ordinary human virtues have been fused, absorbed,transformed and sublimated into a new supreme virtueof loyalty to Exploitation, patriotism for Profiteering.He began life as a working-man, he tells us, in thegood old American fashion of hustle for yourself;but he differed from other Americans in that he hadan instant, intuitive recognition of the intellectualand moral excellence of Plutocracy. The firsttime he met a rich man, he quivered with rapture,he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So veryquickly he was recognized as a proper person to havecharge of a Mental Munition Works; and the rulingclasses proceeded to pin medals upon the bosom ofhis academic robes—D.D., S.T.D., L.L.D.,D.C.L., L.H.D.
The Chancellor knows the masters of our Profit System,those “consummate geniuses of manufacture andtrade by which the earth has yielded up her infinitetreasures.” And having been at the sametime in intimate daily communion with the Almighty,he can tell us the Almighty’s attitude towardsthese prodigies. “God has made the richof this world to serve Him.... He has shown thema way to have this world’s goods and to be richtowards God....God wants the rich men.... Christ’sdoctrines have made the world rich, and provide adequateuses for its riches.” Also the Chancellorknows our great corporations, and gives us the Almighty’sviews about them; they mean that “the forceswith which God built the universe have been put intothe hands of man.” Likewise by divine authoritywe learn that “the sympathy given to Socialismis appalling. It is insanity.” We learnthat the income tax is “a doctrine suited tothe 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 beeaten in the fear of God.” And then, tomake assurance doubly sure, he settles it with plainhuman logic; and you are astonished to see how simple,under his handling, the complex problem becomes—howclear and clean-cut is the distinction he draws foryou:
Every boy knows thatone cannot take stolen goods without
being a partaker withthe thief. But the proceeds of
recognized businessare quite a different thing.
#Holy Oil#
And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenonof Protestant Christianity at the beginning of thetwentieth century. For the benefit of posterityI explain that “Billy” is a baseball playerturned Evangelist, who has brought to the cause ofGod the crowds and uproar of the diamond; also thecommercial spirit of America’s most popularinstitution. He travels like a circus, with allthe press-agent work and newspaper hurrah; he conductswhat are called “revivals”, in an enormous“tabernacle” built especially for him ineach city. I cannot better describe the BillySunday circus than in the words of a certain SidneyC. 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 anappeal to the emotions and in stirring up the sensesby a combination of carrying the United States flagin one hand and the Bible in the other, singing,trumpeting, organ playing, garrulous and acrobaticfeats of defendant, by defendant in his talkleaping from the rostrum to the top of the pulpit,lying prone on the floor of the rostrum on hisstomach in the presence of the vast audience and fromthence into a pit to shake hands with the so-called“trail-hitters” and the vulgar useof plaintiff’s thoughts contained in saidbooks. Said harangues and vulgarisms of saiddefendant and horns, drums, organs and singing by saidchoir and vast audience which are assembled bymeans of said newspaper advertisem*nts for thepurpose of inducing a habit of free and copiousflow of money through religious and patrioticexcitement produced by and through the vulgarisms,scurrility, buffoonery, obscenity and profanityof defendant pretending to be in the interestof the cause of religion through what he denominates“hitting the trail”, the real objectbeing to induce a religious frenzy and enthusiasmwhich he announces in advance is to result inlarge audiences composed of thousands of peoplegenerously contributing vast sums of money onthe last day and night of the so-called revivalwhich is invariably appropriated by the defendantand through which scheme and device defendant hasbecome enormously wealthy.
As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, andtwice each day he holds forth to a crowd of ten orfifteen thousand; in addition the newspapers printliterally pages of his utterances. The entireProtestant clergy for a score of miles around has beenhitched to his triumphal chariot, and driven captivethrough the streets. Here in this dignified cityof Pasadena, home of millionaire brewers and chewing-gumkings, all the churches have been plastered for weekswith cloth signs: “This Church is Cooperatingin the Sunday Campaign.” To give a sampleof the intellectual level of the performance, hereis what Billy has to say about modern thought:
All this blasphemy against God andJesus Christ, all this sneering, highbrow, rotten,loathesome, higher criticism, wriggling its dirty,filthy, stinking carcass out of a beer-mug inLeipzig or Heidelberg!
Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers situpon the platform and smile while Billy thus slangsthe devil; and being themselves, poor fellows, attheir wits end to draw the crowd, they watch and seehow he does it, and then return to their own churchesand try the same stunt; so the manners of the baseballdiamond spread like a contagion. I open my morningpaper, and find a picture of an intense-looking clericalgentleman, the Rev. J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor ofthe Baptist Temple. He is discussing certainslanderous rumors which he has heard about Billy Sunday,and he offers ten thousand dollars reward to anyonewho can prove these things; though, as he says,
The dirty, low-down, contemptible,weazen-brained, impure-hearted, shrivelled-souled,gossipping 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, underhandedsneaks.... Carrion-loving buzzards and foul-smellingskunks.
You will be prepared after this to hear that whenthe Socialists were near to carrying Los Angeles,this clergyman preached a sermon in support of thecandidate of “Booze, Gas and Railroads”.
In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglectedyouth of our streets from drinking, gambling and whoring,no one could wish him anything but success; but hisbesotted ignorance, his childish crudity of mind,make it impossible that he could have any success exceptof a delusive nature. He is utterly devoid ofa social sense; utterly unaware of the existence ofthe forces of capitalism which are causing depravityten times as fast as all the evangelists in creationcan remedy it. So he is precisely like the Catholicswith their “charity”, cleaning up loathsomeand unsightly messes for a thousand years, and neverstopping to ask why such messes continue to come intoexistence.
More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialismwhich he fosters does not help the development ofevil more than his preaching hinders it. Thenewspapers always report the cost of the tabernacle,and of the “free-will offering”, whichamounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in each“campaign”. In each city the expensesare guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinisterexploiting forces of the community; they welcome andfete him, and he visits their homes, and is in everyway one of the crowd. After the big silk strikein Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholicsincluded, all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sundayto that city; and it was freely proclaimed that thepurpose was to undermine the radical union movement.This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his wholecampaign was conducted on that basis.
Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certainrich young man, perhaps a thousand times as rich asany that lived in Palestine. This young man cameto Billy and said: “What shall I do to inheriteternal life?” And Billy told him to keep thecommandments—“Do not commit adultery,Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness,Honor thy father and thy mother.” The youngman answered; “All these have I kept from myyouth up.” And Billy said: “Yetlackest thou one thing; sell all that thou hast anddistribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasurein heaven; and come follow me.” And whenhe heard this he was very sorrowful, for he was veryrich.
—No, I have got the story mixed up.That is what happened in Palestine. What happenedin New York is that Billy said, “I am delightedto meet you, Mr. Rockefeller.” And Mr. Rockefellersaid, “Come be my guest at my palace in thePocantico Hills; and then we will go together andyou may preach submission to my wage-slaves in theoil-factories at Bayonne and elsewhere.”And Billy went to the palace, and went and preachedto the wage-slaves, telling them to beware the “stinkingSocialists”, and to concentrate their attentionon the saving of their souls; so the rich young manwas delighted, and he sent for all the newspaper reportersto come to his office at 26 Broadway, and told themwhat a great and useful man Billy Sunday is.As the New York “Times” tells about it:
Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviewsand certainly he has never been charged withhaving an excess of verbally expressed enthusiasmon any subject. But he talked for an hourand a half about the evangelist. He was full ofthe subject of Billy Sunday. “Billydid New York a lot of good,” he said.He went on to tell of 187 meetings held in 100 differentfactories, attended by 50,000 men. “That’sgood work.” And he expressed his satisfactionwith Sunday’s theology: “Hebelieves the Bible from cover to cover and thatis good enough for me.” The Sunday campaignhad cost $200,000, and “If it had stoppedhere, if it was not kept up, it would be poorbusiness; a poor dividend on the $200,000 andthe work invested. But we expect to get dividendsin 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 defendlarge-scale merchants while they live, but to burythem when they die, and to place the seal of sanctityupon their careers. Concerning this aspect ofBootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an earnesthater of shams, William Makepeace Thackeray:
I think the part which pulpits playin the death of kings is the most ghastly ofall the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, theblinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries,the simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies—alluttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches:these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung fromtime immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad,wicked, licentious. The State parson mustbring out his commonplaces; his apparatus ofrhetorical black-hanging....
And this, of course, applies not merely to kings ofEngland, but to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kingsof Oil, kings of Wall Street. Leland Stanford,son of a great king of Western railroads, died; andstanding over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwardsBishop, preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, whereinhe likened young Leland to the boy Christ. Inthe year 1904 there passed from his earthly rewardin Pennsylvania a United States senator who had beenthroughout his lifetime a notorious and unblushingcorruptionist. Matthew Stanley Quay was his name,and the New York “Nation”, having no clericalconnections, was free to state the facts about him:
He bought the organization, bribedor intimidated the press, got his grip on thepublic service, including even the courts; imposedhis will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon thelast three Presidents—making the latterprovide for the offal of his political machine,which even Pennsylvania could no longer stomach—andall without identifying his name with a singlemeasure of public good, without making a speechor uttering a party watchword, without even pretendingto be honest, but solely because, like Judas, he carriedthe 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 ReverendDr. J.S. Ramsey, who stood over the coffin of“Matt”, and without cracking a smile declaredthat he had been “a statesman who was alwayson the right side of every moral question!”
In that same year of 1904 died the high priest ofour political corruption, Mark Hanna. He hadbelonged to no church, but had backed them all, understandingthe main thesis of this book as clearly as the writerof it. In his home city of Cleveland the eulogyupon him was pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St.Paul’s Episcopal Church; while in the UnitedStates Senate the service was performed by the Chaplain,the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. This is a name well-knownin American letters, as in American religious life;it was borne by a benevolent old gentleman, a Unitarianand a liberal, who organized “Lend-a-Hand Clubs”and such like amiabilities. “Do You LoveThis Old Man?” the signs in the street-carsused to ask when I was a boy; and I promptly answered“Yes”—for my mother took the“Ladies’ Home Journal”, and I swallowedthe sentimental dish-water set out for me. But
when I read the Rev. Edward’s funeral orationover the Irrev. Mark, I loved neither of themany longer. “This whole-souled child ofGod,” cried the Rev. Edward, “who believedin success, and knew how to succeed by using the infinitepowers!” You perceive that the Chaplain of theMillionaires’ Club agrees with this book, thatthe “infinite powers” in America are thepowers that prey!#The Great American Fraud#
Among the most loathesome products of our native commercialgreed is the patent medicine industry, “TheGreat American Fraud,” as its historian hascalled it. In 1907 this historian wrote:
Gullible America will spend this yearsome seventy-five millions of dollars in thepurchase of patent medicines. In considerationof this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol,an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wideassortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful anddangerous heart depressants to insidious liverstimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients,undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited bythe skillfullest of advertising bunco men, isthe basis of the trade.
One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes:habit-forming laxatives, head-ache powders full ofacetanilid, soothing-syrups and catarrh-cures fullof opium and cocaine, co*ck-tails subtly disguisedas “bitters”, “sarsaparillas”,and “tonics”. He shows how the faketestimonials are made up and exploited; how the confidentialletters, telling the secret troubles of men and women,are collected by tens and hundreds of thousands andadvertised and sold—so that the victim,as he begins to lose faith in one fake, finds anotherat hand, fully informed as to his weakness. Hequotes the amazing “Red Clause” in thecontracts which the patent-medicine makers have withthousands of daily and weekly papers, whereby themakers are able to control the press of the countryand prevent legislation against the “Great AmericanFraud.”
There are a thousand religious papers in America,weekly and monthly; and what is their attitude onthis question? Mr. Adams tells us:
Whether because church-going peopleare more trusting, and therefore more easilybefooled than others, or from some more obscurereason, many of the religious papers fairly reekwith patent medicine fakes.
He gives us many pages of specific instances:
Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancervampires. He is a patron and prop of religiousjournalism. It is his theory that the easiestprey is to be found among readers of church papers.Moreover he has learned from his father-in-law (whobuilt a small church out of blood-money) to capitalizehis own sectarian associations, and when confrontedrecently with a formal accusation he replied,with an air of injured innocence, that he wasa regular attendant at church, and could producean endorsem*nt from his minister.
And here is the “Church Advocate”, ofHarrisburg, Pa., which publishes quack advertisem*ntsdisguised as editorials. One of them Mr. Adamsparaphrases:
As Dr. Smith is, on the face of hisown 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 journalisticsupporter for pay, is just such another as himself!
And again:
Will the editor of the “BaptistWatchman” of Boston explain by what phenomenonof logic or elasticity of ethics he accepts thelucubrations of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of Liquozone,of Actina, that marvelous two-ended mechanical appliancewhich “cures” deafness at one terminusand blindness at the other, and all with a littleoil of mustard?
And again:
The “Christian Observer”of Louisville replied to a protesting subscriber,suggesting that the “Collier” articleswere written in a spirit of revenge, because “Collier’s”could not get patent medicine advertising. WhenI asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse for hisfoundation for the charge, he said that one ofthe typewriters must have written the letter!Doubtless also the same highly responsible typewriterimitated the signature with startling fidelityto Dr. Converse’s handwriting!
And here is—would you think it possible?—our“Church of Good Society”! It hasan organ in Chicago called the “Living Church”,most dignified and decorous. You have to studyquite a while to ascertain what denomination it belongsto; it will not tell you directly, for the Anglicianpose is that it is #the# church
Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all theearth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one Faith, one Birth;
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And toward one Hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
And this one holy institution was found setting atit* peak the black flag of the trader, the “JollyRoger” of the modern commercial pirate—“Caveatemptor!” To quote the precise words:
The editors and publishersof the “Living Church” assume no
responsibility for theassertions of advertisers.
And so it threw open its columns to the claims ofAmerica’s champion labor-baiter, the late C.W.Post, that his “Grapenuts” would preventappendicitis, and obviate the need of operations insuch cases!
And here is the “Christian Endeavor World”,organ of one of the most powerful non-sectarian religiousbodies in the country. Some one wrote complainingof its medical advertising, and the answer was:
To the best of our knowledge and belief,we are not publishing any fraudulent or unworthymedical advertising.... Trusting that youwill be able to understand that we are actingaccording 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 AmericanFraud” remarks:
Assuming that the business managementof the “Christian Endeavor World”represents normal intelligence, I would like toask whether it accepts the statement that a pair of“magic foot drafts” applied to thesoles of the feet will cure any and every kindof rheumatism in any part of the body? Further,if the advertising department is genuinely interestedin declining “fraudulent and unworthy”copy, I would call their attention to the ridiculousclaims of Dr. Shoop’s medicines, which“cure” almost every disease; to two hairremovers, one an “Indian Secret”, the otheran “accidental discovery”, both eitherfakes or dangerous; to the lying claims of Hall’sCatarrh Cure, that it is “a positive curefor catarrh”, in all its stages; to “Syrupof Figs”, which is not a fig syrup, buta preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer’sSwamp Root, of which the principal medical constituentis alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye’s Oil Curefor cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunatessuffering from an incurable malady. All ofthese, with other matter, which for the sakeof decency I do not care to detail in these columns,appear in recent issues of the “ChristianEndeavor World”.
#Riches in Glory#
There came recently to Los Angeles a “world-famousevangelist”, known as “Gipsy” Smith.There was a shirt-waist strike at the time, and thegirls were starving, and they sent a delegation tothis evangelist to ask for help. They told himhow they were mistreated, exposed to insults, drivento sell their virtue because their wage would notsupport life; and to their plea he made answer:“Get Jesus in your hearts, and these questionswill take care of themselves!”
So we see the most important of the many serviceswhich the churches perform for the merchants—takingthe revolutionary hope of Jesus, for a kingdom ofheaven upon earth, and perverting it into a dream ofa golden harp in an uncertain future. To appreciatethe fullness of this betrayal, take the prayer whichJesus dictated—so simple, direct and practical:“Give us this day our daily bread”, andput it beside the hymns which the slave-congregationsare trained to sing. In my neighborhood is aone-roomed building with a plate glass front, uponwhich I observe a painter inscribing in red, whiteand blue letters the sign “#Glory Mission.#”I approach him, and he drops his work and welcomesme with eager cordiality. Am I “living ingrace”? I answer that I am. I haveto shout the good tidings into his ear, as he is verydeaf. He presents me with his card, which showsthat he bears the title of “Reverend”,also the sobriquet of “Mountain Missionary”.I ask him to permit me to examine the hymn-book whichhe uses in his work, and with touching eagerness hepresses upon me a well-worn volume bearing the title“Waves of Glory”. I seat myself andnote down a few of the baits it sets out for hungrywage-slaves:
O, there’s a plenty, O, there’sa plenty,
There’s a plenty in my Father’sbank above!
Riches in glory, riches in glory,
Royal supply our wants exceed!
Feasting, I’m feasting,
I’m feasting with my Lord!
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 ofthe 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, poetof the I.W.W. who was executed a few years ago inUtah, and who used this tune in his little red bookof 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 youdie!
#Captivating Ideals#
In one of the writer’s earlier novels, “PrinceHagen”, the hero is a Nibelung out of Wagner’s“Rheingold”, who leaves his diggings inthe bowels of the earth, and comes up to look intoour superior civilization. The thing that impresseshim most is what he calls “the immortality idea”.The person who got that up was a world-genius, heexclaims. “If you can once get a man tobelieving in immortality, there is no more left foryou to desire; you can take everything he owns—youcan skin him alive if it pleases you—andhe will bear it all with perfect good humor.”
And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung—orthe effort of a young author to be smart? Wouldyou like to hear that view of the most vital of Christiandoctrines set forth in the language of scholarshipand culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiasticalauthority, equipped with every tool of modern learning,would set about voicing the idea that the functionof 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 dressof scholarship, dated 1912, and written by ProfessorGeorges 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 richof the danger they run in giving up their religionand ceasing to support its priests. It explainshow “the genius of Christianity has succeededin making the individual suffering, the individualsacrifices, which are indispensible for the welfareof the collectivity, appear as indispensible for theindividual welfare.” The learned professormakes plain just what he means by “individualsuffering, individual sacrifices”; he meansall the horrors of capitalism; and the advantage ofChristianity is that it makes you think that by submittingto these horrors, you are profiting your own soul.“By making individual salvation depend on theacceptance of suffering, on the voluntary sacrificeof egotistical interests, Christianity adapts the individualto society”.
And this, as the professor explains, is not an easything to do, in a world in which so many people arethinking for themselves. “The only meansof causing the rationalized individual to consent tothe sacrifice ... is to captivate him with a sufficientlypowerful ideal” And the professor shows howbeautifully Jesus can be used for this purpose.“Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceasedto insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirablenessof suffering—of that suffering which aweak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppressif it could.”
You get this, you “blanket-stiff”, you“husky”, or “wop”, or whateveryou are—you disinherited of the earth, youproletarians 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 “overproduction”;you have raised too much food, and therefore you arestarving, you have woven too much cloth, and thereforeyou are naked, you have finished the world for yourmasters, and it is time for you to move out of theway. As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it,“Your suppression imposes itself as an imperiousnecessity.” And the function of the Christianreligion is to make you enjoy the process, by “captivatingyou with a sufficiently powerful ideal”!The priest will fill your nostrils with incense, youreyes with candle-lights and images, your ears withsweet music and soothing words; and so you will perishwithout raising a finger! “Here,”reflects the professor, “we see how magnificentlythe teaching of Jesus applies to all classes of society!”
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologistthe embarrassing fact that so many of those who surviveunder 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’sequipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewithat any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out ofreach of vulgar materialists, like you and me.“Inequality signifies inequality of capacity,”he explains; but the standard whereby we judge thiscapacity “cannot be the standard of the morallaw.”
The laws which govern the biologicalevolution of man are known, but those which governhis moral nature cannot be known; the moral natureappertains to the Absolute, and hence is notsubject to the law of inequality!
As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, thatis almost as wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newmanwhen confronted with the fact that his divinely guidedchurch had burned men for teaching the Copernicanview of the universe; that infallible popes had againand again condemned this heresy #ex cathedra#.Said the eloquent cardinal:
Scripture says that the sun moves andthe earth is stationary, and science that theearth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest.How can we determine which of these oppositestatements is the very truth #till we know what motionis#?
#Spook Hunting#
Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christianprofessors 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 andnot wonder how the poor stand it, and more especially#why# they stand it. There have been many thinkingmen who have given up the miracle-business quite cheerfully,but have stood appalled at the idea of letting thelower classes find out the truth. You note thatidea continually in the writings of Professor GoldwinSmith, who was a free-thinker, but also a #bourgeois#publicist, with a deep sense of responsibility tothe money-masters of the world. He was aboutas honest a man as the capitalist system can produce;he was the #beau ideal# of the New York “EveningPost”, which indicates his point of view.He wrote:
It can hardly be doubted that hopeof compensation in a future state, for a shortmeasure of happiness here, has materially helpedto reconcile the less favored members of thecommunity to the inequalities of the existing orderof things.
When I was a student in Columbia University, I tooka course called “Practical Ethics”, undera professor by the name of Hyslop. The coursediffered from most of the forty that I tried, in thatit gave evidence that the professor was accustomedto read the morning paper. He had learned thatAmerican politics were rotten; his idea of “PracticalEthics” was to outline in elaborate detail acomplete scheme of constitutional changes which wouldmake it impossible for the “boss” to controlthe government. I think I must have been bornwith a charm against #bourgeois# thought, for the goodprofessor never fooled me an instant; I remember Iused to smile at the idea of how quickly the “boss”would brush through his constitutional cobwebs.The reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity—andof course long before they could be put into practice,the politicians would be ready with devices to makethem of no effect.
Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned andwent to hunting spooks. I don’t want tobe unfair to him; I know that he is a determined andcourageous man, and it seems possible that he mayreally have bagged some spooks. All I wish topoint out here is the method he uses in seeking topersuade the heedless rich to support the spook-huntingindustry. The very same argument as we got fromthe University of Geneva and the University of Toronto!Says our head spook-hunter:
There has been no belief that exercisedso much power upon the poor as that in a futurelife. The politicians, men of the world,have known this so well as to postpone the day ofpolitical judgment by it for many years.
And again:
The Church, having lost all its battleswith science, and having abandoned a strenuousintellectual defense of its fundamental beliefs,has lost its power over the poor and the laboringclasses.... The spiritual ideal of life has goneout of the masses as well as the classes, and nothingis left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.
And again, more menacingly yet:
The rich will learnin the dangers of a social revolution
that the poor will notsacrifice both wealth and
immortality.
What is to be done about this? The question answersitself: Step up, ladies and gentlemen, and emptyyour purses into the Psychical Research hat!So that we may accumulate statistics as to the costof milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!
You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters,and the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association makinguse of their incantations. You admired my abilityto sling language, but not my taste; and you certainlydid not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts.But what do these quotations mean, unless they meanwhat I have said? Are not these three professorsmen of culture? Are they not as “spiritual”as any men of learning you can find in our present-daysociety?
And now stop for a moment and put yourself in theposition of the young student of the working-class,who goes to these books and discovers that truth isnot truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who discoversthat professors of ethics, practical or impractical,are not interested in justice among men, but onlyin collecting funds for their specialty; that in orderto get funds, they are willing to teach the rich howto paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonderthat 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 templeof truth?
#Running the Rapids#
And now, can you form to yourselves a clear conceptof what it means to society that practically all itsmoral teaching should be in the hands of men who areincapable of clean, straight thinking? That allthe intellectual prestige of the Church should be lentto the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberateevasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in themost terrific social crisis of history; I search fora metaphor to picture our position, and I recall acanoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario, hundreds of milesdown a long swift river. You sit in the bow ofthe canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead;and there comes a slide of smooth green water, andyou go over it, and into a torrent of foaming white,which seizes you and rushes you along with the speedof a race-horse.
With every sense alert, you watch for the rocks, andwhen you see one, you dip your paddle on one sideor the other and with a quick motion draw the canoeclear of the danger. If by any chance you failto do it, over you go, and your partner with you,and all your belongings go down-stream, and maybeyou are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen forseveral hours afterwards. Precisely like thisis the voyage of life, for the whole of society andfor every individual. The paddle which wouldsave us from the rocks is experimental science; butin most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle,but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurswords in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then,when he sees an especially formidable obstruction—awar, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.—hecasts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.
* * * * *
And mind you, it isn’t as if I could save myselfand you could save yourself; we are all in the samecanoe, and we all go overboard together. You,perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenchesin winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, becausein 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 thetradition of Paul, the Roman bureaucrat, who despisedwomen, and regarded marriage as a means of gratifyingan unclean animal desire. “It is betterto marry than to burn,” he said, with unmatchablebrutality; and so of course those who think him avoice of God can form no conception of the dignityand grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesomesex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them amongthe Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followersof the Apostle to the Gentiles.
You go to a so-called “divorce-court,”which is dominated by this Christian taboo, and existsfor the purpose of barring you from a second chanceat the gratification of your unclean animal desire.You are not permitted to tell your own story, forthat would be “collusion;” you listenwhile your intimate friends recite the pitiful andshameful details of your domestic misfortune, underthe cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressedfor 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 guaranteedyou by law has been taken from you by corrupt courtofficials, who have sold copies of the testimony tothe newspapers, so that all the intimate details ofwhere you slept and where your wife slept and whatyou saw your wife doing have been thrown out to journalisticjackals, who scream with glee as they rend the carcassof your dead love. And in the end, perhaps, youfind that you have gone through this horror for nothing—theaugust court with its Roman Catholic judge throws outyour petition, its suspicions having been excited bythe fact that when you discovered your domestic tragedy,you sought to behave like a civilized person, withpity and self-restraint, instead of like a sultanin Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
#Birth Control#
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethicalquestions by minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraftis an unmitigated curse to the race. The armoryof science is full of weapons which might be usedto slay the monsters of disease and vice—butthese weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimesnot even to be mentioned. Consider the miserywhich is piling itself up in the slums of our greatcities—the degenerate, the defective, theinsane, who are multiplying as never before in history.
There exists a perfectly harmless and painless methodof sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they cannot reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religionobjects to this operation, and so the law does notmake use of this knowledge. There exists a simple,entirely harmless, and practically costless methodof preventing conception, which would enable us tocheck the blind and futile fecundity of Nature, andto multiply as gods instead of as animals. Considerthe festering mass of misery in the slums of our greatcities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-houndedwomen, 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 theyare born—until finally the mother, wornout with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and followsher misbegotten offspring. Consider how manywomen, in their agony and despair, make use of themethods of the primitive savage, to escape from Nature’scurse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimatedthat in the United States alone there are a millionabortions every year; and consider that all this hideousmass of suffering—a bloody European wargoing on continually, unheeded by any newspaper correspondent—mightbe avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula,which we are not permitted to give! The Federationof Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-booksof the nation, and of all the states as well; thewhole power of police and courts and jails is at theservice of religious bigots, and a young girl is sentto prison and forcibly fed with a tube through thenose for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how tokeep from becoming pregnant!And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world,the judges and district attorneys, the commissionersof correction and doctors who perpetrated this infamyunder, a so-called “reform” administrationin 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 wivesor their mistresses. The second thing you findis that the statute-books are crowded with other lawswhich they make no pretense of enforcing; for example,the law which forbids the saloons to be open on Sunday—whichlaw they take the liberty of understanding to meanthat the saloons shall not have their front doors openon Sunday. You will find that they are not atall afraid of the religious taboos; they are afraidof the religious vote—and even more theyare afraid of the campaign contributions of sweat-shopmanufacturers and landlords, who cannot see what wouldbecome of prosperity if the women of the slums wereto cease to breed. So once more we discover thewolf in sheep’s clothing, the trader, makinguse of Tradition-worship; hiding behind the skirtsof devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers, who repeatthe instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, “Befruitful 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 ofEden, full of all fruits that grow and all creaturesthat 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 seven cents a pound!
#Sheep#
There are more than a hundred thousand Protestantchurches in America. They own more than a billiondollars’ worth of property, and in the Westand South they dominate the intellectual life of thecountry. I do not wish to be unfair in what Isay of them. They are far more democratic thanthe Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against theliquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious,or directly derived from vice. There are amongtheir clergy many men who are honestly seeking light,and trying to make their institutions a factor forprogress. But they are caught in the spirit ofLutheran scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmaticand jealous; and they cannot help it, because theyare pledged by their creeds and foundations to Tradition-worship;they have to believe certain things because theirancestors believed them, they have to act in certainways, because of certain facts which existed in theworld three thousand years ago, but which now areknown only to historians.
You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheepto follow the example of their leader; if this leaderleaps over a stick, all the rest will leap when theycome to that spot, even though the stick may havebeen taken away in the meantime. The scientistexplains this seeming-foolishness by the fact thatsheep once lived in high mountains, and fled fromtheir enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when the leaderleaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, withoutwaiting to see in the dust and confusion. Nowthere are no mountains and no enemies, but the sheepstill jump. And in exactly the same way the tailorstill sews buttons at the back of your dress-coat,because a couple of hundred years age all gentlemenwore swords; in the same way our railroad buildersmake cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to overturn,because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled bymules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew willeat no pork, in spite of the fact that the microscopeaffords him complete protection against disease; theorthodox Catholic will not eat meat on Friday, becausehe thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodoxAnglican will not marry his deceased wife’s sister,because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodoxBaptist requires total immersion in a climate quitedifferent from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodistrefuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise on the Sabbath.
In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-airlife, tending sheep and working the fields; so itwas an excellent thing for them to rest from laborone day of the week, and to gather in temples to hearthe reading of the best literature of their time.But nowadays the city slave spends his week-days shutup 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 intothe open air, and persuade him to run and play.But do we do that, we human sheep? We write ancientHebrew laws upon our modern statute-books, and ifthe city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries toplay base-ball, we send a policeman and take him tojail, and next morning he is fined five dollars, andprobably loses his job.
In the city where I live, a city supposed to be freeand enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened withchurches, there are tennis courts built and paid forout of public funds, my own included; yet I cannotuse these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancientHebrew taboo. My mail is not delivered to me,the swimming pool in the park is closed to me, thelibrary is closed nearly all day. If I enquireabout it, I am told that it is desirable that cityemployees should have one day’s rest a week;but when I ask why it might not be possible to relaythe employees, so that they might all have one, oreven two days’ rest a week, and still give thepublic their rights on Sunday, there is no answer.But I know the answer, having probed our politicsof 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 boredomof sermons.
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday;but moving pictures having come into being since thedays of Puritan rule, the picture-shows are free tokeep open. The law permits “sacred concerts”—which,under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come tomean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a freerein to the imbecilities of “Mutt & Jeff”and the obscenities of Anna Held and Gaby Deslys—whilewe bar the greatest moralists of our times, such asIbsen 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 enlightenmentand progress, in our free American democracy, whoseconstitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbidsthe establishment by the state of any form of worship,I was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours inthe state prison of Delaware for playing a game oftennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upona warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly cladin a prison costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile,duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell fullof vermin—in a building housing some fivehundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them servinglife-terms under circ*mstances which never permittedthem a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the sunshineor the sky. They had no exercise court to theirprison, and the inmates were not permitted to speakto one another, but ate their meals in dead silence,and walked back to their cells with folded arms, andhad their only occupation working for a sweat-shopcontractor; this on the outskirts of the pious cityof Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches!The writer was informed that he would return to thisinstitution regularly every week unless he abandonedhis godless habit of playing tennis on a private clubcourt on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishmentby making the discovery that at the Wilmington CountryClub it was the custom of the leading officials ofthe city and state to play golf every Sunday, andby threatening to employ detectives and have thesemighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison.Which shows again the importance of understandingthis relationship of Superstition and Big Business!
* * * * *
#Book six#
#The Church of the Quacks#
They may talk as they please about whatthey call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one’sself,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eatingand drinking—
My pleasure of thought is the pleasureof thinking
How pleasant itis to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant itis to have money.
Clough.
* * * * *
#Tabula Rasa#
Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slateupon which to write what we will. And what arewe writing? What is our intellectual life?I came to the far West, which I had been taught bynovelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom.I came, because I like freedom; I am staying becauseI like the climate. I find that what freedommeans in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanaticalpersons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scripturalinterpretation, to build a new cult around it, andearn a living out of it.
My first contact with that sort of thing was whenI went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigatehydrotherapy, and found myself in a nest of Seventh-dayAdventists. Three generations or so ago some oddcharacter hit upon the discovery that the Christianchurches had let the devil snare them into restingon the first day of the week, whereas the Bible statesdistinctly that the Lord “rested on the seventhday”. So here is a million dollar establishment,with a thousand or two patients and employees, andon Friday at sundown the silence of death settlesupon the place, and stays settled until sundown ofSaturday, when everything comes suddenly to life again,and there is a little celebration, like Easter orNew Year’s, with what I used to call “sterilizeddancing”—the men pairing with menand the women with women.
They are decent and kindly people, and you learn toput up with their eccentricities; it is really convenientin some ways, because, as not all the city sharestheir delusions, there are some stores open everyday of the week. But then you discover that theSanitarium is training “medical missionaries”to send to Africa, and is teaching these supposed-to-be-scientiststhat evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and notproven anyhow!
You get the shrewd little doctor who is running thisestablishment alone in his office, and he will smileand admit that of course it is not necessary to takeall Bible phrases literally; but you know how it is—thereare different levels of intelligence, and so on.Yes, I know how it is. You have an institutionfounded upon a certain dogma, and run by means ofthat dogma, and it is hard to change without smashingthings. It is especially convenient when servantsand nurses have a religious upbringing, and do notsteal the pocket-books of the patients. Peoplewill come from all over the country, and pay highprices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetariansof them, which you think more important than teachingabstract notions about their being descended frommonkeys. Also you can manufacture vegetarianfoods for them, and build up an enormous business—soobtaining that Power which is the thing desired ofmen.
This is but one illustration of a sort of thing ofwhich I could cite a hundred. The city in whichI live is headquarters of another sect, the “PentecostalChurch of the Nazarene”; primitive Methodists,Bible-worshippers not content with the King James version,but going back to the Sinaitic Ms. They havea “University”, located in one of themost beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institutionwith seventy-five students. A couple of yearsago I happened to meet the “president,”who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanseof his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech fullof the commonest grammatical errors, such as “youwas” and “I seen”. The pastyear witnessed a split, and the founding of a brandnew church and “University”—becauseone of the preachers insisted upon preaching so muchthat the students got no chance to study; also becausehe sent home a rich man’s daughter whose shirt-waistsrevealed 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 timeof Thais. A lady friend of mine, generously blessedwith this world’s goods, asks me have I seenthe hermit. “Hermit?” I say, and shereplies, “Didn’t you know there was ahermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, andnever has anything to do with the world. He hasno books; he contemplates spiritually.”I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rollingpalace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of thishermit’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 thisis the odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks thatI am enormously witty; I have to explain to her thatI am not jesting, but that there are definite physiologicalphenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.
#The Book of Mormon#
Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquartersof a still stranger cult.
On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, theAngel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr.,an ignorant farmer-youth in a “backwoods”part of New York State, some plates which had “theappearance of gold”. As we know from thescriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lordto appear in unexpected places and to make miraculousrevelations to men in humble walks of life; so, asdevout believers, we hold ourselves in readiness.In this case the plates were written in “reformedEgyptian”; but the Angel thoughtfully providedJoseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magicstones with which to read the records. They provedto deal with a mystery which has haunted the mindsof Bible students for centuries—the fateof the “lost ten tribes of Israel”, whowere now revealed to have been the ancestors of theAmerican Indians. The Angel told Smith to founda new religion, and gave him prophecies concerningthings in general; so, on the 6th of April, 1830,
in the town of Manchester, N.Y., there was formallylaunched the “Church of the Latter Day Saints.”Smith turned over to his followers his translationof the miraculous plates, called “The Book ofMormon”; obviously genuine, for it read preciselylike the books which we already know are the revealedword of God. But, on chance that this might notbe sufficient, we were offered in the preface twodocuments, 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 shallcome: That Joseph Smith Jr., the translatorof this work, has shewn unto us the plates of whichhath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold;and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hathtranslated, we did handle with our hands; andwe also saw the engravings there-on, all of whichhas the appearance of ancient work and of curiousworkmanship. And this we bear record with wordsof soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto us,for we have seen and hefted, and know of a suretythat the said Smith hath got the plates of whichwe have spoken. And we give our names untothe 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 LatterDay Saints bore out the Angel’s prophesies andproved conclusively its divine origin; it was persecutedas the saints of old were persecuted, and its followersproceeded 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 revealedin a vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally theysettled in Utah, where they have a magnificent marbletabernacle, and some 300,000 followers. The UnitedStates government, not being entirely Biblical, objectedto their practice of allowing the patriarchs of thetribe to have as many wives as they could support;the government confiscated the church’s property,and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy,as is done by elderly church members in other partsof 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 itssecret plates, the “Book of Abraham”, byegyptologists, who found that it was ordinary Egyptianhieroglyphics, not “reformed”, but containingprayers to the sun-god. But this will of coursemake no difference to the devout followers of Joseph—anymore than it has made to devout Catholics and Episcopaliansthat German scholars have proven that the Bible legendsand ritual have come from the Babylonians, and thatthe four gospels date from the second and third centuriesafter Christ.
#Holy Rolling#
All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults,some of them pathetic, some of them dangerous, someof them merely grotesque. Thus, for example,there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the “ChristianCatholic Church in Zion” and dressed himselfup in scarlet and purple robes with stars on.Through his Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Companyhe became enormously wealthy; he finally announcedhimself as “Elijah the Restorer.”I remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to NewYork, and P.T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the whiteelephant never made such a sensation. The ridiculeof the metropolis overwhelmed the old prophet, andhe died and passed on his robes and his tabernacleand his bank to his son; straightway, according tothe rule of all religions, the followers fell to quarrellingand splitting up, and suing one another in the law-courts.
Also there are the “Holy Rollers” and“Holy Jumpers”, ghastly sects which cultivatethe religious hysterias, and have spread like a plagueamong the women of our lonely prairie farms and desertranches. The “Holy Rollers”, whocall themselves the “Apostolic Church”,have a meeting place here in Pasadena, and any Sundayevening at nine o’clock you may see the Spiritof the Lord taking possession of the worshippers,causing moans and shrieks and convulsions; you maysee a woman holding her hands aloft for seventeenminutes by the watch, making chattering sounds likean ape. This is called “talking in tongues”and is a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit.If you come back at eleven in the evening, you willfind the entire congregation, men and women, prostrateon the floor, or hanging over the benches; and maybea child moaning in terror, having a devil cast out.
You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throwyourself into these convulsions. Here is a papercalled “Trust”, which is “publishedMonthly (D.V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Workand Bible Training School.” Elizabeth Sissonwrites on “The Pentecostal Baptism”, andtells the story of her experiences. She “campedon the Word of God,” she declares.
I went up to Calgary in Canada, andthe leader of the mission told me, “Youcan go down to the mission and stay there allday. There is plenty of wood, and you can staythere all night.” I went down, andthere was plenty of “let go” in me.I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got wonderfullyloosed....
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. Hespoiled my praying and I took up praising.I praised God that He who worked in the UpperRoom was working the same in me. I praised,and I praised, and I praised. The devil saidto me, “That’s mechanical.”I said, “I’ll praise You Lord, andif You want real praise, You’ll have to put thewind in the sails.”
That’s the way I came through.One morning I was just getting out of bed, “thisgibberish, this jargon” as the enemy likesto call it, began to come. The Lord said, “Letit babble!” I let. The babble increased,and by night I was up to my neck. I let.I still let. That’s all. Someone elsedoes the work, and it does not tire you.
And here is another paper. “Meat in DueSeason: published monthly, or as often as theLord leads.” The editor quotes the Bible,“Call upon the name of the Lord,” andexplains that “Call means #call#.”The word appears to have a special meaning to thesepentecostal persons—it means working yourselfinto 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 bold face beinghis:
Pray as if your very life dependedupon it! The first few minutes seeminglyall the powers of hell will contend every word,the next few, relief in a measure will come, moreliberty in calling. In a very little whileyou will be #dead to the room, dead to the chair#,dead to everyone around you, dead to all andtremendously alive to your desperate need andemptyness; this conviction will grow as you increasecalling upon Him. It maybe you’ll weep,it maybe you’ll perspire, it maybe yourclothing will be deranged, it maybe your throatwill get sore. Never for a moment let your mindrest on the condition of your person. Open yourmouth and God has promised to fill it. Askpersistently until the very floor seems to sinkbeneath you and the fountains of the deep, ofyour heart let loose. Like David, “pourout your soul” like one would pour waterout of a bucket. I have seen hundreds getthrough 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 ofperson gone. Draw near to God and He willdraw near to you saith the scripture, but youmust draw near to Him first.
These enthusiasts derive their practices from theShakers, a sect which originated in England, but wasdriven by persecution to the New World. The Shakerscall themselves the “United Society of TrueBelievers in Christ’s Second Coming,” andwere founded by Ann Lee, who variously termed herselfthe “Female Christ”, the “Holy Comforter”,and the “God-anointed Woman”. Theymight be termed the suffragettes of religion, forthey pray always to “Our Father and Mother, whichare in heaven.” They were taught the convenientdoctrine that their Founder had “spiritual illumination”,so that any evidence of the senses used against hermight deceive. She governed through terror, holdingthat by her mental powers she could inflict tormentupon any of her followers. Fortunately she taughtabsolute celibacy, and so there are now only abouta thousand of her disciples.
Bible Prophecy
This far western country swarms with those fanaticswho await the return of Christ, and find in Biblechronology positive evidence that he is coming ona specified day. Seldom do I give a lecture onSocialism that some eager old lady does not come upto me and point out how futile are my hopes, becausethe Millenium 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 toshout and sing and pray, expecting the vision of theLord and His Angels in the skies. I have in myhand a pamphlet entitled “Shekineh: TheGlory of God in Israel, Facts Mathematically Foretold,of the Soon Coming of Our Blessed Lord.”It is earnestly, yearningly written, in that spiritof feeble-minded affectionateness which the Bible-sectsseem to encourage:
Now dear reader you see that theseproblems tell a wonderful story which I knoware the Eternal Truths of God. Jesus is sooncoming. 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 theA.M. year, which will be March 20th, 1897.But let us take up the sickle of God, etc.Oh, my Christian friends, live near the BlessedChrist, and gain eternal life through Jesus OurLord!
In the public library I find another pamphlet, entitled“The Our Race,” which proves that the“lost ten tribes of Israel” are not theAmerican Indians, but the Irish! And here is apublication of the “Watch Tower Bible and TractSociety,” declaring:
The great pyramid in Egypt is a witnessto all the events of the ages and of our day.The pyramid’s downward passage under “aDraconis” symbolizes the course of Sin.Its first ascending passage symbolizes the JewishAge. Its Grand Gallery symbolizes the GospelAge. Its upper step symbolizes the approachingperiod of tribulation and anarchy, “Judgment”upon Christendom.
It is a Sunday morning, and I sit in the Californiasunshine revising this manuscript, when a decorous-lookingyoung 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 ReligiousNewspaper, Specially devoted to the Forwarding ofthe Lay-men’s Home Missionary Movement for theGlory of God and Good of Humanity.” Theleading article is headed “The Fall of Babylon:Ancient Babylon a Type—Mystic Babylon theAntitype: Why Christendom must Suffer—theFinal Outcome.” A note explains:
The following article is extractedfrom Pastor Russell’s posthumous volumeentitled “The Finished Mystery,” the 7thin the series of his Studies in the Scripturesand published subsequent to his death. PastorRussell held the distinction of being the mostfearless and powerful writer of modern timeson ecclesiastical subjects. In this posthumousvolume, which is called “his last legacyto the Christians on earth,” is found athorough exposition of every verse in the entirebook of Revelation and also an elucidation of theobscure prophecy of Ezekiel. The book contains608 pages, handsomely bound in embossed cloth.
Pastor Russell used to publish a two-column sermonin some hundreds of Sunday newspapers, together witha presentment of his features—solemn, stiff,white-whiskered, set off with a “choker”and a black broadcloth coat. There are five millionsuch faces in America, but if you have an impulseto despair for your country, remember that it producedMark Twain and Artemus Ward, as well as Pastor Russelland the Moody and Sankey hymn-book. I quote onepassage from “The Finished Mystery”, inorder that the reader may know what it means to “holdthe distinction of being the most fearless and powerfulwriter of modern times on ecclesiastical subjects.”Pastor Russell does not approve of the Methodists,and he quotes twelve verses of Revelation, line byline and phrase by phrase, showing how the evil courseand downfall of the Wesleyan system were divinelyforetold. Thus:
“But that they should be tormentedfive months.”—In symbolic time,150 years—5x30=150. (Ezek. 4:6.) Wesleybecame the first Methodist in 1728. (Rev. 9:1.) When the Methodist denomination, with allthe others, was cast off from favor in 1878 (Rev.3:14) its powers to torment men by preachingwhat 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 isgoing to press, “The Finished Mystery”is suppressed by the government and several score“Bible Students” are landed in jail forsedition.
#Koreshanity#
Such are the beliefs built on the Bible. Butthere are other ancient writings with strange nomenclatureand ritual and symbolism, calculated to impress theunlettered; also our prophets have imaginations oftheir own, and can invent nomenclature and ritual andsymbolism never seen in heaven nor on earth before.Thus there is Dr. Newo Newi New, who called himself“Archbishop of the Newthot Church,” andgathered about him a harem of devoted females in SanFrancisco, and was landed in jail for using the mailsto defraud. Or there is “Oahspe, the CosmicBible,” a work of brand-new revelation with abrand-new view of the universe and all things therein:
The reader soon discovers that he mustradically revise not only his ideas of celestialCosmogony, but the order and significance ofnames and titles commonly applied to the TranscendentalBrethren. The great provinces of Etheria arepresided over by chiefs, chosen for their superiordevelopment in wisdom and love. For our solarsystem to cross one of these provinces requiresabout 3,000 years, and between them are beltsof high Etherian light which take several yearsto pass over. The passage of each province isa cycle of earthly history, and the crossingsare called Dawns of Dan.
And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed bythe Lord to Dr. C.R. Teed of Chicago in the year1889. This new seer took the name of Koresh,which is Hebrew for Cyrus, “the Shepherd fromJoseph, the Stone of Israel, the Sun-Man; the illuminatingcenter of the Son of man”, and went out on thestreets of the city to preach that the earth is ahollow sphere with the stars inside. The streeturchins of the pork-packing metropolis threw stonesat him, and the irreverent newspapers took up hisadventures, with the result that followers gathered,and now there is a flourishing colony in Florida, witha dignified magazine called “The Flaming Sword”,and a collection of propaganda volumes: “TheCellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of Koreshan Universologyand 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, TheStanding of the Great Ensign, by Koresh.”The “Religio-science” of this Chicagorevelator is based, first upon some precise measurementsof the earth which prove that its surface is concave;and second upon some philological discoveries verymuch resembling puns. Thus the “cross ofChrist” is explained in a sense of the word morecommon among horse-breeders than among theologians:
The highest characteristic of the alchemicallaw is the cross of Christ with sensual man.The cross means that the Lord God, in order toperpetuate his own being, descends into the raceof sensuality.
And again, when someone asks about meteors:
The word Heaven means things heavedup, that is, heaved up from their material basis,the earth; thus, the meteors which fall to theearth are composed of metallic, mineral, andgeological substances, being materialized or actuallycreated in the atmosphere by an alchemico-organicprocess from zones or belts periodically open,which precipitate their contents in the formor shape of meteors.”
And perhaps I ought also to quote the “Indiciaof Human Progress”, by “Berthaldine, Matrona”.I don’t know what a “Matrona” is—unlessit is a female matron. This female matron tellsme that now is the “Time of Restitution”,and explains that “the prolification of the humanrace has reached a fruition of the adultery of the
truth and good of the Lord with the fallacies andevils of the mortal hells” ...We have come,it seems, to the “age of Pisces”, whichis “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 ofthe Most High”, which is the organization ofthe “Aquarian age”, proclaimed by Koreshon January 15th, 1891.#Mazdaznan#
And here is another and even more startling revelationfrom Chicago, given to a seer by the name of Dr. OtomanPrince of Adusht Ha’nish, prophet of the SunGod, Prince of Peace, Manthra Magi of Temple El Katman,Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and Envoy of Mazdaznanliving, 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 namedOtto Hanisch, you might at first have trouble in recognizinghim through this transmogrification. I have tracedhis career in the files of the Chicago newspapers,and find him herding sheep, setting type, preachingprestidigitation, mesmerism, and fake spiritualism,joining the Mormon Church, then the “ChristianCatholic Church in Zion”, and then the cult ofBrighouse, who claimed to be Christ returned.
Finally he sets himself up in Chicago as a PersianMagus, teaching Yogi breathing exercises and occultsex-lore to the elegant society ladies of the pork-packingmetropolis. The Sun God, worshipped for two scorecenturies in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a newshrine on Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet givestea-parties at which his disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms—“thewhite 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, andhe sells his lady adorers a book called “InnerStudies”, price five dollars per volume, withinformation on such subjects as:
The Immaculate Conceptionand its Repetition; The Secrets of
Lovers Unveiled; OurIdeals and Soul Mates; Magnetic
Attraction and ElectricMating.
A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jailfor six months; but that does not harm his cult, whichnow has a temple in Chicago, presided over by a ladycalled Kalantress and Evangelist; also a “NorthernStronghold” in Montreal, an “Embassy”in London, an “International Aryana” inSwitzerland, and “Centers” all over America.At the moment of going to press, the prophet himselfis in flight, pursued by a warrant charging him withimproper conduct with a number of young boys in aLos Angeles hotel.
I have dipped into Ha’nish’s revelations,which are a farrago of every kind of ancient mysticism—paperand binding from the Bible, illustrations from theEgyptian, names from the Zoroastrian, health rulesfrom the Hindoos, laws from the Confucians—priceten dollars per volume. Would you like to discoveryour seventeen senses, to develop them according tothe Ga-Llama principle, and to share the “expansionof the magnetic circles”? Here is the wayto do it:
Inhale through nostrilsfor four seconds, and upon one
exhalation, speak slowly:
Open, O thou world-sustainingSun, the entrance unto Truth
hidden by the vase ofdazzling light.
Again inhale for fourseconds, and breathe out the following
sentence upon one exhalationas before:
Soften the radiationof Thy Illuminating Splendor, that I
may behold Thy TrueBeing.
I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper tellingof the prophet’s arriving there. He takesthe front page with the captivating headline:“Women Didn’t Think Till They Put On Corsets”.The interview tells about his mysteriousness, hisaloofness, his bird-like-diet, and his personal beauty.“Despite his seventy-three years, Ha’nishevidences no sign of age. His keen blue eyes showedno sign of wavering. There were no wrinkles onhis face, and his walk was that of a man of forty.”The humor of this becomes apparent when we mentionthat at Ha’nish’s trial, three or fouryears ago, he was proven to be thirty-five years old!
Being thus warned as to the accuracy of American journalism,we shall not be taken in by the repeated statementsthat the Mazdaznan prophet is a millionaire.But there is no doubt that he is wealthy; and as allAmericans wish to be wealthy, I will quote his formulaof prosperity, his method of accomplishing what mightbe called the Individual Revolution:
When hungry and you do not know whereto get your next piece of bread, do not despair.Thy Father, all-loving, has provided, you witheverything that will meet all cases of emergency.
Place your teeth tightly together,with tongue pressing against the lower teethand lips parted. Breathe in, close lipsimmediately, exhaling through the nostrils. Breatheagain; if saliva forms in your mouth, hold yourbreath so you can swallow it first before youexhale. You thus take out of the air themetal-substance contained therein; you can eventaste the iron which you convert into substance requiredfor making the blood. Should you feel that, althoughyou have sufficient iron in the blood, there is alack of copper and zinc and silver, place upperteeth over lower, keep lower lip tightly to lowerteeth, now breathe and you can even taste themetals named. Then should you feel you needmore gold element for your brain functions, placeyour back teeth together just as if you were to grindthe back teeth, taking short breaths only.You will then learn to know that there is goldand silver all around us. That our bodiesare filled with quite a quantity of gold.
#Black Magic#
What all this means is that we have a continent, witha hundred million half-educated people, materiallyprosperous, but spiritually starving; so any man whopossesses personality, who looks in any way strangeand impressive, or has hunted up old books in a library,and can pronounce mysterious words in a thrillingvoice—such a man can find followers.Anybody can do it with any doctrine, from anywhere,Persia or Patagonia, Pekin or Pompei. I wouldbe willing to wager that if I cared to come out andannounce that I had had a visit from God lastnight, and to devote such literary and emotional poweras I possess to communicating a new revelation, Icould have a temple, a university, and a million dollarswithin five years at the outside. And if at theend of five years I were to announce that I had playeda joke on the world, some one of my followers wouldconvince the faithful that I had been an agent ofGod without knowing it, and that the leadership hadnow been turned over to him.
I would not be understood as believing that all ourcults are undiluted fakery, for that would be doinginjustice to some earnest people. There are,in this country, many followers of the Persian reformer,Abbas Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and whohave what I am inclined to think is the purest andmost dignified religion in existence. There wasa man named Jacob Beilhardt, who founded a cult inIllinois with the painful name of “Spirit FruitColony”, who nevertheless was a man of spiritualinsight, a true mystic; he was honest, and so he failed,and died of a broken heart. Also there are theChristian Scientists and the Theosophists, so exasperatingthat one would like to throw them onto the rubbish-heap,who yet compel us to sift over their mountains ofchaff for the grains of truth which will bear fruitin future.
While we western races have been exploring the naturalworld and perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoostudents have been exploring the subconscious andits strange powers. What Myers and Lodge andJanet and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling ustoday they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtlessthey have hints of other things, upon which our scientistshave not yet come. I have friends, perfectlysane and competent people, who tell me that they cansee auras, and use this ability as a means of judgingcharacter. Shall I say that there are no auras,simply because I do not happen to have this gift ofseeing them? In the same way, having read Gurney’s“Phantasms of the Living,” I am not readyto ridicule the claim of the Yogi adepts, that theyare able to project some kind of astral body, andto communicate with one another from distant places.But granting such occult powers in a world of economicstrife, what follows? Simply new floods of charlatanism,elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and metaphysicfor the deluding and plundering of the credulous.
I have seen the thing working itself out in one caseknown to me. A young man had a gift of mentalhealing; I know, because I saw it work; but it didnot always work, and that was annoying. He waspenniless and had a taste for power, and to eke outhis erratic endowment he got himself books of Easternlore, and day by day as I watched him I could seehim becoming more and more impressive, mysterious andforbidding. Today he is a full-fledged wonder-worker,with the language of a dozen mystic cults at his tongue’send, and the reverent regard of many wealthy ladies.I have never tried to break through his guard, butI feel certain that he is a deliberate charlatan.
This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible.Just as the manufacturer of honest foods is drivenout by the adulterator, so the worker of miraclesdrives out the sincere investigator. As a resultwe have here in America a plague of Eastern cults,with “swamis” using soft yellow robesand soft brown eyes to win the souls of idle societyladies. These teachers of ancient Hindoo loredespise us as a race of barbarians; but they stay—whetherbecause of love of man or woman, I do not pretendto say.
There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schoolsand institutes and temples and colonies, and a doctrineas complex and detailed and fantastic as that of theRoman Catholics. I have already referred to thewritings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway Russian armyofficer’s daughter, whose career reads likea tale out of the Arabian Nights. And there isAnnie Besant, who was once an ardent worker in theSocial-democratic Federation; H.M. Hyndman tellsof his dismay when she went to India and walked ina procession between two white bulls! Here inCalifornia is Madame Tingley, with a colony and a hostof followers in a minature paradise. Men workat money-lending or manufacturing sporting-goods,and when they get old and tired they make the thrillingdiscovery that they have souls; the theosophists cultivatethese souls and they leave their money to the soul-cause,and there are lawsuits and exposes in the newspapers.For, you see, there is ferocious rivalry in the gameof cultivating millionaire souls; there are slandersand feuds, just as in soulless affairs. “Don’thave anything to do with Madame Tingley,” whispersa Theosophist lady to my Wife; and when my wife inall innocence inquires, “Why not?” theawe-stricken answer comes, “She practices blackmagic!”
Let me add that I do not say that she practices blackmagic. I do not believe that she #could# practiceit, even if she wanted to—I do not believein black magic. My purpose is merely to show howtheosophists quarrel: going back to the daysof Anu and Baal and the bronze Image of the Babylonianfire-god:
Let them die, but let me live!
Let them be put under a ban, but let meprosper!
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 religiousfaith. Why, if there be a power which loves andcan be persuaded to aid us, may there not also bea power which hates, and can be persuaded to destroy?No religion has ever been able to answer this, andtherefore none has ever been able to escape from devil-terrors.Even Jesus was pursued by Satan, and the Holy CatholicChurch has its ceremonies for the exorcising of demons,and a most frightful formula for cursing. Andhere are our friends the Christian Scientists, proclaimingthe unreality of all evil, their ability to banishdisease by convincing themselves that they are perfectin God—yet tormented by a squalid phobiacalled “Mental Malpractice”, or “MaliciousAnimal Magnetism”.
Christian Science is the most characteristic of Americanreligious contributions. Just as Billy Sundayis the price we pay for failing to educate our base-ballplayers, so Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy is theprice we pay for failing to educate our farmer’sdaughters.
That she had a power to cure disease I do not doubt,because I have a little of it myself. At firstmy opinion was that her “Science” madeits way by curing the imaginary ailments of the idlerich. If a person has nothing to do but thinkthat he is sick, you can work easy miracles by persuadinghim to think that he is well; and if he has nothingto do but think that he is well, he will help you tobuild marble churches and maintain propaganda societies.But recently I have experimented with mental healing—enoughto satisfy myself that the subconscious mind whichcontrols our physical functions can be powerfullyinfluenced by the will.
I told the story of some of these experiments in Hearst’sMagazine for April, 1914. Suffice it here tosay that if you will lay your hands upon a sick person,forming a vivid mental picture of the bodily changesyou desire, and concentrating the power of your willupon them, you may be surprised by the results, especiallyif you possess anything in the way of psychic gifts.You do not have to adopt any theories, you do nothave to do it in the name of any divinity, ancientor modern; the only bearing of such ideas is that theyserve to persuade people to make the experiment, andto make it with persistence and intensity. Soit has come about that “miracles” of healingare associated with “faith”; and so itcomes about that scientists are apt to flout the subject.But read of the work of Janet and Charcot and theirfollowers at the Salpetriere; they have proven thatall kinds of seeming-organic ailments may be entirelyhysterical in nature, and may be cured by the simplestform of suggestion. Understanding this, you mayfind it more easy to credit the fact that cripplesdo sometimes throw away their crutches in the grottoof Lourdes. For my part, I can believe that Jesusperformed all the miracles of healing attributed tohim—including the raising up of peoplepronounced to be dead by the ignorance of that time.I am convinced that in the new science of psycho-analysiswe have a universe as vast as the universe of theatom or of the stars.
The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power;they have mixed it up with metaphysic and divinity,and built some four or five hundred churches, andprinted the Mother Church alone knows how many millionpamphlets and books. I once invested three ofmy hard-earned dollars for a copy of the Eddy Bible,and let myself be stunned and blinded by the flappingof metaphysical wings. It is unadulterated moonshine—asthe Platonist and Berkeleyan and Hegelian and otherorthodox collegiate metaphysical magi can prove toyou in one minute. What interests me about thephenomenon is not the slinging of tremendous words,but the strictly Yankee use which is made of them.There is no nonsense about saving your soul in ChristianScience; what it is for is to remove your wen, tonail down your floating kidney, and to enable youto hustle and make money. We saw in our politicsthe growth of a Party of the Full Dinner-Pail; contemporaneoustherewith, and corresponding thereto, we see in ourreligious life the development of a Church of theFull Pocket-Book.
It is a strict religion—strictly cash.The heads of the cult do not issue cheap editionsof “Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures”,to relieve the suffering of the proletariat; no—thework is copyrighted, in all its varying and contradictoryeditions, and the price is from three to seven-fifty,according to binding. Treatments cost from threedollars to ten, whether you come and get them or takethem over the telephone. And we have no nonsenseabout charity, we don’t worry about the poorwho fester in our city slums; because poverty is aproduct of Mortal Mind, and we offer to all men a wayto get rich right off the bat. You may; cometo our marble churches and hear people testify howthrough the power of Divine Mind they were enabledto anticipate a rise in the stock-market. If youdon’t avail yourself of the opportunity, thefault is yours, and yours also the punishment.
As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholichierarchy is a Bolshevik democracy in comparison.The Church is controlled by an absolutely irresponsibleself-perpetuating body of five men, who alone dictateits policy. I have in my hand a letter from aChristian Science healer who was listed as an “authorizedpractitioner”, and who withdrew from the Churchbecause of its attitude on public questions.He sends me a copy of his correspondence with the editorsof the “Christian Science Monitor”, containinga detailed analysis of the position of that paperon such issues as the Ballinger land-frauds. Hewrites:
I am thoroughly convinced now thatthe policy of the Church is consciously plutocratic.The only recommendation I have heard of the latestappointee to the Board of Directors is that heis one of the richest men in the movement.
After the Titanic disaster, Senator La Follette broughtin a carefully drawn bill to compel steamship companiesto provide life-boats and trained crews. The“Christian Science Monitor” opposed thisbill; and when my correspondent cited the fact, hebrought out a quaint bit of metaphysical logic, asfollows:
One would prefer to travel on a vesselwithout a single boat, rather than on some othervessels 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 Yankeereligion from the day of its birth. In the firstedition of her new Bible “Mother” Eddydropped the hint to her readers: “Men ofbusiness have said this science was of great advantagefrom a secular point of view.” And in heradvertisem*nts she threw aside all pretense, declaringthat her work “Affords an opportunity to acquirea profession by which one can accumulate a fortune.”When her pupils did accumulate, she boasted of theirsuccess; nor did she neglect her own accumulating.
It has been a dozen years since I looked into thiscult; in order to be sure that it has not been purifiedin the interim, I proceed to a street corner in myhome city, where is a stand with a sign: “ChristianScience Literature.” I take four samplecopies of a magazine, the “Christian ScienceSentinel”, published by the Mother Church inBoston, and turn to the “Testimonials of Healing”.In the issue of August 11, 1917, Mary C. Richardsof St. Margarets-on-Thames, England, testifies:“Through a number of circ*mstances unnecessaryto relate, but proving conclusively that the resultcame not from man but from God, employment was found.”In the issue of December 2, 1916, Frances Tuttle ofJersey City, N.J., testifies how her sister was successfullytreated for unemployment by a scientist practitioner.“Every condition was beautifully met.”In the same issue Fred D. Miller of Los Angeles, Cal.,testifies: “Soon after this wonderful truthcame to me, Divine Love led me to a new position witha responsible firm. The work was new to me, butI have given entire satisfaction, and my salary hasbeen advanced twice in less than a year.”In the issue of January 27, 1917, Eliza Fryant of Agricola,Miss., testifies how she cured her little dog of snake-biteand removed two painful corns from her own foot.In the issue of August 4, 1917, Marcia E. Gaier, ofEverett, Wash., testifies how it suddenly occurredto her that because God is All, she would drop herplanning and outlining in regard to real estate properties,“upon which for nine months all available materialmethods were tried to no effect.” The resultwas a triumph of “Principle”.
While working in the yard one morningand gratefully communing with God, the only power,I suddenly felt that I should stop working andprepare for visitors on their way to look atthe property. I obeyed this very distinct command,and in about an hour I greeted two people whohad searched almost the entire city for justwhat we had to offer. They had been directedto our place by what to material sense wouldseem an accident, but we know it was the divine lawof harmony in its universal operation.
After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, ina Christian Science lecture at Kansas City, Mo., shouldproclaim:
My friends, do you know that sincethe world began Christian Science is the onlysystem which has intelligently related religionto business? Christian Science shows that sinceall ideas belong to Mind, God, therefore allreal business belongs to Him.
As I said, these people have the new-old power ofmental healing. They blunder along with it blindly,absurdly, sometimes with tragic consequences; butmeantime the rank and file of the pill-doctors knownothing about this power, and regard it with contemptmingled with fear; so of course the hosts of suffererswhom the pill-doctors cannot help flock to the healersof the “Church of Christ, Scientist”.According to the custom of those who are healed by“faith”, they swallow line, hook, andsinker, creed, ritual, metaphysic and divinity.So we see in twentieth-century America precisely whatwe saw in B.C. twentieth-century Assyria—ahost of worshippers; giving their worldly goods withoutstint, and a priesthood, made partly of fanatics andpartly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterpriseof graft, and harvesting that thing desired of allmen, power over the lives and destinies of others.
And of course among themselves they quarrel; theymurder one another’s Mortal Minds, they driveone another out, they snarl over the spoils like apack of hungry animals. Listen to the Mother,denouncing one of her students—a perfectlyamiable and harmless youth whose only offense wasthat he had gone his own way and was healing the sickfor the benefit of his own pocket-book:
Behold! thou criminal mental marauder,that would blot out the sunshine of earth, thatwould sever friends, destroy virtue, put outTruth, and murder in secret the innocent, befoulingthy track with the trophies of thy guilt—Isay, Behold the “cloud” no biggerthan a man’s hand already rising on thehorizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty headthe hailstones of doom.
And again:
The Nero of today, regaling himselfthrough a mental method with the torture of individuals,is repeating history, and will fall upon hisown sword, and it shall pierce him through.Let him remember this when, in the dark recesses ofthought, he is robbing, committing adultery andkilling. When he is attempting to turn friendaway from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quiveringheart; when he is clipping the thread of lifeand giving to the grave youth and its rainbowhues; when he is turning back the reviving suffererto his bed of pain, clouding his first morningafter years of night; and the Nemesis of thathour 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 givenup entirely to the whims of pretty ladies. Itsfloors 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, diamondsfrom South Africa and beads from the Philippines,grapes from Spain and cherries from Japan, fortune-tellersfrom Arabia and dancing-masters from Petrograd and“naturopaths” from Vienna. There areseventy-three shops, by actual count, containing everythingthat could be imagined or desired by a pretty lady,whether for her body, or for that vague stream of emotionshe calls her “soul”. One of the seventy-threeshops is a “Metaphysical Library”, havingbroad windows, and walls in pastel tints, and prettyvases with pink flowers, and pretty gray wicker chairsin which the reader will please to be seated, whilewe probe the mysteries of an activity widely spreadthroughout America, called “New Thought.”
We begin with a shelf of magazines having mysticaltitles: Azoth; Master Mind; Aletheian; Wordsof Power; Qabalah; Comforter; Adept; Nautilus; TrueWord; Astrological Bulletin; Unity; Uplift; Now.And then come shelves of pretty pamphlets, alluringto the eye and the purse; also shelves of imposing-lookingvolumes containing the lore and magic of a score ofraces and two score of centuries—togetherwith the very newest manifestations of Yankee hustleand graft.
As in the case of Christian Science, these New Thoughtershave a fundamental truth, which I would by no meanswish to depreciate. It is a fact that the mysteriousSource of our being is infinite, and that we are onlyat the beginning of our thinking about it. Itis a fact that by appeal to it we can perform seemingmiracles of mental and moral regeneration; we canstimulate 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 doesnot bar the fact that He has certain ways of working,which He does not vary; and that it is our businessto explore and understand these ways, instead of settingour fancies to work imagining other ways more agreeableto our sentimentality.
Thus, for example, if we want bread, it is God’sdecree that we shall plant wheat and harvest it, andgrind and bake and distribute it. Under conditionsprevailing at the moment, it appears to be His decreethat we shall store the wheat in elevators, and shipit in freight cars, and buy it through a grain exchange,with capital borrowed from a national bank; in otherwords, that our daily bread shall be the playthingof exploiters and speculators, until such a time aswe have the intelligence to form an effective politicalparty and establish Industrial Democracy. Butwhen you come to study the ways of God in the literatureof the New Thought, do you find anything about theMillers’ Trust and the Bakers’ Trust andhow to expropriate these agencies of starvation?You do not!
What you find is Bootstrap-lifting; you find gentlemenand lady practitioners shutting their eyes and liftingtheir hands and pronouncing Incantations in awe-inspiringvoices—or in Capital Letters and largetype: “God is infinite, God is All-Loving,#god will provide.# Bread is comingto you! #Bread is coming to you!! Bread iscoming to you!!!”
You think this is exaggeration? If so, it isbecause you have never entered the building of thepretty ladies, and sat in the gray wicker chairs ofthe metaphysical library. One of the highesthigh-priestesses of the cults of New Nonsense is alady named Elizabeth Towne, editor of “The Nautilus”;and Priestess Elizabeth tells you:
I believe the idea thatmoney wants you will help you to the
right mental condition.Be a pot of honey and let it come.
I look over this Priestess’ magazine, and findit full of testimonials and advertisem*nts for theconjuring of prosperity. “Are you in thesuccess sphere?” asks one exhorter; the nexttells you “How to enter the silence. Howto manifest what you desire. The secret of advancement.”Another tells: “How a Failure at Sixty WonSudden Success; From Poverty to $40,000 a year—aLesson for Old and Young Alike.” The lesson,it appears, is to pay $3.00 for a book called “Powerof Will.” And here is another book:
Master Key: Which can unlock theSecret Chamber of Success, can throw wide thedoors which seem to bar men from the TreasureHouse of Nature, and bids those enter and partakewho are Wise enough to Understand and broad enoughto Weigh the Evidence, firm enough to Followtheir Own Judgment and Strong enough to Makethe Sacrifice Exacted.
#"Dollars Want Me"#
I turn to the shelves of pamphlets. Here is apretty one called “All Sufficiency in All Things,”published by the “Unity School of Christianity”,in Kansas City; it explains that God is God, not merelyof the Soul, but also of the Kansas City stockyards.
This divine Substance is ever abidingwithin us, and stands ready to manifest itselfin whatever form you and I need or wish, justas it did in Elisha’s time. It is the sameyesterday, today and forever. Abundant Supplyby the manifestation of the Father within us,from within outward, is as much a legitimateoutcome of the Christ life or spiritual understandingas is bodily healing.... “Know that Iam 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, authorof a work called “Mind Power”. Wouldyou like to be an Impressive Personality? Mr.Atkinson will tell you exactly how to do it; he willgive you the secret of the Magnetic Handclasp, ofthe Intense, Straight-in-the-eye Look; he will tellyou what to say, he will write out for you Incantationswhich you may pronounce to yourself, to convince yourselfthat you have #Power#, that the indwelling presencewith all its #might# is yours. Mr. Atkinsonrebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellowBootstrap-lifters to employ these arts for money-making;but you notice that his magazine, “AdvancedThought”, does not decline the advertisem*ntsof such too-practical practitioners.
Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of WallaceWattles, who tells in one pamphlet “How to Bea Genius”, and in another pamphlet “Howto Get What you Want”. The thing for youto do is—
Saturate your mentality through andthrough with the knowledge that you cando what you want to do....Look upon the peanut-stand merely as the beginningof the department store, and make it grow; youcan.
And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of acquisitiveness:
Hold this consciousness and say withdeep, earnest feeling: I can succeed!All that is possible to any one is possible tome. I am success. I do succeed, forI am full of the Power of Success.
Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in thetreadmill of the capitalist system—a “soda-jerker”,a “counter-jumper”, a book-keeper forthe Steel Trust. His chances of rising in lifeare one in ten thousand; but he comes to the MetaphysicalLibrary, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphletby Henry Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarianclergyman, and then an extra-high Bootstrap-lifterin San Francisco, an Honorary Vice-President of theInternational New Nonsense Alliance. Mr. Brownwill tell our soda-jerker or counter-jumper exactlyhow to elevate himself by mental machinery. Allcalculations of probabilities are delusions of thesenses; if you have faith, you can move, not merelymountains, 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 impressedon the Divine Mind only by your
faith. A doubtcuts the connection.
A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in itsthirtieth edition, bears the thrilling title of “#DollarsWant Me#!” In it Mr. Brown lays claim to beinga pioneer:
I believe that this little monographis the first utterance of the thought that eachindividual has the ability so to radiate hismental forces that he can cause the Dollars to feelhim, love him, seek him, and thus draw at will allthings needed for his unfoldment from the universalsupply.
“What are Dollars?” asks our author; andanswers:
Dollars are manifestations of the OneInfinite Substance as you are, but, unlike you,they are not Self-Conscious. They have nopower till you give them power. Make them feelthis through your thought-vibrations as you feelthe importance of your work. They will thencome to you to be used.
“What is Poverty?” Mr. Brown asks, andanswers himself:
Poverty is a mental condition.It can be cured only by the Affirmation of Powerto cure: I am a part of the One, and, inthe One, I possess all! Affirm this and patientlywait for the manifestation. You have sownthe thought seed.
And our author goes on to hand out packages of thesethought-seeds—“Affirmations”as they are called, in the jargon of the New Conjuring:
I desire a deep consciousness of financialfreedom.
I desire that the flow of prosperity becomeequalized.
I desire a greater consciousness of mypower 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 thepalace, and that of the non-conformist sects of thecounting-house, that of the International New NonsenseAlliance is of Wall Street and the “ticker”.“What is your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?”asks William Morris Nichols in the publication ofthe “‘Now’ Folk”, 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 thatlast question affirmatively, you are
on the road to becomea Master in Spiritual Financiering.
Have you an account with the First(and only) Bank of Spirit? If not, thenyou should at once open one therewith. Forno one can afford to keep less than a large depositof spiritual funds with that Bank.
And how do you proceed to open your account?It is very simple:
Intend the mind in the direction indicatedby your desire. Seek for the Light and Guidanceby which you may open up the way for your SpiritualSubstance, which governs material supply, toreach you and make you as rich as you ought to be,in freedom and happiness. All this you can, andwhen in earnest, will do.
I turn over the advertisem*nts of this publicationof the “‘Now’ Folk”.One offers “The Business Side of New Thought.”Another offers “The Books Without an If”,with your money back if you are not satisfied!
Another offers land in Bolivia for two dollars anacre. Another quotes Shakespeare: “Tisthe mind that makes the body rich.” Anotheroffers two copies of the “Phrenological Era”for ten cents.
There is apparently no delusion of any age or climewhich cannot find dupes among the readers of thisNew Nonsense. One notice commands:
Stop! A Revelation!A Book has been written entitled
“Strands of Gold”or “from Darkness into Light!”
Another announces:
The Most Wonderful Bookof the Ages: The Acquarian Gospel of
Jesus the Christ, Transcribedfrom the Book of God’s
Remembrance, the AkashicRecords.
And here is an advertisem*nt published in Mr. Atkinson’spaper:
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 fullparticulars of his personal work which is dedicatedto your service. No problem is too big ortoo small for Numerology. Understandingawaits you.
And looking in the body of the magazine, you findthis Philosopher imparting some of this Understanding.Would you like, for example, to understand why Americaentered the War? Nothing easier. The vowelsof 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 firstsee what that has to do with the War—untilthe Philosopher points out that “9 is the numberof completion, indicating the end of a cosmic cycle.”That, of course, explains everything.
And here is a work on what you perhaps thought tobe a dead science, Astrology. It is called “LuckyHours for Everybody: A True System of PlanetaryHours—by Prof. John B. Early.Price One Dollar.” It teaches you thingslike this:
Saturn’s negative hours are especiallygood for all matters relating to gold-mining....The Sun negative rules the emerald, the musicalnote D sharp, and the number four. The lunarhours are a good time to deal in public commodities,and to hire servants of both sexes....
A recent lady visitor informed me thatshe had made several vain attempts to transactimportant business in the hours ruled by Jupiter,usually held to be fortunate, while she was nearlyalways fortunate in what she began in the hours ruledby Saturn. Upon investigation I found her namewas ruled by the Sun negative, and that she hadCapricorn with Saturn therein as her ascendantat birth, which explains.
And finally, here is a London “scientist”,reported in the “Weekly Unity” of KansasCity, who proves his mental power over two-horse poweroil engines which fail to act. “Going alittle apart, he came back in a few minutes and said:’The engine is all right now and will work satisfactorily.’and without any further difficulty it did.”We are told how Dr. Rawson gave a demonstration ofhis method to a newspaper reporter the other day.Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he apparentlybecame absorbed in deep contemplation and said aloud:“There is no danger; man is surrounded by divinelove; there is no matter; all is spirit and manifestationof spirit.”
You might at first find difficulty in believing whatcan be accomplished by “demonstrations”such as this; not merely are two-horse power oil enginesmade to work, but the whole gigantic machine of Prussianmilitarism is prevented from working. You mayrecall how Arthur Machen’s magazine story ofthe Angels of Mons was taken up and made into a Catholiclegend over-night; now here is a New-Nonsense legend,complete and perfect, going the rounds of our Nonsensemagazines:
London, Dec. 14.—Shell-proofand bullet-proof soldiers have been discoveredon the European battle-fronts. Heroes with “charmedlives” are being made every day, according toFrederick L. Rawson, a London scientist, who insistshe has found the miraculous way by which theyare developed. He calls it “audibletreatment”. “Practical utilizationof the powers of God by right thinking,”is the agency through which Dr. Rawson declareshe can so treat a man that he will not be harmedwhen hundreds of men are being shot dead besidehim. This amazing treatment includes a new typeof prayer. It is being administered to hundredsof men audibly, and to hundreds more by letter.Nothing since the war began has aroused so muchtalk of modern miracles as have many of the statementsof Dr. Rawson....
At the taking of a wood there werefive hundred yards of “No Man’s Land”to be crossed. Our troops could not get across.Then Capt.——, who practicesthis method of prayer, treated them for an hourbefore they started, and not a man was knockedout. He was the only officer left out of eightyin his brigade. He simply held onto thefact that man is spiritual and perfect and couldnot be touched. A bullet fired from a revolveronly five yards away hit him over the chest,tore his shirt and went out at the shoulder. Butit never penetrated his chest. He was frequentlyin a hail of shells and bullets which did nottouch him.
#The Graft of Grace#
All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religionsin a world of commercial competition. It happensnot merely to Christian Science and New Thought religions,Mazdaznan and Zionist, Holy Roller and Mormon religions,but to Catholic and Episcopalian, Presbyterian andMethodist and Baptist religions. For you see,when you are with the wolves you must howl with them;when you are competing with fakirs you must fake.The ordinary Christian will read the claims of theNew Thought fakers with contempt; but have I not shownthe Catholic Church publishing long lists of money-miracles?Have I not shown the Church of Good Society, our exclusiveand aristocratic Protestant Episcopal communion, pretendingto call rain and to banish pestilence, to protectcrops and win wars and heal those who are “sickin estate”—that is, who are in businesstrouble?
The reader will say that I am a cynic, despising myfellows; but that is not so. I am an economicscientist, analyzing the forces which operate in humansocieties. I blame the prophets and priests andhealers for their fall from idealism; but I blame stillmore the competitive wage-system, which presents themwith the alternative to swindle or to starve.
For, you see, the prophet has to have food. Hehas frequently got along with almost none, and withonly a rag for clothing; in Palestine and India, wherethe climate is warm, a sincere faith has been possiblefor short periods. But the modern prophet whoexpects to influence the minds of men has to havebooks and newspapers; he will find a telephone anda typewriter and postage-stamps hardly to be dispensedwith, also in Europe and America some sort of a roofover his meeting place. So the prophet is caught,like all the rest of us, in the net of the speculatorand the landlord. He has to get money, and inorder to get it he has to impress those who alreadyhave it—people whose minds and souls havebeen 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 becomesa church of charlatans. I care not how sincere,how passionately proletarian a religious prophet maybe, that is the fate which sooner or later befallshim in a competitive society—to be thefounder of an organization of fools, conducted byknaves, for the benefit of wolves. That fate befellBuddha and Jesus, it befell Ignatius Loyola and Francisof 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 peculiargift; whether we believe in the survival of personality,or whether we call it telepathy, does not alter thefact that they have a rare and special sensitiveness,a new faculty which science must investigate.They come, poor people mostly—for the well-to-dowill seldom give their time to exacting and wearisomeexperiments. They come, wearing frayed and thinclothing, shivering with cold, obviously undernourished;and their survival depends upon their producing “phenomena”—whichphenomena are capricious, and will not come at call.So, what more natural than that mediums should resortto faking? That the whole field should be reekingwith fraud, and science should be held back from understandingan extraordinary power of the subconscious mind?
Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies havebeen telling us about the wondrous powers of a mulatto-woman,a manicurist at the city’s most fashionablehotel. The other day, out of curiosity, my wifeand I went; the moment the “medium” openedher mouth my wife recognized her as the person whohas been trying for several months to get me on thetelephone to tell me how the spirit of Jack Londonis seeking to communicate with me! The #seance#was a public one, a gathering composed, half of wealthyand cultured society-women, and half of confederates,people with the dialect and manners of a vaudevilletroupe. A megaphone was set in the middle of thefloor, the room was made dark, a couple of hymns weresung, and then the spirit of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
spoke through the megaphone with a Bowery accent,and gave communications from relatives and friendsof the various confederates. “Jesus iswith us”, said Dr. Holmes. “The spiritof Jesus bids you to study spiritualism.”And then came the voice of a child: “Mamma!Mamma!” “It is little Georgie!” criedDr. Holmes; and one of the society ladies started,and answered, and presently burst into tears.A marvelous piece of evidence—especiallywhen you recall that the story of this mother’sbereavement had been published in all the papers acouple of months before!And this kind of swindling is going on every nightin every city of America. It goes on wholesalefor months every summer at Lily Dale, in New YorkState, where the spiritualists hold their combinationof Chautauqua and Coney Island. And the samething 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 withnew spiritual fervors, new moral idealisms, new poetry,new music, new painting, new sculpture. The faker,the charlatan is everywhere—using the mentaland moral and artistic forces of life as a means ofdelivering himself from economic servitude. EverywhereI turn I see it—credulity being exploited,and men of practical judgment, watching the game andseeing through it, made hard in their attitude ofmaterialism. How many men I know who sit by insullen protest while their wives drift from one newquackery to another, wasting their income seeking healthand happiness in futile emotionalism! How manykind and sensitive spirits I know—bothmen and women—who pour their treasures offaith and admiration into the laps of hierophantswho began by fooling all mankind and ended by foolingthemselves!
In each one of the cults of what I have called the“Church of the Quacks”, there are thousands,perhaps millions of entirely sincere, self-sacrificingpeople. They will read this book—ifanyone can persuade them to read it—withpain and anger; thinking that I am mocking at theirfaith, and have no appreciation of their devotion.All that I can say is that I am trying to show themhow they are being trapped, how their fine and generousqualities are being used by exploiters of one sortor another; and how this must continue, world withoutend, until there is order in the material affairs ofthe race, until justice has been established as thelaw of man’s dealing with his fellows.
* * * * *
#Book seven#
#The Church of the Social Revolution#
They have taken the tomb of our ComradeChrist—
Infidel hordes that believenot in man;
Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,
But his tomb is built on akingly plan.
They have hedged him round with pomp andparade,
They have buried him deepunder steel and stone—
But we come leading the great Crusade
To give our Comrade back tohis own.
Waddell.
* * * * *
#Christ and Caesar#
In the most deeply significant of the legends concerningJesus, we are told how the devil took him up intoa high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms ofthe world in a moment of time; and the devil said untohim: “All this power will I give unto thee,and the glory of them, for that is delivered untome, 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 theebehind me, Satan!” And he really meant it; hewould have nothing to do with worldly glory, with“temporal power;” he chose the career ofa revolutionary agitator, and died the death of adisturber of the peace. And for two or threecenturies his church followed in his footsteps, cherishinghis proletarian gospel. The early Christianshad “all things in common, except women;”they lived as social outcasts, hiding in desertedcatacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled inoil.
But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give upat one defeat, for he knows human nature, and thestrength 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 thenew revolutionary idea, the Church had won a positionof tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire;and the subtle worm assumed the guise or no less aperson than the Emperor himself, suggesting that heshould become a convert to the new faith, so thatthe Church and he might work together for the greaterglory 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 hadgot everything he had asked from Jesus three hundredyears before; he had got the world’s greatestreligion. How complete and swift was his successyou may judge from the fact that fifty years laterwe find the Emperor Valentinian compelled to passan edict limiting the donations of emotional femalesto the church in Rome!
From that time on Christianity has been what I haveshown in this book, the chief of the enemies of socialprogress. From the days of Constantine to thedays of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesarhave been one, and the Church has been the shield andarmor of predatory economic might. With onlyone qualification to be noted: that the Churchhas never been able to suppress entirely the memoryof her proletarian Founder. She has done herbest, of course; we have seen how her scholars twisthis words out of their sense, and the Catholic Churcheven goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead language,so that her victims may not hear the words of Jesusin a form they can understand.
’Tis well thatsuch seditious songs are sung Only by
priests, and in theLatin tongue!
But in spite of this, the history of the Church hasbeen one incessant struggle with upstarts and rebelswho have filled themselves with the spirit of theMagnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of thatbitterly class-conscious proletarian, James, the brotherof Jesus.
And here is the thing to be noted, that the factorwhich has given life to Christianity, which enablesit to keep its hold on the hearts of men today, isprecisely this new wine of faith and fervor which hasbeen poured into it by generation after generationof poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and dielike Jesus as criminals, and are revered like Jesusas founders and saints. The greatest of the earlyChurch fathers were bitterly fought by the Church authoritiesof their own time. St. Chrysostom, Bishop ofConstantinople, was turned out of office, exiled andpractically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted bythe Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated thetyrannical Emperor Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave allhis wealth to the poor, and was exiled and finallymartyred. In the same way, most of the hereticswhom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned wereproletarian rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres,the founders of the orders which gave it life forcentury after century, were men who sought to returnto the example of the carpenter’s son. Letus 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 communisticideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest doctrinalreformer before the reformation; but his eyes, too,were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the RomanChurch by joining in a great national and patrioticmovement against the alien domination and extortionof the Church. The Bohemian revolt, madefamous by the name of John Huss, was quite asmuch political and social as religious. Savonarolawas a great democrat as well as a religious prophet.In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo deMedici he made three demands as a condition forgranting absolution. Of the man he demandeda living faith in God’s mercy. Ofthe millionaire he demanded restitution of his ill-gottenwealth. Of the political usurper he demanded therestoration of the liberties of the people ofFlorence. It is significant that the dyingsinner found it easy to assent to the first,hard to assent to the second, and impossible toconcede the last.
#Locusts and Wild Honey#
This proletarian strain in Christianity goes backto a time long before Jesus; it seems to have beeninherent in the religious character of the Jews—thatstubborn independence, that stiff-necked insistenceon the right of a man to interview God for himselfand to find out what God wants him to do; also theinclination to find that God wants him to oppose earthlyrulers and their plundering of the poor. Whatis it that gives to the Bible the vitality it has today?Its literary style? To say that is to displaythe ignorance of the cultured; for elevation of styleis a by-product of passionate conviction; it is whatthe Jewish writers had to say, and not the way theysaid it, that has given them their hold upon mankind.
Was it their insistence upon conscience, their fearof God as the beginning of wisdom? But that sameelement appears in the Babylonian psalms, which areas eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews,yet are read only by scholars. Was it their senseof the awful presence of divinity, of the soul immortalin its keeping? The Egyptians had that far morethan the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their religiousbooks. Or was it the love of man for all thingsliving, the lesson of charity upon which the Catholicslay such stress? The gentle Buddha had that,and had it long before Christ; also his priests hadmetaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John theApostle or Thomas Aquinas.No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishesthe Hebrew sacred writings from all others, and thatis their insistent note of proletarian revolt, theirfurious denunciations of exploiters, and of luxuryand wantonness, the vices of the rich. Of thatnote the Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian writingcontain not a trace, and the Egyptian hardly enoughto mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it; butthe true, natural-born rebels of all time were theHebrews. They were rebels against oppressionin ancient Judea, as they are today in Petrograd andNew York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood whichspoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, throughJohn the Baptist and Jesus and James, spoke in thelast century through Marx and Lassalle and Jaures,and speaks today through Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburgand Karl Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and Morris Hillquitand Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the JosephFels endowment.
The legal rate of interest throughout the BabylonianEmpire was 20%; the laws of Manu permitted 24%, whilethe laws of the Egyptians only stepped in to preventmore than 100%. But listen to this Hebrew law:
If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallenin 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 interestof him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy brothermay live with thee. Thou shalt not give him anymoney upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals forincrease.
And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bondservants, and commanding that at the end of fiftyyears all debtors shall have their debts forgivenand their lands returned to them. And note thatthis is not the raving of agitators, the demand ofa minority party; it is the law of the Hebrew land.
There has been of late a great deal of new discoveryconcerning the early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizesthe results as follows:
The land-mark law, which sternly forbidsencroachment upon peasant rights; considerationfor the foreigner; additional sanitary and foodlaws; tithe regulations on behalf of widows,orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those who haveno economic independence should eat and be satisfied;that loans should be given cheerfully, not onlywithout any interest, but even at the risk oflosing the principal. To withhold a loanbecause the year of release is at hand in whichthe principal is no longer recoverable, is describedas a grave sin. When you are compelled tofree your slaves, you must give them sufficientcapital to embark upon some industry which shallprevent their falling back into slavery.A number of holidays are insisted upon. Theremust be no more crushing of the poor out of existence,for God cares for these people who have beendriven to poverty, and they shall never ceaseout of the land. Howbeit there shall beno poor with you, for the Lord will bless you, if youwill obey these laws.
But then prosperity came, and culture, which meantcontact 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 locustsand wild honey, breaking in upon priests and kingsand 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’spolitical advisers, Abijah had stirred Jeroboamto revolt, Elijah had resisted Ahab, Elisha hadfanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders againstthe misrule of the king of Israel, Isaiah denouncesthe landlords and the usurers, Micah charges themwith blood-guiltiness; Jeremiah and the latterprophets, though they strike a more intimatenote of personal repentance, strike it as theprelude to that national restoration for whichthey hunger as exiles.
The first chapters of Isaiah are typicalof the Old Testament point of view. Justas the prophets of the nineteenth century thunderedagainst the “Christian” employersof Lancashire, and told them their houses were cementedwith the blood of little children, so Isaiah criesagainst his generation: “Your governingclasses companion with thieves; behold you buildup Sion with blood.” Their ceremonialand their Sabbath keeping are an abomination to God.“When ye spread forth your hands, I will hidemine eyes from you. Your hands are fullof blood.” The poor man is robbed.The rich exact usury. “Woe unto you thatlay house to house and field to field, that yemay dwell alone in the midst of the land.”“Wash you, make you clean, put away the evilof 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 shallbe as white as snow; though they be red likecrimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willingand obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devouredby the sword.
#Mother Earth#
And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators,following the same tradition, possessed by the samedream as the ancient Hebrew prophets. I havementioned Emma Goldman; it may be that the reader isnot familiar with her writings, and does not realizehow very Biblical she is, both in point of view andstyle. Let me quote a few sentences from a recentissue of her paper, “Mother Earth”, onthe subject of our ruling classes and their socialresponsibility:
Yes, you idle rich, you may howl aboutwhat we mean to do to you! Your riches arerotten and your fine clothes are falling from yourbacks. Your stocks and bonds are so taintedthat the ink on them should turn to acid andeat holes in your pockets and your skins. Youhave piled up your dirty millions, but what wageshave you paid to the poor devils of farm handsyou have robbed? And do you imagine they won’tremember it when the revolution comes? You lollon soft couches and amuse yourselves with yourmistresses; you think you are “it” andthe world is yours. You send militiamen andshoot down our organizers, and we are helpless.But wait, comrades, our time is coming.
Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the authorof this tirade is now in jail, where she can no longerdefy the laws of good taste. They always putthe ancient prophets in jail; that is the way to knowa prophet when you meet him. Let me quote anotherprophet who is now behind bars—AlexanderBerkman, in his “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist”,discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:
Tell me, you four hundred, where didyou get it? Who gave it to you? Yourgrandfather, you say? Your father? Can yougo all the way back and show there is no flawanywhere in your title? I tell you thatthe beginning and the root of your wealth isnecessarily in injustice. And why? BecauseNature did not make this man rich and that manpoor from the start. Nature does not intendfor one man to have capital and another to bea wage-slave. Nature made the earth to be cultivatedby all. The idea we Anarchists have of the richis of highwaymen, standing in the street and robbingevery one that passes.
Or take “Big Bill” Haywood, chief of theI.W.W. Hear what he has to say in a pamphletaddressed to the harvest-hands he is seeking to organize:
How much farther do you plutes expectto go with your grabbing? Do you want tobe the only people left on earth? Why elsedo you drive out the workers from all share in Nature,and claim everything for yourselves? The earthwas made for all, rich and poor alike; wheredo you get your title deeds to it? Naturegave everything for all men to use alike; itis 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 times candidate of theSocialist Party for President. I quote from oneof his pamphlets:
The propertied classes are like peoplewho go into a public theatre and refuse to letanyone else come in, treating as private propertywhat is meant for social use. If each man wouldtake only what he needs, and leave the balance tothose who have nothing, there would be no richand no poor. The rich man is a thief.
I might go on citing such quotations for many pages;but I know that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkmanand Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may read this book,and I don’t want them to close it in the middleand throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten toexplain my poor joke; the sentiments I have been quotingare not those of our modern agitators, but of anothergroup of ancient ones. The first is not from EmmaGoldman, nor did I find it in “Mother Earth”.I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by orthodoxauthorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus.It is exactly what he wrote—save that Ihave put it into modern phrases, and changed the swingof the sentences, in order that those familiar withthe Bible might read it without suspicion. Thesecond passage is not in the writings of AlexanderBerkman, but in those of St. John Chrysostom, mostfamous 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 LatinChurch, 340-397, and the fourth is not by ComradeDebs, but by St. Basil of the Greek Church, 329-379.And if the reader objects to my having fooled himfor a minute or two, what will he say to the ChristianChurch, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundredyears?
#The Soap Box#
This book will be denounced from one end of Christendomto the other as the work of a blasphemous infidel.Yet it stands in the direct line of the Christiantradition: written by a man who was brought upin the Church, and loved it with all his heart andsoul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocritesin high places; a man who thinks of Jesus more frequentlyand with more devotion than he thinks of any otherman that lives or has ever lived on earth; and whohas but one purpose in all that he says and does,to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamedof peace on earth and good will toward men.
I will go farther yet and say that not merely is thisbook written for the cause of Jesus, but it is writtenin the manner of Jesus. We read his bitter railingsat the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, becausethe word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach.But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the wordwas 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 Jesusis to do with him what we did with the early churchfathers—translate him into American.This time, since the reader shares the secret, itwill not be necessary to disguise the Bible style,and we may follow the text exactly. Let me trythe twenty-third chapter of Matthew, omitting sevenverses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew casuistry,for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott orSt. Alphonsus to find a parallel:
Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box,and began a speech, saying, The doctors of divinityand Episcopalians fill the Fifth Avenue churches;and it would be all right if you were to listento what they preach, and do that; but don’t followtheir actions, for they never practice what theypreach. They load the backs of the working-classeswith crushing burdens, but they themselves nevermove a finger to carry a burden, and everythingthey do is for show. They wear frock-coatsand silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the speakers’table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, andthey occupy the best pews in the churches, andtheir doings are reported in all the papers;they are called leading citizens and pillarsof the church. But don’t you be calledleading citizens, for the only useful man is theman who produces. (Applause). And whoeverexalts himself shall be abased, and whoever humbleshimself shall be exalted.
Woe unto you, doctors of divinity andCatholics, hypocrites! for you shut up the kingdomof Heaven against men; you don’t go inyourself 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 Africato 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 transubstantiationand consubstantiation and all the rest of it;you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors ofdivinity and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for youdrop your checks into the collection-plate andyou pay no heed to the really important thingsin the Bible, which are justice and mercy andfaith in goodness. You blind guides, who strainat a gnat and swallow a camel! (Laughter).Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Anglicans,hypocrites! for you bathe yourselves and dressin immaculate clothing but within you are fullof extortion and excess. You blind high churchmen,clean first your hearts, so that the clothes youwear may represent you. Woe unto you, doctorsof divinity and Baptists, hypocrites! for youare like marble tombs which appear beautifulon the outside, but inside are full of dead men’sbones and all uncleanness. Even so you appearrighteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisyand 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 wouldnot have helped to kill those good men. That oughtto show you how to treat us at present. (Laughter).But you are the children of those who killedthe good men; so go ahead and kill us too!You serpents, you generation of vipers, how canyou escape the damnation of hell?
At this point, according to the report published inthe Jerusalem “Times”, a police sergeantstepped up to the orator and notified him that hewas under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one ofhis followers attempted to use a knife, and was severelyclubbed. Jesus was taken to the station-housefollowed by a riotous throng, and held upon a chargeof disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr.Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against him, and MagistratePilate sentenced him to six months on Blackwell’sIsland, remarking that from this time on he proposedto make an example of those soap-box orators who persistin using threatening and abusive language. Justas the prisoner was being led away, a detective appearedwith a requisition from the Governor, ordering thatJesus be taken to San Francisco, where he is underindictment for murder in the first degree, it beingcharged that his teachings helped to incite the PreparednessDay explosion.
#The Church Machine#
The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said,“Master, we would have a sign of Thee”—meaningthat they wanted him to do some magic, to prove totheir vulgar minds that his power came from God.He answered by calling them an evil and adulterousgeneration—which is exactly what I havesaid about the Papal machine. The Baptists andMethodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippersof his time accused him of violating the sacred commandsso definitely set down in their ancient texts, andto them he answered that the Sabbath was made forman and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites,and quoted Karl Marx at them—“Thispeople honoreth me with their lips, but their heartis far from me.” Because he despised thecompany of the respectables, and went among the humbleand human folk of his own class in the places wherethey gathered—the public houses—thechurchly scandal-mongers called him “a man gluttonousand a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”—preciselyas in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialistsfor having their meetings in the backrooms of saloons,and precisely as they still denounce us as free-loversand atheists.
But the longing for justice between man and man, whichis the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepestinstinct of the human heart, and the voice of thecarpenter 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 morewidespread, more concentrated and more systematizedthan ever before in history—even in thesedays of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christianclergymen who dare to preach as Jesus preached.One by one they are cast out of the Church—FatherMcGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J. StittWilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White;but their voices are not silenced, they are like theleaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of God—awoman took it and hid it in three measures of mealtill the whole was leavened. The young theologicalstudents read, and some of them understand; I knowthree brothers in one family who have just gone intothe Church, and are preaching straight social revolution—andthe scribes and the pharisees have not yet dared tocast them out.
In this book I have portrayed the Christian Churchas the servant and henchman of Big Business, a partof the system of Mammon. Every church is necessarilya money machine, holding and administering property.And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is inpolitics, seeking favors from the state—theexemption of church property from taxation, exemptionof ministers from military service, free transportationfor them and their families on the railroads, thecontrol of charity and education, laws to deprivepeople of amusem*nts on Sunday—so on througha long list. As the churches have to be builtwith money, you find that in them the rich possessthe control and demand the deference, while the poorare humble, and in their secret hearts jealous andbitter; in other words, the class struggle is in thechurches, as everywhere else in the world, and thesocial revolution is coming in the churches, justas it is coming in industry.
It is a fact of deep significance that the majorityof ministers are proletarians, eking out their existenceupon a miserable salary, and beholden in all theircomings 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 thepolitical orders of his superiors, but goes to thepolls and votes for his class instead of for his pope.In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defyingtheir bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religiousmovement for an Irish Republic.
What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjectionto the exploiter? Simply terror, the terror oflosing his job. And if you could get into theinmost soul of Christian ministers, you would findthat precisely the same force is keeping many of themslaves to Tradition. They are educated men, andthousands of them must resent the dilemma which compelsthem to be either fools or hypocrites. They havecaught enough of the spirit of their time not to enjoyhaving to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers andwitch-doctors; they would like to say frankly thatthey do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed thewhale, and even that they are dubious about Herculesand Achilles and other demigods. But they arepart of a machine, and the old men and the rich menwho run the machine have laid down the law. Thosewho find themselves tempted to think, remember suddenlythat they have wives and children; they have onlyone profession, they have been unfitted for any otherby a life-time of study of dead things, as well asby the practice of altruism.
But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming uponswift wings—it may be here before thisbook sees the light. And who knows but then wemay see in America that wonderful sight which we sawin Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burnedtheir holy books, and petitioned the state to takethem in as citizens and human beings? It is mybelief that when the power of exploitation is broken,we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into dust, as amummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air.All those men who stay in the Church and pretend tobelieve nonsense, because it affords an easy way toearn a living, will suddenly realize that it is possibleto earn a living outside; that any man can go intoa factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly run,and by four hours work can earn the purchasing powerof ten or fifteen dollars. Do you not think thatthere may be some who will choose freedom and self-respecton those terms?
And what of those thousands and tens of thousandswho join the church because it is a part of the regimeof respectability, a way to make the acquaintanceof the rich, to curry favor and obtain promotion, toget customers if you are a tradesman, to extend yourpractice if you are a professional man? And whatabout the millions who go to church because they arepoor, and because life is a desperate struggle, andthis is one way to keep the favor of the boss, to geta little better chance for the children, to get charityif you fall into need; in short, to acquire influencewith the well-to-do and powerful, who stand together,and like to see the poor humble and reverent, contentedin that state of life to which it has pleased God tocall them?
#The Church Redeemed#
Do I mean that I expect to see the Church—allchurches—perish and pass away? I donot, for I believe that the Church answers one of thefundamental needs of man. The Social Revolutionwill abolish poverty and parasitism, it will maketemptations fewer, and the soul’s path throughlife much easier; but it will not remove the necessityof struggle for individual virtue, it will only clearthe way for the discovery of newer and higher typesof virtue. Men will gather more than ever inbeautiful places to voice their love of life and ofone another; but the places in which they gather willbe places swept clean of superstition and tyranny.As the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church tocleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses,so the Social Revolution will compel it to repudiateits defense of parasitism and exploitation. Iwill record the prophecy that by the year 1950 allCatholic authorities will be denying that the Churchever opposed Socialism—true Socialism; justas today they deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo,ever burned men for teaching that the earth movesaround 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, todrive out their formalists and traditionalists.If there is any church that refuses so to adapt itself,the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom willleave it without followers. But in the greatreligions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity,we may be sure that reformers will arise, prophetsand saints who, as of old, will preach the living wordof God. In many churches today we can see thebeginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Evenin the Catholic Church there is a “modernist”rebellion; read the books of the “Sillon”,and Fogazzaro’s trilogy of novels, “TheSaint”, and you will see a genuine and vitalprotest against the economic corruption of the Church.In America, the “Knights of Slavery” havebeen forced by public pressure to support a “Warfor Democracy”, and even to compete with theY.M.C.A. in the training camps. They are doinggood work, I am told.
This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by thespirit of modern common sense is shown most interestinglyin the Salvation Army. William Booth was a manwith a great heart, who took his life into his handsand went out with a bass-drum to save the lost soulsof the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but hepersisted, and brought his captives to Jesus—–
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.
Incidentally the “General” learned toknow his slum population. He had not wanted toengage in charity and material activities; he fearedhypocrisy and corruption. But in his writingshe lets us see how utterly impossible it is for aman of real heart to do anything for the souls ofthe slum-dwellers without at the same time helpingtheir diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So theSalvation army was forced into useful work—oldclothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas dinners,farm colonies—until today the bare listof the various kinds of enterprises it carries onfills three printed pages. It is all done withthe money of the rich, and is tainted by subservienceto authority, but no one can deny that it is betterthan “Gibson’s Preservative”, andthe fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with port.
And in Protestant Churches the advance has been evengreater. Here and there you will find a realrebel, hanging onto his job and preaching the proletarianJesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches aremaking attempts at “missions” and “settlements”in the slums. The more vital churches are graduallyturning themselves into societies for the practicalbetterment of their members. Their clergy arerunning boys clubs and sewing-schools for girls, foodconservation lectures for mothers, social study clubsfor men. You get prayer-meetings and psalm-singingalong with this; but here is the fact that hangs alwaysbefore the clergyman’s face—that withprayer-meetings and psalm-singing alone he has a hardtime, while with clubs and educational societies andsocial reforms he thrives.
And now the War has broken upon the world, and caughtthe churches, like everything else, in its mightycurrent; the clergy and the congregations are confrontedby pressing national needs, they are forced to takenotice of a thousand new problems, to engage in athousand practical activities. No one can seethe end of this—any more than he can seethe end of the vast upheaval in politics and industry.But we who are trained in revolutionary thought cansee the main outlines of the future. We see thatin these new church activities the clergy are inspiredby things read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but inthe daily newspapers. They are responding to theactual, instant needs of their boys in the trenchesand the camps; and this is bound to have an effectupon their psychology. Just as we can say thatan English girl who leaves the narrow circle of herold life, and goes into a munition factory and joinsa union and takes part in its debates, will neverafter be a docile home-slave; so we can say that theclergyman who helps in Y.M.C.A. work in France, orin Red Cross organization in America, will be lessthe bigot and formalist forever after. He willhave learned, in spite of himself, to adjust meansto ends; he will have learned co-operation and socialsolidarity by the method which modern educators mostfavor—by doing. Also he will haveabsorbed a mass of ideas in news despatches from overthe world. He is forced to read these despatchescarefully, because the fate of his own boys is involved;and we Socialists will see to it that the despatchesare well filled with propaganda!
#The Desire of Nations#
So the churches, like all the rest of the world, arecaught in the great revolutionary current, and swepton towards a goal which they do not forsee, and fromwhich they would shrink in dismay: the Churchof the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit ofBrotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join.They call us materialists, and say that we think aboutnothing but the belly—and that is true,in a way; because we are the representatives of astarving class, which thinks about its belly preciselyas does any individual who is ravening with hunger.But give us what that arrant materialist, James, thebrother of Jesus, calls “those things which areneedful to the body,” and then we will use ourminds, and even discover that we have souls; whereasat present we are led to despise the very word “spiritual”,which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites andposeurs.
We have children, whom we love, and whose future isprecious to us. We would be glad to have themtrained in ways of decency and self-control, of dignityand grace. It would make us happy if there werein the world institutions conducted by men and womenof consecrated life who would specialize in teachinga true morality to the young. But it must bea morality of freedom, not of slavery; a moralityfounded 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 truthinspires. They cannot be the pitiful shufflersand compromisers we see in the churches today, theJowetts who say they used to believe in the Father,the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather than trustour children to such shameless cynics, we will makeshift to train them ourselves—we amateurs,not knowing much about children, and absorbed in thedesperate struggle against organized wrong.It is a statement which many revolutionists wouldresent, yet it is a fact nevertheless, that we needa new religion, need it just as badly as any of therest of our pitifully groping race. That we needit is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in ourmidst—the schisms which waste the greaterpart of our activities, and which are often the resultof personal jealousies and petty vanities. Tolift men above such weakness, to make them reallybrothers in a great cause—that is the workof “personal religion” in the true andvital sense of the words.
We pioneers and propagandists may not live to seethe birth of the new Church of Humanity; but our childrenwill see it, and the dream of it is in our hearts;our poets have sung of it with fervor and conviction.Read these lines from “The Desire of Nations,”by Edwin Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemerwho is at hand:
And when he comes into the world gonewrong,
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 norns will cry tomen:
“Baldur the Beautiful has come again!”
The flutes of Greece will whisper fromthe dead:
“Apollo has unveiled his sunbrighthead!”
The stones of Thebes and Memphis willfind voice:
“Osiris comes: Oh tribes ofTime, 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 manto man:
“Lo, He has come, our Christ theartisan,
The King who loved the lilies, He hascome!”
#The Knowable#
The new religion will base itself upon the facts oflife, as demonstrated by experience and reason; forto the modern thinker the basis of all interest istruth, and the wonders of the microscope and the telescope,of the new psychology and the new sociology are morewonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient Mythologies.And even if this were not so, the business of thethinker is to follow the facts. The history ofall philosophy might be summed up in this simile:The infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretchesout his hands and cries for it; but those in chargedo not give it to him, and so after a while the infanttires of crying, and turns to his mother’s breastand takes a drink of milk.
Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerablefor him to be here, and not know how, or whence, orwhy. He demands the knowledge immediately andfinally, and invents innumerable systems and creeds.He makes himself believe them, with fire and torturemakes other men believe them; until finally, in theconfusion of a million theories, it occurs to himto investigate his instruments, and he makes the discoverythat his tools are inadequate, and all their productsworthless. His mind is finite, while the thinghe seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative, whilethe First Cause is absolute.
This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the fatherof modern philosophy. In his famous “antinomies”,he proved four propositions: first, that theuniverse is limitless in time and space; second, thatmatter is composed of simple, indivisible elements;third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, thatthere must be an absolute or first cause. Andhaving proven these things, he turned round and provedtheir opposites, with arguments exactly as unanswerable.Any one who follows these demonstrations and understandsthem, takes all his metaphysical learning and laysit on the shelf with his astrology and magic.
It is a fact, which every one who wishes to thinkmust get clear, that when you are dealing with absolutesand ultimates, you can prove whatever you want toprove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension;you fly into it and come back upside down, hindsideforemost, inside out; and when you get tired of thiscondition, you take another flight, and come backthe way you were before. So metaphysical thinkingserves the purpose of Catholic cheats like CardinalNewman and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves hystericalwomen like “Mother” Eddy; it serves theNew-thoughters, who wish to fill their bellies withwind; it serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wishto befuddle the wits of the populace. Real thinkersavoid it as they would a bottomless swamp; they avoid,not merely the idealism of Platonists and Hegelians,but the monism of Haeckel, and the materialism ofBuechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact isthat it is as impossible to prove the priority oforigin and the ultimate nature of matter as it isof mind; so that the scientist who lays down a materialistdogma is exactly as credulous as a Christian.
How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect themystery into an Unknowable, like Spencer, and callourselves Agnostics with a capital letter, like Huxley?Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an inadequatedivinity out of our impotence? I have read thebooks of the “Positivists”, and attendedtheir imitation church in London, but I did not getany satisfaction from them. In the midst of theirdogmatic pronouncements I found myself rememberinghow the egg falls apart and reveals a chicken, howthe worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly.The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and itseems a futile occupation to set limits upon the future.Our business is not to say what men will know tenthousand years from now, but to content ourselveswith the simple statement of what men know #now#.What we know is a procession of phenomena called anenvironment; our life being an act of adjustment toits changes, and our faith being the conviction thatthis adjustment is possible and worth while.
In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the actof trust is automatic. But with the dawn of reasonthe thinker has to justify his faith; to convincehimself that life is sincere, that there is worth-whilenessin being, or in seeking to be; that there is orderin creation, laws which can be discovered, processeswhich can be applied. Just as the babe trustslife when it gropes for its mother’s breast,so the most skeptical of scientists trusts it whenhe declares that water is made of two parts hydrogenand one part oxygen, and sets it down for a certaintythat this will always be so—that he is notbeing played with by some sportive demon, who willtoday cause H20 to behave like water, and tomorrowlike benzine.
#Nature’s Insurgent Son#
Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain;and with each bit of knowledge acquired, the environmentis changed, the life becomes a new thing. Consider,for example, what a different place the world becameto the man who discovered that the force which laidthe forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warma cave and make wild grains nutritious! In otherwords, man can create life, he can make the worldand himself into that which his reason decides it oughtto be, The means by which he does this is the mostmagical of all the tools he has invented since hisarboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool ofexperimental science—and when one considersthat this weapon has been understood and deliberatelyemployed for but two or three centuries, he realizesthat we are indeed only at the beginning of humanevolution.
To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasonedand deliberate acts, to make the world a consciousand ordered product—that is the task ofman. Sir Ray Lankester has set this forth withbeautiful precision in his book, “The Kingdomof Man”. We are, at this time, in an uncomfortableand dangerous transition stage, as a child playingwith explosives. This child has found out howto alter his environment in many startling ways, buthe does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, norto what purpose. He finds that certain thingsare uncomfortable, and these he proceeds immediatelyto change. Discovering that grain fermented dispelsboredom, he creates a race of drunkards; discoveringthat foods can be produced in profusion, and preparedin alluring combinations, he makes himself so manydiseases that it takes an encyclopedia to tell aboutthem. Discovering that captives taken in warcan 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, eliminatingruthlessly. It takes a million eggs to produceone salmon; it has taken a million million men toproduce one idea—algebra, or the bow andarrow, or democracy. Nature’s present impulseappears 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 taskin her old blundering way. Some men are scheduledto elimination because of defective eyesight; theyare furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defectiveeyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child wouldperish at once in the course of Nature; it is savedin the name of charity, and a new line of degeneratesis started.
What shall we do? Return to the method of theSpartans, exposing our sickly infants? We donot have to do anything so wasteful, because we canreplace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breedingwhich will prevent the unfit from getting a chanceat life. We can replace instinct by self-discipline.We can substitute for the regime of “Naturered in tooth and claw with ravin” the regimeof man the creator, knowing what he wishes to be andhow to set about to be it. Whether this can happen,whether the thing which we call civilization is tobe the great triumph of the ages, or whether the humanrace is to go back into the melting pot, is a questionbeing determined by an infinitude of contests betweenenlightenment and ignorance: precisely such acontest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encountera man who has thought his way out to the light, andcomes to urge you to perform the act of self-emancipation,to take up the marvellous new tools of science, andto make yourself, by means of exact knowledge, thecreator of your own life and in part of the life ofthe race.
#The New Morality#
Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldmentof new powers; driven by that inner impulse whichthe philosophers of Pragmatism call the #elan vital#.Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an emotionof joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of distress.So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and thefinal goal is a condition of free and constantly acceleratinggrowth, in which joy is enduring.
That man will ever reach such a state is more thanwe can say. It is a perfectly conceivable thingthat tomorrow a comet may fall upon the earth andwipe out all man’s labor’s. But onthe other hand, it is a conceivable thing that manmay some day learn to control the movements of comets,and even of starry systems. It seems certain thatif he is given time, he will make himself master ofthe forces of his immediate environment—–
The untamed giants of nature shall bowdown—–
The tides, the tempest and the lightningcease
From mockery and destruction, and be turned
Unto the making of the soul of man.
It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to createhis food from the elements without the slow processesof agriculture; it is conceivable that he may masterthe bacteria which at present prey upon his body,and so put an end to death. It is certain thathe will ascertain the laws of heredity, and createhuman qualities as he has created the spurs of thefighting-co*ck and the legs of the greyhound.He will find out what genius is, and the laws of itsbeing, and the tests whereby it may be recognized.In the new science of psycho-analysis he has alreadybegun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousnessinto the light of day; it may be that in the evidenceof 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 theinhabitants of Mars, and of the dark stars which thespectroscope and the telescope are disclosing.
All these are fascinating possibilities. Whatstands in the way of their realization? Ignoranceand superstition, fear and submission, the old habitsof rapine and hatred which man has brought with himfrom his animal past. These make him a slave,a victim of himself and of others; to root them outof the garden of the soul is the task of the modernthinker.
The new morality is thus a morality of freedom.It teaches that man is the master, or shall becomeso; that there is no law, save the law of his ownbeing, no check upon his will save that which he himselfimposes.
The new morality is a morality of joy. It teachesthat true pleasure is the end of being, and the testof all righteousness.
The new morality is a morality of reason. Itteaches that there is no authority above reason; nopossibility of such authority, because if such wereto appear, reason would have to judge it, and acceptor reject it.
The new morality is a morality of development.It teaches that there can no more be an immutablelaw of conduct, than there can be an immutable positionfor the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The businessof the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machinealoft amid shifting currents of wind. The businessof a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changingenvironment. An action which was suicide yesterdaybecomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy tomorrow.
This 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 useno others, without self-destruction; yet it has tomeet enemies who fight with the old weapons of forceand fraud. Whether it will prevail is more thanany prophet can say. Perhaps it is too much toask that it should succeed—this insolenteffort of the pigmy man to leap upon the back of hismaster and fit a bridle into his mouth. Perhapsit is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, thescientists and poets and inventors, the dreamers ofthe race. Perhaps the nerve of the pigmy willfail him at the critical moment, and he will fallfrom the back of his master, and under his master’shoofs.
The hour of the decision is now; for this we can seeplainly, and as scientists we can proclaim it—thehuman race is in a swift current of degeneration,which a new morality alone can check. The struggleis at its height in our time; if it fails, if thefibre of the race continues to deteriorate, the soulof the race to be eaten out by poverty and luxury,by insanity and disease, by prostitution, crime andwar—then mankind will slip back into theabyss, the untamed giants of Nature will resume theirancient sway, and the tides, the tempest and the lightningwill sweep the earth clean again. I do not believethat this calamity will befall us. I know thatin the diseased social body the forces of resistanceare gathering—the Socialist movement, inthe broad sense—the activities of all whobelieve in the possibility of reconstructing societyupon a basis of reason, justice and love. Tosuch people this book goes out: to the truly religiouspeople, those who hunger and thirst after righteousnesshere and now, who believe in brotherhood as a reality,and are willing to bear pain and ridicule and privationfor the sake of its ultimate achievement.
Fromdiscord and defeat,
From doubt andlame division,
Wepluck the fruit and eat;
And the mouth finds it bitter, and thespirit sweet....
O sorrowing heartsof slaves,
Weheard you beat from far!
We bring the lightthat saves,
Webring the morning star;
Freedom’s good things we bring you,whence all good things are....
#Envoi#
I have come to the end of my task; but one questiontroubles me. I think of the “young menand maidens meek” who will read this book, andI wonder what they will make of it. We have hada lark together; we have gone romping down the vistaof the ages, swatting every venerable head that showeditself, 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 sufferdisillusionment and vexation.
I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life;they have nearly all been gallant and honest, butthey have not all been wise, and therefore not sohappy as they might have been. In the course oftime I have formulated to myself the peril to whichyoung radicals are exposed. We see so much thatis wrong in ancient things, it gets to be a habitwith us to reject them. We have only to know thata thing is old to feel an impulse of impatient scorn;on the other hand, we are tempted to welcome anythingwhich can prove itself to be unprecedented. Thereis a common type of radical whose aim in life is tobe several jumps ahead of mankind; whose criterionof conduct is that it shocks the bourgeois. Ifyou do not know that type, you may find him—andher—in the newest of the Bohemian cafes,drinking the newest red chemicals, smoking the newestbrand of cigarettes, and discussing the newest formof #psycopathia sexualis#. After you have watchedthem a while, you realize that these ultra-new peoplehave fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy,the non sequitur, and likewise to the oldest formof slavery, which is self-indulgence.
If it is true that much in the old moral codes isbased upon ignorance, and cultivated by greed, itis also true that much in the old moral codes is basedupon facts which will not change so long as man iswhat he is—a creature of impulses, goodand bad, wise and foolish, selfish and generous, andcompelled to make choice between these impulses; solong as he is a material body and a personal consciousness,obliged to live in society and adjust himself to therights of others. What I would like to say toyoung radicals—if there is any way to sayit without seeming a prig—is that in choosingtheir own path through life, they will need not merelyenthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and judgmentand hard study.
It is our fundamental demand that society shall ceaseto repeat over and over the blunders of the past,the blunders of tyranny and slavery, of luxury andpoverty, which wrecked the ancient societies; andsurely it is a poor way to begin by repeating in ourown persons the most ancient blunders of the morallife. To light the fires of lust in our hearts,and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are tryingnew experiments in psychology! Who does not knowthe radical woman who demonstrates her emancipationfrom convention by destroying her nerves with nicotine?Who does not know the genius of revolt who demonstrateshis repudiation of private property by permitting hislady loves to support him? Who does not know theman who finds in the phrases of revolution the mosteffective devices for the seducing of young girls?
You will have read this book to ill purpose if youdraw the conclusion that there is anything in it tospare you the duty of getting yourself moral standardsand holding yourself to them. On the contrary,because your task is the highest and hardest thatman has yet undertaken—for this reasonyou will need standards the most exacting ever formulated.Let me quote some words from a teacher you will notaccuse of holding to the slave-moralities:
Free dost thou callthyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I
hear, and not that thouhast escaped a yoke.
Art thou such a onethat 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 thyselfthy good and thine evil, and hang
thy will above theeas thy law? Canst thou be thine own
judge, and avenger ofthy law?
Fearful it is to bealone with the judge and the avenger of
thy law. So isa stone flung out into empty space and into
the icy breath of isolation.
Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emergeinto the sunlight of knowledge, to take control ofa world, and to make it over, not according to thewill of any gods, but according to the law in our ownhearts. For that task we have need of all theresources 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 thefirst moral impulse of mankind—the knowledgethat our actions determine the future of life, notmerely for ourselves but for all the race. Forthis is one of the laws of the ancient Hebrews whichmodern science has not repealed, but on the contraryhas reinforced with a thousand confirmations—thatthe sins of the fathers are visited upon the childrenunto the third and fourth generations.
I get letters from the readers of my books; nearlyalways they are young people, so I feel like the fatherof a large family. I gather them now about myknee, and pronounce upon them a benediction in theancient patriarchal style. Children and grandchildrenof my hopes, for ages men suffered and fought, sothat the world might be turned over to you. Nowthe day is coming, the glad, new day which blinds uswith the shining of its wings; it is coming so swiftlythat I am afraid of it. I thought we should havemore time to get ready for the taking over of theworld! 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 wewill or not, we have to take charge of the world; wehave to decide what to do with it, even while we aredoing it. Let us not fail, young comrades; letus not write on the scroll of history that mankindhad to go through yet new generations of wars and tumultsand enslavements, because the youth of the internationalrevolution could not lift themselves above those ancientpersonal vices which wrecked the fair hopes of theirfathers—bigotry and intolerance, vindictivenessand vanity, envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness!
* * * * *
INDEX
A
Abbott, Lyman 175-191
Abbott, L.F. 189
Adams 214
Adventists 237
Amberley 52
Anglican Church 47-88
Appeal to Reason 144
Archer 133
Assyria 32
Atkinson 267
Austria 155
Aztecs 32
B
Babists 254
Babylonia 26, 32, 50
Baxter 183
Beilhardt 254
Berkman 288
Besant 250
Bible-students 246
Bismarck 153
Black Magic 253
Blavatsky 23, 256
Blougram 109
Bonzano 121, 126
Booth 298
Bootstrap-lifting 11, 266
Brougher 209
Brown 268
Buchanan 68, 159
Buckle 41
Burns 75
C
Caesar 161
Cannon 143
Carlyle 163
Carnegie 177
Catholic Church 27, 105-157, 295
Catholic Encyclopedia 67
Centrum 152
Charcot 258
Chatterton-Hill 220
Chinese 74
Christian Endeavor World 216
Christian Science 254-264
Churchman 101, 102
Clark 23
Clough 235
Columbus 115
Conway 127
Curates 71
D
Darwin 56
Day 205
Debs 289
Dixon 204, 205
Dowie 242
Durham 80
E
Eastman 140
Eddy 257, 261
Education 81
England 49, 73, 75
England, Church of 47-88
Episcopal Church 89-102
Eucharist 59
F
Ferrer 51, 133
Fish 65
Flint 78, 79
Fogazzaro 298
Foraker 143
Frederick 163
G
Galileo 51
Gallipoli 61
Garrison 167
Gladstone 57, 58, 81
Goldman 287
Goode 59, 61
Green 63
Gurney 254
H
Hagen 219
Hale 213
Hammurabi 85
Hampton 181
Ha’nish 250
Hanna 122, 142, 153, 213
Harris 72
Harrison 304
Haywood 288
Hebrew 36, 173, 284, 285
Henry the Eighth 66, 67
Hill, Joe 219
Hill, Rev. J.W. 204
Holmes 276
Holy Rollers 242, 243
Hubbard 190
Huss 38, 41
Huxley 56, 58
Hyndman 256
Hyslop 223
I
Inquisition 39, 51
Ireland 43
Isaiah 287
J
Janet 258
Jastrow 32
Jehovah 35, 36
Jesuits 148
Jesus 74, 100, 101, 161,
172, 174, 175, 176, 197, 221,
258, 281, 282, 290, 291, 292
Jews 284, 286
Job 25, 26, 55
Joshua 37
Jowett 54
Jungle 190, 194, 197
Junker 152
K
Kaiser 164-166
Kant 303
Kemp 19
King Coal 137
Kingsley 34
Knights of Columbus 123
Koreshanity 248
L
La Follette 260
Landor 34
Lankester 306
Lea 39
Leeky 136
Leo XIII 119, 123
Ligouri 174
Li Hung Chang 75
London 276
Los Angeles 149, 150, 208, 209, 217
L.A. Examiner 149
L.A. Times 44, 151
Lourdes 258
Luther 161, 163
M
MacGill 42
Machen 273
Mallock 77
Malthus 77
Manning 118
Manu 285
Markham 302
Marx 71, 173
Massey 55
Mazdaznan 250
McCabe 148
McDonald 139
Mellen 185
Menace 135
Milton 199
Morality 308
More 85
Morgan 99, 101
Mormon 239, 240
Moses 36, 37
N
Nazarite 29
New Haven 180, 181
New Thought 264
N.Y. Evening Post 223
N.Y. Sun 193
N.Y. Times 211
Nichols 270
Noel 83, 286
Northcliffe 72
Numerology 271
O
Oahspe 248
O’Connell 120
Opium 74
Outlook 175-198
P
Paine 87
Paley 87
Pasadena 150, 208, 276
Patent Medicine 214
Patterson 139
Paul 56, 161, 207
Peabody 99
Peters 204
Phelan 119
Pillsbury 167
Pius IX 116
Plowman 64
Pope 67, 121, 143
Positivists 304
Post 216
Potter 98
Prescott 32
Preston 127
Protestant 201
Prussia 153, 163
Q
Quakers 177
Quay 212
Quigley 129
R
Rauschenbusch 163, 283
Rawson 272
Reformation 163, 201
Religion 16, 17
Rig-Veda 30
Robinson 228
Rockefeller 138, 177, 190, 192, 211
Roosevelt 142
Russell, C.E. 95, 181
Russell, G. 82
Russell, Pastor 247
Ryan 105
S
Sacred Heart 113
Salpetriere 238
Salvation Army 298
Sanday 78
Segur 117
Shaftesbury 74, 82
Shakers 244, 245
Shelley 87, 183
Siam 34
Sinn Fein 295
Smith, Gipsy 217
Smith, Goldwin 223
Soap Box 290
Socialist Movement 311
Spain 131
Spiritualism 275
Stalker 78
Sterling 45
Sunday 207, 210
Swinburne 103
Syracuse 205
T
Tablet 157
Tacitus 170
Taft 142-144
Tammany 93, 143
Thackery 68, 212
Theosophists 254, 255
Thirty-nine Articles 54
Tingley 256
Torrey 203
Tractarian 55
Trinity 94
Trinity Corporation 95
Trowbridge 29
V
Vedder 76
Voltaire 53
W
Waddell 279
Wagner 219
Wall Street 181
Wanamaker 203
Ward 55
Wattles 268
Wesley 170
Westcott 79
White, A.D. 52
White, Bouck 192
Wilberforce 56, 88
William 63
Wilson 169, 186
Y
Yogi 255
York 76
* * * * *
