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The Profits of Religion
by Upton Sinclair
December, 1998 [Etext #1558]
[Date last updated: March 28, 2003]
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
An Essay in Economic Interpretation
By UPTON SINCLAIR
The Profits of Religion
OFFERTORY
This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of
view--as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege. I have
searched the libraries through, and no one has done it before. If
you read it, you will see that it needed to be done. It has meant
twenty-five years of thought and a year of investigation. It
contains the facts.
I publish the book myself, so that it may be available at the
lowest possible price. I am giving my time and energy, in return
for one thing which you may give me--the joy of speaking a true
word and getting it heard.
The present volume is the first of a series, which will do for
Education, Journalism and Literature what has here been done for
the Church: the four volumes making a work of revolutionary
criticism, an Economic Interpretation of Culture under the
general title of "The Dead Hand."
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
Birth Control
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 New Morality
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, crouched in uncomfortable and
distressing positions, their fingers hooked in the straps of
their boots. They are engaged in lifting themselves; tugging and
straining until they grow red in the face, exhausted. The
perspiration streams from their foreheads, they show every
symptom of distress; the eyes of all are fixed, not upon each
other, nor upon their boot-straps, but upon the sky above. There
is a look of rapture upon their faces, and now and then, amid
grunts and groans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.
I approach one and say to him, "Friend, what is this you are
doing?"
He answers, without pausing to glance at me, "I am performing
spiritual exercises. See how I rise?"
"But," I say, "you are not rising at all!"
Whereat he becomes instantly angry. "You are one of the
scoffers!"
"But, friend," I protest, "don't you feel the earth under your
feet?"
"You are a materialist!"
"But, friend, I can see--"
"You are without spiritual vision!"
And so I move on among the sweating and groaning hordes. Being of
a sympathetic turn of mind, I cannot help being distressed by the
prevalence of this singular practice among so large a portion of
the human race. How is it possible that none of them should
suspect the futility of their procedure? Or can it really be that
I am uncomprehending? That in some way they are actually getting
off the ground, or about to get off the ground?
Then I observe a new phenomenon: a man gliding here and there
among the bootstrap-lifters, approaching from the rear and
slipping his hands into their pockets. The position of the
spiritual exercisers greatly facilitates his work; their eyes
being cast up to heaven, they do not see him, their thoughts
being occupied, they do not heed him; he goes through their
pockets at leisure, and transfers the contents to a bag he
carries, and then moves on to the next victim. I watch him for a
while, and finally approach and ask, "What are you doing, sir?"
He answers, "I am picking pockets."
"Oh," I say, puzzled by his matter-of-course tone. "But--I beg
pardon--are you a thief?"
"Oh, no," hie answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the
Wholesale Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."
"I see," I reply. "And these people let you--"
"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."
I turn, following his glance, and observe another person
approaching--a stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple robes,
moving with slow dignity. He gazes about at the sweating and
grunting hordes; now and then he stops and lifts his hands in a
gesture of benediction, and proclaims in rolling tones, "Blessed
are the Bootstrap-lifters, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven."
He moves on, and after a bit stops and announces again, "Man doth
not live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh out of the
mouth of the prophets and priests of Bootstrap-lifting."
Watching a while longer, I see this majestic one approach the
agent of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association. The agent greets
him as a friend, and proceeds to transfer to the pockets of his
capacious robes a generous share of the loot which he has
collected. The majestic one does not cringe, nor does he make any
effort to hide what is going on. On the contrary he cries aloud,
"It is more blessed to give than to receive!" And again he cries,
"The laborer is worthy of his hire!" And a third time he cries,
yet more sternly, "Render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar's!" And the Bootstrap-lifters pause long enough to answer:
"Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this
law!" Then they renew their straining and tugging.
I step up, and in timid tones begin, "Reverend sir, will you tell
me by what right you take this wealth?"
Instantly a frown comes upon his face, and he cries in a voice of
thunder, "Blasphemer!" And all the Bootstrap-lifters desist from
their lifting, and menace me with furious looks. There is a
general call for a policeman of the Wholesale Pickpockets'
Association; and so I fall silent, and slink away in the throng,
and thereafter keep my thoughts to myself.
Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and
incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting
impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a
long time ago--no man can recall how far back--the Wholesale
Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's
pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual
exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in
support of the practice. Now their propaganda is everywhere
triumphant, and year by year we see an increase in the rewards
and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the cult. The
ground is covered with stately temples of various designs, all of
which I am told are consecrated to Bootstrap-lifting. I come to
where a group of people are occupied in laying the corner-stone
of a new white marble structure; I inquire and am informed it is
the First Church of Bootstrap-lifters, Scientist. As I stand
watching, a card is handed to me, informing me that a lady will
do my Bootstrap-lifting at five dollars per lift.
I go on to another building, which I am told is a library
containing volumes in defense of the Bootstrap-lifters, published
under the auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets. I enter, and
find endless vistas of shelves, also several thousand current
magazines and papers. I consult these--for my legs have given out
in the effort to visit and inspect all phases of the
Bootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that hardly a week passes
that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if
I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and
ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies,
the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting. There
are the Holy Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests are fed by
Transubstantiation; the established Anglican Bootstrap-lifters,
whose priests live by "livings"; the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters,
whose preachers practice total immersion in Standard Oil. There
are Yogi Bootstrap-lifters with flowing robes of yellow silk;
Theosophist Bootstrap-lifters with green and purple auras; Mormon
Bootstrap-lifters, Mazdaznan Bootstrap-lifters, Spiritualist and
Spirit-Fruit, Millerite and Dowieite, Holy Roller and Holy
Jumper, Come-to-glory negro, Billy Sunday base-ball and Salvation
Army bass-drum Bootstrap-lifters. There are the thousand
varieties of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic and
transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme
Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters
with half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift"
and "optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden
Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar
per volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian
professors of collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at
several thousand dollars per year each. There are the Nietzschean
Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves to the Superman, and the
art-for-art's-sake, neo-Pagan Bootstrap-lifters, who lift
themselves down to the Ape.
Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of all
these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of
Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic
that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and
less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and
give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when
the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a
year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school
Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand
of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the
priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect,
many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not
reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is
to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation,
that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply
their immemorial role with less chance of interference.
Religion
The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn
the sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul. No; I
admit the honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask
of the preacher is that he shall make an effort to practice his
doctrine. Let him be tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad
like Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar and be devoured by
worms like Simeon Stylites--on these terms I grant to any dreamer
the right to hold himself above economic science.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions
about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries
to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not
limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this
impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to
say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of
by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see
asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers
of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become
hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind
twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What
I say is--Bootstrap-lifting!
It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two senses,
one good and the other bad. Morality means the will to
righteousness, or it means Anthony Comstock; democracy means the
rule of the people, or it means Tammany Hall. And so it is with
the word "Religion". In its true sense Religion is the most
fundamental of the soul's impulses, the impassioned love of life,
the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and further
it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that
sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very
nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing
it, I would make clear that I hold it beyond assailment.
But we are denied the pleasure of using the word in that honest
sense, because of another which has been given to it. To the
ordinary man "Religion" means, not the soul's longing for growth,
the "hunger and thirst after righteousness", but certain forms in
which this hunger has manifested itself in history, and prevails
to-day throughout the world; that is to say, institutions having
fixed dogmas and "revelations", creeds and rituals, with an
administering caste claiming supernatural sanction. By such
institutions the moral strivings of the race, the affections of
childhood and the aspirations of youth are made the prerogatives
and stock in trade of ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the
thesis of this book that "Religion" in this sense is a source of
income to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of
oppression and exploitation.
If by my jesting at "Bootstrap-lifting" I have wounded some dear
prejudice of the reader, let me endeavor to speak in a more
persuasive voice. I am a man who has suffered, and has seen the
suffering of others; I have devoted my life to analyzing the
causes of the suffering, to find out if it be necessary and
fore-ordained, or if by any chance there be a way of escape for
future generations. I have found that the latter is the case; the
suffering is needless, it can with ease and certainty be banished
from the earth. I know this with the knowledge of science--in the
same way that the navigator of a ship knows his latitude and
longitude, and the point of the compass to which he must steer in
order to reach the port.
Come, reader, let us put aside prejudice, and the terrors of the
cults of the unknown. The power which made us has given us a
mind, and the impulse to its use; let us see what can be done
with it to rid the earth of its ancient evils. And do not be
troubled if at the outset this book seems to be entirely
"destructive". I assure you that I am no crude materialist, I am
not so shallow as to imagine that our race will be satisfied with
a barren rationalism. I know that the old symbols came out of the
heart of man because they corresponded to certain needs of the
heart of man. I know that new symbols will be found,
corresponding more exactly to the needs of our time. If here I
set to work to tear down an old and ramshackle building, it is
not from blind destructfulness, but as an architect who means to
put a new and sounder structure in its place. Before we part
company, I shall submit the blue print of that new home of the
spirit.
BOOK ONE
The Church of the Conquerors
I saw the Conquerors riding by
With trampling feet of horse and men:
Empire on empire like the tide
Flooded the world and ebbed again;
A thousand banners caught the sun,
And cities smoked along the plain,
And laden down with silk and gold
And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.
Kemp.
The Priestly Lie
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of
lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no
conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this
event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read
about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and
Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all
these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight
of the fact that they were originally meant with entire
seriousness--that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but
was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an
explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence
was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who
slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and
night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the
phenomena, it was the science of early times.
Men imagined supernatural powers such as they could comprehend.
If the lightning god destroyed a hut, obviously it must be
because the owner of the hut had given offense; so the owner must
placate the god, using those means which would be effective in
the quarrels of men--presents of roast meats and honey and fresh
fruits, of wine and gold and jewels and women, accompanied by
friendly words and gestures of submission. And when in spite of
all things the natural evil did not cease, when the people
continued to die of pestilence, then came the opportunity for
hysterical or ambitious persons to discover new ways of
penetrating the mind of the god. There would be dreamers of
dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of the
entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds; there
would be burning bushes and stone tablets on mountain-tops, and
inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands.
There would arise special castes of men and women, learned in
these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally
emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves
aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and
entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles
in ways favorable to themselves and their order; they would
proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking
with him in the night-time, receiving his messengers and angels,
acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in dealing
punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of
laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes to
distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to
impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects,
architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and
dancing, candles and incense and bells and gongs
And storied winnows 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 complicated forms,
the Priestly Lie. There are a score of great religions in the
world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its
priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens
and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of
millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with
more or less heartiness--and each is a mighty fortress of Graft.
There will be few readers of this book who have not been brought
up under the spell of some one of these systems of
Supernaturalism; who have not been taught to speak with respect
of some particular priestly order, to thrill with awe at some
particular sacred rite, to seek respite from earthly woes in some
particular ceremonial spell. These things are woven into our very
fibre in childhood; they are sanctified by memories of joys and
griefs, they are confused with spiritual struggles, they become
part of all that is most vital in our lives. The reader who
wishes to emancipate himself from their thrall will do well to
begin with a study of the beliefs and practices of other sects
than his own--a field where he is free to observe and examine
without fear of sacrilege. Let him look into Madame Blavatsky's
"Secret Doctrine", or her "Isis Unveiled"!--encyclopedias of the
fantastic inventions which terror and longing have wrung out of
the tortured soul of man. Here are mysteries and solemnities,
charms and spells, illuminations and transmigrations, angels and
demons, guides, controls and masters--all of which it is
permissible to refuse to support with gifts. Let the reader then
go to James Freeman Clarke's "Ten Great Religions", and realize
how many billions of humans have lived and died in the solemn
certainty that their welfare on earth and in heaven depended upon
their accepting certain ideas and practicing certain rites, all
mutually exclusive and incompatible, each damning the others and
the followers of the others. So gradually the realization will
come to him that the test of a doctrine about life and its
welfare must be something else than the fact that one was born to
it.
The Great Fear
It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant, nor
that his ignorance made him a prey to dread. The traces of his
mental suffering will inspire in us only pity and sympathy; for
Nature is a grim school-mistress, and not all her lessons have
yet been learned. We have a right to scorn and anger only when we
see this dread being diverted from its true function, a stimulus
to a search for knowledge, and made into a means of clamping down
ignorance upon the mind of the race. That this has been the
deliberate policy of institutionalized Religion no candid student
can deny.
The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion,
ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed
by it--and that it cultivates the source from which its
nourishment is derived. "The fear of divine anger", says Prof.
Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent through the entire religious
literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In the words of
Tabi-utul-Enlil, King of ancient Nippur:
Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god is full of mystery--who can understand it?
He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.
In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.
And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the
Hebrew scriptures: the only difference being that the Hebrews
combined all their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the
thousand wives; and the Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear
are with Him," cries Job. "How then can any man be just before
God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? Behold, even
the moon hath no brightness, and the stars are not pure in His
sight: How much less man, that is a worm? And the son of man,
which is a worm?" He goes on, in his lyrical rapture, "Sheol is
naked before Him, and Destruction hath no covering. . . . The
pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at His rebuke. . . .
The thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is
some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter the
fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical
perversion of the facts of life, and a preparation of the mind
for the seeds of Priestcraft.
The Book of Job has been called a "Wisdom-drama": and what is the
denouement of this drama, what is ancient Hebrew wisdom's last
word about life? "Wherefore I abhor myself," says Job, "and
repent in dust and ashes." The poor fellow has done nothing; we
have been told at the beginning that he "was perfect and upright,
and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." But the Sabeans and
the Chaldeans rob him, and "the fire of God" falls from heaven
and burns up his sheep and his servants, and "a great wind from
the wilderness" kills his sons and daughters; and then his body
becomes covered with boils--a phenomenon caused in part by worry,
and the consequent nervous indigestion, but mainly by excess of
starch and deficiency of mineral salts in the diet. Job, however,
has never heard of the fasting cure for disease, and so he takes
him a potsherd to scrape himself withal, and he sits among the
ashes--a highly unsanitary procedure enforced by his religious
ritual. So naturally he feels like a worm, and abhors himself,
and cries out: "I know that Thou canst do all things, and that no
purpose of Thine can be restrained." By which utter, unreasoning
humility he succeeds in appeasing the Great Fear, and his friends
make a sacrifice of seven bullocks and seven rams--a feast for a
whole templeful of priests--and then "the Lord gave Job twice as
much as he had before. . . . And after this Job lived an hundred
and forty years, and saw his sons and his sons' sons, even four
generations."
You do not have to look very deeply into this "Wisdom-drama" to
find out whose wisdom it is. Confess your own ignorance and your
own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred
Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon
and respite--in exchange for fresh meat. Here are verses from a
psalm of the ancient Babylonians, which "heathen" chant is
identical in spirit and purpose with the utterances of Job:
The Sin that I have wrought, I know not;
The unclean that I have eaten, I know not;
The offense into which I have walked, I know not....
The lord, in the wrath of his heart, hath regarded me;
The god, in the anger of his heart, hath surrounded me;
A goddess, known or unknown, hath wrought me sorrow....
I sought for help, but no one took my hand;
I wept, but no one harkened to me....
The feet of my goddess I kiss, I touch them;
To the god, known or unknown, I utter my prayer;
O god, known or unknown, turn thy countenance, accept my
sacrifice;
O goddess, known or unknown, look mercifully on me! accept
my sacrifice!
Salve Regina!
And now let the reader leap three thousand years of human
history, of toil and triumph of the intellect of man; and instead
of a Hebrew manuscript or a Babylonian brick there confronts him
a little publication, printed on a modern rotary press in the
capital of the United States of America, bearing the date of
October, 1914, and the title "Salve Regina". In it we find "a
beautiful prayer", composed by the late cardinal Rampolla; we are
told that "Pius X attached to it an indulgence of 100 days, each
time it is piously recited, applicable to the souls in
purgatory."
O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, cast a glance from Heaven, where
thou sittest as Queen, upon this poor sinner, your servant.
Though conscious of his unworthiness.... he blesses and exalts
thee from his whole heart as the purest, the most beautiful and
the most holy of creatures. He blesses thy holy name. He blesses
thy sublime prerogatives as real Mother of God, ever Virgin,
conceived without stain of sin, as co-Redemptress of the human
race. He blesses the Eternal Father who chose you, etc. He
blesses the Incarnate Word, etc. He blesses the Divine Spirit,
etc. He blesses, exalts and thanks the most august Trinity, etc.
O Virgin, holy and merciful . . . be pleased to accept this
little homage of your servant, and obtain for him also from your
divine Son pardon for his sins, Amen.
And then, looking more closely, we discover the purpose of this
"beautiful prayer", and of the neat little paper which prints it.
"Salve Regina" is raising funds for the "National Shrine of the
Immaculate Conception", a home for more priests, and Catholic
ladies who desire to collect for it may receive little books
which they are requested to return within three months. Pius X
writes a letter of warm endorsement, and sets an example by
giving four hundred dollars "out of his poverty"--or, to be more
precise, out of the poverty of the pitiful peasantry of Italy.
There is included in the paper a form of bequest for "devoted
clients of Our Blessed Mother", and at the top of the editorial
page the most alluring of all baits for the loving hearts of the
flock--that the names of deceased relatives and friends may be
written in the collection books, and will be transferred to the
records of the Shrine, and these persons "will share in all its
spiritual benefits". In the days of Job it was with threats of
boils and poverty that the Priestly Lie maintained itself; but in
the case of this blackest of all Terrors, transplanted to our
free Republic from the heart of the Dark Ages, the wretched
victims see before their eyes the glare of flames, and hear the
shrieks of their loved ones writhing in torment through uncounted
ages and eternities.
Fresh Meat
In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I sought
earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor
compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig
and the bear--he was vegetarian when he could not help it. The
advocates of the reform insist that meat as a diet causes muddy
brains and dulled nerves; but you would certainly never suspect
this from a study of history. What you find in history is that
all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the strongest and
cleverest get it. Everywhere you find the subject classes living
in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they
rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of liberty, our
millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and geese and turkeys,
and hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but save
everything for the summer-boarder or the buyer from the city. It
would not be too much to say of the cultural records of early man
that they all have to do, directly or indirectly, with the
reserving of fresh meat to the masters. In J. T. Trowbridge's
cheerful tale of the adventures of Captain Seaborn, we are told
by the cannibal priest how idol-worship has ameliorated the
morals of the tribe--
For though some warriors of renown
Continue anthropophagous,
'Tis rare that human flesh goes down
The low-caste man's aesophagus!
I suspect that we should have to go back to the days of the
cave-man to find the first lover of the flesh-pots who put a
taboo upon meat, and promised supernatural favors to all who
would exercise self-control, and instead of consuming their meat
themselves, would bring it and lay it upon the sacred griddle, or
altar, where the god might come in the night-time and partake of
it. Certainly, at any rate, there are few religions of record in
which such devices do not appear. The early laws of the Hebrews
are more concerned with delicatessen for the priests than with
any other subject whatever. Here, for example, is the way to make
a Nazarite:
He shall offer his offering up to the Lord, one he lamb of the
first year without blemish for a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb
of the first year without blemish for a sin offering, and one ram
without blemish for peace offerings, and a basket of unleavened
bread, cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, and wafers of
unleavened bread anointed with oil, and their meat offerings.
And the law goes on to instruct the priests to take certain
choice, parts and "wave them for a wave offering before the Lord:
this is holy for the priest." What was done with the other
portions we are not told; but earlier in this same "Book of
Numbers" we find the general law that
Every offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel,
which they bring unto the priest, shall be his. And every man's
hallowed things shall be his: whatsoever any man giveth to the
priest, it shall be his.
In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the priests
of Ceylon first present the gifts to the god, and then eat them.
Among the Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must bring four
new robes to the priests; if they do this, the priests wear the
robes; if they fail to do it, the dead man appears naked before
the judgment-throne. The devotees are instructed that "he who
performs this rite succeeds in both worlds, and obtains a firm
footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists, the followers give
alms to the monks, and are told specifically what advantages will
thereby accrue to them. In the Aitareyo Brahmairiarn of the
Rig-Veda we read
He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is born
from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the
nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge),
the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and is absorbed into
the deity.
Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma,
or juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a god.
Among the Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the
sacred juice is that of the grape, and the priest is not allowed
to throw away what is left of it, but is ordered "reverently to
consume it." In as much as the priest is the sole judge of how
much good sherry wine he shall consecrate previous to the
ceremony, it is to be expected that the priests of this cult
should be lukewarm towards the prohibition movement, and should
piously refuse to administer their sacrament with unfermented and
uninteresting grape-juice.
Priestly Empires
In every human society of which we have record there has been one
class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the "hewers of
wood and drawers of water"; and there has been another, much
smaller class which has done the directing. To belong to this
latter class is to work also, but with the head instead of the
hands; it is also to enjoy the good things of life, to live in
the best houses, to eat the best food, to have choice of the most
desirable women; it is to have leisure to cultivate the mind and
appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and distinctions, to give
laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered
and regarded--in short, to have Power. How to get this Power and
to hold it has been the first object of the thoughts of men from
the beginning of time.
The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is
uncertain, for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed
with it. It will be found that empires based upon military force
alone, however cruel they may be, are not permanent, and
therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when
resistance is paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that the
race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds and
even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all priestly
empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the
priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.
Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:
Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the Aztecs....
Such was the crafty policy of the priests, who, by reserving to
themselves the business of instruction, were enabled to mould the
young and plastic mind according to their own wills, and to train
it early to implicit reverence for religion and its ministers.
The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of this
teaching:
To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the
maintenance of the priests. The estates were augmented by the
policy or devotion of successive princes, until, under the last
Montezuma, they had swollen to an enormous extent, and covered
every district of the empire.
And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices,
whereby the priestly caste maintained the prestige of its
divinities:
At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the
prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the purpose,
were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long.
The ceremony consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives
are said to have perished at the shrine of this terrible deity.
The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of the
priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:
The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the
original legal tribunal was the place where the image or symbol
of the god stood. A legal decision was an oracle or omen,
indicative of the will of the god. The power thus lodged in the
priests of Babylonia and Assyria was enormous. They virtually
held in their hands the life and death of the people.
And of the business side of this vast religious system:
The temples were the natural depositories of the legal archives,
which in the course of centuries grew to veritably enormous
proportions. Records were made of all decisions; the facts were
set forth, and duly attested by witnesses. Business and marriage
contracts, loans and deeds of sale were in like manner drawn up
in the presence of official scribes, who were also priests. In
this way all commercial transactions received the written
sanction of the religious organization. The temples
themselves--at least in the large centres--entered into business
relations with the populace. In order to maintain the large
household represented by such an organization as that of the
temple of Enlil of Nippur, that of Ningirsu at Lagash, that of
Marduk at Babylon, or that of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings
of land were required which, cultivated by agents for the
priests, or farmed out with stipulations for a goodly share of
the produce, secured an income for the maintenance of the temple
officials. The enterprise of the temples was expanded to the
furnishing of loans at interest--in later periods, at 20%--to
barter in slaves, to dealings in lands, besides engaging labor
for work of all kinds directly needed for the temples. A large
quantity of the business documents found in the temple archives
are concerned with the business affairs of the temple, and we are
justified in including the temples in the large centres as among
the most important business institutions of the country. In
financial or monetary transactions the position of the temples
was not unlike that of national banks. . . .
And so on. We may venture the guess that the learned professor
said more in that last sentence than he himself intended, for his
lectures were delivered in that temple of plutocracy, the
University of Pennsylvania, and paid out of an endowment which
specifies that "all polemical subjects shall be positively
excluded!"
Prayer-wheels
These priestly empires exist in the world today. If we wish to
find them we have only to ask ourselves: What countries are
making no contribution to the progress of the race? What
countries have nothing to give us, whether in art, science, or
industry?
For example, Gervaise tells us of the Talapoins, or priests of
Siam, that "they are exempted from all public charges, they
salute nobody, while everybody prostrates himself before them.
They are maintained at the public expense." In the same way we
read of the negroes of the Caribbean islands that "their priests
and priestesses exercise an almost unlimited power." Miss
Kingsley, in her "West African Studies", tells us that if we
desire to understand the institutions of this district, we must
study the native's religion.
For his religion has so firm a grasp upon his mind that it
influences everything he does. It is not a thing apart, as the
religion of the Europeans is at times. The African cannot say,
"Oh, that is all right from a religious point of view, but one
must be practical." To be practical, to get on in the world, to
live the day and night through, he must be right in the religious
point of view, namely, must be on working terms with the great
world of spirits around him. The knowledge of this spirit world
constitutes the religion of the African, and his customs and
ceremonies arise from his idea of the best way to influence it.
Or consider Henry Savage Landor's account of Thibet:
In Lhassa and many other sacred places fanatical pilgrims make
circumambulations, sometimes for miles and miles, and for days
together, covering the entire distance lying flat upon their
bodies.... From the ceiling of the temple hang hundreds of long
strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so
many flying prayers when hung up--for mechanical praying in every
way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus instead of having to learn by
heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to stuff the
entire prayer-book into a prayer-wheel, and revolve it while
repeating as fast as you can four words meaning, "O God, the gem
emerging from the lotus-flower.". . . . The attention of the
pilgrims is directed to a large box, or often a big bowl, where
they may deposit whatever offerings they can spare, and it must
be said that their religious ideas are so strongly developed that
they will dispose of a considerable portion of their money in
this fashion.... The Lamas are very clever in many ways, and have
a great hold over the entire country. They are ninety per cent of
them unscrupulous scamps, depraved in every way and given to
every sort of vice. So are the women Lamas. They live and sponge
on the credulity and ignorance of the crowds; it is to maintain
this ignorance, upon which their luxurious life depends, that
foreign influence of every kind is strictly kept out of the
country.
The Butcher-Gods
In this last sentence we have summed up the fundamental fact
about institutionalized religion. Wherever belief and ritual have
become the means of livelihood of a class, all innovation will of
necessity be taken as an attack upon that class; it will be
literally a crime--robbing the priests of their age-long
privileges. And of course they will oppose the robber--using
every weapon of terrorism, both of this world and the next. They
will require the submission, not merely of their own people, but
of their neighbors, and their jealousy of rival priestly castes
will be a cause of wars. The story of the early days of mankind
is a sickening record of torture and slaughter in the name of ten
thousand butcher-gods.
Thus, for example, we read in the Hebrew religious records how
the priests were engaged in establishing the prestige of a fetish
called "the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated this
fetish and wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god.
And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked
into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty
thousand and three score and ten men; and the people lamented,
because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great
slaughter. And the men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able to stand
before this holy Lord God?
This terrible old Hebrew divinity said of himself that he was "a
jealous god". Throughout the time of his sway he issued through
his ministers precise instructions for the most revolting
cruelties, the extermination of whole nations of men, women and
children, whose sole offense was that they did not pay tribute to
Jehovah's priests. Thus, for example, the chief of his prophets,
Moses, called the people together, and with all solemnity, and
with many warnings, handed down ten commandments graven upon
stone tablets; he went on to set forth how the people were to set
upon and rob their neighbors, and gave them these blood-thirsty
instructions:
When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou
goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee,
the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the
Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the
Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when
the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite
them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with
them, nor shew mercy unto them: ... But thus shall ye deal with
them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images,
and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with
fire. For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord
thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself,
above all people that are upon the face of the earth.
The records of this Jehovah are full of similar horrors. He sent
his chosen people out to destroy the Midianites, and they slew
all the males, but this was not sufficient, and Moses was wroth,
and commanded them to kill all the married women, and to take the
single women "for themselves". We are told that sixteen thousand
single women were spared, of whom "the Lord's tribute was thirty
and two!" In the Book of Joshua we read that he had an interview
with a supernatural personage called "the captain of the Lord's
host", and how this captain had given to him a magic spell which
would destroy the city of Jericho. The city should be accursed,
"even it and all that are therein, to the Lord"; every living
thing except one traitor-harlot was to be slaughtered, and all
the wealth of the city reserved to the priestly caste. This was
carried out to the letter, except that "Achan, the son of Carmi,
the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took
of the accursed thing"--that is, he hid some gold and silver in
his tent; whereupon the army met with a defeat, and everybody
knew that something was wrong, and Joshua rent his clothes and
fell to the earth upon his face before the ark of the Lord, and
got another message from Jehovah, to the effect that the guilty
man should be burned with fire, "he and all that he hath."
And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah,
and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his
sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his
sheep, and his tent, and all that he had: and they brought them
unto the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled
us? the Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned
him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned
him with stones.
We have no means of knowing what was the character of the
unfortunate inhabitants of the city of Jericho, nor of the
Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of
the victims of Jehovah. To be sure, we are told by the Hebrew
priests that they sacrificed their children to their gods; but
then, consider what we should believe about the Hebrew religion,
if we took the word of rival priestly castes! Consider, for
example, that in this twentieth century we saw an orthodox Jew
tried in a Russian court of law for having made a sacrifice of
Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a
considerable part of the intelligence and idealism of Russia. We
know in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture and
all of the scientific knowledge of Spain; that the Huguenots had
most of the conscience and industry of France; and we know that
they were massacred or driven out to death by the priestly castes
of the Middle Ages.
The Holy Inquisition
Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those mediaeval
times, so that we may know what we ourselves have escaped. In the
fifteenth century there was established in Europe the cult of a
three-headed god, whose priests had won lordship over a
continent. They were enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt;
they sold to the rich the license to commit every possible crime,
and they held the poor in ignorance and degradation. Among the
comparatively intelligent and freedom-loving people of Bohemia
there arose a great reformer, John Huss, himself a priest,
protesting against the corruptions of his order. They trapped him
into their power by means of a "safe-conduct"--which they
repudiated because no promise to a heretic could have validity.
They found him guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine that
a priest who committed crimes could not give absolution for the
crimes of others; and they held an auto de fe--which means a
"sentence of faith." As we read in Lea's "History of the
Inquisition":
The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund (the
Emperor) and his nobles, the great officers of the empire with
their insignia, the prelates in their splendid robes. While mass
was sung, Huss, as an excommunicate, was kept waiting at the
door; when brought in he was placed on an elevated bench by a
table on which stood a coffer containing priestly vestments.
After some preliminaries, including a sermon by the Bishop of
Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the events of that day
would confer on him immortal glory, the articles of which Huss
was convicted were recited. In vain he protested that he believed
in transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in
polluted hands. He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on his
persisting the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of
this he continued to utter protests. The sentence was then read
in the name of the council, condemning him both for his written
errors and those which had been proven by witnesses. He was
declared a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic who did not
desire to return to the Church; his books were ordered to be
burned, and himself to be degraded from the priesthood and
abandoned to the secular court. Seven bishops arrayed him in
priestly garb and warned him to recant while yet there was time.
He turned to the crowd, and with broken voice declared that he
could not confess the errors which he never entertained, lest he
should lie to God, when the bishops interrupted him, crying that
they had waited long enough, for he was obstinate in his heresy.
He was degraded in the usual manner, stripped of his sacerdotal
vestments, his fingers scraped; but when the tonsure was to be
disposed of, an absurd quarrel arose among the bishops as to
whether the head should be shaved with a razor or the tonsure be
destroyed with scissors. Scissors won the day, and a cross was
cut in his hair. Then on his head was placed a conical paper cap,
a cubit in height, adorned with painted devils and the
inscription, "This is the heresiarch."
The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which he
was conducted by two thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louis at
their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates,
and cardinals. The route followed was circuitous, in order that
he might be carried past the episcopal palace, in front of which
his books were burning, whereat he smiled. Pity from man there
was none to look for, but he sought comfort on high, repeating to
himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon
us!" and when he came in sight of the stake he fell on his knees
and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and said that
he would gladly do so if there were space. A wide circle was
formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to custom, had been
providently empowered to take advantage of final weakening, came
forward, saying, "Dear sir and master, if you will recant your
unbelief and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly
hear your confession; but if you will not, you know right well
that, according to canon law, no one can administer the sacrament
to a heretic." To this Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am
not a mortal sinner." His paper crown fell off and he smiled as
his guards replaced it. He desired to take leave of his keepers,
and when they were brought to him he thanked them for their
kindness, saying that they had been to him rather brothers than
jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German,
telling them that he suffered for errors which he did not hold,
and he was cut short. When bound to the stake, two cartloads of
fagots and straw were piled up around him, and the palsgrave and
vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could
save himself, but only repeated that he had been convicted by
false witnesses on errors never entertained by him. They clapped
their hands and then withdrew, and the executioners applied the
fire. Twice Huss was heard to exclaim, "Christ Jesus, Son of the
living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing up and
blowing the flames and smoke into his face checked further
utterances, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to move
while one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy
was over; the sorely-tried soul bad escaped from its tormentors,
and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him
the praise that no philosopher of old had faced death with more
composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity. No
faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle.
Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the
executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be
reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him.
With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and
thrown into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was
dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the
spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which
they reverenced as relies of their martyr. The next day thanks
were returned to God in a solemn procession in which figured
Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen
cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all the
clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had
delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left
Constance, feeling that his work was done.
Hell-Fire
If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it would
only be in some remote and wholly savage place, such as the
mountains of Hayti, or the Solomon Islands. It could no longer
happen in any civilized country; the reason being, not any
abatement of the pretensions of the priesthood, but solely the
power of science, embodied in the physical arm of a secular
State. The advance of that arm the church has fought
systematically, in every country, and at every point. To quote
Buckle: "A careful study of the history of religious toleration
will prove that in every Christian country where it has been
adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy by the authority of
the secular classes." The wolf of superstition has been driven
into its lair; but it has backed away snarling, and it still
crouches, watching for a chance to spring. The Church which
burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that
the earth moves round the sun--that same church, in the name of
the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the
firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of
this book, it will be solely because of the police. Not being
allowed to burn me here, the clergy will vent their holy
indignation by sentencing me to eternal burning in a future world
which they have created, and which they run to suit themselves.
It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated,
that the measure of the civilization which any nation has
attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of
institutionalized religion. Those peoples which are wholly under
the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans,
Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectual
life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos, and Turks,
who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther on the way
are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a flashlight of
the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick
MacGill:
The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always
told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn
for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you
sorry for the debts that you did not pay," said the priest. "What
is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar
steps. "If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and
took a million years to count every single grain, how long would
it take him to count them all? A long time, you'll say. But that
time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning in hell
while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand,
counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did
not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within
the letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the
letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened, and no
one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it meant.
There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture;
the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one
for agricultural co-operation and the other for political
independence--both of them definitely and specifically
non-religious. This same thing has been true of the movements
which have helped on happier nations, such as the republics of
France and America, which have put an end to the power of the
priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the
mind of the child without its parents' consent.
This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently
not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty
to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though
it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still
permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with
images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and
sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of
devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns
and systematically to infect whole cities full of men, women and
children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city where I
write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees,
even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing,
screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning
paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in Los
Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living
God", upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their
neighbors. The police officers testified that the accused claimed
to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this
possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and
barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling",
about which the newspapers did not go into details. And again, a
week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,
and found tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged
to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft.
Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve
failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed a
whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have
deserved to be whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake
had been made--it was another woman who was the witch. And again
in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly serious news item,
telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and found on his
pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of the head
of Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his neighbors to
witness the miracle, and declared that while he was not
superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened
by chance, and he knew what it was intended to signify--he would
buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the
war!
And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture
think that the battle of the intellect is won, and that it is no
longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting "Religion!"
BOOK TWO
The Church of Good Society
Within the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert
By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,
Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,
And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.
Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts
Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts--
A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,
To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls
Sterling.
The Rain Makers
I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be
the Church in which I was brought up. Reading this statement,
some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I search my
heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can
remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every
Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were chanted
in my childish ears! I take up the book of ritual, done in
aristocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old worn
volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I
endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the
volume--not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a
landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used
as a source of income and a shield to privilege.
In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled
the field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer",
I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has
been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to
stand still, or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good
Society" has discovered astronomy! But if any astronomer
attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy,
let him at least stop to consider my "economic interpretation" of
the phenomenon--the fact that the heavenly bodies affect the
destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient
emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as
astrologer.
But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference!
Has any utmost precision of barometer been able to drive the
priest out of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most
civilized of countries; not in that most decorous and dignified
of institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I
study with care the passage wherein the clergyman appears as
controller of the fate of crops. I note a chastened caution of
phraseology; the church will not repeat the experience of the
sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons to bringing water, and
then could not make them stop! The spell invokes "moderate rain
and showers"; and as an additional precaution there is a
counter-spell against "excessive rains and floods": the
weather-faucet being thus under exact control.
I turn the pages of this "Book of Common Prayer", and note the
remnants of magic which it contains. There are not many of the
emergencies of life with which the priest is not authorized to
deal; not many natural phenomena for which he may not claim the
credit. And in case anything should have been overlooked, there
is a blanket order upon Providence: "Graciously hear us, that
those evils which the craft or subtilty of the devil or man
worketh against us, be brought to nought!" I am reminded of the
idea which haunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories about the
hero who was allowed three wishes that would come true. I could
never understand why the hero did not settle the matter once for
all--by wishing that everything he wished might come true!
Most of these incantations are harmless, and some are amiable;
but now and then you come upon one which is sinister in its
implications. The volume before me happens to be of the Church of
England, which is even more forthright in its confronting of the
Great Magic. Many years ago I remember talking with an English
army officer, asking how he could feel sure of his soldiers in
case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him that the men had
relatives among the workers, and might some time refuse to shoot
them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the military had
worked out its technique with care. He would never think of
ordering his men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he would first
start the spell of discipline to work, he would march them round
the block, and get them in the swing, get their blood moving to
military music; then, when he gave the order, in they would go. I
have never forgotten the gesture, the animation with which he
illustrated their going--I could hear the grunting of bayonets in
the flesh of men. The social system prevailing in England has
made necessary the perfecting of such military technique; also,
you discover, English piety has made necessary the providing of a
religious sanction for it. After the job has been done, and the
bayonets have been wiped clean, the company is marched to church,
and the officer kneels in his family pew, and the privates kneel
with the parlor-maids, and the clergyman raises his hands to
heaven and intones: "We bless thy Holy Name, that it hath pleased
Thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately
raised up among us!"
And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killers--he
even takes part in their bloody work. In the Home Office Records
of the British Government I read (vol 40, page 17) how certain
miners were on strike against low wages and the "truck" system,
and the Vicar of Abergavenny put himself at the head of the
yeomanry and the Greys. He wrote the Home Office a lively account
of his military operations. All that remained was to apprehend
certain of the strikers, "and then I shall be able to return to
my Clerical duties." Later he wrote of the "sinister influences"
which kept the miners from returning to their work, and how he
had put half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.
The Babylonian Fire-god
So we come to the most important of the functions of the tribal
god, as an ally in war, an inspirer to martial valour. When in
ancient Babylonia you wished to overcome your enemies, you went
to the shrine of the Firegod, and with awful rites the priest
pronounced incantations, which have been preserved on bricks and
handed down for the use of modern churches. "Pronounce in a
whisper, and have a bronze image therewith," commands the ancient
text, and runs on for many strophes in this fashion:
Let them die, but let me live!
Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!
Let them perish, but let me increase!
Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!
O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among the gods,
Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.
This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand years ago. Since
then, the world has moved on--
Three thousand years of war and peace and glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams--
And in one of the world's leading nations the people stand up and
bare their heads, and sing to their god to save their king and
punish those who oppose him--
O Lord our God, arise, Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On him our hopes we fix,
God save us all.
Recently, I understand, it has become the custom to omit this
stanza from the English national anthem; but it is clear that
this is because of its crudity of expression, not because of
objection to the idea of praying to a god to assist one nation
and injure others; for the same sentiment is expressed again and
again in the most carefully edited of prayer-books:
Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their
devices.
Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies.
Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish and overcome
all his enemies.
There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God.
Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-called civilized
nation today. Behind every battle-line in Europe you may see the
priests of the Babylonian Fire-god with their bronze images and
their ancient incantations; you may see magic spells being
wrought, magic standards sanctified, magic bread eaten and magic
wine drunk, fetishes blessed and hoodoos lifted, eternity
ransacked to find means of inciting soldiers to the mood where
they will "go in". Throughout all civilization, the phobias and
manias of war have thrown the people back into the toils of the
priest, and that church which tortured Galileo in the dungeons of
the Inquisition, and shot Ferrier beneath the walls of the
fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of religion".
The Medicine-men
Andrew D. White tells us that
It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague,
the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of
the landed and personal property of every European country was in
the hands of the Church. Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that
"pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God."
And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as
banishers of epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit
to rebuke the upstart teachers of impious and atheistical
inoculation, and scourge the people back into His fold as in the
good old days of Moses and Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in his
immensely learned and half-suppressed work, "The Analysis of
Religious Belief", quotes some missionaries to the Fiji
islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the
subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a "disease-maker",
who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they
blew horns to frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The
missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the
affliction--and thereby revealed that they stood upon the same
intellectual level as the heathen they were supposed to instruct!
It appeared that the natives had been at war with their
neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist;
they had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as
punishment for savage presumption!
And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of
Common Prayer" of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I
remember as a little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned
by the prevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread
three times a day; and there came an amiable clerical gentleman
and recited the service proper to such pastoral calls: "Take
therefore in good part the visitation of the Lord!" And again,
when my mother was ill, I remember how the clergyman read out in
church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness, "in mind, body
or estate". I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaning of
these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize that
the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in
front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his
tenements might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his
little "flyer" in cotton might prove successful; so that the
children in his mills might work with greater speed.
Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by incantations,
and he answered, "Yes, if you use a little strychnine with it."
And that would seem to be the attitude of the present-day
Anglican church-member; he calls in the best physician he knows,
he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and after that he
thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have a chance. It makes
the women happy, and after all, there are a lot of things we
don't yet know about the world. So he repairs to the family pew,
and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributes his mite
to the maintenance of an institution which, fourteen Sundays
every year, proclaims the terrifying menaces of the Athanasian
Creed:
Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he
hold the Catholick faith. Which faith, except one do keep whole
and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be explained
that the "Catholick faith" here referred to is not the Roman
Catholic, but that of the Church of England and the Protestant
Episcopal Church of America. This creed of the ancient
Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacing
precision--forty-four paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae,
closing with the final doom: "This is the Catholick faith: which
except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."
You see, the founders of this august institution were not content
with cultured complacency; what they believed they believed
really, with their whole hearts, and they were ready to act upon
it, even if it meant burning their own at the stake. Also, they
knew the ceaseless impulse of the mind to grow; the terrible
temptation which confronts each new generation to believe that
which is reasonable. They met the situation by setting out the
true faith in words which no one could mistake. They have
provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also the
"Thirty-nine Articles"--which are thirty-nine separate and
binding guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal
Church shall be either a man of inferior mentality, or else a
sophist and hypocrite. How desperate some of them have become in
the face of this cruel dilemma is illustrated by the tale which
is told of Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford: that when he
was required to recite the "Apostle's Creed" in public, he would
save himself by inserting the words "used" between the words "I
believe", saying the inserted words under his breath, thus, "I
used to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
Perhaps the eminent divine never did this; but the fact that his
students told it, and thought it funny, is sufficient indication
of their attitude toward their "Religion." The son of William
George Ward tells in his biography how this leader of the
"Tractarian Movement" met the problem with cynicism which seems
almost sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are justified in
deception; and then lie like a trooper!"
The Canonization of Incompetence
The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in
all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of
mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it
canonizes incompetence. Consider the power of the Church of
England and its favorite daughter here in America; consider their
prestige with the press and in politics, their hold upon
literature and the arts, their control of education and the minds
of children, of charity and the lives of the poor: consider all
this, and then say what it means to society that such a power
must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction
and falsehood. "So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be," runs the church's formula; and this per se and a
priori, of necessity and in the nature of the case.
Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the
church's opposition to every advance in every field of science,
even the most remote from theological concern. Here is the
Reverend Edward Massey, preaching in 1772 on "The Dangerous and
Sinful Practice of Inoculation"; declaring that Job's distemper
was probably confluent small-pox; that he had been inoculated
doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for
the punishment of sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent
them is "a diabolical operation". Here are the Scotch clergy of
the middle of the nineteenth century denouncing the use of
chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking "to avoid one
part of the primeval curse on woman". Here is Bishop Wilberforce
of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of natural
selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; it
"contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator";
it "is inconsistent with the fulness of His glory"; it is "a
dishonoring view of nature". And the Bishop settled the matter by
asking Huxley whether he was descended from an ape through his
grandmother or grandfather.
Think what it means, friends of progress, that these
ecclesiastical figures should be set up for the reverence of the
populace, and that every time mankind is to make an advance in
power over Nature, the pioneers of thought have to come with
crow-bars and derricks and heave these figures out of the way!
And you think that conditions are changed to-day? But consider
syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we know so much, and can do
almost nothing; consider birth-control, which we are sent to jail
for so much as mentioning! Consider the divorce reforms for which
the world is crying--and for which it must wait, because of St.
Paul! Realize that up to date it has proven impossible to
persuade the English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister! That when the war broke upon England the whole
nation was occupied with a squabble over the disestablishment of
the church of Wales! Only since 1888 has it been legally possible
for an unbeliever to hold a seat in Parliament; while up to the
present day men are tried for blasphemy and convicted under the
decisions of Lord Hale, to the effect that "it is a crime either
to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian
religion or to hold them up to contempt or ridicule." Said Mr.
justice Horridge, at the West Riding Assizes, 1911: "A man is not
free in any public place to use common ridicule on subjects which
are sacred."
The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London, is
"to preserve the standard of outward decency." And you will find
that the one essential to prosecution is always that the victim
shall be obscure and helpless; never by any chance is he a duke
in a drawing-room. I will record an utterance of one of the
obscure victims of the British "standard of outward decency", a
teacher of mathematics named Holyoake, who presumed to discuss in
a public hall the starvation of the working classes of the
country. A preacher objected that he had discussed "our duty to
our neighbor" and neglected "our duty to God"; whereupon the
lecturer replied: "Our national Church and general religious
institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about twenty
million pounds annually. Worship being thus expensive, I appeal
to your heads and your pockets whether we are not too poor to
have a God. While our distress lasts, I think it would be wise to
put deity upon half pay." And for that utterance the unfortunate
teacher of mathematics served 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 church can do by way of setting up
dullness in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's"
writings on theological and religious questions. Read his
"Juventus Mundi", in the course of which he establishes, a mystic
connection between the trident of Neptune and the Christian
Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that the writer of Genesis was
an inspired geologist! This writer of Genesis points out in
Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in an orderly
succession of times: First, the water population; secondly, the
air population; thirdly, the land population of animals;
fourthly, the land population consummated in man." And it seems
that this division and sequence "is understood to have been so
affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a
demonstrated conclusion and established fact." Hence we must
conclude of the writer of Genesis that "his knowledge was
divine"! Consider that this was actually published in one of the
leading British monthlies, and that it was necessary for
Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that so far is it
from being true that "a fourfold division and orderly sequence"
of water, air and land animals "has been affirmed in our time by
natural science", that on the contrary, the assertion is
"directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is
acquainted with the elements of natural science". The
distribution of fossils proves that land animals originated
before sea-animals, and there has been such a mixing of land, sea
and air animals as utterly to destroy the reputation of both
Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine knowledge of
Geology.
Gibson's Preservative
I have a friend, a well-known "scholar", who permits me the use
of his extensive library. I stand in the middle and look about
me, and see in the dim shadows walls lined from floor to ceiling
with decorous and grave-looking books, bound for the most part in
black, many of them fading to green with age. There are literally
thousands of such, and their theme is the pseudo-science of
"divinity". I close my eyes, to make the test fair, and walk to
the shelves and put out my hand and take a book. It proves to be
a modern work, "A History of the English Prayer-book in Relation
to the Doctrine of the Eucharist". I turn the pages and discover
that it is a study of the variations of one minute detail of
church doctrine. This learned divine--he has written many such
works, as the advertisements inform us--fills up the greater part
of his pages with foot-notes from hundreds of authorities,
arguments and counter-arguments over supernatural subtleties. I
will give one sample of these footnotes--asking the reader to be
patient:
I add the following valuable observation, of Dean Goode: ("On
Eucharist", II p 757. See also Archbishop Ware in Gibson's
"Preservative", vol X, Chap II) "One great point for which our
divines have contended, in opposition to Romish errors, has been
the reality of that presence of Christ's Body and Blood to the
soul of the believer which is affected through the operation of
the Holy Spirit notwithstanding the absence of that Body and
Blood in Heaven. Like the Sun, the Body of Christ is both present
and absent; present, really and truly present, in one sense--that
is, by the soul being brought into immediate communion with--but
absent in another sense--that is, as regards the contiguity of
its substance to our bodies. The authors under review, like the
Romanists, maintain that this is not a Real Presence, and
assuming their own interpretation of the phrase to be the only
true one, press into their service the testimony of divines who,
though using the phrase, apply it in a sense the reverse of
theirs. The ambiguity of the phrase, and its misapplication by
the Church of Rome, have induced many of our divines to repudiate
it, etc."
Realize that of the work from which this "valuable observation"
is quoted, there are at least two volumes, the second volume
containing not less than 757 pages! Realize that in Gibson's
"Preservative" there are not less than ten volumes of such
writing! Realize that in this twentieth century a considerable
portion of the mental energies of the world's greatest empire is
devoted to that kind of learning!
I turn to the date upon the volume, and find that it is 1910. I
was in England within a year of that time, and so I can tell what
was the condition of the English people while printers were
making and papers were reviewing and book-stores were
distributing this work of ecclesiastical research. I walked along
the Embankment and saw the pitiful wretches, men, women and
sometimes children, clad in filthy rags, starved white and frozen
blue, soaked in winter rains and shivering in winter winds,
homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors of divinity,
unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative". I walked on Hampstead
Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns out
for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror,
for I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These
creatures were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were
some new grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could
only shamble; they could not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a
hand-organ playing, and turned away--the things they did in their
efforts to dance were not to be watched. And then I went out into
the beautiful English country; cultured and charming ladies took
me in swift, smooth motor-cars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and
the drink-sodden, starch-poisoned inhabitants--slum-populations
everywhere, even on the land! When the newspaper reporters came
to me, I said that I had just come from Germany, and that if ever
England found herself at war with that country, she would regret
that she had let the bodies and the minds of her people rot; for
which expression I was severely taken to task by more than one
British divine.
The bodies--and the minds; the rot of the latter being the cause
of the former. All over England in that year of 1910, in
thousands of schools, rich and poor, and in the greatest centres
of learning, men like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead
languages and dead sciences and dead arts; sending them out to
life with no more conception of the modern world than a monk of
the Middle Ages; sending them out with minds, made hard and
inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to progress,
contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this
terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and
disciplined by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The
awful muddle that was in England during the first two years of
the war has not yet been told in print; but thousands know it,
and some day it will be written, and it will finish forever the
prestige of the British ruling caste. They rushed off an
expedition to Gallipoli, and somebody forgot the water-supply,
and at one time they had ninety-five thousand cases of dysentery!
They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of
their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle
through"--they had to come to America for help. As I write, our
Congress is voting billions and tens of billions of dollars, and
a million of the best of our young manhood are being taken from
their homes--because in 1910 the mind of England was occupied
with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and the ten volumes of Gibson's
"Preservative".
The Elders
What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged.
It means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the
church, but in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army
and navy. For a test I look up the list of bishops of the Church
of England in Whitaker's Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of
these functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the
suffragans; and that the total salary paid to them amounts to
more than nine hundred thousand dollars a year. This, it should
be understood, does not include the pay of their assistants, nor
the cost of maintaining their religious establishments; it does
not include any private incomes which they or their wives may
possess, as members of the privileged classes of the Empire. I
look up their ages in Who's Who, and I find that there is only
one below fifty-three; the oldest of them is ninety-one, while
the average age of the goodly company is seventy. There have been
men in history who have retained their flexibility of mind, their
ability to adjust themselves to new circumstances at the age of
seventy, but it will always be found that these men were trained
in science and practical affairs, never in dead languages and
theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter
that he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an
opinion on the labor question.
And now--here is the crux of the argument--do these aged
gentlemen rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally
nothing of their own power; they could not make their own
episcopal robes, they could not even cook their own episcopal
dinners. They have to be maintained in all their comings and
goings. Who supports them, and to what end?
The roots of the English Church are in the English land system,
which is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from
the days of William the Norman, who took possession of Britain
with his sword, and in order to keep possession for himself and
his heirs, distributed the land among his nobles and prelates. In
those days, you understand, a high ecclesiastic was a man of war,
who did not stoop to veil his predatory nature under pretense of
philanthropy; the abbots and archbishops, of William wore armor
and had their troops of knights like the barons and the dukes.
William gave them vast tracts, and at the same time he gave them
orders which they obeyed. Says the English chronicler, "Stark he
was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots of their
abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependencie of the church on
the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from
bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt
before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my
lord, I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly
regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and
death, God help me."
The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has
held, and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege
man for life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the
whole story of the church of England, in the twentieth century as
in the eleventh. The balance of power has shifted from time to
time; old families have lost the land and new families have
gotten it; but the loyalty and homage of the church have been
held by the land, as the needle of the compass is held by a mass
of metal. Some two hundred and fifty years ago a popular song
gave the general impression--
For this is law that I'll maintain
Until my dying day, sir:
That whatsoever king shall reign
I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!
So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and
Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every
injustice that profits the owning class. And always among
themselves you find them intriguing and squabbling over the
dividing of the spoils; always you find them enjoying leisure and
ease, while the people suffer and the rebels complain. One can
pass down the corridor of English history and prove this
statement by the words of Englishmen from every single
generation. Take the fourteenth century; the "Good Parliament"
declares that
Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to benefices of a
thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of
twenty. God gave the sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and
shorn.
And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers Plowman--
But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets, A
leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land, Pricking on a
palfrey from manor to manor, A heap of hounds at his back, as
tho he were a lord; And if his servant kneel not when he brings
his cup, He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy.
Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands Away to the
Orders that have no pity; Money rains upon their altars. There
where such parsons be living at ease They have no pity on the
poor; that is their "charity". Ye hold you as lords; your lands
are too broad, But there shall come a king and he shall shrive
you all And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your
Rule.
Another step through history, and in the early part of the
sixteenth century here is Simon Fish, addressing King Henry the
Eighth, in the "Supplicacyon for the Beggars", complaining of the
"strong, puissant and counterfeit holy and ydell" which "are now
increased under your sight, not only into a great nombre, but
ynto a kingdome."
They have begged so importunatly that they have gotten ynto their
hondes more than a therd part of all youre Realme. The goodliest
lordshippes, maners, londes, and territories, are theyres.
Besides this, they have the tenth part of all the come, medowe,
pasture, grasse, wolle, coltes, calves, lambes, pigges, gese and
chikens. Ye, and they looke so narowly uppon theyre proufittes,
that the poore wyves must be countable to thym of every tenth eg,
or elles she gettith not her rytes at ester, shal be taken as an
heretike. . . . Is it any merveille that youre people so
compleine of povertie? The Turke nowe, in your tyme, shulde never
be abill to get so moche grounde of christendome . . . And whate
do al these gredy sort of sturdy, idell, holy theves? These be
they that have made an hundredth thousand idell hores in your
realme. These be they that catche the pokkes of one woman, and
here them to an other.
The petitioner goes on to tell how they steal wives and all their
goods with them, and if any man protest they make him a heretic,
"so that it maketh him wisshe that he had not done it". Also they
take fortunes for masses and then don't say them. "If the Abbot
of westminster shulde sing every day as many masses for his
founders as he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkes
were too few." The petitioner suggests that the king shall "tie
these holy idell theves to the cartes, to be whipped naked about
every market towne till they will fall to laboure!"
Church History
King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he took
away the property of the religious orders for the expenses of his
many wives and mistresses, and forced the clergy in England to
forswear obedience to the Pope and make his royal self their
spiritual head. This was the beginning of the Anglican Church, as
distinguished from the Catholic; a beginning of which the
Anglican clergy are not so proud as they would like to be. When I
was a boy, they taught me what they called "church history", and
when they came to Henry the Eighth they used him as an
illustration of the fact that the Lord is sometimes wont to
choose evil men to carry out His righteous purposes. They did not
explain why the Lord should do this confusing thing, nor just how
you were to know, when you saw something being done by a
murderous adulterer, whether it was the will of the Lord or of
Satan; nor did they go into details as to the motives which the
Lord had been at pains to provide, so as to induce his royal
agent to found the Anglican Church. For such details you have to
consult another set of authorities--the victims of the
plundering.
When I was in college my professor of Latin was a gentleman with
bushy brown whiskers and a thundering voice of which I was often
the object--for even in those early days I had the habit of
persisting in embarrassing questions. This professor was a devout
Catholic, and not even in dealing with ancient Romans could he
restrain his propaganda impulses. Later on in life he became
editor of the "Catholic Encyclopedia", and now when I turn its
pages, I imagine that I see the bushy brown whiskers, and hear
the thundering voice: "Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I tell you
it is so!"
I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about King
Henry the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of
England; he is ready with an "economic interpretation", as
complete as the most rabid muckraker could desire! It appears
that the king wanted a new wife, and demanded that the Pope
should grant the necessary permission; in his efforts to browbeat
the Pope into such betrayal of duty, King Henry threatened the
withdrawal of the "annates" and the "Peter's pence". Later on he
forced the clergy to declare that the Pope was "only a foreign
bishop", and in order to "stamp out overt expression of
disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of terror".
In Anglican histories, you are assured that all this was a work
of religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure
vehicle of God's grace. There were no more "holy idell theves",
holding the land of England and plundering the poor. But get to
know the clergy, and see things from the inside, and you will
meet some one like the Archbishop of Cashell, who wrote to one of
his intimates:
I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat,
drink and grow fat, rich and die; which laudable example I
propose for the remainder of my days to follow.
If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray
reports of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew
with peculiar intimacy:
I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's
favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5000 pounds. (She
betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be made a bishop,
and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time
led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George II's
St. James, I see crowds of cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of
the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into
their laps; that godless old king yawning under his canopy in his
Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.
Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment? Whilst
the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in German and
almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman
actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because the defender of
the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to
him!
Land and Livings
And how is it in the twentieth century? Have conditions been much
improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote
Robert Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who
therefore has still to be recognized by English critics. He
writes of the "New Rome", by which he means present-day England:
The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of Men!
You see, the land system of England remains--the changes having
been for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep the
Saxon peasantry contented, so he left them their "commons"; but
in the eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away. We
saw the same thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and
from the same motive--because developing capitalism needs cheap
labor, whereas people who have access to the land will not slave
in mills and mines. In England, from the time of Queen Anne to
that of William and Mary, the parliaments of the landlords passed
some four thousand separate acts, whereby more than seven million
acres of the common land were stolen from the people. It has been
calculated that these acres might have supported a million
families; and ever since then England has had to feed a million
paupers all the time.
As an old song puts the matter:
Why prosecute the man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
And let the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose?
In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in
British soil: some of them direct descendants of the Normans,
others children of the court favorites and panders who grew rich
in the days of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts. Seven men
own practically all the land of the city and county of London,
and collect tribute from seven millions of people. The estates
are entailed--that is, handed down from father to oldest son
automatically; you cannot buy any land, but if you want to build,
the landlord gives you a lease, and when the lease is up, he
takes possession of your buildings. The tribute which London pays
is more than a hundred million dollars a year. So absolute is the
right of the land-owner that he can sue for trespass the driver
on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes on fishermen a
tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the shore.
And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each
church owns land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms
and city lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral owns
large tracts; so do the schools and universities in which the
clergy are educated. The income from the holdings of a church
constitutes what is called a "living"; these livings, which vary
in size, are the prerogatives of the younger sons of the ruling
families, and are intrigued and scrambled for in exactly the
fashion which Thackeray describes in the eighteenth century.
About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great
land owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such
plums; and needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen
who favor radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like
himself--autocratic to the poor, easy-going to members of his own
class, and cynical concerning the grafts of grace.
In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven
hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent
had a large family, he lived there. In another place the living
was worth a thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate,
himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the
King's birthday, to preach a sermon; the rest of the time he
spent in Paris. It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was
proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that is, clergymen
holding more than one "living"--to furnish curates to do their
work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with
strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting
against it without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp
saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergy would rather part
with thirty-eight of their thirty-nine articles 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 Oxford or Cambridge, and
possess the one essential qualification, that they are gentlemen.
Their average price is two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their
function was made clear to me when I attended my first English
tea-party. There was a wicker table, perhaps a foot and a half
square, having three shelves, one below the other the top layer
the plates and napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the
lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you pass the curate,
please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call that the
curate, because it does the work of a curate."
Graft in Tail
As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular
with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in
their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and
disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their
interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption in
American politics; surely I must know that in England they had no
such evils! I explained that they did not have to; their graft,
to use their own legal phrase, was "in tail"; the grafters had,
as a matter of divine right, the things which in America they had
to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate, a
"Millionaire's Club", for admission to which the members paid in
cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as
their birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself,
it is merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England
has even more than America. When I explained this, my popularity
with the British ruling classes vanished quickly.
As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she
realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about
herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of
the libel laws, which have as their first principle "the greater
the truth, the greater the libel". Englishmen read with
satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my
attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as
they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England,
the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought
their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our
American senators have done; they have bought the political
parties with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have
taken over the press, whether by outright purchase like
Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy--both of which methods we
Americans know. Within the last decade or two another group has
been coming into control; and not merely is this the same class
of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same
individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the international
financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist
system. These gentlemen make the world their home--or, as
Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit
themselves to all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and
Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris,
democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews
wherever they are.
And of course, in buying the English government, these new
classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the
world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They
have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of
the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant
of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for
the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant,
who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one
agent, without rival--the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy
of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal
Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the
dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled my
childhood--my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial
robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest,
and pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:
"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins
thou dost retain, they are retained!"
Bishops and Beer
For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines
of South Africa--wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly
taxed than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So
the armies of England were sent to subjugate the country. You
might think they would have had the good taste to leave the lowly
Jesus out of this affair--but if so, you have missed the
essential point about established religion. The bishops, priests,
and deacons are set up for the populace to revere, and when the
robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then is the
opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their
"living." During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English
clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly
reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of
Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to
women and children in the South African concentration-camps, it
was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought
forward to make reply. Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi,
and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one
mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war
as a means of keeping the nation "virile"; nor Archbishop
Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making "noble
natures".
The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example,
the opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy
in India and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made
perhaps a hundred million "noble natures" by this method; and
also they were making a hundred million dollars a year. The
Chinese, moved by their new "virility," undertook to destroy some
opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use
British battle-ships to punish and subdue them. Was there any
difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless
this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most
devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of
the clergy, and wrote in his diary:
I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated.
We have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and
unfair struggles in the records of history; and Christians have
shed more heathen blood in two years, than the heathens have shed
of Christian blood in two centuries.
That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England
continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and
only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought
to an end. Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the
church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a
letter to the Anti-Opium Society:
Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China
can never meet on a common ground. China views the whole question
from a moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.
And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the
English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and
country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are
clamoring for restriction--and what prevents? Head and front of
the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the
Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early
temperance movement, declares that "among its supporters I cannot
recall one Church of England minister of influence." When Asquith
brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer,
he was confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy,
protesting against the act. And what was the basis of their
protest? That beer is a food and not a poison? Yes, of course;
but also that there was property invested in brewing it, Three
hundred and thirty-two clergy of the diocese of Peterborough
declared:
We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the present
bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave injustice as
amounting to a confiscation of private property, spelling ruin
for thousands of quite innocent people, and provoking deep and
widespread resentment, which must do harm to our cause and hinder
our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken
petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for
research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C.
Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:
It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr. Asquith's
temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through the opposition
of clergymen who had invested their savings in brewery stock, the
profits of which might have been lessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was
sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no
prohibition legislation should ever be passed without providing
for compensation to the owners of the industry. Today, all over
America, appeals are being made to the people to eat less grain;
the grain is being shipped to England, some of it to be made into
beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the Archbishop of
York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices, and in
his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his
church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time
economy!
Anglicanism and Alcohol
This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to
British radicals; they see it at work in every election--the
publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson
confuses them with spirituality. There are two powerful societies
in England employing this deadly combination--the "Anti-Socialist
Union" and the "Liberty and Property Defense League." If you scan
the lists of the organizers, directors and subsidizers of these
satanic institutions, you find Tory politicians and landlords,
prominent members of the higher clergy, and large-scale dealers
in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting called by the
"Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to a
denunciation of Socialism by W. H. Mallock, a master sophist of
Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a
dozen members of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary
of the Federated Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine,
Spirit, and Beer Trade Association, and three or four other
alcoholic magnates.
In every public library in England and many in America you will
find an assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations,
and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock
misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these
writings are brutal--setting forth the ethics of exploitation in
the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who
supplied for capitalist depredation a basis in pretended natural
science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot
get subsistence from his parents, and if society does not want
his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food,
and in fact has no business to be where he is. At Nature's mighty
feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and
will quickly execute her own orders.
Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth
century; but it was found that for some reason this failed to
stop the growth of Socialism, and so in our time the clerical
defenders of Privilege have grown subtle and insinuating. They
inform us now that they have a deep sympathy with our fundamental
purposes; they burn with pity for the poor, and they would really
and truly wish happiness to everyone, not merely in Heaven, but
right here and now. However, there are so many complications--and
so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist bug-a-boos.
Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D. D., expounding
"The Ethics of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:
Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands to
another may be inspired by the same passions as have blinded the
present holders to their own highest good, and may be accompanied
with injustice as extreme as has ever been manifested by the rich
and powerful.
And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D. D., an especially popular
clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on
wage-slavery:
The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through
them, of which this is one. Where God has been so patient, it is
not for us to be impatient.
And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a
clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing
us back to the faith of our fathers:
The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social
arrangements, but to personal vices.
I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just what,
if anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our
time. I find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of
Durham, as being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop
Westcott, whether he is talking to a high society congregation,
or to one of workingmen, shows "an exquisite sense of knowing
always where to stop." So I consulted the Bishop's volume, "The
Social Aspects of Christianity" and I see at once why he is
popular with the anti-Socialist propagandists--neither I or any
other man can possibly discover what he really means, or what he
really wants done.
I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I
kept on the good Bishop's trail, I might in the end find
something a plain man could understand; so I got the beautiful
two-volume "Life of Brooke Westcott, by his Son"--and there I
found an exposition of the social purposes of bishops! In the
year 1892 there was a strike in Durham, which is in the coal
country; the employers tried to make a cut in wages, and some ten
thousand men walked out, and there was a long and bitter
struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much
consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at
last the masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as
arbitrator, and the dispute was triumphantly settled--how do you
suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!
I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the
naivete with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the
story of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came
out from the conference "all smiles, and well satisfied with the
result of his day's work." As for his followers, they were in
ecstacies; they "seized and waltzed one another around on the
carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flower show ball.
Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer ourselves
hoarse." The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more
communication on episcopal stationery--an order to all his clergy
to "offer their humble and hearty thanks to God for our happy
deliverance from the strife by which the diocese has been long
afflicted." Strange to say, there were a few varlets in Durham
who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop, and one
of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he
made reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life. The
biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted
that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and
so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he had
been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where
the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not
permitted to; while the working people, who didn't want to live
on tea and toast, were compelled to!
Dead Cats
For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been
fighting with every resource at their command the liberal and
enlightened men of England who wished to educate the masses of
the people. In 1807 the first measure for a national
school-system was denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as
"derogatory to the authority of the Church." As a counter-
measure, his supporters established the "National Society for
Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the
Established Church"; and the founder of the organization, a
clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and
insisted that the children of the workers "should not be taught
beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council
of Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the
Archbishops, setting forth the decree of "their lordships" that
"the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of
the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and
precepts of revealed religion." In 1850 a bill for secular
education was denounced as presenting to the country "a choice
between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870, Forster,
author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the parsons
were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into
savages."
As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to
abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts
endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism
conferred emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon
the Bishop of London laid down the formula of exploitation:
"Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do not make the
least alteration of civil property."
Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of
the cultured classes of England:
In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political
controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the
franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected
religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable
institution of slavery, or what subject they touched, these
leisured classes, these educated classes, these titled classes
have been in the wrong.
The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes," for
he belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the
record will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform
measures which Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the
Reform Bill of 1832. It opposed all the social reforms of Lord
Shaftesbury. This noble-hearted Englishman complained that at
first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to
the end only a few. He expressed himself as distressed and
puzzled "to find support from infidels and non-professors;
opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers."
And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of
Bishops voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The
House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; the House of
Bishops opposed Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the
end. Concerning this establishment Lord Shaftesbury, himself the
most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase: "this vast
aquarium full of cold-blooded life." He told the Bishops that he
would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform,
because he knew that they would never begin. Another member of
the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russell, has written of
their record and adventures:
They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody penal
code; they were the resolute opponents of every political or
social reform; and they had their reward from the nation outside
Parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his palace sacked and
burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep an engagement to
preach lest the congregation should stone him. The Bishop of
Litchfield barely escaped with his life after preaching at St.
Bride's, Fleet Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for
his primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought
by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the
mob. On the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester
were burnt in effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop
Howley's chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown at
him, when the Archbishop--a man of apostolic meekness--replied:
"You should be thankful that it was not a live one."
The people had reason for this conduct--as you will always find
they have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote
another member of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel,
who gives "an instance of the procedure of Church and State about
this period":
In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by
one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week
each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood.
The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the
chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for
whatever their masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at
first promised his help, now turned against them, and the masters
promptly reduced the wage to 7s., with a threat of further
reduction. Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for which
all seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to
the assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them into
submission. The judge determined to convict them, and directed
that they should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III,
specially passed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore. The
grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers; both
judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing type. The judge
summed up as follows: "Not for anything that you have done, or
that I can prove that you intend to do, but for an example to
others I consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven years'
penal transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and
every one of you."
Suffer Little Children
The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in
children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by
them, He did not consider them superfluous. "Of such is the
Kingdom of Heaven", He said; and His Church is the inheritor of
this tradition--"feed my lambs". There were children in Great
Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may
see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin's "Industrial
History of England":
Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands,
who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily
capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American
markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of
their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere
slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to
feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their
places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the
parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one
idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane
children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than
that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been
disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings
from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and
cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by
exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly
applied to force continued work. Children were often worked
sixteen hours a day, by day and by night.
In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the
labor of children nine years of age to four-teen hours a day.
This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to
have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently
opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It
was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the
will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church,
whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.
C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing
economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted
prince, worshipper of the gods".... so begins the oldest legal
code which has come down to us, from 2250 B. C.; and the
coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the
same thesis. The duty of submission, not merely to divinely
chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen
Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and
explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people petition
for increase of grace to hear meekly "Thy Word"; and here is this
"Word," as little children are made to learn it by heart. If
there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics,
I do not know where to find it.
My duty towards my neighbour is.....
To honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority
under him;
To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual
pastors, and masters:
To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters ....
Not to covet nor desire other men's goods;
But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do
my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to
call me.
A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers
was Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the
coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the
starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in
which they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly
known as "Little Hell." In this place two hundred people were
crowded into nineteen houses. "There is not one creature in it
that can give a cup of broth if it would save a life." In one
winter eighteen perished of "a putrid fever", and the clergyman
"could not raise a sixpence to save a life."
And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to
cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social
protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a
day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a
proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular
woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be
sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had
asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a
famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like
flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them
her pious self. "In suffering by the scarcity, you have but
shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the
advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered
no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place she
explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
be grateful to the rich!
Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite all
ranks of people together, to show the poor how immediately they
are dependent upon the rich, and to show both rich and poor that
they are all dependent upon Himself. It has also enabled you to
see more clearly the advantages you derive from the government
and constitution of this country--to observe the benefits flowing
from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the
high to so liberally assist the low.
It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by this
pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night and burned
an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic
consequence, for one of the "common people," known as Robert,
"was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear at Sunday
School next day. This fall from grace occasioned intense remorse
in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his mind for many months,"
records Martha More, "and despair seemed at length to take
possession of him." Hannah had some conversation with him, and
read him some suitable passages from "The Rise and Progress". "At
length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give
him comfort."
Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in any way
unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the letters of
Shelley how his father tormented him with Archdeacon Paley's
"Evidences" as a cure for atheism. This eminent churchman wrote a
book, which he himself ranked first among his writings, called
"Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Labouring Classes of
the British Public." In this book he not merely proved that
religion "smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a prospect
which makes all earthly distinctions nothing"; he went so far as
to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters
were less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a
day.
Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of the
labouring part of mankind must be so called) imposes, are not
hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a pleasure. It is
an exercise of attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is
successful, produces satisfaction..... This is lost among
abundance.
And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as
Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies
and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement,
and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to
British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot.
Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of
Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican
establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the
basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion
is to remind the poor:
That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand
of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties,
and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects
about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the
contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers
indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction
than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man's
reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if
their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also
exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are
happily extempted; that, "having food and raiment, they should be
therewith content," since their situation in life, with all its
evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and
finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and
the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same
Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly
inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the
temporal well-being of political communities.
The Court Circular
The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to
the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the
sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired
church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this
revolution was purely one of Church politics--in doctrine and
ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America" remained in
every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are
taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself lowly and
reverently to all my betters." The only difference is that
instead of being told "to honour and obey the King," they are
told "to honour and obey the civil authority."
It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same
in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves
with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and
imitation English clothes--so in their Heaven they have provided
an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize
the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow
their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon
absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book--not the English, but
the sturdy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have
not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its
contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I
read:
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee, Casting down their
golden crowns around the glassy sea; Cherubim and seraphim
bowing down before Thee, Which wert, and art, and ever more
shall be!
One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal
imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find
that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king ... ..
throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn
begins--
Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;
To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.
And the second--
Christ, whose glory fills the skies---
And the third--
Lord of all being, throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star.
There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look
up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as
they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same
ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous,
greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious,
punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless
round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No
member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he
wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family--not even
the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his
mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low
society.
This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried
weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off
in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:
The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain:
His blood-red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?
This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on
earth; utterly simple and honest--he would not even let anyone
praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he answered,
quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one,
that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with
deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments
upon him in conventional, courtly style:
The company of angels
Are praising Thee on high;
And mortal men, and all things
Created, make reply: All Glory, laud and honour,
To Thee, Redeemer, King. . . . .
The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable
boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful
occupation than that of the saints--casting down their golden
crowns around the glassy sea--unless it be that of the
Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching
these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous
compliments!
But one can understand that such things are necessary in a
monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good
Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely
the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few
can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time
going through costly formalities--not because they enjoy it, but
because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about them
and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is
allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the
horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.
Horn-blowing
I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied it
from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout little boy; one
of my earliest recollections--I cannot have been more than four
years of age--is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the
choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I
remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this
fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it
reverently." When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own
volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during
the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching
Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth
Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the
city will understand that this is a peculiar location--precisely
half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august
of the city's aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy
of the city's slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church,
and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei
gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully
cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made
for them--as all the rest of the world is made for them; the
populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.
The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman;
orthodox, yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could
not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the
rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor,
visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little
kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and
Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school,
where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health
of their souls.
I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would
be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and
the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the
walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but
they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little
morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives
of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord
and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as
practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive
away a pestilence.
I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the
papers, and watching politics and business. I, followed the fates
of my little slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was
getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the
panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty
thieves--all these were paying the policeman and the politician
for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into
trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who
consoled them in prison--but it was the Tammany leader who saw
the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson even
earlier in life than I got mine--that the church was a kind of
amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was
Tammany.
I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good
Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did
nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to
investigate, I discovered the reason--that their incomes came
from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were
contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the
corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it
appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei
gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but
none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against
which they were blowing their religious horns!
So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and
is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part
of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and
cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be
meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device
to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters.
And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great
Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world,
I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I met, not
sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation--until
the venerable institution which had once seemed dignified and
noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.
Trinity Corporation
There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering
brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous
churches in America. As a child I have walked through its church
yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its
gravestones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it
seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the
world's infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning,
this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at
noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to
listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my
young soul; and what is it in reality?
The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell.
Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of
the great landlords of New York. In the early days it bought a
number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has grown up
around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere
from forty to a hundred million dollars. The true amount has
never been made public; to quote Russell's words:
The real owners of the property are the communicants of the
church. For 94 years none of the owners has known the extent of
the property, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom, nor what
is done with the money. Every attempt to learn even the simplest
fact about these matters has been baffled. The management is a
self perpetuating body, without responsibility and without
supervision.
And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this
great corporation, which is simply the English land system
complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long
periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease
expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum.
Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them
into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total
of fifty dollars a month. The houses were not built for
tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the
habitation of animals. The article, in Everybody's Magazine for
July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond
belief. To quote the writer again:
Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an
owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent
institution all possible credit for a spirit of improvement
manifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation. I have
tramped the Eighth Ward day after day with a list of Trinity
properties in my hand, and of all the tenement houses that stand
there on Trinity land, I have not found one that is not a
disgrace to civilization and to the City of New York.
It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over
this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have
shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what
devilish utterances were some day to proceed from the lips of the
little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as
the bishop's attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church!
Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect, even to the
most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way!
Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For while the
bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the
sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported,
that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand dollars
worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the
doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess fifty
thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting
the blood-hounds of the police on the train of a human being. I
asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember his patient
explanation--that the bishop had to know all classes and
conditions of men: his wife had to go among the rich as well as
the poor, and must be able to dress so that she would not be
embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work
to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal
cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much time
among the rich!
The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had
to be cathedrals--despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St.
Paul had declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made
with hands." In the twenty-five years which have passed since
that time the good Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but
the mighty structure which is a monument to his visitations among
the rich towers over the city from its vantage-point on
Morningside Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine; and knowing what I know about the men who contributed its
funds, and about the general functions of the churches of the
Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it
were built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the
skulls of human beings.
Spiritual Interpretation
There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions
of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that
they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who
was crucified as a common criminal because, as they said, "He
stirreth up the people." An embarrassing "Savior" for the church
of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up
and make him respectable.
I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day
Saturday I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole
potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the
roofs of apartment-houses; but on Saturday night I went into a
tub and was lathered and scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in
a newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tie and
a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me
impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth
Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all
church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and
most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week
--and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean
clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion
are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable
Founder--to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a
stained-glass-window divinity.
The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and
crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail
him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to
the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of
gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here
is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and scholarly volume,
published by the exclusive house of Scribner, and written by the
Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I carried in the
stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His Relation to the
Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter,
D. D., L. L. D., D. C. L.--a course of lectures delivered before
the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the
endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the
Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the
deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at
Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:
Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced
pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He did not abhor
the company of rich men; he sought it. He did not invariably
scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure.
And do you think that the late Bishop of J. P. Morgan and Company
stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of
golden nails? In the course of this book there will march before
us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their
way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter's son: the
Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the
Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the
Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club, the Pastor of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the
Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the
weight of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons,
newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound
their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet
of the proletarian Christ.
Here, for example, is Rev. F. G. Peabody, Professor of Christian
Morals at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several
books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid
of the carpenter's denunciations of the rich, and says:
Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as this,
a teaching so slightly distinguished from the curbstone rhetoric
of a modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the
scope and power of the teaching of Jesus?
The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a
gentleman; he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of
universities where gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of
Christian Morals proceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus'
actions; demonstrating therefrom that there are three proper uses
to be made of great wealth: first, for almsgiving--"The poor ye
have always with you!"; second, for beauty and culture--buying
wine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other objets de
vertu; and third, "stewardship," "trusteeship"--which in plain
English is "Big Business."
I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can
imagine he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the
proletarian Founder emerging all new and respectable under the
brush of this capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all
his own for reading the scriptures; he tells us that when there
are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretation is that
"the more spiritual is to be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes
Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor." Another puts it: "Blessed are
the poor in spirit." The first one is crude and literal;
obviously the second must be what Jesus meant! In other words,
the professor and his church have made for their economic masters
a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a
quality of submissiveness, impotence and futility, which they
call by the name of "spirituality". This virtue they exalt above
all others, and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus
everything which has relation to the realities of life!
So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at
Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," and
explaining:
The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its radicalism,
but in its externalism. It proposes to accomplish by economic
change what can be attained by nothing less than spiritual
regeneration.
And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of New
York, warning us:
It is necessary to remember that something more than material and
temporal considerations are involved. There are things of more
importance to the purposes of God and to the welfare of humanity
than economic readjustments and social amelioration.
And again:
Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing upon
clergy and laity alike, to address their religious energies too
exclusively to those tasks whereby human life may be made more
abundant and wholesome materially..... We need constantly to be
reminded that spiritual things come first.
There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen
for whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen
and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid
gloves and shiny top-hats; the ladies of Good Society with their
Easter costumes in pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their
sweet intoxicating odors. I picture them as I have seen them at
St. George's, where that aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the
elder, used to pass the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where
they drove downtown in old-fashioned carriages with grooms and
footmen sitting like twin statues of insolence; at St. Thomas',
where you might see all the "Four Hundred" on exhibition at once;
at St. Mary the Virgin's, where the choir paraded through the
aisles, swinging costly incense into my childish nostrils, the
stout clergyman walking alone with nose upturned, carrying on his
back a jewelled robe for which some adoring female had paid sixty
thousand dollars. "Spiritual things come first?" Ah, yes! "Seek
first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall be added
unto you!" And it is so dreadful about the French and German
Socialists, who, as the "Churchman" reports, "make a creed out of
materialism." But then, what is this I find in one issue of the
organ of the "Church of Good Society"?
Business men contribute to the Y. M. C. A. because they realize
that if their employes are well cared for and religiously
influenced, they can be 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 prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet,
And with hard, overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
Was it for this--that men should make
Thy name a fetter on men's necks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
And women withered out of sex?
Was it for this--that slaves should be--
Thy word was passed to set men free?
Swinburne.
Charity
As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and
self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there
must be at home a large number of other women who live sterile
and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their
luckier sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings;
they have emotions--or, in religious parlance, "souls;" it is
necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating
the property of their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming
enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New
York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the
other, St. Patrick's, for the servant-girls. The latter is
located on Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide
with the homes of the Vanderbilts the interest of the crowds of
sight-seers. Now, early every Sunday morning, before "Good
Society" has opened its eyes, you may see the devotees of the
Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each with a little
black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do inside? What
are they taught about life? This is the question to which we have
next to give attention.
Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate
of New York, favored me with his justification of his own career
and activities. He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one
man of the world to another, he said: "The reason I put them into
the hands of Catholics is not religious, but because I find they
are efficient in such matters. They don't ask questions, they do
what you want them to do, and do it economically."
I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the
remark--like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and
his mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.
When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long
hours and improper working-conditions which drove him to
desperation; they do not ask if police and politicians are
getting a rake-off from the saloon, or if traction magnates are
using it as an agency for the controlling of votes; they do not
plunge into prohibition movements or good government
campaigns--they simply take the man in, at a standard price, and
the patient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and then
turn him out for society to make him drunk again. That is
"charity," and it is the special industry of Roman Catholicism.
They have been at it for a thousand years, cleaning up loathsome
and unsightly messes--"plague, pestilence and famine, battle and
murder and sudden death." Yet--puzzling as it would seem to
anyone not religious--there were never so many messes, never so
many different kinds of messes, as now at the end of the thousand
years of charitable activity!
But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building
and rebuilding his web across a doorway; like soldiers under the
command of a ruling class with a "muddling through" tradition--
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have
messes to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away
quickly and without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this
service, no matter what their personal religious beliefs or lack
of beliefs may be. Somewhere in the neighborhood of every
steel-mill, every coal-mine or other place of industrial danger,
you will find a Catholic hospital, with its slave-sisters and
attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking" near Pittsburgh, I went
to one of these places to ask information as to the frequency of
industrial accidents and the fate of the victims. The "Mother
Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These
concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as a matter of
business it would not do for us to talk about them."
Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as
it is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the
work of vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and
saloon-keepers and ward-heelers which the Catholic machine
controls. This industry of vote-getting is a comparatively new
one; but the Church has been handling the masses for so many
centuries that she quickly learned this new way of "democracy,"
and has established her supremacy over all rivals. She has the
schools for training the children, the confessional for
controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the
purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the supreme
advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really
believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to
table-rappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings
in order to bolster their hope of the survival of personality
after death!
So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance have
been driven to a more or less reluctant alliance with the Papacy.
The Church is here, and her followers are here, before the war
several hundred thousand of them pouring into the country every
year. It is no longer possible to do without Catholics in
America; not merely do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal
mined, and dishes washed, but franchises have to be granted,
tariff-schedules adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police
trained and strikes crushed. Under our native political system,
for these purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes
belong to people of a score of nationalities--Irish and German
and Italian and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and
Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church
can handle these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and
editors and politicians familiar with all these languages?
Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely
moderate--the mere actual expenses of the campaign, the cost of
red fire and torch-lights, of liquor and newspaper
advertisements. The rest may come out of the public till, in the
form of exemption from taxation of church buildings and lands, a
share of the public funds for charities and schools, the control
of the police for saloon-keepers and district leaders, the
control of police-courts and magistrates, of municipal
administrations and boards of education, of legislatures and
governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our
sacred self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme Court
Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige,
some cabinet-members and legislators and justices to attend High
Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholic prelates and
dignitaries.
You think this is empty rhetoric--you comfortable, easy-going,
ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic shades,
absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless
intelligence"--while the world about you slides down into the
pit! You ladies of Good Society, practicing your "sweet little
charities," pursuing your "dear little ideals," raising your
families of one or two lovely children--while Irish and
French-Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Hungarians are
breeding their dozens and scores, and preparing to turn you out
of your country!
God's Armor
You remember "Bishop Blougram's Apology," Browning's study of the
psychology of a modern Catholic ecclesiastic. He is not unaware
of modern thought, this bishop; he is a man of culture, who wants
to have beauty about him, to be a "cabin passenger":
There's power in me and will to dominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else;
In many ways I need mankind's respect,
Obedience, and the love that's born of fear.
He wishes that he had faith--faith in anything; he understands
that faith is all-important--
Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat.
But you cannot get faith just by wishing for it--
But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn!
He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade for truth, but he
asks what there would be in it for him--
State the facts,
Read the text right, emancipate the world--
The emancipated world enjoys itself
With scarce a thank-you.
Blougram told it first
It could not owe a farthing,--not to him
More than St. Paul!
So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasily conscious of
the contempt of intellectual people.
I pine among my million imbeciles
(You think) aware some dozen men of sense
Eye me and know me, whether I believe
In the last winking virgin as I vow,
And am a fool, or disbelieve in her,
And am a knave.
But, as he says, you have to keep a tight hold upon the chain of
faith, that is what
Gives all the advantage, makes the difference,
With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule.
We are their lords, or they are free of us,
Just as we tighten or relax that hold.
So he continues, but not with entire satisfaction, in his role of
shepherd to those whom he calls "King Bomba's lazzaroni," and
"ragamuffin saints."
I wander into a Catholic bookstore and look to see what Bishop
Blougram is doing with his lazzaroni and his ragamuffin saints
here in this new country of the far West. It is easy to acquire
the information, for the saleswoman is polite and the prices fit
my purse. America is going to war, and Catholic boys are being
drafted to be trained for battle; so for ten cents I obtain a
firmly bound little pamphlet called "God's Armor, a Prayer Book
for Soldiers." It is marked "Copyright by the G. R. C.
Central-Verein," and bears the "Nihil Obstat" of the "Censor
Theolog." and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes Josephus,
Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici"--which last you may at first fail
to recognize as a well-known city on the Mississippi River. Do
you not feel the spell of ancient things, the magic of the past
creeping over you, as you read those Latin trade-marks? Such is
the Dead Hand, and its cunning, which can make even St. Louis
sound mysterious!
In this booklet I get no information as to the commercial causes
of war, nor about the part which the clerical vote may have
played throughout Europe in supporting military systems. I do not
even find anything about the sacred cause of democracy, the
resolve of a self-governing people to put an end to feudal rule.
Instead I discover a soldier-boy who obeys and keeps silent, and
who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip of terrors both of body
and soul. Poor, pitiful soldier-boy, marking yourself with
crosses, performing genuflexions, mumbling magic formulas in the
trenches--how many billions of you have been led out to slaughter
by the greeds and ambitions of your religious masters, since
first this accursed Antichrist got its grip upon the hearts of
men!
I quote from this little book:
Start this day well by lifting up your heart to God. Offer
yourself to Him, and beg grace to spend the day without sin. Make
the sign of the cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, behold me in Thy Divine Presence. I adore Thee and give
Thee thanks. Grant that all I do this day be for Thy Glory, and
for the salvation of my immortal soul.
During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your prayers
need not be long nor read from a book. Learn a few of these short
ejaculations by heart and frequently repeat them. They will serve
to recall God to your heart and will strengthen you and comfort
you.
You remember a while back about the prayer-wheels of the
Thibetans. The Catholic religion was founded before the Thibetan,
and is less progressive; it does not welcome mechanical devices
for saving labor. You have to use your own vocal apparatus to
keep yourself from hell; but the process has been made as
economical as possible by kindly dispensations of the Pope. Thus,
each time that you say "My God and my all," you get fifty days
indulgence; the same for "My Jesus, mercy," and the same for
"Jesus, my God, I love Thee above all things." For "Jesus, Mary,
Joseph," you get three hundred days--which would seem by all odds
the best investment of your spare breath.
And then come prayers for all occasions: "Prayer before Battle";
"Prayer for a Happy Death"; "Prayer in Temptation"; "Prayer
before and after Meals"; "Prayer when on Guard"; "Prayer before a
long March"; "Prayer of Resignation to Death"; "Prayer for Those
in their Agony"--I cannot bear to read them, hardly to list them.
I remember standing in a cathedral "somewhere in France" during
the celebration of some special Big Magic. There was brilliant
white light, and a suffocating strange odor, and the thunder of a
huge organ, and a clamor of voices, high, clear voices of young
boys mounting to heaven, like the hands of men in a pit reaching
up, trying to climb over the top of one another. It sent a
shudder into the depths of my soul. There is nothing left in the
modern world which can carry the mind so far back into the
ancient nightmare of anguish and terror which was once the mental
life of mankind, as these Roman Catholic incantations with their
frantic and ceaseless importunity. They have even brought in the
sex-spell; and the poor, frightened soldier-boy, who has perhaps
spent the night with a prostitute, now prostrates himself before
a holy Woman-being who is lifted high above the shames of the
flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe and affection which his
mother brought to him in early childhood. Read over the phrases
of this "Litany of the Blessed Virgin":
Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Mother of God. Holy Virgin of
Virgins. Mother of Christ. Mother of divine grace. Mother most
pure. Mother most chaste. Mother inviolate. Mother undefiled.
Mother most amiable. Mother most admirable. Mother of good
counsel. Mother of our Creator. Mother of our Savior. Virgin most
prudent. Virgin most venerable. Virgin most renowned. Virgin most
powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin most faithful. Mirror of
justice. Seat of wisdom. Cause of our Joy. Spiritual vessel.
Vessel of honor. Singular vessel of devotion. Mystical rose.
Tower of David. Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the
covenant. Gate of heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick.
Refuge of sinners. Comforter of the afflicted. Help of
Christians. Queen of Angels. Queen of Patriarchs. Queen of
Prophets. Queen of Apostles. Queen of Martyrs. Queen of
Confessors. Queen of Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queen
conceived without original sin. Queen of the most holy Rosary.
Queen of Peace, Pray for us.
Thanksgivings
For another five cents--how cheaply a man of insight can obtain
thrills in this fantastic world!--I purchase a copy of the
"Messenger of the Sacred Heart", a magazine published in New
York, the issue for October, 1917. There are pages of
advertisements of schools and colleges with strange titles:
"Immaculata Seminary", "Holy Cross Academy", "Holy Ghost
Institute", "Ladycliff", "Academy of Holy Child Jesus". The
leading article is by a Jesuit, on "The Spread of the Apostleship
of Prayer among the Young"; and then "Sister Clarissa" writes a
poem telling us "What are Sorrows"; and then we are given a story
called "Prayer for Daddy"; and then another Jesuit father tells
us about "The Hills that Jesus Loved". A third father tells us
about the "Eucharistic Propaganda"; and we learn that in July,
1917, it distributed 11,699 beads, and caused the expenditure of
57,714 hours of adoration; and then the faithful are given a form
of letter which they are to write to the Honorable Baker,
Secretary of War, imploring him to intimate to the French
government that France should withdraw from one of her advances
in civilization, and join with mediaeval America in exempting
priests from being drafted to fight for their country. And then
there is a "Question Box"--just like the Hearst newspapers, only
instead of asking whether she should allow him to kiss her before
he has told her that he loves her, the reader asks what is the
Pauline Privilege, and what is the heroic Act, and is Robert a
saint's name, and if food remains in the teeth from the night
before, would it break the fast to swallow it before Holy
Communion. (No, I am not inventing this.)
I quoted the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and pointed out how
deftly the Church has managed to slip in a prayer for worldly
prosperity. But the Catholic Church does not show any
squeamishness in dealing with its "million imbeciles", its
"rough, purblind mass". There is a department of the little
magazine entitled "Thanksgiving", and a statement at the top that
"the total number of Thanksgivings for the month is 2,143,911." I
am suspicious of that, as of German reports of prisoners taken;
but I give the statement as it stands, not going through the list
and picking out the crudest, but taking them as they come,
classified by states:
GENERAL FAVORS: For many of these favors Mass and publication
were promised, for others the Badge of Promoter's Cross was used,
for others the prayers of the Associates had been asked.
Alabama--Jewelry found, relief from pain, protection during
storm.
Alaska--Safe return, goods found.
Arizona--Two recoveries, suitable boarding place, illness
averted, safe delivery.
British Honduras--Successful operation.
California--Seventeen recoveries, six situations, two successful
examinations, house rented, stocks sold, raise in salary, return
to religious duties, sight regained, medal won, Baptism,
preservation from disease, contract obtained, success in
business, hearing restored, Easter duty made, happy death,
automobile sold, mind restored, house found, house rented,
successful journey, business sold, quarrel averted, return of
friends, two successful operations.
And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic machine is
harvesting the price day by day--harvesting with that ancient
fervor which the Latin poet described as "auri sacra fames". As
Christopher Columbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: "Gold is a
wonderful thing. By means of gold we can even get souls into
Paradise."
The Holy Roman Empire
The system thus self-revealed you admit is appalling in its
squalor; but you say that at least it is milder and less perilous
than the Church which burned Giordano Bruno and John Huss. But
the very essence of the Catholic Church is that it does not
change; semper eadem is its motto: the same yesterday, today and
forever--the same in Washington as in Rome or Madrid--the same in
a modern democracy as in the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church is
not primarily a religious organization; it is a political
organization, and proclaims the fact, and defies those who would
shut it up in the religious field, The Rev. S. B. Smith, a
Catholic doctor of divinity, explains in his "Elements of
Ecclesiastical Law":
Protestants contend that the entire power of the Church consists
in the right to teach and exhort, but not in the right to
command, rule, or govern; whence they infer that she is not a
perfect society or sovereign state. This theory is false; for the
Church, as was seen, is vested Jure divino with power, (1) to
make laws; (2) to define and apply them (potestas judicialis);
(3) to punish those who violate her laws (potestas coercitiva).
And this is not one scholar's theory, but the formal and repeated
proclamation of infallible popes. Here is the "Syllabus of
Errors", issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in
precise language that
The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess
and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.
It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical power shall
require the permission of the civil power in order to the
exercise of its authority.
Then in the same Syllabus the rights and powers of the Church are
affirmed thus:
She has the right to require the state not to leave every man
free to profess his own religion.
She has the right to exercise her power without the permission or
consent of the state.
She has the right of perpetuating the union of church and state.
She has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be
the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others.
She has the right to prevent the state from granting the public
exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating from it.
She has the power of requiring the state not to permit free
expression of opinion.
You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You, who
think that liberty of conscience is the basis of civilization,
ought at least to know what the Catholic Church has to say about
the matter. Here is Mgr. Segur, in his "Plain Talk About
Protestantism of Today", a book published in Boston and
extensively circulated by American Catholics:
Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is likewise
the soul of modern rationalism and philosophy. It is one of those
impossibilities which only the levity of a superficial reason can
regard as admissable. But a sound mind, that does not feed on
empty words, looks upon this freedom of thought only as simply
absurd, and, what is more, as sinful.
You take the liberty of thinking, nevertheless; you feel safe
because the Law will protect you. But do you imagine that this
"Law" applies to your Catholic neighbors? Do you imagine that
they are bound by the restraints that bind you? Here is Pope Leo
XIII, in his Encyclical of 1890--and please remember that Leo
XIII was the beau ideal of our capitalist statesmen and editors,
as wise and kind and gentle-souled a pope as ever roasted a
heretic. He says:
If the laws of the state are openly at variance with the laws of
God--if they inflict injury upon the Church--or set at naught the
authority of Jesus Christ which is vested in the Supreme Pontiff,
then indeed it becomes a duty to resist them, a sin to render
obedience.
And consider how many fields there are in which the laws of a
democratic state do and forever must contravene the "laws of God"
as interpreted by the Catholic Church. Consider for example, that
the Pope, in his decree Ne Temere, has declared that all persons
who have been married by civil authorities or by Protestant
clergymen are living in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the
same way, the problems of education, burial, prison discipline,
blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain, religious
endowments, vows of celibacy. To the above list, as given by
Gladstone, one might add many issues, such as birth control,
which have arisen since his time.
What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of
expressions of that intention, set forth in the boldest and
haughtiest and most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal
Manning, in the Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name
of the Pope:
I acknowledge no civil power; I am the subject of no prince; I
claim more than this--I claim to be the supreme judge and
director of the consciences of men---of the peasant that tills
the field, and of the prince that sits upon the throne; of the
household of privacy, and the legislator that makes laws for
kingdoms; I am the sole, last supreme judge of what is right and
wrong.
Temporal Power
What this means is, that here in our American democracy the
Catholic Church is a rebel; a prisoner of war who bides his time,
watching for the moment to rise in revolt, and meantime making no
secret of his intentions. The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true
believers in America, instructed them as to their attitude in
captivity:
The Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and
government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation,
protected against violence by the common laws and the
impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without
hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very
erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought
the type of the most desirable status of the church, or that it
would be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to
be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that
Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying
a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the
fecundity with which God has endowed His Church .... But she
would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to
liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of the
public authority.
Accordingly, here is Father Phelan of St. Louis, addressing his
flock in the "Western Watchman", June 27, 1913:
Tell us we are Catholics first and Americans or Englishmen
afterwards; of course we are. Tell us, in the conflict between
the church and the civil government we take the side of the
church; of course we do. Why, if the government of the United
States were at war with the church, we would say tomorrow, To
hell with the government of the United States; and if the church
and all the governments of the world were at war, we would say,
To hell with all the governments of the world .... Why is it that
in this country, where we have only seven per cent of the
population, the Catholic church is so much feared? She is loved
by all her children and feared by everybody. Why is it that the
Pope has such tremendous power? Why, the Pope is the ruler of the
world. All the emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all the
presidents of the world, are as these altar boys of mine. The
Pope is the ruler of the world.
You recall what I said at the outset about Power; the ability to
control the lives of other men, to give laws and moral codes, to
shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and regarded. Here is a
man swollen to bursting with this Power. Dressed in his holy
robes, with his holy incense in his nostrils, and the faces of
the faithful gazing up at him awe-stricken, hear him proclaim:
The Church gives no bonds for her good behavior. She is the judge
of her own rights and duties, and of the rights and duties of the
state.
And lest you think that an extreme example of ultramontanist
arrogance, listen to the Boston "Pilot", April 6, 1912, speaking
for Cardinal O'Connell, whose official organ it is:
It must be borne in mind that even though Cardinals Farley,
O'Connell and Gibbons are at heart patriotic Americans and
members of an American hierachy, yet they are as cardinals
foreign princes of the blood, to whom the United States, as one
of the great powers of the world, is under an obligation to
concede the same honors that they receive abroad.
Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American man-of-war, he
would be entitled to the salutes and to naval honors reserved for
a foreign royal personage, and at any official entertainment at
Washington the Cardinal will outrank not merely every cabinet
officer, the speaker of the house and the vice-president, but
also the foreign ambassadors, coming immediately next to the
chief magistrate himself.
Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal personage not
of sovereign rank visits New York it is his duty to make the
first call on Cardinal Farley.
Knights of Slavery
Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly Jesus.
And what is their attitude towards their brothers in God, the
rank and file of the membership, whose pennies grease the wheels
of the ecclesiastical machine? His Holiness, the Pope, sent over
a delegate to represent him in America, and at a convention of
the Federation of Catholic Societies held in New Orleans in
November, 1910, this gentleman, Diomede Falconio, delivered
himself on the subject of Capital and Labor. We have heard the
slave-code of the Anglican disciples of Jesus, the revolutionary
carpenter; now let us hear the slave-code of his Roman disciples:
Human society has its origin from God and is constituted of two
classes of people, the rich and the poor, which respectively
represent Capital and Labor.
Hence it follows that according to the ordinance of God, human
society is composed of superiors and subjects, masters and
servants, learned and unlettered, rich and poor, nobles and
plebeians.
And lest this should not be clear enough, the Pope sent a second
representative, Mgr. John Bonzano, who, speaking at a general
meeting of the German Catholic Central-Verein, St. Louis, 1917,
declared:
One of the worst evils that may grow out of the European war is
the spreading of the doctrine of Socialism, and the Catholic
Church must be ready to counteract such doctrines. We must be
ready to prevent the spread of Socialism and to work against it.
As I understand, you have a society of wealthy people in St.
Louis ready for such a campaign. You have experienced leaders who
are masters in their kind of work. They are always insistent to
show that this wealth was and is in close touch with the Church,
and therefore it will not fail.
This, you perceive, is the complete thesis of the present book,
which therefore no doubt will be entitled to the "Nihil Obstat"
of the "Censor Theolog.", and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes
Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici." No wonder that the
"experienced leaders" of America, our captains of industry and
exploiters of labor, are forced, whatever their own faith may be,
to make use of this system of subjection. A few years ago we read
in our papers how a Jewish millionaire of Baltimore was
presenting a fortune to the Catholic Church, to be used in its
war upon Socialism. The late Mark Hanna, the shrewdest and most
far-seeing man that Big Business ever brought into power, said
that in twenty years there would be two parties in America, a
capitalist and a socialist; and that it would be the Catholic
church that would save the country from Socialism. That prophecy
was widely quoted, and sank into the souls of our steel and
railway and money magnates; from which time you might see, if you
watched political events, a new tone of deference to the Roman
Hierarchy on the part of our ruling classes. Today you cannot get
an expression of opinion hostile to Catholicism into any
newspaper of importance. The Associated Press does not handle
news unfavorable to the Church, and from top to bottom, the
politician takes off his hat when the Sacred Host goes by. Said
Archbishop Quigley, speaking before the children of the Mary
Sodality:
I'd like to see the politician who would try to rule against the
church in Chicago. His reign would be short indeed.
Priests and Police
And how is it in our national capital, the palladium of our
liberties? As a means of demonstrating the power of the church
and the subservience of our politicians, the Catholics have
invented what they call the "Cardinal's Day Mass": An elaborate
procession of high ecclesiastics, dressed in gorgeous robes and
jewels, through the streets of Washington, accompanied by a small
army of policemen, paid by non-Catholic taxpayers. The Cardinal
seats himself upon a throne, and our political rulers make
obeisance before him. On Sunday, January 14, 1917, there were
present at this political mass the following personages: Four
cabinet members and their wives; the speaker of the House; a
large group of senators and representatives; a general of the
army and his wife; an admiral of the navy and his wife; the Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court and his wife, and another Justice of
the Supreme Court and his wife.
And understand that the church makes no secret of its purpose in
conducting such public exhibitions. Here is the pious Pope Leo
XIII again, in his Encyclical of Nov. 1, 1885:
All Catholics must make themselves felt as active elements in
daily political life in the countries where they live. They must
penetrate, wherever possible, in the administration of civil
affairs; must constantly exert the utmost vigilance and energy to
prevent the usages of liberty from going beyond the limits fixed
by God's law. All Catholics should do all in their power to cause
the constitutions of states and legislation to be modeled on the
principles of the true Church.
And following these instructions, the Catholics are organized for
political work. There are the various Catholic Societies, such as
the Knights of Columbus, secret, oath-bound organizations, the
military arm of the Papal Power. These societies boast some three
million members, and control not less than that many votes. The
one thing that you can be certain about these votes is that on
every public question, of whatever nature, they will be cast on
the side of ignorance and reaction. Thus, it was the influence of
the Catholic Societies which put upon our national statute books
the infamous law providing five years imprisonment and five
thousand dollars fine for the sending through the mail of
information about the prevention of conception. It is their
influence which keeps upon the statute-books of New York state
the infamous law which permits divorce only for infidelity, and
makes it "collusion" if both parties desire the divorce. It is
these societies which, in every city and town in America, are
pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so
that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books;
to get Catholics into the public schools and on school-boards, so
that children may not hear about Galileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to
have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates benches,
so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or
punished.
You are shocked at this, you think it a vulgar jest, perhaps; but
during a period of "vice raids" in New York I was told by a
captain of police, himself a Catholic, that it was a common thing
for them to get priests in their net. "Of course," the official
added, good-naturedly, "we let them slip out." I understood that
he had to do that; for the Pope, in his "Motu Proprio" decree,
has forbidden Catholics to bring a priest into court for any
civil crime whatsoever; he has forbidden Catholic policemen to
arrest, Catholic judges to try, and Catholic law-makers to make
laws affecting any priest of the Church of Rome. And of course we
know, upon the authority of a cardinal, that the Pope is "the
sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong." He has
held that position for a thousand years and more; and wherever
you consult the police records throughout the thousand years, you
find the same entries concerning Catholic ecclesiastics. I turn
to Riley's "Illustrations of London Life from Original
Documents," and I find in the year 1385 a certain chaplain, whose
name is considerately suppressed, had a breviary stolen from him
by a loose woman, because he has not given her any money, either
on that night or the one previous. In 1320 John de Sloghtre, a
priest, is put in the tower "for being found wandering about the
city against the peace", and Richard Heyring, a priest, is
indicted in the ward of Farringdon and in the ward of Crepelgate
"as being a bruiser and nightwalker." That this has been going on
for six hundred years is due, not to any special corruption of
the Catholic heart, but to the practice of clerical celibacy,
which is contrary to nature, a transgression of fundamental
instinct. It should be noted that the purpose of this
transgression, which pretends to be spiritual, is really
economic; it was the means whereby the church machine built up
its power through the Middle Ages. The priests had children then,
as they have them today; but these children not being recognized,
the church machine remained the sole heir of the property of its
clergy.
The Church Militant
Knowing what we know today, we marvel that it was possible for
Germany to prepare through so many years for her assault on
civilization, and for England to have slept through it all. In
exactly the same way, the historian of a generation from now will
marvel that America should have slept, while the New Inquisition
was planning to strangle her. For we are told with the utmost
explicitness precisely what is to be done. We are to see wiped
out these gains of civilization for which our race has bled and
agonized for many centuries; the very gains are to serve as the
means of their own destruction! Have we not heard Pope Leo tell
his faithful how to take advantage of what they find in
America--our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty,
our open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met
democracy?
We see the army being organized and drilled under our eyes; and
we can read upon its banners its purpose proclaimed. Just as the
Prussian military caste had its slogan "Deutschland ueber Alles!"
so the Knights of Slavery have their slogan: "Make America
Catholic!"
Their attitude to democratic institutions is attested by the fact
that none of their conventions ever fails in its resolutions to
"deeply deplore the loss of the temporal power of Our Father, the
Pope." Their subjection to priestly domination is indicated by
such resolutions as this, bearing date of May 13th, 1914:
The Knights of Columbus of Texas in annual convention assembled,
prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, present filial regards
with assurances of loyalty and obedience to the Holy See and
request the Papal blessing.
On June 10th, 1912, one T. J. Carey of Palestine, Texas, wrote to
Archbishop Bonzano, the Apostolic Delegate: "Must I, as a
Catholic, surrender my political freedom to the Church? And by
this I mean the right to vote for the Democratic, Socialist, or
Republican parties when and where I please?" The answer was: "You
should submit to the decisions of the Church, even at the cost of
sacrificing political principles." And to the same effect Mgr.
Preston, In New York City, Jan. 1, 1888: "The man who says, 'I
will take my faith from Peter, but I will not take my politics
from Peter,' is not a true Catholic."
Such is the Papal machine; and not a day passes that it does not
discover some new scheme to advance the Papal glory; a "Catholic
battle-ship" in the United States navy; Catholic chaplains on all
ships of the navy; Catholic holidays---such as Columbus Day--to
be celebrated by all Protestants in America; thirty million
dollars worth of church property exempted from taxation in New
York City; mission bells to be set up at the expense of the state
of California; state support for parish schools--or, if this
cannot be had, exemption of Catholics from taxation for school
purposes. So on through the list which might continue for pages.
More than anything else, of course, the Papal machine is
concerned with education, or rather, with the preventing of
education. It was in its childish days that the race fell under
the spell of the Priestly Lie; it is in his childish days that
the individual can be most safely snared. Suffer little children
to come unto the Catholic priest, and he will make upon their
sensitive minds an impression which nothing in after life can
eradicate. So the mainstay of the New Inquisition is the
parish-school, and its deadliest enemy is the American school
system. Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus,
in his book, "The Rights of Our Little Ones":
Catholic parents cannot, in conscience send their children to
American public schools, except for very grave reasons approved
by the ecclesiastical authorities.
While state education removes illiteracy and puts a limited
amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it cannot be said to
have a beneficial influence on civilization in general.
The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in
case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essential physical and
moral education are sufficiently provided for.
And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church is
fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is necessary; as
"America", the organ of the Jesuits, explains:
Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at taxing the
school buildings, which creates hardships to the parochial and
other private schools. Now it is the free text book law that puts
a double burden on the Catholics. Then again it is the unwise
extension of the compulsory school age that forces children to be
in school until they are 16 to 18 years old.
And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools, hear
Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking before the children of
the Mary Sodality in the Holy Name Parish-School:
Within twenty years this country is going to rule the world.
Kings and emperors will pass away, and the democracy of the
United States will take their place. The West will dominate the
country, and what I have seen of the Western parochial schools
has proved that the generation which follows us will be
exclusively Catholic. When the United States rules the world the
Catholic Church will rule the world.
The Church Triumphant
The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to
rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that there have
to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be
preferable to rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at least do
not fail to consider what history has to tell about priestly
government. We do not have to use our imaginations in the matter,
for there was once a Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreams
of, when the power of the church was complete, when emperors and
princes paid homage to her, and the civil authority made haste to
carry out her commands. What was the condition of the people in
those times? We are told by Lea, in his "History of the
Inquisition" that:
The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved.
Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and its
methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin was
comparatively unimportant except as a source of revenue to those
who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and
purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The
artificial standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the
Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no
matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he
has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many
wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth
are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests who are not
heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they
may be. Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue
was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such
a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in
the remarks of Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent
theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution
embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be
patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of
Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase
absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the
only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error
of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before
them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and
debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of
morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong
became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more
vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with
their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the
mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual
life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population
was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal
oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that
the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with
them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative
holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the
benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal
immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from
heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to
dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals
of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be
impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,
blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder,
rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery,
avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness: and similar
vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the
territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there
occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders committed in the
bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar
places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his Crusaders to
destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery
scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of
Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St. Denis admits was much
better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over
the disaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the general
corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an
alternation of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought
but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her
tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of
blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector
of the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops,
through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual
accepters of persons; they annointed themselves with the last
essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them
nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.
God in the Schools
But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a
modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will.
Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are
turning against the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to
Rafael Shaw's "Spain From Within":
On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church,
interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life,
ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their
hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and
maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders, placing
obstacles in the way of their children's education, hindering
them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and
deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run
counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in
Barcelona; they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes
to war in Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the
mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The
consumos cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are financially
interested in their continuance.
We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state
cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter
illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was
an official investigation of school conditions, the report
appearing in the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909. In 1857
there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of schools
in each of the 79 provinces: this requirement being below the
very low standards prevailing at that time in other European
countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four provinces had
the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of
increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch
up. Seventy-five per cent of the population were wholly
illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government
schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and a half
dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools
were nearly all "nuns' schools", which taught only needle-work
and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and
disgusting."
As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of
Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as
follows:
More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these
are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There are
schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughter
houses, with stables. One school forms the entrance to a
cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master's table while
the last responses are being said. There is a school into which
the children cannot enter until the animals have been sent out to
pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm weather
begins the boys faint for want of air and ventilation. One school
is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, and one of the local
authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in
winter. One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in
Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there
is a bull-fight in the town.
These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by
the name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he called a "modern
school", in which the pupils should be taught science and common
sense. He drew, of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic
hierarchy, which saw in the spread of his principles the end of
their mastery of the people. When the Barcelona insurrection took
place, they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of having been its
instigator; they had him tried in secret before a military
tribunal, convicted upon forged documents, and shot beneath the
walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was thoroughly
investigated by William Archer, one of England's leading critics,
a man of scrupulous rectitude of mind. His conclusion is that
Ferrer was absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and
that his execution was the result of a clerical plot. Of Ferrer's
character Archer writes:
Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have quoted
form a pretty complete revelation. From first to last we see in
him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible idealist. His ideals
are narrow, and his devotion to them fanatical; but it is devoid,
if not of egoism, at any rate of self-interest and self-seeking.
As he shrank from applying the money entrusted him to ends of
personal luxury, so also he shrank from making his ideas and
convictions subserve any personal ambition or vanity.
The Menace
There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest
idle while their country falls into the condition of Spain. There
are anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers
to discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating
to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any
criticism of it as blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe
the working out of the doctrine that the Church is superior to
the civil law.
On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein,
Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J.
Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The
Catholics of the town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the
place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the
town, Father O'Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the
lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate Crowley was
surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was
six feet three in size, he was beaten almost to death. At the
trial which followed it developed that Father O'Connor and also
his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were accessories
before the fact.
Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military societies,
with their uniforms and their armories, are not maintained for
nothing. As Archbishop Quigley declared before the German
Catholic Central Verein:
We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck
and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what the church
authorities tell them to do. With these bodies of loyal Catholics
ready to step into the breach at any time and present an unbroken
front to the enemy we may feel secure.
And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics
entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a
police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an
anti-Catholic lecturer. They bound and gagged him, took him to a
lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing
happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev.
William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case the
assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to
punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a
Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:
It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the
purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the law of
the Church under the pretext of observing the civil law.
There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting
of this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a
circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights of
Slavery do not enjoy reading it. Year after year they have
marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the
mails--so far, in vain. They caused an obscenity prosecution,
which failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were blown
up with dynamite. At the present time there is a "Catholic Truth
Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose the
anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising
absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of
those who "come across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of
the American Federation of Catholic Societies" for September,
1915, I find a record of the ceaseless plotting to bar criticism
of the Catholic Church from the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany
Catholic congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge
St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the Federation's "law
committee", points out the difficulties in the way of such
legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion,
because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science,
Mormonism, and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks
the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they
can slip into the present law the words "scurrilous and
slanderous"; he hopes that this much can be done without the
American people catching on!
You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want
to start an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste, therefore, to
restate the main thesis of this book. It is not the New
Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege.
It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of
Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.
You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal
corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the
"ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty"
and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explained our
political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that
the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the
most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there was a
political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain
of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, and taking some
public privilege in return. So we came to realize that political
corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.
And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of
Supersition in America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a
democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the
poor foreigner who troubles us. Our human magic would win
him--our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our
open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We
should break down the Catholic machine, and not all the priests
in the hierarchy could stop us--were it not for the Steel Trust
and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the
Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters of America who
do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing,
but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert,
physically, mentally and morally helpless!
No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not
the pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering
cathedrals; it is not the two-dollar contributions for the
salvation of souls which support the Catholic Truth Society and
the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society and the Mary
Sodality and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and
all the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda. These
help, of course; but the main sources of growth are, first, the
subsidies of industrial exploiters, the majority of whom are
non-Catholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted
as payment for votes by politicians who are creatures and puppets
of Big Business.
King Coal
The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial
life of America. I will stop long enough to present an account of
one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if
space permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a
dozen other industries which I have studied--the steel-mills of
Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the
glass-works of Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the
cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of
Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of
Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.
In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of
enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and
other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some
twelve or fifteen thousand in number, come from all the nations
of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average
wage-slave. I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present
sworn testimony, taken by the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the Italian miners
live, as described in a doctor's report:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are habitable,
and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably disgraceful. I
have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack
to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former
superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company:
The C. F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and
dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings and
are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings. And the
people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty. Frequently
the population is so congested that whole families are crowded
into one room; eight persons in one small room was reported
during the year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses
whom the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most uncouth,
ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most brutal set of
men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights,
and applies for the protection which the law of the state allows
him. What happens then?
"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of the
super he was getting too smart."
"And he got what?"
"He got it in the neck, generally."
And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on
strike, in the words of the Commission's report:
Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in the
strikers' tent colony were shot to death by militiamen and guards
employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and burned to death
when these militiamen and guards set fire to the tents in which
they made their homes.
And now, what is the position of education in such camps? The
Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the
school building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were
four teachers, the next three, and the next only two. The teacher
of the primary grade had a hundred and twenty children enrolled,
ninety per cent of whom could not speak a word of English.
Every little bench was seated 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 deliberately cultivated
ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson testified that
the companies controlled all elections and all nominations:
Election returns from the two or three counties in which the
large companies operate show that in the precincts in which the
mining camps are located the returns are nearly unanimous in
favor of the men or measures approved by the companies,
regardless of party.
And now comes the all-important question. What of the Catholic
Church and these evils? The majority of these mine-slaves are
Catholics, it is this Church which is charged with their
protection. There are priests in every town, and in nearly every
camp. And do we find them lifting their voices in behalf of the
miners, protesting against the starving and torturing of thirty
or forty thousand human beings? Do we find Catholic papers
printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic
journalists on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defending
the strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their
troubles? We do not!
Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of
just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say
for the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached
the strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text
that "Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as
a "scab" and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively,
thinking of his church superiors. My informant, a union miner,
laughed. "We made him!" he said.
I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and
could not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max
Eastman, reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an
interview with a Catholic sister.
"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people, or to
bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most useless
thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.
The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and
several clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore
testimony to the outrages which were being committed against the
strikers; but of all the Catholic priests in the district not one
appeared--not one! Several Protestant clergymen testified that
they had been driven from the coal-camps--not because they
favored the unions, but because the companies objected to having
their workers educated at all; but no one ever heard of the
Catholic Church having trouble with the operators. To make sure
on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who
watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:
The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies very
cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps. The
impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor
what good the Church does, but I know of no instance, during the
Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or place, when the
Catholic Church has taken any special interest in the cause of
the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially the men, quit the
church during the coal-strike.
The Unholy Alliance
Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all
power, political, social, and religious, is economic
exploitation. To all other powers and all other organizations it
speaks in these words: "Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us,
and you will be destroyed." It has spoken to the Catholic Church,
for sixteen hundred years the friend and servant of every ruling
class; and the Church has hastened to fit itself into the
situation, continuing its pastoral role as shepherd to the
wage-slave vote.
In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so
in the Blaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman
to describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the
Holy Office was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old
Party was desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of
Mark Hanna, the President-Maker, there began a rapprochement
between Big Business and the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the
Catholic Church got representation in the Cabinet; under him the
Cardinal's Mass became a government institution, a Catholic
College came to the fore in Washington, and Catholic prelates
were introduced in the role of eminent publicists, their
reactionary opinions on important questions being quoted with
grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark Hanna himself
who founded the National Civic Federation, upon whose executive
committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops might work hand in
glove with Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming of the
American working-class. Hanna's biographer naively calls
attention to the President-maker's popularity among Catholics,
high and low, and the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland
was in frequent correspondence with him, and used his influence
in Mr. Hanna's behalf."
And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under
Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the
most pliant tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White
House since the days of the Slave Power. President Taft was
himself a Unitarian; yet it was under his administration that the
Catholic Church achieved one of its dearest ambitions, and broke
into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can imagine the powers of the
time in conference. It is desired to pack the Court against the
possibility of progress; it is desired to find men who will stand
like a rock against change--and who better than those who have
been trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for
doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that Hereditary
Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property
rights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part of an infallible
Pope!
Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the
strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a
combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the
leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt"
Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish
Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the
draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the
tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its
burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of
the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish
Secretary of the Interior. And of course under such an
administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides.
Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic
ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor
became a means to political advancement. You might see a
hard-swearing old political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon,
taking his cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and
betaking himself to the "Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff
knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate
on a throne. You might see an emissary of the United States
government proceeding to Rome, prostrating himself before the
Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our taxes for
lands which the filthy and sensual friars of the Philippine
Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and
which the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a
revolution.
Secret Service
This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made
the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical
thought. Because the popular magazines were opposing the
plundering of the country, a bill was introduced into Congress to
put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the
President himself devoted all his power to forcing the passage of
this bill. At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped
by every sort of persecution. I was at that time in intimate
touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I know that scarcely a
month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some
new "regulation" especially designed to limit its circulation. I
recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to
Washington with a trunkful of letters from subscribers who
complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to
them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic
Attorney General and sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken
the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.
From my personal knowledge I can say that under the
administration of President Taft the Roman Catholic Church and
the Secret Service of the Federal Government worked hand in hand
for the undermining of the radical movement in America. Catholic
lecturers toured the country, pouring into the ears of the public
vile slanders about the private morality of Socialists; while at
the same time government detectives, paid out of public funds,
spent their time seeking evidence for these Catholic lecturers to
use. I know one man, a radical labor-leader, whose morals
happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician,
and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from
accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen
others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one
case--myself--a man who was asking a divorce from his wife, and
whose mail was opened for months.
This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme
reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no
charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our
political police evidently thought it likely that a man who was
not living with his wife might have something to hide; so for
months my every move was watched and all my mail intercepted. In
such a case one might at first suspect one's private opponent;
but it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for
any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened, but the
mail of all my relatives and friends--people residing in places
as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile
of a government official to whom I complained about this matter:
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer
was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the methods of
the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence
if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with
the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be
convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case,
the matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad to live;
when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft
administration had been repudiated at the polls, and the Secret
Service of the government was no longer at the disposal of the
Catholic machine.
Tax Exemption
Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere
recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It
has some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million
communicants, and property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon
this property it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national;
which means, quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to
church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of
Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and lighted and cleaned
in front of Catholic churches; we pay to have thieves kept away
from them, fires put out in them, records preserved for them--all
the services of civilization given to them gratis, and this in a
land whose constitution provides that Congress (which includes
all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no law
respecting a religious establishment." When war is declared, and
our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks
and friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are
"ministers of religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have
the status of "conscientious objectors." We do not teach
"religion"; we only teach justice and humanity, decency and
truth.
In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stock answer is that
the property is being used for purposes of "education" or
"charity". It is a school, in which children are being taught
that "liberty of conscience is a most pestiferous error, from
which arises revolution, corruption, contempt of sacred things,
holy institutions, and laws." (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 in a
laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a "parish-house", in
which a celibate priest lives under the care of an attractive
young "house-keeper". Or it is a nunnery, in which young girls
are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their
sisters' plates to teach them humility, and taught to lie before
the altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their
"Superiors" walk upon their bodies to impress the religious
virtues. "I was a teacher in the Catholic schools up to a very
recent period," writes the woman friend who tells me of these
customs, "and I know about the whole awful system which endeavors
to throttle every genuine impulse of the human will."
Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of
"religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In
every large city of America you will find acres of land owned by
the Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some
institution; but as time goes on and property values increase,
the church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to
cash in the profits of its investment, precisely as does any
other real estate speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history
of Romanism you find it at this same game, doing business under
the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy name of Christ. Read
the letter which the Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope
in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their boundless
graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits" appears a
summary:
A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the
fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth of
Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides cattle
and other property. They own six large sugar refineries, worth
from half a million to a million crowns each, and making an
annual profit of 100,000 crowns each, while all the other monks
and clergy of Mexico together own only three small refineries.
They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and
butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue
for legacies--a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns--and
they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to
add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit
congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the
fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely
maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be
added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidized by the
King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only five or six
Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they conducted
only ten colleges.
"Holy History"
And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken
away from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of
procedure. Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and
if the letter is not published, go and see the editor and ask
why; so you will learn something about the partnership between
Superstition and Big Business!
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any
large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the
Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the
ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new
Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that
graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each
paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's
crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's
cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city
with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one
of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West
"rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P.
convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch
square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic
festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not! He is a newspaper
man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the
assignment and write like the devil. To read him now you might
think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and
he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically
picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in the
inexorable progress of its immense structure, which rises from
the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith and devotion
piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround the world and
the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St.
Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed in his
diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.
And then, a month later, comes another occasion of state--the
Twenty-third Annual-Banquet of the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay
to make clear the sociological significance of that function;
explaining first, a nation-wide organization which has been
proven by congressional investigation and by the publication of
its secret documents to be a machine for the corruption of our
political life; and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels",
from which all Angels have long since fled; a city in the first
crude stage of land speculation, without order, dignity or charm;
a city of real estate agents, who exist by selling climate to new
arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectual life is
"boosting", whose standards of truth are those of the
horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of temperatures,
showing the daily contrast between Southern California and the
East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last June,
when for five days and nights the temperature was over 110, and
several times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!
In the same way, there is a rule that our earthquake shocks are
never mentioned, unless they destroy whole towns. On the
afternoon of Jan. 26th, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of violence
sufficient to lift a barn over a church-steeple and deposit it in
the pastor's front yard. That evening a friend of mine in Los
Angeles called up the office of the "Times" to make inquiry; and
although they are only thirteen miles away, and have a branch
office and a special correspondent in Pasadena, the answer was
that they had heard nothing about the cyclone! And next morning I
made a careful search of their columns. On the front page I read:
"Fourth Blizzard of Season Raging in East"; also: "Another
Earthquake in Guatemala". But not a line about the Pasadena
cyclone That there was plenty of space in that issue, you may
judge from the fact that there were twenty headlines like the
following--many of them representing full page and half page
illustrated "write-ups":
Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The Bright
Side of Sunshine Land; Come to California: Southland's Arms
Outstretched in Cordial Invitation to the East; Flower Stands
Make Gay City Streets; Southland Climate Big Manufacturing
Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los Angeles' Beautiful Homes;
Nymphs Knit and Bathe at Ocean's Sunny Beach; etc.
Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are making
money hand over fist. It is all the more delightful, because we
are putting our souls into it, we are lending our money to the
government and saving the world for Democracy! Our labor
unionists have been driven to other cities, and our Mexican
agitators and I. W. W.'s are in jail; so, in the gilt ball-room
of our palatial six-dollar-a-day hotel the four hundred masters
of our prosperity meet to pat themselves on the back, and they
invite the new Catholic bishop to come and confer the grace of
God upon their eating.
The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"--the labor-hating,
labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"--and here is
the episcopal picture on the front page, the arms stretched four
columns wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus
does love the Merchants and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is
poured out upon them! "You represent, gentlemen, the largest and
the most civilizing secular body in the country. You are the
pioneers of American civilization..... I am glad to be among you;
glad that my lines have fallen in this glorious land by the
sunset sea, and honored to meet in intimate acquaintance the big
men who have raised here in a few years a city of metropolitan
proportions."
And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian of
Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them about the coming
class-war. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and
respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on
the other a demagog speaking about the tyranny of capitalists and
usurers." And then, of course, the inevitable religious tag: "How
will men obey you, if they believe not in God, who is the author
of all authority?" At which, according to the "Times", "prolonged
applause and cheers" from the Merchants and Manufacturers! The
editor of the "Times" goes back to his office, and inspired by
this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader" with the statement
that: "We have no proletariat in America!"
Das Centrum
In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy
Alliance, this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association, we have to go to Europe, where the
arrangement has been working for a thousand years. In Europe
to-day we see the whole world in conflict with a band of
criminals who have been able to master the minds and lives of a
hundred million highly civilized people. As I write, the Junker
aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat cut; but there
comes a Holy Father 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. The Holy Father loves
all mankind with a tender and touching love; his heart bleeds at
the sight of bloodshed and suffering, and he pleads the sacred
cause of peace on earth and good-will toward men.
But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-three years
that the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the
world? How was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and
good will? He is, you understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge
of what is right and wrong," and his followers obey him with the
utmost promptness and devotion--they express themselves as
"prostrate at his feet." And when the masters of Prussia came to
him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation into the
world's greatest military empire"--what did the Roman Church
answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause
of peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not. To
Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna
in America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the
minds of the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our
cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish
you with votes, so that you may rule the state and do what you
will."
You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know
the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the
Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the
Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the
anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its
lesson, and would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We
know how this bargain was carried out; we have the record of the
Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies
were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia was
erected. Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the
Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was
beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout
its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors' gallery of the
Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against the
torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the
deputies of the Holy Father's political party screaming their
rage like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic
Church organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were
called, to scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary
movement. The Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for
the management of these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious
and benevolent Leo XIII:
"They must pay special and principal attention to piety and
morality, and their internal discipline must be directed
precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely lose
their special character, and come to be very little better than
those societies which take no account of Religion at all."
It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and
morality while he is starving! I am quoting from the Encyclical
Letter on "The Condition of Labor," issued in 1891, and addressed
"to our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops
and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the
Apostolic See." The purpose of the letter is "to refute false
teaching," and the substance of its message is:
This great labor question cannot be solved except by assuming as
a principle that private property must be held sacred and
inviolable.
And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as
frank as any used in the present book:
The chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by legal
enactment and policy, of private property. Most of all it is
essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude
within the line of duty; for if all may justly strive to benefit
their condition, yet neither justice nor the common good allows
any one to seize that which belongs to another, or, under the
pretext of futile and ridiculous equality, to lay hands on other
peoples' fortunes.
And this, you understand, in lands where rapine and conquest,
class-tyranny and priestly domination have been the custom since
the dawn of history; in which no property-right can possibly
trace back to any other basis than force. In Austria, for
example--Austria, the leader and guardian of the Holy
Alliance--Austria, which had no Reformation, no Revolution, no
Kultur-kampf--Austria, in which the income of the Catholic
Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words, Austria is still to a
large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was Austria which began
the war--began it in a religious quarrel, with a Slav people
which does not acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of the
world, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church. So of
course to-day, when Austria is learning the bitter lesson that
they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword, the heart of
the Holy Father is wrung with grief, and he sends out these
eloquent peace-notes, written in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And
at the same time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced
to prison for life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!
It is a curious thing to observe--the natural instinct which, all
over the world, draws Superstition and Exploitation together.
This war, which is hailed as a war against autocracy, might
almost as accurately be described as a war against the clerical
system. Wherever in the world you find the Papal power strong,
there you find sympathy with the Prussian infamy and there you
find German intrigue. In Spain, for example; in Ireland and
Quebec, and in the Argentine. The treatment of Belgium was a
little too raw--too many priests were shot at the outset, and so
Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice that he
pleads in vain with the Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved
Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The Kaiser
allows the hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace
settlement; and meantime the law forbidding the presence of the
Jesuits in Germany has been repealed, and all over the world the
propagandists of this order are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger
Casement was raised a Catholic, and so also "Jim" Larkin, the
Irish labor-leader who is touring America denouncing the Allies.
The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beat conscription in
Australia, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery among the
ignorant peasant-soldiers from Sicily which caused the breaking
of the Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct
worked that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New
York was campaigning for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish
suddenly forgot their ancient horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's
Journal" published nine articles favoring Socialism in a single
issue; while even "The Tablet," the diocesan paper, began to
discover that the Socialists were not such bad fellows after all.
The same "Tablet" which a few years ago allowed Father Belford to
declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be "stopped with
a bullet"!
Note to second edition: Since the above was written, the war
fervor has swept America, including even the rank and file of the
Catholics, and what has here been said might seem unfair to
persons who have forgotten the attitude of the Church during the
early part of the conflict, and the struggle it cost to bring the
hierarchy into line. It is one of the ironies of history that the
most reactionary organization in the world should be lending its
aid to the destruction of the second most reactionary. When the
Catholic Church marches forth to war for Democracy, it is not
drawing America down into the pit, but is letting America pull it
out of the pit--at least for a time, and the spectacle is one in
which all lovers of progress will rejoice.
BOOK FOUR
The Church of the Slavers
See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
And merrily from night to morn
We chaunt his praise and worship him--
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!
A wondrous god! most fit for those
Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;
Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
Hell's burning incense fills the air,
And Death attests in street and lane
The hideous glory of his reign.
Face of Caesar
The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing
mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by
Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various
Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much
better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon
an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary
product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry,
drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand
years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove
anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to
do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and
wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the
direct orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the
Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.
They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most
dangerous form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and
see what men have done with his little joke about the face of
Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead. As for
Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up;
when he ordered, "Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly
what he said. The Roman official stamp which he put upon the
gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the
Reformation on.
In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were
suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself
knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the
priestly land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which
he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever
is done about it--until at last the miserable peasants attempted
to organize and win their own rights. Their demands do not seem
to us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of
electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the
right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction
of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and--that
universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England,
Mexico or sixteenth century Germany--the restoration to the
village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of
slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline
sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would
drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with
spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist
without inequalities, etc.
And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon
them and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations
which might have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to
the police-force of his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot
answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to hit him
with the fist until blood flows from the nose." He issued a
letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants,"
which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue
Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this
well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a
sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of Methodist
Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled
about the severity of their repression, for it will save many
souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes
set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable
wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the
Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and
militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar, Prof.
Rauschenbusch, puts it:
The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to
1525, when the whole nation was in commotion, and a great
revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every class and
every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal of life. . . .
The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and
creative when it embraced the whole of human life and enlisted
the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When it became
"religious" in the narrow sense, it grew scholastic and spiny,
quarrelsome, and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and noble
life.
Deutschland ueber Alles
As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became
the state church of Prussia, and Bible-worship and Devil-terror
played their part, along with the Mass and the Confessional, in
building up the Junker dream. A court official--the
Oberhofprediger--was set up, and from that time on the
Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick
the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer,
but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said:
"If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in
the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells
with jocular approval how he kept them from thinking:
He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of pains
with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to them; and for
the rest expects to be obeyed by them, as by his Sergeants and
Corporals. Indeed, the reverend men feel themselves to be a body
of Spiritual Sergeants, Corporals, and Captains, to whom
obedience is the rule, and discontent a thing not to be indulged
in by any means.
So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided Silesia
and Poland. His successors ordered all the Protestant sects into
one, so that they might be more easily controlled; from which
time the Lutheran Church has been a department of the Prussian
state, in some cases a branch of the municipal authority.
In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded their
liberty, it was an ultra-pious king of Prussia who sent his
troops and shot them down--precisely as Luther had advised to
shoot down the peasants. At this time the future maker of the
German Empire rose in the Landtag and made his bow before the
world; a young Prussian land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck by name,
he shook his fist in the face of the new German liberalism, and
incidentally of the new German infidelity:
Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no state erected
upon any other foundation can permanently exist.
The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintained this tradition
of his line. It was his custom to tour the Empire in a train of
blue and white cars, carrying as many costumes as any stage
favorite, most of them military; with him on the train went the
Prussian god, and there was scarcely a performance at which this
god did not appear, also in military costume. After the failure
of the "Kultur-kampf," the official Lutheran religion was ordered
to make friends with its ancient enemy, the Catholic Church. Said
the Kaiser:
I make no difference between the adherents of the Catholic and
Protestant creeds. Let them both stand upon the foundation of
Christianity, and they are both bound to be true citizens and
obedient subjects. Then the German people will be the rock of
granite upon which our Lord God can build and complete his work
of Kultur in the world.
And here is the oath required of the Catholic clergy, upon their
admission to equality of trustworthiness with their Protestant
confreres:
I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his Royal
Majesty,--and his lawful successors in the government,--as my
most gracious King and Sovereign; promote his welfare according
to my ability; prevent injury and detriment to him; and
particularly endeavor carefully to cultivate in the minds of the
people under my care a sense of reverence and fidelity towards
the King, love for the Fatherland, obedience to the laws, and all
those virtues which in a Christian denote a good citizen; and I
will not suffer any man to teach or act in a contrary spirit. In
particular I vow that I will not support any society or
association, either at home or abroad, which might endanger the
public security, and will inform His Majesty of any proposal
made, either in my diocese or elsewhere, which might prove
injurious to the State.
And later on this heaven-guided ruler conceived the scheme of a
Berlin-Bagdad railway, for which he needed one religion more; he
paid a visit to Constantinople, and made another debut and
produced another god--with the result that millions of Turks are
fighting under the belief that the Kaiser is a convert to the
faith of Mohammed!
Der Tag.
All this was, of course, in preparation for the great event to
which all good Germans looked forward--to which all German
officers drank their toasts at banquets--the Day.
This glorious day came, and the field-gray armies marched forth,
and the Pauline-Lutheran God marched with them. The Kaiser, as
usual, acted as spokesman:
Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, the
German emperor, the spirit of God has descended. I am His sword,
His weapon and His viceregent. Woe to the disobedient and death
to cowards and unbelievers.
As to the Prussian state religion, its attitude to the war is set
forth in a little book written by a high clerical personage, the
Herr Consistorialrat Dietrich Vorwerk, containing prayers and
hymns for the soldiers, and for the congregations at home. Here
is an appeal to the Lord God of Battles:
Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work daily death
and tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful
long-suffering each bullet and each blow which misses its mark.
Lead us not into the temptation of letting our wrath be too tame
in carrying out Thy divine judgment. Deliver us and our ally from
the Infernal Enemy and his servants on earth. Thine is the
kingdom, the German land; may we, by the aid of Thy steel-clad
hand, achieve the fame and the glory.
It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetrated the great
masterpiece of humor of the war--the hymn in which he appeals to
that God who keeps guard over Cherubim, Seraphim, and Zeppelins.
You have to say over the German form of these words in order to
get the effect of their delicious melody--"Cherubinen,
Seraphinen, Zeppelinen!" And lest you think that this too-musical
clergyman is a rara avis, turn to the little book which has been
published in English under the same title as Herr Vorwerk's
"Hurrah and Hallelujah." Here is the Reverend S. Lehmann:
Germany is the center of God's plans for the world. Germany's
fight against the whole world is in reality the battle of the
spirit against the whole world's infamy, falsehood and devilish
cunning.
And here is Pastor K. Koenig:
It was God's will that we should win the war.
And Pastor J. Rump:
Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity. We fight
for the cause of Jesus within mankind.
And here is an eminent theological professor:
The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is the
German God. Not the national God such as the lower nations
worship, but "our God," who is not ashamed of belonging to us,
the peculiar acquirement of our heart.
King Cotton
It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to denounce the
Prussian system; my only purpose is to show that Bible-worship,
precisely as saint-worship or totem-worship, delivers the
worshipper up to the Slavers. This truth has held in America,
precisely as in Prussia. During the middle of the last century
there was fought out a mighty issue in our free republic; and
what was the part played in this struggle by the Bible-cults?
Hear the testimony of William Lloyd Garrison: "American
Christianity is the main pillar of American slavery." Hear Parker
Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church before we could
reach the dreadful institution at all."
In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which
represented the churches of the South as well as of the North,
passed by a unanimous vote a resolution to the effect that
"Slavery is utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which
requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But in a
generation the views of the entire South, including the
Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What was the reason?
Had the "law of God" been altered? Had some new "revelation" been
handed down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that a Yankee by
the name of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take the seeds
out of short staple cotton. The cotton crop of the South
increased from four thousand bales in 1791 to four hundred and
fifty thousand in 1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in
1860.
There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended
upon slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn
of history, he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he
wanted was right and holy. From one end of the South to the other
the pulpits rang with the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to
servants shall he be to his brethren." The learned Bishop
Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery", gave the standard
interpretation of this text:
The Almighty, forseeing the total degredation of the Negro race,
ordained them to servitude or slavery under the descendants of
Shem and Japheth, doubtless because he judged it to be their
fittest condition.
I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from
defenses of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus
Christ--and not only from the South, but from the North. For it
must be understood that leading families of Massachusetts and New
York owed their power to Slavery; their fathers had brought
molasses from New Orleans and made it into rum, and taken it to
the coast of Africa to be exchanged for slaves for the Southern
planters. And after this trade was outlawed, the slave-grown
cotton had still to be shipped to the North and spun; so the
traders of the North must have divine sanction for the Fugitive
Slave law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The slavery
of the negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in
the Old and New Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of
New York, giving the decision of a clerical man of the world:
"There is no debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise,
and it may continue through the Millenium."
And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in arms
against those who presumed to interfere with this divine
institution, the men of God of the South called down blessings
upon their armies in words which, with the proper change of
names, might have been spoken in Berlin in August, 1914. Thus Dr.
Thornwell, one of the leading Presbyterian divines of the South:
"The triumph of Lincoln's principles is the death-knell of
slavery...... Let us crush the serpent in the egg." And the
Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: "The war is a war against
slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against the Word,
Providence and Government of God." I read in the papers, as I am
writing, how the clergy of Germany are thundering against
President Wilson's declaration that that country must become
democratic. Here is a manifesto of the German Evangelical League,
made public on the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation:
We especially warn against the heresy, promulgated from America,
that Christianity enjoins democratic institutions, and that they
are an essential condition of the kingdom of God on earth.
In exactly the same way the religious bodies of the entire South
united in an address to Christians throughout the world, early in
the year 1863:
The recent proclamation of the President of the United States,
seeking the emancipation of the slaves of the South, is in our
judgment occasion of solemn protest on the part of the people of
God.
Witches and Women
To whatever part of the world you travel, to whatever page of
history you turn, you find the endowed and established clergy
using the word of God in defense of whatever form of
slave-driving may then be popular and profitable. Two or three
hundred years ago it was the custom of Protestant divines in
England and America to burn poor old women as witches; only a
hundred and fifty years ago we find John Wesley, founder of
Methodism, declaring that "the giving up of witchcraft is in
effect the giving up of the Bible." And if you investigate this
witch-burning, you will find that it is only one aspect of a blot
upon civilization, the Christian Mysogyny. You see, there were
two Hebrew legends--one that woman was made out of a man's rib,
and the other that she ate an apple; therefore in modern England
a wife must be content with a legal status lower than a domestic
servant.
Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims is this--that
Christianity has promoted chivalry and respect for womanhood. In
ancient Greece and Rome the woman was the equal and helpmate of
man; we read in Tacitus about the splendid women of the Germans,
who took part in public councils, and even fought in battles. Two
thousand years before the Christian era we are told by Maspero
that the Egyptian woman was the mistress of her house; she could
inherit equally with her brothers, and had full control of her
property. We are told by Paturet that she was "juridically the
equal of man, having the same rights and being treated in the
same fashion." But in present-day England, under the common law,
woman can hold no office of trust or power, and her husband has
the sole custody of her person, and of her children while minors.
He can steal her children, rob her of her clothing, and beat her
with a stick provided it is no thicker than his thumb. While I
was in London the highest court handed down a decision on the law
which does not permit a woman to divorce her husband for
infidelity, unless it has been accompanied by cruelty; a man had
brought his mistress into his home and--compelled his wife to
work for and wait upon her, and the decision was that this was
not cruelty in the meaning of the law!
And if you say that this enslavement of Woman has nothing to do
with religion--that ancient Hebrew fables do not control modern
English customs--then listen to the Vicar of Crantock, preaching
at St. Crantock's, London, Aug. 27th, 1905, and explaining why
women must cover their heads in church:
(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then Eve.
(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but the
woman of the man.
(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the
woman, but the woman for the man.
(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory of
God, but woman is the glory of man.
(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but the
woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.
(6) The marriage relation. As the Church is subject to Christ, so
let the wives be to their husbands.
(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is
Christ, but the head of the woman is man.
I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these
ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which
cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes.
In the city where I write, three clergymen are being sent to jail
for six months for protesting against the use of the name of
Jesus in the wholesale slaughter of men. Now, I am backing this
war. I know that it has to be fought, and I want to see it fought
as hard as possible; but I want to leave Jesus out of it, for I
know that Jesus did not believe in war, and never could have been
brought to support a war. I object to clerical cant on the
subject; and I note that an eminent theological authority,
"Billy" Sunday, appears to agree with me; for I find him on the
front page of my morning paper, assailing the three pacifist
clergymen, and making his appeal not to Jesus, but to the
blood-thirsty tribal diety of the ancient Hebrews:
I suppose they think they know more than God Almighty, who
commanded the sun to stand still while Joshua won the battle for
the Lord; more than the God who made Samson strong so he could
slay thousands of his nation's enemies in a righteous cause.
Right you are, Billy! And if the capitalist system continues to
develop unchecked, we shall some day see it dawn upon the masters
of the world how wasteful it is to permit the superannuated
workers to perish by slow starvation. So much more sensible to
make use of them! So we shall have a Bible defense of
cannibalism; we shall hear our evangelists quoting Leviticus:
"They shall eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters." Or
perhaps some of our leisure-class ladies might make the discovery
that the flesh of working-class babies is relished by pomeranians
and poodles. If so, the Billy Sundays of the twenty-first century
may discover the text: "Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth
thy little ones against the stones."
Moth and Rust
It is especially interesting to notice what happens when the
Bible texts work against the interests of the Slavers and their
clerical retainers. Then they are null and void--and no matter
how precise and explicit and unmistakable they may be! Take for
example the Sabbath injunction: "Six days shalt thou labor and do
all that thou hast to do." Karl Marx records of the pious England
of his time that
Occasionally in rural districts a day-labourer is condemned to
imprisonment for desecrating the Sabbath by working in his front
garden. The same labourer is punished for breach of contract if
he remains away from his metal, paper or glass works on the
Sunday, even if it be from a religious whim. The orthodox
Parliament will hear nothing of Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in
the process of expanding capital.
Or consider the attitude of the Church in the matter of usury.
Throughout ancient Hebrew history the money-lender was an
outcast; both the law and the prophets denounced him without
mercy, and it was made perfectly clear that what was meant was,
not the taking of high interest, but the taking of any interest
whatsoever. The early church fathers were explicit, and the
Catholic Church for a thousand years consigned money-lenders
unhesitatingly to hell. But then came the modern commercial
system, and the money-lenders became the masters of the world!
There is no more amusing illustration of the perversion of human
thought than the efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape from
the dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had trapped them.
Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuit of the
eighteenth century, a doctor of the Church, now worshipped as St.
Alphonsus, presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental
usury"; concluding that, if the borrower pay interest of his own
free will, the lender may keep it. In answer to the question
whether the lender may keep what the borrower pays, not out of
gratitude, but out of fear that otherwise loans will be refused
to him in future, Ligouri says that "to be usury, it must be paid
by reason of a contract, or as justly due; payment by reason of
such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual
price," Again the great saint and doctor tells us that "it is not
usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of
regaining the principal!" Could the house of J. P. Morgan and
Company ask more of their ecclesiastical department?
The reader may think that such sophistications are now out of
date; but he will find precisely the same knavery in the efforts
of present-day Slavers to fit Jesus Christ into the system of
competitive commercialism. Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a
carpenter's son, a thoroughly class-conscious proletarian. He
denounced the exploiters of his own time with ferocious
bitterness, he drove the money-changers out of the temple with
whips, and he finally died the death of a common criminal. If he
had forseen the whole modern cycle of capitalism and
wage-slavery, he could hardly have been more precise in his
exortations to his followers to stand apart from it. But did all
this avail him? Not in the least!
I place upon the witness-stand an exponent of Bible-Christianity
whom all readers of our newspapers know well: a scholar of
learning, a publicist of renown; once pastor of the most famous
church in Brooklyn; now editor of our most influential religious
weekly; a liberal both in theology and politics; a modernist, an
advocate of what he calls industrial democracy. His name is Lyman
Abbott, and he is writing under his own signature in his own
magazine, his subject being "The Ethical Teachings of Jesus".
Several times I have tried to persuade people that the words I am
about to quote were actually written and published by this
eminent doctor of divinity, and people have almost refused to
believe me. Therefore I specify that the article may be found in
the "Outlook", the bound volumes of which are in all large
libraries: volume 94, page 576. The words are as follows, the
bold face being Dr. Abbott's, not mine:
My radical friend declares that the teachings of Jesus are not
practicable, that we cannot carry them out in life, and that we
do not pretend to do so. Jesus, he reminds us, said, 'Lay not up
for yourself treasures upon earth;' and Christians do universally
lay up for themselves treasures upon earth; every man that owns a
house and lot, or a share of stock in a corporation, or a life
insurance policy, or money in a savings bank, has laid up for
himself treasure upon earth. But Jesus did not say, "Lay not up
for yourselves treasures upon earth." He said, "Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt
and where thieves break through and steal." And no sensible
American does. Moth and rust do not get at Mr. Rockefeller's oil
wells, nor at the Sugar Trust's sugar, and thieves do not often
break through and steal a railway or an insurance company or a
savings bank. What Jesus condemned was hoarding wealth.
Strange as it may sound to some of the readers of this book, I
count myself among the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. His
example has meant more to me than that of any other man, and all
the experiences of my revolutionary life have brought me nearer
to him. Living in the great Metropolis of Mammon, I have felt the
power of Privilege, its scourge upon my back, its crown of thorns
upon my head. When I read that article in the "Outlook", I felt
just as Jesus himself would have felt; and I sat down and wrote a
letter--
To Lyman Abbott
This discovery of a new method of interpreting the Bible is one
of such very great interest and importance that I cannot forbear
to ask space to comment upon it. May I suggest that Dr. Abbott
elaborate this exceedingly fruitful idea, and write us another
article upon the extent to which the teachings of the Inspired
Word are modified by modern conditions, by the progress of
invention and the scientific arts? The point of view which Dr.
Abbott takes is one which had never occurred to me before, and I
had therefore been completely mistaken as to the attitude of
Jesus on the question. Also I have, like Dr. Abbott, many radical
friends who are still laboring under error.
Jesus goes on to bid his hearers: "Consider the lilies of the
field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin." What
an apt simile is this for the "great mass of American wealth," in
Dr. Abbott's portrayal of it! "It is serving the community," he
tells us; "it is building a railway to open a new country to
settlement by the homeless; it is operating a railway to carry
grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed millions of the
East," etc. Incidentally, it is piling up dividends for its pious
owners; and so everybody is happy--and Jesus, if he should come
back to earth, could never know that he had left the abodes of
bliss above.
Truly, there should be a new school of Bible interpretation
founded upon this brilliant idea. Jesus says, "Therefore when
thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the
hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may
have glory of men." Verily not; for of what avail are trumpets,
compared with the millions of copies of newspapers which daily go
forth to tell of Mr. Rockefeller's benefactions? How transitory
are they, compared with the graven marble or granite which Mr.
Carnegie sets upon the front of each of his libraries!
There is the paragraph, "Neither shalt thou swear by thy head,
because thou canst not make one hair white or black." I have
several among my friends who are Quakers; presumably Dr. Abbott
has also; and he should not fail to point out to them the changes
which scientific discovery has wrought in the significance of
this command against swearing. We can now make our hair either
white or black, or a combination of both. We can make it a
brilliant peroxide golden; we could, if pushed to an extreme,
make it purple or green. So we are clearly entitled to swear all
we please by our head.
Nor should we forget to examine other portions of the Bible
according to this method. "Look not upon the wine when it is
red," we are told. Thanks to the activities of that Capitalism
which Dr. Abbott praises so eloquently, we now make our beverages
in the chemical laboratory, and their color is a matter of
choice. Also, it should be pointed out that we have a number of
pleasant drinks which are not wine at all--"high-balls" and "gin
rickeys" and "peppered punches"; also vermouthe and creme de
menthe and absinthe, which I believe, are green in hue, and
therefore entirely safe.
Then there are the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image." See how completely our understanding of
this command is changed, so soon as we realize that we are free
to make images of molten metal! And that we may with impunity bow
down to them and worship them and serve them--even, for instance,
a Golden Calf!
"The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou
shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy
manservant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor the
stranger that is within thy gates." This, again, it will be
noted, is open to new interpretations. It specifies maidservants,
but does not prevent one's employing as many married women as he
pleases. It also says nothing about the various kinds of
labor-saving machinery which we have now taught to work for
us--sail-boats, naptha launches, yachts, automobiles, and private
cars--all of which may be busily occupied during the seventh day
of the week. The men who run these machines--the guides, boatmen,
stokers, pilots, chauffeurs, and engineers--would all indignantly
resent being regarded as "servants", and so they do not come
under the prohibition any more than the machines.
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet
thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor
his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." I read
this paragraph over for the first time in quite a while, and I
came with a jolt to its last words. I had been intending to point
out that it said nothing about a neighbor's automobile, nor a
neighbor's oil wells, sugar trusts, insurance companies and
savings banks. The last words, however, stop one off abruptly.
One is almost tempted to imagine that the Divine Intelligence
must have foreseen Dr. Abbott's ingenious method of
interpretation, and taken this precaution against him. And this
was a great surprise to me--for, truly, I had not supposed it
possible that such an interpretation could have been foreseen,
even by Omniscience itself. I will conclude this communication by
venturing the assertion that it could not have been foreseen by
any other person or thing, in the heavens above, on the earth
beneath, or the waters under the earth. Dr. Abbott may accept my
congratulations upon having achieved the most ingenious and
masterful exhibition of casuistical legerdemain that it has ever
been my fortune to encounter in my readings in the literatures of
some thirty centuries and seven different languages.
And I will also add that I respectfully challenge Dr. Abbott to
publish this letter. And I announce to him in advance that if he
refuses to publish it, I will cause it to be published upon the
first page of the "Appeal to Reason", where it will be read by
some five hundred thousand Socialists, and by them set before
several million followers of Jesus Christ, the world's first and
greatest revolutionist, whom Dr. Lyman Abbott has traduced and
betrayed by the most amazing piece of theological knavery that it
has ever been my fortune to encounter.
The Octopus
Dr. Lyman Abbott published this letter! In his editorial comment
thereon he said that he did not know which of two biblical
injunctions to follow: "Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest thou be thought like unto him"; or "Answer a fool according
to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit". I replied by
pointing out a third text which the Reverend Doctor had possibly
overlooked: "He that calleth his neighbor a fool shall be in
danger of hell-fire." But the Reverend Doctor took refuge in his
dignity, and I bided my time and waited for that revenge which
comes sooner or later to us muck-rakers. In this case it came
speedily. The story is such a perfect illustration of the
functions of religion as oil to the machinery of graft that I ask
the reader's permission to recite it at length.
For a couple of decades the political and financial life of New
England has been dominated by a gigantic aggregation of capital,
the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. It is a "Morgan"
concern; its popular name, "The New Haven", stands for all the
railroads of six states, nearly all the trolley-lines and
steamship-lines, and a group of the most powerful banks of Boston
and New York. It is controlled by a little group of insiders, who
followed the custom of rail-road-wrecking familiar to students of
American industrial life: buying up new lines, capitalizing them
at fabulous sums, and unloading them on the investing public;
paying dividends out of capital, "passing" dividends as a means
of stock manipulation, accumulating surpluses and cutting
"melons" for the insiders, while at the same time crushing labor
unions, squeezing wages, and permitting rolling-stock and
equipment to go to wreck.
All these facts were perfectly well known in Wall Street, and
could not have escaped the knowledge of any magazine editor
dealing with current events. In eight years the "New Haven" had
increased its capitalization 1501 per cent; and what that meant,
any office boy in "the Street" could have told. What attitude
should a magazine editor take to the matter?
At that time there were still two or three free magazines in
America. One of them was Hampton's, and the story of its wrecking
by the New Haven criminals will some day serve in school
text-books as the classic illustration of that financial piracy
which brought on the American social revolution. Ben Hampton had
bought the old derelict "Broadway Magazine", with twelve thousand
subscribers, and in four years, by the simple process of straight
truth-telling, had built up for it a circulation of 440,000. In
two years more he would have had a million; but in May, 1911, he
announced a series of articles dealing with the New Haven
management.
The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, were so exact
that they read today like the reports of the Interstate Commerce
Commission, dated three years later. A representative of the New
Haven called upon the editor of Hampton's with a proof of the
first article--obtained from the printer by bribery--and was
invited to specify the statements to which he took exception; in
the presence of witnesses he went over the article line by line,
and specified two minor errors, which were at once corrected. At
the end of the conference he announced that if the articles were
published, Hampton's Magazine would be "on the rocks in ninety
days."
Which threat was carried out to the letter. First came a campaign
among the advertisers of the magazine, which lost an income of
thousands of dollars a month, almost over night. And then came a
campaign among the banks--the magazine could not get credit.
Anyone familiar with the publishing business will understand that
a magazine which is growing rapidly has to have advances to meet
each month's business. Hampton undertook to raise the money by
selling stock; whereupon a spy was introduced into his office as
bookkeeper, his list of subscribers was stolen, and a campaign
was begun to destroy their confidence.
It happened that I was in Hampton's office in the summer of 1911,
when the crisis came. Money had to be had to pay for a huge new
edition; and upon a property worth two millions of dollars, with
endorsements worth as much again, it was impossible to borrow
thirty thousand dollars in the city of New York. Bankers,
personal friends of the publisher, stated quite openly that word
had gone out that any one who loaned money to him would be
"broken". I myself sent telegrams to everyone I knew who might by
any chance be able to help; but there was no help, and Hampton
retired without a dollar to his name, and the magazine was sold
under the hammer to a concern which immediately wrecked it and
discontinued publication.
The Industrial Shelley
Such was the fate of an editor who opposed the "New Haven". And
now, what of those editors who supported it? Turn to "The
Outlook, a Weekly Journal of Current Events," edited by Lyman
Abbott--the issue of Dec. 25th, nineteen hundred and nine years
after Christ came down to bring peace on earth and good-will
toward Wall Street. You will there find an article by Sylvester
Baxter entitled "The Upbuilding of a Great Railroad." It is the
familiar "slush" article which we professional writers learn to
know at a glance. "Prodigious", Mr. Baxter tells us, has been the
progress of the New Haven; this was "a masterstroke", that was
"characteristically sagacious". The road had made "prodigious
expenditures", and to a noble end: "Transportation efficiency
epitomizes the broad aim that animated these expenditures and
other constructive activities." There are photographs of bridges
and stations--"vast terminal improvements", "a masterpiece of
modern engineering", "the highest, greatest and most
architectural of bridges". Of the official under whom these
miracles were being wrought--President Mellen--we read:
"Nervously organized, of delicate sensibility, impulsive in
utterance, yet with an extraordinarily convincing power for
vividly logical presentation." An industrial Shelley, or a
Milton, you perceive; and all this prodigious genius poured out
for the general welfare! "To study out the sort of transportation
service best adapted to these ends, and then to provide it in the
most efficient form possible, that is the life-task that
President Mellen has set himself."
There was no less than sixteen pages of these raptures--quite a
section of a small magazine like the "Outlook". "The New Haven
ramifies to every spot where industry flourishes, where business
thrives." "As a purveyor of transportation it supplies the public
with just the sort desired." "Here we have the new efficiency in
a nutshell." In short, here we have what Dr. Lyman Abbott means
when he glorifies "the great mass of American wealth". "It is
serving the community; it is building a railway to open a new
country to settlement by the homeless; it is operating a railway
to carry grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed
millions of the East," etc. The unfed millions--my typewriter
started to write "underfed millions"--are humbly grateful for
these services, and hasten to buy copies of the pious weekly
which tells about them.
The "Outlook" runs a column of "current events" in which it tells
what is happening in the world; and sometimes it is compelled to
tell of happenings against the interests of "the great mass of
American wealth". The cynical reader will find amusement in
following its narrative of the affairs of the New Haven during
the five years subsequent to the publication of the Baxter
article.
First came the collapse of the road's service; a series of
accidents so frightful that they roused even clergymen and
chambers of commerce to protest. A number of the "Outlook's"
subscribers are New Haven "commuters", and the magazine could not
fail to refer to their troubles. In the issue of Jan. 4th, 1913,
three years and ten days after the Baxter rhapsody, we read:
The most numerous accidents on a single road since the last
fiscal year have been, we believe, those on the New Haven. In the
opinion of the Connecticut Commission, the Westport wreck would
not have occurred if the railway company had followed the
recommendation of the Chief Inspector of Safety Appliances of the
Interstate Commerce Commission in its report on a similar
accident at Bridgeport a year ago.
And by June 28th, matters had gone farther yet; we find the
"Outlook" reporting:
Within a few hours of the collision at Stamford, the wrecked
Pullman car was taken away and burned. Is this criminal
destruction of evidence?
This collapse of the railroad service started a clamor for
investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which of
course brought terror to the bosoms of the plunderers. On Dec.
20, 1913, we find the "Outlook" "putting the soft pedal" on the
public indignation. "It must not be forgotten that such a road as
the New Haven is, in fact if not in terms, a National possession,
and as it goes down or up, public interests go down or up with
it," But in spite of all pious admonitions, the Interstate
Commerce Commission yielded to the public clamor, and an
investigation was made--revealing such conditions of rottenness
as to shock even the clerical retainers of Privilege. "Securities
were inflated, debt was heaped upon debt", reports the horrified
"Outlook"; and when its hero, Mr. Mellen--its industrial Shelley,
"nervously organized, of delicate sensibility"--admitted that he
had no authority as to the finances of the road and no
understanding of them, but had taken all his orders from Morgan,
the "Outlook" remarks, deeply wounded: "A pitiable position for
the president of a great railway to assume." A little later, when
things got hotter yet, we read:
In the search for truth the Commissioners had to overcome many
obstacles, such as the burning of books, letters and documents,
and the obstinacy of witnesses, who declined to testify until
criminal proceedings were begun. The New Haven system has more
than three hundred subsidiary corporations in a web of entangling
alliances, many of which were seemingly planned, created and
manipulated by lawyers expressly retained for the purpose of
concealment or deception.
But do you imagine even that would sicken the pious jackals of
their offal? If so, you do not know the sturdiness of the pious
stomach. A compromise was patched up between the government and
the thieves who were too big to be prosecuted; this bargain was
not kept by the thieves, and President Wilson declared in a
public statement that the New Haven administration had "broken an
agreement deliberately and solemnly entered into," in a manner to
the President "inexplicable and entirely without justification."
Which, of course, seemed to the "Outlook" dreadfully impolite
language to be used concerning a "National possession"; it
hastened to rebuke President Wilson, whose statement was "too
severe and drastic."
A new compromise was made between the government and the thieves
who were too big to be prosecuted, and the stealing went on. Now,
as I work over this book, the President takes the railroads for
war use, and reads to Congress a message proposing that the
securities based upon the New Haven swindles, together with all
the mass of other railroad swindles, shall be sanctified and
secured by dividends paid out of the Public purse. New Haven
securities take a big jump; and the "Outlook", needless to say,
is enthusiastic for the President's policy. Here is a chance for
the big thieves to baptize themselves--or shall we say to have
the water in their stocks made "holy"? Says our pious editor, for
the government to take property without full compensation "would
be contrary to the whole spirit of America."
The Outlook for Graft
Anyone familiar with the magazine world will understand that such
crooked work as this, continued over a long period, is not done
for nothing. Any magazine writer 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, and has to sit in silence; but
when his board bill falls due and his landlady is persistent, he
experiences a direct and earnest hatred of the crooks of
journalism who thrive at his expense. If he is a Socialist, he
looks forward to the day when he may sit on a Publications' Graft
Commission, with access to all magazine books which have not yet
been burned!
In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the price--thanks
to the labors of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Needless to
say, you will not find the facts recorded in the columns of the
Outlook; you might have read it line by line from the palmy days
of Mellen to our own, and you would have got no hint of what the
Commission revealed about magazine and newspaper graft. Nor would
you have got much more from the great metropolitan dailies, which
systematically "played down" the expose, omitting all the really
damaging details. You would have to go to the reports of the
Commission--or to the files of "Pearson's Magazine", which is out
of print and not found in libraries!
According to the New Haven's books, and by the admission of its
own officials, the road was spending more than four hundred
thousand dollars a year to influence newspapers and magazines in
favor of its policies. (President Mellen stated that this was
relatively less than any other railroad in the country was
spending). There was a professor of the Harvard Law School, going
about lecturing to boards of trade, urging in the name of
economic science the repeal of laws against railroad
monopolies--and being paid for his speeches out of railroad
funds! There was a swarm of newspaper reporters, writing on
railroad affairs for the leading papers of New England, and
getting twenty-fivedollars weekly, or two or three hundred on
special occasions. Sums had been paid directly to more than a
thousand newspapers--$3,000 to the Boston "Republic", and when
the question was asked "Why?" the answer was, "That is Mayor
Fitzgerald's paper." Even the ultra-respectable "Evening
Transcript", organ of the Brahmins of culture, was down for $144
for typing, mimeographing and sending out "dope" to the country
press. There was an item of $381 for 15,000 "Prayers"; and when
asked about that President Mellen explained that it referred to a
pamphlet called "Prayers from the Hills", embodying the yearnings
of the back-country people for trolley-franchises to be issued to
the New Haven. Asked why the pamphlet was called "Prayers", Mr.
Mellen explained that "there was lots of biblical language in
it."
And now we come to the "Outlook"; after five years of waiting, we
catch our pious editors with the goods on them! There appears on
the pay-roll of the New Haven, as one of its regular
press-agents, getting sums like $500 now and then--would you
think it possible?--Sylvester Baxter! And worse yet, there
appears an item of $938.64 to the "Outlook", for a total of 9,716
copies of its issue of Dec. 25th, nineteen hundred and nine years
after Christ came to bring peace on earth and good will towards
Wall Street!
The writer makes a specialty of fair play, even when dealing with
those who have never practiced it towards him. He wrote a letter
to the editor of the "Outlook", asking what the magazine might
have to say upon this matter. The reply, signed by Lawrence F.
Abbott, President of the "Outlook" Company, was that the
"Outlook" did not know that Mr. Baxter had any salaried
connection with the New Haven, and that they had paid him for the
article at the usual rates. Against this statement must be set
one made under oath by the official of the New Haven who had the
disbursing of the corruption fund--that the various papers which
used the railroad material paid nothing for it, and "they all
knew where it came from." Mr. Lawrence Abbott states that "the
New Haven Railroad bought copies of the 'Outlook' without any
previous understanding or arrangement as anybody is entitled to
buy copies of the 'Outlook'." I might point out that this does
not really say as much as it seems to; for the President of every
magazine company in America knows without any previous
understanding or arrangement that any time he cares to print an
article such as Mr. Baxter's, dealing with the affairs of a great
corporation, he can sell ten thousand copies to that corporation.
The late unlamented Elbert Hubbard wrote a defense of the
Rockefeller slaughter of coal-miners, published it in "The Fra,"
and came down to New York and unloaded several tons at 26
Broadway; he did the same thing in the case of the copper strike
in Michigan, and again in the case of "The Jungle"--and all this
without the slightest claim to divine inspiration or authority!
Mr. Abbott answers another question: "We certainly did not return
the amount to the railroad company." Well, a sturdy conscience
must be a comfort to its possessor. The President of the
"Outlook" is in the position of a pawnbroker caught with stolen
goods in his establishment. He had no idea they were stolen; and
we might believe it, if the thief were obscure. But when the
thief is the most notorious in the city--when his picture has
been in the paper a thousand times? And when the thief swears
that the broker knew him? And when the broker's shop is full of
other suspicious goods? Why did the "Outlook" practically take
back Mr. Spahr's revelations concerning the Powder barony of
Delaware? Why did it support so vigorously the Standard Oil
ticket for the control of the Mutual Life Insurance Company--and
with James Stillman, one of the heads of Standard Oil, president
of Standard Oil's big bank in New York, secretly one of its
biggest stockholders!
Also, why does the magazine refuse to give its readers a chance
to judge its conduct? Why is it that a search of its columns
reveals no mention of the revelations concerning Mr. Baxter--not
even any mention of the $400,000 slush fund of its paragon, of
transportation virtues? I asked that question in my letter, and
the president of the "Outlook" Company for some reason failed to
notice it. I wrote a second time, courteously reminding him of
the omission; and also of another, equally significant--he had
not informed me whether any of the editors of the "Outlook", or
the officers or directors of the Company, were stockholders in
the New Haven. His final reply was that the questions seem to him
"wholly unimportant"; he does not know whether the "Outlook"
published anything about the Baxter revelations, nor does he know
whether any of the editors or officers or directors of the
"Outlook" Company are or ever have been stockholders of the New
York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company. The fact "would
not in the slightest degree affect either favorably or
unfavorably our editorial treatment of that corporation."
Caesar's wife, it appears is above suspicion--even when she is
caught in a brothel!
Clerical Camouflage
I have seen a photograph from "Somewhere in France", showing a
wayside shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary, innocent and
loving, with her babe in her arms. If you were a hostile aviator,
you might sail over and take pictures to your heart's content,
and you would see nothing but a saintly image; you would have to
be on the enemy's side, and behind the lines, to make the
discovery that under the image had been dug a hole for a
machine-gun. When I saw that picture, I thought to myself--there
is capitalist Religion!
You see, if cannon and machine-guns are out in the open, they are
almost instantly spotted and put out of action; and so with
magazines like "Leslie's Weekly", or "Munsey's", or the "North
American Review", which are frankly and wholly in the interest of
Big Business. If an editor wishes really to be effective in
holding back progress, he must protect himself with a camouflage
of piety and philanthropy, he must have at his tongue's end the
phrases of brotherhood and justice, he must be liberal and
progressive, going a certain cautious distance with the
reformers, indulging in carefully measured fair play--giving a
dime with one hand, while taking back a dollar with the other!
Let us have an illustration of this clerical camouflage. Here are
the wives and children of the Colorado coal-miners being shot and
burned in their beds by Rockefeller gun-men, and the press of the
entire country in a conspiracy of silence concerning the matter.
In the effort to break down this conspiracy, Bouck White,
Congregational clergyman, author of "The Call of the Carpenter",
goes to the Fifth Avenue Church of Standard Oil and makes a
protest in the name of Jesus. I do not wish to make extreme
statements, but I have read history pretty thoroughly, and I
really do not know where in nineteen hundred years you can find
an action more completely in the spirit and manner of Jesus than
that of Bouck White. The only difference was that whereas Jesus
took a real whip and lashed the money-changers, White politely
asked the pastor to discuss with him the question whether or not
Jesus condemned the holding of wealth. He even took the
precaution to write a letter to the clergyman announcing in
advance what he intended to do! And how did the clergyman prepare
for him? With the sword of truth and the armor of the spirit?
No--but with two or three dozen strong-arm men, who flung
themselves upon the Socialist author and hurled him out of the
church. So violent were they that several of White's friends,
also one or two casual spectators, were moved to protest; what
happened then, let us read in the New York "Sun", the most
bitterly hostile to radicalism of all the metropolitan
newspapers. Says the "Sun's" report:
A police billy came crunching against the bones of Lopez's legs.
It struck him as hard as a man could swing it eight times. A fist
planted on Lopez's jaw knocked out two teeth. His lip was torn
open. A blow in the eye made it swell and blacken instantly. A
minute later Lopez was leaning against the church with blood
running to the doorsill.
And now, what has the clerical camouflage to say on this
proceeding? Does it approve it? Oh no! It was "a mistake", the
"Outlook" protests; it intensifies the hatred which these
extremists feel for the church. The proper course would have been
to turn the disturber aside with a soft answer; to give him some
place, say in a park, where he could talk his head off to people
of his own sort, while good and decent Christians continued to
worship by themselves in peace, and to have the children of their
mine-slaves shot and burned in their beds. Says our pious editor:
The true way to repress cranks is not to suppress them; it is to
give them an opportunity to air their theories before any who
wish to learn, while forbidding them to compel those to listen
who do not wish to do so.
Or take another case. Twelve years ago the writer made an effort
to interest the American people in the conditions of labor in
their packing-plants. It happened that incidentally I gave some
facts about the bedevilment of the public's meat-supply, and the
public really did care about that. As I phrased it at the time, I
aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the
stomach. There was a terrible clamor, and Congress was forced to
pass a bill to remedy the evils. As a matter of fact this bill
was a farce, but the public was satisfied, and soon forgot the
matter entirely. The point to be noted here is that so far as
concerned the atrocious miseries of the working-people, it was
not necessary even to pretend to do anything. The slaves of
Packingtown went on living and working as they were described as
doing in "The Jungle", and nobody gave a further thought to them.
Only the other day I read in my paper--while we are all making
sacrifices in a "War for Democracy"--that Armour and Company had
paid a dividend of twenty-one per cent, and Swift and Company a
dividend of thirty-five per cent.
This prosperity they owe in good part to their clerical
camouflage. Listen to our pious "Outlook", engaged in
countermining "The Jungle". The "Outlook" has no doubt that there
are genuine evils in the packing-plants; the conditions of the
workers ought of course to be improved; BUT--
To disgust the reader by dragging him through every conceivable
horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid excitement and
with offensive minuteness the life in jail and brothel--all this
is to overreach the object .... Even things actually terrible may
become distorted when a writer screams them out in a sensational
way and in a high pitched key...... More convincing if it were
less hysterical.
Don't you see what these clerical crooks are for?
The Jungle
A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were
killed and half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish
chattel slavery and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a
thorough study of both these industrial systems, and I freely
admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage
slave is better than that of the chattel slave. The wage slave is
free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his
starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the
distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the policeman's
club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and
so he has the candle of hope to light him to his death-bed. But
excepting this consideration, and taking the circumstances of the
wage slave from the material point of view alone, I hold it
beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of 1860
was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the
Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was the Southern master's real
concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be
kept physically sound; but it is nobody's business to care
anything about the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave
were valuable property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a
happy outdoor life, and medical attention if they fell ill. But
the children of the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the
canning-factory are raised in a city slum, and never know what it
is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or
rest--
We are weary in our cradles
From our mother's toil untold;
We are born to hoarded weariness
As some to hoarded gold.
The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale
capitalist industry in its final flowering! I quote from "The
Jungle":
Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut up in foul
pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to live. Tonight
in Chicago there are ten thousand men, homeless and wretched,
willing to work and begging for a chance, yet starving, and
fronting with terror the awful winter cold! Tonight in Chicago
there are a hundred thousand children wearing out their strength
and blasting their lives in the effort to earn their bread! There
are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and
squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones!
There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless,
waiting for death to take them from their torments! There are a
million people, men and women and children, who share the curse
of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can stand and see,
for just enough to keep them alive; who are condemned till the
end of their days to monotony and weariness, to hunger and
misery, to heat and cold, to dirt and disease, to ignorance and
drunkenness and vice! And then turn over the page with me, and
gaze upon the other side of the picture. There are a
thousand--ten thousand, maybe--who are the masters of these
slaves, who own their toil. They do nothing to earn what they
receive, they do not even have to ask for it---it comes to them
of itself, their only care is to dispose of it. They live in
palaces, they riot in luxury and extravagance--such as no words
can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes
the soul grow sick and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for
a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions
for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets,
for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies. Their
life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation
and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary
things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their
fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat
and tears and blood of the human race! It is all theirs--it comes
to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the
streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the ocean--so,
automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to
them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner digs in the earth, the
weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone, the clever man
invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the
inspired man sings--and all the results, the products of the
labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous
stream and poured into their laps!
This is the system. It is the crown and culmination of all the
wrongs of the ages; and in proportion to the magnitude of its
exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical
camouflage which has been organized in its behalf. Beyond all
question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been
made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this blood-thirsty
system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a blasphemy beyond
the power of art to express. Read the man's words, furious as
those of any modern agitator that I have heard in twenty years of
revolutionary experience: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth!--Sell that ye have and give alms!--Blessed are ye poor,
for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!--Woe unto you that are rich,
for ye have received your consolation!--Verily, I say unto you,
that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of
Heaven!--Woe unto you also, you lawyers!--Ye serpents, ye
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"
"And this man"--I quote from "The Jungle" again--"they have made
into the high-priest of property and smug respectability, a
divine sanction of all the horrors and abominations of modern
commercial civilization! Jewelled images are made of him, sensual
priests burn insense to him, and modern pirates of industry bring
their dollars, wrung from the toil of helpless women and
children, and build temples to him, and sit in cushioned seats
and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of dusty
divinity!"
BOOK FIVE
The Church of the Merchants
Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and
thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.....
Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
Milton.
The Head Merchant
Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandists never weary of
telling us. Business is the basis of our material lives, and
consequently of our culture. Business men control our politics
and dictate our laws; business men own our newspapers and direct
their policy; business men sit on our school boards, and endow
and manage our universities. The Reformation was a revolt of the
newly-developing merchant classes against the tyrannies and
abuses of feudal clericalism: so in all Protestant Christianity
one finds the spirit, ideals, and language of Trade. We have
shown how the symbolism of the Anglican Church is of the palace
and the throne; in the same way that of the non-conformist sects
may be shown to be of the counting-house. In the view of the
middle-class Britisher, the nexus between man and man is cent per
cent; and so in their Sunday services the worshippers sing such
hymns as this:
Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousand fold shall be;
Then gladly will we give to Thee,
Who givest all.
The first duty of every man under the competitive system is to
secure the survival of his own business; so on the Sabbath, when
he comes to deal with eternity, he is practical and explicit:
Nothing is worth a thought beneath
But how I may escape the death
That never, never dies;
How make mine own election sure,
And when I fail on earth secure
A mansion in the skies.
Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figures God as a
mighty Conqueror--
Marching as to war
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before
so the preacher to the trader figures the divinity as a glorified
Merchant keeping books. This Head Merchant has a monopoly in His
line; He knows all His rivals' secrets, so there is no getting
ahead of Him, and nothing to do but obey His Word, as revealed
through His clerical staff. The system is oily with protestations
of divine love; but when you read the comments of Luther upon
Calvin and of Calvin upon Luther, you understand that this love
is confined to the inside of each denomination. And even so
restricted, there is not always enough to go around. Recently I
met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked, "I see by the
papers that you have just finished a church building." "Yes," he
answered; "and I have had three offers of a new church." I did
not see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so
successful with this one?" The reply was, "They always take it
for granted that you want to change when you've finished a new
building, because you make so many enemies!"
The business man puts up the money to build the church, he puts
up the money to keep it going; and the first rule of a business
man is that when he puts up the money for a thing he "runs" that
thing. Of course he sees that it spreads his own views of life,
it helps to maintain his tradition. In the days of Anu and Baal
we heard the proclamation of the divine right of Kings; in these
days of Mammon we hear the proclamation of the divine right of
Merchants. Some fifteen years ago the head of our Coal Trust
announced during a great strike that the question would be
settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom
has given control of the property interests of this country". And
on that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever their
denominations, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath doctrines are alike, as
their week-day practices are alike; whether it is Rockefeller
shooting his Bayonne oil-workers and burning alive the little
children of his miners; or smooth John Wanamaker, paying
starvation wages to department-store girls and driving them to
the streets; or that clergyman who, at a gathering of society
ladies, members of the "Law and Order League" of Denver, declared
in my hearing that if he could have his way he would blow up the
home of every coal-striker with dynamite; or the Rev. R. A.
Torrey, Dean of the Bible institute of Los Angeles, who refused
to employ union labor on the million dollar building of the
Institute, declaring that "the Church cannot afford to have any
dealings with a band of fire-bugs and murderers!"
"Herr Beeble"
The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association is to justify the processes of trade,
and to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of
frugality, humility, and loyalty to the profit system. The depths
of sociological depravity to which some of the agents of this
Association have sunk is difficult of belief. Twelve years ago I
was invited to address the book-sellers of New York, in company
with a well-known clergyman of the city, the Reverend Madison C.
Peters. This gentleman's address made such an impression upon me
that I recall it even at this distance: a string of jokes spoken
with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with
commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it
was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant
to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which
the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor
of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so
ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism means free
love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so
dishonest that he garbled the writings of this "Herr Beeble",
making him say something quite different from what he had meant
to say. I could name several clergymen of various denominations
who have stooped to that device against the Socialists; including
the Catholic Father Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and
should be stopped with bullets.
Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's
pulpit-slang used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy;
and when I grew up, and came into the Socialist movement--behold,
here he was, chief inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I
had a friend, a man who saved my life at a time when I was
practically starving, and to whom therefore I owe my survival as
a writer; this friend had been a clergyman in a Middle Western
state, and had preached Jesus as he really was, and so was hated
and feared like Jesus. It happened that he was unhappily married,
and permitted his wife to divorce him so that he might marry the
woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the organized
hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils with
poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he
applied his imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel
under the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were
reading the story of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted through
the personality of a he-goat. Of late years this clerical author
has turned his energies to negrophobia, and militarism, making
millions out of motion-picture incitements to hatred and terror.
The pictures were made here in Southern California, and friends
in the business have described to me the pious propagandist in
the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarms of cute and
playful little movie-girls.
Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D., D.
C. L., L. H. D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical
Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor of Syracuse University, a
branch of the Mental Munitions Department of the Standard Oil
Company; his function being to manufacture intellectual weapons
and explosives to be used in defense of the Rockefeller fortune.
It is generally not expected that the makers of ruling-class
munitions should face the dirty and perilous work of the
trenches; but ten years ago, during a raid by an active squad of
muckrake-men, Chancellor Day astonished the world by rushing to
the front with both arms full of star-shells and bombs. He
afterwards put the history of this gallant action into a volume,
"The Raid on Prosperity"; and if you want the real thrill of the
class-war, here is where to get it!
The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; an enthusiast and
dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whom the ordinary human virtues
have been fused, absorbed, transformed and sublimated into a new
supreme virtue of loyalty to Exploitation, patriotism for
Profiteering. He began life as a working-man, he tells us, in the
good old American fashion of hustle for yourself; but he differed
from other Americans in that he had an instant, intuitive
recognition of the intellectual and moral excellence of
Plutocracy. The first time he met a rich man, he quivered with
rapture, he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So very quickly he
was recognized as a proper person to have charge of a Mental
Munition Works; and the ruling classes proceeded to pin medals
upon the bosom of his 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 and trade by which the earth
has yielded up her infinite treasures." And having been at the
same time in intimate daily communion with the Almighty, he can
tell us the Almighty's attitude towards these prodigies. "God has
made the rich of this world to serve Him.... He has shown them a
way to have this world's goods and to be rich towards God ....
God wants the rich men ....Christ's doctrines have made the world
rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches." Also the
Chancellor knows our great corporations, and gives us the
Almighty's views about them; they mean that "the forces with
which God built the universe have been put into the hands of
man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy
given to Socialism is appalling. It is insanity." We learn that
the income tax is "a doctrine suited to the dark ages, only no
age ever has been dark enough." Somebody raises the issue of
"tainted money", and the Chancellor disposes of this matter also.
As a Deputy of Divinity, he settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul
permitted meat offered to idols to be eaten in the fear of God."
And then, to make assurance doubly sure, he settles it with plain
human logic; and you are astonished to see how simple, under his
handling, the complex problem becomes--how clear and clean-cut is
the distinction he draws for you:
Every boy knows that one cannot take stolen goods without being a
partaker with the thief. But the proceeds of recognized business
are quite a different thing.
Holy Oil
And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenon of
Protestant Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth
century. For the benefit of posterity I explain that "Billy" is a
baseball player turned Evangelist, who has brought to the cause
of God the crowds and uproar of the diamond; also the commercial
spirit of America's most popular institution. He travels like a
circus, with all the press-agent work and newspaper hurrah; he
conducts what are called "revivals", in an enormous "tabernacle"
built especially for him in each city. I cannot better describe
the Billy Sunday circus than in the words of a certain Sidney C.
Tapp, who brought suit against the evangelist for $100,000
damages for the theft of the ideas of a book. Says Mr. Tapp in
his complaint:
The so-called religious awakening or "trail-hitting" is produced
by an appeal to the emotions and in stirring up the senses by a
combination of carrying the United States flag in one hand and
the Bible in the other, singing, trumpeting, organ playing,
garrulous and acrobatic feats of defendant, by defendant in his
talk leaping from the rostrum to the top of the pulpit, lying
prone on the floor of the rostrum on his stomach in the presence
of the vast audience and from thence into a pit to shake hands
with the so-called "trail-hitters" and the vulgar use of
plaintiff's thoughts contained in said books. Said harangues and
vulgarisms of said defendant and horns, drums, organs and singing
by said choir and vast audience which are assembled by means of
said newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit
of free and copious flow of money through religious and patriotic
excitement produced by and through the vulgarisms, scurrility,
buffoonery, obscenity and profanity of defendant pretending to be
in the interest of the cause of religion through what he
denominates "hitting the trail", the real object being to induce
a religious frenzy and enthusiasm which he announces in advance
is to result in large audiences composed of thousands of people
generously contributing vast sums of money on the last day and
night of the so-called revival which is invariably appropriated
by the defendant and through which scheme and device defendant
has become enormously wealthy.
As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, and twice each day
he holds forth to a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand; in addition
the newspapers print literally pages of his utterances. The
entire Protestant clergy for a score of miles around has been
hitched to his triumphal chariot, and driven captive through the
streets. Here in this dignified city of Pasadena, home of
millionaire brewers and chewing-gum kings, all the churches have
been plastered for weeks with cloth signs: "This Church is
Cooperating in the Sunday Campaign." To give a sample of the
intellectual level of the performance, here is what Billy has to
say about modern thought:
All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this
sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher criticism,
wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out of a beer-mug
in Leipzig or Heidelberg!
Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the
platform and smile while Billy thus slangs the devil; and being
themselves, poor fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd,
they watch and see how he does it, and then return to their own
churches and try the same stunt; so the manners of the baseball
diamond spread like a contagion. I open my morning paper, and
find a picture of an intense-looking clerical gentleman, the Rev.
J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the Baptist Temple. He is
discussing certain slanderous rumors which he has heard about
Billy Sunday, and he offers ten thousand dollars reward to anyone
who 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, underhanded sneaks.....
Carrion-loving buzzards and foul-smelling skunks.
You will be prepared after this to hear that when the Socialists
were near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman preached a
sermon in support of the candidate of "Booze, Gas and Railroads".
In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected youth
of our streets from drinking, gambling and whoring, no one could
wish him anything but success; but his besotted ignorance, his
childish crudity of mind, make it impossible that he could have
any success except of a delusive nature. He is utterly devoid of
a social sense; utterly unaware of the existence of the forces of
capitalism which are causing depravity ten times as fast as all
the evangelists in creation can remedy it. So he is precisely
like the Catholics with their "charity", cleaning up loathsome
and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and never stopping to
ask why such messes continue to come into existence.
More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism
which he fosters does not help the development of evil more than
his preaching hinders it. The newspapers always report the cost
of the tabernacle, of the "free-will offering", which amounts to
hundreds of thousands of dollars in each "campaign", In each city
the expenses are guaranteed by men who are generally the most
sinister exploiting forces of the community; they welcome and
fete him, and he visits their homes, and is in every way one of
the crowd. After the big strike in Paterson, N. J., the
employers, Jews and Catholics included, all subscribed a fund to
bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was freely proclaimed
that the purpose was to undermine the radical union movement.
This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his whole campaign
was conducted on that basis.
Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich young
man, perhaps a thousand times as rich as any that lived in
Palestine. This young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I
do to inherit eternal life?" And Billy told him to keep the
commandments--"Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal,
Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother." The
young man answered; "All these have I kept from my youth up." And
Billy said: "Yet lackest thou one thing; sell all that thou hast
and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this he was very
sorrowful, for he was very rich.
--No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in
Palestine. What happened in New York is that Billy said, "I am
delighted to meet you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller
said, "Come be my guest at my palace in the Pocantico Hills; and
then we will go together and you may preach submission to my
wage-slaves in the oil-factories at Bayonne and elsewhere." And
Billy went to the palace, and went and preached to the
wage-slaves, telling them to beware the "stinking Socialists",
and to concentrate their attention on the saving of their souls;
so the rich young man was delighted, and he sent for all the
newspaper reporters to come to his office at 26 Broadway, and
told them what a great and useful man Billy Sunday is. As the New
York "Times" tells about it:
Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has
never been charged with having an excess of verbally expressed
enthusiasm on any subject. But he talked for an hour and a half
about the evangelist. He was full of the subject of Billy Sunday.
"Billy did New York a lot of good," he said. He went on to tell
of 187 meetings held in 100 different factories, attended by
50,000 men. "That's good work." And he expressed his satisfaction
with Sunday's theology: "He believes the Bible from cover to
cover and that is good enough for me." The Sunday campaign had
cost $200,000, and "If it had stopped here, if it was not kept
up, it would be poor business; a poor dividend on the $200,000
and the work invested. But we expect to get dividends in the next
year."
Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house!
Rhetorical Black-hanging
It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend large-scale
merchants while they live, but to bury them when they die, and to
place the seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning this
aspect of Bootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an earnest
hater of shams, William Makepeace Thackeray:
I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the
most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the
blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the
simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies--all uttered in
the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous
Threnodies which have been sung from time immemorial over kings
and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must
bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical
black-hanging......
And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but
to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall
Street. When a certain king of Western railroads died, a
Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop, likened his heir to the
boy Christ; a statement which requires for its appreciation a
mention of the fact that this heir died of syphilis. In the year
1904 there passed from his earthly reward in Pennsylvania a
United States senator who had been throughout his lifetime a
notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley Quay was
his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical
connections, was free to state the facts about him:
He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press, got
his grip on the public service, including even the courts;
imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon the last three
Presidents--making the latter provide for the offal of his
political machine, which even Pennsylvania could no longer
stomach--and all without identifying his name with a single
measure of public good, without making a speech or uttering a
party watchword, without even pretending to be honest, but solely
because, like Judas, he carried the bag and could buy whom he
would.
Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was
expressed by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J. S.
Ramsey, who stood over the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking
a smile declared that he had been "a statesman who was always on
the right side of every moral question!"
In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our political
corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged to no church, but had
backed them all, understanding the main thesis of this book as
clearly as the writer of it. In his home city of Cleveland the
eulogy upon him was pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St. Paul's
Episcopal Church; while in the United States Senate the service
was performed by the Chaplain, the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. This
is a name well-known in American letters, as in American
religious life; it was borne by a benevolent old gentleman, a
Unitarian and a liberal, who organized "Lend-a-Hand Clubs" and
such like amiabilities. "Do You Love This Old Man?" the signs in
the street-cars used to ask when I was a boy; and I promptly
answered "Yes"--for my mother took the "Ladies' Home Journal",
and I swallowed the sentimental dish-water set out for me. But
when I read the Rev. Edward's funeral oration over the Irrev.
Mark, I loved neither of them any longer. "This whole-souled
child of God," cried the Rev. Edward, "who believed in success,
and knew how to succeed by using the infinite powers!" You
perceive that the Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club agrees with
this book, that the "infinite powers" in America are the powers
that prey!
The Great American Fraud
Among the most loathesome products of our native commercial greed
is the patent medicine industry, "The Great American Fraud," as
its historian has called it. In 1907 this historian wrote:
Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions
of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration
of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an
appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of
varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart
depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of
all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by
the skillfullest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the
trade.
One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes:
habit-forming laxatives, head-ache powders full of acetanilid,
soothing-syrups and catarrh-cures full of opium and cocaine,
cock-tails subtly disguised as "bitters", "sarsaparillas", and
"tonics". He shows how the fake testimonials are made up and
exploited; how the confidential letters, telling the secret
troubles of men and women, are collected by tens and hundreds of
thousands and advertised and sold--so that the victim, as he
begins to lose faith in one fake, finds another at hand, fully
informed as to his weakness. He quotes the amazing "Red Clause"
in the contracts which the patent-medicine makers have with
thousands of daily and weekly papers, whereby the makers are able
to control the press of the country and prevent legislation
against the "Great American Fraud."
There are a thousand religious papers in America, weekly and
monthly; and what is their attitude on this question? Mr. Adams
tells us:
Whether because church-going people are more trusting, and
therefore more easily befooled than others, or from some more
obscure reason, many of the religious papers fairly reek with
patent medicine fakes.
He gives us many pages of specific instances:
Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancer vampires. He is a patron
and prop of religious journalism. It is his theory that the
easiest prey is to be found among readers of church papers.
Moreover he has learned from his father-in-law (who built a small
church out of blood-money) to capitalize his own sectarian
associations, and when confronted recently with a formal
accusation he replied, with an air of injured innocence, that he
was a regular attendant at church, and could produce an
endorsement from his minister.
And here is the "Church Advocate", of Harrisburg, Pa., which
publishes quack advertisements disguised as editorials. One of
them Mr. Adams paraphrases:
As Dr. Smith is, on the face of his own statements, a
self-branded swindler and rascal, you run no risk in assuming
that the Rev. C. H. Forney, D. D., L. L. D., in acting as his
journalistic supporter for pay, is just such another as himself!
And again:
Will the editor of the "Baptist Watchman" of Boston explain by
what phenomenon of logic or elasticity of ethics he accepts the
lucubrations of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of Liquozone, of Actina,
that marvelous two-ended mechanical appliance which "cures"
deafness at one terminus and blindness at the other, and all with
a little oil of mustard?
And again:
The "Christian Observer" of Louisville replied to a protesting
subscriber, suggesting that the "Collier" articles were written
in a spirit of revenge, because "Collier's" could not get patent
medicine advertising. When I asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse
for his foundation for the charge, he said that one of the
typewriters must have written the letter! Doubtless also the same
highly responsible typewriter imitated the signature with
startling fidelity to Dr. Converse's handwriting!
And here is--would you think it possible?--our "Church of Good
Society"! It has an organ in Chicago called the "Living Church",
most dignified and decorous. You have to study quite a while to
ascertain what denomination it belongs to; it will not tell you
directly, for the Anglician pose is that it is the church
Elect from every nation,
Yet one oer all the earth,
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 at its peak the
black flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the modern
commercial pirate--"Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:
The editors and publishers of the "Living Church" assume no
responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.
And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's
champion labor-baiter, the late C. W. Post, that his "Grapenuts"
would prevent appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in
such cases!
And here is the "Christian Endeavor World", organ of one of the
most powerful non-sectarian religious bodies in the country. Some
one wrote complaining of its medical advertising, and the answer
was:
To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not publishing
any fraudulent or unworthy medical advertising ...... Trusting
that you will be able to understand that we are acting according
to our best and sincerest judgment, I remain, yours very truly,
The Golden Rule Company, George W. Coleman, Business Manager.
Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud" remarks:
Assuming that the business management of the "Christian Endeavor
World" represents normal intelligence, I would like to ask
whether it accepts the statement that a pair of "magic foot
drafts" applied to the soles of the feet will cure any and every
kind of rheumatism in any part of the body? Further, if the
advertising department is genuinely interested in declining
"fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I would call their attention to
the ridiculous claims of Dr. Shoop's medicines, which "cure"
almost every disease; to two hair removers, one an "Indian
Secret", the other an "accidental discovery", both either fakes
or dangerous; to the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it
is "a positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of
Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna; to
Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical
constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for
cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering
from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which
for the sake of decency I do not care to detail in these columns,
appear in recent issues of the "Christian Endeavor World".
Riches in Glory
There came recently to Los Angeles a "world-famous evangelist",
known as "Gipsy" Smith. There was a shirt-waist strike at the
time, and the girls were starving, and they sent a delegation to
this evangelist to ask for help. They told him how they were
mistreated, exposed to insults, driven to sell their virtue
because their wage would not support life; and to their plea he
made answer: "Get Jesus in your hearts, and these questions will
take care of themselves!"
So we see the most important of the many services which the
churches perform for the merchants--taking the revolutionary hope
of Jesus, for a kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting it
into a dream of a golden harp in an uncertain future. To
appreciate the fullness of this betrayal, take the prayer which
Jesus dictated--so simple, direct and practical: "Give us this
day our daily bread", and put it beside the hymns which the
slave-congregations are trained to sing. In my neighborhood is a
one-roomed building with a plate glass front, upon which I
observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters the
sign "Glory Mission". I approach him, and he drops his work and
welcomes me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I
answer that I am. I have to shout the good tidings into his ear,
as he is very deaf. He presents me with his card, which shows
that he bears the title of "Reverend", also the sobriquet of
"Mountain Missionary". I ask him to permit me to examine the
hymn-book which he uses in his work, and with touching eagerness
he presses upon me a well-worn volume bearing the title "Waves of
Glory". I seat myself and note down a few of the baits it sets
out for hungry wage-slaves:
O, there's a plenty, O, there's a plenty,
There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!
Riches in glory, riches in glory,
Royal supply our wants exceed!
Feasting, I'm feasting,
I'm feasting with my Lord!
Beautiful robes, beautiful robes,
Beautiful robes we then shall wear!
Jerusalem the golden,
With milk and honey blest!
Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem,
I'll be there, I'll be there!
Blest Canaan land, bright Canaan land,
I love to be in Canaan land!
Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
As on the highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me!
In the sweet bye and bye
We shall meet on that beautiful shore--
I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I. W. W.
who was hanged three or four years ago in Utah, and who used this
tune in his little red book of revolutionary chants:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In the glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die!
Captivating Ideals
In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero
is a Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his
diggings in the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into
our superior civilization. The thing that impresses him most is
what he calls "the immortality idea". The person who got that up
was a world-genius, he exclaims. "If you can once get a man to
believing in immortality, there is no more left for you to
desire; you can take everything he owns--you can skin him alive
if it pleases you--and he will bear it all with perfect good
humor."
And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the
effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that
view of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the
language of scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how
an ecclesiastical authority, equipped with every tool of modern
learning, would set about voicing the idea that the function of
the teaching of Heaven is to chloroform the poor, so that the
rich may continue to rob them in security?
Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of
scholarship, dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges
Chatterton-Hill, of the University of Geneva. Its title is "The
Sociological Value of Christianity", and from cover to cover it
is a warning to the rich of the danger they run in giving up
their religion and ceasing to support its priests. It explains
how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded in making the
individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which are
indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as
indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor
makes plain just what he means by "individual suffering,
individual sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism;
and the advantage of Christianity is that it makes you think that
by submitting to these horrors, you are profiting your own soul.
"By making individual salvation depend on the acceptance of
suffering, on the voluntary sacrifice of egotistical interests,
Christianity adapts the individual to society". And this, as the
professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a world in
which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only means
of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
sacrifice...... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful
idea!" And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used
for this purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never
ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness
of suffering--of that suffering which a weak and sickly
humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could."
You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or
whatever you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians
who have only your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones
who are condemned to elimination? There has come, let us say, a
period of "overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and
therefore you are starving, you have woven too much cloth, and
therefore you are naked, you have finished the world for your
masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way. As the
sociologist from Geneva phrases it, "Your suppression imposes
itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of the
Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process, by
"captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest
will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with
candle-lights and images, your ears with sweet music and soothing
words; and so you will perish without raising a finger! "Here,"
reflects the professor, "we see how magnificently the teaching of
Jesus applies to all classes of society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the
embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the
capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that
troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he
carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical
wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out
of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. "Inequality
signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but the standard
whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the standard of the
moral law."
The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known,
but those which govern his moral nature cannot be known; the
moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject
to the law of inequality!
As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as
wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with
the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for
teaching the Copernican view of the universe; that infallible
popes had again and again condemned this heresy ex cathedra. Said
the eloquent cardinal:
Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary,
and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at
rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is
the very truth till we know what motion is?
Spook Hunting
Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian
professors realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is never
far from the thoughts of any of them--for, of course, no man can
look at the present system and not wonder how the poor stand it,
and more especially why they stand it. There have been many
thinking men who have given up the miracle-business quite
cheerfully, but have stood appalled at the idea of letting the
lower classes find out the truth. You note that idea continually
in the writings of Professor Goldwin Smith, who was a
free-thinker, but also a bourgeois publicist, with a deep sense
of responsibility to the money-masters of the world. He was about
as honest a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was the
beau ideal of the New York "Evening Post", which indicates his
point of view. He wrote:
It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a future
state, for a short measure of happiness here, has materially
helped to reconcile the less favored members of the community to
the inequalities of the existing order of things.
When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course
called "Practical Ethics", under a professor by the name of
Hyslop. The course differed from most of the forty that I tried,
in that it gave evidence that the professor was accustomed to
read the morning paper. He had learned that American politics
were rotten; his idea of "Practical Ethics" was to outline in
elaborate detail a complete scheme of constitutional changes
which would make it impossible for the "boss" to control the
government. I think I must have been born with a charm against
bourgeois thought, for the good professor never fooled me an
instant; I remember I used to smile at the idea of how quickly
the "boss" would brush through his constitutional cobwebs. The
reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity--and of
course long before they could be put into practice, the
politicians would be ready with devices to make them of no
effect.
Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to
hunting spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he
is a determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he
may really have bagged some spooks. All I wish to point out here
is the method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to
support the spook-hunting industry. The very same argument as we
got from the University of Geneva and the University of Toronto!
Says our head spook-hunter:
There has been no belief that exercised so much power upon the
poor as that in a future life. The politicians, men of the world,
have known this so well as to postpone the day of political
judgment by it for many years.
And again:
The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and having
abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its fundamental
beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and the laboring
classes..... The spiritual ideal of life has gone out of the
masses as well as the classes, and nothing is left but a venture
on a struggle with wealth.
And again, more menacingly yet:
The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution that
the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and immortality.
What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step
up, ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the
Psychical Research hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as
to the cost of milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!
You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the
Wholesale Pickpockets' Association making use of their
incantations. You admired my ability to sling language, but not
my taste; and you certainly did not think that I would back my
rhetoric with facts. But what do these quotations mean, unless
they mean what I have said? Are not these three professors men of
culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of learning you
can find in our present-day society?
And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the
young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and
discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare.
Who discovers that professors of ethics, practical or
impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in
collecting funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds,
they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the minds of
the poor! Do you wonder that such young students conclude that
bourgeois thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are
prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the
temple of truth?
Running the Rapids
And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it
means to society that practically all its moral teaching should
be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight
thinking? That all the intellectual prestige of the Church should
be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate
evasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in the most terrific
social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our
position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario,
hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the bow of
the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there
comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into
a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along
with the speed of a race-horse. With every sense alert, You watch
for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one
side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of
the danger. If by any chance you fail to do it, over you go, and
your partner with you, and all your belongings go down-stream,
and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for
several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of
life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The
paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental
science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no
paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurs
words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees
an especially formidable obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus,
or the I. W. W.--he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.
And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could
save yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go
overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into
the trenches in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud,
because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and
kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find
yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free
yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to
law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman
bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means
of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of
course those who think him a voice of God can form no conception
of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and
wholesome sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among
the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the
Apostle to the Gentiles.
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire.
You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the
pitiful and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under
the cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time
whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly
the details of a prescribed procedure, at the cost of all
sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the
privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt
court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the
newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept
and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have
been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as
they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps,
you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing--the
august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your
petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave
like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of
like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
Birth Control
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated
curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which
might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these
weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be
mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the
slams of our great cities---the degenerate, the defective, the
insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There
exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing
the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their
hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and
so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a
simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind
and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead
of as animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums
of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified,
poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after
another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and
seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born-until
finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up
and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women,
in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the
primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr.
Wm. J. Robinson has estimated that in the United States alone
there are a million abortions every year; and consider that all
this hideous mass of suffering--a bloody European war going on
continually, unheeded by any newspaper correspondent--might be
avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula, which we are
not permitted to give! The Federation of Catholic Societies have
placed a law upon the statute-books of the nation, and of all the
states as well; the whole power of police and courts and jails is
at the service of religious bigots, and a young girl is sent to
prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling
poverty-ridden, slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant!
And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors
who perpetrated this infamy under a so-called "reform"
administration in New York City--and what do you find? The first
thing you find is that they themselves, one and all, practice
birth-control with their wives or their mistresses. The second
thing you find is that the statute-books are crowded with other
laws which they make no pretense of enforcing; for example, the
law which forbids the saloons to be open on Sunday--which law
they take the liberty of understanding to mean that the saloons
shall not have their front doors open on Sunday. You will find
that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos; they are
afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid of
the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the
women of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we
discover the wolf in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of
Tradition-worship; hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden
aunts and grandmothers, who repeat the instructions which God
gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
earth." As if God were as blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and
could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full of all
fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and
a modern East Side tenement-room, with an oil stove and no
windows and no water-closet, and the price of cabbage seven cents
a pound!
Sheep
There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in
America. They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property,
and in the West and South they dominate the intellectual life of
the country. I do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them.
They are far more democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight
valiantly against the liquor traffic and those forms of graft
which are obvious, or directly derived from vice. There are among
their clergy many men who are honestly seeking light, and trying
to make their institutions a factor for progress. But they are
caught in the spirit of Lutheran scholasticism, narrow and
ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they cannot help it, because
they are pledged by their creeds and foundations to
Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things because
their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain ways,
because of certain facts which existed in the world three
thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.
You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the
example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all
the rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the
stick may have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist
explains this seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once
lived in high mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly
rushing herds; when the leader leaped across an abyss, the others
had to leap, without waiting to see in the dust and confusion.
Now there are no mountains and no enemies, but the sheep still
jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still sews buttons
at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred years
ago all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad
builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to
overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled by
mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in
spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete
protection against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat
meat on Friday, because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that
day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's
sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox
Baptist requires total immersion in a climate quite different
from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy
fresh air and exercise on the Sabbath.
In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life,
tending sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent
thing for them to rest from labor one day of the week, and to
gather in temples to hear the reading of the best literature of
their time. But nowadays the city slave spends his week-days shut
up in an office, poring over a ledger, or in a sweat-shop,
chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously, therefore, the thing to
do on the seventh day is to lure him into the open air, and
persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we human sheep?
We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern statute-books, and
if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries to play
base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next
morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.
In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and
enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there
are tennis courts built and paid for out of public funds, my own
included; yet I cannot use these tennis courts on Sunday, because
of the ancient Hebrew taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the
swimming pool in the park is closed to me, the library is closed
nearly all day. If I enquire about it, I am told that it is
desirable that city employees should have one day's rest a week;
but when I ask why it might not be possible to relay the
employees, so that they might all have one, or even two days'
rest a week, and still give the public their rights on Sunday,
there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when
their peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law
enforces a general boredom, the public may be more disposed to
endure the boredom of sermons.
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving
pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule,
the picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred
concerts"--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come
to mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to
the imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna
Held and Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our
times, such as Ibsen and Brieux.
I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an
experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this
century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American
democracy, whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and
forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship, I
was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state
prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I
was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate,
duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a
stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full
of vermin--in a building housing some five hundred wretches,
black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under
circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air
nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise
court to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to
speak to one another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and
walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had their only
occupation working for a sweat-shop contractor; this on the
outskirts of the capital city of Wilmington, with no less than
ninety-one churches! The writer was informed that he would return
to this institution regularly every week unless he abandoned his
godless habit of playing tennis on a private club court on
Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making the
discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom
of the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every
Sunday, and by threatening to employ detectives and have these
mighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows
again the importance of understanding the relationship of
Superstition and Big Business!
BOOK SIX
The Church of the Quacks
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
Clough.
Tabula Rasa
Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which
to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our
intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been
taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom.
I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the
climate. I find that what freedom means in the West is the
ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new,
fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new
cult around it, and earn a living out of it.
My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the
Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found
myself in a nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or
so ago some odd character hit upon the discovery that the
Christian churches had let the devil snare them into resting on
the first day of the week, whereas the Bible states distinctly
that the Lord "rested on the seventh day". So here is a million
dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients and
employees, and on Friday at sundown the silence of death settles
upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of Saturday, when
everything comes suddenly to life again, and there is a little
celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I used to call
"sterilized dancing"--the men pairing with men and the women with
women.
They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with
their eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways,
because, as not all the city shares their delusions, there are
some stores open every day of the week. But then you discover
that the Sanitarium is training "medical missionaries" to send to
Africa, and is teaching these supposed-to-be-scientists that
evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and not proven anyhow!
You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this
establishment alone in his office, and he will smile and admit
that of course it is not necessary to take all Bible phrases
literally; but you know how it is--there are different levels of
intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know how it is. You have an
institution founded upon a certain dogma, and run by means of
that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing things. It
is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the
patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay
high prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make
vegetarians of them, which you think more important than teaching
abstract notions about their being descended from monkeys. Also
you can manufacture vegetarian foods for them, and build up an
enormous business--so obtaining that Power which is the thing
desired of men.
This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could
cite a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of
another sect, the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive
Methodists, Bible-worshippers not content with the King James
version, but going back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a
"University", located in one of the most beautiful spots that
Nature ever made; an institution with seventy-five students. A
couple of years ago I happened to meet the "president," who was a
preacher with grease on the ample expanse of his black broadcloth
waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest grammatical errors,
such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year witnessed a split,
and the founding of a brand new church and "University"--because
one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so much that the
students got no chance to study; also because he sent home a rich
man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her
fleshly nature.
And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking
you back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady
friend of mine, generously blessed with this world's goods, asks
me have I seen the hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies,
"Didn't you know there was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a
cave, and never has anything to do with the world. He has no
books; he contemplates spiritually." I picture my friend with her
large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies, drawing up at
the door of this hermit's cave. "He received you?" I ask. "Yes,
he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh,
how he stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my
friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to
her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite
physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.
The Book of Mormon
Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a
still stranger cult.
On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the
Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth
in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had
"the appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is
the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places
and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of
life; so, as devout believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In
this case the plates were written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the
Angel thoughtfully provided Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and
Thummim, two magic stones with which to read the records. They
proved to deal with a mystery which has haunted the minds of
Bible students for centuries--the fate of the "lost ten tribes
of Israel", who were now revealed to have been the ancestors of
the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a new
religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general;
so, on the 6th of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N. Y.,
there was formally launched the "Church of the Latter Day
Saints." Smith turned over to his followers his translation of
the miraculous plates, called "The Book of Mormon"; obviously
genuine, for it read precisely like the books which we already
know are the revealed word of God. But, on chance that this might
not be sufficient, we were offered in the preface two documents,
the "Testimony of Three Witnesses", and the "Further Testimony of
Eight Witnesses". The latter being the shorter, may be quoted:
Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, unto
whom this work shall come: That Joseph Smith Jr., the translator
of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of which hath been
spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the
leaves as the said Smith hath translated, we did handle with our
hands; and we also saw the engravings there-on, all of which has
the appearance of ancient work and of curious workmanship. And
this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith
has shewn unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a
surety that the said Smith hath got the plates of which we have
spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to witness that
which we have seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.
Christian Whitmer
Jacob Whitmer
Peter Whitmer, Jr.
John Whitmer
Hiram Page
Joseph Smith, Sr.
Hyrum Smith
Saml. H. Smith
The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore
out the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its divine
origin; it was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted,
and its followers proceeded to massacre the nearby unbelieving
populations, just as the divinely guided Hebrews had done. Driven
from place to place, they built at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful
temple, according to plans revealed in a vision, exactly like
Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where they have a
magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers. The
United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected
to their practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have
as many wives as they could support; the government confiscated
the church's property, and forced it to conceal the practice of
polygamy, as is done by elderly church members in other parts of
the country. Recently the head of the church, who bears the title
of "Prophet, Seer and Revelator", was persuaded to permit an
examination of one of its secret plates, the "Book of Abraham",
by egyptologists, who found that it was ordinary Egyptian
hieroglyphics, not "reformed", but containing prayers to the
sun-god. But this will of course make no difference to the devout
followers of Joseph--any more than it has made to devout
Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that
the Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and
that the four gospels date from the second and third centuries
after Christ.
Holy Rolling
All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults, some of
them pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely
grotesque. Thus, for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who
founded the "Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed
himself up in scarlet and purple robes with stars on. Through his
Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Company he became enormously
wealthy; he finally announced himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I
remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to New York, and P.
T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white elephant never made such a
sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis overwhelmed the old
prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and his tabernacle
and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the rule of
all religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting
up, and suing one another in the law-courts.
Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers", ghastly
sects which cultivate the religious hysterias, and have spread
like a plague among the women of our lonely prairie farms and
desert ranches. The "Holy Rollers", who call themselves the
"Apostolic Church", have a meeting place here in Pasadena, and
any Sunday evening at nine o'clock you may see the Spirit of the
Lord taking possession of the worshippers, causing moans and
shrieks and convulsions; you may see a woman holding her hands
aloft for seventeen minutes by the watch, making chattering
sounds like an ape. This is called "talking in tongues" and is a
sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come back at
eleven in the evening, you will find the entire congregation, men
and women, prostrate on the floor, or hanging over the benches;
and maybe a child moaning in terror, having a devil cast out.
You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself
into these convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust", which is
"published Monthly (D. V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work
and Bible Training School." Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The
Pentecostal Baptism", and tells the story of her experiences. She
"camped on the Word of God," she declares.
I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the mission
told me, "You can go down to the mission and stay there all day.
There is plenty of wood, and you can stay there all night." I
went down, and there was plenty of "let go" in me. I cried, and
prayed all I knew, and got wonderfully loosed.....
Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God told me it
was mine. What was there left for me to pray about. He spoiled my
praying and I took up praising. I praised God that He who worked
in the Upper Room was working the same in me. I praised, and I
praised, and I praised. The devil said to me, "That's
mechanical." I said, "I'll praise You Lord, and if You want real
praise, You'll have to put the wind in the sails."
That's the way I came through. One morning I was just getting out
of bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the enemy likes to call
it, began to come. The Lord said, "Let it babble!" I let. The
babble increased, and by night I was up to my neck. I let. I
still let. That's all. Someone else does the work, and it does
not tire you.
And here is another paper. "Meat in Due Season: published
monthly, or as often as the Lord leads." The editor quotes the
Bible, "Call upon the name of the Lord," and explains that "Call
means call." The word appears to have a special meaning to these
pentecostal persons--it means working yourself into a frenzy of
agitation; as the editor puts it, "you must lay hold of the horns
of the altar." He goes on to exhort--the bold face being his:
Pray as if your very life depended upon it! The first few minutes
seemingly all the powers of hell will contend every word, the
next few, relief in a measure will come, more liberty in calling.
In a very little while you will be dead to the room, dead to the
chair, dead to everyone around you, dead to all and tremendously
alive to your desperate need and emptyness; this conviction will
grow as you increase calling upon Him. It maybe you'll weep, it
maybe you'll perspire, it maybe your clothing will be deranged,
it, maybe your throat will get sore. Never for a moment let your
mind rest on the condition of your person. Open your mouth and
God has promised to fill it. Ask persistently until the very
floor seems to sink beneath you and the fountains of the deep, of
your heart let loose. Like David, "pour out your soul" like one
would pour water out of a bucket. I have seen hundreds get
through right at this point. When self-thought, reticence,
decorum, reserve, propriety and dignity had all been thrown to
the four winds of heaven. Self was then obliterated and
consciousness of person gone. Draw near to God and He will draw
near to you saith the scripture, but you must draw near to Him
first.
These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a sect
which originated in England, but was driven by persecution to the
New World. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of
True Believers in Christ's Second Coming," and were founded by
Ann Lee, who, variously termed herself the "Female Christ", the
"Holy Comforter", and the "God-anointed Woman". They might be
termed the suffragettes of religion, for they pray always to "Our
Father and Mother, which are in heaven." They were taught the
convenient doctrine that their Founder had "spiritual
illumination", so that any evidence of the senses used against
her might deceive. She governed through terror, holding that by
her mental powers she could inflict torment upon any of her
followers. Fortunately she taught absolute celibacy, and so there
are now only about a thousand of her disciples.
Bible Prophecy
This far western country swarms with those fanatics who await the
return of Christ, and find in Bible chronology positive evidence
that he is coming on a specified day. Seldom do I give a lecture
on Socialism that some eager old lady does not come up to me and
point out how futile are my hopes, because the 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 to
shout and sing and pray, expecting the vision of the Lord and His
Angels in the skies. I have in my hand a pamphlet entitled
"Shekineh: The Glory of God in Israel, Facts Mathematically
Foretold, of the Soon Coming of Our Blessed Lord." It is
earnestly, yearningly written, in that spirit of feeble-minded
affectionateness which the Bible-sects seem to encourage:
Now dear reader you see that these problems tell a wonderful
story which I know are the Eternal Truths of God. Jesus is soon
coming. I believe that from now on we can say, next week perhaps
our blessed Lord will return. Yet the time may not end till the
close of the A. M. year, which will be March 20th, 1897. But let
us take up the sickle of God, etc. Oh, my Christian friends, live
near the Blessed Christ, and gain eternal life through Jesus Our
Lord!
In the public library I find another pamphlet, entitled "The Our
Race," which proves that the "lost ten tribes of Israel" are not
the American Indians, but the Irish! And here is a publication of
the "Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society," declaring:
The great pyramid in Egypt is a witness to all the events of the
ages and of our day. The pyramid's downward passage under "a
Draconis" symbolizes the course of Sin. Its first ascending
passage symbolizes the Jewish Age. Its Grand Gallery symbolizes
the Gospel Age. Its upper step symbolizes the approaching period
of tribulation and anarchy, "Judgment" upon Christendom.
It is a Sunday morning, and I sit in the California sunshine
revising this manuscript, when a decorous-looking young man
approaches, having a sack over his shoulder. "From the
Bible-students," he says politely, and hands me a little paper,
"The Bible Students' Monthly: an Independent, Unsectarian
Religious Newspaper, Specially devoted to the Forwarding of the
Laymen's Home Missionary Movement for the Glory of God and Good
of Humanity." The leading article is headed "The Fall of Babylon:
Ancient Babylon a Type--Mystic Babylon the Antitype: Why
Christendom must Suffer--the Final Outcome." A note explains:
The following article is extracted from Pastor Russell's
posthumous volume entitled "The Finished Mystery," the 7th in the
series of his Studies in the Scriptures and published subsequent
to his death. Pastor Russell held the distinction of being the
most fearless and powerful writer of modern times on
ecclesiastical subjects. In this posthumous volume, which is
called "his last legacy to the Christians on earth," is found a
thorough exposition of every verse in the entire book of
Revelation and also an elucidation of the obscure prophecy of
Ezekiel. The book contains 608 pages, handsomely bound in
embossed cloth.
Pastor Russell used to publish a two-column sermon in some
hundreds of Sunday newspapers, together with a presentment of his
features--solemn, stiff, white-whiskered, set off with a "choker"
and a black broadcloth coat. There are five million such faces in
America, but if you have an impulse to despair for your country,
remember that it produced Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, as well as
Pastor Russell and the Moody and Sankey hymn-book. I quote one
passage from "The Finished Mystery", in order that the reader may
know what it means to "hold the distinction of being the most
fearless and powerful writer of modern times on ecclesiastical
subjects." Pastor Russell does not approve of the Methodists, and
he quotes twelve verses of Revelation, line by line and phrase by
phrase, showing how the evil course and downfall of the Wesleyan
system were divinely foretold. Thus:
"But that they should be tormented five months."--In symbolic
time, 150 years--5 X 30 = 150. (Ezek. 4:6.) Wesley became the
first Methodist in 1728. (Rev. 9:1.) When the Methodist
denomination, with all the others, was cast off from favor in
1878 (Rev. 3:14) its powers to torment men by preaching what
Presbyterians describe as "Conscious misery, eternal in duration"
came to an end legally, and to a large extent actually--Rev.
9:10.
P. S. A few months pass, and while this book is going to press,
"The Finished Mystery" is suppressed by the government and
several score "Bible Students" are landed in jail for sedition.
Koreshanity
Such are the beliefs built on the Bible. But there are other
ancient writings with strange nomenclature and ritual and
symbolism, calculated to impress the unlettered; also our
prophets have imaginations of their own, and can invent
nomenclature and ritual and symbolism never seen in heaven nor on
earth before. Thus there is Dr. Newo Newi New, who called himself
"Archbishop of the Newthot Church," and gathered about him a
harem of devoted females in San Francisco, and was landed in jail
for using the mails to defraud. Or there is "Oahspe, the Cosmic
Bible," a work of brand-new revelation with a brand-new view of
the universe and all things therein:
The reader soon discovers that he must radically revise not only
his ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the order and significance
of names and titles commonly applied to the Transcendental
Brethren. The great provinces of Etheria are presided over by
chiefs, chosen for their superior development in wisdom and love.
For our solar system to cross one of these provinces requires
about 3,000 years, and between them are belts of high Etherian
light which take several years to pass over. The passage of each
province is a cycle of earthly history, and the crossings are
called Dawns of Dan.
And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed by the Lord to
Dr. C. R. Teed of Chicago in the year 1889. This new seer took
the name of Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, "the Shepherd from
Joseph, the Stone of Israel, the Sun-Man; the illuminating center
of the Son of man", and went out on the streets of the city to
preach that the earth is a hollow sphere with the stars inside.
The street urchins of the pork-packing metropolis threw stones at
him, and the irreverent newspapers took up his adventures, with
the result that followers gathered, and now there is a
flourishing colony in Florida, with a dignified magazine called
"The Flaming Sword", and a collection of propaganda volumes: "The
Cellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of Koreshan Universology and
the New Geodesy"; "The Immortal Manhood, the Laws and Processes
of its Attainment in the Flesh"; "The Great Red Dragon, by Lord
Chester"; "The Coming of the Shepherd from Joseph, The Standing
of the Great Ensign, by Koresh." The "Religio-science" of this
Chicago revelator is based, first upon some precise measurements
of the earth which prove that its surface is concave; and second
upon some philological discoveries very much resembling puns.
Thus the "cross of Christ" is explained in a sense of the word
more common among horse-breeders than among theologians:
The highest characteristic of the alchemical law is the cross of
Christ with sensual man. The cross means that the Lord God, in
order to perpetuate his own being, descends into the race of
sensuality.
And again, when someone asks about meteors:
"The word Heaven means things heaved up, that is, heaved up from
their material basis, the earth; thus, the meteors which fall to
the earth are composed of metallic, mineral, and geological
substances, being materialized or actually created in the
atmosphere by an alchemico-organic process from zones or belts
periodically open, which precipitate their contents in the form
or shape of meteors."
And perhaps I ought also to quote the "Indicia of Human
Progress", by "Berthaldine, Matrona". I don't know what a
"Matrona" is--unless it is a female matron. This female matron
tells me that now is the "Time of Restitution", and explains that
"the prolification of the human race has reached a fruition of
the adultery of the truth and good of the Lord with the fallacies
and evils of the mortal hells"..... We have come, it seems, to
the "age of Pisces", which is "one of the greatest radical
prolification"; and what we now need is the "power of
polarization", so that we may join the "White Horse Army of the
Most High", which is the organization of the "Aquarian age",
proclaimed by Koresh on January 15th, 1891.
Mazdaznan
And here is another and even more startling revelation from
Chicago, given to a seer by the name of Dr. Otoman Prince of
Adusht Ha'nish, prophet of the Sun God, Prince of Peace, Manthra
Magi of Temple El Katman, Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and
Envoy of Mazdaznan living, Viceroy-Elect and International Head
of Master-Thot. If you had happened to live near the town of
Mendota, Illinois, and had known the German grocer-boy named Otto
Hanisch, you might at first have trouble in recognizing him
through this transmogrification. I have traced his career in the
files of the Chicago newspapers, and find him herding sheep,
setting type, preaching prestidigitation, mesmerism, and fake
spiritualism, joining the Mormon Church, then the "Christian
Catholic Church in Zion", and then the cult of Brighouse, who
claimed to be Christ returned. Finally he sets himself up in
Chicago as a Persian Magi, teaching Yogi breathing exercises and
occult sex-lore to the elegant society ladies of the pork-packing
metropolis. The Sun God, worshipped for two score centuries in
India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on Lake Park
Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at which his disciples
are fed on lilac-blossoms--"the white and pinkish for males, the
blue-tinted for females". He wears a long flowing robe of pale
grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid shoes,
and he sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner Studies",
price five dollars per volume, with information on such subjects
as:
The Immaculate Conception and its Repetition; The Secrets of
Lovers Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates; Magnetic Attraction
and Electric Mating.
A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jail for six
months; but that does not harm his cult, which now has a temple
in Chicago, presided over by a lady called Kalantress and
Evangelist; also a "Northern Stronghold" in Montreal, an
"Embassy" in London, an "International Aryana" in Switzerland,
and "Centers" all over America. At the moment of going to press,
the prophet himself is in flight, pursued by a warrant charging
him with improper conduct with a number of young boys in a Los
Angeles hotel.
I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a farrago of
every kind of ancient mysticism--paper and binding from the
Bible, illustrations from the Egyptian, names from the
Zoroastrian, health rules from the Hindoos, laws from the
Confucians--price ten dollars per volume. Would you like to
discover your seventeen senses, to develop them according to the
GaLlama principle, and to share the "expansion of the magnetic
circles"? Here is the way to do it:
Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one
exhalation, speak slowly:
Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth hidden
by the vase of dazzling light.
Again inhale for four seconds, and breathe out the following
sentence upon one exhalation as before:
Soften the radiation of Thy Illuminating Splendor, that I may
behold Thy True Being.
I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of the
prophet's arriving there. He takes the front page with the
captivating headline: "Women Didn't Think Till They Put On
Corsets". The interview tells about his mysteriousness, his
aloofness, his bird-like-diet, and his personal beauty. "Despite
his seventy-three years, Ha'nish evidences no sign of age. His
keen blue eyes showed no sign of wavering. There were no wrinkles
on his face, and his walk was that of a man of forty." The humor
of this becomes apparent when we mention that at Ha'nish's trial,
three or four years 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 statements that the
Mazdaznan prophet is a millionaire. But there is no doubt that he
is wealthy; and as all Americans wish to be wealthy, I will quote
his formula of prosperity, his method of accomplishing what might
be called the Individual Revolution:
When hungry and you do not know where to get your next piece of
bread, do not despair. Thy Father, all-loving, has provided you
with everything that will meet all cases of emergency. Place your
teeth tightly together, with tongue pressing against the lower
teeth and lips parted. Breathe in, close lips immediately,
exhaling through the nostrils. Breathe again; if saliva forms in
your mouth, hold your breath so you can swallow it first before
you exhale. You thus take out of the air the metal-substance
contained therein; you can even taste the iron which you convert
into substance required for making the blood. Should you feel
that, although you have sufficient iron in the blood, there is a
lack of copper and zinc and silver, place upper teeth over lower,
keep lower lip tightly to lower teeth, now breathe and you can
even taste the metals named. Then should you feel you need more
gold element for your brain functions, place your back teeth
together just as if you were to grind the back teeth, taking
short breaths only. You will then learn to know that there is
gold and silver all around us. That our bodies are filled with
quite a quantity of gold.
Black Magic
What all this means is that we have a continent, with a hundred
million half-educated people, materially prosperous, but
spiritually starving; so any man who possesses personality, who
looks in any way strange and impressive, or has hunted up old
books in a library, and can pronounce mysterious words in a
thrilling voice--such a man can find followers. Anybody can do it
with any doctrine, from anywhere, Persia or Patagonia, Pekin or
Pompei. I would be willing to wager that if I cared to come out
and announce that I had had a visit from God last night, and to
devote such literary and emotional power as I possess to
communicating a new revelation, I could have a temple, a
university, and a million dollars within five years at the
outside. And if at the end of five years I were to announce that
I had played a joke on the world, some one of my followers would
convince the faithful that I had been an agent of God without
knowing it, and that the leadership had now been turned over to
him.
I would not be understood as believing that all our cults are
undiluted fakery, for that would be doing injustice to some
earnest people. There are, in this country, many followers of the
Persian reformer, Abbas Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and
who have what I am inclined to think is the purest and most
dignified religion in existence. There was a man named Jacob
Beilhardt, who founded a cult in Illinois with the painful name
of "Spirit Fruit Colony", who nevertheless was a man of spiritual
insight, a true mystic; he was honest, and so he failed, and died
of a broken heart. Also there are the Christian Scientists and
the Theosophists, so exasperating that one would like to throw
them onto the rubbish-heap, who yet compel us to sift over their
mountains of chaff for the grains of truth which will bear fruit
in future.
While we western races have been exploring the natural world and
perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo students have been
exploring the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and
Lodge and Janet and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us
today they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtless they have
hints of other things, upon which our scientists have not yet
come. I have friends, perfectly sane and competent people, who
tell me that they can see auras, and use this ability as a means
of judging character. Shall I say that there are no auras, simply
because I do not happen to have this gift of seeing them? In the
same way, having read Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living," I am
not ready to ridicule the claim of the Yogi adepts, that they are
able to project some kind of astral body, and to communicate with
one another from distant places. But granting such occult powers
in a world of economic strife, what follows? Simply new floods of
charlatanism, elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and
metaphysic for the deluding and plundering of the credulous.
I have seen the thing working itself out in one case known to me.
A young man had a gift of mental healing; I know, because I saw
it work; but it did not always work, and that was annoying. He
was penniless and had a taste for power, and to eke out his
erratic endowment he got himself books of Eastern lore, and day
by day as I watched him I could see him becoming more and more
impressive, mysterious and forbidding. Today he is a full-fledged
wonder-worker, with the language of a dozen mystic cults at his
tongue's end, and the reverent regard of many wealthy ladies. I
have never tried to break through his guard, but I feel certain
that he is a deliberate charlatan.
This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible. Just as
the manufacturer of honest foods is driven out by the
adulterator, so the worker of miracles drives out the sincere
investigator. As a result we have here in America a plague of
Eastern cults, with "swamis" using soft yellow robes and soft
brown eyes to win the souls of idle society ladies. These
teachers of ancient Hindoo lore despise us as a race of
barbarians; but they stay--whether because of love of man or
woman, I do not pretend to say.
There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and
institutes and temples and colonies, and a doctrine as complex
and detailed and fantastic as that of the Roman Catholics. I have
already referred to the writings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway
Russian army officer's daughter, whose career reads like a tale
out of the Arabian Nights. And there is Annie Besant, who was
once an ardent worker in the Social-democratic Federation; H. M.
Hyndman tells of his dismay when she went to India and walked in
a procession between two white bulls! Here in California is
Madame Tingley, with a colony and a host of followers in a
miniature paradise. Men work at money-lending or manufacturing
sporting-goods, and when they get old and tired they make the
thrilling discovery that they have souls; the theosophists
cultivate these souls and they leave their money to the
soul-cause, and there are lawsuits and exposes in the newspapers.
For, you see, there is ferocious rivalry in the game of
cultivating millionaire souls; there are slanders and feuds, just
as in soulless affairs. "Don't have anything to do with Madame
Tingley," whispers a Theosophist lady to my wife; and when my
wife in all innocence inquires, "Why not?" the awe-stricken
answer comes, "She practices black magic!"
Let me add that I do not say that she practices black magic. I do
not believe that she could practice it, even if she wanted to--I
do not believe in black magic. My purpose is merely to show how
theosophists quarrel: going back to the days of Anu and Baal and
the bronze image of the Babylonian fire-god:
Let them die, but let me live! Let them be put under a ban, but
let me prosper! Let them perish, but let me increase! Let them
become weak, but let me wax strong!
Mental Malpractice
This is the other side of the fair shield of religious faith.
Why, if there be a power which loves and can be persuaded to aid
us, may there not also be a power which hates, and can be
persuaded to destroy? No religion has ever been able to answer
this, and therefore none has ever been able to escape from
devil-terrors. Even Jesus was pursued by Satan, and the Holy
Catholic Church has its ceremonies for the exorcising of demons,
and a most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our
friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of
all evil, their ability to banish disease by convincing
themselves that they are perfect in God--yet tormented by a
squalid phobia called "Mental Malpractice", or "Malicious Animal
Magnetism".
Christian Science is the most characteristic of American
religious contributions. Just as Billy Sunday is the price we pay
for failing to educate our base-ball players, so Mary Baker
Glover Patterson Eddy is the price we pay for failing to educate
our farmer's daughters.
That she had a power to cure disease I do not doubt, because I
have a little of it myself. At first my opinion was that her
"Science" made its way by curing the imaginary ailments of the
idle rich. If a person has nothing to do but think that he is
sick, you can work easy miracles by persuading him to think that
he is well; and if he has nothing to do but think that he is
well, he will help you to build marble churches and maintain
propaganda societies. But recently I have experimented with
mental healing--enough to satisfy myself that the subconscious
mind which controls our physical functions can be powerfully
influenced by the will.
I told the story of some of these experiments in Hearst's
Magazine for April, 1914. Suffice it here to say that if you will
lay your hands upon a sick person, forming a vivid mental picture
of the bodily changes you desire, and concentrating the power of
your will upon them, you may be surprised by the results,
especially if you possess anything in the way of psychic gifts.
You do not have to adopt any theories, you do not have to do it
in the name of any divinity, ancient or modern; the only bearing
of such ideas is that they serve to persuade people to make the
experiment, and to make it with persistence and intensity. So it
has come about that "miracles" of healing are associated with
"faith"; and so it comes about that scientists are apt to flout
the subject. But read of the work of Janet and Charcot and their
followers at the Salpetriere; they have proven that all kinds of
seeming-organic ailments may be entirely hysterical in nature,
and may be cured by the simplest form of suggestion.
Understanding this, you may find it more easy to credit the fact
that cripples do sometimes throw away their crutches in the
grotto of Lourdes. For my part, I can believe that Jesus
performed all the miracles of healing attributed to him
--including the raising up of people pronounced to be dead by the
ignorance of that time. I am convinced that in the new science of
psycho-analysis we have a universe as vast as the universe of the
atom or of the stars.
The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they have
mixed it up with metaphysic and divinity, and built some four or
five hundred churches, and printed the Mother Church alone knows
how many million pamphlets and books. I once invested three of my
hard-earned dollars for a copy of the Eddy Bible, and let myself
be stunned and blinded by the flapping of metaphysical wings. It
is unadulterated moonshine--as the Platonist and Berkeleyan and
Hegelian and other orthodox collegiate metaphysical magi can
prove to you in one minute. What interests me about the
phenomenon 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 Christian Science; what it is for is to
remove your wen, to nail down your floating kidney, and to enable
you to hustle and make money. We saw in our politics the growth
of a Party of the Full Dinner-Pail; contemporaneous therewith,
and corresponding thereto, we see in our religious life the
development of a Church of the Full Pocket-Book.
It is a strict religion--strictly cash. The heads of the cult do
not issue cheap editions of "Science and Health, With Key to the
Scriptures", to relieve the suffering of the proletariat; no--the
work is copyrighted, in all its varying and contradictory
editions, and the price is from three to seven-fifty, according
to binding. Treatments cost from three dollars to ten, whether
you come and get them or take them over the telephone. And we
have no nonsense about charity, we don't worry about the poor who
fester in our city slums; because poverty is a product of Mortal
Mind, and we offer to all men a way to get rich right off the
bat. You may come to our marble churches and hear people testify
how through the power of Divine Mind they were enabled to
anticipate a rise in the stock-market. If you don't avail
yourself of the opportunity, the fault is yours, and yours also
the punishment.
As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholic hierarchy
is a Bolshevik democracy in comparison. The Church is controlled
by an absolutely irresponsible self-perpetuating body of five
men, who alone dictate its policy. I have in my hand a letter
from a Christian Science healer who was listed as an "authorized
practitioner", and who withdrew from the Church because of its
attitude on public questions. He sends me a copy of his
correspondence with the editors of the "Christian Science
Monitor", containing a detailed analysis of the position of that
paper on such issues as the Ballinger land-frauds. He writes:
I am thoroughly convinced now that the policy of the Church is
consciously plutocratic. The only recommendation I have heard of
the latest appointee to the Board of Directors is that he is one
of the richest men in the movement.
After the Titanic disaster, Senator La Follette brought in a
carefully drawn bill to compel steamship companies to provide
life-boats and trained crews. The "Christian Science Monitor"
opposed this bill; and when my correspondent cited the fact, he
brought out a quaint bit of metaphysical logic, as follows:
One would prefer to travel on a vessel without a single boat,
rather than on some other vessels which were loaded down with
life-boats, where the government of Mind was not understood!
Science and Wealth
The truth is that the brand of Mammon was on our Yankee religion
from the day of its birth. In the first edition of her new Bible
"Mother" Eddy dropped the hint to her readers: "Men of business
have said this science was of great advantage from a secular
point of view." And in her advertisements she threw aside all
pretense, declaring that her work "Affords an opportunity to
acquire a profession by which one can accumulate a fortune." When
her pupils did accumulate, she boasted of their success; nor did
she neglect her own accumulating.
It has been a dozen years since I looked into this cult; in order
to be sure that it has not been purified in the interim, I
proceed to a street corner in my home city, where is a stand with
a sign: "Christian Science Literature." I take four sample
copies of a magazine, the "Christian Science Sentinel", published
by the Mother Church in Boston, and turn to the "Testimonials of
Healing". In the issue of August 11, 1917, Mary C. Richards of
St. Margarets-on-Thames, England, testifies: "Through a number of
circumstances unnecessary to relate, but proving conclusively
that the result came not from man but from God, employment was
found." In the issue of December 2, 1916, Frances Tuttle of
Jersey City, N. J., testifies how her sister was successfully
treated for unemployment by a scientist practitioner. "Every
condition was beautifully met." In the same issue Fred D. Miller
of Los Angeles, Cal., testifies: "Soon after this wonderful truth
came to me, Divine Love led me to a new position with a
responsible firm. The work was new to me, but I have given entire
satisfaction, and my salary has been advanced twice in less than
a year." In the issue of January 27, 1917, Eliza Fryant of
Agricola, Miss., testifies how she cured her little dog of
snake-bite and removed two painful corns from her own foot. In
the issue of August 4, 1917, Marcia E. Gaier, of Everett, Wash.,
testifies how it suddenly occurred to her that because God is
All, she would drop her planning and outlining in regard to real
estate properties, "upon which for nine months all available
material methods were tried to no effect." The result was a
triumph of "Principle".
While working in the yard one morning and gratefully communing
with God, the only power, I suddenly felt that I should stop
working and prepare for visitors on their way to look at the
property. I obeyed this very distinct command, and in about an
hour I greeted two people who had searched almost the entire city
for just what we had to offer. They had been directed to our
place by what to material sense would seem an accident, but we
know it was the divine law of harmony in its universal operation.
After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, in a Christian
Science lecture at Kansas City, Mo., should proclaim:
My friends, do you know that since the world began Christian
Science is the only system which has intelligently related
religion to business? Christian Science shows that since all
ideas belong to Mind, God, therefore all real business belongs to
Him.
As I said, these people have the new-old power of mental healing,
They blunder along with it blindly, absurdly, sometimes with
tragic consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the
pill-doctors know nothing about this power, and regard it with
contempt mingled with fear; so of course the hosts of sufferers
whom the pill-doctors cannot help flock to the healers of the
"Church of Christ, Scientist". According to the custom of those
who are healed by "faith", they swallow line, hook, and sinker,
creed, ritual, metaphysic and divinity. So we see in
twentieth-century America precisely what we saw in B. C.
twentieth-century Assyria--a host of worshippers, giving their
worldly goods without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of
fanatics and partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise
of graft, and harvesting that thing desired of all men, power
over the lives and destinies of others.
And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one
another's Mortal Minds, they drive one another out, they snarl
over the spoils like a pack of hungry animals. Listen to the
Mother, denouncing one of her students--a perfectly amiable and
harmless youth whose only offense was that he had gone his own
way and was healing the sick for the benefit of his own
pocket-book:
Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the
sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put
out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track
with the trophies of thy guilt--I say, Behold the "cloud" no
bigger than a man's hand already rising on the horizon of Truth,
to pour down upon thy guilty head the hailstones of doom.
And again:
The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with
the torture of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall
upon his own sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him
remember this when, in the dark recesses of thought, he is
robbing, committing adultery and killing. When he is attempting
to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the
quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life and
giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is
turning back the reviving sufferer to his bed of pain, clouding
his first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that
hour shall point to the tyrant's fate, who falls at length upon
the sword of justice.
New Nonsense
In a certain city of America is a large building given up
entirely to the whims of pretty ladies. Its floors are not floors
but "Promenades", and have walls of glass, behind which, as you
stroll, you see bonnets from Paris and opera cloaks from London,
furs from Alaska and blankets from Arizona, diamonds from South
Africa and beads from the Philippines, grapes from Spain and
cherries from Japan, fortune-tellers from Arabia and
dancing-masters from Petrograd and "naturopaths" from Vienna.
There are seventy-three shops, by actual count, containing
everything that could be imagined or desired by a pretty lady,
whether for her body, or for that vague stream of emotion she
calls her "soul". One of the seventy-three shops is a
"Metaphysical Library", having broad windows, and walls in pastel
tints, and pretty vases with pink flowers, and pretty gray wicker
chairs in which the reader will please to be seated, while we
probe the mysteries of an activity widely spread throughout
America, called "New Thought."
We begin with a shelf of magazines having mystical titles: Azoth;
Master Mind; Aletheian; Words of Power; Qabalah; Comforter;
Adept; Nautilus; True Word; Astrological Bulletin; Unity; Uplift;
Now. And then come shelves of pretty pamphlets, alluring to the
eye and the purse; also shelves of imposing-looking volumes
containing the lore and magic of a score of races and two score
of centuries--together with the very newest manifestations of
Yankee hustle and graft.
As in the case of Christian Science, these New Thoughters have a
fundamental truth, which I would by no means wish to depreciate.
It is a fact that the mysterious Source of our being is infinite,
and that we are only at the beginning of our thinking about it.
It is a fact that by appeal to it we can perform seeming miracles
of mental and moral regeneration; we can stimulate the flow of
nervous energy and of the blood, thus furthering the processes of
bodily healing. But the fact that God is Infinite and Omnipotent
does not bar the fact that He has certain ways of working, which
He does not vary; and that it is our business to explore and
understand these ways, instead of setting our fancies to work
imagining other ways more agreeable to our sentimentality.
Thus, for example, if we want bread, it is God's decree that we
shall plant wheat and harvest it, and grind and bake and
distribute it. Under conditions prevailing at the moment, it
appears to be His decree that we shall store the wheat in
elevators, and ship it in freight cars, and buy it through a
grain exchange, with capital borrowed from a national bank; in
other words, that our daily bread shall be the plaything of
exploiters and speculators, until such a time as we have the
intelligence to form an effective political party and establish
Industrial Democracy. But when you come to study the ways of God
in the literature of the New Thought, do you find anything about
the Millers' Trust and the Bakers' Trust and how to expropriate
these agencies of starvation? You do not!
What you find is Bootstrap-lifting; you find gentlemen and lady
practitioners shutting their eyes and lifting their hands and
pronouncing Incantations in awe-inspiring voices--or in Capital
Letters and LARGE TYPE: "God is infinite, God is All-Loving, GOD
WILL PROVIDE. Bread is coming to you! Bread is coming to you!!
BREAD IS COMING TO YOU!!!"
You think this is exaggeration? If so, it is because you have
never entered the building of the pretty ladies, and sat in the
gray wicker chairs of the metaphysical library. One of the
highest high-priestesses of the cults of New Nonsense is a lady
named Elizabeth Towne, editor of "The Nautilus"; and Priestess
Elizabeth tells you:
I believe the idea that money wants you will help you to the
right mental condition. Be a pot of honey and let it come.
I look over this Priestess' magazine, and find it full of
testimonials and advertisements for the conjuring of prosperity.
"Are you in the success sphere?" asks one exhorter; the next
tells you "How to enter the silence. How to manifest what you
desire. The secret of advancement." Another tells: "How a Failure
at Sixty Won Sudden Success; From Poverty to $40,000 a year--a
Lesson for Old and Young Alike." The lesson, it appears, is to
pay $3.00 for a book called "Power of Will." And here is another
book:
Master Key: Which can unlock the Secret Chamber of Success, can
throw wide the doors which seem to bar men from the Treasure
House of Nature, and bids those enter and partake who are Wise
enough to Understand and broad enough to Weigh the Evidence, firm
enough to Follow their Own Judgment and Strong enough to Make the
Sacrifice Exacted.
"Dollars Want Me"
I turn to the shelves of pamphlets. Here is a pretty one called
"All Sufficiency in All Things," published by the "Unity School
of Christianity", in Kansas City; it explains that God is God,
not merely of the Soul, but also of the Kansas City stockyards.
This divine Substance is ever abiding within us, and stands ready
to manifest itself in whatever form you and I need or wish, just
as it did in Elisha's time. It is the same yesterday, today and
forever. Abundant Supply by the manifestation of the Father
within us, from within outward, is as much a legitimate outcome
of the Christ life or spiritual understanding as is bodily
healing..... "Know that I am God--all of God, Good, all of Good.
I am Life. I am Health. I am Supply. I am the Substance."
And here is W. W. Atkinson of Chicago, author of a work called
"Mind Power". Would you like to be an Impressive Personality? Mr.
Atkinson will tell you exactly how to do it; he will give you the
secret of the Magnetic Handclasp, of the Intense,
Straight-in-the-eye Look; he will tell you what to say, he will
write out for you Incantations which you may pronounce to
yourself, to convince yourself that you have Power, that the
INDWELLING PRESENCE with all its MIGHT is yours. Mr. Atkinson
rebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellow
Bootstrap-lifters to employ these arts for money-making; but you
notice that his magazine, "Advanced Thought", does not decline
the advertisements of such too-practical practitioners.
Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace Wattles,
who tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a Genius", and in another
pamphlet "How to Get What you Want". The thing for you to do is--
Saturate your mentality through and through with the knowledge
that YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO..... Look upon the
peanut-stand merely as the beginning of the department store, and
make it grow; you can.
And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of acquisitiveness:
Hold this consciousness and say with deep, earnest feeling: I CAN
succeed! All that is possible to any one is possible to me. I AM
success. I do succeed, for I am full of the Power of Success.
Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of
the capitalist system--a "soda-jerker", a "counter-jumper", a
book-keeper for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life
are one in ten thousand; but he comes to the Metaphysical
Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry
Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarian clergyman, and then an
extra-high Bootstrap-lifter in San Francisco, an Honorary
Vice-President of the International New Nonsense Alliance. Mr.
Brown will tell our soda-jerker or counter-jumper exactly how to
elevate himself by mental machinery. All calculations of
probabilities are delusions of the senses; if you have faith, you
can move, not merely mountains, but Riker-Hegeman's, Macy's, or
the Steel Trust. "How to Promote Yourself " is the title of one
of Mr. Brown's pamphlets, in which he explains that--
Your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by your faith. A
doubt cuts the connection.
A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its thirtieth
edition, bears the thrilling title of "Dollars Want Me!" In it
Mr. Brown lays claim to being a pioneer:
I believe that this little monograph is the first utterance of
the thought that each individual has the ability so to radiate
his mental forces that he can cause the Dollars to feel him, love
him, seek him, and thus draw at will all things needed for his
unfoldment from the universal supply.
"What are Dollars?" asks our author; and answers:
Dollars are manifestations of the One Infinite Substance as you
are, but, unlike you, they are not Self-Conscious. They have no
power till you give them power. Make them feel this through your
thought-vibrations as you feel the importance of your work. They
will then come to you to be used.
"What is Poverty?" Mr. Brown asks, and answers himself:
Poverty is a mental condition. It can be cured only by the
Affirmation of Power to cure: I am a part of the One, and, in the
One, I possess all! Affirm this and patiently wait for the
manifestation. You have sown the thought seed.
And our author goes on to hand out packages of these
thought-seeds--"Affirmations" as they are called, in the jargon
of the New Conjuring:
I desire a deep consciousness of financial freedom. I desire
that the flow of prosperity become equalized. I desire a greater
consciousness of my power to attract the dollar. The Indwelling
Power cares for my purse. I own whatever I desire. I can afford
to use dollars for my happiness. I always have a good bank
account. I actually see it. My one idea of the law is to use,
use, USE.
Spiritual Financiering
If the symbolism of the Episcopal Church is of the palace, and
that of the non-conformist sects of the counting-house, that of
the International New Nonsense Alliance is of Wall Street and the
"ticker". "What is your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?" asks
William Morris Nichols in the publication of the " 'Now' 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 that last question affirmatively, you are on
the road to become a Master in Spiritual Financiering.
Have you an account with the First (and only) Bank of Spirit? If
not, then you should at once open one therewith. For no one can
afford to keep less than a large deposit of spiritual funds with
that Bank.
And how do you proceed to open your account? It is very simple:
Intend the mind in the direction indicated by your desire. Seek
for the Light and Guidance by which you may open up the way for
your Spiritual Substance, which governs material supply, to reach
you and make you as rich as you ought to be, in freedom and
happiness. All this you can, and when in earnest, will do.
I turn over the advertisements of this publication of the " 'Now'
Folk". One offers "The Business Side of New Thought." Another
offers "The Books Without an If", with your money back IF you are
not satisfied! Another offers land in Bolivia for two dollars an
acre. Another quotes Shakespeare: " 'Tis the mind that makes the
body rich." Another offers two copies of the "Phrenological Era"
for ten cents.
There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which cannot
find dupes among the readers of this New Nonsense. One notice
commands:
Stop! A Revelation! A Book has been written entitled "Strands of
Gold" or "From Darkness into Light!"
Another announces:
The Most Wonderful Book of the Ages: The Acquarian Gospel of
Jesus the Christ, Transcribed from the Book of God's Remembrance,
the Akashic Records.
And here is an advertisement published in Mr. Atkinson's paper:
Numerology: the Universal Adjuster! Do you know: What you appear
to be to others? What you really are? What you want to be? What
would overcome your present and future difficulties? Write to X,
Philosopher. You will receive full particulars of his personal
work which is dedicated to your service. No problem is too big or
too small for Numerology. Understanding awaits you.
And looking in the body of the magazine, you find this
Philosopher imparting some of this Understanding. Would you like,
for example, to understand why America entered the War? Nothing
easier. The vowels of the Words United States of America are
uieaeoaeia, which are numbered 2951561591, which added make 45,
or 4 plus 5 equals 9. You might not at first see what that has to
do with the War--until the Philosopher points out that "9 in the
number of completion, indicating the end of a cosmic cycle."
That, of course, explains everything.
And here is a work on what you perhaps thought to be a dead
science, Astrology. It is called "Lucky Hours for Everybody: A
True System of Planetary Hours by Prof. John B. Early. Price One
Dollar." It teaches you things like this:
Saturn's negative hours are especially good for all matters
relating to gold-mining..... The Sun negative rules the emerald,
the musical note D sharp, and the number four. The lunar hours
are a good time to deal in public commodities, and to hire
servants of both sexes.....
A recent lady visitor informed me that she had made several vain
attempts to transact important business in the hours ruled by
Jupiter, usually held to be fortunate, while she was nearly
always fortunate in what she began in the hours ruled by Saturn.
Upon investigation I found her name was ruled by the Sun
negative, and that she had Capricorn with Saturn therein as her
ascendant at birth, which explains.
And finally, here is a London "scientist", reported in the
"Weekly Unity" of Kansas City, who proves his mental power over
two-horse power oil engines which fail to act. "Going a little
apart, he came back in a few minutes and said: 'The engine is all
right now and will work satisfactorily.' and without any further
difficulty it did." We are told how Dr. Rawson gave a
demonstration of his method to a newspaper reporter the other
day. Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he apparently
became absorbed in deep contemplation and said aloud: "There is
no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter;
all is spirit and manifestation of spirit."
You might at first find difficulty in believing what can be
accomplished by "demonstrations" such as this; not merely are
two-horse power oil engines made to work, but the whole gigantic
machine of Prussian militarism is prevented from working. You may
recall how Arthur Machen's magazine story of the Angels of Mons
was taken up and made into a Catholic legend over-night; now here
is a New-Nonsense legend, complete and perfect, going the rounds
of our Nonsense magazines:
London, Dec. 14.--Shell-proof and bullet-proof soldiers have been
discovered on the European battle-fronts. Heroes with "charmed
lives" are being made every day, according to Frederick L.
Rawson, a London scientist, who insists he has found the
miraculous way by which they are developed. He calls it "audible
treatment". "Practical utilization of the powers of God by right
thinking," is the agency through which Dr. Rawson declares he can
so treat a man that he will not be harmed when hundreds of men
are being shot dead beside him. This amazing treatment includes a
new type of prayer. It is being administered to hundreds of men
audibly, and to hundreds more by letter. Nothing since the war
began has aroused so much talk of modern miracles as have many of
the statements of Dr. Rawson.......
At the taking of a wood there were five hundred yards of "No
Man's Land" to be crossed. Our troops could not get across. Then
Capt. --------, who practices this method of prayer, treated them
for an hour before they started, and not a man was knocked out.
He was the only officer left out of eighty in his brigade. He
simply held onto the fact that man is spiritual and perfect and
could not be touched. A bullet fired from a revolver only five
yards away hit him over the chest, tore his shirt and went out at
the shoulder. But it never penetrated his chest. He was
frequently in a hail of shells and bullets which did not touch
him.
The Graft of Grace
All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religions in a
world of commercial competition. It happens not merely to
Christian Science and New Thought religions, Mazdaznan and
Zionist, Holy Roller and Mormon religions, but to Catholic and
Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Methodist and Baptist religions.
For you see, when you are with the wolves you must howl with
them; when you are competing with fakirs you must fake. The
ordinary Christian will read the claims of the New Thought fakers
with contempt; but have I not shown the Catholic Church
publishing long lists of money-miracles? Have I not shown the
Church of Good Society, our exclusive and aristocratic Protestant
Episcopal communion, pretending to call rain and to banish
pestilence, to protect crops and win wars and heal those who are
"sick in estate"--that is, who are in business trouble?
The reader will say that I am a cynic, despising my fellows; but
that is not so. I am an economic scientist, analyzing the forces
which operate in human societies. I blame the prophets and
priests and healers for their fall from idealism; but I blame
still more the competitive wage-system, which presents them with
the alternative to swindle or to starve.
For, you see, the prophet has to have food. He has frequently got
along with almost none, and with only a rag for clothing; in
Palestine and India, where the climate is warm, a sincere faith
has been possible for short periods. But the modern prophet who
expects to influence the minds of men has to have books and
newspapers; he will find a telephone and a typewriter and
postage-stamps hardly to be dispensed with, also in Europe and
America some sort of a roof over his meeting place. So the
prophet is caught, like all the rest of us, in the net of the
speculator and the landlord. He has to get money, and in order to
get it he has to impress those who already have it--people whose
minds and souls have been deformed by the system of parasitism
and exploitation.
So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he becomes
a martyr, and founds a church which becomes a church of
charlatans. I care not how sincere, how passionately proletarian
a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or
later befalls him in a competitive society--to be the founder of
an organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit of
wolves. That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it befell Ignatius
Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Fox and John Calvin and John
Wesley.
A friend of mine who has made a study of "Spiritualism" describes
to me the conditions in that field. The mediums are people,
mostly women, with a peculiar gift; whether we believe in the
survival of personality, or whether we call it telepathy, does
not alter the fact that they have a rare and special
sensitiveness, a new faculty which science must investigate. They
come, poor people mostly--for the well-to-do will seldom give
their time to exacting and wearisome experiments. They come,
wearing frayed and thin clothing, shivering with cold, obviously
undernourished; and their survival depends upon their producing
"phenomena"--which phenomena are capricious, and will not come at
call. So, what more natural than that mediums should resort to
faking? That the whole field should be reeking with fraud, and
science should be held back from understanding an extraordinary
power of the subconscious mind?
Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies have been telling
us about the wondrous powers of a mulatto-woman, a manicurist at
the city's most fashionable hotel. The other day, out of
curiosity, my wife and I went; the moment the "medium" opened her
mouth my wife recognized her as the person who has been trying
for several months to get me on the telephone to tell me how the
spirit of Jack London is seeking to communicate with me! The
seance was a public one, a gathering composed, half of wealthy
and cultured society-women, and half of confederates, people with
the dialect and manners of a vaudeville troupe. A megaphone was
set in the middle of the floor, the room was made dark, a couple
of hymns were sung, and then the spirit of Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes spoke through the megaphone with a Bowery accent, and gave
communications from relatives and friends of the various
confederates. "Jesus is with us", said Dr. Holmes. "The spirit of
Jesus bids you to study spiritualism." And then came the voice of
a child: "Mamma! Mamma!" "It is little Georgie!" cried Dr.
Holmes; and one of the society ladies started, and answered, and
presently burst into tears. A marvelous piece of
evidence--especially when you recall that the story of this
mother's bereavement had been published in all the papers a
couple of months before!
And this kind of swindling is going on every night in every city
of America. It goes on wholesale for months every summer at Lily
Dale, in New York State, where the spiritualists hold their
combination of Chautauqua and Coney Island. And the same thing is
going on in the field of mental healing, and of all other
"occult" forces and powers, whether real or imaginary. It is
going on with new spiritual fervors, new moral idealisms, new
poetry, new music, new painting, new sculpture. The faker, the
charlatan is everywhere--using the mental and moral and artistic
forces of life as a means of delivering himself from economic
servitude. Everywhere I turn I see it--credulity being exploited,
and men of practical judgment, watching the game and seeing
through it, made hard in their attitude of materialism. How many
men I know who sit by in sullen protest while their wives drift
from one new quackery to another, wasting their income seeking
health and happiness in futile emotionalism! How many kind and
sensitive spirits I know--both men and women--who pour their
treasures of faith and admiration into the laps of hierophants
who began by fooling all mankind and ended by fooling themselves!
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-sacrificing people. They will read this book--if
anyone can persuade them to read it--with pain and anger;
thinking that I am mocking at their faith, and have no
appreciation of their devotion. All that I can say is that I am
trying to show them how they are being trapped, how their fine
and generous qualities are being used by exploiters of one sort
or another; and how this must continue, world without end, until
there is order in the material affairs of the race, until justice
has been established as the law of man's dealing with his
fellows.
BOOK SEVEN
The Church of the Social Revolution
They have taken the tomb of our Comrade Christ--
Infidel hordes that believe not in man;
Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,
But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.
They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,
They have buried him deep under steel and stone--
But we come leading the great Crusade
To give our Comrade back to his own.
Waddell.
Christ and Caesar
In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus,
we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and
showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and
the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee,
and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to
whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship
me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said
"Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would
have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he
chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death
of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his
church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian
gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except
women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted
catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.
But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one
defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces
which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again,
to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new
revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous
power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed
the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself,
suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so
that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory
of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for
their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off
laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from
Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest
religion. How complete and swift was his success you may judge
from the fact that fifty years later we find the Emperor
Valentinian compelled to pass an edict limiting the donations of
emotional females to the church in Rome!
From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this
book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days
of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and
Caesar have been one, and the Church has been the shield and
armor of predatory economic might. With only one qualification to
be noted: that the Church has never been able to suppress
entirely the memory of her proletarian Founder. She has done her
best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his words
out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so far as
to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims may
not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.
'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!
But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one
incessant struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled
themselves with the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on
the Mount, and of that bitterly class-conscious proletarian,
James, the brother of Jesus.
And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has
given life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on
the hearts of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and
fervor which has been poured into it by generation after
generation of poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and die
like Jesus as criminals, and are revered like Jesus as founders
and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers were
bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their own time. St.
Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of office,
exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by the
Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor
Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was
exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the
heretics whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were
proletarian rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres, the
founders of the orders which gave it life for century after
century, were men who sought to return to the example of the
carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar on this point,
Prof. Rauschenbusch:
The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the
Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic and
communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest doctrinal
reformer before the reformation; but his eyes, too, were first
opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman Church by joining in
a great national and patriotic movement against the alien
domination and extortion of the Church. The Bohemian revolt made
famous by the name of John Huss, was quite as much political and
social as religious. Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a
religious prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo
de Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's mercy.
Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his ill-gotten
wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the restoration of
the liberties of the people of Florence. It is significant that
the dying sinner found it easy to assent to the first, hard to
assent to the second, and impossible to concede the last.
Locusts and Wild Honey
This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time long
before Jesus; it seems to have been inherent in the religious
character of the Jews--that stubborn independence, that
stiff-necked insistence on the right of a man to interview God
for himself and to find out what God wants him to do; also the
inclination to find that God wants him to oppose earthly rulers
and their plundering of the poor. What is it that gives to the
Bible the vitality it has today? Its literary style? To say that
is to display the ignorance of the cultured; for elevation of
style is a by-product of passionate conviction; it is what the
Jewish writers had to say, and not the way they said it, that has
given them their hold upon mankind. Was it their insistence upon
conscience, their fear of God as the beginning of wisdom? But
that same element appears in the Babylonian psalms, which are as
eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews, yet are read
only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful presence of
divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians had
that far more than the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their
religious books. Or was it the love of man for all things living,
the lesson of charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress?
The gentle Buddha had that, and had it long before Christ; also
his priests had metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John
the Apostle or Thomas Aquinas.
No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishes the
Hebrew sacred writings from all others, and that is their
insistent note of proletarian revolt, their furious denunciations
of exploiters, and of luxury and wantonness, the vices of the
rich. Of that note the Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian
writing contain not a trace, and the Egyptian hardly enough to
mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it; but the true,
natural-born rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They were
rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today in
Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood
which spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, through John the
Baptist and Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through
Marx and Lassalle and Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and
Morris Hillquit and Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the Joseph
Fels endowment.
The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire was
20%; the laws of Manu permitted 24%, while the laws of the
Egyptians only stepped in to prevent more than 100%. But listen
to this Hebrew law:
If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then
thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a
sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no interest of
him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy brother may live with
thee. Thou shalt not give him any money upon usury, nor lend him
thy victuals for increase.
And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants, and
commanding that at the end of fifty years All debtors shall have
their debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note
that this is not the raving of agitators, the demand of a
minority party; it is the law of the Hebrew land.
There has been of late a great deal of new discovery concerning
the early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as follows:
The land-mark law, which sternly forbids encroachment upon
peasant rights; consideration for the foreigner; additional
sanitary and food laws; tithe regulations on behalf of widows,
orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those who have no economic
independence should eat and be satisfied; that loans should be
given cheerfully, not only without any interest, but even at the
risk of losing the principal. To withhold a loan because the year
of release is at hand in which the principal is no longer
recoverable, is described as a grave sin. When you are compelled
to free your slaves, you must give them sufficient capital to
embark upon some industry which shall prevent their falling back
into slavery. A number of holidays are insisted upon. There must
be no more crushing of the poor out of existence, for God cares
for these people who have been driven to poverty, and they shall
never cease out of the land. Howbeit there shall be no poor with
you, for the Lord will bless you, if you will obey these laws.
But then prosperity came, and culture, which meant contact with
the capitalist ideas of the heathen empires. The Jews fell from
the stern justice of their fathers; and so came the prophets,
wild-eyed men of the people, clad in camel's hair and living upon
locusts and wild honey, breaking in upon priests and kings and
capitalists with their furious denunciations. And always they
incited to class war and social disturbance. I quote Conrad Noel
again:
Nathan and Gad bad been David's political advisers, Abijah had
stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had resisted Ahab, Elisha had
fanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders against the misrule
of the king of Israel, Isaiah denounces the landlords and the
usurers, Micah charges them with blood-guiltiness; Jeremiah and
the latter prophets, though they strike a more intimate note of
personal repentance, strike it as the prelude to that national
restoration for which they hunger as exiles.
The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old Testament
point of view. Just as the prophets of the nineteenth century
thundered against the "Christian" employers of Lancashire, and
told them their houses were cemented with the blood of little
children, so Isaiah cries against his generation: "Your governing
classes companion with thieves; behold you build up Sion with
blood." Their ceremonial and their Sabbath keeping are an
abomination to God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide
mine eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood." The poor man
is robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house to
house and field to field, that ye may dwell alone in the midst of
the land." "Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your
doing from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well,
seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead
for the widow. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord.
Though your sins be blood-colored, they shall be as white as
snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If
ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.
But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword."
Mother Earth
And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators,
following the same tradition, possessed by the same dream as the
ancient Hebrew prophets. I have mentioned Emma Goldman; it may be
that the reader is not familiar with her writings, and does not
realize how very Biblical she is, both in point of view and
style. Let me quote a few sentences from a recent issue of her
paper, "Mother Earth", on the subject of our ruling classes and
their social responsibility:
Yes, you idle rich, you may howl about what we mean to do to you!
Your riches are rotten and your fine clothes are falling from
your backs. Your stocks and bonds are so tainted that the ink on
them should turn to acid and eat holes in your pockets and your
skins. You have piled up your dirty millions, but what wages have
you paid to the poor devils of farm hands you have robbed? And do
you imagine they won't remember it when the revolution comes? You
loll on soft couches and amuse yourselves with your mistresses;
you think you are "it" and the world is yours. You send
militiamen and shoot down our organizers, and we are helpless.
But wait, comrades, our time is coming.
Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of this
tirade is now in jail, where she can no longer defy the laws of
good taste. They always put the ancient prophets in jail; that is
the way to know a prophet when you meet him. Let me quote another
prophet who is now behind bars--Alexander Berkman, in his "Prison
Memoirs of an Anarchist", discussing the same subject of
plutocratic pretension:
Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it to
you? Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can you go all the
way back and show there is no flaw anywhere in your title? I tell
you that the beginning and the root of your wealth is necessarily
in injustice. And why? Because Nature did not make this man rich
and that man poor from the start. Nature does not intend for one
man to have capital and another to be a wage-slave. Nature made
the earth to be cultivated by all. The idea we Anarchists have of
the rich is of highwaymen, standing in the street and robbing
every one that passes.
Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I. W. W. Hear what he
has to say in a pamphlet addressed to the harvest-hands he is
seeking to organize:
How much farther do you plutes expect to go with your grabbing?
Do you want to be the only people left on earth? Why else do you
drive out the workers from all share in Nature, and claim
everything for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and
poor alike; where do you get your title deeds to it? Nature gave
everything for all men to use alike; it is only your robbery
which makes your so-called "ownership". Capital has no rights.
The land belongs to Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.
Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist
Party for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:
The propertied classes are like people who go into a public
theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as
private property what is meant for social use. If each man would
take only what he needs, and leave the balance to those who have
nothing, there would be no rich and no poor. The rich man is a
thief.
I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know
that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene
Debs may read this book, and I don't want them to close it in the
middle and throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to explain my
poor joke; the sentiments I have been quoting are not those of
our modern agitators, but of another group of ancient ones. The
first is not from Emma Goldman, nor did I find it in "Mother
Earth". I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by orthodox
authorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus. It is
exactly what he wrote--save that I have put it into modern
phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order that
those familiar with the Bible might read it without suspicion.
The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman,
but in those of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early
fathers, who lived 374-407. The third is not from the pen of "Big
Bill" but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church,
340-397, and the fourth is not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil
of the Greek Church, 329-379. And if the reader objects to my
having fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the
Christian Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred
years?
The Soap Box
This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the
other as the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in the
direct line of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was
brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and
soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high
places; a man who thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more
devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever
lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in all that he says
and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of
peace on earth and good will toward men.
I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book
written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner
of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss
the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a
word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time
the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and
respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem. The way
to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what
we did with the early church fathers--translate him into
American. This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will
not be necessary to disguise the Bible style, and we may follow
the text exactly. Let me try the twenty-third chapter of Matthew,
omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew
casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St.
Alphonsus to find a parallel:
Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech, saying,
The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the Fifth Avenue
churches; and it would be all right if you were to listen to what
they preach, and do that; but don't follow their actions, for
they never practice what they preach. They load the backs of the
working-classes with crushing burdens, but they themselves never
move a finger to carry a burden, and everything they do is for
show. They wear frock-coats and silk hats on Sundays, and they
sit at the speakers' table at the banquets of the Civic
Federation, and they occupy the best pews in the churches, and
their doings are reported in all the papers; they are called
leading citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be
called leading citizens, for the only useful man is the man who
produces. (Applause). And whoever exalts himself shall be abased,
and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.
Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics, hypocrites! for
you shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men; you don't go in
yourself and you don't let others go in. Woe unto you, doctors of
divinity and Presbyterians, hypocrites! for you foreclose
mortgages on widows' houses, and for a pretense you make long
prayers. For this you will receive the greater damnation! Woe
unto you, doctors of divinity and Methodists, hypocrites! for you
send missionaries to Africa to make one convert, and when you
have made him, he is twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.
(Applause). Woe unto you, blind guides, with your subtleties of
doctrine, your transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all
the rest of it; you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors of
divinity and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks
into the collection-plate and you pay no heed to the really
important things in the Bible, which are justice and mercy and
faith in goodness. You blind guides, who strain at a gnat and
swallow a camel! (Laughter). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity
and Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe yourselves and dress in
immaculate clothing but within you are full of extortion and
excess. You blind high churchmen, clean first your hearts, so
that the clothes you wear may represent you. Woe unto you,
doctors of divinity and Baptists, hypocrites! for you are like
marble tombs which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside
are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you
appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and
iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect statues to dead
reformers, and put wreathes upon the tombs of old-time martyrs.
You say, if we had been alive in those days, we would not have
helped to kill those good men. That ought to show you how to
treat us at present. (Laughter). But you are the children of
those who killed the good men; so go ahead and kill us too! You
serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the
damnation of hell?
At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem
"Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified
him that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of
his followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed.
Jesus was taken to the station-house followed by a riotous
throng, and held upon a charge of disorderly conduct. Next
morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against
him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months on
Blackwell's Island, remarking that from this time on he proposed
to make an example of those soap-box orators who persist in using
threatening and abusive language. Just as the prisoner was being
led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the
Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he
is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being
charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day
explosion.
The Church Machine
The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we
would have a sign of Thee"--meaning that they wanted him to do
some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came
from God. He answered by calling them an evil and adulterous
generation--which is exactly what I have said about the Papal
machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other
book-worshippers of his time accused him of violating the sacred
commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to
them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man
for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx
at them--"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their
heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of the
respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own
class in the places where they gathered--the public houses--the
churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a
wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"--precisely as in
the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having
their meetings in the back-rooms of saloons, and precisely as
they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.
But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the
Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human
heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within
the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs
in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is
more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than
ever before in history--even in these days of Morgan and
Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as
Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the
Church--Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J.
Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but
their voices are not silenced they are like the leaven, to which
Jesus compared the kingdom of God--a woman took it and hid it in
three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young
theological students read, and some of them understand; I know
three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church,
and are preaching straight social revolution--and the scribes and
the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.
In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant
and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon.
Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and
administering property. And it is not alone the Catholic Church
which is in politics, seeking favors from the state--the
exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of
ministers from military service, free transportation for them and
their families on the railroads, the control of charity and
education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday--so on
through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money,
you find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the
deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts
jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the
churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social
revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in
industry.
It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers
are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable
salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the
wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church
that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class,
and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic
Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest
who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but
goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his
pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their
bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious movement for
an Irish Republic.
What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the
exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if
you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you
would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of them
slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them
must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or
hypocrites. They have caught enough of the spirit of their time
not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and
witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that they do not
believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they
are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods. But
they are part of a machine, and the old men and the rich men who
run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find themselves
tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and
children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted
for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as
by the practice of altruism.
But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift
wings--it may be here before this book sees the light. And who
knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which
we saw in Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burned their
holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as citizens
and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of
exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into
dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. All
those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe nonsense,
because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly
realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any
man can go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly
run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten
or fifteen dollars. Do you not think that there may be some who
will choose freedom and self-respect on those terms?
And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the
church because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a
way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and
obtain promotion, to get customers if you are a tradesman, to
extend your practice if you are a professional man? And what
about the millions who go to church because they are poor, and
because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one way to keep
the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for the
children, to get charity if you fall into need; in short, to
acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who stand
together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent, contented
in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them?
The Church Redeemed
Do I mean that I expect to see the Church--all churches--perish
and pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church answers
one of the fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will
abolish poverty and parasitism, it will make temptations fewer,
and the soul's path through life much easier; but it will not
remove the necessity of struggle for individual virtue, it will
only clear the way for the discovery of newer and higher types of
virtue. Men will gather more than ever in beautiful places to
voice their love of life and of one another; but the places in
which they gather will be places swept clean of superstition and
tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to
cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses, so the
Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its defense of
parasitism and exploitation. I will record the prophecy that by
the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the
Church ever opposed Socialism--true Socialism; just as today they
deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men for
teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right
to commit crime, ever gave away the New World to Spain and
Portugal, ever buried newly-born infants in the cellars of
nunneries.
The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian,
Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their
formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that
refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment
and freedom will leave it without followers. But in the great
religions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be
sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of
old, will preach the living word of God. In many churches today
we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Even in
the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the
books of the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The
Saint", and you will see a genuine and vital protest against the
economic corruption of the Church. In America, the "Knights of
Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a "War
for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y. M. C. A. in the
training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.
This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of
modern common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation
Army. William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his
life into his hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the
lost souls of the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he
persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus--
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.
Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population.
He had not wanted to engage in charity and material activities;
he feared hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets
us see how utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do
anything for the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same
time helping their diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So the
Salvation army was forced into useful work--old clothes depots,
nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm colonies--until today
the bare list of the various kinds of enterprises it carries on
fills three printed pages. It is all done with the money of the
rich, and is tainted by subservience to authority, but no one can
deny that it is better than "Gibson's Preservative", and the
fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with port.
And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater.
Here and there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job
and preaching the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth
Avenue churches are making attempts at "missions" and
"settlements" in the slums. The more vital churches are gradually
turning themselves into societies for the practical betterment of
their members. Their clergy are running boys clubs and
sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for mothers,
social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs
always before the clergyman's face--that with prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
educational societies and social reforms he thrives.
And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the
churches, like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy
and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs,
they are forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to
engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end
of this--any more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in
politics and industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary
thought can see the main outlines of the future. We see that in
these new church activities the clergy are inspired by things
read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers.
They are responding to the actual, instant needs of their boys in
the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have an effect
upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl
who leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a
munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates,
will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the
clergyman who helps in Y. M. C. A. work in France, or in Red
Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and
formalist forever after. He will have learned, in spite of
himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have learned
co-operation and social solidarity by the method which modern
educators most favor--by doing. Also he will have absorbed a mass
of ideas in news despatches from over the world. He is forced to
read these despatches carefully, because the fate of his own boys
is involved; and we Socialists will see to it that the despatches
are well filled with propaganda!
The Desire of Nations
So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in
the great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal
which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in
dismay: the Church of the future, the Church redeemed by the
spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join.
They call us materialists, and say that we think about nothing
but the belly--and that is true, in a way; because we are the
representatives of a starving class, which thinks about its belly
precisely as does any individual who is ravening with hunger. But
give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of
Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the body," and
then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls;
whereas at present we are led to despise the very word
"spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and
poseurs.
We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to
us. We would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and
self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if
there were in the world institutions conducted by men and women
of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true
morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not
of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not upon
superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what
truth is, and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth
inspiries. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers
we see in the churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to
believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather than
trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift
to train them ourselves--we amateurs, not knowing much about
children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against
organized wrong.
It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it
is a fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need it just
as badly as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race. That
we need it is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our
midst--the schisms which waste the greater part of our
activities, and which are often the result of personal jealousies
and petty vanities. To lift men above such weakness, to make them
really brothers in a great muse--that is the work of "personal
religion" in the true and vital sense of the words.
We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of
the new Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the
dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with
fervor and conviction. Read these lines from "The Desire of
Nations," by Edwin Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer
who is at hand:
And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
To every heart he will its own dream be:
One moon has many phantoms in the sea.
Out of the North the norns will cry to men:
"Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
"Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
"Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"
And social architects who build the State,
Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
"Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"
The Knowable
The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker
the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the
microscope and the telescope, of the new psychology and the new
sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in
ancient Mythologies. And even if this were not so, the business
of the thinker is to follow the facts. The history of all
philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The infant opens
his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out his hands and cries
for it, but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a
while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his mother's
breast and takes a drink of milk.
Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him
to be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the
knowledge immediately and finally, and invents innumerable
systems and creeds. He makes himself believe them, with fire and
torture makes other men believe them; until finally, in the
confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate
his instruments, and he makes the discovery that his tools are
inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite,
while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative,
while the First Cause is absolute.
This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern
philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four
propositions: first, that the universe is limitless in time and
space; second, that matter is composed of simple, indivisible
elements; third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, that
there must be an absolute or first cause. And having proven these
things, he turned round and proved their opposites, with
arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows these
demonstrations and understands them, takes all his metaphysical
learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.
It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear,
that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can
prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth
dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside
foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition,
you take another flight, and come back the way you were before.
So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose of Catholic cheats
like Cardinal Newman and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves
hysterical women like "Mother" Eddy; it serves the
New-thoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it
serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to befuddle the wits
of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a
bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that
it is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the
ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist
who lays down a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a
Christian.
How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a
capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison,
making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read
the books of the "Positivists", and attended their imitation
church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction from them.
In the midst of their dogmatic pronouncements I found myself
remembering how the egg falls apart and reveals a chicken, how
the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly. The spirit of man
is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile occupation to set
limits upon the future. Our business is not to say what men will
know ten thousand years from now, but to content ourselves with
the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a
procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an
act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.
In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify
his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there
is worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is
order in creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which
can be applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for
its mother's breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts
it when he declares that water is made of two parts hydrogen and
one part oxygen, and sets it down for a certainty that this will
always be so--that he is not being played with by some sportive
demon, who will today cause H2O to behave like water, and
tomorrow like benzine.
Nature's Insurgent Son
Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each
bit of knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life
becomes a new thing. Consider, for example, what a different
place the world became to the man who discovered that the force
which laid the forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warm a
cave and make wild grains nutritious! In other words, man can
create life, he can make the world and himself into that which
his reason decides it ought to be. The means by which he does
this is the most magical of all the tools he has invented since
his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of
experimental science--and when one considers that this weapon has
been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three
centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning
of human evolution.
To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and
deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
product--that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this
forth with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man".
We are, at this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous
transition stage, as a child playing with explosives. This child
has found out how to alter his environment in many startling
ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, nor to
what purpose. He finds that certain things are uncomfortable, and
these he proceeds immediately to change. Discovering that grain
fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of drunkards;
discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared
in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that
it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that
captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession
of empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption,
and fall into ruins again.
This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping
blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It
takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a
million million men to produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and
arrow, or democracy. Nature's present impulse appears as a
rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will
emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her
blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son";
but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old
blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of
defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the
breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child
would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the
name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.
What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing
our sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful,
because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific
breeding which will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at
life. We can replace instinct by self-discipline. We can
substitute for the regime of "Nature red in tooth and claw with
ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what he wishes to
be and how to set about to be it. Whether this can happen,
whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great
triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into
the melting pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude
of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely such a
contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who
has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to
perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvellous
new tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact
knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life
of the race.
The New Morality
Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers;
driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism
call the elan vital. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is
an emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of
distress. So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the
final goal is a condition of free and constantly accelerating
growth, in which joy is enduring.
That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It
is a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall
upon the earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other
hand, it is a conceivable thing that man may some day learn to
control the movements of comets, and even of starry systems. It
seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself
master of the forces of his immediate environment--
The untamed giants of nature shall bow down--
The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
From mockery and destruction, and be turned
Unto the making of the soul of man.
It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food
from the elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it
is conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present
prey upon his body, and so put an end to death. It is certain
that he will ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human
qualities as he has created the spurs of the fighting-cock and
the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what genius is, and
the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be
recognized. In the new science of psycho-analysis he has already
begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into
the light of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy
which the psychic researchers are accumulating, he is beginning
to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which may come
to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars, and of
the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are
disclosing.
All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way
of their realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and
submission, the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has
brought with him from his animal past. These make him a slave, a
victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden
of the soul is the task of the modern thinker.
The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that
man is the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save
the law of his own being, no check upon his will save that which
he himself imposes.
The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true
pleasure is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.
The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there
is no authority above reason; no possibility of such authority,
because if such were to appear, reason would have to judge it,
and accept or reject it.
The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that
there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can
be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane.
The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine
aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist
is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action
which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility
or hypocrisy tomorrow.
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 use no others, without
self-destruction; yet it has to meet enemies who fight with the
old weapons of force and fraud. Whether it will prevail is more
than any prophet can say. Perhaps it is too much to ask that it
should succeed--this insolent effort of the pigmy man to leap
upon the back of his master and fit a bridle into his mouth.
Perhaps it is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, the
scientists and poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race.
Perhaps the nerve of the pigmy will fail him at the critical
moment, and he will fall from the back of his master, and under
his master's hoofs.
The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and
as scientists we can proclaim it--the human race is in a swift
current of degeneration, which a new morality alone can check.
The struggle is at its height in our time; if it fails, if the
fibre of the race continues to deteriorate, the soul of the race
to be eaten out by poverty and luxury, by insanity and disease,
by prostitution, crime and war--then mankind will slip back into
the abyss, the untamed giants of Nature will resume their ancient
sway, and the tides, the tempest and the lightning will sweep the
earth clean again. I do not believe that this calamity will
befall us. I know that in the diseased social body the forces of
resistance are gathering--the Socialist movement, in the broad
sense--the activities of all who believe in the possibility of
reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice and love.
To such people this book goes out: to the truly religious people,
those who hunger and thirst after righteousness here and now, who
believe in brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear pain
and ridicule and privation for the sake of its ultimate
achievement.
From the edge of harsh derision,
From discord and defeat,
From doubt and lame division,
We pluck the fruit and eat;
And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....
O sorrowing hearts of slaves,
We heard you beat from far!
We bring the light that saves,
We bring the morning star;
Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things are...
Envoi
I have come to the end of my task; but one question troubles me.
I think of the "young men and maidens meek" who will read this
book, and I wonder what they will make of it. We have had a lark
together; we have gone romping down the vista of the ages,
swatting*, every venerable head that showed itself, beating the
dust out of ancient delusions. You would like all your life to be
that kind of lark; but you may not find it so, and perhaps you
will suffer disillusionment and vexation.
I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have
nearly all been gallant and honest, but they have not all been
wise, and therefore not so happy as they might have been. In the
course of time I have formulated to myself the peril to which
young radicals are exposed. We see so much that is wrong in
ancient things, it gets to be a habit with us to reject them. We
have only to know that a thing is old to feel an impulse of
impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are tempted to welcome
anything which can prove itself to be unprecedented. There is a
common type of radical whose aim in life is to be several jumps
ahead of mankind; whose criterion of conduct is that it shocks
the bourgeois. If you do not know that type, you may find
him--and her--in the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the
newest red chemicals, smoking the newest brand of cigarettes, and
discussing the newest form of psycopathia sexualis. After you
have watched them a while, you realize that these ultra-new
people have fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy,
the non sequitur, and likewise to the oldest form of slavery,
which is self-indulgence.
If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon
ignorance, and cultivated by greed, it is also true that much in
the old moral codes is based upon facts which will not change so
long as man is what he is--a creature of impulses, good and bad,
wise and foolish, selfish and generous, and compelled to make
choice between these impulses; so long as he is a material body
and a personal consciousness, obliged to live in society and
adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would like to say
to young radicals--if there is any way to say it without seeming
a prig--is that in choosing their own path through life, they
will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom
and judgment and hard study.
It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat
over and over the blunders of the past, the blunders of tyranny
and slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient
societies; and surely it is a poor way to begin by repeating in
our own persons the most ancient blunders of the moral life. To
light the fires of lust in our hearts, and let them smoulder
there, and imagine we are trying new experiments in psychology!
Who does not know the radical woman who demonstrates her
emancipation from convention by destroying her nerves with
nicotine? Who does not know the genius of revolt who demonstrates
his repudiation of private property by permitting his lady loves
to support him? Who does not know the man who finds in the
phrases of revolution the most effective devices for the seducing
of young girls?
You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the
conclusion that there is anything in it to spare you the duty of
getting yourself moral standards and holding yourself to them. On
the contrary, because your task is the highest and hardest that
man has yet undertaken--for this reason you will need standards
the most exacting ever formulated. Let me quote some words from a
teacher you will not accuse of holding to the slave-moralities:
Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I hear, and
not that thou hast escaped a yoke.
Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke?
Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye
tell me: free to what?
Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang thy
will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own judge, and
avenger of thy law?
Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of thy
law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into the icy
breath of isolation.
Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emerge into the
sunlight of knowledge, to take control of a world, and to make it
over, not according to the will of any gods, but according to the
law in our own hearts. For that task we have need of all the
resources of our being; of courage and high devotion, of faith in
ourselves and our comrades, of clean, straight thinking, of
discipline both of body and mind. We go to this task with a
knowledge as old as the first moral impulse of mankind--the
knowledge that our actions determine the future of life, not
merely for ourselves but for all the race. For this is one of the
laws of the ancient Hebrews which modern science has not
repealed, but on the contrary has reinforced with a thousand
confirmations--that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the
children unto the third and fourth generations.
I get letters from the readers of my books; nearly always they
are young people, so I feel like the father of a large family. I
gather them now about my knee, and pronounce upon them a
benediction in the ancient patriarchal style. Children and
grandchildren of my hopes, for ages men suffered and fought, so
that the world might be turned over to you. Now the day is
coming, the glad, new day which blinds us with the shining of its
wings; it is coming so swiftly that I am afraid of it. I thought
we should have more time to get ready for the taking over of the
world! But the old managers of it went insane, they took to
tearing each other's eyes out, and now they lie dead about us.
So, whether we will or not, we have to take charge of the world;
we have to decide what to do with it, even while we are doing it.
Let us not fail, young comrades; let us not write on the scroll
of history that mankind had to go through yet new generations of
wars and tumults and enslavements, because the youth of the
international revolution could not lift themselves above those
ancient personal vices which wrecked the fair hopes of their
fathers--bigotry and intolerance, vindictiveness and vanity,
envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness!
Reader:
For twenty years I have been haunted by the dream that I might
some day be my own publisher. I was waiting till I could afford
the luxury; but many a man has put off a bold action till he
died, so I am publishing this book without being able to afford
it.
The reason is that I do not want to be a writer for the rich. I
want to be read by working-boys and girls, and by poor students.
I offer the book at a low price. In the hope of tempting you to
go out and get your friends to read it, I have made a price in
quantities which will allow no profit at all. A margin has been
figured to cover postage, stationery, circulars, and the cost of
a clerical assistant; but nothing for interest on capital, which
is a gift, nor for the rent of an office, which is my home, nor
for the services of manager and press agent, which is myself.
You have read the book, and its fate is yours to decide. If it
seems worth while, pass it on to someone else. If you can afford
it, order a number of copies and give them away. If you can't
afford it, give your time and be a book-agent.
End of Project Gutenberg Etext of The Profits of Religion, by Sinclair
