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+Project Gutenberg's The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition, by Upton Sinclair
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
+
+Author: Upton Sinclair
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2005 [EBook #16470]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFITS OF RELIGION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jayam Subramanian and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: The spelling inconsistencies of the original
+are retained in this etext.]
+
+
+
+  The Profits of Religion
+
+
+
+
+
+  An Essay in Economic Interpretation
+
+
+
+
+
+  By
+  UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+NEW YORK
+VANGUARD PRESS
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VANGUARD PRINTINGS
+First-January, 1927
+Second-April, 1927
+Third-June, 1928
+
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+Note to fifth edition, 1926: "The Profits of Religion" was first
+published early in 1917. The present edition represents a sale of over
+60,000 copies, without counting a dozen translations. In this edition
+a few errors have been corrected, but otherwise the book has not been
+changed. The reader will understand that references to the World War
+are of the date 1917, prior to America's entrance.
+
+This book is the first of a series of volumes, an economic
+interpretation of culture, which now includes "The Brass Check," "The
+Goose-step," "The Goslings," and "Mammonart."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#CONTENTS#
+
+#Introductory#
+
+Bootstrap-lifting
+
+Religion
+
+#Book One: The Church of the Conquerors#
+
+The Priestly Lie
+
+The Great Fear
+
+Salve Regina!
+
+Fresh Meat
+
+Priestly Empires
+
+Prayer-wheels
+
+The Butcher-Gods
+
+The Holy Inquisition
+
+Hell-fire
+
+#Book Two: The Church of Good Society#
+
+The Rain Makers
+
+The Babylonian Fire-God
+
+The Medicine-men
+
+The Canonization of Incompetence
+
+Gibson's Preservative
+
+The Elders
+
+Church History
+
+Land and Livings
+
+Graft in Tail
+
+Bishops and Beer
+
+Anglicanism and Alcohol
+
+Dead Cats
+
+"Suffer Little Children" The Court-circular
+
+Horn-blowing
+
+Trinity Corporation
+
+Spiritual Interpretation
+
+#Book Three: The Church of the Servant Girls#
+
+Charity
+
+God's Armor
+
+Thanksgivings
+
+The Holy Roman Empire
+
+Temporal Power
+
+Knights of Slavery
+
+Priests and Police
+
+The Church Militant
+
+The Church Triumphant
+
+God in the Schools
+
+The Menace
+
+King Coal
+
+The Unholy Alliance
+
+Secret Service
+
+Tax Exemption
+
+Holy History
+
+Das Centrum
+
+#Book Four: The Church of the Slavers#
+
+The Face of Caesar
+
+Deutschland ueber Alles
+
+Der Tag
+
+King Cotton
+
+Witches and Women
+
+Moth and Rust
+
+To Lyman Abbott
+
+The Octopus
+
+The Industrial Shelley
+
+The Outlook for Graft
+
+Clerical Camouflage
+
+The Jungle
+
+#Book Five: The Church of the Merchants#
+
+The Head Merchant
+
+"Herr Beeble" Holy Oil
+
+Rhetorical Black-hanging
+
+The Great American Fraud
+
+Riches in Glory
+
+Captivating Ideals
+
+Spook Hunting
+
+Running the Rapids
+
+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," he answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the Wholesale
+Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."
+
+"I see," I reply. "And these people let you--"
+
+"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."
+
+I turn, following his glance, and observe another person
+approaching--a stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple robes,
+moving with slow dignity. Ha 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 today throughout the
+world; that is to say, institutions having fixed dogmas and
+"revelations", creeds and rituals, with an administering caste
+claiming supernatural sanction. By such institutions the moral
+strivings of the race, the affections of childhood and the aspirations
+of youth are made the prerogatives and stock in trade of
+ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the thesis of this book that
+"Religion" in this sense is a source of income to parasites, and the
+natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation.
+
+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 windows richly dight,
+  Casting a dim religious light.
+  There let the pealing organ blow,
+  To the full-voiced choir below,
+  In service high and anthem clear,
+  As may with sweetness through mine ear
+  Dissolve me into ecstacies,
+  And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
+
+So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and 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 Brahmanam of the Rig-Veda we read
+
+     He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is
+     born from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates
+     in the nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred
+     knowledge), the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and
+     is absorbed into the deity.
+
+Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the 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 Lander'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 had escaped from
+     its tormentors, and the bitterest enemies of the reformer
+     could not refuse to him the praise that no philosopher of
+     old had faced death with more composure than he had shown in
+     his dreadful extremity. No faltering of the voice had
+     betrayed an internal struggle. Palsgrave Louis, seeing
+     Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the executioners, ordered
+     it thrown into the flames lest it should be reverenced as a
+     relic, and promised the man to compensate him. With the same
+     view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and thrown into
+     the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was dug up
+     and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the
+     spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay,
+     which they reverenced as relics of their martyr. The next
+     day thanks were returned to God in a solemn procession in
+     which figured Sigismund and his queen, the princes and
+     nobles, nineteen cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven
+     bishops, and all the clergy of the council. A few days later
+     Sigismund, who had delayed his departure for Spain to see
+     the matter concluded, left Constance, feeling that his work
+     was done.
+
+#Hell-Fire#
+
+If 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 bed-post, 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. Heading 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 Fire-god, and with awful rites the priest pronounced
+incantations, which have been preserved on bricks and handed down for
+the use of modern churches. "Pronounce in a whisper, and have a bronze
+image therewith," commands the ancient text, and runs on for many
+strophes in this fashion:
+
+  Let them die, but let me live!
+  Let them be put under a 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 forced
+Galileo to recant under threat of torture, and had Ferrer shot beneath
+the walls of the fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of
+religion".
+
+#The Medicine-men#
+
+Andrew D. White tells us that
+
+     It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great
+     plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased
+     proportion of the landed and personal property of every
+     European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a
+     great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences 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 to" between the words "I believe", saying the inserted
+words under his breath, thus, "I used to believe in the Father, the
+Son, and the Holy Ghost." Perhaps the eminent divine never did this;
+but the fact that his students told it, and thought it funny, is
+sufficient indication of their attitude toward their "Religion." The
+son of William George Ward tells in his biography how this leader of
+the "Tractarian Movement" met the problem with cynicism which seems
+almost sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are justified in
+deception; and then lie like a trooper!"
+
+#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. N, 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 I 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 net even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be
+maintained in all their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to
+what end?
+
+The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which
+is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of
+William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and
+in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the
+land among his nobles and prelates. In those days, you understand, a
+high ecclesiastic was a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his
+predatory nature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and
+archbishops of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like
+the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the
+same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English
+chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
+abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependence of the
+church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted
+from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt
+before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord,
+I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and
+I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."
+
+The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held,
+and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege man for
+life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the whole story of
+the church of England, in the 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
+     corne, 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
+west-minster 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 5600
+     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 birth-day, 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--on 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
+NAIVET� 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
+on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops,
+setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" 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 Salisbury. 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 Salisbury, 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. Russel, 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
+     oweners in the American markets. After that the children
+     were simply at the mercy of their oweners, 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 owener 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 fourteen 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 six-pence to
+save a life."
+
+And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover
+you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not
+even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have
+anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the
+mental powers of England's most popular woman writer. She was
+perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for
+stealing butter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too
+high a price. When there came a famine, and the children of these
+mine-slaves were dying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy
+because God had sent them her pious self. "In suffering by the
+scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of
+knowing the advantage you have had over many villages in your having
+suffered no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place
+she explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
+be grateful to the rich!
+
+     Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
+     permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite
+     all ranks of people together, to show the poor how
+     immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show
+     both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.
+     It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages
+     you derive from the government and constitution of this
+     country--to observe the benefits flowing from the
+     distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high
+     to so liberally assist the low.
+
+     It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by
+     this pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night
+     and burned an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a
+     tragic consequence, for one of the "common people," known as
+     Robert, "was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear
+     at Sunday School next day. This fall from grace occasioned
+     intense remorse in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his
+     mind for many months," records Martha More, "and despair
+     seemed at length to take 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 exempted; that,
+     "having food and raiment, they should be therewith content,"
+     since their situation in life, with all its evils, is better
+     than they have deserved at the 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 grave-stones;
+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 bloodhounds
+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
+tophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in
+pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating
+odors. I picture them as I have seen them at St. George's, where that
+aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the
+collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in
+old-fashioned carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin
+statues of insolence; at St. Thomas', where you might see all the
+"Four Hundred" on exhibition at once; at St. Mary the Virgin's, where
+the choir paraded through the aisles, swinging costly incense into my
+childish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alone with nose
+upturned, carrying on his back a jewelled robe for which some adoring
+female had paid 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 door-way; 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 substance 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 in substance:
+
+     She has the right to require the state not to leave every
+     man free to profess his own religion.
+
+     She has the right to exercise her power without the
+     permission or consent of the state.
+
+     She has the right of perpetuating the union of church and
+     state.
+
+     She has the right to require that the Catholic religion
+     shall be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of
+     all others.
+
+     She has the right to prevent the state from granting the
+     public exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating
+     from it.
+
+     She has the power of requiring the state not to permit free
+     expression of opinion.
+
+You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You, who
+think that liberty of conscience is the basis of civilization, ought
+at least to know what the Catholic Church has to say about the matter.
+Here is Mgr. Segur, in his "Plain Talk About Protestantism of Today",
+a book published in Boston and extensively circulated by American
+Catholics:
+
+     Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is
+     likewise the soul of modern rationalism and philosophy. It
+     is one of those impossibilities which only the levity of a
+     superficial reason can regard as 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 Catholics who are
+married by civil authorities or by Protestant clergymen will be living
+in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of
+education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief,
+incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To
+the above list, as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such
+as birth control, which have arisen since his time.
+
+What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of
+expressions of that intention, set forth in the boldest and haughtiest
+and most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal Manning, in the
+Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name of the Pope:
+
+     I acknowledge 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 hierarchy, yet they are as cardinals
+     foreign princes of the blood, to whom the United States, as
+     one of the great powers of the world, is under an obligation
+     to concede the same honors that they receive abroad.
+
+     Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American man-of-war,
+     he would be entitled to the salutes and to naval honors
+     reserved for a foreign royal personage, and at any official
+     entertainment at Washington the Cardinal will outrank not
+     merely every cabinet officer, the speaker of the house and
+     the vice-president, but also the foreign ambassadors, coming
+     immediately next to the chief magistrate himself.
+
+     Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal
+     personage not of sovereign rank visits New York it is his
+     duty to make the first call on Cardinal Farley.
+
+#Knights of Slavery#
+
+Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly Jesus. And
+what is their attitude towards their brothers in God, the rank and
+file of the membership, whose pennies 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 consumes 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 Superstition in
+America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a democracy, we find
+precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the poor foreigner who
+troubles us. Our human magic would win him--our easy-going trust, our
+quiet certainty of liberty, our open-handed and open-homed and
+hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We should break down the Catholic
+machine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy could stop us--were
+it not for the Steel Trust and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the
+Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters
+of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and
+self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant,
+inert, physically, mentally and morally helpless!
+
+No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not the
+pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering cathedrals; it
+is not the 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 en-rolled, 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 Elaine 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 t 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 an establishment of religion." When war is declared,
+and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and
+friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of
+religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the status of
+"conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach
+justice and humanity, decency and truth.
+
+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, conies another occasion of state--the
+twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
+Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to
+make clear the sociological significance of that function; explaining
+first, a nation-wide organization which has been proven by
+congressional investigation and by the publication of its secret
+documents to be a machine for the corruption of our political life;
+and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels
+have long since fled; a city in the first crude stage of land
+speculation, without order, dignity or charm; a city of real estate
+agents, who exist by selling climate to new arrivals from the East; a
+city whose intellectual life is "boosting", whose standards of truth
+are those of the horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of
+temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern California
+and the East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last
+June, when for five days the temperature went to over 110, and several
+times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!
+
+In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quake 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"!
+
+     P. S. The reader will be interested to know that for the
+     statements on page 155, Upton Sinclair was described as a
+     "scoundrel" by a former prime minister of the Austrian
+     Empire, and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a
+     court trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns--about $7
+     in American money.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#BOOK FOUR#
+
+#The Church of the Slavers#
+
+  Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
+    The eye-balls fierce, 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.
+
+  --Buchanan
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#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 will the war.
+
+And Pastor J. Rump:
+
+     Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity. We
+     fight for the cause of Jesus within mankind.
+
+And here is an eminent theological professor:
+
+     The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is
+     the German God. Not the national God such as the lower
+     nations worship, but "our God," who is not ashamed of
+     belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart.
+
+#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 hang 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 lea, 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 maidservant, 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 of-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-five
+dollars 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., LL.D., D.C.L.,
+L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers
+himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is
+Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions
+Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to
+manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense
+of the Rockefeller fortune. It is generally not expected that the
+makers of ruling-class munitions should face the dirty and perilous
+work of the trenches; but 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, and of the "free-will offering", which amounts to hundreds
+of thousands of dollars in each "campaign". In each city the expenses
+are guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting
+forces of the community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits
+their homes, and is in every way one of the crowd. After the big silk
+strike in Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included,
+all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was
+freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the radical union
+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.
+Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western railroads, died; and
+standing over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop,
+preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, wherein he likened young Leland
+to the boy Christ. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly
+reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout
+his 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 o'er 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 executed a few years ago in Utah, and who used this tune in his
+little red book of revolutionary chants:
+
+  You will eat, bye and bye,
+  In the glorious land above the sky;
+  Work and pray, live on hay,
+  You'll get pie in the sky when you die!
+
+#Captivating Ideals#
+
+In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero is a
+Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his diggings in the
+bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into our superior
+civilization. The thing that impresses him most is what he calls "the
+immortality idea". The person who got that up was a world-genius, he
+exclaims. "If you can once get a man to believing in immortality,
+there is no more left for you to desire; you can take everything he
+owns--you can skin him alive if it pleases you--and he will bear it
+all with perfect good humor."
+
+And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the
+effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that view
+of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the language of
+scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiastical
+authority, equipped with every tool of modern learning, would set
+about voicing the idea that the function of the teaching of Heaven is
+to chloroform the poor, so that the rich may continue to rob them in
+security?
+
+Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of scholarship,
+dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges Chatterton-Hill, of the
+University of Geneva. Its title is "The Sociological Value of
+Christianity", and from cover to cover it is a warning to the rich of
+the danger they run in giving up their religion and ceasing to support
+its priests. It explains 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 ideal"
+And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this
+purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist on
+the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering--of that
+suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress
+if it could."
+
+You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever
+you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only
+your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned
+to elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of
+"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 slums of our great
+cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying
+as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
+painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can
+not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this
+operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There
+exists a simple, 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 age 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 pious 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 this 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 Lay-men'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--5x30=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 Magus, 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 Ga-Llama principle, and to share the
+"expansion of the magnetic circles"? Here is the way to do it:
+
+     Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one
+     exhalation, speak slowly:
+
+     Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth
+     hidden by the vase of dazzling light.
+
+     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 minature 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 expos�s 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 is 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 #s�ance# 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 or 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 had 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 backrooms 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 inspires. 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 cause--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 H20 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 #�lan 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 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!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+A
+
+Abbott, Lyman 175-191
+Abbott, L.F. 189
+Adams 214
+Adventists 237
+Amberley 52
+Anglican Church 47-88
+Appeal to Reason 144
+Archer 133
+Assyria 32
+Atkinson 267
+Austria 155
+Aztecs 32
+
+B
+
+Babists 254
+Babylonia 26, 32, 50
+Baxter 183
+Beilhardt 254
+Berkman 288
+Besant 250
+Bible-students 246
+Bismarck 153
+Black Magic 253
+Blavatsky 23, 256
+Blougram 109
+Bonzano 121, 126
+Booth 298
+Bootstrap-lifting 11, 266
+Brougher 209
+Brown 268
+Buchanan 68, 159
+Buckle 41
+Burns 75
+
+C
+
+C�sar 161
+Cannon 143
+Carlyle 163
+Carnegie 177
+Catholic Church 27, 105-157, 295
+Catholic Encyclopedia 67
+Centrum 152
+Charcot 258
+Chatterton-Hill 220
+Chinese 74
+Christian Endeavor World 216
+Christian Science 254-264
+Churchman 101, 102
+Clark 23
+Clough 235
+Columbus 115
+Conway 127
+Curates 71
+
+D
+
+Darwin 56
+Day 205
+Debs 289
+Dixon 204, 205
+Dowie 242
+Durham 80
+
+E
+
+Eastman 140
+Eddy 257, 261
+Education 81
+England 49, 73, 75
+England, Church of 47-88
+Episcopal Church 89-102
+Eucharist 59
+
+F
+
+Ferrer 51, 133
+Fish 65
+Flint 78, 79
+Fogazzaro 298
+Foraker 143
+Frederick 163
+
+G
+
+Galileo 51
+Gallipoli 61
+Garrison 167
+Gladstone 57, 58, 81
+Goldman 287
+Goode 59, 61
+Green 63
+Gurney 254
+
+H
+
+Hagen 219
+Hale 213
+Hammurabi 85
+Hampton 181
+Ha'nish 250
+Hanna 122, 142, 153, 213
+Harris 72
+Harrison 304
+Haywood 288
+Hebrew 36, 173, 284, 285
+Henry the Eighth 66, 67
+Hill, Joe 219
+Hill, Rev. J.W. 204
+Holmes 276
+Holy Rollers 242, 243
+Hubbard 190
+Huss 38, 41
+Huxley 56, 58
+Hyndman 256
+Hyslop 223
+
+I
+
+Inquisition 39, 51
+Ireland 43
+Isaiah 287
+
+J
+
+Janet 258
+Jastrow 32
+Jehovah 35, 36
+Jesuits 148
+Jesus 74, 100, 101, 161,
+   172, 174, 175, 176, 197, 221,
+   258, 281, 282, 290, 291, 292
+Jews 284, 286
+Job 25, 26, 55
+Joshua 37
+Jowett 54
+Jungle 190, 194, 197
+Junker 152
+
+K
+
+Kaiser 164-166
+Kant 303
+Kemp 19
+King Coal 137
+Kingsley 34
+Knights of Columbus 123
+Koreshanity 248
+
+L
+
+La Follette 260
+Landor 34
+Lankester 306
+Lea 39
+Leeky 136
+Leo XIII 119, 123
+Ligouri 174
+Li Hung Chang 75
+London 276
+Los Angeles 149, 150, 208, 209, 217
+L.A. Examiner 149
+L.A. Times 44, 151
+Lourdes 258
+Luther 161, 163
+
+M
+
+MacGill 42
+Machen 273
+Mallock 77
+Malthus 77
+Manning 118
+Manu 285
+Markham 302
+Marx 71, 173
+Massey 55
+Mazdaznan 250
+McCabe 148
+McDonald 139
+Mellen 185
+Menace 135
+Milton 199
+Morality 308
+More 85
+Morgan 99, 101
+Mormon 239, 240
+Moses 36, 37
+
+N
+
+Nazarite 29
+New Haven 180, 181
+New Thought 264
+N.Y. Evening Post 223
+N.Y. Sun 193
+N.Y. Times 211
+Nichols 270
+Noel 83, 286
+Northcliffe 72
+Numerology 271
+
+O
+
+Oahspe 248
+O'Connell 120
+Opium 74
+Outlook 175-198
+
+P
+
+Paine 87
+Paley 87
+Pasadena 150, 208, 276
+Patent Medicine 214
+Patterson 139
+Paul 56, 161, 207
+Peabody 99
+Peters 204
+Phelan 119
+Pillsbury 167
+Pius IX 116
+Plowman 64
+Pope 67, 121, 143
+Positivists 304
+Post 216
+Potter 98
+Prescott 32
+Preston 127
+Protestant 201
+Prussia 153, 163
+
+Q
+
+Quakers 177
+Quay 212
+Quigley 129
+
+R
+
+Rauschenbusch 163, 283
+Rawson 272
+Reformation 163, 201
+Religion 16, 17
+Rig-Veda 30
+Robinson 228
+Rockefeller 138, 177, 190, 192, 211
+Roosevelt 142
+Russell, C.E. 95, 181
+Russell, G. 82
+Russell, Pastor 247
+Ryan 105
+
+S
+
+Sacred Heart 113
+Salpetriere 238
+Salvation Army 298
+Sanday 78
+Segur 117
+Shaftesbury 74, 82
+Shakers 244, 245
+Shelley 87, 183
+Siam 34
+Sinn Fein 295
+Smith, Gipsy 217
+Smith, Goldwin 223
+Soap Box 290
+Socialist Movement 311
+Spain 131
+Spiritualism 275
+Stalker 78
+Sterling 45
+Sunday 207, 210
+Swinburne 103
+Syracuse 205
+
+T
+
+Tablet 157
+Tacitus 170
+Taft 142-144
+Tammany 93, 143
+Thackery 68, 212
+Theosophists 254, 255
+Thirty-nine Articles 54
+Tingley 256
+Torrey 203
+Tractarian 55
+Trinity 94
+Trinity Corporation 95
+Trowbridge 29
+
+V
+
+Vedder 76
+Voltaire 53
+
+W
+
+Waddell 279
+Wagner 219
+Wall Street 181
+Wanamaker 203
+Ward 55
+Wattles 268
+Wesley 170
+Westcott 79
+White, A.D. 52
+White, Bouck 192
+Wilberforce 56, 88
+William 63
+Wilson 169, 186
+
+Y
+
+Yogi 255
+York 76
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
+by Upton Sinclair
+
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+      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
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+      <title>Profits of Religion, by Upton Sinclair</title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition, by Upton Sinclair
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
+
+Author: Upton Sinclair
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2005 [EBook #16470]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFITS OF RELIGION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jayam Subramanian and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p>
+[Transcriber's note: The spelling inconsistencies of the original
+are retained in this etext.]
+</p>
+
+
+<div style="background-color: white; color: black; border-style: ridge;">
+<center>
+<h1>The Profits of Religion</h1></center></div>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<h2><i>An Essay in Economic Interpretation</i></h2>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<h3><i>By</i></h3>
+<br />
+<h2>UPTON SINCLAIR</h2>
+<br /> <br />
+<center><img alt="illustration"
+src="images/image01.jpg" width="139" height="178" /></center>
+
+ <br /> <br />
+<h3><a href="#CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h3>
+<h4>NEW YORK<br />
+VANGUARD PRESS</h4>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+
+
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<h6>
+VANGUARD PRINTINGS<br />
+<i>First&mdash;January</i>, 1927<br />
+<i>Second&mdash;April</i>, 1927<br />
+<i>Third&mdash;June</i>, 1928</h6>
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<h5>PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</h5>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<h4>OFFERTORY</h4>
+<p>
+This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of view&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;the joy of speaking a true word and
+getting it heard.</p>
+<p>Note to fifth edition, 1926: "The Profits of Religion" was first
+published early in 1917. The present edition represents a sale of over
+60,000 copies, without counting a dozen translations. In this edition
+a few errors have been corrected, but otherwise the book has not been
+changed. The reader will understand that references to the World War
+are of the date 1917, prior to America's entrance.</p>
+<p>This book is the first of a series of volumes, an economic
+interpretation of culture, which now includes "The Brass Check," "The
+Goose-step," "The Goslings," and "Mammonart."</p>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<h3><a name="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h3>
+
+<br /> <br />
+<ul>
+<li><h3>Introductory</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_11"><b>Bootstrap-lifting</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_16"><b>Religion</b></a><br /> <br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book One: The Church of the Conquerors</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_21"><b>The Priestly Lie</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_24"><b>The Great Fear</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_27"><b>Salve Regina!</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_28"><b>Fresh Meat</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_31"><b>Priestly Empires</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_33"><b>Prayer-wheels</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_35"><b>The Butcher-Gods</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_38"><b>The Holy Inquisition</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_41"><b>Hell-fire</b></a><br /><br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book Two: The Church of Good Society</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_47"><b>The Rain Makers</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_50"><b>The Babylonian Fire-God</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_52"><b>The Medicine-men</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_55"><b>The Canonization of Incompetence</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_58"><b>Gibson's Preservative</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_62"><b>The Elders</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_66"><b>Church History</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_68"><b>Land and Livings</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_71"><b>Graft in Tail</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_73"><b>Bishops and Beer</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_76"><b>Anglicanism and Alcohol</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_80"><b>Dead Cats</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_84"><b>"Suffer Little Children"</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_89"><b>The Court-circular</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_92"><b>Horn-blowing</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_94"><b>Trinity Corporation</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_97"><b>Spiritual Interpretation</b></a><br /><br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book Three: The Church of the Servant Girls</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_105"><b>Charity</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_109"><b>God's Armor</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_113"><b>Thanksgivings</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_115"><b>The Holy Roman Empire</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_118"><b>Temporal Power</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_120"><b>Knights of Slavery</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_122"><b>Priests and Police</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_125"><b>The Church Militant</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_128"><b>The Church Triumphant</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_131"><b>God in the Schools</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_133"><b>The Menace</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_137"><b>King Coal</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_141"><b>The Unholy Alliance</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_144"><b>Secret Service</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_146"><b>Tax Exemption</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_148"><b>Holy History</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_152"><b>Das Centrum</b></a><br /><br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book Four: The Church of the Slavers</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_161"><b>The Face of Caesar</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_163"><b>Deutsehland ueber Alles</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_164"><b>Der Tag</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_167"><b>King Cotton</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_170"><b>Witches and Women</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_173"><b>Moth and Rust</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_176"><b>To Lyman Abbott</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_180"><b>The Octopus</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_183"><b>The Industrial Shelley</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_187"><b>The Outlook for Graft</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_191"><b>Clerical Camouflage</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_195"><b>The Jungle</b></a><br /><br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book Five: The Church of the Merchants</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_201"><b>The Head Merchant</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_203"><b>"Herr Beeble"</b></a></li>
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_207"><b>Holy Oil</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_212"><b>Rhetorical Black-hanging</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_214"><b>The Great American Fraud</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_217"><b>Riches in Glory</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_219"><b>Captivating Ideals</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_222"><b>Spook Hunting</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_225"><b>Running the Rapids</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_227"><b>Birth Control</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_230"><b>Sheep</b></a><br /><br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book Six: The Church of the Quacks</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_237"><b>Tabula Rasa</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_239"><b>The Book of Mormon</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_242"><b>Holy Rolling</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_245"><b>Bible Prophecy</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_248"><b>Koreshanity</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_250"><b>Mazdaznan</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_253"><b>Black Magic</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_257"><b>Mental Malpractice</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_261"><b>Science and Wealth</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_264"><b>New Nonsense</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_267"><b>"Dollars Want Me!"</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_270"><b>Spiritual Financiering</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_273"><b>The Graft of Grace</b></a><br /><br /></li>
+
+<li><h3>Book Seven: The Church of the Social Revolution</h3></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_281"><b>Christ and Caesar</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_284"><b>Locusts and Wild Honey</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_287"><b>Mother Earth</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_290"><b>The Soap Box</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_292"><b>The Church Machine</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_296"><b>The Church Redeemed</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_300"><b>The Desire of Nations</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_302"><b>The Knowable</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_305"><b>"Nature's Insurgent Son"</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_308"><b>The New Morality</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_311"><b>Envoi</b></a></li>
+
+<li class="indent">
+<a href="#Page_317"><b>INDEX</b></a></li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3><a name="INTRODUCTORY" id="INTRODUCTORY">INTRODUCTORY</a></h3>
+<hr /><br />
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Bootstrap-lifting</b></p>
+<p>
+Bootstrap-lifting? says the reader.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+I approach one and say to him, "Friend, what is this you are doing?"</p>
+<p>
+He answers, without pausing to glance at me, "I am performing
+spiritual exercises. See how I rise?"</p>
+<p>
+"But," I say, "you are not rising at all!"</p>
+<p>
+Whereat he becomes instantly angry. "You are one of the scoffers!"</p>
+<p>
+"But, friend," I protest, "don't you feel the earth under your feet?"</p>
+<p>
+"You are a materialist!"</p>
+<p>
+"But, friend, I can see&mdash;"</p>
+<p>
+"You are without spiritual vision!"</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+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?</p>
+<p>
+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?"</p>
+<p>
+He answers, "I am picking pockets."</p>
+<p>
+"Oh," I say, puzzled by his matter-of-course tone. "But&mdash;I beg
+pardon&mdash;are you a thief?"</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, no," he answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the Wholesale
+Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."</p>
+<p>
+"I see," I reply. "And these people let you&mdash;"</p>
+<p>
+"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."</p>
+<p>
+I turn, following his glance, and observe another person
+approaching&mdash;a stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple robes,
+moving with slow dignity. Ha gazes about at the sweating and grunting
+hordes; now and then he stops and lifts his hands in a gesture of
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+
+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."</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+I step up, and in timid tones begin, "Reverend sir, will you tell me
+by what right you take this wealth?"</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+ regular propaganda on foot; a long
+time ago&mdash;no man can recall how far back&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Religion</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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&mdash;on
+these terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above
+economic science.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+ purposes of
+class-cruelty and greed? What I say is&mdash;Bootstrap-lifting!</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+But we are denied the pleasure of using the word in that honest sense,
+because of another which has been given to it. To the ordinary man
+"Religion" means, not the soul's longing for growth, the "hunger and
+thirst after righteousness", but certain forms in which this hunger
+has manifested itself in history, and prevails today throughout the
+world; that is to say, institutions having fixed dogmas and
+"revelations", creeds and rituals, with an administering caste
+claiming supernatural sanction. By such institutions the moral
+strivings of the race, the affections of childhood and the aspirations
+of youth are made the prerogatives and stock in trade of
+ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the thesis of this book that
+"Religion" in this sense is a source of income to parasites, and the
+natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation.</p>
+<p>
+If by my jesting at "Bootstrap-lifting" I have wounded
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK ONE</h3>
+<hr/>
+<br />
+<h4>The Church of the Conquerors</h4>
+<br />
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">I saw the Conquerors riding by<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">With trampling feet of horse and men:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Empire on empire like the tide<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Flooded the world and ebbed again;<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">A thousand banners caught the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And cities smoked along the plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And laden down with silk and gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="quotsig"> Kemp.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Priestly Lie</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+
+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</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">And storied windows richly dight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Casting a dim religious light.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There let the pealing organ blow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the full-voiced choir below,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In service high and anthem clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As may with sweetness through mine ear<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Dissolve me into ecstacies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And bring all heaven before mine eyes.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and complicated
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+
+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&mdash;and each is a mighty fortress of Graft.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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"&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Great Fear</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The plan of a god is full of mystery&mdash;who can understand it?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+And that cry might be duplicated from almost any
+page of the Hebrew scriptures: the only difference being
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+and so he takes him a potsherd to scrape himself withal,
+and he sits among the ashes&mdash;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&mdash;a feast for a whole templeful of priests&mdash;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."</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">The Sin that I have wrought, I know not;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The unclean that I have eaten, I know not;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The offense into which I have walked, I know not....<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The lord, in the wrath of his heart, hath regarded me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The god, in the anger of his heart, hath surrounded me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A goddess, known or unknown, hath wrought me sorrow....<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I sought for help, but no one took my hand;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I wept, but no one harkened to me....<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The feet of my goddess I kiss, I touch them;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the god, known or unknown, I utter my prayer;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">O god, known or unknown, turn thy countenance, accept my sacrifice;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">O goddess, known or unknown, look mercifully on me, accept my sacrifice!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Salve Regina!</b></p>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+
+by giving four hundred dollars "out of his poverty"&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Fresh Meat</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+
+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&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza"><p>
+<span class="i2">For though some warriors of renown<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Continue anthropophagous,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">'Tis rare that human flesh goes down<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The low-caste man's aesophagus!<br /></span>
+</p></div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+And the law goes on to instruct the priests to take
+certain choice parts and "wave them for a wave offering
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+
+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</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley
+that the priests of Ceylon first present the gifts to the
+god, and then eat them. Among the Parsees, when a man
+dies, the relatives must bring four new robes to the
+priests; if they do this, the priests wear the robes; if they
+fail to do it, the dead man appears naked before the judgment-throne.
+The devotees are instructed that "he who
+performs this rite succeeds in both worlds, and obtains
+a firm footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists,
+the followers give alms to the monks, and are told specifically
+what advantages will thereby accrue to them. In
+the Aitareyo Brahmanam of the Rig-Veda we read</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Priestly Empires</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+
+the will of the priests, taught to them from childhood as
+the word of the gods.</p>
+<p>
+Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest
+of this teaching:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+And this concerning the frightful system of human
+sacrifices, whereby the priestly caste maintained the prestige
+of its divinities:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account
+of the priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+And of the business side of this vast religious system:
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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&mdash;at least in the large centres&mdash;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&mdash;in later periods, at 20%&mdash;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....</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+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!"</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Prayer-wheels</b></p>
+<p>
+These priestly empires exist in the world today. If
+we wish to find them we have only to ask ourselves:
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+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?</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+Or consider Henry Savage Lander's account of
+Thibet:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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&mdash;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,</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Butcher-Gods</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+
+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?</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+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"&mdash;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."</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Holy Inquisition</b></p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;which they repudiated
+because no promise to a heretic could have validity.
+They found him guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+
+that a priest who committed crimes could not give
+absolution for the crimes of others; and they held an auto
+de fe&mdash;which means a "sentence of faith." As we read
+in Lea's "History of the Inquisition":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+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 had escaped from its tormentors, and the bitterest
+enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him the praise that
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+
+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 relics of their martyr. The next day
+thanks were returned to God in a solemn procession in which
+figured Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen
+cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all
+the clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had
+delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded,
+left Constance, feeling that his work was done.</p>
+</div>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Hell-Fire</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for
+teaching that the earth moves round the sun&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+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 bed-post,
+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&mdash;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&mdash;he
+would buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent
+in his support of the war!</p>
+<p>
+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!"</p>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK TWO</h3>
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church of Good Society</b></p><br />
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i6"> the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.<br /></span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="quotsig">Sterling.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Rain Makers</b></p>
+<p>
+I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be the
+Church in which I was brought up. Heading 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference! Has
+any utmost precision of barometer
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;by wishing that everything he wished might
+come true!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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!"</p>
+<p>
+And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killers&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Babylonian Fire-god</b></p>
+<p>
+So we come to the most important of the functions of the tribal god,
+as an ally in war, an inspirer to martial valour. When in ancient
+Babylonia you wished to overcome your enemies, you went to the shrine
+of the Fire-god, and with awful rites the priest pronounced
+incantations, which have been preserved on bricks and handed down for
+the use of modern churches. "Pronounce in a whisper, and have a bronze
+image therewith," commands the ancient text, and runs on for many
+strophes in this fashion:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Let them die, but let me live!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let them perish, but let me increase!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among the gods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand years ago. Since
+then, the world has moved on&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Three thousand years of war and peace and glory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of mighty voices raised in song and story,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams&mdash;<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i1">O Lord our God, arise, <br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Scatter his enemies, <br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And make them fall;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Confound their politics, <br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Frustrate their knavish tricks, <br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On him our hopes we fix,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">God save us all. <br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span class="i2">Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+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 forced
+Galileo to recant under threat of torture, and had Ferrer shot beneath
+the walls of the fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of
+religion".</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Medicine-men</b></p>
+<p>
+Andrew D. White tells us that</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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 eclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests
+     of the ministers of God."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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."</p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;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 to" between the words "I believe", saying the inserted
+words under his breath, thus, "I used to believe in the Father, the
+Son, and the Holy Ghost." Perhaps the eminent divine never did this;
+but the fact that his students told it, and thought it funny, is
+sufficient indication of their attitude
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+ 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!"</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Canonization of Incompetence</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Gibson's Preservative</b></p>
+<p>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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;he has written many
+such works, as the advertisements inform us&mdash;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&mdash;asking the reader to be patient:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+     I add the following valuable observation, of Dean Goode:
+     ("On Eucharist", II p 757. See also Archbishop Ware in
+     Gibson's "Preservative", vol. N, 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&mdash;that is, by the soul being brought into immediate
+     communion with&mdash;but absent in another sense&mdash;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."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Realize that of the work from which this "valuable
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+ observation" is
+quoted, there are at least two volumes, the second volume containing
+not less than 757 pages I Realize that in Gibson's "Preservative"
+there are not less than ten volumes of such writing! Realize that in
+this twentieth century a considerable portion of the mental energies
+of the world's greatest empire is devoted to that kind of learning!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;slum-populations everywhere, even on the
+land! When the newspaper
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+The bodies&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of
+their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle through"&mdash;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&mdash;because in 1910
+the mind of England was occupied with
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+ Dean Goode "On Eucharist",
+and the ten volumes of Gibson's "Preservative".</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Elders</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+And now&mdash;here is the crux of the argument&mdash;do these aged gentlemen
+rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally nothing of
+their own power; they could
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+ not make their own episcopal robes,
+they could net even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be
+maintained in all their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to
+what end?</p>
+<p>
+The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which
+is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of
+William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and
+in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the
+land among his nobles and prelates. In those days, you understand, a
+high ecclesiastic was a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his
+predatory nature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and
+archbishops of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like
+the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the
+same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English
+chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
+abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependence of the
+church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted
+from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt
+before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord,
+I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and
+I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."</p>
+<p>
+The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held,
+and always on the same condition&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">For this is law that I'll maintain<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Until my dying day, sir:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That whatsoever king shall reign<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+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</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers Plowman&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Away to the Orders that have no pity;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Money rains upon their altars.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There where such parsons be living at ease<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They have no pity on the poor; that is their "charity".<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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 corne, 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 bere
+     them to an other.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+west-minster
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+ 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!"</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Church History</b></p>
+<p>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&mdash;the victims of the plundering.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;for even in those early days I had the habit of persisting in
+embarrassing
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+ 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!"</p>
+<p>
+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".</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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>I</i> propose for the remainder of my days to follow.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+ Thackeray
+reports of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew with
+peculiar intimacy:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious
+     King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600
+     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?&mdash;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!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Land and Livings</b></p>
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">The gods are dead, but in their name<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Humanity is sold to shame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sitteth with robbers at the feast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And poureth freely (now as then)<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The sacramental blood of Men!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+You see, the land system of England remains&mdash;the changes having been
+for the worse. William the Conqueror
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+As an old song puts the matter:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Why prosecute the man or woman<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who steals a goose from off the common,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And let the greater felon loose<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who steals the common from the goose?<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church
+owns land&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;autocratic to
+the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical
+concerning the grafts of grace.</p>
+<p>
+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 birth-day, 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&mdash;that
+is, clergymen holding more than one "living"&mdash;to furnish curates to do
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;on 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."</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Graft in Tail</b></p>
+<p>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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;or, as
+Shakespeare puts it,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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:</p>
+<p>
+"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thorn
+dost retain, they are retained!"</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Bishops and Beer</b></p>
+<p>For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of
+South Africa&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+ leave the lowly Jesus out of this
+affair&mdash;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".</p>
+<p>The British God had other ways of improving nations&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+ upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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;&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+
+clergy of the diocese of Peterborough declared:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Anglicanism and Alcohol</b></p>
+<p>
+This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British
+radicals; they see it at work in
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+ every election&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+ mighty feast there is no cover for him.
+     She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D.D., an especially popular clerical
+author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on wage-slavery:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social
+     arrangements, but to personal vices.
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+</p></div>
+<p>
+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&mdash;neither I or any other man can possibly
+discover what he really means, or what he really wants done.</p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;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&mdash;how do you
+suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!</p>
+<p>
+I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the
+<b>NAIVET&Eacute;</b> with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the story
+of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came out from the
+conference
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+ "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&mdash;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!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Dead Cats </b></p>
+<p>
+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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+ 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
+on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops,
+setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" 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."</p>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the
+cultured classes of England:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+ of slavery, or what
+     subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated
+     classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 Salisbury. 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."</p>
+<p>
+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 Salisbury, 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. Russel, has
+written of their record and adventures:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;a man of
+     apostolic meekness&mdash;replied: "You should be thankful that it
+     was not a live one."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The people had reason for this conduct&mdash;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":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+ seven years' penal
+     transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and
+     every one of you."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Suffer Little Children</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;"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":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+     oweners in the American markets. After that the children
+     were simply at the mercy of their oweners, 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 owener 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor
+of children nine years of age to fourteen
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+ "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 six-pence to
+save a life."</p>
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;to observe the benefits flowing from the
+     distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high
+     to so liberally assist the low.</p></div>
+<p>
+     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."</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the
+     hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge
+     its duties, and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that
+     the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are
+     not worth the contest; that the peace of mind, which
+     Religion offers indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more
+     true satisfaction than all the expensive pleasures which are
+     beyond the poor man's reach; that in this view the poor have
+     the advantage; that if their superiors enjoy more abundant
+     comforts, they are also exposed to many temptations from
+     which the inferior classes are happily exempted; that,
+     "having food and raiment, they should be therewith content,"
+     since their situation in life, with all its evils, is better
+     than they have deserved at the 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.
+</p></div>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Court-Circular</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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."</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<p>
+
+<span class="i1">Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Cherubim and seraphim bowing down before Thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which wert, and art, and ever more shall be!</span>
+</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.<br /></span>
+</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>
+And the second&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Christ, whose glory fills the skies&mdash;<br /></span>
+</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+And the third&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Lord of all being, throned afar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy glory flames from sun and star.<br /></span>
+</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<p>
+<span class="i1">The Son of God goes forth to war,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A kingly crown to gain:<br /></span>
+
+<span class="i1">His blood-red banner streams afar:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who follows in His train?<br /></span>
+</p>
+</blockquote>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+<p>
+
+This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on earth;
+utterly simple and honest&mdash;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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">The company of angels<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Are praising Thee on high;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And mortal men, and all things<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Created, make reply:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">All Glory, laud and honour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To Thee, Redeemer, King....<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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&mdash;casting down their golden crowns around the
+glassy sea&mdash;unless it be that of the Triumvirate itself, compelled to
+sit through eternity watching these saints, and listening to their
+mawkish and superfluous compliments!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Horn-blowing</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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&mdash;I cannot have been more than four years of
+age&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;as all the rest
+of the world is made for them; the populace was permitted to occupy a
+fringe of vacant seats.</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+ They were corralled into
+the Sunday-school, where it was my duty to give them what they needed
+for the health of their souls.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;that the church was a
+kind of amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was
+Tammany.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>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!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;until the venerable institution which had once seemed
+dignified and noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Trinity Corporation</b></p>
+<p>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 grave-stones;
+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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+ 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?</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p></div>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+ The article, in Everybody's Magazine for July, 1908, gives
+pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief. To quote the
+writer again:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p></div>
+<p>
+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 bloodhounds
+of the police on the train of a human being. I asked my clergyman
+friend about it, and remember his patient explanation&mdash;that the bishop
+had to know all classes and conditions of men: his wife had to go
+among
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+ 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!</p>
+<p>
+The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had to be
+cathedrals&mdash;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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Spiritual Interpretation</b></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>
+I remember something analogous in my own boyhood.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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&mdash;to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a
+stained-glass-window divinity.</p>
+<p>
+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.&mdash;a course of lectures delivered
+before the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the
+endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+ 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:</p><div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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&mdash;books, sermons,
+newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches&mdash;wherewith they pound
+their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of
+the proletarian Christ.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as this, a
+teaching so slightly distinguished from the curbstone
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+ rhetoric of a
+modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the scope and
+power of the teaching of Jesus?</p></div>
+<p>
+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&mdash;"The poor ye have always with you!"; second,
+for beauty and culture&mdash;buying wine for wedding-feasts, and
+ointment-boxes and other <b>objets de vertu</b>; and third, "stewardship,"
+"trusteeship"&mdash;which in plain English is "Big Business."</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+ cut from the record of Jesus
+everything which has relation to the realities of life!</p>
+<p>
+So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at
+Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," and
+explaining:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p></div>
+<p>
+And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of New York,
+warning us:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p></div>
+<p>
+And again:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen for
+whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen and pillars
+of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shiny
+tophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in
+pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating
+odors. I picture them as I have seen them at St. George's, where that
+aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the
+collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in
+old-fashioned carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin
+statues of insolence; at St. Thomas',
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+ 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"?</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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!</p></div>
+<p>
+Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK THREE</h3>
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church of the Servant-girls</b></p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Was it for this&mdash;that prayers like these<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Should spend themselves about thy feet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And with hard, overlabored knees<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bosoms too lean to suckle sons<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And fruitless as their orisons?<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Was it for this&mdash;that men should make<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Thy name a fetter on men's necks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Poor men made poorer for thy sake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And women withered out of sex?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Was it for this&mdash;that slaves should be&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy word was passed to set men free?<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="quotsig">Swinburne.</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Charity</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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&mdash;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 <b>enceinte.</b> 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.</p>
+<p>
+Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the
+remark&mdash;like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his
+mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;"plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder
+and sudden death." Yet&mdash;puzzling as it would seem to anyone not
+religious&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building and
+rebuilding his web across a door-way;<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+like soldiers under the command of a ruling class with a "muddling
+through" tradition&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Theirs not to reason why,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Theirs but to do and die.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+ 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!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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?</p>
+<p>
+Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely
+moderate&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+You think this is empty rhetoric&mdash;you comfortable, easy-going,
+ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic shades,
+absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless
+intelligence"&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>God's Armor</b></p>
+<p>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":</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">There's power in me and will to dominate<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which I must exercise, they hurt me else;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In many ways I need mankind's respect,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Obedience, and the love that's born of fear.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+He wishes that he had faith&mdash;faith in anything; he understands that
+faith is all-important&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+But you cannot get faith just by wishing for it&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
+He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade for truth, but he
+asks what there would be in it for him&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i4">State the facts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Read the text right, emancipate the world&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The emancipated world enjoys itself<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With scarce a thank-you. Blougram told it first<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It could not owe a farthing,&mdash;not to him<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">More than St. Paul!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasily conscious of the
+contempt of intellectual people.</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">I pine among my million imbeciles<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(You think) aware some dozen men of sense<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Eye me and know me, whether I believe<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the last winking virgin as I vow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And am a fool, or disbelieve in her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And am a knave.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+But, as he says, you have to keep a tight hold upon the chain of
+faith, that is what</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Gives all the advantage, makes the difference,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We are their lords, or they are free of us,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Just as we tighten or relax that hold.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+ the G.R.C. Central-Verein," and bears the
+"Nihil Obstat" of the "Censor Theolog." and the "Imprimatur" of
+"Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici"&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+I quote from this little book:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.</p>
+<p>
+     During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your
+     prayers need not be long nor read from a book. Learn a few
+     of
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;which would seem by
+all odds the best investment of your spare breath.</p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+ 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":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Thanksgivings</b></p>
+<p>
+For another five cents&mdash;how cheaply a man of insight can obtain
+thrills in this fantastic world!&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+ 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"&mdash;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.)</p>
+<p>
+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".</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+Alabama&mdash;Jewelry found, relief from pain, protection during storm.</p>
+<p>
+Alaska&mdash;Safe return, goods found.</p>
+<p>
+Arizona&mdash;Two recoveries, suitable boarding place, illness averted,
+safe delivery.</p>
+<p>
+British Honduras&mdash;Successful operation.</p>
+<p>
+California&mdash;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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic machine is
+harvesting the price day by day&mdash;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."</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Holy Roman Empire</b></p>
+<p>
+The system thus self-revealed you admit is appalling
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+ 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; <b>semper
+eadem</b> is its motto: the same yesterday, today and forever&mdash;the same
+in Washington as in Rome or Madrid&mdash;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":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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 <b>Jure
+     divino</b> with power, (1) to make laws; (2) to define and
+     apply them <b>(potestas judicialis)</b>; (3) to punish those who
+     violate her laws <b>(potestas coercitiva).</b>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And this is not one scholar's theory, but the formal and repeated
+proclamation of infallible popes. Here is the "Syllabus of Errors",
+issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in substance that</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The state has not the right to leave every man free to
+     profess and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Then in the same Syllabus the rights and powers of the Church are
+affirmed in substance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+     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.</p>
+<p>
+She has the right of perpetuating the union of church and state.</p>
+<p>
+She has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be the
+only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others.</p>
+<p>
+She has the right to prevent the state from granting the public
+exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating from it.</p>
+<p>
+She has the power of requiring the state not to permit free expression
+of opinion.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 <b>you</b>? Here is Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical
+of 1890&mdash;and please remember that Leo XIII was the <b>beau ideal</b> of our
+capitalist statesmen and editors, as wise and kind and gentle-souled a
+pope as ever roasted a heretic. He says:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     If the laws of the state are openly at variance with the
+     laws of God&mdash;if they inflict injury upon the Church&mdash;or set
+     at naught
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 <b>Ne Temere</b>, has declared that Catholics who are
+married by civil authorities or by Protestant clergymen will be living
+in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of
+education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief,
+incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To
+the above list, as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such
+as birth control, which have arisen since his time.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>
+I acknowledge no civil power; I am the subject of no prince; I claim
+more than this&mdash;I claim to be the supreme judge and director of the
+consciences of men&mdash;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.</p>
+</div>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Temporal Power</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+
+intentions. The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true believers in
+America, instructed them as to their attitude in captivity:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Accordingly, here is Father Phelan of St. Louis, addressing his flock
+in the "Western Watchman", June 27,1913:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+You recall what I said at the outset about Power;
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     It must be borne in mind that even though Cardinals Farley,
+     O'Connell and Gibbons are at heart patriotic Americans and
+     members of an American hierarchy, yet they are as cardinals
+     foreign princes of the blood, to whom the United States, as
+     one of the great powers of the world, is under an obligation
+     to concede the same honors that they receive abroad.</p>
+<p>
+     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.</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Knights of Slavery</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     I'd like to see the politician who would try to rule against
+     the church in Chicago. His reign would be short indeed.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Priests and Police</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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;
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church Militant</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our
+open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy?</p>
+<p>
+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!"</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;such as Columbus Day&mdash;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&mdash;or, if this cannot be had, exemption of
+Catholics from taxation for school purposes. So on through the list
+which might continue for pages.</p>
+<p>
+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":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Catholic parents cannot, in conscience, send their children
+     to
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+ American public schools, except for very grave reasons
+     approved by the ecclesiastical authorities.
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church Triumphant</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.</p>
+<p>
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+ 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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>God in the Schools</b></p>
+<p>
+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":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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 consumes cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are
+     financially interested in their continuance.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Menace</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+ be got to
+convict a Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The
+most pious Leo XIII has laid down:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;except
+when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
+publication make use of Untruth in their labors&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+ "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!</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of Superstition in
+America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a democracy, we find
+precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the poor foreigner who
+troubles us. Our human magic would win him&mdash;our easy-going trust, our
+quiet certainty of liberty, our open-handed and open-homed and
+hail-fellow-well-met
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+ democracy. We should break down the Catholic
+machine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy could stop us&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>King Coal</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;the steel-mills of Western
+Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the glass-works of
+Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former
+superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado Fuel and
+Iron Company:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The C.F. &amp; 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses whom
+the Rockefellers employ:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+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?</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     "When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of
+     the super he was getting too smart."
+</p> <p>"And he got what?"</p> <p> "He
+     got it in the neck, generally."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on strike,
+in the words of the Commission's report:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 en-rolled, ninety per cent of
+whom could not speak a word of English.</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was
+     over-crowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
+     around there.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Election returns from the two or three counties in which the
+     large companies operate show that in the precincts in which
+     the
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+ mining camps are located the returns are nearly
+     unanimous in favor of the men or measures approved by the
+     companies, regardless of party.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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. "<b>We</b>
+made him!" he said.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     "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.
+</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+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&mdash;not one!
+Several Protestant clergymen testified that they had been driven from
+the coal-camps&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Unholy Alliance</b></p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so in
+the Elaine 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."</p>
+<p>
+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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Secret Service</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+From my personal knowledge I can say that under the administration of
+President Taft t the Roman Catholic Church and the Secret Service of
+the Federal Government
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;myself&mdash;a man who was asking a divorce from his wife,
+and whose mail was opened for months.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Tax Exemption</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;all the services of civilization given to them gratis, and
+this in a land whose constitution provides that Congress (which
+includes all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no
+law respecting an establishment of religion." When war is declared,
+and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and
+friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of
+religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+ have the status of
+"conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach
+justice and humanity, decency and truth.</p>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;a woman
+     has recently left them 70,000 crowns&mdash;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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p><b>"Holy History"</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+ learn
+something about the partnership between Superstition and Big Business!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+And then, a month later, conies another occasion of state&mdash;the
+twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
+Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to
+make clear the sociological significance of that function; explaining
+first, a nation-wide organization which has been proven by
+congressional investigation and by the publication of its secret
+documents to be a machine for the corruption of our political life;
+and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels
+have long since fled; a city in the first crude stage of land
+speculation, without order, dignity or charm; a city of real estate
+agents, who exist by selling climate to new arrivals from the East; a
+city whose intellectual life is "boosting", whose standards of truth
+are those of the horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of
+temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern California
+and the East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last
+June, when for five days the temperature went to over 110, and several
+times 114&mdash;the Los Angeles space was left empty!</p>
+<p>
+In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quake 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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;many of them representing full page and half page
+illustrated "write-ups":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"&mdash;the labor-hating,
+labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"&mdash;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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+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: "<b>We have no proletariat in
+America!</b>"</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Das Centrum</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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"&mdash;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."</p>
+<p>
+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
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+"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."</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+
+See." The purpose of the letter is "to refute false teaching," and the
+substance of its message is:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     This great labor question cannot be solved except by
+     assuming as a principle that private property must be held
+     sacred and inviolable.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as frank as
+any used in the present book:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;Austria, the
+leader and guardian of the Holy Alliance&mdash;Austria, which had no
+Reformation, no Revolution, no Kultur-kampf&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+ And at the
+same time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced to prison
+for life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!</p>
+<p>
+It is a curious thing to observe&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>is</i> 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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+ Journal" published nine articles
+favoring Socialism in a single issue; while even "The Tablet," the
+diocesan paper, began to discover that the Socialists were not such
+bad fellows after all. The same "Tablet" which a few years ago allowed
+Father Belford to declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be
+"stopped with a bullet"!</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     P. S. The reader will be interested to know that for the
+     statements on <a href="#Page_155">page 155</a>, Upton Sinclair was described as a
+     "scoundrel" by a former primeminister of the Austrian
+     Empire, and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a
+     court trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns&mdash;about $7
+     in American money.
+</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK FOUR</h3>
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church of the Slavers</b></p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And merrily from night to morn<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">We chaunt his praise and worship him&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">A wondrous god! most fit for those<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Blood on his heavenly altar flows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Hell's burning incense fills the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Death attests in street and lane<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The hideous glory of his reign.<br /></span></p>
+<p class="quotsig">&mdash;Buchanan</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Face of Caesar</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+
+nothing had been done about it, nothing ever is done about it&mdash;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&mdash;that universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia,
+England, Mexico or sixteenth century Germany&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Deutschland ueber Alles</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;the Oberhofprediger&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of
+     pains with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to them;
+     and
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no state
+     erected upon any other foundation can permanently exist.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is the oath required of the Catholic clergy, upon their
+admission to equality of trustworthiness with their Protestant
+confreres:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his Royal
+     Majesty,&mdash;and his lawful successors in the government,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;with the result that millions of Turks are fighting under the
+belief that the Kaiser is a convert to the faith of Mo-hammed!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Der Tag.</b></p>
+<p>
+All this was, of course, in preparation for the great event to which
+all good Germans looked forward&mdash;to which all German officers drank
+their toasts at banquets&mdash;the Day.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetrated the great
+masterpiece of humor of the war&mdash;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&mdash;"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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Germany is the center of God's plans for the world.
+     Germany's
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+ fight against the whole world is in reality the
+     battle of the spirit against the whole world's infamy,
+     falsehood and devilish cunning.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is Pastor K. Koenig:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     It was God's will that we should will the war.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And Pastor J. Rump:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity. We
+     fight for the cause of Jesus within mankind.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is an eminent theological professor:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>King Cotton</b></p>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which represented
+the churches of the South as well as of the North, passed by a
+<b>unanimous</b> vote a resolution to the effect that "Slavery is utterly
+inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from defenses
+of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus Christ&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Witches and Women</b></p>
+<p>
+To whatever part of the world you travel, to whatever page of history
+you turn, you find the endowed and established clergy using the word
+of God in defense of whatever form of slave-driving may then be
+popular and profitable. Two or three hundred years ago it was the
+custom of Protestant divines in England and America to hang poor old
+women as witches; only 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims is this&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+ 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!</p>
+<p>
+And if you say that this enslavement of Woman has nothing to do with
+religion&mdash;that ancient Hebrew fables do not control modern English
+customs&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then Eve.</p>
+<p>
+(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but the woman
+of the man.</p>
+<p>
+(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the woman,
+but the woman for the man.</p>
+<p>
+(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory of God, but
+woman is the glory of man.</p>
+<p>
+(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but the
+woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+(6) The marriage relation. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let
+the wives be to their husbands.</p>
+<p>
+(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is Christ,
+but the head of the woman is man.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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;
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+ we shall hear our
+evangelists quoting Leviticus: "<b>They shall eat the flesh of their own
+sons and daughters.</b>" 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: "<b>Happy shall be he that
+taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.</b>"</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Moth and Rust</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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?</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+ 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!</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>To Lyman Abbott</b></p>
+<p>
+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 lea, 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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;and Jesus, if he should come back to earth, could never know
+that he had left the abodes of bliss above.</p>
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;"high-balls" and "gin rickeys" and "peppered punches"; also
+<b>vermouthe and creme de menthe and absinthe</b>, which I believe, are
+green in hue, and therefore entirely safe.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;even, for instance, a Golden Calf!</p>
+<p>
+"The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy <i>God</i>; in it thou
+shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy
+manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor the 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&mdash;sail-boats, naptha launches, yachts,
+automobiles, and private cars&mdash;all of which may be busily occupied
+during the seventh day of the week. The men who run these
+machines&mdash;the guides, boatmen, stokers, pilots, chauffeurs, and
+engineers&mdash;would all indignantly
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+ resent being regarded
+as-"servants", and so they do not come under the prohibition any more
+than the machines.</p>
+<p>
+"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 of-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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Octopus</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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?</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, were so exact that
+they read today like the reports of the Interstate Commerce
+Commission, dated three
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+ years later. A representative of the New
+Haven called upon the editor of Hampton's with a proof of the first
+article&mdash;obtained from the printer by bribery&mdash;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."</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Industrial Shelley</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;"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&mdash;President Mellen&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<p>
+There was no less than sixteen pages of these raptures&mdash;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&mdash;my typewriter started to write "underfed
+millions"&mdash;are humbly grateful for these services, and hasten to buy
+copies of the pious weekly which tells about them.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+ to their
+troubles. In the issue of Jan. 4th, 1913, three years and ten days
+after the Baxter rhapsody, we read:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And by June 28th, matters had gone farther yet; we find the "Outlook"
+reporting:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Within a few hours of the collision at Stamford, the wrecked
+     Pullman car was taken away and burned. Is this criminal
+     destruction of evidence?
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;its industrial
+Shelley, "nervously organized, of delicate sensibility"&mdash;admitted that
+he had no authority as to the finances of the road and no
+understanding of them, but had taken all his
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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."</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Outlook for Graft</b></p>
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the price&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;or to the files of
+"Pearson's Magazine", which is out of print and not found in
+libraries!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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-five
+dollars weekly, or two or three hundred on special occasions. Sums had
+been paid directly to more than a thousand newspapers&mdash;$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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+ issued to the New
+Haven. Asked why the pamphlet was called "Prayers", Mr. Mellen
+explained that "there was lots of biblical language in it."</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;would you think it possible?&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
+
+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"&mdash;and
+all this without the slightest claim to divine inspiration or
+authority!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+<p>
+Also, why does the magazine refuse to give its
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;even when she is caught in a brothel!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Clerical Camouflage</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+ for a machine-gun. When I saw that picture, I thought to
+myself&mdash;<b>there</b> is capitalist Religion!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;giving
+a dime with one hand, while taking back a dollar with the other!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+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&mdash;while we are all making sacrifices in a
+"War for Democracy"&mdash;that Armour and Company had paid a dividend of
+twenty-one per cent, and Swift and Company a dividend of thirty-five
+per cent.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;all this is to overreach the object.... Even
+     things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer
+     screams them out in
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+ a sensational way and in a high
+     pitched key.... More convincing if it were less hysterical.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Don't you see what these clerical crooks are for?</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Jungle</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<p>
+<span class="i2">We are weary in our cradles<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From our mother's toil untold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We are born to hoarded weariness<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As some to hoarded gold.<br /></span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale capitalist
+industry in its final flowering! I quote from "The Jungle":</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;ten thousand, maybe&mdash;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&mdash;it comes to them of itself, their only care is
+     to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in luxury
+     and extravagance&mdash;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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+ the toil and anguish of
+     the nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human
+     race! It is all theirs&mdash;it comes to them; just as all the
+     springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into
+     rivers, and the rivers into the ocean&mdash;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&mdash;and all the results, the
+     products of the labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into
+     one stupendous stream and poured into their laps!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!&mdash;Sell that ye have
+and give alms!&mdash;Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of
+Heaven!&mdash;Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your
+consolation!&mdash;Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly
+enter into the kingdom of Heaven!&mdash;Woe unto you also, you lawyers!&mdash;Ye
+serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
+hell?"</p>
+<p>
+"And this man"&mdash;I quote from "The Jungle" again&mdash;"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!
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
+ 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!"
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK FIVE</h3>
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church of the Merchants</b></p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i8">Mammon led them on&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Were always downward bent, admiring more<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In vision beatific.... Let none admire<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Deserve the precious bane.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+
+<p class="quotsig">Milton.</p>
+
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Head Merchant</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Repaid a thousand fold shall be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Then gladly will we give to Thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who givest all.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Nothing is worth a thought beneath<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But how I may escape the death<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That never, never dies;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How make mine own election sure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And when I fail on earth secure<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">A mansion in the skies.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+
+<p>
+Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figures God as a mighty
+Conqueror&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i4">Marching as to war<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the cross of Jesus<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Going on before&mdash;<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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!"</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+ 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!"</p>
+<br /><p><b>"Herr Beeble"</b></p>
+<p>
+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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D., D.C.L.,
+L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers
+himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is
+Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions
+Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to
+manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense
+of the Rockefeller fortune. It is generally not expected that the
+makers of ruling-class munitions should face the dirty and perilous
+work of the trenches; but 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!
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;D.D., S.T.D., L.L.D., D.C.L.,
+L.H.D.</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;how clear and clean-cut is the distinction he draws for you:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Holy Oil</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The so-called religious awakening or "trail-hitting" is
+     produced by an appeal to the emotions and in stirring up the
+     senses
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+
+     sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher criticism,
+     wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out of a
+     beer-mug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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,</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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".</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism which
+he fosters does not help the development of evil more than his
+preaching hinders it. The newspapers always report the cost of the
+tabernacle, and of the "free-will offering", which amounts to hundreds
+of thousands of dollars in each "campaign". In each city the expenses
+are guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting
+forces of the community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits
+their homes, and is in every way one of the crowd. After the big silk
+strike in Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included,
+all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was
+freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the radical union
+movement. This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his whole
+campaign was conducted on that basis.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;"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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house!
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Rhetorical Black-hanging</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;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....
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to
+kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall Street.
+Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western railroads, died; and
+standing over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop,
+preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, wherein he likened young Leland
+to the boy Christ. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly
+reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout
+his 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;making the latter provide for the
+     offal of his political machine, which even Pennsylvania
+     could no longer stomach&mdash;and
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!"</p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+
+Millionaires' Club agrees with this book, that the "infinite powers"
+in America are the powers that prey!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Great American Fraud</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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."</p>
+<p>
+There are a thousand religious papers in America,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+ weekly and
+monthly; and what is their attitude on this question? Mr. Adams tells
+us:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+He gives us many pages of specific instances:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is the "Church Advocate", of Harrisburg, Pa., which publishes
+quack advertisements disguised as editorials. One of them Mr. Adams
+paraphrases:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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?
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+ 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!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is&mdash;would you think it possible?&mdash;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 <b>the</b> church</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Elect from every nation,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Yet one o'er all the earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Her charter of salvation,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">One Lord, one Faith, one Birth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One holy name she blesses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Partakes one holy food,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And toward one Hope she presses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">With every grace endued.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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&mdash;"Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The editors and publishers of the "Living Church" assume no
+     responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud" remarks:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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".
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Riches in Glory</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+ plea he made answer: "Get Jesus in your
+hearts, and these questions will take care of themselves!"</p>
+<p>
+So we see the most important of the many services which the churches
+perform for the merchants&mdash;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&mdash;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 <b>"Glory Mission".</b> 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 "Keverend", 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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">O, there's a plenty, O, there's a plenty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Riches in glory, riches in glory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Royal supply our wants exceed!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Feasting, I'm feasting,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I'm feasting with my Lord!<br /></span>
+
+
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Beautiful robes, beautiful robes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beautiful robes we then shall wear!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Jerusalem the golden,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With milk and honey blest!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I'll be there, I'll be there!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Blest Canaan land, bright Canaan land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I love to be in Canaan land!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As on the highest mount I stand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I look away across the sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where mansions are prepared for me!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">In the sweet bye and bye<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We shall meet on that beautiful shore&mdash;<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I.W.W. who
+was executed a few years ago in Utah, and who used this tune in his
+little red book of revolutionary chants:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">You will eat, bye and bye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the glorious land above the sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Work and pray, live on hay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You'll get pie in the sky when you die!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Captivating Ideals</b></p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+ left for you to desire; you can take everything he
+owns&mdash;you can skin him alive if it pleases you&mdash;and he will bear it
+all with perfect good humor."</p>
+<p>
+And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung&mdash;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?</p>
+<p>
+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".</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+ And this, as the professor explains, is not an easy thing to do,
+in a world in which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The
+only means of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
+sacrifice ... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful ideal"
+And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this
+purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist on
+the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering&mdash;of that
+suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress
+if it could."</p>
+<p>
+You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever
+you are&mdash;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!"</p>
+<p>
+Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+ 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."</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 <b>ex cathedra</b>. Said the eloquent cardinal:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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 <b>till we know what
+     motion is?</b>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Spook Hunting</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;for, of course, no man can look at the
+present system and not wonder how the poor stand it, and more
+especially <b>why</b> they stand it. There have been many
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+ 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 <b>bourgeois</b>
+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 <b>beau ideal</b> of the New York "Evening Post", which
+indicates his point of view. He wrote:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 <b>bourgeois</b> 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&mdash;and of course
+long before they could be put into practice, the politicians would be
+ready with devices to make them of no effect.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again, more menacingly yet:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution
+     that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and
+     immortality.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+ 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?</p>
+<p>
+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 <b>bourgeois</b> thinkers do not know
+what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be
+kicked out of the temple of truth?</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Running the Rapids</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;a war, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.&mdash;he casts a holy
+wafer upon the foaming torrent.</p>
+
+
+<p>
+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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+ you will be as apt to find them among the
+Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to
+the Gentiles.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Birth Control</b></p>
+<p>
+I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
+minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+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&mdash;but these weapons are
+not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned.
+Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our
+great cities&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;a bloody
+European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper
+correspondent&mdash;might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing
+formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of
+Catholic
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
+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!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Sheep</b></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+ 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 age 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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;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 &amp; Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and
+Gaby Deslys&mdash;while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as
+Ibsen and Brieux.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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 pious 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 this relationship of Superstition and Big
+Business!</p>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK SIX</h3>
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church of the Quacks</b></p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And how one ought never to think of one's self,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">How pleasant it is to have money.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="quotsig">Clough.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Tabula Rasa</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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"&mdash;the men pairing with men and the
+women with women.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
+ 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!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;so
+obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+ 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"&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Book of Mormon</b></p>
+<p>
+Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still
+stranger cult.</p>
+<p>
+On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord
+delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr.,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="ctr">
+
+Christian Whitmer<br />
+Jacob Whitmer<br />
+Peter Whitmer, Jr.<br />
+John Whitmer<br />
+Hiram Page<br />
+Joseph Smith, Sr.<br />
+Hyrum Smith <br />
+Saml. H. Smith<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Holy Rolling</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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....</p>
+<p>
+     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."</p>
+<p>
+     That's the way I came through. One morning I was just
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 <b>call</b>." The word
+appears to have a special meaning to these pentecostal persons&mdash;it
+means working yourself into a frenzy of agitation; as the editor puts
+it, "you must <b>lay</b> hold of the <b>horns</b> of the <b>altar."</b> He goes on to
+exhort&mdash;the bold face being his:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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 <b>dead
+     to the room, dead to the chair</b>, 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
+     <b>self-thought, reticence, decorum, reserve, propriety and
+     dignity</b> 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a sect
+which originated in England, but was
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Bible Prophecy</b></p>
+<p>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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
+ that
+spirit of feeble-minded affectionateness which the Bible-sects seem to
+encourage:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 Lay-men'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&mdash;Mystic Babylon the Antitype: Why
+Christendom must Suffer&mdash;the Final Outcome." A note explains:</p>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Pastor Russell used to publish a two-column sermon in some hundreds of
+Sunday newspapers, together with a presentment of his features&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     "But that they should be tormented five months."&mdash;In
+     symbolic time, 150 years&mdash;5x30=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.&mdash;Rev. 9:10.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Koreshanity</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again, when someone asks about meteors:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+<p> And perhaps I ought also to quote the "Indicia of Human
+Progress", by "Berthaldine, Matrona". I don't know what a
+"Matrona" is&mdash;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.</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Mazdaznan</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
+ Finally he sets himself up in Chicago as a Persian Magus, teaching
+Yogi breathing exercises and occult sex-lore to the elegant society
+ladies of the pork-packing metropolis. The Sun God, 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&mdash;"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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     The Immaculate Conception and its Repetition; The Secrets of
+     Lovers Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates; Magnetic
+     Attraction and Electric Mating.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a farrago of every
+kind of ancient mysticism&mdash;paper and binding from the Bible,
+illustrations from the Egyptian, names from the Zoroastrian, health
+rules from the Hindoos, laws from the Confucians&mdash;price ten dollars
+per volume. Would you like to discover your
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
+ seventeen senses, to
+develop them according to the Ga-Llama principle, and to share the
+"expansion of the magnetic circles"? Here is the way to do it:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one
+     exhalation, speak slowly:</p>
+<p>
+     Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth
+     hidden by the vase of dazzling light.</p>
+<p>
+     Again inhale for four seconds, and breathe out the following
+     sentence upon one exhalation as before:</p>
+<p>
+     Soften the radiation of Thy Illuminating Splendor, that I
+     may behold Thy True Being.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Black Magic</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 <i>God</i>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
+ agent of God without knowing it, and
+that the leadership had now been turned over to him.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;whether because of love of man or woman, I
+do not pretend to say.</p>
+<p>
+There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and institutes
+and temples and colonies, and a
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+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 minature 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 expos&eacute;s 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!"</p>
+<p>
+Let me add that I do not say that she practices black magic. I do not
+believe that she <b>could</b> practice it, even if she wanted to&mdash;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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Let them die, but let me live!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let them perish, but let me increase!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Mental Malpractice</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;yet tormented by a squalid
+phobia called "Mental Malpractice", or "Malicious Animal Magnetism".</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;enough to satisfy myself that the
+subconscious mind which controls our
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+ physical functions can be
+powerfully influenced by the will.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they have mixed
+it up with metaphysic and divinity,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+It is a strict religion&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Science and Wealth</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>
+
+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".</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, in a Christian
+Science lecture at Kansas City, Mo., should proclaim:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And again:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>
+ 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>New Nonsense</b></p>
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;together
+with the very newest manifestations of Yankee hustle and graft.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
+ Bakers' Trust and how to expropriate these
+agencies of starvation? You do not!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;or in Capital
+Letters and LARGE TYPE: "God is infinite, God is All-Loving, <b>GOD
+WILL PROVIDE.</b> Bread is coming to you! <b>Bread is coming to you!!
+BREAD IS COMING TO YOU!!!"</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.</p>
+</div>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
+
+<br /><p><b>"Dollars Want Me"</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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.</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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&mdash;all of God, Good, all of Good. I am Life. I am
+     Health. I am Supply. I am the Substance."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 <b>Power</b>,
+that the INDWELLING PRESENCE with all its <b>MIGHT</b> 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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of acquisitiveness:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the
+capitalist system&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+
+
+     Your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by your faith. A
+     doubt cuts the connection.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its thirtieth edition,
+bears the thrilling title of "<b>Dollars Want Me</b>!" In it Mr. Brown lays
+claim to being a pioneer:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+"What are Dollars?" asks our author; and answers:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+"What is Poverty?" Mr. Brown asks, and answers himself:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And our author goes on to hand out packages of these
+thought-seeds&mdash;"Affirmations" as they are called, in the jargon of the
+New Conjuring:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">I desire a deep consciousness of financial freedom.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I desire that the flow of prosperity become equalized.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I desire a greater consciousness of my power to attract the dollar.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Indwelling Power cares for my purse.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I own whatever I desire.<br /></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="i2">I can afford to use dollars for my happiness.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I always have a good bank account. I actually see it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My one idea of the law isto use, use, USE.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Spiritual Financiering</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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?</p>
+<p>
+     If you can answer that last question affirmatively, you are
+     on the road to become a Master in Spiritual Financiering.</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And how do you proceed to open your account? It is very simple:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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!</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which cannot find
+dupes among the readers of this New Nonsense. One notice commands:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Stop! A Revelation! A Book has been written entitled
+     "Strands of Gold" or "from Darkness into Light!"
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Another announces:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And here is an advertisement published in Mr. Atkinson's paper:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;until the Philosopher
+points out that "9 is the number of completion, indicating
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+ the end
+of a cosmic cycle." That, of course, explains everything.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;by Prof. John B. Early. Price One Dollar." It teaches
+you things like this:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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....</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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."</p>
+<p>
+You might at first find difficulty in believing what
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     London, Dec. 14.&mdash;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....</p>
+<p>
+     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.&mdash;&mdash;, 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Graft of Grace</b></p>
+<p>All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religions
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>
+ 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"&mdash;that is, who are in business trouble?</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;people whose minds and souls have been deformed by the system of
+parasitism and exploitation.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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"&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>
+ understanding an extraordinary
+power of the subconscious mind?</p>
+<p>
+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 <b>s&eacute;ance</b> 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&mdash;especially when you recall
+that the story of this mother's bereavement had been published in all
+the papers a couple of months before!</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;both men and women&mdash;who pour their treasures of faith and
+admiration into the laps of hierophants who began by fooling all
+mankind and ended by fooling themselves!</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;if anyone can
+persuade them to read it&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
+</p>
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a>
+<hr />
+<h3>BOOK SEVEN</h3>
+<hr />
+<br />
+<p>
+The Church of the Social Revolution</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">They have taken the tomb of our Comrade Christ&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Infidel hordes that believe not in man;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">They have buried him deep under steel and stone&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But we come leading the great Crusade<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To give our Comrade back to his own.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="quotsig">Waddell.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Christ and Caesar</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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 or 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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
+
+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!</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     <span class="i2">'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
+ 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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
+ the
+first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible to concede the
+last.</p>
+</div>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Locusts and Wild Honey</b></p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishes the Hebrew
+sacred writings from all others,
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
+ There has been of late a great deal of new discovery concerning
+the early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as follows:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Nathan and Gad had 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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Mother Earth</b></p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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,
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+
+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&mdash;Alexander Berkman, in his "Prison Memoirs of an
+Anarchist", discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>
+ Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist
+Party for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+
+Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred years?</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Soap Box</b></p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     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.</p>
+<p>
+     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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
+ 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?
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church Machine</b></p>
+<p>
+
+The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would
+have a sign of Thee"&mdash;meaning that they wanted him to do some magic,
+to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He
+answered
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
+ by calling them an evil and adulterous generation&mdash;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&mdash;"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&mdash;the public houses&mdash;the
+churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a
+wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"&mdash;precisely as in the
+old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their
+meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still
+denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J.
+Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey,</p>
+<p>
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+ Bouck White; but their voices are not silenced, they are like the
+leaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of God&mdash;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&mdash;and the scribes and the
+pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift wings&mdash;it
+may be here before this book sees the light. And who knows but then we
+may see in
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span>
+ 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?</p>
+<p>
+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?</p>
+
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Church Redeemed</b></p>
+<p>Do I mean that I expect to see the Church&mdash;all
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+ churches&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Unwashed legions with the ways of death.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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&mdash;old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas
+dinners, farm colonies&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
+ deny that it is better than "Gibson's
+Preservative", and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with
+port.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;that with prayer-meetings and
+psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
+educational societies and social reforms he thrives.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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!</p>
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Desire of Nations</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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 inspires. 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&mdash;we amateurs, not knowing much
+about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against
+organized wrong.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;the schisms which
+waste the greater part of our activities, and which are often the
+result of personal jealousies and petty vanities. To lift men above
+such weakness, to make them really brothers in a great cause&mdash;that is
+the
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
+ work of "personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the
+words.</p>
+<p>
+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:</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">And when he comes into the world gone wrong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He will rebuild her beauty with a song.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To every heart he will its own dream be:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One moon has many phantoms in the sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Out of the North the norns will cry to men:<br /></span>
+  <span class="i2">"Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:<br /></span>
+  <span class="i2">"Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:<br /></span>
+  <span class="i2">"Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And social architects who build the State,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And glad quick cries will go from man to man:<br /></span>
+  <span class="i2">"Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The Knowable</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that
+when you are dealing with absolutes
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
+ 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 <b>now</b>. 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;that he is not
+being played with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H20 to
+behave like water, and tomorrow like benzine.</p>
+
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Nature's Insurgent Son</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and
+deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
+product&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
+ one idea&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
+ exact
+knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life of the
+race.</p>
+
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>The New Morality</b></p>
+<p>
+
+Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers;
+driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call
+the <b>&eacute;lan vital</b>. 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;-</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i2">The untamed giants of nature shall bow down&mdash;-<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From mockery and destruction, and be turned<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Unto the making of the soul of man.<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true pleasure
+is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.</p>
+<p>
+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.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and as
+scientists we can proclaim it&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;the
+Socialist movement, in the broad sense&mdash;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.</p>
+<blockquote class="poem">
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>
+<span class="i6">From the edge of harsh derision,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">From discord and defeat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">From doubt and lame division,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">We pluck the fruit and eat;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">O sorrowing hearts of slaves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">We heard you beat from far!<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">We bring the light that saves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">We bring the morning star;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things are....<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<br /><p class="strong"><b>Envoi</b></p>
+<p>
+
+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.</p>
+<p>
+
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;and her&mdash;in the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the
+newest red chemicals, smoking the newest brand of cigarettes, and
+discussing the newest form of <b>psycopathia sexualis</b>. 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.</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;if there
+is any
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
+ way to say it without seeming a prig&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>
+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?</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+
+     Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I
+     hear, and not that thou hast escaped a yoke.</p>
+<p>
+     Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke?
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
+ Free from
+     what? What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell
+     me: free to what?</p>
+<p>
+     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?</p>
+<p>
+     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.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;that the
+sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and
+fourth generations.</p>
+<p>
+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
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span>
+ 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&mdash;bigotry and intolerance,
+vindictiveness and vanity, envy, hatred and malice and all
+uncharitableness!
+
+<span class="newpage"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+
+
+<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+<hr />
+<h3>INDEX</h3>
+<hr />
+<br /><br />
+<ul>
+<li>Abbott, Lyman
+<a href="#Page_175">175-191</a></li>
+<li>Abbott, L.F.
+<a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+<li>Adams
+<a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+<li>Adventists
+<a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+<li>Amberley
+<a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+<li>Anglican Church
+<a href="#Page_47">47-88</a></li>
+<li>Appeal to Reason
+<a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+<li>Archer
+<a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+<li>Assyria
+<a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+<li>Atkinson
+<a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+<li>Austria
+<a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+<li>Aztecs
+<a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Babists
+<a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+<li>Babylonia
+<a href="#Page_26">26</a>,
+<a href="#Page_32">32</a>,
+<a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+<li>Baxter
+<a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+<li>Beilhardt
+<a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+<li>Berkman
+<a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+<li>Besant
+<a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+<li>Bible-students
+<a href="#Page_246">246</a></li>
+<li>Bismarck
+<a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+<li>Black Magic
+<a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+<li>Blavatsky
+<a href="#Page_23">23</a>,
+<a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+<li>Blougram
+<a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+<li>Bonzano
+<a href="#Page_121">121</a>,
+<a href="#Page_126">126</a></li>
+<li>Booth
+<a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+<li>Bootstrap-lifting
+<a href="#Page_11">11</a>,
+<a href="#Page_266">266</a></li>
+<li>Brougher
+<a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+<li>Brown
+<a href="#Page_268">268</a></li>
+<li>Buchanan
+<a href="#Page_68">68</a>,
+<a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+<li>Buckle
+<a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+<li>Burns
+<a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>C&aelig;sar
+<a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+<li>Cannon
+<a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+<li>Carlyle
+<a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+<li>Carnegie
+<a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+<li>Catholic Church
+<a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+<a href="#Page_105">105-157</a>,
+<a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+<li>Catholic Encyclopedia
+<a href="#Page_67">67</a>Centrum
+<a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li>Charcot
+<a href="#Page_258">258</a></li>
+<li>Chatterton-Hill
+<a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+<li>Chinese
+<a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+<li>Christian Endeavor World
+<a href="#Page_216">216</a></li>
+<li>Christian Science
+<a href="#Page_254">254-264</a></li>
+<li>Churchman
+<a href="#Page_101">101</a>,
+<a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+<li>Clark
+<a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+<li>Clough
+<a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+<li>Columbus
+<a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+<li>Conway
+<a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+<li>Curates
+<a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Darwin
+<a href="#Page_56">56</a></li>
+<li>Day
+<a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+<li>Debs
+<a href="#Page_289">289</a></li>
+<li>Dixon
+<a href="#Page_204">204</a>,
+<a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+<li>Dowie
+<a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+<li>Durham
+<a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Eastman
+<a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li>Eddy
+<a href="#Page_257">257</a>,
+<a href="#Page_261">261</a></li>
+<li>Education
+<a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li>England
+<a href="#Page_49">49</a>,
+<a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+<a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+<li>England, Church of
+<a href="#Page_47">47-88</a></li>
+<li>Episcopal Church
+<a href="#Page_89">89-102</a></li>
+<li>Eucharist
+<a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Ferrer
+<a href="#Page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+<li>Fish
+<a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+<li>Flint
+<a href="#Page_78">78</a>,
+<a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+<li>Fogazzaro
+<a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+<li>Foraker
+<a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+<li>Frederick
+<a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Galileo
+<a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+<li>Gallipoli
+<a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li>Garrison
+<a href="#Page_167">167</a>Gladstone
+<a href="#Page_57">57</a>,
+<a href="#Page_58">58</a>,
+<a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li>Goldman
+<a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+<li>Goode
+<a href="#Page_59">59</a>,
+<a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li>Green
+<a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+<li>Gurney
+<a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Hagen
+<a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+<li>Hale
+<a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+<li>Hammurabi
+<a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+<li>Hampton
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+<li>Ha'nish
+<a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+<li>Hanna
+<a href="#Page_122">122</a>,
+<a href="#Page_142">142</a>,
+<a href="#Page_153">153</a>,
+<a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+<li>Harris
+<a href="#Page_72">72</a></li>
+<li>Harrison
+<a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>
+<li>Haywood
+<a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+<li>Hebrew
+<a href="#Page_36">36</a>,
+<a href="#Page_173">173</a>,
+<a href="#Page_284">284</a>,
+<a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+<li>Henry the Eighth
+<a href="#Page_66">66</a>,
+<a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+<li>Hill, Joe
+<a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+<li>Hill, Rev. J.W.
+<a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+<li>Holmes
+<a href="#Page_276">276</a></li>
+<li>Holy Rollers
+<a href="#Page_242">242</a>,
+<a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+<li>Hubbard
+<a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+<li>Huss
+<a href="#Page_38">38</a>,
+<a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+<li>Huxley
+<a href="#Page_56">56</a>,
+<a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+<li>Hyndman
+<a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+<li>Hyslop
+<a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Inquisition
+<a href="#Page_39">39</a>,
+<a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+<li>Ireland
+<a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+<li>Isaiah
+<a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Janet
+<a href="#Page_258">258</a></li>
+<li>Jastrow
+<a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+<li>Jehovah
+<a href="#Page_35">35</a>,
+<a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+<li>Jesuits
+<a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+<li>Jesus
+<a href="#Page_74">74</a>,
+<a href="#Page_100">100</a>,
+<a href="#Page_101">101</a>,
+<a href="#Page_161">161</a>,<br />
+
+<a href="#Page_172">172</a>,
+<a href="#Page_174">174</a>,
+<a href="#Page_175">175</a>,
+<a href="#Page_176">176</a>,
+<a href="#Page_197">197</a>,
+<a href="#Page_221">221</a>,<br />
+
+<a href="#Page_258">258</a>,
+<a href="#Page_281">281</a>,
+<a href="#Page_282">282</a>,
+<a href="#Page_290">290</a>,
+<a href="#Page_291">291</a>,
+<a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>
+<li>Jews
+<a href="#Page_284">284</a>,
+<a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+<li>Job
+<a href="#Page_25">25</a>,
+<a href="#Page_26">26</a>,
+<a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+<li>Joshua
+<a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+<li>Jowett
+<a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+<li>Jungle
+<a href="#Page_190">190</a>,
+<a href="#Page_194">194</a>,
+<a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+<li>Junker
+<a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Kaiser
+<a href="#Page_164">164-166</a></li>
+<li>Kant
+<a href="#Page_303">303</a></li>
+<li>Kemp
+<a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li>King Coal
+<a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+<li>Kingsley
+<a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li>Knights of Columbus
+<a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+<li>Koreshanity
+<a href="#Page_248">248</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>La Follette
+<a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+<li>Landor
+<a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li>Lankester
+<a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li>Lea
+<a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+<li>Leeky
+<a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+<li>Leo XIII
+<a href="#Page_119">119</a>,
+<a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+<li>Ligouri
+<a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+<li>Li Hung Chang
+<a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+<li>London
+<a href="#Page_276">276</a></li>
+<li>Los Angeles
+<a href="#Page_149">149</a>,
+<a href="#Page_150">150</a>,
+<a href="#Page_208">208</a>,
+<a href="#Page_209">209</a>,
+<a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+<li>L.A. Examiner
+<a href="#Page_149">149</a></li>
+<li>L.A. Times
+<a href="#Page_44">44</a>,
+<a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+<li>Lourdes
+<a href="#Page_258">258</a></li>
+<li>Luther
+<a href="#Page_161">161</a>,
+<a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>MacGill
+<a href="#Page_42">42</a></li>
+<li>Machen
+<a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+<li>Mallock
+<a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+<li>Malthus
+<a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+<li>Manning
+<a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+<li>Manu
+<a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+<li>Markham
+<a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+<li>Marx
+<a href="#Page_71">71</a>,
+<a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+<li>Massey
+<a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+<li>Mazdaznan
+<a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+<li>McCabe
+<a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+<li>McDonald
+<a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+<li>Mellen
+<a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+<li>Menace
+<a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+<li>Milton
+<a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+<li>Morality
+<a href="#Page_308">308</a></li>
+<li>More
+<a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+<li>Morgan
+<a href="#Page_99">99</a>,
+<a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+<li>Mormon
+<a href="#Page_239">239</a>,
+<a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+<li>Moses
+<a href="#Page_36">36</a>,
+<a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Nazarite
+<a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+<li>New Haven
+<a href="#Page_180">180</a>,
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+<li>New Thought
+<a href="#Page_264">264</a></li>
+<li>N.Y. Evening Post
+<a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+<li>N.Y. Sun
+<a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+<li>N.Y. Times
+<a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+<li>Nichols
+<a href="#Page_270">270</a></li>
+<li>Noel
+<a href="#Page_83">83</a>,
+<a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+<li>Northcliffe
+<a href="#Page_72">72</a></li>
+<li>Numerology
+<a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Oahspe
+<a href="#Page_248">248</a></li>
+<li>O'Connell
+<a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li>Opium
+<a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+<li>Outlook
+<a href="#Page_175">175-198</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Paine
+<a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+<li>Paley
+<a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+<li>Pasadena
+<a href="#Page_150">150</a>,
+<a href="#Page_208">208</a>,
+<a href="#Page_276">276</a></li>
+<li>Patent Medicine
+<a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+<li>Patterson
+<a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+<li>Paul
+<a href="#Page_56">56</a>,
+<a href="#Page_161">161</a>,
+<a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+<li>Peabody
+<a href="#Page_99">99</a></li>
+<li>Peters
+<a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+<li>Phelan
+<a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+<li>Pillsbury
+<a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+<li>Pius IX
+<a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+<li>Plowman
+<a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+<li>Pope
+<a href="#Page_67">67</a>,
+<a href="#Page_121">121</a>,
+<a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+<li>Positivists
+<a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>
+<li>Post
+<a href="#Page_216">216</a></li>
+<li>Potter
+<a href="#Page_98">98</a></li>
+<li>Prescott
+<a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+<li>Preston
+<a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+<li>Protestant
+<a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+<li>Prussia
+<a href="#Page_153">153</a>,
+<a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Quakers
+<a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+<li>Quay
+<a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+<li>Quigley
+<a href="#Page_129">129</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Rauschenbusch
+<a href="#Page_163">163</a>,
+<a href="#Page_283">283</a></li>
+<li>Rawson
+<a href="#Page_272">272</a>Reformation
+<a href="#Page_163">163</a>,
+<a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+<li>Religion
+<a href="#Page_16">16</a>,
+<a href="#Page_17">17</a></li>
+<li>Rig-Veda
+<a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+<li>Robinson
+<a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>
+<li>Rockefeller
+<a href="#Page_138">138</a>,
+<a href="#Page_177">177</a>,
+<a href="#Page_190">190</a>,
+<a href="#Page_192">192</a>,
+<a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+<li>Roosevelt
+<a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+<li>Russell, C.E.
+<a href="#Page_95">95</a>,
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+<li>Russell, G.
+<a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+<li>Russell, Pastor
+<a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+<li>Ryan
+<a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Sacred Heart
+<a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+<li>Salpetriere
+<a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+<li>Salvation Army
+<a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+<li>Sanday
+<a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+<li>Segur
+<a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+<li>Shaftesbury
+<a href="#Page_74">74</a>,
+<a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+<li>Shakers
+<a href="#Page_244">244</a>,
+<a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+<li>Shelley
+<a href="#Page_87">87</a>,
+<a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+<li>Siam
+<a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li>Sinn Fein
+<a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+<li>Smith, Gipsy
+<a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+<li>Smith, Goldwin
+<a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+<li>Soap Box
+<a href="#Page_290">290</a></li>
+<li>Socialist Movement
+<a href="#Page_311">311</a></li>
+<li>Spain
+<a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+<li>Spiritualism
+<a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+<li>Stalker
+<a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+<li>Sterling
+<a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>
+<li>Sunday
+<a href="#Page_207">207</a>,
+<a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+<li>Swinburne
+<a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+<li>Syracuse
+<a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Tablet
+<a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+<li>Tacitus
+<a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+<li>Taft
+<a href="#Page_142">142-144</a></li>
+<li>Tammany
+<a href="#Page_93">93</a>,
+<a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+<li>Thackery
+<a href="#Page_68">68</a>,
+<a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+<li>Theosophists
+<a href="#Page_254">254</a>,
+
+<a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+<li>Thirty-nine Articles
+<a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+<li>Tingley
+<a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+<li>Torrey
+<a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+<li>Tractarian
+<a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+<li>Trinity
+<a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+<li>Trinity Corporation
+<a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+<li>Trowbridge
+<a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Vedder
+<a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+<li>Voltaire
+<a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Waddell
+
+<a href="#Page_279">279</a></li>
+<li>Wagner
+<a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+<li>Wall Street
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+<li>Wanamaker
+<a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+<li>Ward
+<a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+<li>Wattles
+<a href="#Page_268">268</a></li>
+<li>Wesley
+<a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+<li>Westcott
+<a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+<li>White, A.D.
+<a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+<li>White, Bouck
+<a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+<li>Wilberforce
+<a href="#Page_56">56</a>,
+<a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+<li>William
+<a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+<li>Wilson
+<a href="#Page_169">169</a>,
+<a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Yogi
+<a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+<li>York
+<a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+</ul>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
+by Upton Sinclair
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFITS OF RELIGION ***
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+Project Gutenberg's The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition, by Upton Sinclair
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
+
+Author: Upton Sinclair
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2005 [EBook #16470]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFITS OF RELIGION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jayam Subramanian and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: The spelling inconsistencies of the original
+are retained in this etext.]
+
+
+
+  The Profits of Religion
+
+
+
+
+
+  An Essay in Economic Interpretation
+
+
+
+
+
+  By
+  UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+NEW YORK
+VANGUARD PRESS
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VANGUARD PRINTINGS
+First-January, 1927
+Second-April, 1927
+Third-June, 1928
+
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+Note to fifth edition, 1926: "The Profits of Religion" was first
+published early in 1917. The present edition represents a sale of over
+60,000 copies, without counting a dozen translations. In this edition
+a few errors have been corrected, but otherwise the book has not been
+changed. The reader will understand that references to the World War
+are of the date 1917, prior to America's entrance.
+
+This book is the first of a series of volumes, an economic
+interpretation of culture, which now includes "The Brass Check," "The
+Goose-step," "The Goslings," and "Mammonart."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#CONTENTS#
+
+#Introductory#
+
+Bootstrap-lifting
+
+Religion
+
+#Book One: The Church of the Conquerors#
+
+The Priestly Lie
+
+The Great Fear
+
+Salve Regina!
+
+Fresh Meat
+
+Priestly Empires
+
+Prayer-wheels
+
+The Butcher-Gods
+
+The Holy Inquisition
+
+Hell-fire
+
+#Book Two: The Church of Good Society#
+
+The Rain Makers
+
+The Babylonian Fire-God
+
+The Medicine-men
+
+The Canonization of Incompetence
+
+Gibson's Preservative
+
+The Elders
+
+Church History
+
+Land and Livings
+
+Graft in Tail
+
+Bishops and Beer
+
+Anglicanism and Alcohol
+
+Dead Cats
+
+"Suffer Little Children" The Court-circular
+
+Horn-blowing
+
+Trinity Corporation
+
+Spiritual Interpretation
+
+#Book Three: The Church of the Servant Girls#
+
+Charity
+
+God's Armor
+
+Thanksgivings
+
+The Holy Roman Empire
+
+Temporal Power
+
+Knights of Slavery
+
+Priests and Police
+
+The Church Militant
+
+The Church Triumphant
+
+God in the Schools
+
+The Menace
+
+King Coal
+
+The Unholy Alliance
+
+Secret Service
+
+Tax Exemption
+
+Holy History
+
+Das Centrum
+
+#Book Four: The Church of the Slavers#
+
+The Face of Caesar
+
+Deutschland ueber Alles
+
+Der Tag
+
+King Cotton
+
+Witches and Women
+
+Moth and Rust
+
+To Lyman Abbott
+
+The Octopus
+
+The Industrial Shelley
+
+The Outlook for Graft
+
+Clerical Camouflage
+
+The Jungle
+
+#Book Five: The Church of the Merchants#
+
+The Head Merchant
+
+"Herr Beeble" Holy Oil
+
+Rhetorical Black-hanging
+
+The Great American Fraud
+
+Riches in Glory
+
+Captivating Ideals
+
+Spook Hunting
+
+Running the Rapids
+
+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," he answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the Wholesale
+Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."
+
+"I see," I reply. "And these people let you--"
+
+"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."
+
+I turn, following his glance, and observe another person
+approaching--a stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple robes,
+moving with slow dignity. Ha 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 today throughout the
+world; that is to say, institutions having fixed dogmas and
+"revelations", creeds and rituals, with an administering caste
+claiming supernatural sanction. By such institutions the moral
+strivings of the race, the affections of childhood and the aspirations
+of youth are made the prerogatives and stock in trade of
+ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the thesis of this book that
+"Religion" in this sense is a source of income to parasites, and the
+natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation.
+
+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 windows richly dight,
+  Casting a dim religious light.
+  There let the pealing organ blow,
+  To the full-voiced choir below,
+  In service high and anthem clear,
+  As may with sweetness through mine ear
+  Dissolve me into ecstacies,
+  And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
+
+So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and 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 Brahmanam of the Rig-Veda we read
+
+     He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is
+     born from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates
+     in the nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred
+     knowledge), the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and
+     is absorbed into the deity.
+
+Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the 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 Lander'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 had escaped from
+     its tormentors, and the bitterest enemies of the reformer
+     could not refuse to him the praise that no philosopher of
+     old had faced death with more composure than he had shown in
+     his dreadful extremity. No faltering of the voice had
+     betrayed an internal struggle. Palsgrave Louis, seeing
+     Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the executioners, ordered
+     it thrown into the flames lest it should be reverenced as a
+     relic, and promised the man to compensate him. With the same
+     view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and thrown into
+     the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was dug up
+     and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the
+     spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay,
+     which they reverenced as relics of their martyr. The next
+     day thanks were returned to God in a solemn procession in
+     which figured Sigismund and his queen, the princes and
+     nobles, nineteen cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven
+     bishops, and all the clergy of the council. A few days later
+     Sigismund, who had delayed his departure for Spain to see
+     the matter concluded, left Constance, feeling that his work
+     was done.
+
+#Hell-Fire#
+
+If 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 bed-post, 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. Heading 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 Fire-god, and with awful rites the priest pronounced
+incantations, which have been preserved on bricks and handed down for
+the use of modern churches. "Pronounce in a whisper, and have a bronze
+image therewith," commands the ancient text, and runs on for many
+strophes in this fashion:
+
+  Let them die, but let me live!
+  Let them be put under a 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 forced
+Galileo to recant under threat of torture, and had Ferrer shot beneath
+the walls of the fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of
+religion".
+
+#The Medicine-men#
+
+Andrew D. White tells us that
+
+     It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great
+     plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased
+     proportion of the landed and personal property of every
+     European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a
+     great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences 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 to" between the words "I believe", saying the inserted
+words under his breath, thus, "I used to believe in the Father, the
+Son, and the Holy Ghost." Perhaps the eminent divine never did this;
+but the fact that his students told it, and thought it funny, is
+sufficient indication of their attitude toward their "Religion." The
+son of William George Ward tells in his biography how this leader of
+the "Tractarian Movement" met the problem with cynicism which seems
+almost sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are justified in
+deception; and then lie like a trooper!"
+
+#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. N, 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 I 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 net even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be
+maintained in all their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to
+what end?
+
+The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which
+is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of
+William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and
+in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the
+land among his nobles and prelates. In those days, you understand, a
+high ecclesiastic was a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his
+predatory nature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and
+archbishops of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like
+the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the
+same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English
+chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
+abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependence of the
+church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted
+from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt
+before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord,
+I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and
+I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."
+
+The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held,
+and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege man for
+life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the whole story of
+the church of England, in the 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
+     corne, 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
+west-minster 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 5600
+     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 birth-day, 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--on 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
+on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops,
+setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" 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 Salisbury. 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 Salisbury, 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. Russel, 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
+     oweners in the American markets. After that the children
+     were simply at the mercy of their oweners, 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 owener 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 fourteen 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 six-pence to
+save a life."
+
+And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover
+you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not
+even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have
+anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the
+mental powers of England's most popular woman writer. She was
+perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for
+stealing butter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too
+high a price. When there came a famine, and the children of these
+mine-slaves were dying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy
+because God had sent them her pious self. "In suffering by the
+scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of
+knowing the advantage you have had over many villages in your having
+suffered no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place
+she explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
+be grateful to the rich!
+
+     Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
+     permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite
+     all ranks of people together, to show the poor how
+     immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show
+     both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.
+     It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages
+     you derive from the government and constitution of this
+     country--to observe the benefits flowing from the
+     distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high
+     to so liberally assist the low.
+
+     It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by
+     this pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night
+     and burned an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a
+     tragic consequence, for one of the "common people," known as
+     Robert, "was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear
+     at Sunday School next day. This fall from grace occasioned
+     intense remorse in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his
+     mind for many months," records Martha More, "and despair
+     seemed at length to take 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 exempted; that,
+     "having food and raiment, they should be therewith content,"
+     since their situation in life, with all its evils, is better
+     than they have deserved at the 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 grave-stones;
+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 bloodhounds
+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
+tophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in
+pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating
+odors. I picture them as I have seen them at St. George's, where that
+aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the
+collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in
+old-fashioned carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin
+statues of insolence; at St. Thomas', where you might see all the
+"Four Hundred" on exhibition at once; at St. Mary the Virgin's, where
+the choir paraded through the aisles, swinging costly incense into my
+childish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alone with nose
+upturned, carrying on his back a jewelled robe for which some adoring
+female had paid 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 door-way; 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 substance 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 in substance:
+
+     She has the right to require the state not to leave every
+     man free to profess his own religion.
+
+     She has the right to exercise her power without the
+     permission or consent of the state.
+
+     She has the right of perpetuating the union of church and
+     state.
+
+     She has the right to require that the Catholic religion
+     shall be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of
+     all others.
+
+     She has the right to prevent the state from granting the
+     public exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating
+     from it.
+
+     She has the power of requiring the state not to permit free
+     expression of opinion.
+
+You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You, who
+think that liberty of conscience is the basis of civilization, ought
+at least to know what the Catholic Church has to say about the matter.
+Here is Mgr. Segur, in his "Plain Talk About Protestantism of Today",
+a book published in Boston and extensively circulated by American
+Catholics:
+
+     Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is
+     likewise the soul of modern rationalism and philosophy. It
+     is one of those impossibilities which only the levity of a
+     superficial reason can regard as 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 Catholics who are
+married by civil authorities or by Protestant clergymen will be living
+in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of
+education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief,
+incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To
+the above list, as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such
+as birth control, which have arisen since his time.
+
+What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of
+expressions of that intention, set forth in the boldest and haughtiest
+and most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal Manning, in the
+Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name of the Pope:
+
+     I acknowledge 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 hierarchy, yet they are as cardinals
+     foreign princes of the blood, to whom the United States, as
+     one of the great powers of the world, is under an obligation
+     to concede the same honors that they receive abroad.
+
+     Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American man-of-war,
+     he would be entitled to the salutes and to naval honors
+     reserved for a foreign royal personage, and at any official
+     entertainment at Washington the Cardinal will outrank not
+     merely every cabinet officer, the speaker of the house and
+     the vice-president, but also the foreign ambassadors, coming
+     immediately next to the chief magistrate himself.
+
+     Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal
+     personage not of sovereign rank visits New York it is his
+     duty to make the first call on Cardinal Farley.
+
+#Knights of Slavery#
+
+Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly Jesus. And
+what is their attitude towards their brothers in God, the rank and
+file of the membership, whose pennies 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 consumes 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 Superstition in
+America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a democracy, we find
+precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the poor foreigner who
+troubles us. Our human magic would win him--our easy-going trust, our
+quiet certainty of liberty, our open-handed and open-homed and
+hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We should break down the Catholic
+machine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy could stop us--were
+it not for the Steel Trust and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the
+Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters
+of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and
+self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant,
+inert, physically, mentally and morally helpless!
+
+No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not the
+pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering cathedrals; it
+is not the 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 en-rolled, 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 Elaine 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 t 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 an establishment of religion." When war is declared,
+and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and
+friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of
+religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the status of
+"conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach
+justice and humanity, decency and truth.
+
+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, conies another occasion of state--the
+twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
+Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to
+make clear the sociological significance of that function; explaining
+first, a nation-wide organization which has been proven by
+congressional investigation and by the publication of its secret
+documents to be a machine for the corruption of our political life;
+and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels
+have long since fled; a city in the first crude stage of land
+speculation, without order, dignity or charm; a city of real estate
+agents, who exist by selling climate to new arrivals from the East; a
+city whose intellectual life is "boosting", whose standards of truth
+are those of the horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of
+temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern California
+and the East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last
+June, when for five days the temperature went to over 110, and several
+times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!
+
+In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quake 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"!
+
+     P. S. The reader will be interested to know that for the
+     statements on page 155, Upton Sinclair was described as a
+     "scoundrel" by a former prime minister of the Austrian
+     Empire, and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a
+     court trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns--about $7
+     in American money.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#BOOK FOUR#
+
+#The Church of the Slavers#
+
+  Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
+    The eye-balls fierce, 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.
+
+  --Buchanan
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#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 will the war.
+
+And Pastor J. Rump:
+
+     Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity. We
+     fight for the cause of Jesus within mankind.
+
+And here is an eminent theological professor:
+
+     The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is
+     the German God. Not the national God such as the lower
+     nations worship, but "our God," who is not ashamed of
+     belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart.
+
+#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 hang 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 lea, 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 maidservant, 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 of-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-five
+dollars 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., LL.D., D.C.L.,
+L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers
+himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is
+Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions
+Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to
+manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense
+of the Rockefeller fortune. It is generally not expected that the
+makers of ruling-class munitions should face the dirty and perilous
+work of the trenches; but 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, and of the "free-will offering", which amounts to hundreds
+of thousands of dollars in each "campaign". In each city the expenses
+are guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting
+forces of the community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits
+their homes, and is in every way one of the crowd. After the big silk
+strike in Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included,
+all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was
+freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the radical union
+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.
+Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western railroads, died; and
+standing over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop,
+preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, wherein he likened young Leland
+to the boy Christ. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly
+reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout
+his 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 o'er 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 executed a few years ago in Utah, and who used this tune in his
+little red book of revolutionary chants:
+
+  You will eat, bye and bye,
+  In the glorious land above the sky;
+  Work and pray, live on hay,
+  You'll get pie in the sky when you die!
+
+#Captivating Ideals#
+
+In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero is a
+Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his diggings in the
+bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into our superior
+civilization. The thing that impresses him most is what he calls "the
+immortality idea". The person who got that up was a world-genius, he
+exclaims. "If you can once get a man to believing in immortality,
+there is no more left for you to desire; you can take everything he
+owns--you can skin him alive if it pleases you--and he will bear it
+all with perfect good humor."
+
+And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the
+effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that view
+of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the language of
+scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiastical
+authority, equipped with every tool of modern learning, would set
+about voicing the idea that the function of the teaching of Heaven is
+to chloroform the poor, so that the rich may continue to rob them in
+security?
+
+Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of scholarship,
+dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges Chatterton-Hill, of the
+University of Geneva. Its title is "The Sociological Value of
+Christianity", and from cover to cover it is a warning to the rich of
+the danger they run in giving up their religion and ceasing to support
+its priests. It explains 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 ideal"
+And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this
+purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist on
+the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering--of that
+suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress
+if it could."
+
+You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever
+you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only
+your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned
+to elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of
+"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 slums of our great
+cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying
+as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
+painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can
+not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this
+operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There
+exists a simple, 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 age 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 pious 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 this 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 Lay-men'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--5x30=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 Magus, 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 Ga-Llama principle, and to share the
+"expansion of the magnetic circles"? Here is the way to do it:
+
+     Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one
+     exhalation, speak slowly:
+
+     Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth
+     hidden by the vase of dazzling light.
+
+     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 minature 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 is 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 or 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 had 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 backrooms 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 inspires. 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 cause--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 H20 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 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!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+A
+
+Abbott, Lyman 175-191
+Abbott, L.F. 189
+Adams 214
+Adventists 237
+Amberley 52
+Anglican Church 47-88
+Appeal to Reason 144
+Archer 133
+Assyria 32
+Atkinson 267
+Austria 155
+Aztecs 32
+
+B
+
+Babists 254
+Babylonia 26, 32, 50
+Baxter 183
+Beilhardt 254
+Berkman 288
+Besant 250
+Bible-students 246
+Bismarck 153
+Black Magic 253
+Blavatsky 23, 256
+Blougram 109
+Bonzano 121, 126
+Booth 298
+Bootstrap-lifting 11, 266
+Brougher 209
+Brown 268
+Buchanan 68, 159
+Buckle 41
+Burns 75
+
+C
+
+Caesar 161
+Cannon 143
+Carlyle 163
+Carnegie 177
+Catholic Church 27, 105-157, 295
+Catholic Encyclopedia 67
+Centrum 152
+Charcot 258
+Chatterton-Hill 220
+Chinese 74
+Christian Endeavor World 216
+Christian Science 254-264
+Churchman 101, 102
+Clark 23
+Clough 235
+Columbus 115
+Conway 127
+Curates 71
+
+D
+
+Darwin 56
+Day 205
+Debs 289
+Dixon 204, 205
+Dowie 242
+Durham 80
+
+E
+
+Eastman 140
+Eddy 257, 261
+Education 81
+England 49, 73, 75
+England, Church of 47-88
+Episcopal Church 89-102
+Eucharist 59
+
+F
+
+Ferrer 51, 133
+Fish 65
+Flint 78, 79
+Fogazzaro 298
+Foraker 143
+Frederick 163
+
+G
+
+Galileo 51
+Gallipoli 61
+Garrison 167
+Gladstone 57, 58, 81
+Goldman 287
+Goode 59, 61
+Green 63
+Gurney 254
+
+H
+
+Hagen 219
+Hale 213
+Hammurabi 85
+Hampton 181
+Ha'nish 250
+Hanna 122, 142, 153, 213
+Harris 72
+Harrison 304
+Haywood 288
+Hebrew 36, 173, 284, 285
+Henry the Eighth 66, 67
+Hill, Joe 219
+Hill, Rev. J.W. 204
+Holmes 276
+Holy Rollers 242, 243
+Hubbard 190
+Huss 38, 41
+Huxley 56, 58
+Hyndman 256
+Hyslop 223
+
+I
+
+Inquisition 39, 51
+Ireland 43
+Isaiah 287
+
+J
+
+Janet 258
+Jastrow 32
+Jehovah 35, 36
+Jesuits 148
+Jesus 74, 100, 101, 161,
+   172, 174, 175, 176, 197, 221,
+   258, 281, 282, 290, 291, 292
+Jews 284, 286
+Job 25, 26, 55
+Joshua 37
+Jowett 54
+Jungle 190, 194, 197
+Junker 152
+
+K
+
+Kaiser 164-166
+Kant 303
+Kemp 19
+King Coal 137
+Kingsley 34
+Knights of Columbus 123
+Koreshanity 248
+
+L
+
+La Follette 260
+Landor 34
+Lankester 306
+Lea 39
+Leeky 136
+Leo XIII 119, 123
+Ligouri 174
+Li Hung Chang 75
+London 276
+Los Angeles 149, 150, 208, 209, 217
+L.A. Examiner 149
+L.A. Times 44, 151
+Lourdes 258
+Luther 161, 163
+
+M
+
+MacGill 42
+Machen 273
+Mallock 77
+Malthus 77
+Manning 118
+Manu 285
+Markham 302
+Marx 71, 173
+Massey 55
+Mazdaznan 250
+McCabe 148
+McDonald 139
+Mellen 185
+Menace 135
+Milton 199
+Morality 308
+More 85
+Morgan 99, 101
+Mormon 239, 240
+Moses 36, 37
+
+N
+
+Nazarite 29
+New Haven 180, 181
+New Thought 264
+N.Y. Evening Post 223
+N.Y. Sun 193
+N.Y. Times 211
+Nichols 270
+Noel 83, 286
+Northcliffe 72
+Numerology 271
+
+O
+
+Oahspe 248
+O'Connell 120
+Opium 74
+Outlook 175-198
+
+P
+
+Paine 87
+Paley 87
+Pasadena 150, 208, 276
+Patent Medicine 214
+Patterson 139
+Paul 56, 161, 207
+Peabody 99
+Peters 204
+Phelan 119
+Pillsbury 167
+Pius IX 116
+Plowman 64
+Pope 67, 121, 143
+Positivists 304
+Post 216
+Potter 98
+Prescott 32
+Preston 127
+Protestant 201
+Prussia 153, 163
+
+Q
+
+Quakers 177
+Quay 212
+Quigley 129
+
+R
+
+Rauschenbusch 163, 283
+Rawson 272
+Reformation 163, 201
+Religion 16, 17
+Rig-Veda 30
+Robinson 228
+Rockefeller 138, 177, 190, 192, 211
+Roosevelt 142
+Russell, C.E. 95, 181
+Russell, G. 82
+Russell, Pastor 247
+Ryan 105
+
+S
+
+Sacred Heart 113
+Salpetriere 238
+Salvation Army 298
+Sanday 78
+Segur 117
+Shaftesbury 74, 82
+Shakers 244, 245
+Shelley 87, 183
+Siam 34
+Sinn Fein 295
+Smith, Gipsy 217
+Smith, Goldwin 223
+Soap Box 290
+Socialist Movement 311
+Spain 131
+Spiritualism 275
+Stalker 78
+Sterling 45
+Sunday 207, 210
+Swinburne 103
+Syracuse 205
+
+T
+
+Tablet 157
+Tacitus 170
+Taft 142-144
+Tammany 93, 143
+Thackery 68, 212
+Theosophists 254, 255
+Thirty-nine Articles 54
+Tingley 256
+Torrey 203
+Tractarian 55
+Trinity 94
+Trinity Corporation 95
+Trowbridge 29
+
+V
+
+Vedder 76
+Voltaire 53
+
+W
+
+Waddell 279
+Wagner 219
+Wall Street 181
+Wanamaker 203
+Ward 55
+Wattles 268
+Wesley 170
+Westcott 79
+White, A.D. 52
+White, Bouck 192
+Wilberforce 56, 88
+William 63
+Wilson 169, 186
+
+Y
+
+Yogi 255
+York 76
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
+by Upton Sinclair
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFITS OF RELIGION ***
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tree	e72b783c5b4554b3c0db2e9dd38917de1a7907f1