Title: The Profits of Religion
Author: Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968
Language: English
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THE PROFITS OF RELIGION

An Essay in Economic Interpretation

By Upton Sinclair



THE PROFITS OF RELIGION



OFFERTORY

This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of view--as
a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege. I have searched the
libraries through, and no one has done it before. If you read it, you
will see that it needed to be done. It has meant twenty-five years of
thought and a year of investigation. It contains the facts.

I publish the book myself, so that it may be available at the lowest
possible price. I am giving my time and energy, in return for one thing
which you may give me--the joy of speaking a true word and getting it
heard.

The present volume is the first of a series, which will do for
Education, Journalism and Literature what has here been done for the
Church: the four volumes making a work of revolutionary criticism, an
Economic Interpretation of Culture under the general title of "The Dead
Hand."



CONTENTS

Introductory Bootstrap-lifting
 Religion

Book One: The Church of the Conquerors The Priestly Lie
 The Great Fear
 Salve Regina!
 Fresh Meat
 Priestly Empires
 Prayer-wheels
 The Butcher-Gods
 The Holy Inquisition
 Hell-fire

Book Two: The Church of Good Society The Rain Makers
 The Babylonian Fire-God
 The Medicine-men
 The Canonization of Incompetence
 Gibson's Preservative
 The Elders
 Church History
 Land and Livings
 Graft in Tail
 Bishops and Beer
 Anglicanism and Alcohol
 Dead Cats
 "Suffer Little Children"
 The Court-circular
 Horn-blowing
 Trinity Corporation
 Spiritual Interpretation

Book Three: The Church of the Servant Girls Charity
 God's Armor
 Thanksgivings
 The Holy Roman Empire
 Temporal Power
 Knights of Slavery
 Priests and Police
 The Church Militant
 The Church Triumphant
 God in the Schools
 The Menace
 King Coal
 The Unholy Alliance
 Secret Service
 Tax Exemption
  Holy History
 Das Centrum

Book Four: The Church of the Slavers The Face of Caesar
 Deutschland ueber Alles
 Der Tag
 King Cotton
 Witches and Women
 Moth and Rust
 To Lyman Abbott
 The Octopus
 The Industrial Shelley
 The Outlook for Graft
 Clerical Camouflage
 The Jungle

Book Five: The Church of the Merchants The Head Merchant
 "Herr Beeble"
 Holy Oil
 Rhetorical Black-hanging
 The Great American Fraud
 Riches in Glory
 Captivating Ideals
 Spook Hunting
 Running the Rapids
 Birth Control
 Sheep

Book Six: The Church of the Quacks Tabula Rasa
 The Book of Mormon
 Holy Rolling
 Bible Prophecy
 Koreshanity
 Mazdaznan
 Black Magic
 Mental Malpractice
 Science and Wealth
 New Nonsense
 "Dollars Want Me!"
 Spiritual Financiering
 The Graft of Grace

Book Seven: The Church of the Social Revolution Christ and Caesar
 Locusts and Wild Honey
 Mother Earth
 The Soap Box
 The Church Machine
 The Church Redeemed
 The Desire of Nations
 The Knowable
 "Nature's Insurgent Son
 The New Morality
 Envoi



INTRODUCTORY



BOOTSTRAP-LIFTING

Bootstrap-lifting? says the reader.

It is a vision I have seen: upon a vast plain, men and women are
gathered in dense throngs, crouched in uncomfortable and distressing
positions, their fingers hooked in the straps of their boots. They are
engaged in lifting themselves; tugging and straining until they grow red
in the face, exhausted. The perspiration streams from their foreheads,
they show every symptom of distress; the eyes of all are fixed, not upon
each other, nor upon their boot-straps, but upon the sky above. There
is a look of rapture upon their faces, and now and then, amid grunts and
groans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.

I approach one and say to him, "Friend, what is this you are doing?"

He answers, without pausing to glance at me, "I am performing spiritual
exercises. See how I rise?"

"But," I say, "you are not rising at all!"

Whereat he becomes instantly angry. "You are one of the scoffers!"

"But, friend," I protest, "don't you feel the earth under your feet?"

"You are a materialist!"

"But, friend, I can see--"

"You are without spiritual vision!"

And so I move on among the sweating and groaning hordes. Being of
a sympathetic turn of mind, I cannot help being distressed by the
prevalence of this singular practice among so large a portion of the
human race. How is it possible that none of them should suspect
the futility of their procedure? Or can it really be that I am
uncomprehending? That in some way they are actually getting off the
ground, or about to get off the ground?

Then I observe a new phenomenon: a man gliding here and there among the
bootstrap-lifters, approaching from the rear and slipping his hands
into their pockets. The position of the spiritual exercisers greatly
facilitates his work; their eyes being cast up to heaven, they do not
see him, their thoughts being occupied, they do not heed him; he goes
through their pockets at leisure, and transfers the contents to a bag he
carries, and then moves on to the next victim. I watch him for a while,
and finally approach and ask, "What are you doing, sir?"

He answers, "I am picking pockets."

"Oh," I say, puzzled by his matter-of-course tone. "But--I beg
pardon--are you a thief?"

"Oh, no," hie answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the Wholesale
Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."

"I see," I reply. "And these people let you--"

"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."

I turn, following his glance, and observe another person approaching--a
stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple robes, moving with slow
dignity. He gazes about at the sweating and grunting hordes; now and
then he stops and lifts his hands in a gesture of benediction, and
proclaims in rolling tones, "Blessed are the Bootstrap-lifters, for
theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." He moves on, and after a bit stops and
announces again, "Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every
word that cometh out of the mouth of the prophets and priests of
Bootstrap-lifting."

Watching a while longer, I see this majestic one approach the agent
of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association. The agent greets him as a
friend, and proceeds to transfer to the pockets of his capacious robes a
generous share of the loot which he has collected. The majestic one does
not cringe, nor does he make any effort to hide what is going on. On the
contrary he cries aloud, "It is more blessed to give than to receive!"
And again he cries, "The laborer is worthy of his hire!" And a third
time he cries, yet more sternly, "Render unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar's!" And the Bootstrap-lifters pause long enough to answer:
"Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!" Then
they renew their straining and tugging.

I step up, and in timid tones begin, "Reverend sir, will you tell me by
what right you take this wealth?"

Instantly a frown comes upon his face, and he cries in a voice of
thunder, "Blasphemer!" And all the Bootstrap-lifters desist from their
lifting, and menace me with furious looks. There is a general call for
a policeman of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association; and so I fall
silent, and slink away in the throng, and thereafter keep my thoughts to
myself.

Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and
incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting
impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time
ago--no man can recall how far back--the Wholesale Pickpockets made the
discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while
he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering
prizes for the best essays in support of the practice. Now their
propaganda is everywhere triumphant, and year by year we see an increase
in the rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the cult.
The ground is covered with stately temples of various designs, all of
which I am told are consecrated to Bootstrap-lifting. I come to where a
group of people are occupied in laying the corner-stone of a new white
marble structure; I inquire and am informed it is the First Church of
Bootstrap-lifters, Scientist. As I stand watching, a card is handed
to me, informing me that a lady will do my Bootstrap-lifting at five
dollars per lift.

I go on to another building, which I am told is a library containing
volumes in defense of the Bootstrap-lifters, published under the
auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets. I enter, and find endless vistas
of shelves, also several thousand current magazines and papers. I
consult these--for my legs have given out in the effort to visit and
inspect all phases of the Bootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that
hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive
an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the
creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and
liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.
There are the Holy Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests are fed by
Transubstantiation; the established Anglican Bootstrap-lifters,
whose priests live by "livings"; the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters, whose
preachers practice total immersion in Standard Oil. There are Yogi
Bootstrap-lifters with flowing robes of yellow silk; Theosophist
Bootstrap-lifters with green and purple auras; Mormon Bootstrap-lifters,
Mazdaznan Bootstrap-lifters, Spiritualist and Spirit-Fruit, Millerite
and Dowieite, Holy Roller and Holy Jumper, Come-to-glory negro, Billy
Sunday base-ball and Salvation Army bass-drum Bootstrap-lifters. There
are the thousand varieties of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters;
the mystic and transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme
Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters
with half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift"
and "optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden
Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar per
volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian professors of
collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at several thousand dollars
per year each. There are the Nietzschean Bootstrap-lifters, who lift
themselves to the Superman, and the art-for-art's-sake, neo-Pagan
Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves down to the Ape.

Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of all these
cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting
have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little
lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now
and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely
symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman
Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or
when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters
shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most
part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily
erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could
not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to
exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that
the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their
immemorial role with less chance of interference.



RELIGION

The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn the
sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul. No; I admit the
honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask of the preacher
is that he shall make an effort to practice his doctrine. Let him be
tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad like Nietzsche; let him stand
upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites--on these
terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above economic
science.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about
himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny
his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its
weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless,
when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of
heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What
are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and
comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say when we see
idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of
mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What
I say is--Bootstrap-lifting!

It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two senses, one good
and the other bad. Morality means the will to righteousness, or it means
Anthony Comstock; democracy means the rule of the people, or it means
Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word "Religion". In its true sense
Religion is the most fundamental of the soul's impulses, the impassioned
love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and
further it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that
sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very nature of
our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing it, I would make
clear that I hold it beyond assailment.

But we are denied the pleasure of using the word in that honest sense,
because of another which has been given to it. To the ordinary man
"Religion" means, not the soul's longing for growth, the "hunger and
thirst after righteousness", but certain forms in which this hunger has
manifested itself in history, and prevails to-day throughout the world;
that is to say, institutions having fixed dogmas and "revelations",
creeds and rituals, with an administering caste claiming supernatural
sanction. By such institutions the moral strivings of the race, the
affections of childhood and the aspirations of youth are made the
prerogatives and stock in trade of ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the
thesis of this book that "Religion" in this sense is a source of income
to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of oppression and
exploitation.

If by my jesting at "Bootstrap-lifting" I have wounded some dear
prejudice of the reader, let me endeavor to speak in a more persuasive
voice. I am a man who has suffered, and has seen the suffering of
others; I have devoted my life to analyzing the causes of the suffering,
to find out if it be necessary and fore-ordained, or if by any chance
there be a way of escape for future generations. I have found that the
latter is the case; the suffering is needless, it can with ease and
certainty be banished from the earth. I know this with the knowledge of
science--in the same way that the navigator of a ship knows his latitude
and longitude, and the point of the compass to which he must steer in
order to reach the port.

Come, reader, let us put aside prejudice, and the terrors of the cults
of the unknown. The power which made us has given us a mind, and the
impulse to its use; let us see what can be done with it to rid the earth
of its ancient evils. And do not be troubled if at the outset this book
seems to be entirely "destructive". I assure you that I am no crude
materialist, I am not so shallow as to imagine that our race will be
satisfied with a barren rationalism. I know that the old symbols came
out of the heart of man because they corresponded to certain needs of
the heart of man. I know that new symbols will be found, corresponding
more exactly to the needs of our time. If here I set to work to
tear down an old and ramshackle building, it is not from blind
destructfulness, but as an architect who means to put a new and sounder
structure in its place. Before we part company, I shall submit the blue
print of that new home of the spirit.



BOOK ONE -- The Church of the Conquerors

    I saw the Conquerors riding by
         With trampling feet of horse and men:
     Empire on empire like the tide
         Flooded the world and ebbed again;

    A thousand banners caught the sun,
         And cities smoked along the plain,
     And laden down with silk and gold
         And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.
            Kemp.



The Priestly Lie

When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning,
he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural
forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an
individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads
and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and
Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of
the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with
entire seriousness--that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but
was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation
of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only
explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring
dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter;
it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of
early times.

Men imagined supernatural powers such as they could comprehend. If the
lightning god destroyed a hut, obviously it must be because the owner
of the hut had given offense; so the owner must placate the god, using
those means which would be effective in the quarrels of men--presents of
roast meats and honey and fresh fruits, of wine and gold and jewels and
women, accompanied by friendly words and gestures of submission. And
when in spite of all things the natural evil did not cease, when the
people continued to die of pestilence, then came the opportunity for
hysterical or ambitious persons to discover new ways of penetrating the
mind of the god. There would be dreamers of dreams and seers of
visions and hearers of voices; readers of the entrails of beasts and
interpreters of the flight of birds; there would be burning bushes and
stone tablets on mountain-tops, and inspired words dictated to aged
disciples on lonely islands. There would arise special castes of men and
women, learned in these sacred matters; and these priestly castes
would naturally emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold
themselves aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and
entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles in ways
favorable to themselves and their order; they would proclaim themselves
friends and confidants of the god, walking with him in the night-time,
receiving his messengers and angels, acting as his deputies in forgiving
offenses, in dealing punishments and in receiving gifts. They would
become makers of laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes
to distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to
impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects, architecture
and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and dancing, candles and
incense and bells and gongs

  And storied winnows richly dight,
  Casting a dim religious light.
  There let the pealing organ blow,
  To the full-voiced choir below,
  In service high and anthem clear,
  As may with sweetness through mine ear
  Dissolve me into ecstacies,
  And bring all heaven before mine eyes.

So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and complicated forms, the
Priestly Lie. There are a score of great religions in the world, each
with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its
complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its
thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each
damns all the others, with more or less heartiness--and each is a mighty
fortress of Graft.

There will be few readers of this book who have not been brought up
under the spell of some one of these systems of Supernaturalism; who
have not been taught to speak with respect of some particular priestly
order, to thrill with awe at some particular sacred rite, to seek
respite from earthly woes in some particular ceremonial spell. These
things are woven into our very fibre in childhood; they are sanctified
by memories of joys and griefs, they are confused with spiritual
struggles, they become part of all that is most vital in our lives. The
reader who wishes to emancipate himself from their thrall will do well
to begin with a study of the beliefs and practices of other sects than
his own--a field where he is free to observe and examine without fear
of sacrilege. Let him look into Madame Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine",
or her "Isis Unveiled"!--encyclopedias of the fantastic inventions which
terror and longing have wrung out of the tortured soul of man. Here
are mysteries and solemnities, charms and spells, illuminations and
transmigrations, angels and demons, guides, controls and masters--all of
which it is permissible to refuse to support with gifts. Let the reader
then go to James Freeman Clarke's "Ten Great Religions", and realize how
many billions of humans have lived and died in the solemn certainty
that their welfare on earth and in heaven depended upon their accepting
certain ideas and practicing certain rites, all mutually exclusive and
incompatible, each damning the others and the followers of the others.
So gradually the realization will come to him that the test of a
doctrine about life and its welfare must be something else than the fact
that one was born to it.



The Great Fear

It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant, nor that his
ignorance made him a prey to dread. The traces of his mental suffering
will inspire in us only pity and sympathy; for Nature is a grim
school-mistress, and not all her lessons have yet been learned. We have
a right to scorn and anger only when we see this dread being diverted
from its true function, a stimulus to a search for knowledge, and made
into a means of clamping down ignorance upon the mind of the race. That
this has been the deliberate policy of institutionalized Religion no
candid student can deny.

The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or
modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it--and that
it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived. "The
fear of divine anger", says Prof. Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent
through the entire religious literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In
the words of Tabi-utul-Enlil, King of ancient Nippur:

        Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
      The plan of a god is full of mystery--who can understand it?
     He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.
  In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.

And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the Hebrew
scriptures: the only difference being that the Hebrews combined all
their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the thousand wives; and the
Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear are with Him," cries Job. "How
then can any man be just before God? Or how can he be clean that is born
of a woman? Behold, even the moon hath no brightness, and the stars are
not pure in His sight: How much less man, that is a worm? And the son
of man, which is a worm?" He goes on, in his lyrical rapture, "Sheol is
naked before Him, and Destruction hath no covering.... The pillars of
heaven tremble and are astonished at His rebuke.... The thunder of His
power who can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great
poetry does not in the least alter the fact that it is an abasement
of the soul, an hysterical perversion of the facts of life, and a
preparation of the mind for the seeds of Priestcraft.

The Book of Job has been called a "Wisdom-drama": and what is the
denouement of this drama, what is ancient Hebrew wisdom's last word
about life? "Wherefore I abhor myself," says Job, "and repent in dust
and ashes." The poor fellow has done nothing; we have been told at the
beginning that he "was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and
eschewed evil." But the Sabeans and the Chaldeans rob him, and "the fire
of God" falls from heaven and burns up his sheep and his servants, and
"a great wind from the wilderness" kills his sons and daughters; and
then his body becomes covered with boils--a phenomenon caused in part by
worry, and the consequent nervous indigestion, but mainly by excess of
starch and deficiency of mineral salts in the diet. Job, however, has
never heard of the fasting cure for disease, and so he takes him a
potsherd to scrape himself withal, and he sits among the ashes--a highly
unsanitary procedure enforced by his religious ritual. So naturally he
feels like a worm, and abhors himself, and cries out: "I know that Thou
canst do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can be restrained."
By which utter, unreasoning humility he succeeds in appeasing the Great
Fear, and his friends make a sacrifice of seven bullocks and seven
rams--a feast for a whole templeful of priests--and then "the Lord
gave Job twice as much as he had before.... And after this Job lived an
hundred and forty years, and saw his sons and his sons' sons, even four
generations."

You do not have to look very deeply into this "Wisdom-drama" to find out
whose wisdom it is. Confess your own ignorance and your own impotence,
abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers of
the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite--in exchange for
fresh meat. Here are verses from a psalm of the ancient Babylonians,
which "heathen" chant is identical in spirit and purpose with the
utterances of Job:

 The Sin that I have wrought, I know not;
  The unclean that I have eaten, I know not;
  The offense into which I have walked, I know not....
  The lord, in the wrath of his heart, hath regarded me;
  The god, in the anger of his heart, hath surrounded me;
  A goddess, known or unknown, hath wrought me sorrow....
  I sought for help, but no one took my hand;
  I wept, but no one harkened to me....
  The feet of my goddess I kiss, I touch them;
  To the god, known or unknown, I utter my prayer;
  O god, known or unknown, turn thy countenance, accept my
       sacrifice;
  O goddess, known or unknown, look mercifully on me! accept
       my sacrifice!



Salve Regina!

And now let the reader leap three thousand years of human history,
of toil and triumph of the intellect of man; and instead of a
Hebrew manuscript or a Babylonian brick there confronts him a little
publication, printed on a modern rotary press in the capital of the
United States of America, bearing the date of October, 1914, and the
title "Salve Regina". In it we find "a beautiful prayer", composed by
the late cardinal Rampolla; we are told that "Pius X attached to it an
indulgence of 100 days, each time it is piously recited, applicable to
the souls in purgatory."

O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, cast a glance from Heaven, where thou
sittest as Queen, upon this poor sinner, your servant. Though conscious
of his unworthiness.... he blesses and exalts thee from his whole heart
as the purest, the most beautiful and the most holy of creatures. He
blesses thy holy name. He blesses thy sublime prerogatives as real
Mother of God, ever Virgin, conceived without stain of sin, as
co-Redemptress of the human race. He blesses the Eternal Father who
chose you, etc. He blesses the Incarnate Word, etc. He blesses the
Divine Spirit, etc. He blesses, exalts and thanks the most august
Trinity, etc. O Virgin, holy and merciful... be pleased to accept this
little homage of your servant, and obtain for him also from your divine
Son pardon for his sins, Amen.

And then, looking more closely, we discover the purpose of this
"beautiful prayer", and of the neat little paper which prints it. "Salve
Regina" is raising funds for the "National Shrine of the Immaculate
Conception", a home for more priests, and Catholic ladies who desire
to collect for it may receive little books which they are requested to
return within three months. Pius X writes a letter of warm endorsement,
and sets an example by giving four hundred dollars "out of his
poverty"--or, to be more precise, out of the poverty of the pitiful
peasantry of Italy. There is included in the paper a form of bequest for
"devoted clients of Our Blessed Mother", and at the top of the editorial
page the most alluring of all baits for the loving hearts of the
flock--that the names of deceased relatives and friends may be written
in the collection books, and will be transferred to the records of the
Shrine, and these persons "will share in all its spiritual benefits".
In the days of Job it was with threats of boils and poverty that the
Priestly Lie maintained itself; but in the case of this blackest of all
Terrors, transplanted to our free Republic from the heart of the Dark
Ages, the wretched victims see before their eyes the glare of flames,
and hear the shrieks of their loved ones writhing in torment through
uncounted ages and eternities.



Fresh Meat

In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I sought
earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor compelled
me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig and the bear--he
was vegetarian when he could not help it. The advocates of the reform
insist that meat as a diet causes muddy brains and dulled nerves; but
you would certainly never suspect this from a study of history. What you
find in history is that all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the
strongest and cleverest get it. Everywhere you find the subject classes
living in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they
rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of liberty, our
millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and geese and turkeys, and
hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but save everything for the
summer-boarder or the buyer from the city. It would not be too much
to say of the cultural records of early man that they all have to do,
directly or indirectly, with the reserving of fresh meat to the masters.
In J. T. Trowbridge's cheerful tale of the adventures of Captain
Seaborn, we are told by the cannibal priest how idol-worship has
ameliorated the morals of the tribe--

 For though some warriors of renown
      Continue anthropophagous,
  'Tis rare that human flesh goes down
      The low-caste man's aesophagus!

I suspect that we should have to go back to the days of the cave-man to
find the first lover of the flesh-pots who put a taboo upon meat, and
promised supernatural favors to all who would exercise self-control, and
instead of consuming their meat themselves, would bring it and lay
it upon the sacred griddle, or altar, where the god might come in the
night-time and partake of it. Certainly, at any rate, there are few
religions of record in which such devices do not appear. The early laws
of the Hebrews are more concerned with delicatessen for the priests than
with any other subject whatever. Here, for example, is the way to make a
Nazarite:

He shall offer his offering up to the Lord, one he lamb of the first
year without blemish for a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb of the first
year without blemish for a sin offering, and one ram without blemish for
peace offerings, and a basket of unleavened bread, cakes of fine flour
mingled with oil, and wafers of unleavened bread anointed with oil, and
their meat offerings.

And the law goes on to instruct the priests to take certain choice,
parts and "wave them for a wave offering before the Lord: this is holy
for the priest." What was done with the other portions we are not told;
but earlier in this same "Book of Numbers" we find the general law that

Every offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel, which
they bring unto the priest, shall be his. And every man's hallowed
things shall be his: whatsoever any man giveth to the priest, it shall
be his.

In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the priests of
Ceylon first present the gifts to the god, and then eat them. Among the
Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must bring four new robes to the
priests; if they do this, the priests wear the robes; if they fail to do
it, the dead man appears naked before the judgment-throne. The devotees
are instructed that "he who performs this rite succeeds in both worlds,
and obtains a firm footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists,
the followers give alms to the monks, and are told specifically what
advantages will thereby accrue to them. In the Aitareyo Brahmairiarn of
the Rig-Veda we read

He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is born from
the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the nature of the
Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge), the Brahma (sacred
element) and immortality, and is absorbed into the deity.

Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma, or
juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a god. Among the
Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the sacred juice is that
of the grape, and the priest is not allowed to throw away what is left
of it, but is ordered "reverently to consume it." In as much as
the priest is the sole judge of how much good sherry wine he shall
consecrate previous to the ceremony, it is to be expected that the
priests of this cult should be lukewarm towards the prohibition
movement, and should piously refuse to administer their sacrament with
unfermented and uninteresting grape-juice.



Priestly Empires

In every human society of which we have record there has been one class
which has done the hard and exhausting work, the "hewers of wood and
drawers of water"; and there has been another, much smaller class which
has done the directing. To belong to this latter class is to work also,
but with the head instead of the hands; it is also to enjoy the good
things of life, to live in the best houses, to eat the best food,
to have choice of the most desirable women; it is to have leisure
to cultivate the mind and appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and
distinctions, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and
tastes, to be revered and regarded--in short, to have Power. How to get
this Power and to hold it has been the first object of the thoughts of
men from the beginning of time.

The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is uncertain,
for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed with it. It will
be found that empires based upon military force alone, however cruel
they may be, are not permanent, and therefore not so dangerous to
progress; it is only when resistance is paralyzed by the agency of
Superstition, that the race can be subjected to systems of exploitation
for hundreds and even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all
priestly empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the
priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.

Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:

Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the Aztecs.... Such
was the crafty policy of the priests, who, by reserving to themselves
the business of instruction, were enabled to mould the young and plastic
mind according to their own wills, and to train it early to implicit
reverence for religion and its ministers.

The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of this teaching:

To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the maintenance
of the priests. The estates were augmented by the policy or devotion of
successive princes, until, under the last Montezuma, they had swollen to
an enormous extent, and covered every district of the empire.

And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices, whereby
the priestly caste maintained the prestige of its divinities:

At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the
prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the purpose,
were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long. The
ceremony consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives are said
to have perished at the shrine of this terrible deity.

The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of the priesthood
of Babylonia and Assyria:

The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the original
legal tribunal was the place where the image or symbol of the god stood.
A legal decision was an oracle or omen, indicative of the will of the
god. The power thus lodged in the priests of Babylonia and Assyria was
enormous. They virtually held in their hands the life and death of the
people.

And of the business side of this vast religious system:

The temples were the natural depositories of the legal archives, which
in the course of centuries grew to veritably enormous proportions.
Records were made of all decisions; the facts were set forth, and duly
attested by witnesses. Business and marriage contracts, loans and
deeds of sale were in like manner drawn up in the presence of official
scribes, who were also priests. In this way all commercial transactions
received the written sanction of the religious organization. The
temples themselves--at least in the large centres--entered into business
relations with the populace. In order to maintain the large household
represented by such an organization as that of the temple of Enlil of
Nippur, that of Ningirsu at Lagash, that of Marduk at Babylon, or
that of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings of land were required which,
cultivated by agents for the priests, or farmed out with stipulations
for a goodly share of the produce, secured an income for the maintenance
of the temple officials. The enterprise of the temples was expanded to
the furnishing of loans at interest--in later periods, at 20%--to barter
in slaves, to dealings in lands, besides engaging labor for work of all
kinds directly needed for the temples. A large quantity of the business
documents found in the temple archives are concerned with the business
affairs of the temple, and we are justified in including the temples in
the large centres as among the most important business institutions of
the country. In financial or monetary transactions the position of the
temples was not unlike that of national banks....

And so on. We may venture the guess that the learned professor said more
in that last sentence than he himself intended, for his lectures were
delivered in that temple of plutocracy, the University of Pennsylvania,
and paid out of an endowment which specifies that "all polemical
subjects shall be positively excluded!"



Prayer-wheels

These priestly empires exist in the world today. If we wish to find them
we have only to ask ourselves: What countries are making no contribution
to the progress of the race? What countries have nothing to give us,
whether in art, science, or industry?

For example, Gervaise tells us of the Talapoins, or priests of Siam,
that "they are exempted from all public charges, they salute nobody,
while everybody prostrates himself before them. They are maintained
at the public expense." In the same way we read of the negroes of the
Caribbean islands that "their priests and priestesses exercise an almost
unlimited power." Miss Kingsley, in her "West African Studies", tells
us that if we desire to understand the institutions of this district, we
must study the native's religion.

For his religion has so firm a grasp upon his mind that it influences
everything he does. It is not a thing apart, as the religion of the
Europeans is at times. The African cannot say, "Oh, that is all right
from a religious point of view, but one must be practical." To be
practical, to get on in the world, to live the day and night through, he
must be right in the religious point of view, namely, must be on working
terms with the great world of spirits around him. The knowledge of this
spirit world constitutes the religion of the African, and his customs
and ceremonies arise from his idea of the best way to influence it.

Or consider Henry Savage Landor's account of Thibet:

In Lhassa and many other sacred places fanatical pilgrims make
circumambulations, sometimes for miles and miles, and for days together,
covering the entire distance lying flat upon their bodies.... From the
ceiling of the temple hang hundreds of long strips, katas, offered by
pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so many flying prayers when hung
up--for mechanical praying in every way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus
instead of having to learn by heart long and varied prayers, all you
have to do is to stuff the entire prayer-book into a prayer-wheel, and
revolve it while repeating as fast as you can four words meaning, "O
God, the gem emerging from the lotus-flower.".... The attention of the
pilgrims is directed to a large box, or often a big bowl, where they
may deposit whatever offerings they can spare, and it must be said that
their religious ideas are so strongly developed that they will dispose
of a considerable portion of their money in this fashion.... The Lamas
are very clever in many ways, and have a great hold over the entire
country. They are ninety per cent of them unscrupulous scamps, depraved
in every way and given to every sort of vice. So are the women Lamas.
They live and sponge on the credulity and ignorance of the crowds; it
is to maintain this ignorance, upon which their luxurious life depends,
that foreign influence of every kind is strictly kept out of the
country.



The Butcher-Gods

In this last sentence we have summed up the fundamental fact about
institutionalized religion. Wherever belief and ritual have become the
means of livelihood of a class, all innovation will of necessity
be taken as an attack upon that class; it will be literally a
crime--robbing the priests of their age-long privileges. And of course
they will oppose the robber--using every weapon of terrorism, both of
this world and the next. They will require the submission, not merely
of their own people, but of their neighbors, and their jealousy of rival
priestly castes will be a cause of wars. The story of the early days of
mankind is a sickening record of torture and slaughter in the name of
ten thousand butcher-gods.

Thus, for example, we read in the Hebrew religious records how the
priests were engaged in establishing the prestige of a fetish called
"the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated this fetish and
wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god.

And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the
ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and three
score and ten men; and the people lamented, because the Lord had smitten
many of the people with a great slaughter. And the men of Beth-shemesh
said, Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God?

This terrible old Hebrew divinity said of himself that he was "a jealous
god". Throughout the time of his sway he issued through his ministers
precise instructions for the most revolting cruelties, the extermination
of whole nations of men, women and children, whose sole offense was that
they did not pay tribute to Jehovah's priests. Thus, for example, the
chief of his prophets, Moses, called the people together, and with all
solemnity, and with many warnings, handed down ten commandments graven
upon stone tablets; he went on to set forth how the people were to
set upon and rob their neighbors, and gave them these blood-thirsty
instructions:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest
to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites,
and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the
Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater
and mightier than thou; And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them
before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt
make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:... But thus shall
ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their
images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with
fire. For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God
hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people
that are upon the face of the earth.

The records of this Jehovah are full of similar horrors. He sent his
chosen people out to destroy the Midianites, and they slew all the
males, but this was not sufficient, and Moses was wroth, and commanded
them to kill all the married women, and to take the single women "for
themselves". We are told that sixteen thousand single women were spared,
of whom "the Lord's tribute was thirty and two!" In the Book of Joshua
we read that he had an interview with a supernatural personage called
"the captain of the Lord's host", and how this captain had given to him
a magic spell which would destroy the city of Jericho. The city should
be accursed, "even it and all that are therein, to the Lord"; every
living thing except one traitor-harlot was to be slaughtered, and all
the wealth of the city reserved to the priestly caste. This was carried
out to the letter, except that "Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of
Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed
thing"--that is, he hid some gold and silver in his tent; whereupon the
army met with a defeat, and everybody knew that something was wrong, and
Joshua rent his clothes and fell to the earth upon his face before the
ark of the Lord, and got another message from Jehovah, to the effect
that the guilty man should be burned with fire, "he and all that he
hath."

And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and
the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and
his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent,
and all that he had: and they brought them unto the Valley of Achor. And
Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us? the Lord shall trouble thee this
day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire,
after they had stoned him with stones.

We have no means of knowing what was the character of the unfortunate
inhabitants of the city of Jericho, nor of the Hittites and the
Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of the victims of Jehovah.
To be sure, we are told by the Hebrew priests that they sacrificed their
children to their gods; but then, consider what we should believe about
the Hebrew religion, if we took the word of rival priestly castes!
Consider, for example, that in this twentieth century we saw an orthodox
Jew tried in a Russian court of law for having made a sacrifice of
Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a
considerable part of the intelligence and idealism of Russia. We know
in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture and all of
the scientific knowledge of Spain; that the Huguenots had most of the
conscience and industry of France; and we know that they were massacred
or driven out to death by the priestly castes of the Middle Ages.



The Holy Inquisition

Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those mediaeval times,
so that we may know what we ourselves have escaped. In the fifteenth
century there was established in Europe the cult of a three-headed god,
whose priests had won lordship over a continent. They were enormously
wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt; they sold to the rich the license to
commit every possible crime, and they held the poor in ignorance and
degradation. Among the comparatively intelligent and freedom-loving
people of Bohemia there arose a great reformer, John Huss, himself a
priest, protesting against the corruptions of his order. They trapped
him into their power by means of a "safe-conduct"--which they repudiated
because no promise to a heretic could have validity. They found him
guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine that a priest who committed
crimes could not give absolution for the crimes of others; and they held
an auto de fe--which means a "sentence of faith." As we read in Lea's
"History of the Inquisition":

The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund (the Emperor) and
his nobles, the great officers of the empire with their insignia, the
prelates in their splendid robes. While mass was sung, Huss, as an
excommunicate, was kept waiting at the door; when brought in he
was placed on an elevated bench by a table on which stood a coffer
containing priestly vestments. After some preliminaries, including a
sermon by the Bishop of Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the
events of that day would confer on him immortal glory, the articles
of which Huss was convicted were recited. In vain he protested that he
believed in transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in
polluted hands. He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on his persisting
the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of this he continued
to utter protests. The sentence was then read in the name of the
council, condemning him both for his written errors and those which
had been proven by witnesses. He was declared a pertinacious and
incorrigible heretic who did not desire to return to the Church; his
books were ordered to be burned, and himself to be degraded from the
priesthood and abandoned to the secular court. Seven bishops arrayed him
in priestly garb and warned him to recant while yet there was time. He
turned to the crowd, and with broken voice declared that he could not
confess the errors which he never entertained, lest he should lie to
God, when the bishops interrupted him, crying that they had waited long
enough, for he was obstinate in his heresy. He was degraded in the usual
manner, stripped of his sacerdotal vestments, his fingers scraped; but
when the tonsure was to be disposed of, an absurd quarrel arose among
the bishops as to whether the head should be shaved with a razor or the
tonsure be destroyed with scissors. Scissors won the day, and a cross
was cut in his hair. Then on his head was placed a conical paper cap, a
cubit in height, adorned with painted devils and the inscription, "This
is the heresiarch."

The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which he was
conducted by two thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louis at their head,
and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates, and cardinals. The
route followed was circuitous, in order that he might be carried past
the episcopal palace, in front of which his books were burning, whereat
he smiled. Pity from man there was none to look for, but he sought
comfort on high, repeating to himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living
God, have mercy upon us!" and when he came in sight of the stake he fell
on his knees and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and
said that he would gladly do so if there were space. A wide circle
was formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to custom, had been
providently empowered to take advantage of final weakening, came
forward, saying, "Dear sir and master, if you will recant your unbelief
and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly hear your
confession; but if you will not, you know right well that, according to
canon law, no one can administer the sacrament to a heretic." To this
Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am not a mortal sinner." His
paper crown fell off and he smiled as his guards replaced it. He desired
to take leave of his keepers, and when they were brought to him he
thanked them for their kindness, saying that they had been to him rather
brothers than jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German,
telling them that he suffered for errors which he did not hold, and
he was cut short. When bound to the stake, two cartloads of fagots and
straw were piled up around him, and the palsgrave and vogt for the last
time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could save himself, but only
repeated that he had been convicted by false witnesses on errors never
entertained by him. They clapped their hands and then withdrew, and the
executioners applied the fire. Twice Huss was heard to exclaim, "Christ
Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing
up and blowing the flames and smoke into his face checked further
utterances, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to move while
one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy was over;
the sorely-tried soul bad escaped from its tormentors, and the bitterest
enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him the praise that no
philosopher of old had faced death with more composure than he had shown
in his dreadful extremity. No faltering of the voice had betrayed an
internal struggle. Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm
of one of the executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it
should be reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him.
With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and thrown
into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was dug up and
carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the spot and carried
home fragments of the neighboring clay, which they reverenced as relies
of their martyr. The next day thanks were returned to God in a solemn
procession in which figured Sigismund and his queen, the princes and
nobles, nineteen cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops,
and all the clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who
had delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left
Constance, feeling that his work was done.



Hell-Fire

If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it would only be
in some remote and wholly savage place, such as the mountains of Hayti,
or the Solomon Islands. It could no longer happen in any civilized
country; the reason being, not any abatement of the pretensions of the
priesthood, but solely the power of science, embodied in the physical
arm of a secular State. The advance of that arm the church has fought
systematically, in every country, and at every point. To quote Buckle:
"A careful study of the history of religious toleration will prove that
in every Christian country where it has been adopted, it has been forced
upon the clergy by the authority of the secular classes." The wolf
of superstition has been driven into its lair; but it has backed away
snarling, and it still crouches, watching for a chance to spring. The
Church which burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching
that the earth moves round the sun--that same church, in the name of the
same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the firing-squad;
if it does not do the same thing to the author of this book, it will
be solely because of the police. Not being allowed to burn me here,
the clergy will vent their holy indignation by sentencing me to eternal
burning in a future world which they have created, and which they run to
suit themselves.

It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the
measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent
to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion.
Those peoples which are wholly under the sway of the priesthood, such
as Thibetans and Koreans, Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom
the intellectual life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos,
and Turks, who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther on the
way are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a flashlight of the
Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick MacGill:

The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always told
the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn for ever and
ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you sorry for the debts
that you did not pay," said the priest. "What is eternity?" he would
ask in a solemn voice from the altar steps. "If a man tried to count the
sands on the sea-shore and took a million years to count every single
grain, how long would it take him to count them all? A long time, you'll
say. But that time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning
in hell while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand,
counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did not pay
Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within the letter of
the law." That concluding phrase, "within the letter of the law," struck
terror into all who listened, and no one, maybe not even the priest
himself, knew what it meant.

There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture;
the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one for
agricultural co-operation and the other for political independence--both
of them definitely and specifically non-religious. This same thing has
been true of the movements which have helped on happier nations, such as
the republics of France and America, which have put an end to the power
of the priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the
mind of the child without its parents' consent.

This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently not yet
occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty to the
child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though it has the
misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still permitted that
parents should terrify their little ones with images of a personal devil
and a hell of eternal brimstone and sulphur; it is permitted to found
schools for the teaching of devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize
gigantic campaigns and systematically to infect whole cities full of
men, women and children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city
where I write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees,
even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing, screaming
to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning paper and read of
the arrest of five men and seven women in Los Angeles, members of a
sect known as the "Church of the Living God", upon a charge of having
disturbed the peace of their neighbors. The police officers testified
that the accused claimed to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that
as signs of this possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted
like pigs and barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more
startling", about which the newspapers did not go into details. And
again, a week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,
and found tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged to a
religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft. Another woman
was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve failed, and the "high
priest" was called in, who decreed a whipping. The victim explained to
the police that she would have deserved to be whipped had she really
been a witch, but a mistake had been made--it was another woman who
was the witch. And again in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly
serious news item, telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and
found on his pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of
the head of Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his
neighbors to witness the miracle, and declared that while he was not
superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened by
chance, and he knew what it was intended to signify--he would buy more
Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the war!

And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture think
that the battle of the intellect is won, and that it is no longer
necessary to spend our energies in fighting "Religion!"



BOOK TWO -- The Church of Good Society

 Within the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert
  By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,
 Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,
  And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.

 Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts
  Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts--
 A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,
  To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls
                                    Sterling.

The Rain Makers

I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be the
Church in which I was brought up. Reading this statement, some of my
readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I search my heart; yes, it
brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can remember I knew this
atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every Sunday those melodious and
hypnotizing incantations were chanted in my childish ears! I take up the
book of ritual, done in aristocratic black leather with gold lettering,
and the old worn volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected
awe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the
volume--not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a landmark
of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used as a source of
income and a shield to privilege.

In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled the
field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer", I discover
that there is at least one spot out of which he has been cleared
entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still, or
to comets to go away. The "Church of Good Society" has discovered
astronomy! But if any astronomer attributes this to his instruments with
their marvelous accuracy, let him at least stop to consider my "economic
interpretation" of the phenomenon--the fact that the heavenly bodies
affect the destinies of mankind so little that there has not been
sufficient emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as
astrologer.

But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference! Has
any utmost precision of barometer been able to drive the priest out
of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most civilized of
countries; not in that most decorous and dignified of institutions, the
Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I study with care the passage
wherein the clergyman appears as controller of the fate of crops. I
note a chastened caution of phraseology; the church will not repeat the
experience of the sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons to bringing
water, and then could not make them stop! The spell invokes "moderate
rain and showers"; and as an additional precaution there is a
counter-spell against "excessive rains and floods": the weather-faucet
being thus under exact control.

I turn the pages of this "Book of Common Prayer", and note the remnants
of magic which it contains. There are not many of the emergencies of
life with which the priest is not authorized to deal; not many natural
phenomena for which he may not claim the credit. And in case anything
should have been overlooked, there is a blanket order upon Providence:
"Graciously hear us, that those evils which the craft or subtilty of the
devil or man worketh against us, be brought to nought!" I am reminded
of the idea which haunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories about the
hero who was allowed three wishes that would come true. I could never
understand why the hero did not settle the matter once for all--by
wishing that everything he wished might come true!

Most of these incantations are harmless, and some are amiable; but now
and then you come upon one which is sinister in its implications. The
volume before me happens to be of the Church of England, which is even
more forthright in its confronting of the Great Magic. Many years ago I
remember talking with an English army officer, asking how he could feel
sure of his soldiers in case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him
that the men had relatives among the workers, and might some time refuse
to shoot them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the military had
worked out its technique with care. He would never think of ordering his
men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he would first start the spell of
discipline to work, he would march them round the block, and get them in
the swing, get their blood moving to military music; then, when he gave
the order, in they would go. I have never forgotten the gesture, the
animation with which he illustrated their going--I could hear the
grunting of bayonets in the flesh of men. The social system prevailing
in England has made necessary the perfecting of such military technique;
also, you discover, English piety has made necessary the providing of a
religious sanction for it. After the job has been done, and the bayonets
have been wiped clean, the company is marched to church, and the officer
kneels in his family pew, and the privates kneel with the parlor-maids,
and the clergyman raises his hands to heaven and intones: "We bless thy
Holy Name, that it hath pleased Thee to appease the seditious tumults
which have been lately raised up among us!"

And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killers--he even
takes part in their bloody work. In the Home Office Records of the
British Government I read (vol 40, page 17) how certain miners were
on strike against low wages and the "truck" system, and the Vicar of
Abergavenny put himself at the head of the yeomanry and the Greys. He
wrote the Home Office a lively account of his military operations. All
that remained was to apprehend certain of the strikers, "and then I
shall be able to return to my Clerical duties." Later he wrote of the
"sinister influences" which kept the miners from returning to their
work, and how he had put half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.



The Babylonian Fire-god

So we come to the most important of the functions of the tribal god, as
an ally in war, an inspirer to martial valour. When in ancient Babylonia
you wished to overcome your enemies, you went to the shrine of the
Firegod, and with awful rites the priest pronounced incantations, which
have been preserved on bricks and handed down for the use of modern
churches. "Pronounce in a whisper, and have a bronze image therewith,"
commands the ancient text, and runs on for many strophes in this
fashion:

      Let them die, but let me live!
      Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!
      Let them perish, but let me increase!
      Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!
      O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among the gods,
      Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.

This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand years ago. Since then,
the world has moved on--

 Three thousand years of war and peace and glory,
      Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
  Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams--

And in one of the world's leading nations the people stand up and bare
their heads, and sing to their god to save their king and punish those
who oppose him--

 O Lord our God, arise,  Scatter his enemies,
      And make them fall;
  Confound their politics,
  Frustrate their knavish tricks,
  On him our hopes we fix,
      God save us all.

Recently, I understand, it has become the custom to omit this stanza
from the English national anthem; but it is clear that this is because
of its crudity of expression, not because of objection to the idea of
praying to a god to assist one nation and injure others; for the same
sentiment is expressed again and again in the most carefully edited of
prayer-books:

Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices.
Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies.
Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish and overcome all his
enemies. There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God.

Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-called civilized nation
today. Behind every battle-line in Europe you may see the priests of
the Babylonian Fire-god with their bronze images and their ancient
incantations; you may see magic spells being wrought, magic standards
sanctified, magic bread eaten and magic wine drunk, fetishes blessed and
hoodoos lifted, eternity ransacked to find means of inciting soldiers
to the mood where they will "go in". Throughout all civilization, the
phobias and manias of war have thrown the people back into the toils of
the priest, and that church which tortured Galileo in the dungeons of
the Inquisition, and shot Ferrier beneath the walls of the fortress of
Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of religion".



The Medicine-men


Andrew D. White tells us that

It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague, the Black
Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of the landed and
personal property of every European country was in the hands of the
Church. Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the
harvests of the ministers of God."

And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as banishers of
epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit to rebuke the upstart
teachers of impious and atheistical inoculation, and scourge the people
back into His fold as in the good old days of Moses and Aaron? Viscount
Amberley, in his immensely learned and half-suppressed work, "The
Analysis of Religious Belief", quotes some missionaries to the Fiji
islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the
subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a "disease-maker", who was
burning images of the people with incantations; so they blew horns to
frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The missionaries undertook
to explain the true cause of the affliction--and thereby revealed that
they stood upon the same intellectual level as the heathen they were
supposed to instruct! It appeared that the natives had been at war with
their neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist; they
had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as punishment for
savage presumption!

And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of Common
Prayer" of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I remember as a
little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by the prevalence
in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread three times a day; and
there came an amiable clerical gentleman and recited the service proper
to such pastoral calls: "Take therefore in good part the visitation
of the Lord!" And again, when my mother was ill, I remember how the
clergyman read out in church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness,
"in mind, body or estate". I was thinking only of my mother, and the
meaning of these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize
that the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in
front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his tenements
might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his little "flyer" in
cotton might prove successful; so that the children in his mills might
work with greater speed.

Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by incantations, and he
answered, "Yes, if you use a little strychnine with it." And that would
seem to be the attitude of the present-day Anglican church-member; he
calls in the best physician he knows, he makes sure that his plumbing is
sound, and after that he thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have
a chance. It makes the women happy, and after all, there are a lot of
things we don't yet know about the world. So he repairs to the family
pew, and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributes his mite
to the maintenance of an institution which, fourteen Sundays every year,
proclaims the terrifying menaces of the Athanasian Creed:

Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he
hold the Catholick faith. Which faith, except one do keep whole and
undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be explained that the
"Catholick faith" here referred to is not the Roman Catholic, but that
of the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church of America.
This creed of the ancient Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim
and menacing precision--forty-four paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae,
closing with the final doom: "This is the Catholick faith: which except
a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."

You see, the founders of this august institution were not content with
cultured complacency; what they believed they believed really, with
their whole hearts, and they were ready to act upon it, even if it meant
burning their own at the stake. Also, they knew the ceaseless impulse
of the mind to grow; the terrible temptation which confronts each new
generation to believe that which is reasonable. They met the situation
by setting out the true faith in words which no one could mistake.
They have provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also the
"Thirty-nine Articles"--which are thirty-nine separate and binding
guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal Church shall be
either a man of inferior mentality, or else a sophist and hypocrite. How
desperate some of them have become in the face of this cruel dilemma is
illustrated by the tale which is told of Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College,
Oxford: that when he was required to recite the "Apostle's Creed" in
public, he would save himself by inserting the words "used" between the
words "I believe", saying the inserted words under his breath, thus, "I
used to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Perhaps the
eminent divine never did this; but the fact that his students told it,
and thought it funny, is sufficient indication of their attitude toward
their "Religion." The son of William George Ward tells in his biography
how this leader of the "Tractarian Movement" met the problem with
cynicism which seems almost sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are
justified in deception; and then lie like a trooper!"



The Canonization of Incompetence

The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its
operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it
banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
Consider the power of the Church of England and its favorite daughter
here in America; consider their prestige with the press and in politics,
their hold upon literature and the arts, their control of education and
the minds of children, of charity and the lives of the poor: consider
all this, and then say what it means to society that such a power
must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction and
falsehood. "So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be," runs
the church's formula; and this per se and a priori, of necessity and in
the nature of the case.

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the
church's opposition to every advance in every field of science, even
the most remote from theological concern. Here is the Reverend Edward
Massey, preaching in 1772 on "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of
Inoculation"; declaring that Job's distemper was probably confluent
small-pox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil; that
diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin; and that the
proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation". Here are
the Scotch clergy of the middle of the nineteenth century denouncing
the use of chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking "to avoid
one part of the primeval curse on woman". Here is Bishop Wilberforce
of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of natural selection
is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; it "contradicts the
revealed relation of creation to its creator"; it "is inconsistent with
the fulness of His glory"; it is "a dishonoring view of nature". And the
Bishop settled the matter by asking Huxley whether he was descended from
an ape through his grandmother or grandfather.

Think what it means, friends of progress, that these ecclesiastical
figures should be set up for the reverence of the populace, and that
every time mankind is to make an advance in power over Nature, the
pioneers of thought have to come with crow-bars and derricks and heave
these figures out of the way! And you think that conditions are changed
to-day? But consider syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we know so
much, and can do almost nothing; consider birth-control, which we are
sent to jail for so much as mentioning! Consider the divorce reforms for
which the world is crying--and for which it must wait, because of St.
Paul! Realize that up to date it has proven impossible to persuade the
English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased wife's sister! That
when the war broke upon England the whole nation was occupied with a
squabble over the disestablishment of the church of Wales! Only since
1888 has it been legally possible for an unbeliever to hold a seat in
Parliament; while up to the present day men are tried for blasphemy and
convicted under the decisions of Lord Hale, to the effect that "it is
a crime either to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrines of the
Christian religion or to hold them up to contempt or ridicule." Said Mr.
justice Horridge, at the West Riding Assizes, 1911: "A man is not
free in any public place to use common ridicule on subjects which are
sacred."

The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London, is "to
preserve the standard of outward decency." And you will find that the
one essential to prosecution is always that the victim shall be obscure
and helpless; never by any chance is he a duke in a drawing-room. I
will record an utterance of one of the obscure victims of the British
"standard of outward decency", a teacher of mathematics named Holyoake,
who presumed to discuss in a public hall the starvation of the working
classes of the country. A preacher objected that he had discussed "our
duty to our neighbor" and neglected "our duty to God"; whereupon
the lecturer replied: "Our national Church and general religious
institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about twenty million
pounds annually. Worship being thus expensive, I appeal to your heads
and your pockets whether we are not too poor to have a God. While our
distress lasts, I think it would be wise to put deity upon half pay."
And for that utterance the unfortunate teacher of mathematics served six
months in the common Gaol at Gloucester!

While men were being tried for publishing the "Free-thinker", the
Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you wish to know
what an established church can do by way of setting up dullness in high
places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's" writings on theological
and religious questions. Read his "Juventus Mundi", in the course of
which he establishes, a mystic connection between the trident of Neptune
and the Christian Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that the writer of
Genesis was an inspired geologist! This writer of Genesis points out in
Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession
of times: First, the water population; secondly, the air population;
thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly, the land population
consummated in man." And it seems that this division and sequence "is
understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science that
it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact."
Hence we must conclude of the writer of Genesis that "his knowledge was
divine"! Consider that this was actually published in one of the leading
British monthlies, and that it was necessary for Professor Huxley
to answer it, pointing out that so far is it from being true that "a
fourfold division and orderly sequence" of water, air and land animals
"has been affirmed in our time by natural science", that on the
contrary, the assertion is "directly contradictory to facts known to
everyone who is acquainted with the elements of natural science". The
distribution of fossils proves that land animals originated before
sea-animals, and there has been such a mixing of land, sea and air
animals as utterly to destroy the reputation of both Genesis and
Gladstone as possessing a divine knowledge of Geology.



Gibson's Preservative

I have a friend, a well-known "scholar", who permits me the use of his
extensive library. I stand in the middle and look about me, and see
in the dim shadows walls lined from floor to ceiling with decorous and
grave-looking books, bound for the most part in black, many of them
fading to green with age. There are literally thousands of such, and
their theme is the pseudo-science of "divinity". I close my eyes, to
make the test fair, and walk to the shelves and put out my hand and
take a book. It proves to be a modern work, "A History of the English
Prayer-book in Relation to the Doctrine of the Eucharist". I turn the
pages and discover that it is a study of the variations of one minute
detail of church doctrine. This learned divine--he has written many such
works, as the advertisements inform us--fills up the greater part of
his pages with foot-notes from hundreds of authorities, arguments and
counter-arguments over supernatural subtleties. I will give one sample
of these footnotes--asking the reader to be patient:

I add the following valuable observation, of Dean Goode: ("On
Eucharist", II p 757. See also Archbishop Ware in Gibson's
"Preservative", vol X, Chap II) "One great point for which our divines
have contended, in opposition to Romish errors, has been the reality
of that presence of Christ's Body and Blood to the soul of the
believer which is affected through the operation of the Holy Spirit
notwithstanding the absence of that Body and Blood in Heaven. Like the
Sun, the Body of Christ is both present and absent; present, really and
truly present, in one sense--that is, by the soul being brought into
immediate communion with--but absent in another sense--that is, as
regards the contiguity of its substance to our bodies. The authors under
review, like the Romanists, maintain that this is not a Real Presence,
and assuming their own interpretation of the phrase to be the only true
one, press into their service the testimony of divines who, though using
the phrase, apply it in a sense the reverse of theirs. The ambiguity of
the phrase, and its misapplication by the Church of Rome, have induced
many of our divines to repudiate it, etc."

Realize that of the work from which this "valuable observation" is
quoted, there are at least two volumes, the second volume containing not
less than 757 pages! Realize that in Gibson's "Preservative" there
are not less than ten volumes of such writing! Realize that in this
twentieth century a considerable portion of the mental energies of the
world's greatest empire is devoted to that kind of learning!

I turn to the date upon the volume, and find that it is 1910. I was
in England within a year of that time, and so I can tell what was the
condition of the English people while printers were making and
papers were reviewing and book-stores were distributing this work of
ecclesiastical research. I walked along the Embankment and saw the
pitiful wretches, men, women and sometimes children, clad in filthy
rags, starved white and frozen blue, soaked in winter rains and
shivering in winter winds, homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors
of divinity, unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative". I walked on
Hampstead Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns
out for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror, for
I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These creatures were
hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were some new grotesque
race of apes. They could not walk, they could only shamble; they could
not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a hand-organ playing, and turned
away--the things they did in their efforts to dance were not to be
watched. And then I went out into the beautiful English country;
cultured and charming ladies took me in swift, smooth motor-cars, and
I saw the pitiful hovels and the drink-sodden, starch-poisoned
inhabitants--slum-populations everywhere, even on the land! When
the newspaper reporters came to me, I said that I had just come from
Germany, and that if ever England found herself at war with that
country, she would regret that she had let the bodies and the minds of
her people rot; for which expression I was severely taken to task by
more than one British divine.

The bodies--and the minds; the rot of the latter being the cause of the
former. All over England in that year of 1910, in thousands of schools,
rich and poor, and in the greatest centres of learning, men like Dean
Goode were teaching boys dead languages and dead sciences and dead arts;
sending them out to life with no more conception of the modern world
than a monk of the Middle Ages; sending them out with minds, made
hard and inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to progress,
contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this
terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and disciplined
by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful muddle that was
in England during the first two years of the war has not yet been told
in print; but thousands know it, and some day it will be written, and
it will finish forever the prestige of the British ruling caste.
They rushed off an expedition to Gallipoli, and somebody forgot the
water-supply, and at one time they had ninety-five thousand cases of
dysentery!

They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of their
ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle through"--they had to
come to America for help. As I write, our Congress is voting billions
and tens of billions of dollars, and a million of the best of our young
manhood are being taken from their homes--because in 1910 the mind of
England was occupied with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and the ten volumes
of Gibson's "Preservative".



The Elders

What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged. It means
old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the church, but in the
law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army and navy. For a test
I look up the list of bishops of the Church of England in Whitaker's
Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of these functionaries, including
the archbishops, but not the suffragans; and that the total salary paid
to them amounts to more than nine hundred thousand dollars a year. This,
it should be understood, does not include the pay of their assistants,
nor the cost of maintaining their religious establishments; it does not
include any private incomes which they or their wives may possess, as
members of the privileged classes of the Empire. I look up their ages
in Who's Who, and I find that there is only one below fifty-three;
the oldest of them is ninety-one, while the average age of the goodly
company is seventy. There have been men in history who have retained
their flexibility of mind, their ability to adjust themselves to new
circumstances at the age of seventy, but it will always be found that
these men were trained in science and practical affairs, never in dead
languages and theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter that
he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an opinion on
the labor question.

And now--here is the crux of the argument--do these aged gentlemen rule
of their own power? They do not! They do literally nothing of their own
power; they could not make their own episcopal robes, they could not
even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be maintained in all
their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to what end?

The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which
is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of
William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and
in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the
land among his nobles and prelates. In those days, you understand,
a high ecclesiastic was a man of war, who did not stoop to veil
his predatory nature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and
archbishops, of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like
the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the same
time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English chronicler,
"Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots of their
abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependencie of the church on the
royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as
from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt before William,
bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord, I become liege
man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith
and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."

The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held,
and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege man for life
and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the whole story of the
church of England, in the twentieth century as in the eleventh. The
balance of power has shifted from time to time; old families have lost
the land and new families have gotten it; but the loyalty and homage of
the church have been held by the land, as the needle of the compass is
held by a mass of metal. Some two hundred and fifty years ago a popular
song gave the general impression--

 For this is law that I'll maintain
      Until my dying day, sir:
  That whatsoever king shall reign
      I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!

So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and
Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every injustice
that profits the owning class. And always among themselves you find them
intriguing and squabbling over the dividing of the spoils; always you
find them enjoying leisure and ease, while the people suffer and the
rebels complain. One can pass down the corridor of English history
and prove this statement by the words of Englishmen from every single
generation. Take the fourteenth century; the "Good Parliament" declares
that,

Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to benefices of a thousand
marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty. God gave
the sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and shorn.

And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers Plowman--

But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets,  A
leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land, Pricking on a palfrey from
manor to manor, A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord;
And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup, He loureth on him
asking who taught him courtesy. Badly have lords done to give their
heirs' lands Away to the Orders that have no pity; Money rains upon
their altars. There where such parsons be living at ease They have no
pity on the poor; that is their "charity". Ye hold you as lords; your
lands are too broad, But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you
all And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.

Another step through history, and in the early part of the sixteenth
century here is Simon Fish, addressing King Henry the Eighth, in the
"Supplicacyon for the Beggars", complaining of the "strong, puissant and
counterfeit holy and ydell" which "are now increased under your sight,
not only into a great nombre, but ynto a kingdome."

They have begged so importunatly that they have gotten ynto their hondes
more than a therd part of all youre Realme. The goodliest lordshippes,
maners, londes, and territories, are theyres. Besides this, they have
the tenth part of all the come, medowe, pasture, grasse, wolle, coltes,
calves, lambes, pigges, gese and chikens. Ye, and they looke so narowly
uppon theyre proufittes, that the poore wyves must be countable to thym
of every tenth eg, or elles she gettith not her rytes at ester, shal
be taken as an heretike.... Is it any merveille that youre people so
compleine of povertie? The Turke nowe, in your tyme, shulde never be
abill to get so moche grounde of christendome... And whate do al these
gredy sort of sturdy, idell, holy theves? These be they that have made
an hundredth thousand idell hores in your realme. These be they that
catche the pokkes of one woman, and here them to an other.

The petitioner goes on to tell how they steal wives and all their goods
with them, and if any man protest they make him a heretic, "so that it
maketh him wisshe that he had not done it". Also they take fortunes for
masses and then don't say them. "If the Abbot of westminster shulde sing
every day as many masses for his founders as he is bounde to do by his
foundacion, 1000 monkes were too few." The petitioner suggests that the
king shall "tie these holy idell theves to the cartes, to be whipped
naked about every market towne till they will fall to laboure!"



Church History

King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he took away
the property of the religious orders for the expenses of his many wives
and mistresses, and forced the clergy in England to forswear obedience
to the Pope and make his royal self their spiritual head. This was the
beginning of the Anglican Church, as distinguished from the Catholic;
a beginning of which the Anglican clergy are not so proud as they would
like to be. When I was a boy, they taught me what they called "church
history", and when they came to Henry the Eighth they used him as an
illustration of the fact that the Lord is sometimes wont to choose evil
men to carry out His righteous purposes. They did not explain why the
Lord should do this confusing thing, nor just how you were to know, when
you saw something being done by a murderous adulterer, whether it was
the will of the Lord or of Satan; nor did they go into details as to the
motives which the Lord had been at pains to provide, so as to induce his
royal agent to found the Anglican Church. For such details you have to
consult another set of authorities--the victims of the plundering.

When I was in college my professor of Latin was a gentleman with
bushy brown whiskers and a thundering voice of which I was often the
object--for even in those early days I had the habit of persisting in
embarrassing questions. This professor was a devout Catholic, and not
even in dealing with ancient Romans could he restrain his propaganda
impulses. Later on in life he became editor of the "Catholic
Encyclopedia", and now when I turn its pages, I imagine that I see the
bushy brown whiskers, and hear the thundering voice: "Mr. Sinclair, it
is so because I tell you it is so!"

I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about King Henry
the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of England; he is
ready with an "economic interpretation", as complete as the most rabid
muckraker could desire! It appears that the king wanted a new wife, and
demanded that the Pope should grant the necessary permission; in his
efforts to browbeat the Pope into such betrayal of duty, King Henry
threatened the withdrawal of the "annates" and the "Peter's pence".
Later on he forced the clergy to declare that the Pope was "only
a foreign bishop", and in order to "stamp out overt expression of
disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of terror".

In Anglican histories, you are assured that all this was a work of
religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure vehicle of
God's grace. There were no more "holy idell theves", holding the land
of England and plundering the poor. But get to know the clergy, and see
things from the inside, and you will meet some one like the Archbishop
of Cashell, who wrote to one of his intimates:

I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink
and grow fat, rich and die; which laudable example I propose for the
remainder of my days to follow.

If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports
of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew with peculiar
intimacy:

I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's
favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5000 pounds. (She betted
him the 5000 pounds that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and
paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands
for consecration? As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of
cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy
clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old king yawning
under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is
discoursing. Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment?
Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in German and
almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman actually
burst out crying in his pulpit, because the defender of the faith and
the dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him!



Land and Livings

And how is it in the twentieth century? Have conditions been much
improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote Robert
Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who therefore has still
to be recognized by English critics. He writes of the "New Rome", by
which he means present-day England:

  The gods are dead, but in their name
  Humanity is sold to shame,
  While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest
  Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
  Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
  Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,
  And poureth freely (now as then)
  The sacramental blood of Men!

You see, the land system of England remains--the changes having been
for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon peasantry
contented, so he left them their "commons"; but in the eighteenth
century these were nearly all filched away. We saw the same thing done
within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same motive--because
developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas people who have access
to the land will not slave in mills and mines. In England, from the
time of Queen Anne to that of William and Mary, the parliaments of the
landlords passed some four thousand separate acts, whereby more than
seven million acres of the common land were stolen from the people.
It has been calculated that these acres might have supported a million
families; and ever since then England has had to feed a million paupers
all the time.

As an old song puts the matter:

  Why prosecute the man or woman
  Who steals a goose from off the common,
  And let the greater felon loose
  Who steals the common from the goose?

In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in British
soil: some of them direct descendants of the Normans, others children of
the court favorites and panders who grew rich in the days of the Tudors
and the unspeakable Stuarts. Seven men own practically all the land of
the city and county of London, and collect tribute from seven millions
of people. The estates are entailed--that is, handed down from father
to oldest son automatically; you cannot buy any land, but if you want
to build, the landlord gives you a lease, and when the lease is up, he
takes possession of your buildings. The tribute which London pays is
more than a hundred million dollars a year. So absolute is the right of
the land-owner that he can sue for trespass the driver on an aeroplane
which flies over him; he imposes on fishermen a tax upon catches made
many hundred of yards from the shore.

And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church owns
land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city lots from
which it derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts; so do the
schools and universities in which the clergy are educated. The income
from the holdings of a church constitutes what is called a "living";
these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of the younger
sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and scrambled for in
exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the eighteenth century.

About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land
owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and
needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor radical
land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to the poor,
easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical concerning the
grafts of grace.

In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven
hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent had a
large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a
thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate, himself appearing
twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birthday, to preach a
sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting that
in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that is,
clergymen holding more than one "living"--to furnish curates to do their
work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with strenuous
clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting against it without a
division. Thus we may understand the sharp saying of Karl Marx, that the
English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of their thirty-nine
articles than with one thirty-ninth of their income.

There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England. They are the
sons of the less influential ruling families, and of the clergy; they
have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and possess the one essential
qualification, that they are gentlemen. Their average price is two
hundred and fifty pounds a year; their function was made clear to me
when I attended my first English tea-party. There was a wicker table,
perhaps a foot and a half square, having three shelves, one below the
other the top layer the plates and napkins, on the next the muffins,
and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you pass the curate,
please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call that the curate,
because it does the work of a curate."



Graft in Tail

As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular
with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their
campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted
when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my
writings. I had told of corruption in American politics; surely I must
know that in England they had no such evils! I explained that they did
not have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase, was "in tail";
the grafters had, as a matter of divine right, the things which in
America they had to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate, a
"Millionaire's Club", for admission to which the members paid in
cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as their
birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself, it is merely
a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England has even more than
America. When I explained this, my popularity with the British ruling
classes vanished quickly.

As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she realizes; her
British reticence has kept her ignorant about herself. I could not carry
on my business in England, because of the libel laws, which have as
their first principle "the greater the truth, the greater the libel".
Englishmen read with satisfaction what I write about America; but if
I should turn my attention to their own country, they would send me to
jail as they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England,
the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought their way
into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our American senators
have done; they have bought the political parties with campaign gifts,
precisely as in America; they have taken over the press, whether by
outright purchase like Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy--both of
which methods we Americans know. Within the last decade or two another
group has been coming into control; and not merely is this the
same class of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same
individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the international
financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist system.
These gentlemen make the world their home--or, as Shakespeare puts it,
their oyster. They know how to fit themselves to all environments; they
are Catholics in Rome and Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons
vivants in Paris, democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and
Hebrews wherever they are.

And of course, in buying the English government, these new classes have
bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they are,
they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the story of
the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is always over
their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in his torment,
groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the
eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is
but one agent, without rival--the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy
of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal Life.
Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the dust! I can see
in my memory the sight that thrilled my childhood--my grim old Bishop,
clad in his gorgeous ceremonial robes, stretching out his hands over
the head of the new priest, and pronouncing that most deadly of all the
Christian curses:

"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou
dost retain, they are retained!"



Bishops and Beer

For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of
South Africa--wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly taxed
than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So the armies of
England were sent to subjugate the country. You might think they would
have had the good taste to leave the lowly Jesus out of this affair--but
if so, you have missed the essential point about established religion.
The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for the populace to revere,
and when the robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then
is the opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their
"living." During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English clergy was
so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly reviews felt moved to
protest against it. When the pastors of Switzerland issued a collective
protest against cruelties to women and children in the South African
concentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester
who was brought forward to make reply. Nowadays all England is reading
Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one
mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war as a
means of keeping the nation "virile"; nor Archbishop Alexander, who said
that it was God's way of making "noble natures".

The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example, the
opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India
and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred
million "noble natures" by this method; and also they were making
a hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new
"virility," undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic;
whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and
subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established
church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury,
himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the
attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:

I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated. We have
triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and unfair struggles
in the records of history; and Christians have shed more heathen blood
in two years, than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two
centuries.

That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued
to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last
two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughout the
long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung Chang
was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society:

Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China can
never meet on a common ground. China views the whole question from a
moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.

And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the English
people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and country,
labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are clamoring for
restriction--and what prevents? Head and front of the opposition for a
century, standing like a rock, has been the Established Church. The Rev.
Dawson Burns, historian of the early temperance movement, declares that
"among its supporters I cannot recall one Church of England minister of
influence." When Asquith brought in his bill for the restriction of the
traffic in beer, he was confronted with petitions signed by members of
the clergy, protesting against the act. And what was the basis of their
protest? That beer is a food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but
also that there was property invested in brewing it, Three hundred and
thirty-two clergy of the diocese of Peterborough declared:

We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the present bill
as creating amongst our people a sense of grave injustice as amounting
to a confiscation of private property, spelling ruin for thousands of
quite innocent people, and provoking deep and widespread resentment,
which must do harm to our cause and hinder our aims.

I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken
petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for
research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C.
Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:

It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr. Asquith's
temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through the opposition of
clergymen who had invested their savings in brewery stock, the profits
of which might have been lessened by the bill.

Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was sufficient
to put through Parliament a provision that no prohibition legislation
should ever be passed without providing for compensation to the owners
of the industry. Today, all over America, appeals are being made to the
people to eat less grain; the grain is being shipped to England, some
of it to be made into beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the
Archbishop of York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices,
and in his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his
church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time economy!



Anglicanism and Alcohol

This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British
radicals; they see it at work in every election--the publican
confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson confuses them with
spirituality. There are two powerful societies in England employing
this deadly combination--the "Anti-Socialist Union" and the "Liberty
and Property Defense League." If you scan the lists of the organizers,
directors and subsidizers of these satanic institutions, you find Tory
politicians and landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy,
and large-scale dealers in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting
called by the "Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to a
denunciation of Socialism by W. H. Mallock, a master sophist of Roman
Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a dozen members
of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary of the Federated
Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, and Beer Trade
Association, and three or four other alcoholic magnates.

In every public library in England and many in America you will find an
assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations, and scholarly
volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock misrepresentations of
Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these writings are brutal--setting
forth the ethics of exploitation in the manner of the Rev. Thomas
Malthus, the English clergyman who supplied for capitalist depredation a
basis in pretended natural science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get
subsistence from his parents, and if society does not want his labor,
has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact has
no business to be where he is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no
cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her
own orders.

Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth century; but
it was found that for some reason this failed to stop the growth of
Socialism, and so in our time the clerical defenders of Privilege have
grown subtle and insinuating. They inform us now that they have a deep
sympathy with our fundamental purposes; they burn with pity for the
poor, and they would really and truly wish happiness to everyone, not
merely in Heaven, but right here and now. However, there are so many
complications--and so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist
bug-a-boos. Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D. D.,
expounding "The Ethics of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:

Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands to another
may be inspired by the same passions as have blinded the present holders
to their own highest good, and may be accompanied with injustice as
extreme as has ever been manifested by the rich and powerful.

And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D. D., an especially popular clerical
author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on wage-slavery:

The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through them,
of which this is one. Where God has been so patient, it is not for us to
be impatient.

And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a clergyman,
author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing us back to the
faith of our fathers:

The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social arrangements, but
to personal vices.

I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just what, if
anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our time. I
find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of Durham, as
being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop Westcott, whether
he is talking to a high society congregation, or to one of workingmen,
shows "an exquisite sense of knowing always where to stop." So I
consulted the Bishop's volume, "The Social Aspects of Christianity"
and I see at once why he is popular with the anti-Socialist
propagandists--neither I or any other man can possibly discover what he
really means, or what he really wants done.

I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I kept on
the good Bishop's trail, I might in the end find something a plain man
could understand; so I got the beautiful two-volume "Life of Brooke
Westcott, by his Son"--and there I found an exposition of the social
purposes of bishops! In the year 1892 there was a strike in Durham,
which is in the coal country; the employers tried to make a cut in
wages, and some ten thousand men walked out, and there was a long
and bitter struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much
consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at last the
masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as arbitrator, and
the dispute was triumphantly settled--how do you suppose? On the basis
of a ten per cent reduction in wages!

I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the naivete
with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the story of this
episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came out from the conference
"all smiles, and well satisfied with the result of his day's work." As
for his followers, they were in ecstacies; they "seized and waltzed one
another around on the carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a
flower show ball. Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer
ourselves hoarse." The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more
communication on episcopal stationery--an order to all his clergy to
"offer their humble and hearty thanks to God for our happy deliverance
from the strife by which the diocese has been long afflicted." Strange
to say, there were a few varlets in Durham who did not appreciate the
services of the bold Bishop, and one of them wrote and circulated some
abusive verses, in which he made reference to the Bishop's comfortable
way of life. The biographer then explains that the Bishop was so
tender-hearted that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal
coach, and so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he
had been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where
the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not permitted to;
while the working people, who didn't want to live on tea and toast, were
compelled to!



Dead Cats

For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been fighting
with every resource at their command the liberal and enlightened men
of England who wished to educate the masses of the people. In 1807
the first measure for a national school-system was denounced by the
Archbishop of Canterbury as "derogatory to the authority of the Church."
As a counte-measure, his supporters established the "National Society
for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the
Established Church"; and the founder of the organization, a clergyman,
advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and insisted that the
children of the workers "should not be taught beyond their station." In
1840 a Committee of the Privy Council of Education was appointed, but
bowed to the will of the Archbishops, setting forth the decree of
"their lordships" that "the first purpose of all instruction must be the
regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine
and precepts of revealed religion." In 1850 a bill for secular education
was denounced as presenting to the country "a choice between Heaven or
Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870, Forster, author of the still unpassed
bill, wrote that while the parsons were disputing, the children of the
poor were "growing into savages."

As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to
abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored
to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred emancipation
upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of London laid down
the formula of exploitation: "Christianity and the embracing of the
gospel do not make the least alteration of civil property."

Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the
cultured classes of England:

In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political
controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the
franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected
religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of
slavery, or what subject they touched, these leisured classes, these
educated classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.

The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes," for he
belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the record
will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform measures which
Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It
opposed all the social reforms of Lord Shaftesbury. This noble-hearted
Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion
supported him, and to the end only a few. He expressed himself
as distressed and puzzled "to find support from infidels and
non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers."

And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of Bishops
voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The House of Bishops
opposed Home Rule, and beat it; the House of Bishops opposed Womans'
Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerning this establishment
Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid
phrase: "this vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life." He told the
Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical
reform, because he knew that they would never begin. Another member of
the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russell, has written of their
record and adventures:

They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody penal code;
they were the resolute opponents of every political or social reform;
and they had their reward from the nation outside Parliament. The Bishop
of Bristol had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could
not keep an engagement to preach lest the congregation should stone him.
The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his life after preaching
at St. Bride's, Fleet Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for
his primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a
circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the mob. On
the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester were burnt in
effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop Howley's
chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown at him, when
the Archbishop--a man of apostolic meekness--replied: "You should be
thankful that it was not a live one."

The people had reason for this conduct--as you will always find they
have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote another member of
the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives "an instance of
the procedure of Church and State about this period":

In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of
their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded
the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood. The result was a
reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench,
who decided that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay
them. The parson, who had at first promised his help, now turned against
them, and the masters promptly reduced the wage to 7s., with a threat of
further reduction. Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for
which all seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to the
assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them into submission. The
judge determined to convict them, and directed that they should be tried
for mutiny under an act of George III, specially passed to deal with the
naval mutiny at the Nore. The grand jury were landowners, and the petty
jury were farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing
type. The judge summed up as follows: "Not for anything that you have
done, or that I can prove that you intend to do, but for an example to
others I consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven years' penal
transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and every one of
you."



Suffer Little Children

The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in children. He
was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by them, He did not
consider them superfluous. "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven", He said;
and His Church is the inheritor of this tradition--"feed my lambs".
There were children in Great Britain in the early part of the nineteenth
century, and we may see what was done with them by turning to Gibbon's
"Industrial History of England":

Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer,
and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep
them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to
a mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height,
strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the
American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of
their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves,
who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed and
clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be
so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities,
in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the
mill owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy
idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final
end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful
sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed
and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by exhaustion,
after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force
continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day
and by night.

In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of
children nine years of age to four-teen hours a day. This would seem
to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval
of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers,
backed by Christian clergymen. It was interfering with freedom of
contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to
an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918,
and was in 1918 B. C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the
prevailing economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the
exalted prince, worshipper of the gods".... so begins the oldest legal
code which has come down to us, from 2250 B. C.; and the coronation
service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis. The
duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely
chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in the
church's every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds. In the
Litany the people petition for increase of grace to hear meekly "Thy
Word"; and here is this "Word," as little children are made to learn it
by heart. If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave
ethics, I do not know where to find it.

My duty towards my neighbour is..... To honour and obey the King, and
all that are put in authority under him; To submit myself to all my
governours, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters: To order myself
lowly and reverently to all my betters.... Not to covet nor desire other
men's goods; But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and
to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to
call me.

A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers was
Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the coal-country,
to teach this "catechism" to the children of the starving miners. The
"Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in which they tell of their ten
years' labors in a village popularly known as "Little Hell." In this
place two hundred people were crowded into nineteen houses. "There is
not one creature in it that can give a cup of broth if it would save
a life." In one winter eighteen perished of "a putrid fever", and the
clergyman "could not raise a sixpence to save a life."

And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover you
find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not even
of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have anything
to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the mental powers
of England's most popular woman writer. She was perfectly content that a
woman should be sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer
who had asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came
a famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like flies,
Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them her pious self.
"In suffering by the scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot,
with the pleasure of knowing the advantage you have had over many
villages in your having suffered no scarcity of religious instruction."
And in another place she explained that the famine was caused by God to
teach the poor to be grateful to the rich!

Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been permitted
by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite all ranks of people
together, to show the poor how immediately they are dependent upon the
rich, and to show both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon
Himself. It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages you
derive from the government and constitution of this country--to observe
the benefits flowing from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has
enabled the high to so liberally assist the low.

It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by this pious
reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night and burned an effigy of
Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic consequence, for one of the
"common people," known as Robert, "was overtaken by liquor," and
was unable to appear at Sunday School next day. This fall from grace
occasioned intense remorse in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his
mind for many months," records Martha More, "and despair seemed at
length to take possession of him." Hannah had some conversation with
him, and read him some suitable passages from "The Rise and Progress".
"At length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give him
comfort."

Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in any way unique
in the Anglican establishment. We read in the letters of Shelley how his
father tormented him with Archdeacon Paley's "Evidences" as a cure for
atheism. This eminent churchman wrote a book, which he himself ranked
first among his writings, called "Reasons for Contentment, addressed to
the Labouring Classes of the British Public." In this book he not merely
proved that religion "smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a
prospect which makes all earthly distinctions nothing"; he went so far
as to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters were
less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a day.

Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of the labouring
part of mankind must be so called) imposes, are not hardships, but
pleasures. Frugality itself is a pleasure. It is an exercise of
attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is successful, produces
satisfaction..... This is lost among abundance.

And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as
Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies and
foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement, and also of
the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to British wage-slaves all
chance of bettering their lot. Wilberforce published a "Practical View
of the System of Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the
Anglican establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the
basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion is to
remind the poor:

That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of
God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties, and
contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects about which
worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest; that the
peace of mind, which Religion offers indiscriminately to all ranks,
affords more true satisfaction than all the expensive pleasures which
are beyond the poor man's reach; that in this view the poor have the
advantage; that if their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they
are also exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes
are happily 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 gravestones; when I was a
little older, and knew Wall Street, it seemed to me a sublime thing that
here in the very heart of the world's infamy there should be raised,
like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its
great bell rang at noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves
had to listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my
young soul; and what is it in reality?

The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell. Trinity
Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of the great
landlords of New York. In the early days it bought a number of farms,
and these it has held, as the city has grown up around them, until
in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere from forty to a hundred
million dollars. The true amount has never been made public; to quote
Russell's words:

The real owners of the property are the communicants of the church. For
94 years none of the owners has known the extent of the property, nor
the amount of the revenue therefrom, nor what is done with the money.
Every attempt to learn even the simplest fact about these matters
has been baffled. The management is a self perpetuating body, without
responsibility and without supervision.

And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this great
corporation, which is simply the English land system complete. It
refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long periods, and the tenant
builds the house, and then when the lease expires, the Corporation takes
over the house for a nominal sum. Thus it has purchased houses for
as low as $200, and made them into tenements, and rented them to the
swarming poor for a total of fifty dollars a month. The houses were not
built for tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the
habitation of animals. The article, in Everybody's Magazine for July,
1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief. To quote
the writer again:

Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an owner.
Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent institution all
possible credit for a spirit of improvement manifested anywhere, but I
can find no such manifestation. I have tramped the Eighth Ward day
after day with a list of Trinity properties in my hand, and of all the
tenement houses that stand there on Trinity land, I have not found one
that is not a disgrace to civilization and to the City of New York.

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this
Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have shivered and
turned pale had some angel whispered to him what devilish utterances
were some day to proceed from the lips of the little cherub with shining
face and shining robes who acted as the bishop's attendant in the
stately ceremonials of the Church! Truly, even into the goodly company
of the elect, even to the most holy places of the temple, Satan makes
his treacherous way! Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For
while the bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the
sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported, that the
bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels!
It did not seem quite in accordance with the doctrine of Jesus that a
bishop's wife should possess fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels, or
that she should be setting the blood-hounds of the police on the train
of a human being. I asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember
his patient explanation--that the bishop had to know all classes and
conditions of men: his wife had to go among the rich as well as the
poor, and must be able to dress so that she would not be embarrassed.
The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work to raise a million
dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral; and this of
course compelled him to spend much time among the rich!

The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had to be
cathedrals--despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St. Paul had
declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made with hands." In the
twenty-five years which have passed since that time the good Bishop
has passed to his eternal reward, but the mighty structure which is a
monument to his visitations among the rich towers over the city from its
vantage-point on Morningside Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine; and knowing what I know about the men who contributed
its funds, and about the general functions of the churches of the
Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it were
built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the skulls of
human beings.



Spiritual Interpretation

There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions of
the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that they do their
preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who was crucified as a
common criminal because, as they said, "He stirreth up the people." An
embarrassing "Savior" for the church of Good Society, you might imagine;
but they manage to fix him up and make him respectable.

I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day Saturday I ran
about with the little street rowdies, I stole potatoes and roasted them
in vacant lots, I threw mud from the roofs of apartment-houses; but on
Saturday night I went into a tub and was lathered and scrubbed, and on
Sunday I came forth in a newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a
shining tie and a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made
me impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue,
doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all church-members go
through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of them
steal potatoes and throw mud all week--and then take a hot bath of
repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety. In this same way
their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up
their disreputable Founder--to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a
stained-glass-window divinity.

The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and crucify
all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail him to a
jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to the New Golgotha
and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of gold in your hands, try
the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here is a sledge, in the form of
a dignified and scholarly volume, published by the exclusive house of
Scribner, and written by the Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose
train I carried in the stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His Relation
to the Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter,
D. D., L. L. D., D. C. L.--a course of lectures delivered before the
sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the endowment
of a millionaire mining king, founder of the Phelps-Dodge corporation,
which the other day carried out the deportation from their homes of a
thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:

Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced pauperism. He
did not abhor money; he used it. He did not abhor the company of rich
men; he sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain
profuseness of expenditure.

And do you think that the late Bishop of J. P. Morgan and Company stands
alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of golden nails?
In the course of this book there will march before us a long line of
the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their way to the New Golgotha to
crucify the carpenter's son: the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher
of the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop
of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club, the Pastor of
the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the
Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the weight
of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons, newspaper-interviews,
after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound their golden nails of
sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of the proletarian Christ.

Here, for example, is Rev. F. G. Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals
at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several books on the
social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid of the carpenter's
denunciations of the rich, and says:

Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as this, a
teaching so slightly distinguished from the curbstone rhetoric of a
modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the scope and power
of the teaching of Jesus?

The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a gentleman;
he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of universities where
gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of Christian Morals proceeds to
make a subtle analysis of Jesus' actions; demonstrating therefrom that
there are three proper uses to be made of great wealth: first, for
almsgiving--"The poor ye have always with you!"; second, for beauty and
culture--buying wine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other
objets de vertu; and third, "stewardship," "trusteeship"--which in plain
English is "Big Business."

I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can imagine
he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the proletarian
Founder emerging all new and respectable under the brush of this
capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all his own for reading
the scriptures; he tells us that when there are two conflicting
sayings, the rule of interpretation is that "the more spiritual is to
be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor."
Another puts it: "Blessed are the poor in spirit." The first one is
crude and literal; obviously the second must be what Jesus meant! In
other words, the professor and his church have made for their economic
masters a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a
quality of submissiveness, impotence and futility, which they call by
the name of "spirituality". This virtue they exalt above all others,
and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus everything which has
relation to the realities of life!

So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at
Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," and
explaining:

The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its radicalism, but in
its externalism. It proposes to accomplish by economic change what can
be attained by nothing less than spiritual regeneration.

And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of New York,
warning us:

It is necessary to remember that something more than material and
temporal considerations are involved. There are things of more
importance to the purposes of God and to the welfare of humanity than
economic readjustments and social amelioration.

And again:

Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing upon clergy
and laity alike, to address their religious energies too exclusively to
those tasks whereby human life may be made more abundant and wholesome
materially..... We need constantly to be reminded that spiritual things
come first.

There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen for
whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen and pillars
of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shiny
top-hats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in
pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating odors.
I picture them as I have seen them at St. George's, where that aged wild
boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the collection plate; at
Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in old-fashioned carriages
with grooms and footmen sitting like twin statues of insolence; at St.
Thomas', where you might see all the "Four Hundred" on exhibition at
once; at St. Mary the Virgin's, where the choir paraded through the
aisles, swinging costly incense into my childish nostrils, the stout
clergyman walking alone with nose upturned, carrying on his back a
jewelled robe for which some adoring female had paid sixty thousand
dollars. "Spiritual things come first?" Ah, yes! "Seek first the kingdom
of God, and the jewelled robes shall be added unto you!" And it is so
dreadful about the French and German Socialists, who, as the "Churchman"
reports, "make a creed out of materialism." But then, what is this I
find in one issue of the organ of the "Church of Good Society"?

Business men contribute to the Y. M. C. A. because they realize that if
their employees 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, over-labored knees
      Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
  Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
  And fruitless as their orisons?

 Was it for this--that men should make
     Thy name a fetter on men's necks,
  Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
      And women withered out of sex?
  Was it for this--that slaves should be--
Thy word was passed to set men free?                          Swinburne.



Charity

As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and
self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be at
home a large number of other women who live sterile and empty lives, and
devote themselves to cleaning up after their luckier sisters. But these
"domestics" also are human beings; they have emotions--or, in religious
parlance, "souls;" it is necessary to provide a discipline to keep them
from appropriating the property of their mistresses, also to keep them
from becoming enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals
in New York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the
other, St. Patrick's, for the servant-girls. The latter is located on
Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide with the homes of
the Vanderbilts the interest of the crowds of sight-seers. Now, early
every Sunday morning, before "Good Society" has opened its eyes, you may
see the devotees of the Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons,
each with a little black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do
inside? What are they taught about life? This is the question to which
we have next to give attention.

Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate of
New York, favored me with his justification of his own career and
activities. He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one man of
the world to another, he said: "The reason I put them into the hands
of Catholics is not religious, but because I find they are efficient in
such matters. They don't ask questions, they do what you want them to
do, and do it economically."

I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the
remark--like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his mind
set to work to reconstruct the creature.

When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long hours and
improper working-conditions which drove him to desperation; they do not
ask if police and politicians are getting a rake-off from the saloon,
or if traction magnates are using it as an agency for the controlling of
votes; they do not plunge into prohibition movements or good government
campaigns--they simply take the man in, at a standard price, and the
patient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and then turn him
out for society to make him drunk again. That is "charity," and it is
the special industry of Roman Catholicism. They have been at it for a
thousand years, cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes--"plague,
pestilence and famine, battle and murder and sudden death."
Yet--puzzling as it would seem to anyone not religious--there were never
so many messes, never so many different kinds of messes, as now at the
end of the thousand years of charitable activity!

But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building and
rebuilding his web across a doorway; like soldiers under the command of
a ruling class with a "muddling through" tradition--

 Theirs not to reason why,
  Theirs but to do and die.

And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have messes
to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away quickly and
without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this service, no matter
what their personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-mill, every coal-mine or
other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital,
with its slave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking"
near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these places to ask information as to
the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims.
The "Mother Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These
concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as a matter of business
it would not do for us to talk about them."

Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as it
is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the work of
vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepers
and ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls. This industry
of vote-getting is a comparatively new one; but the Church has been
handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned
this new way of "democracy," and has established her supremacy over all
rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the confessional
for controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the
purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the supreme advantage
that the rank and file of her mighty host really believe what she
teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings and flounder
through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster their hope of
the survival of personality after death!

So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance have been
driven to a more or less reluctant alliance with the Papacy. The Church
is here, and her followers are here, before the war several hundred
thousand of them pouring into the country every year. It is no longer
possible to do without Catholics in America; not merely do ditches have
to be dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes washed, but franchises
have to be granted, tariff-schedules adjusted, juries and courts
manipulated, police trained and strikes crushed. Under our native
political system, for these purposes millions of votes are needed; and
these votes belong to people of a score of nationalities--Irish and
German and Italian and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and
Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church can
handle these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and editors and
politicians familiar with all these languages?

Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely
moderate--the mere actual expenses of the campaign, the cost of red fire
and torch-lights, of liquor and newspaper advertisements. The rest may
come out of the public till, in the form of exemption from taxation of
church buildings and lands, a share of the public funds for charities
and schools, the control of the police for saloon-keepers and district
leaders, the control of police-courts and magistrates, of municipal
administrations and boards of education, of legislatures and governors;
with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our sacred
self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme Court Bench; and on
state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige, some cabinet-members
and legislators and justices to attend High Mass, and be blessed in
public by Catholic prelates and dignitaries.

You think this is empty rhetoric--you comfortable, easy-going,
ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic shades,
absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence"--while
the world about you slides down into the pit! You ladies of Good
Society, practicing your "sweet little charities," pursuing your
"dear little ideals," raising your families of one or two lovely
children--while Irish and French-Canadians and Italians and Portuguese
and Hungarians are breeding their dozens and scores, and preparing to
turn you out of your country!



God's Armor

You remember "Bishop Blougram's Apology," Browning's study of the
psychology of a modern Catholic ecclesiastic. He is not unaware of
modern thought, this bishop; he is a man of culture, who wants to have
beauty about him, to be a "cabin passenger":

  There's power in me and will to dominate
  Which I must exercise, they hurt me else;
  In many ways I need mankind's respect,
  Obedience, and the love that's born of fear.

He wishes that he had faith--faith in anything; he understands that
faith is all-important--

 Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat.

But you cannot get faith just by wishing for it--

     But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn!

He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade for truth, but he asks
what there would be in it for him--

     State the facts,
  Read the text right, emancipate the world--
The emancipated world enjoys itself  With scarce a thank-you.
 Blougram told it first
  It could not owe a farthing,--not to him
  More than St. Paul!

So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasily conscious of the
contempt of intellectual people.

  I pine among my million imbeciles
  (You think) aware some dozen men of sense
  Eye me and know me, whether I believe
  In the last winking virgin as I vow,
  And am a fool, or disbelieve in her,
  And am a knave.

But, as he says, you have to keep a tight hold upon the chain of faith,
that is what

  Gives all the advantage, makes the difference,
  With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule.
  We are their lords, or they are free of us,
  Just as we tighten or relax that hold.

So he continues, but not with entire satisfaction, in his role
of shepherd to those whom he calls "King Bomba's lazzaroni," and
"ragamuffin saints."

I wander into a Catholic bookstore and look to see what Bishop Blougram
is doing with his lazzaroni and his ragamuffin saints here in this new
country of the far West. It is easy to acquire the information, for the
saleswoman is polite and the prices fit my purse. America is going to
war, and Catholic boys are being drafted to be trained for battle; so
for ten cents I obtain a firmly bound little pamphlet called "God's
Armor, a Prayer Book for Soldiers." It is marked "Copyright by the G.
R. C. Central-Verein," and bears the "Nihil Obstat" of the "Censor
Theolog." and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus
Sti. Ludovici"--which last you may at first fail to recognize as a
well-known city on the Mississippi River. Do you not feel the spell of
ancient things, the magic of the past creeping over you, as you read
those Latin trade-marks? Such is the Dead Hand, and its cunning, which
can make even St. Louis sound mysterious!

In this booklet I get no information as to the commercial causes of war,
nor about the part which the clerical vote may have played throughout
Europe in supporting military systems. I do not even find anything about
the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve of a self-governing people
to put an end to feudal rule. Instead I discover a soldier-boy who
obeys and keeps silent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip
of terrors both of body and soul. Poor, pitiful soldier-boy, marking
yourself with crosses, performing genuflections, mumbling magic formulas
in the trenches--how many billions of you have been led out to slaughter
by the greeds and ambitions of your religious masters, since first this
accursed Antichrist got its grip upon the hearts of men!

I quote from this little book:

Start this day well by lifting up your heart to God. Offer yourself to
Him, and beg grace to spend the day without sin. Make the sign of the
cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, behold me in Thy
Divine Presence. I adore Thee and give Thee thanks. Grant that all I do
this day be for Thy Glory, and for the salvation of my immortal soul.

During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your prayers need not
be long nor read from a book. Learn a few of these short ejaculations by
heart and frequently repeat them. They will serve to recall God to your
heart and will strengthen you and comfort you.

You remember a while back about the prayer-wheels of the Thibetans.
The Catholic religion was founded before the Thibetan, and is less
progressive; it does not welcome mechanical devices for saving labor.
You have to use your own vocal apparatus to keep yourself from hell;
but the process has been made as economical as possible by kindly
dispensations of the Pope. Thus, each time that you say "My God and my
all," you get fifty days indulgence; the same for "My Jesus, mercy," and
the same for "Jesus, my God, I love Thee above all things." For "Jesus,
Mary, Joseph," you get three hundred days--which would seem by all odds
the best investment of your spare breath.

And then come prayers for all occasions: "Prayer before Battle"; "Prayer
for a Happy Death"; "Prayer in Temptation"; "Prayer before and after
Meals"; "Prayer when on Guard"; "Prayer before a long March"; "Prayer of
Resignation to Death"; "Prayer for Those in their Agony"--I cannot bear
to read them, hardly to list them. I remember standing in a cathedral
"somewhere in France" during the celebration of some special Big Magic.
There was brilliant white light, and a suffocating strange odor, and the
thunder of a huge organ, and a clamor of voices, high, clear voices of
young boys mounting to heaven, like the hands of men in a pit reaching
up, trying to climb over the top of one another. It sent a shudder into
the depths of my soul. There is nothing left in the modern world which
can carry the mind so far back into the ancient nightmare of anguish
and terror which was once the mental life of mankind, as these Roman
Catholic incantations with their frantic and ceaseless importunity.
They have even brought in the sex-spell; and the poor, frightened
soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the night with a prostitute, now
prostrates himself before a holy Woman-being who is lifted high above
the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe and affection
which his mother brought to him in early childhood. Read over the
phrases of this "Litany of the Blessed Virgin":

Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Mother of God. Holy Virgin of Virgins.
Mother of Christ. Mother of divine grace. Mother most pure. Mother most
chaste. Mother inviolate. Mother undefiled. Mother most amiable. Mother
most admirable. Mother of good counsel. Mother of our Creator. Mother
of our Savior. Virgin most prudent. Virgin most venerable. Virgin
most renowned. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin most
faithful. Mirror of justice. Seat of wisdom. Cause of our Joy. Spiritual
vessel. Vessel of honor. Singular vessel of devotion. Mystical rose.
Tower of David. Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the covenant.
Gate of heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick. Refuge of sinners.
Comforter of the afflicted. Help of Christians. Queen of Angels. Queen
of Patriarchs. Queen of Prophets. Queen of Apostles. Queen of Martyrs.
Queen of Confessors. Queen of Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queen
conceived without original sin. Queen of the most holy Rosary. Queen of
Peace, Pray for us.



Thanksgivings

For another five cents--how cheaply a man of insight can obtain thrills
in this fantastic world!--I purchase a copy of the "Messenger of the
Sacred Heart", a magazine published in New York, the issue for October,
1917. There are pages of advertisements of schools and colleges with
strange titles: "Immaculata Seminary", "Holy Cross Academy", "Holy Ghost
Institute", "Ladycliff", "Academy of Holy Child Jesus". The leading
article is by a Jesuit, on "The Spread of the Apostleship of Prayer
among the Young"; and then "Sister Clarissa" writes a poem telling us
"What are Sorrows"; and then we are given a story called "Prayer for
Daddy"; and then another Jesuit father tells us about "The Hills
that Jesus Loved". A third father tells us about the "Eucharistic
Propaganda"; and we learn that in July, 1917, it distributed 11,699
beads, and caused the expenditure of 57,714 hours of adoration; and then
the faithful are given a form of letter which they are to write to the
Honorable Baker, Secretary of War, imploring him to intimate to the
French government that France should withdraw from one of her advances
in civilization, and join with mediaeval America in exempting priests
from being drafted to fight for their country. And then there is a
"Question Box"--just like the Hearst newspapers, only instead of asking
whether she should allow him to kiss her before he has told her that he
loves her, the reader asks what is the Pauline Privilege, and what is
the heroic Act, and is Robert a saint's name, and if food remains in
the teeth from the night before, would it break the fast to swallow it
before Holy Communion. (No, I am not inventing this.)

I quoted the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and pointed out how deftly
the Church has managed to slip in a prayer for worldly prosperity. But
the Catholic Church does not show any squeamishness in dealing with its
"million imbeciles", its "rough, purblind mass". There is a department
of the little magazine entitled "Thanksgiving", and a statement at the
top that "the total number of Thanksgivings for the month is 2,143,911."
I am suspicious of that, as of German reports of prisoners taken; but I
give the statement as it stands, not going through the list and picking
out the crudest, but taking them as they come, classified by states:

GENERAL FAVORS: For many of these favors Mass and publication were
promised, for others the Badge of Promoter's Cross was used, for others
the prayers of the Associates had been asked.

Alabama--Jewelry found, relief from pain, protection during storm.

Alaska--Safe return, goods found.

Arizona--Two recoveries, suitable boarding place, illness averted, safe
delivery.

British Honduras--Successful operation.

California--Seventeen recoveries, six situations, two successful
examinations, house rented, stocks sold, raise in salary, return to
religious duties, sight regained, medal won, Baptism, preservation
from disease, contract obtained, success in business, hearing restored,
Easter duty made, happy death, automobile sold, mind restored, house
found, house rented, successful journey, business sold, quarrel averted,
return of friends, two successful operations.

And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic machine is
harvesting the price day by day--harvesting with that ancient fervor
which the Latin poet described as "auri sacra fames". As Christopher
Columbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: "Gold is a wonderful thing. By
means of gold we can even get souls into Paradise."



The Holy Roman Empire

The system thus self-revealed you admit is appalling in its squalor;
but you say that at least it is milder and less perilous than the Church
which burned Giordano Bruno and John Huss. But the very essence of the
Catholic Church is that it does not change; semper eadem is its motto:
the same yesterday, today and forever--the same in Washington as in Rome
or Madrid--the same in a modern democracy as in the Middle Ages. The
Catholic Church is not primarily a religious organization; it is a
political organization, and proclaims the fact, and defies those
who would shut it up in the religious field, The Rev. S. B. Smith, a
Catholic doctor of divinity, explains in his "Elements of Ecclesiastical
Law":

Protestants contend that the entire power of the Church consists in the
right to teach and exhort, but not in the right to command, rule, or
govern; whence they infer that she is not a perfect society or sovereign
state. This theory is false; for the Church, as was seen, is vested
Jure divino with power, (1) to make laws; (2) to define and apply
them (potestas judicialis); (3) to punish those who violate her laws
(potestas coercitiva).

And this is not one scholar's theory, but the formal and repeated
proclamation of infallible popes. Here is the "Syllabus of Errors",
issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in precise language
that,

The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and
embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.

It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical power shall
require the permission of the civil power in order to the exercise of
its authority.

Then in the same Syllabus the rights and powers of the Church are
affirmed thus:

She has the right to require the state not to leave every man free to
profess his own religion.

She has the right to exercise her power without the permission or
consent of the state.

She has the right of perpetuating the union of church and state.

She has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be the
only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others.

She has the right to prevent the state from granting the public exercise
of their own worship to persons immigrating from it.

She has the power of requiring the state not to permit free expression
of opinion.

You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You, who think
that liberty of conscience is the basis of civilization, ought at least
to know what the Catholic Church has to say about the matter. Here is
Mgr. Segur, in his "Plain Talk About Protestantism of Today", a book
published in Boston and extensively circulated by American Catholics:

Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is likewise the soul
of modern rationalism and philosophy. It is one of those impossibilities
which only the levity of a superficial reason can regard as admissible.
But a sound mind, that does not feed on empty words, looks upon this
freedom of thought only as simply absurd, and, what is more, as sinful.

You take the liberty of thinking, nevertheless; you feel safe because
the Law will protect you. But do you imagine that this "Law" applies
to your Catholic neighbors? Do you imagine that they are bound by the
restraints that bind you? Here is Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical
of 1890--and please remember that Leo XIII was the beau ideal of our
capitalist statesmen and editors, as wise and kind and gentle-souled a
pope as ever roasted a heretic. He says:

If the laws of the state are openly at variance with the laws of God--if
they inflict injury upon the Church--or set at naught the authority
of Jesus Christ which is vested in the Supreme Pontiff, then indeed it
becomes a duty to resist them, a sin to render obedience.

And consider how many fields there are in which the laws of a democratic
state do and forever must contravene the "laws of God" as interpreted by
the Catholic Church. Consider for example, that the Pope, in his decree
Ne Temere, has declared that all persons who have been married by
civil authorities or by Protestant clergymen are living in "filthy
concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of education,
burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation,
mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To the above list, as
given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such as birth control,
which have arisen since his time.

What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of expressions
of that intention, set forth in the boldest and haughtiest and
most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal Manning, in the
Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name of the Pope:

I acknowledge no civil power; I am the subject of no prince; I claim
more than this--I claim to be the supreme judge and director of the
consciences of men---of the peasant that tills the field, and of the
prince that sits upon the throne; of the household of privacy, and the
legislator that makes laws for kingdoms; I am the sole, last supreme
judge of what is right and wrong.



Temporal Power

What this means is, that here in our American democracy the Catholic
Church is a rebel; a prisoner of war who bides his time, watching for
the moment to rise in revolt, and meantime making no secret of his
intentions. The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true believers in
America, instructed them as to their attitude in captivity:

The Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government
of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against
violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is
free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it
would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be
sought the type of the most desirable status of the church, or that it
would be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as
in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you
is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by
all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed
His Church.... But she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in
addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of
the public authority.

Accordingly, here is Father Phelan of St. Louis, addressing his flock in
the "Western Watchman", June 27, 1913:

Tell us we are Catholics first and Americans or Englishmen afterwards;
of course we are. Tell us, in the conflict between the church and the
civil government we take the side of the church; of course we do. Why,
if the government of the United States were at war with the church, we
would say tomorrow, To hell with the government of the United States;
and if the church and all the governments of the world were at war, we
would say, To hell with all the governments of the world.... Why is
it that in this country, where we have only seven per cent of the
population, the Catholic church is so much feared? She is loved by all
her children and feared by everybody. Why is it that the Pope has such
tremendous power? Why, the Pope is the ruler of the world. All the
emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all the presidents of the
world, are as these altar boys of mine. The Pope is the ruler of the
world.

You recall what I said at the outset about Power; the ability to control
the lives of other men, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions
and tastes, to be revered and regarded. Here is a man swollen to
bursting with this Power. Dressed in his holy robes, with his holy
incense in his nostrils, and the faces of the faithful gazing up at him
awe-stricken, hear him proclaim:

The Church gives no bonds for her good behavior. She is the judge of her
own rights and duties, and of the rights and duties of the state.

And lest you think that an extreme example of ultramontanist arrogance,
listen to the Boston "Pilot", April 6, 1912, speaking for Cardinal
O'Connell, whose official organ it is:

It must be borne in mind that even though Cardinals Farley, O'Connell
and Gibbons are at heart patriotic Americans and members of an American
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 anointed themselves
with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them
nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.



God in the Schools

But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a
modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will. Until
recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are turning against
the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to Rafael Shaw's "Spain
From Within":

On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church, interfering
or trying to interfere in their domestic life, ordering the conditions
of employment, draining them of their hard-won livelihood by trusts and
monopolies established and maintained in the interest of the Religious
Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children's education,
hindering them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and
deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run counter
to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in Barcelona; they are
instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco; it is
dragged into it solely in defense of the mines owned, actually, if not
ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The consumos cannot be abolished because the
Jesuits are financially interested in their continuance.

We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state cannot
justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter illiteracy."
How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was an official
investigation of school conditions, the report appearing in the "Heraldo
de Madrid" for November, 1909. In 1857 there had been passed a law
requiring a certain number of schools in each of the 79 provinces: this
requirement being below the very low standards prevailing at that time
in other European countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four
provinces had the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate
of increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch up.
Seventy-five per cent of the population were wholly illiterate,
and 30,000 towns and villages had no government schools at all. The
government owed nearly a million and a half dollars in unpaid salaries
to the teachers. The private schools were nearly all "nuns' schools",
which taught only needle-work and catechism; the punishments prevailing
in them were "cruel and disgusting."

As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of Education
to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as follows:

More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these are
absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There are schools mixed up
with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughter houses, with stables.
One school forms the entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed
on the master's table while the last responses are being said. There
is a school into which the children cannot enter until the animals have
been sent out to pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm
weather begins the boys faint for want of air and ventilation. One
school is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, and one of the local
authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in winter.
One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in Andalusia, is
turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there is a bull-fight in the
town.

These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by the
name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he called a "modern school",
in which the pupils should be taught science and common sense. He drew,
of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic hierarchy, which saw in the
spread of his principles the end of their mastery of the people. When
the Barcelona insurrection took place, they had Ferrer seized upon
a charge of having been its instigator; they had him tried in secret
before a military tribunal, convicted upon forged documents, and shot
beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was thoroughly
investigated by William Archer, one of England's leading critics, a
man of scrupulous rectitude of mind. His conclusion is that Ferrer was
absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and that his execution
was the result of a clerical plot. Of Ferrer's character Archer writes:

Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have quoted form a
pretty complete revelation. From first to last we see in him an ardent,
uncompromising, incorruptible idealist. His ideals are narrow, and his
devotion to them fanatical; but it is devoid, if not of egoism, at any
rate of self-interest and self-seeking. As he shrank from applying the
money entrusted him to ends of personal luxury, so also he shrank from
making his ideas and convictions subserve any personal ambition or
vanity.



The Menace

There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest idle
while their country falls into the condition of Spain. There are
anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers to
discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating to devout
believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any criticism of it as
blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe the working out of the
doctrine that the Church is superior to the civil law.

On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein, Iowa,
a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J. Crowley, to
deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The Catholics of the
town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the place in which the
lecture was to be given; the priest of the town, Father O'Connor,
preached a sermon furiously denouncing the lecturer; and after the
lecture the unfortunate Crowley was surrounded by a mob of men, women
and boys, and although he was six feet three in size, he was beaten
almost to death. At the trial which followed it developed that Father
O'Connor and also his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were
accessories before the fact.

Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military societies, with
their uniforms and their armories, are not maintained for nothing. As
Archbishop Quigley declared before the German Catholic Central Verein:

We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck and
nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what the church authorities tell
them to do. With these bodies of loyal Catholics ready to step into the
breach at any time and present an unbroken front to the enemy we may
feel secure.

And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics entered
the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a police guard and
seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an anti-Catholic lecturer. They
bound and gagged him, took him to a lonely woods, and beat him to
insensibility. The same thing happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at
Buffalo; the Rev. William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each
case the assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts
to punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a Catholic,
fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most pious Leo XIII
has laid down:

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the purpose
of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the law of the Church under
the pretext of observing the civil law.

There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting of
this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a circulation of
more than a million; and naturally the Knights of Slavery do not enjoy
reading it. Year after year they have marshalled their power to have
this paper barred from the mails--so far, in vain. They caused an
obscenity prosecution, which failed; so finally the press rooms of
the paper were blown up with dynamite. At the present time there is a
"Catholic Truth Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose
the anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising absolution
and salvation to the families, dead and living, of those who "come
across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of the American Federation
of Catholic Societies" for September, 1915, I find a record of the
ceaseless plotting to bar criticism of the Catholic Church from the
mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany Catholic congressman, proposes a bill
in Washington; and Judge St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the
Federation's "law committee", points out the difficulties in the way
of such legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion,
because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science, Mormonism,
and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks the purpose of the
Papal plotters will be accomplished if they can slip into the present
law the words "scurrilous and slanderous"; he hopes that this much can
be done without the American people catching on!

You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want to start
an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste, therefore, to restate the main
thesis of this book. It is not the New Inquisition which is our enemy
today; it is hereditary Privilege. It is not Superstition, but Big
Business which makes use of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's
clothing.

You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal
corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the "ignorant
foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty" and you will see
how reformers twenty years ago explained our political depravity. But we
probed deeper, and discovered that the purely American communities, such
as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that
wherever there was a political boss paying bribes on election day,
there was a captain of industry furnishing the money for the bribes,
and taking some public privilege in return. So we came to realize that
political corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.

And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of 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 enrolled, ninety per cent of whom could not
speak a word of English.

Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was over-crowded
entirely, and she could hardly get walking room around there.

And as to the political use made of this deliberately cultivated
ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson testified that the
companies controlled all elections and all nominations:

Election returns from the two or three counties in which the large
companies operate show that in the precincts in which the mining camps
are located the returns are nearly unanimous in favor of the men or
measures approved by the companies, regardless of party.

And now comes the all-important question. What of the Catholic Church
and these evils? The majority of these mine-slaves are Catholics, it is
this Church which is charged with their protection. There are priests in
every town, and in nearly every camp. And do we find them lifting their
voices in behalf of the miners, protesting against the starving and
torturing of thirty or forty thousand human beings? Do we find Catholic
papers printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic
journalists on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defending the
strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their troubles? We do
not!

Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of just
one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say for
the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached the
strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text that "Idleness
is the root of all evil," and had been reported as a "scab" and made
to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively, thinking of his church
superiors. My informant, a union miner, laughed. "We made him!" he said.

I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and could
not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max Eastman, reporting
the strike in the "Masses", tells of an interview with a Catholic
sister.

"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people, or to bring
about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most useless thing in the
world to attempt it," she replied.

The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and several
clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore testimony to the
outrages which were being committed against the strikers; but of all
the Catholic priests in the district not one appeared--not one! Several
Protestant clergymen testified that they had been driven from the
coal-camps--not because they favored the unions, but because the
companies objected to having their workers educated at all; but no one
ever heard of the Catholic Church having trouble with the operators. To
make sure on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who
watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the First New
Mexico Infantry. He answered:

The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies very
cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps. The impression
was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor what good the Church
does, but I know of no instance, during the Colorado coal-strike or at
any other time or place, when the Catholic Church has taken any special
interest in the cause of the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially
the men, quit the church during the coal-strike.



The Unholy Alliance

Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all power,
political, social, and religious, is economic exploitation. To all other
powers and all other organizations it speaks in these words: "Help
us, and you will thrive; oppose us, and you will be destroyed." It has
spoken to the Catholic Church, for sixteen hundred years the friend and
servant of every ruling class; and the Church has hastened to fit itself
into the situation, continuing its pastoral role as shepherd to the
wage-slave vote.

In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so in the
Blaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman to describe
the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the Holy Office was
shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old Party was
desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of Mark Hanna, the
President-Maker, there began a rapprochement between Big Business and
the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the Catholic Church got representation
in the Cabinet; under him the Cardinal's Mass became a government
institution, a Catholic College came to the fore in Washington, and
Catholic prelates were introduced in the role of eminent publicists,
their reactionary opinions on important questions being quoted with
grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark Hanna himself who
founded the National Civic Federation, upon whose executive committee
Catholic cardinals and archbishops might work hand in glove with
Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming of the American
working-class. Hanna's biographer naively calls attention to the
President-maker's popularity among Catholics, high and low, and
the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland was in frequent
correspondence with him, and used his influence in Mr. Hanna's behalf."

And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under Roosevelt,
and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the most pliant tool
of the forces of evil who has occupied the White House since the days
of the Slave Power. President Taft was himself a Unitarian; yet it was
under his administration that the Catholic Church achieved one of its
dearest ambitions, and broke into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can
imagine the powers of the time in conference. It is desired to pack the
Court against the possibility of progress; it is desired to find men
who will stand like a rock against change--and who better than those who
have been trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for
doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that Hereditary Privilege
wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property rights, with a
supreme tribunal to play the part of an infallible Pope!

Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the strangest
legislative alliance our history ever saw; a combination of the Old
Guard of the Republican Party with the leaders of the Tammany Democracy
of New York. "Bloody shirt" Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the
sons of those Irish Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot
down in the draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce
the tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its
burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of the
country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish Secretary of
the Interior. And of course under such an administration the cause of
"Religion" made tremendous strides. Catholic officials were appointed to
public office, Catholic ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and
Catholic favor became a means to political advancement. You might see a
hard-swearing old political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon, taking his
cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and betaking himself
to the "Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff knees and bow his hoary
unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate on a throne. You might see an
emissary of the United States government proceeding to Rome, prostrating
himself before the Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our
taxes for lands which the filthy and sensual friars of the Philippine
Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and which
the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a revolution.



Secret Service

This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made
the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical thought.
Because the popular magazines were opposing the plundering of the
country, a bill was introduced into Congress to put them out of business
by a prohibitive postal tax; the President himself devoted all his power
to forcing the passage of this bill. At the same time the Socialist
press was handicapped by every sort of persecution. I was at that time
in intimate touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I know that scarcely
a month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some new
"regulation" especially designed to limit its circulation. I recall one
occasion when I met the editor on his way to Washington with a trunkful
of letters from subscribers who complained that their postmasters
refused to deliver the paper to them; and later on this same editor was
prosecuted by a Catholic Attorney General and sentenced to prison for
seeking to awaken the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.

From my personal knowledge I can say that under the administration of
President Taft the Roman Catholic Church and the Secret Service of
the Federal Government worked hand in hand for the undermining of the
radical movement in America. Catholic lecturers toured the country,
pouring into the ears of the public vile slanders about the private
morality of Socialists; while at the same time government detectives,
paid out of public funds, spent their time seeking evidence for these
Catholic lecturers to use. I know one man, a radical labor-leader, whose
morals happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician,
and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from accepting
the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen others who were
shadowed and spied upon; I know one case--myself--a man who was asking a
divorce from his wife, and whose mail was opened for months.

This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme reluctance.
I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no charge of
misconduct against me; but those in control of our political police
evidently thought it likely that a man who was not living with his wife
might have something to hide; so for months my every move was watched
and all my mail intercepted. In such a case one might at first suspect
one's private opponent; but it soon became evident that this net was
cast too wide for any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened,
but the mail of all my relatives and friends--people residing in places
as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a
government official to whom I complained about this matter: "If you have
nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer was that a study of
many labor cases had taught me the methods of the agent provocateur. He
is quite willing to take real evidence if he can find it; but if not,
he has familiarized himself with the affairs of his victim, and can make
evidence which will be convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In
my own case, the matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad
to live; when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft
administration had been repudiated at the polls, and the Secret Service
of the government was no longer at the disposal of the Catholic machine.



Tax Exemption

Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere
recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It has
some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million communicants, and
property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon this property it pays no
taxes, municipal, state or national; which means, quite obviously, that
you and I, who do not go to church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the
public costs of Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and lighted
and cleaned in front of Catholic churches; we pay to have thieves kept
away from them, fires put out in them, records preserved for them--all
the services of civilization given to them gratis, and this in a land
whose constitution provides that Congress (which includes all state and
municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no law respecting a religious
establishment." When war is declared, and our sons are drafted to defend
the country, all Catholic monks and friars, priests and dignitaries are
exempted. They are "ministers of religion"; whereas we Socialists may
not even have the status of "conscientious objectors." We do not teach
"religion"; we only teach justice and humanity, decency and truth.

In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stock answer is that the
property is being used for purposes of "education" or "charity". It is
a school, in which children are being taught that "liberty of conscience
is a most pestiferous error, from which arises revolution, corruption,
contempt of sacred things, holy institutions, and laws." (Pius IX). It
is a "House of Refuge", to which wayward girls are committed by Catholic
magistrates, and in which they are worked twelve hours a day in a
laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a "parish-house", in which
a celibate priest lives under the care of an attractive young
"house-keeper". Or it is a nunnery, in which young girls are held
against their will and fed upon the scraps from their sisters' plates
to teach them humility, and taught to lie before the altar, prostrate in
the form of a cross, while their "Superiors" walk upon their bodies to
impress the religious virtues. "I was a teacher in the Catholic schools
up to a very recent period," writes the woman friend who tells me of
these customs, "and I know about the whole awful system which endeavors
to throttle every genuine impulse of the human will."

Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of
"religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In every
large city of America you will find acres of land owned by the Catholic
machine, and supposed to be the future site of some institution; but as
time goes on and property values increase, the church decides to
build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to cash in the profits of
its investment, precisely as does any other real estate speculator.
Everywhere you turn in the history of Romanism you find it at this same
game, doing business under the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy
name of Christ. Read the letter which the Catholic Bishop of Mexico
sent to the Pope in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their
boundless graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits" appears a
summary:

A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the fathers.
They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth of Mexico. Two of
their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides cattle and other property.
They own six large sugar refineries, worth from half a million to a
million crowns each, and making an annual profit of 100,000 crowns each,
while all the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own only three
small refineries. They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large
shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue
for legacies--a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns--and they
refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this
authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at Rome were
still periodically forbidding the fathers to engage in commerce, and
Jesuit writers still gravely maintain that the society never engaged in
commerce. It should be added that the missionaries were still heavily
subsidized by the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says)
only five or six Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they
conducted only ten colleges.



"Holy History"

And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken away
from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of procedure. Write
a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and if the letter is
not published, go and see the editor and ask why; so you will learn
something about the partnership between Superstition and Big Business!

It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large
American city dares to attack the emoluments of the Catholic Church, or
to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine. As I write,
they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the
newspapers of that graft-ridden city herald it as an important
social event. Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his
shepherd's crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal
fool's cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city with
a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one of those
journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West "rodeo" one day,
and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P. convention the next;
and always with his picture, one inch square, at the head of his
effusion. He takes in the Catholic festivity; and does it phaze him?
It does not! He is a newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him to
hell, he would take the assignment and write like the devil. To read
him now you might think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is
uplifted, and he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:

Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically picturing the
holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in the inexorable progress
of its immense structure, which rises from the rock of Peter, with its
beacons of faith and devotion piercing the fog of doubt and fear which
surround the world and the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the
Cathedral of St. Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed
in his diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.

And then, a month later, comes another occasion of state--the
Twenty-third Annual-Banquet of the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to
make clear the sociological significance of that function; explaining
first, a nation-wide organization which has been proven by congressional
investigation and by the publication of its secret documents to be a
machine for the corruption of our political life; and then exhibiting
our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels have long since fled;
a city in the first crude stage of land speculation, without order,
dignity or charm; a city of real estate agents, who exist by selling
climate to new arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectual life is
"boosting", whose standards of truth are those of the horse-trade. Its
newspapers publish a table of temperatures, showing the daily contrast
between Southern California and the East. This device is effective
in the winter-time; but last June, when for five days and nights the
temperature was over 110, and several times 114--the Los Angeles space
was left empty!

In the same way, there is a rule that our earthquake shocks are never
mentioned, unless they destroy whole towns. On the afternoon of Jan.
26th, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of violence sufficient to lift a
barn over a church-steeple and deposit it in the pastor's front yard.
That evening a friend of mine in Los Angeles called up the office of the
"Times" to make inquiry; and although they are only thirteen miles away,
and have a branch office and a special correspondent in Pasadena, the
answer was that they had heard nothing about the cyclone! And next
morning I made a careful search of their columns. On the front page
I read: "Fourth Blizzard of Season Raging in East"; also: "Another
Earthquake in Guatemala". But not a line about the Pasadena cyclone That
there was plenty of space in that issue, you may judge from the fact
that there were twenty headlines like the following--many of them
representing full page and half page illustrated "write-ups":

Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The Bright Side
of Sunshine Land; Come to California: Southland's Arms Outstretched in
Cordial Invitation to the East; Flower Stands Make Gay City Streets;
Southland Climate Big Manufacturing Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated
in Los Angeles' Beautiful Homes; Nymphs Knit and Bathe at Ocean's Sunny
Beach; etc.

Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are making money
hand over fist. It is all the more delightful, because we are putting
our souls into it, we are lending our money to the government and saving
the world for Democracy! Our labor unionists have been driven to other
cities, and our Mexican agitators and I. W. W.'s are in jail; so, in the
gilt ball-room of our palatial six-dollar-a-day hotel the four hundred
masters of our prosperity meet to pat themselves on the back, and they
invite the new Catholic bishop to come and confer the grace of God upon
their eating.

The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"--the labor-hating,
labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"--and here is the
episcopal picture on the front page, the arms stretched four columns
wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus does love the
Merchants and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is poured out upon them!
"You represent, gentlemen, the largest and the most civilizing secular
body in the country. You are the pioneers of American civilization.....
I am glad to be among you; glad that my lines have fallen in this
glorious land by the sunset sea, and honored to meet in intimate
acquaintance the big men who have raised here in a few years a city of
metropolitan proportions."

And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian of
Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them about the coming
class-war. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and respect
for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on the other a
demagog speaking about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers." And
then, of course, the inevitable religious tag: "How will men obey you,
if they believe not in God, who is the author of all authority?" At
which, according to the "Times", "prolonged applause and cheers" from
the Merchants and Manufacturers! The editor of the "Times" goes back to
his office, and inspired by this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader"
with the statement that: "We have no proletariat in America!"



Das Centrum

In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy Alliance,
this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association, we have to go to Europe, where the arrangement has been
working for a thousand years. In Europe to-day we see the whole world in
conflict with a band of criminals who have been able to master the minds
and lives of a hundred million highly civilized people. As I write, the
Junker aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat cut; but there
comes a Holy Father to its rescue, with the cross of Jesus uplifted, and
a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna, edited in Berlin, and
sent out from Rome. The Holy Father loves all mankind with a tender and
touching love; his heart bleeds at the sight of bloodshed and suffering,
and he pleads the sacred cause of peace on earth and good-will toward
men.

But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-three years that
the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the world? How was
the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and good will? He is, you
understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong,"
and his followers obey him with the utmost promptness and devotion--they
express themselves as "prostrate at his feet." And when the masters of
Prussia came to him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation
into the world's greatest military empire"--what did the Roman Church
answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause of
peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not. To Bismarck in
Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna in America: "Give us
honors and prestige; give us power over the minds of the young, so that
we may plunder the poor and build our cathedrals and feed fat our greed;
and in return we will furnish you with votes, so that you may rule the
state and do what you will."

You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know the very
names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the Junkerthum made
his "deal." He had tried the method of the Kultur-kampf, and had failed;
but before he repealed the anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the
Church had learned its lesson, and would nevermore oppose the Prussian
ruling caste. We know how this bargain was carried out; we have the
record of the Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred
deputies were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia
was erected. Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the
Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was beaten in
Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout its "Hoch!" The
writer sat in the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag when the Socialists
were protesting against the torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa,
and he heard the deputies of the Holy Father's political party screaming
their rage like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic
Church organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were called,
to scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary movement. The
Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for the management of
these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious and benevolent Leo XIII:

"They must pay special and principal attention to piety and morality,
and their internal discipline must be directed precisely by these
considerations; otherwise they entirely lose their special character,
and come to be very little better than those societies which take no
account of Religion at all."

It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and morality
while he is starving! I am quoting from the Encyclical Letter on "The
Condition of Labor," issued in 1891, and addressed "to our Venerable
Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops and Bishops of the
Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the Apostolic See." The
purpose of the letter is "to refute false teaching," and the substance
of its message is:

This great labor question cannot be solved except by assuming as a
principle that private property must be held sacred and inviolable.

And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as frank as
any used in the present book:

The chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by legal enactment
and policy, of private property. Most of all it is essential in these
times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude within the line of duty;
for if all may justly strive to benefit their condition, yet neither
justice nor the common good allows any one to seize that which belongs
to another, or, under the pretext of futile and ridiculous equality, to
lay hands on other peoples' fortunes.

And this, you understand, in lands where rapine and conquest,
class-tyranny and priestly domination have been the custom since the
dawn of history; in which no property-right can possibly trace back to
any other basis than force. In Austria, for example--Austria, the leader
and guardian of the Holy Alliance--Austria, which had no Reformation,
no Revolution, no Kultur-kampf--Austria, in which the income of the
Catholic Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words, Austria is still to
a large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was Austria which began the
war--began it in a religious quarrel, with a Slav people which does not
acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of the world, but persists in
adhering to the Eastern Church. So of course to-day, when Austria is
learning the bitter lesson that they who draw the sword shall perish
by the sword, the heart of the Holy Father is wrung with grief, and he
sends out these eloquent peace-notes, written in Vienna and edited
in Berlin. And at the same time his private chaplain is convicted and
sentenced to prison for life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!

It is a curious thing to observe--the natural instinct which, all over
the world, draws Superstition and Exploitation together. This war, which
is hailed as a war against autocracy, might almost as accurately be
described as a war against the clerical system. Wherever in the world
you find the Papal power strong, there you find sympathy with the
Prussian infamy and there you find German intrigue. In Spain, for
example; in Ireland and Quebec, and in the Argentine. The treatment of
Belgium was a little too raw--too many priests were shot at the outset,
and so Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice that
he pleads in vain with the Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved
Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The Kaiser allows the
hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace settlement; and
meantime the law forbidding the presence of the Jesuits in Germany has
been repealed, and all over the world the propagandists of this order
are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger Casement was raised a Catholic,
and so also "Jim" Larkin, the Irish labor-leader who is touring America
denouncing the Allies. The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beat
conscription in Australia, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery
among the ignorant peasant-soldiers from Sicily which caused the
breaking of the Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct
worked that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New York
was campaigning for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish suddenly forgot
their ancient horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's Journal" published nine
articles favoring Socialism in a single issue; while even "The Tablet,"
the diocesan paper, began to discover that the Socialists were not such
bad fellows after all. The same "Tablet" which a few years ago allowed
Father Belford to declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be
"stopped with a bullet"!

Note to second edition: Since the above was written, the war fervor has
swept America, including even the rank and file of the Catholics, and
what has here been said might seem unfair to persons who have forgotten
the attitude of the Church during the early part of the conflict, and
the struggle it cost to bring the hierarchy into line. It is one of the
ironies of history that the most reactionary organization in the
world should be lending its aid to the destruction of the second
most reactionary. When the Catholic Church marches forth to war for
Democracy, it is not drawing America down into the pit, but is letting
America pull it out of the pit--at least for a time, and the spectacle
is one in which all lovers of progress will rejoice.



BOOK FOUR -- The Church of the Slavers

 See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
      The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
  And merrily from night to morn
      We chaunt his praise and worship him--
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet  Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!

 A wondrous god! most fit for those
      Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;
  Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
      Hell's burning incense fills the air,
  And Death attests in street and lane
  The hideous glory of his reign.



Face of Caesar

The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing
mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic
Exploitation. From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are
better than the Catholic, but not much better. The Catholics stand upon
Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word; but since this Word
is the entire literary product, history and biography, science and
legislation, poetry, drama and fiction of a whole people for something
like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to
prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to
do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and wholesale
murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct orders of God,
it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers to construct a
Bible defense of their system.

They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous
form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and see what men have
done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman coin, I
think he would drop dead. As for Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat,
with no nonsense in his make-up; when he ordered, "Servants obey your
masters," he meant exactly what he said. The Roman official stamp which
he put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers
from the Reformation on.

In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering the
most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself knew about it, he had
denounced the princely robbers and the priestly land-exploiters with
that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing had
been done about it, nothing ever is done about it--until at last the
miserable peasants attempted to organize and win their own rights. Their
demands do not seem to us so very criminal as we read them today; the
privilege of electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage,
the right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction of
exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and--that universal
cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England, Mexico or sixteenth
century Germany--the restoration to the village of lands taken by fraud.
But Luther would hear nothing of slaves asserting their own rights, and
took refuge in the Pauline sociology: If they really wished to follow
Christ, they would drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has
to do with spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot
exist without inequalities, etc.

And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon them and
denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations which might have
been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the police-force of his
"City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot answer a rebel with reason, but
the best answer is to hit him with the fist until blood flows from the
nose." He issued a letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob
of Peasants," which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth
Avenue Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this well,
and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a sword." He
implored these rulers, after the fashion of Methodist Chancellor Day of
the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled about the severity
of their repression, for it will save many souls." With such pious
exhortations in their ears the princes set to work, and slaughtered a
hundred thousand of the miserable wretches; they completely aborted
the social hopes of the Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of
wage-slavery and militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar,
Prof. Rauschenbusch, puts it:

The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to 1525,
when the whole nation was in commotion, and a great revolutionary tidal
wave seemed to be sweeping every class and every higher interest one
step nearer to its ideal of life.... The Lutheran Reformation had been
most truly religious and creative when it embraced the whole of human
life and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When
it became "religious" in the narrow sense, it grew scholastic and spiny,
quarrelsome, and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and noble life.



Deutschland ueber Alles

As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became the state
church of Prussia, and Bible-worship and Devil-terror played their part,
along with the Mass and the Confessional, in building up the Junker
dream. A court official--the Oberhofprediger--was set up, and from
that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe.
Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer,
but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my
soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks." And
Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval
how he kept them from thinking:

He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of pains with his
Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to them; and for the rest expects
to be obeyed by them, as by his Sergeants and Corporals. Indeed, the
reverend men feel themselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants,
Corporals, and Captains, to whom obedience is the rule, and discontent a
thing not to be indulged in by any means.

So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided Silesia and
Poland. His successors ordered all the Protestant sects into one, so
that they might be more easily controlled; from which time the Lutheran
Church has been a department of the Prussian state, in some cases a
branch of the municipal authority.

In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded their
liberty, it was an ultra-pious king of Prussia who sent his troops
and shot them down--precisely as Luther had advised to shoot down the
peasants. At this time the future maker of the German Empire rose in
the Landtag and made his bow before the world; a young Prussian
land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck by name, he shook his fist in the
face of the new German liberalism, and incidentally of the new German
infidelity:

Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no state erected upon
any other foundation can permanently exist.

The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintained this tradition of his
line. It was his custom to tour the Empire in a train of blue and white
cars, carrying as many costumes as any stage favorite, most of them
military; with him on the train went the Prussian god, and there
was scarcely a performance at which this god did not appear, also in
military costume. After the failure of the "Kultur-kampf," the official
Lutheran religion was ordered to make friends with its ancient enemy,
the Catholic Church. Said the Kaiser:

I make no difference between the adherents of the Catholic and
Protestant creeds. Let them both stand upon the foundation of
Christianity, and they are both bound to be true citizens and obedient
subjects. Then the German people will be the rock of granite upon which
our Lord God can build and complete his work of Kultur in the world.

And here is the oath required of the Catholic clergy, upon their
admission to equality of trustworthiness with their Protestant
confreres:

I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his Royal Majesty,--and
his lawful successors in the government,--as my most gracious King and
Sovereign; promote his welfare according to my ability; prevent injury
and detriment to him; and particularly endeavor carefully to cultivate
in the minds of the people under my care a sense of reverence and
fidelity towards the King, love for the Fatherland, obedience to the
laws, and all those virtues which in a Christian denote a good citizen;
and I will not suffer any man to teach or act in a contrary spirit. In
particular I vow that I will not support any society or association,
either at home or abroad, which might endanger the public security, and
will inform His Majesty of any proposal made, either in my diocese or
elsewhere, which might prove injurious to the State.

And later on this heaven-guided ruler conceived the scheme of a
Berlin-Bagdad railway, for which he needed one religion more; he paid
a visit to Constantinople, and made another debut and produced another
god--with the result that millions of Turks are fighting under the
belief that the Kaiser is a convert to the faith of Mohammed!



Der Tag.

All this was, of course, in preparation for the great event to which all
good Germans looked forward--to which all German officers drank their
toasts at banquets--the Day.

This glorious day came, and the field-gray armies marched forth, and the
Pauline-Lutheran God marched with them. The Kaiser, as usual, acted as
spokesman:

Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, the German
emperor, the spirit of God has descended. I am His sword, His weapon
and His viceregent. Woe to the disobedient and death to cowards and
unbelievers.

As to the Prussian state religion, its attitude to the war is set
forth in a little book written by a high clerical personage, the Herr
Consistorialrat Dietrich Vorwerk, containing prayers and hymns for the
soldiers, and for the congregations at home. Here is an appeal to the
Lord God of Battles:

Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work daily death and
tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful long-suffering each
bullet and each blow which misses its mark. Lead us not into the
temptation of letting our wrath be too tame in carrying out Thy divine
judgment. Deliver us and our ally from the Infernal Enemy and his
servants on earth. Thine is the kingdom, the German land; may we, by the
aid of Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the fame and the glory.

It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetrated the great
masterpiece of humor of the war--the hymn in which he appeals to that
God who keeps guard over Cherubim, Seraphim, and Zeppelins. You have to
say over the German form of these words in order to get the effect of
their delicious melody--"Cherubinen, Seraphinen, Zeppelinen!" And lest
you think that this too-musical clergyman is a rara avis, turn to the
little book which has been published in English under the same title as
Herr Vorwerk's "Hurrah and Hallelujah." Here is the Reverend S. Lehmann:

Germany is the center of God's plans for the world. Germany's fight
against the whole world is in reality the battle of the spirit against
the whole world's infamy, falsehood and devilish cunning.

And here is Pastor K. Koenig:

It was God's will that we should win the war.

And Pastor J. Rump:

Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity. We fight for
the cause of Jesus within mankind.

And here is an eminent theological professor:

The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is the German
God. Not the national God such as the lower nations worship, but "our
God," who is not ashamed of belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of
our heart.



King Cotton

It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to denounce the
Prussian system; my only purpose is to show that Bible-worship,
precisely as saint-worship or totem-worship, delivers the worshipper up
to the Slavers. This truth has held in America, precisely as in Prussia.
During the middle of the last century there was fought out a mighty
issue in our free republic; and what was the part played in this
struggle by the Bible-cults? Hear the testimony of William Lloyd
Garrison: "American Christianity is the main pillar of American
slavery." Hear Parker Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church
before we could reach the dreadful institution at all."

In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which represented
the churches of the South as well as of the North, passed by a unanimous
vote a resolution to the effect that "Slavery is utterly inconsistent
with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as
ourselves." But in a generation the views of the entire South, including
the Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What was the reason? Had
the "law of God" been altered? Had some new "revelation" been handed
down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that a Yankee by the name
of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take the seeds out of short
staple cotton. The cotton crop of the South increased from four thousand
bales in 1791 to four hundred and fifty thousand in 1820 and five
million, four hundred thousand in 1860.

There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended upon
slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn of history,
he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he wanted was right and
holy. From one end of the South to the other the pulpits rang with
the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to servants shall he be to his
brethren." The learned Bishop Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery",
gave the standard interpretation of this text:

The Almighty, forseeing the total degradation of the Negro race,
ordained them to servitude or slavery under the descendants of Shem and
Japheth, doubtless because he judged it to be their fittest condition.

I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from defenses
of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus Christ--and not
only from the South, but from the North. For it must be understood
that leading families of Massachusetts and New York owed their power to
Slavery; their fathers had brought molasses from New Orleans and made it
into rum, and taken it to the coast of Africa to be exchanged for
slaves for the Southern planters. And after this trade was outlawed, the
slave-grown cotton had still to be shipped to the North and spun; so the
traders of the North must have divine sanction for the Fugitive Slave
law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The slavery of the
negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in the Old and New
Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of New York, giving the
decision of a clerical man of the world: "There is no debasement in
it. It might have existed in Paradise, and it may continue through the
Millenium."

And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in arms against
those who presumed to interfere with this divine institution, the men of
God of the South called down blessings upon their armies in words which,
with the proper change of names, might have been spoken in Berlin
in August, 1914. Thus Dr. Thornwell, one of the leading Presbyterian
divines of the South: "The triumph of Lincoln's principles is the
death-knell of slavery...... Let us crush the serpent in the egg."
And the Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: "The war is a war against
slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against the Word,
Providence and Government of God." I read in the papers, as I am
writing, how the clergy of Germany are thundering against President
Wilson's declaration that that country must become democratic. Here is
a manifesto of the German Evangelical League, made public on the four
hundredth anniversary of the Reformation:

We especially warn against the heresy, promulgated from America, that
Christianity enjoins democratic institutions, and that they are an
essential condition of the kingdom of God on earth.

In exactly the same way the religious bodies of the entire South united
in an address to Christians throughout the world, early in the year
1863:

The recent proclamation of the President of the United States, seeking
the emancipation of the slaves of the South, is in our judgment occasion
of solemn protest on the part of the people of God.



Witches and Women

To whatever part of the world you travel, to whatever page of history
you turn, you find the endowed and established clergy using the word of
God in defense of whatever form of slave-driving may then be popular
and profitable. Two or three hundred years ago it was the custom of
Protestant divines in England and America to burn poor old women as
witches; only a hundred and fifty years ago we find John Wesley, founder
of Methodism, declaring that "the giving up of witchcraft is in effect
the giving up of the Bible." And if you investigate this witch-burning,
you will find that it is only one aspect of a blot upon civilization,
the Christian Mysogyny. You see, there were two Hebrew legends--one that
woman was made out of a man's rib, and the other that she ate an apple;
therefore in modern England a wife must be content with a legal status
lower than a domestic servant.

Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims is this--that
Christianity has promoted chivalry and respect for womanhood. In ancient
Greece and Rome the woman was the equal and helpmate of man; we read in
Tacitus about the splendid women of the Germans, who took part in public
councils, and even fought in battles. Two thousand years before the
Christian era we are told by Maspero that the Egyptian woman was the
mistress of her house; she could inherit equally with her brothers, and
had full control of her property. We are told by Paturet that she was
"juridically the equal of man, having the same rights and being treated
in the same fashion." But in present-day England, under the common law,
woman can hold no office of trust or power, and her husband has the sole
custody of her person, and of her children while minors. He can steal
her children, rob her of her clothing, and beat her with a stick
provided it is no thicker than his thumb. While I was in London the
highest court handed down a decision on the law which does not permit
a woman to divorce her husband for infidelity, unless it has been
accompanied by cruelty; a man had brought his mistress into his home
and--compelled his wife to work for and wait upon her, and the decision
was that this was not cruelty in the meaning of the law!

And if you say that this enslavement of Woman has nothing to do with
religion--that ancient Hebrew fables do not control modern English
customs--then listen to the Vicar of Crantock, preaching at St.
Crantock's, London, Aug. 27th, 1905, and explaining why women must cover
their heads in church:

(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then Eve.

(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but the woman
of the man.

(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the woman, but
the woman for the man.

(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory of God, but
woman is the glory of man.

(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but the woman,
being deceived, was in the transgression.

(6) The marriage relation. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let
the wives be to their husbands.

(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is Christ, but
the head of the woman is man.

I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these ancient
texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which cannot be
persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes. In the city
where I write, three clergymen are being sent to jail for six months
for protesting against the use of the name of Jesus in the wholesale
slaughter of men. Now, I am backing this war. I know that it has to be
fought, and I want to see it fought as hard as possible; but I want to
leave Jesus out of it, for I know that Jesus did not believe in war,
and never could have been brought to support a war. I object to clerical
cant on the subject; and I note that an eminent theological authority,
"Billy" Sunday, appears to agree with me; for I find him on the front
page of my morning paper, assailing the three pacifist clergymen, and
making his appeal not to Jesus, but to the blood-thirsty tribal diety of
the ancient Hebrews:

I suppose they think they know more than God Almighty, who commanded the
sun to stand still while Joshua won the battle for the Lord; more
than the God who made Samson strong so he could slay thousands of his
nation's enemies in a righteous cause.

Right you are, Billy! And if the capitalist system continues to develop
unchecked, we shall some day see it dawn upon the masters of the world
how wasteful it is to permit the superannuated workers to perish by slow
starvation. So much more sensible to make use of them! So we shall have
a Bible defense of cannibalism; we shall hear our evangelists quoting
Leviticus: "They shall eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters."
Or perhaps some of our leisure-class ladies might make the discovery
that the flesh of working-class babies is relished by pomeranians
and poodles. If so, the Billy Sundays of the twenty-first century may
discover the text: "Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones against the stones."



Moth and Rust

It is especially interesting to notice what happens when the Bible texts
work against the interests of the Slavers and their clerical retainers.
Then they are null and void--and no matter how precise and explicit and
unmistakable they may be! Take for example the Sabbath injunction:
"Six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou hast to do." Karl Marx
records of the pious England of his time that,

Occasionally in rural districts a day-labourer is condemned to
imprisonment for desecrating the Sabbath by working in his front garden.
The same labourer is punished for breach of contract if he remains away
from his metal, paper or glass works on the Sunday, even if it be from
a religious whim. The orthodox Parliament will hear nothing of
Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the process of expanding capital.

Or consider the attitude of the Church in the matter of usury.
Throughout ancient Hebrew history the money-lender was an outcast; both
the law and the prophets denounced him without mercy, and it was
made perfectly clear that what was meant was, not the taking of high
interest, but the taking of any interest whatsoever. The early church
fathers were explicit, and the Catholic Church for a thousand years
consigned money-lenders unhesitatingly to hell. But then came the modern
commercial system, and the money-lenders became the masters of the
world! There is no more amusing illustration of the perversion of human
thought than the efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape from the
dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had trapped them.

Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuit of the
eighteenth century, a doctor of the Church, now worshipped as St.
Alphonsus, presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental usury";
concluding that, if the borrower pay interest of his own free will, the
lender may keep it. In answer to the question whether the lender may
keep what the borrower pays, not out of gratitude, but out of fear that
otherwise loans will be refused to him in future, Ligouri says that "to
be usury, it must be paid by reason of a contract, or as justly due;
payment by reason of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as
an actual price," Again the great saint and doctor tells us that "it
is not usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of
regaining the principal!" Could the house of J. P. Morgan and Company
ask more of their ecclesiastical department?

The reader may think that such sophistications are now out of date; but
he will find precisely the same knavery in the efforts of present-day
Slavers to fit Jesus Christ into the system of competitive
commercialism. Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a carpenter's son, a
thoroughly class-conscious proletarian. He denounced the exploiters of
his own time with ferocious bitterness, he drove the money-changers
out of the temple with whips, and he finally died the death of a common
criminal. If he had forseen the whole modern cycle of capitalism and
wage-slavery, he could hardly have been more precise in his exortations
to his followers to stand apart from it. But did all this avail him? Not
in the least!

I place upon the witness-stand an exponent of Bible-Christianity whom
all readers of our newspapers know well: a scholar of learning, a
publicist of renown; once pastor of the most famous church in Brooklyn;
now editor of our most influential religious weekly; a liberal both
in theology and politics; a modernist, an advocate of what he calls
industrial democracy. His name is Lyman Abbott, and he is writing under
his own signature in his own magazine, his subject being "The Ethical
Teachings of Jesus". Several times I have tried to persuade people that
the words I am about to quote were actually written and published by
this eminent doctor of divinity, and people have almost refused to
believe me. Therefore I specify that the article may be found in the
"Outlook", the bound volumes of which are in all large libraries:
volume 94, page 576. The words are as follows, the bold face being Dr.
Abbott's, not mine:

My radical friend declares that the teachings of Jesus are not
practicable, that we cannot carry them out in life, and that we do not
pretend to do so. Jesus, he reminds us, said, 'Lay not up for yourself
treasures upon earth;' and Christians do universally lay up for
themselves treasures upon earth; every man that owns a house and lot, or
a share of stock in a corporation, or a life insurance policy, or money
in a savings bank, has laid up for himself treasure upon earth. But
Jesus did not say, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth."
He said, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and
rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal." And no
sensible American does. Moth and rust do not get at Mr. Rockefeller's
oil wells, nor at the Sugar Trust's sugar, and thieves do not often
break through and steal a railway or an insurance company or a savings
bank. What Jesus condemned was hoarding wealth.

Strange as it may sound to some of the readers of this book, I count
myself among the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. His example has meant
more to me than that of any other man, and all the experiences of my
revolutionary life have brought me nearer to him. Living in the great
Metropolis of Mammon, I have felt the power of Privilege, its scourge
upon my back, its crown of thorns upon my head. When I read that article
in the "Outlook", I felt just as Jesus himself would have felt; and I
sat down and wrote a letter--

To Lyman Abbott

This discovery of a new method of interpreting the Bible is one of such
very great interest and importance that I cannot forbear to ask space
to comment upon it. May I suggest that Dr. Abbott elaborate this
exceedingly fruitful idea, and write us another article upon the extent
to which the teachings of the Inspired Word are modified by modern
conditions, by the progress of invention and the scientific arts? The
point of view which Dr. Abbott takes is one which had never occurred
to me before, and I had therefore been completely mistaken as to the
attitude of Jesus on the question. Also I have, like Dr. Abbott, many
radical friends who are still laboring under error.

Jesus goes on to bid his hearers: "Consider the lilies of the field, how
they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin." What an apt simile is
this for the "great mass of American wealth," in Dr. Abbott's portrayal
of it! "It is serving the community," he tells us; "it is building
a railway to open a new country to settlement by the homeless; it is
operating a railway to carry grain from the harvests of the West to
the unfed millions of the East," etc. Incidentally, it is piling up
dividends for its pious owners; and so everybody is happy--and Jesus,
if he should come back to earth, could never know that he had left the
abodes of bliss above.

Truly, there should be a new school of Bible interpretation founded upon
this brilliant idea. Jesus says, "Therefore when thou doest thine
alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the
synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men." Verily
not; for of what avail are trumpets, compared with the millions of
copies of newspapers which daily go forth to tell of Mr. Rockefeller's
benefactions? How transitory are they, compared with the graven marble
or granite which Mr. Carnegie sets upon the front of each of his
libraries!

There is the paragraph, "Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because
thou canst not make one hair white or black." I have several among my
friends who are Quakers; presumably Dr. Abbott has also; and he should
not fail to point out to them the changes which scientific discovery has
wrought in the significance of this command against swearing. We can now
make our hair either white or black, or a combination of both. We can
make it a brilliant peroxide golden; we could, if pushed to an extreme,
make it purple or green. So we are clearly entitled to swear all we
please by our head.

Nor should we forget to examine other portions of the Bible according
to this method. "Look not upon the wine when it is red," we are told.
Thanks to the activities of that Capitalism which Dr. Abbott praises so
eloquently, we now make our beverages in the chemical laboratory, and
their color is a matter of choice. Also, it should be pointed out
that we have a number of pleasant drinks which are not wine at
all--"high-balls" and "gin rickeys" and "peppered punches"; also
vermouthe and creme de menthe and absinthe, which I believe, are green
in hue, and therefore entirely safe.

Then there are the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any
graven image." See how completely our understanding of this command is
changed, so soon as we realize that we are free to make images of molten
metal! And that we may with impunity bow down to them and worship them
and serve them--even, for instance, a Golden Calf!

"The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt
not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant,
nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is
within thy gates." This, again, it will be noted, is open to new
interpretations. It specifies maidservants, but does not prevent one's
employing as many married women as he pleases. It also says nothing
about the various kinds of labor-saving machinery which we have now
taught to work for us--sail-boats, naptha launches, yachts, automobiles,
and private cars--all of which may be busily occupied during the seventh
day of the week. The men who run these machines--the guides, boatmen,
stokers, pilots, chauffeurs, and engineers--would all indignantly
resent being regarded as "servants", and so they do not come under the
prohibition any more than the machines.

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox,
nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." I read this paragraph
over for the first time in quite a while, and I came with a jolt to its
last words. I had been intending to point out that it said nothing
about a neighbor's automobile, nor a neighbor's oil wells, sugar trusts,
insurance companies and savings banks. The last words, however, stop
one off abruptly. One is almost tempted to imagine that the Divine
Intelligence must have foreseen Dr. Abbott's ingenious method of
interpretation, and taken this precaution against him. And this was a
great surprise to me--for, truly, I had not supposed it possible that
such an interpretation could have been foreseen, even by Omniscience
itself. I will conclude this communication by venturing the assertion
that it could not have been foreseen by any other person or thing, in
the heavens above, on the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.
Dr. Abbott may accept my congratulations upon having achieved the most
ingenious and masterful exhibition of casuistical legerdemain that it
has ever been my fortune to encounter in my readings in the literatures
of some thirty centuries and seven different languages.

And I will also add that I respectfully challenge Dr. Abbott to publish
this letter. And I announce to him in advance that if he refuses to
publish it, I will cause it to be published upon the first page of the
"Appeal to Reason", where it will be read by some five hundred thousand
Socialists, and by them set before several million followers of Jesus
Christ, the world's first and greatest revolutionist, whom Dr.
Lyman Abbott has traduced and betrayed by the most amazing piece of
theological knavery that it has ever been my fortune to encounter.



The Octopus

Dr. Lyman Abbott published this letter! In his editorial comment thereon
he said that he did not know which of two biblical injunctions to
follow: "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be thought
like unto him"; or "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be
wise in his own conceit". I replied by pointing out a third text which
the Reverend Doctor had possibly overlooked: "He that calleth his
neighbor a fool shall be in danger of hell-fire." But the Reverend
Doctor took refuge in his dignity, and I bided my time and waited for
that revenge which comes sooner or later to us muck-rakers. In this
case it came speedily. The story is such a perfect illustration of the
functions of religion as oil to the machinery of graft that I ask the
reader's permission to recite it at length.

For a couple of decades the political and financial life of New England
has been dominated by a gigantic aggregation of capital, the New York,
New Haven and Hartford Railroad. It is a "Morgan" concern; its popular
name, "The New Haven", stands for all the railroads of six states,
nearly all the trolley-lines and steamship-lines, and a group of the
most powerful banks of Boston and New York. It is controlled by a
little group of insiders, who followed the custom of rail-road-wrecking
familiar to students of American industrial life: buying up new lines,
capitalizing them at fabulous sums, and unloading them on the investing
public; paying dividends out of capital, "passing" dividends as a means
of stock manipulation, accumulating surpluses and cutting "melons" for
the insiders, while at the same time crushing labor unions, squeezing
wages, and permitting rolling-stock and equipment to go to wreck.

All these facts were perfectly well known in Wall Street, and could not
have escaped the knowledge of any magazine editor dealing with current
events. In eight years the "New Haven" had increased its capitalization
1501 per cent; and what that meant, any office boy in "the Street" could
have told. What attitude should a magazine editor take to the matter?

At that time there were still two or three free magazines in America.
One of them was Hampton's, and the story of its wrecking by the New
Haven criminals will some day serve in school text-books as the classic
illustration of that financial piracy which brought on the American
social revolution. Ben Hampton had bought the old derelict "Broadway
Magazine", with twelve thousand subscribers, and in four years, by
the simple process of straight truth-telling, had built up for it a
circulation of 440,000. In two years more he would have had a million;
but in May, 1911, he announced a series of articles dealing with the New
Haven management.

The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, were so exact that they
read today like the reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission, dated
three years later. A representative of the New Haven called upon the
editor of Hampton's with a proof of the first article--obtained from the
printer by bribery--and was invited to specify the statements to which
he took exception; in the presence of witnesses he went over the
article line by line, and specified two minor errors, which were at
once corrected. At the end of the conference he announced that if the
articles were published, Hampton's Magazine would be "on the rocks in
ninety days."

Which threat was carried out to the letter. First came a campaign among
the advertisers of the magazine, which lost an income of thousands of
dollars a month, almost over night. And then came a campaign among
the banks--the magazine could not get credit. Anyone familiar with the
publishing business will understand that a magazine which is growing
rapidly has to have advances to meet each month's business. Hampton
undertook to raise the money by selling stock; whereupon a spy was
introduced into his office as bookkeeper, his list of subscribers was
stolen, and a campaign was begun to destroy their confidence.

It happened that I was in Hampton's office in the summer of 1911, when
the crisis came. Money had to be had to pay for a huge new edition; and
upon a property worth two millions of dollars, with endorsements worth
as much again, it was impossible to borrow thirty thousand dollars in
the city of New York. Bankers, personal friends of the publisher, stated
quite openly that word had gone out that any one who loaned money to him
would be "broken". I myself sent telegrams to everyone I knew who
might by any chance be able to help; but there was no help, and Hampton
retired without a dollar to his name, and the magazine was sold under
the hammer to a concern which immediately wrecked it and discontinued
publication.



The Industrial Shelley

Such was the fate of an editor who opposed the "New Haven". And now,
what of those editors who supported it? Turn to "The Outlook, a Weekly
Journal of Current Events," edited by Lyman Abbott--the issue of Dec.
25th, nineteen hundred and nine years after Christ came down to bring
peace on earth and good-will toward Wall Street. You will there find
an article by Sylvester Baxter entitled "The Upbuilding of a Great
Railroad." It is the familiar "slush" article which we professional
writers learn to know at a glance. "Prodigious", Mr. Baxter tells us,
has been the progress of the New Haven; this was "a masterstroke",
that was "characteristically sagacious". The road had made "prodigious
expenditures", and to a noble end: "Transportation efficiency epitomizes
the broad aim that animated these expenditures and other constructive
activities." There are photographs of bridges and stations--"vast
terminal improvements", "a masterpiece of modern engineering", "the
highest, greatest and most architectural of bridges". Of the official
under whom these miracles were being wrought--President Mellen--we read:
"Nervously organized, of delicate sensibility, impulsive in utterance,
yet with an extraordinarily convincing power for vividly logical
presentation." An industrial Shelley, or a Milton, you perceive; and all
this prodigious genius poured out for the general welfare! "To study out
the sort of transportation service best adapted to these ends, and then
to provide it in the most efficient form possible, that is the life-task
that President Mellen has set himself."

There was no less than sixteen pages of these raptures--quite a section
of a small magazine like the "Outlook". "The New Haven ramifies to every
spot where industry flourishes, where business thrives." "As a purveyor
of transportation it supplies the public with just the sort desired."
"Here we have the new efficiency in a nutshell." In short, here we
have what Dr. Lyman Abbott means when he glorifies "the great mass of
American wealth". "It is serving the community; it is building a railway
to open a new country to settlement by the homeless; it is operating
a railway to carry grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed
millions of the East," etc. The unfed millions--my typewriter started to
write "underfed millions"--are humbly grateful for these services, and
hasten to buy copies of the pious weekly which tells about them.

The "Outlook" runs a column of "current events" in which it tells what
is happening in the world; and sometimes it is compelled to tell of
happenings against the interests of "the great mass of American wealth".
The cynical reader will find amusement in following its narrative of
the affairs of the New Haven during the five years subsequent to the
publication of the Baxter article.

First came the collapse of the road's service; a series of accidents so
frightful that they roused even clergymen and chambers of commerce
to protest. A number of the "Outlook's" subscribers are New Haven
"commuters", and the magazine could not fail to refer to their troubles.
In the issue of Jan. 4th, 1913, three years and ten days after the
Baxter rhapsody, we read:

The most numerous accidents on a single road since the last fiscal year
have been, we believe, those on the New Haven. In the opinion of the
Connecticut Commission, the Westport wreck would not have occurred
if the railway company had followed the recommendation of the Chief
Inspector of Safety Appliances of the Interstate Commerce Commission in
its report on a similar accident at Bridgeport a year ago.

And by June 28th, matters had gone farther yet; we find the "Outlook"
reporting:

Within a few hours of the collision at Stamford, the wrecked Pullman car
was taken away and burned. Is this criminal destruction of evidence?

This collapse of the railroad service started a clamor for investigation
by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which of course brought terror
to the bosoms of the plunderers. On Dec. 20, 1913, we find the "Outlook"
"putting the soft pedal" on the public indignation. "It must not be
forgotten that such a road as the New Haven is, in fact if not in terms,
a National possession, and as it goes down or up, public interests
go down or up with it," But in spite of all pious admonitions, the
Interstate Commerce Commission yielded to the public clamor, and an
investigation was made--revealing such conditions of rottenness as
to shock even the clerical retainers of Privilege. "Securities were
inflated, debt was heaped upon debt", reports the horrified "Outlook";
and when its hero, Mr. Mellen--its industrial Shelley, "nervously
organized, of delicate sensibility"--admitted that he had no authority
as to the finances of the road and no understanding of them, but had
taken all his orders from Morgan, the "Outlook" remarks, deeply wounded:
"A pitiable position for the president of a great railway to assume." A
little later, when things got hotter yet, we read:

In the search for truth the Commissioners had to overcome many
obstacles, such as the burning of books, letters and documents, and
the obstinacy of witnesses, who declined to testify until criminal
proceedings were begun. The New Haven system has more than three hundred
subsidiary corporations in a web of entangling alliances, many of which
were seemingly planned, created and manipulated by lawyers expressly
retained for the purpose of concealment or deception.

But do you imagine even that would sicken the pious jackals of their
offal? If so, you do not know the sturdiness of the pious stomach. A
compromise was patched up between the government and the thieves who
were too big to be prosecuted; this bargain was not kept by the thieves,
and President Wilson declared in a public statement that the New Haven
administration had "broken an agreement deliberately and solemnly
entered into," in a manner to the President "inexplicable and entirely
without justification." Which, of course, seemed to the "Outlook"
dreadfully impolite language to be used concerning a "National
possession"; it hastened to rebuke President Wilson, whose statement was
"too severe and drastic."

A new compromise was made between the government and the thieves who
were too big to be prosecuted, and the stealing went on. Now, as I work
over this book, the President takes the railroads for war use, and reads
to Congress a message proposing that the securities based upon the New
Haven swindles, together with all the mass of other railroad swindles,
shall be sanctified and secured by dividends paid out of the Public
purse. New Haven securities take a big jump; and the "Outlook", needless
to say, is enthusiastic for the President's policy. Here is a chance for
the big thieves to baptize themselves--or shall we say to have the water
in their stocks made "holy"? Says our pious editor, for the government
to take property without full compensation "would be contrary to the
whole spirit of America."



The Outlook for Graft

Anyone familiar with the magazine world will understand that such
crooked work as this, continued over a long period, is not done for
nothing. Any magazine writer would know, the instant he saw the Baxter
article, that Baxter was paid by the New Haven, and that the "Outlook"
also was paid by the New Haven. Generally he has no way of proving such
facts, and has to sit in silence; but when his board bill falls due and
his landlady is persistent, he experiences a direct and earnest hatred
of the crooks of journalism who thrive at his expense. If he is
a Socialist, he looks forward to the day when he may sit on a
Publications' Graft Commission, with access to all magazine books which
have not yet been burned!

In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the price--thanks to the
labors of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Needless to say, you will
not find the facts recorded in the columns of the Outlook; you might
have read it line by line from the palmy days of Mellen to our own,
and you would have got no hint of what the Commission revealed about
magazine and newspaper graft. Nor would you have got much more from
the great metropolitan dailies, which systematically "played down" the
expose, omitting all the really damaging details. You would have to
go to the reports of the Commission--or to the files of "Pearson's
Magazine", which is out of print and not found in libraries!

According to the New Haven's books, and by the admission of its own
officials, the road was spending more than four hundred thousand dollars
a year to influence newspapers and magazines in favor of its policies.
(President Mellen stated that this was relatively less than any other
railroad in the country was spending). There was a professor of the
Harvard Law School, going about lecturing to boards of trade, urging
in the name of economic science the repeal of laws against railroad
monopolies--and being paid for his speeches out of railroad funds! There
was a swarm of newspaper reporters, writing on railroad affairs for the
leading papers of New England, and getting twenty-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 incense to him,
and modern pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung from the toil
of helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit in
cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of
dusty divinity!"



BOOK FIVE -- The Church of the Merchants

               Mammon led them on--
 Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
  From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and
      thoughts
  Were always downward bent, admiring more
  The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
  Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
  In vision beatific.....
 Let none admire
  That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
  Deserve the precious bane.
                 Milton.



The Head Merchant

Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandists never weary of telling
us. Business is the basis of our material lives, and consequently of
our culture. Business men control our politics and dictate our laws;
business men own our newspapers and direct their policy; business men
sit on our school boards, and endow and manage our universities. The
Reformation was a revolt of the newly-developing merchant classes
against the tyrannies and abuses of feudal clericalism: so in all
Protestant Christianity one finds the spirit, ideals, and language of
Trade. We have shown how the symbolism of the Anglican Church is of the
palace and the throne; in the same way that of the non-conformist
sects may be shown to be of the counting-house. In the view of the
middle-class Britisher, the nexus between man and man is cent per cent;
and so in their Sunday services the worshippers sing such hymns as this:

 Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
  Repaid a thousand fold shall be;
  Then gladly will we give to Thee,
           Who givest all.

The first duty of every man under the competitive system is to secure
the survival of his own business; so on the Sabbath, when he comes to
deal with eternity, he is practical and explicit:

 Nothing is worth a thought beneath
  But how I may escape the death
     That never, never dies;
  How make mine own election sure,
  And when I fail on earth secure
      A mansion in the skies.

Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figures God as a mighty
Conqueror--

          Marching as to war
  With the cross of Jesus
           Going on before

So the preacher to the trader figures the divinity as a glorified
Merchant keeping books. This Head Merchant has a monopoly in His line;
He knows all His rivals' secrets, so there is no getting ahead of Him,
and nothing to do but obey His Word, as revealed through His clerical
staff. The system is oily with protestations of divine love; but when
you read the comments of Luther upon Calvin and of Calvin upon Luther,
you understand that this love is confined to the inside of each
denomination. And even so restricted, there is not always enough to go
around. Recently I met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked, "I
see by the papers that you have just finished a church building." "Yes,"
he answered; "and I have had three offers of a new church." I did not
see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so successful with this
one?" The reply was, "They always take it for granted that you want to
change when you've finished a new building, because you make so many
enemies!"

The business man puts up the money to build the church, he puts up the
money to keep it going; and the first rule of a business man is that
when he puts up the money for a thing he "runs" that thing. Of course
he sees that it spreads his own views of life, it helps to maintain his
tradition. In the days of Anu and Baal we heard the proclamation of the
divine right of Kings; in these days of Mammon we hear the proclamation
of the divine right of Merchants. Some fifteen years ago the head of our
Coal Trust announced during a great strike that the question would be
settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom has
given control of the property interests of this country". And on that
declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever their denominations,
Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian or Hebrew,
their Sabbath doctrines are alike, as their week-day practices are
alike; whether it is Rockefeller shooting his Bayonne oil-workers
and burning alive the little children of his miners; or smooth John
Wanamaker, paying starvation wages to department-store girls and driving
them to the streets; or that clergyman who, at a gathering of society
ladies, members of the "Law and Order League" of Denver, declared in my
hearing that if he could have his way he would blow up the home of every
coal-striker with dynamite; or the Rev. R. A. Torrey, Dean of the Bible
institute of Los Angeles, who refused to employ union labor on the
million dollar building of the Institute, declaring that "the Church
cannot afford to have any dealings with a band of fire-bugs and
murderers!"



"Herr Beeble"

The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association is to justify the processes of trade, and to
preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of frugality, humility,
and loyalty to the profit system. The depths of sociological depravity
to which some of the agents of this Association have sunk is difficult
of belief. Twelve years ago I was invited to address the book-sellers
of New York, in company with a well-known clergyman of the city, the
Reverend Madison C. Peters. This gentleman's address made such an
impression upon me that I recall it even at this distance: a string of
jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking
with commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it
was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His
Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalist
end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan
Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so ignorant that when he wished
to prove that Socialism means free love, he quoted a writer by the name
of "Herr Beeble"; he was so dishonest that he garbled the writings of
this "Herr Beeble", making him say something quite different from
what he had meant to say. I could name several clergymen of various
denominations who have stooped to that device against the Socialists;
including the Catholic Father Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and
should be stopped with bullets.

Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's pulpit-slang
used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy; and when I grew
up, and came into the Socialist movement--behold, here he was, chief
inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I had a friend, a man who
saved my life at a time when I was practically starving, and to
whom therefore I owe my survival as a writer; this friend had been a
clergyman in a Middle Western state, and had preached Jesus as he really
was, and so was hated and feared like Jesus. It happened that he was
unhappily married, and permitted his wife to divorce him so that he
might marry the woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the organized
hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils with poisoned
whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he applied his
imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel under the title of
"The One Woman"; and it is as if you were reading the story of Jesus and
the Magdalen transmitted through the personality of a he-goat. Of late
years this clerical author has turned his energies to negrophobia, and
militarism, making millions out of motion-picture incitements to hatred
and terror. The pictures were made here in Southern California, and
friends in the business have described to me the pious propagandist in
the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarms of cute and playful
little movie-girls.

Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D., D. C. L.,
L. H. D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who
offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is
Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions
Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to
manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense of
the Rockefeller fortune. It is generally not expected that the makers
of ruling-class munitions should face the dirty and perilous work of
the trenches; but ten years ago, during a raid by an active squad of
muckrake-men, Chancellor Day astonished the world by rushing to the
front with both arms full of star-shells and bombs. He afterwards
put the history of this gallant action into a volume, "The Raid on
Prosperity"; and if you want the real thrill of the class-war, here is
where to get it!

The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; an enthusiast and
dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whom the ordinary human virtues have
been fused, absorbed, transformed and sublimated into a new supreme
virtue of loyalty to Exploitation, patriotism for Profiteering. He began
life as a working-man, he tells us, in the good old American fashion of
hustle for yourself; but he differed from other Americans in that he
had an instant, intuitive recognition of the intellectual and moral
excellence of Plutocracy. The first time he met a rich man, he quivered
with rapture, he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So very quickly he
was recognized as a proper person to have charge of a Mental Munition
Works; and the ruling classes proceeded to pin medals upon the bosom of
his academic robes--D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D., D. C. L., L. H. D.

The Chancellor knows the masters of our Profit System, those "consummate
geniuses of manufacture and trade by which the earth has yielded up her
infinite treasures." And having been at the same time in intimate daily
communion with the Almighty, he can tell us the Almighty's attitude
towards these prodigies. "God has made the rich of this world to serve
Him.... He has shown them a way to have this world's goods and to be
rich towards God.... God wants the rich men....Christ's doctrines have
made the world rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches." Also
the Chancellor knows our great corporations, and gives us the Almighty's
views about them; they mean that "the forces with which God built
the universe have been put into the hands of man." Likewise by divine
authority we learn that "the sympathy given to Socialism is appalling.
It is insanity." We learn that the income tax is "a doctrine suited to
the dark ages, only no age ever has been dark enough." Somebody raises
the issue of "tainted money", and the Chancellor disposes of this
matter also. As a Deputy of Divinity, he settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul
permitted meat offered to idols to be eaten in the fear of God." And
then, to make assurance doubly sure, he settles it with plain human
logic; and you are astonished to see how simple, under his handling, the
complex problem becomes--how clear and clean-cut is the distinction he
draws for you:

Every boy knows that one cannot take stolen goods without being a
partaker with the thief. But the proceeds of recognized business are
quite a different thing.



Holy Oil

And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenon of Protestant
Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the
benefit of posterity I explain that "Billy" is a baseball player turned
Evangelist, who has brought to the cause of God the crowds and uproar
of the diamond; also the commercial spirit of America's most popular
institution. He travels like a circus, with all the press-agent work and
newspaper hurrah; he conducts what are called "revivals", in an enormous
"tabernacle" built especially for him in each city. I cannot better
describe the Billy Sunday circus than in the words of a certain Sidney
C. Tapp, who brought suit against the evangelist for $100,000 damages
for the theft of the ideas of a book. Says Mr. Tapp in his complaint:

The so-called religious awakening or "trail-hitting" is produced by an
appeal to the emotions and in stirring up the senses by a combination of
carrying the United States flag in one hand and the Bible in the other,
singing, trumpeting, organ playing, garrulous and acrobatic feats of
defendant, by defendant in his talk leaping from the rostrum to the top
of the pulpit, lying prone on the floor of the rostrum on his stomach
in the presence of the vast audience and from thence into a pit to
shake hands with the so-called "trail-hitters" and the vulgar use
of plaintiff's thoughts contained in said books. Said harangues and
vulgarisms of said defendant and horns, drums, organs and singing
by said choir and vast audience which are assembled by means of said
newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit of free
and copious flow of money through religious and patriotic excitement
produced by and through the vulgarisms, scurrility, buffoonery,
obscenity and profanity of defendant pretending to be in the interest of
the cause of religion through what he denominates "hitting the trail",
the real object being to induce a religious frenzy and enthusiasm which
he announces in advance is to result in large audiences composed of
thousands of people generously contributing vast sums of money on
the last day and night of the so-called revival which is invariably
appropriated by the defendant and through which scheme and device
defendant has become enormously wealthy.

As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, and twice each day he
holds forth to a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand; in addition
the newspapers print literally pages of his utterances. The entire
Protestant clergy for a score of miles around has been hitched to his
triumphal chariot, and driven captive through the streets. Here in this
dignified city of Pasadena, home of millionaire brewers and chewing-gum
kings, all the churches have been plastered for weeks with cloth signs:
"This Church is Cooperating in the Sunday Campaign." To give a sample of
the intellectual level of the performance, here is what Billy has to say
about modern thought:

All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this sneering,
highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher criticism, wriggling its dirty,
filthy, stinking carcass out of a beer-mug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!

Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the platform
and smile while Billy thus slangs the devil; and being themselves, poor
fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd, they watch and see how he
does it, and then return to their own churches and try the same stunt;
so the manners of the baseball diamond spread like a contagion. I open
my morning paper, and find a picture of an intense-looking clerical
gentleman, the Rev. J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the Baptist Temple.
He is discussing certain slanderous rumors which he has heard about
Billy Sunday, and he offers ten thousand dollars reward to anyone who
can prove these things; though, as he says,

The dirty, low-down, contemptible, weazen-brained, impure-hearted,
shrivelled-souled, gossipping devils do not deserve to be noticed.....
Scandal-mongers, gossip-lovers, reputation-destroyers, hypocritical,
black-hearted, green-eyed slanderers..... Corrupt, devil-possessed,
vile debauches..... Immoral, sin-loving, vice-practicing, underhanded
sneaks..... Carrion-loving buzzards and foul-smelling skunks.

You will be prepared after this to hear that when the Socialists were
near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman preached a sermon in
support of the candidate of "Booze, Gas and Railroads".

In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected youth of
our streets from drinking, gambling and whoring, no one could wish him
anything but success; but his besotted ignorance, his childish crudity
of mind, make it impossible that he could have any success except of a
delusive nature. He is utterly devoid of a social sense; utterly unaware
of the existence of the forces of capitalism which are causing depravity
ten times as fast as all the evangelists in creation can remedy it. So
he is precisely like the Catholics with their "charity", cleaning up
loathsome and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and never stopping
to ask why such messes continue to come into existence.

More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism which he
fosters does not help the development of evil more than his preaching
hinders it. The newspapers always report the cost of the tabernacle,
of the "free-will offering", which amounts to hundreds of thousands of
dollars in each "campaign", In each city the expenses are guaranteed
by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting forces of the
community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits their homes, and is
in every way one of the crowd. After the big strike in Paterson, N. J.,
the employers, Jews and Catholics included, all subscribed a fund to
bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was freely proclaimed that the
purpose was to undermine the radical union movement. This was never
denied by Sunday himself, and his whole campaign was conducted on that
basis.

Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich young man,
perhaps a thousand times as rich as any that lived in Palestine. This
young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I do to inherit eternal
life?" And Billy told him to keep the commandments--"Do not commit
adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor
thy father and thy mother." The young man answered; "All these have I
kept from my youth up." And Billy said: "Yet lackest thou one thing;
sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt
have treasure in heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this he
was very sorrowful, for he was very rich.

--No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in Palestine.
What happened in New York is that Billy said, "I am delighted to meet
you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller said, "Come be my guest at my
palace in the Pocantico Hills; and then we will go together and you may
preach submission to my wage-slaves in the oil-factories at Bayonne and
elsewhere." And Billy went to the palace, and went and preached to the
wage-slaves, telling them to beware the "stinking Socialists", and to
concentrate their attention on the saving of their souls; so the rich
young man was delighted, and he sent for all the newspaper reporters to
come to his office at 26 Broadway, and told them what a great and useful
man Billy Sunday is. As the New York "Times" tells about it:

Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has never been
charged with having an excess of verbally expressed enthusiasm on any
subject. But he talked for an hour and a half about the evangelist. He
was full of the subject of Billy Sunday. "Billy did New York a lot of
good," he said. He went on to tell of 187 meetings held in 100 different
factories, attended by 50,000 men. "That's good work." And he expressed
his satisfaction with Sunday's theology: "He believes the Bible from
cover to cover and that is good enough for me." The Sunday campaign had
cost $200,000, and "If it had stopped here, if it was not kept up, it
would be poor business; a poor dividend on the $200,000 and the work
invested. But we expect to get dividends in the next year."

Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house!



Rhetorical Black-hanging

It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend large-scale merchants
while they live, but to bury them when they die, and to place the
seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning this aspect of
Bootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an earnest hater of shams,
William Makepeace Thackeray:

I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the most
ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the blinking of
disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the
falsehood and sycophancies--all uttered in the name of Heaven in our
State churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung from
time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious.
The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of
rhetorical black-hanging......

And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to
kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall Street.
When a certain king of Western railroads died, a Methodist clergyman,
afterwards Bishop, likened his heir to the boy Christ; a statement which
requires for its appreciation a mention of the fact that this heir died
of syphilis. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly reward
in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout his
lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley Quay
was his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical connections,
was free to state the facts about him:

He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press, got his
grip on the public service, including even the courts; imposed his will
on Congress and Cabinet, and upon the last three Presidents--making
the latter provide for the offal of his political machine, which even
Pennsylvania could no longer stomach--and all without identifying his
name with a single measure of public good, without making a speech or
uttering a party watchword, without even pretending to be honest, but
solely because, like Judas, he carried the bag and could buy whom he
would.

Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was expressed by
a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J. S. Ramsey, who stood over the
coffin of "Matt", and without cracking a smile declared that he had been
"a statesman who was always on the right side of every moral question!"

In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our political
corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged to no church, but had backed
them all, understanding the main thesis of this book as clearly as the
writer of it. In his home city of Cleveland the eulogy upon him was
pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St. Paul's Episcopal Church; while in
the United States Senate the service was performed by the Chaplain, the
Rev. Edward Everett Hale. This is a name well-known in American
letters, as in American religious life; it was borne by a benevolent old
gentleman, a Unitarian and a liberal, who organized "Lend-a-Hand Clubs"
and such like amiabilities. "Do You Love This Old Man?" the signs in
the street-cars used to ask when I was a boy; and I promptly answered
"Yes"--for my mother took the "Ladies' Home Journal", and I swallowed
the sentimental dish-water set out for me. But when I read the Rev.
Edward's funeral oration over the Irrev. Mark, I loved neither of them
any longer. "This whole-souled child of God," cried the Rev. Edward,
"who believed in success, and knew how to succeed by using the infinite
powers!" You perceive that the Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club agrees
with this book, that the "infinite powers" in America are the powers
that prey!



The Great American Fraud

Among the most loathesome products of our native commercial greed is the
patent medicine industry, "The Great American Fraud," as its historian
has called it. In 1907 this historian wrote:

Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of
dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this
sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of
opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from
powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants;
and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud,
exploited by the skillfullest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of
the trade.

One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes: habit-forming
laxatives, head-ache powders full of acetanilid, soothing-syrups and
catarrh-cures full of opium and cocaine, cock-tails subtly disguised
as "bitters", "sarsaparillas", and "tonics". He shows how the fake
testimonials are made up and exploited; how the confidential letters,
telling the secret troubles of men and women, are collected by tens and
hundreds of thousands and advertised and sold--so that the victim, as he
begins to lose faith in one fake, finds another at hand, fully informed
as to his weakness. He quotes the amazing "Red Clause" in the contracts
which the patent-medicine makers have with thousands of daily and weekly
papers, whereby the makers are able to control the press of the country
and prevent legislation against the "Great American Fraud."

There are a thousand religious papers in America, weekly and monthly;
and what is their attitude on this question? Mr. Adams tells us:

Whether because church-going people are more trusting, and therefore
more easily befooled than others, or from some more obscure reason, many
of the religious papers fairly reek with patent medicine fakes.

He gives us many pages of specific instances:

Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancer vampires. He is a patron and
prop of religious journalism. It is his theory that the easiest prey is
to be found among readers of church papers. Moreover he has learned
from his father-in-law (who built a small church out of blood-money) to
capitalize his own sectarian associations, and when confronted recently
with a formal accusation he replied, with an air of injured innocence,
that he was a regular attendant at church, and could produce an
endorsement from his minister.

And here is the "Church Advocate", of Harrisburg, Pa., which publishes
quack advertisements disguised as editorials. One of them Mr. Adams
paraphrases:

As Dr. Smith is, on the face of his own statements, a self-branded
swindler and rascal, you run no risk in assuming that the Rev. C. H.
Forney, D. D., L. L. D., in acting as his journalistic supporter for
pay, is just such another as himself!

And again:

Will the editor of the "Baptist Watchman" of Boston explain by what
phenomenon of logic or elasticity of ethics he accepts the lucubrations
of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of Liquozone, of Actina, that marvelous
two-ended mechanical appliance which "cures" deafness at one terminus
and blindness at the other, and all with a little oil of mustard?

And again:

The "Christian Observer" of Louisville replied to a protesting
subscriber, suggesting that the "Collier" articles were written in a
spirit of revenge, because "Collier's" could not get patent medicine
advertising. When I asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse for his
foundation for the charge, he said that one of the typewriters must
have written the letter! Doubtless also the same highly responsible
typewriter imitated the signature with startling fidelity to Dr.
Converse's handwriting!

And here is--would you think it possible?--our "Church of Good Society"!
It has an organ in Chicago called the "Living Church", most dignified
and decorous. You have to study quite a while to ascertain what
denomination it belongs to; it will not tell you directly, for the
Anglician pose is that it is the church

 Elect from every nation,
      Yet one oer all the earth,
  Her charter of salvation,
      One Lord, one Faith, one Birth;
  One holy name she blesses,
      Partakes one holy food,
  And toward one Hope she presses,
      With every grace endued.

And this one holy institution was found setting at its peak the
black flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the modern commercial
pirate--"Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:

The editors and publishers of the "Living Church" assume no
responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.

And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's champion
labor-baiter, the late C. W. Post, that his "Grapenuts" would prevent
appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in such cases!

And here is the "Christian Endeavor World", organ of one of the most
powerful non-sectarian religious bodies in the country. Some one wrote
complaining of its medical advertising, and the answer was:

To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not publishing any
fraudulent or unworthy medical advertising...... Trusting that you
will be able to understand that we are acting according to our best and
sincerest judgment, I remain, yours very truly, The Golden Rule Company,
George W. Coleman, Business Manager.

Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud" remarks:

Assuming that the business management of the "Christian Endeavor World"
represents normal intelligence, I would like to ask whether it accepts
the statement that a pair of "magic foot drafts" applied to the soles of
the feet will cure any and every kind of rheumatism in any part of the
body? Further, if the advertising department is genuinely interested in
declining "fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I would call their attention
to the ridiculous claims of Dr. Shoop's medicines, which "cure" almost
every disease; to two hair removers, one an "Indian Secret", the other
an "accidental discovery", both either fakes or dangerous; to the lying
claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a positive cure for catarrh",
in all its stages; to "Syrup of Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a
preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal
medical constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for
cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering from an
incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which for the sake
of decency I do not care to detail in these columns, appear in recent
issues of the "Christian Endeavor World".



Riches in Glory

There came recently to Los Angeles a "world-famous evangelist", known as
"Gipsy" Smith. There was a shirt-waist strike at the time, and the girls
were starving, and they sent a delegation to this evangelist to ask for
help. They told him how they were mistreated, exposed to insults, driven
to sell their virtue because their wage would not support life; and
to their plea he made answer: "Get Jesus in your hearts, and these
questions will take care of themselves!"

So we see the most important of the many services which the churches
perform for the merchants--taking the revolutionary hope of Jesus, for a
kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting it into a dream of a
golden harp in an uncertain future. To appreciate the fullness of this
betrayal, take the prayer which Jesus dictated--so simple, direct and
practical: "Give us this day our daily bread", and put it beside
the hymns which the slave-congregations are trained to sing. In my
neighborhood is a one-roomed building with a plate glass front, upon
which I observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters the
sign "Glory Mission". I approach him, and he drops his work and welcomes
me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I answer that I am.
I have to shout the good tidings into his ear, as he is very deaf.
He presents me with his card, which shows that he bears the title of
"Reverend", also the sobriquet of "Mountain Missionary". I ask him to
permit me to examine the hymn-book which he uses in his work, and with
touching eagerness he presses upon me a well-worn volume bearing the
title "Waves of Glory". I seat myself and note down a few of the baits
it sets out for hungry wage-slaves:

 O, there's a plenty, O, there's a plenty,
  There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!

 Riches in glory, riches in glory,
  Royal supply our wants exceed!

 Feasting, I'm feasting,
  I'm feasting with my Lord!

 Beautiful robes, beautiful robes,
  Beautiful robes we then shall wear!

 Jerusalem the golden,
  With milk and honey blest!

 Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem,
  I'll be there, I'll be there!

 Blest Canaan land, bright Canaan land,
  I love to be in Canaan land!

 Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
  As on the highest mount I stand,
  I look away across the sea,
  Where mansions are prepared for me!

 In the sweet bye and bye
  We shall meet on that beautiful shore--

I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I. W. W. who
was hanged three or four years ago in Utah, and who used this tune in
his little red book of revolutionary chants:

 You will eat, bye and bye,
  In the glorious land above the sky;
  Work and pray, live on hay,
  You'll get pie in the sky when you die!



Captivating Ideals

In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero is a
Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his diggings in
the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into our superior
civilization. The thing that impresses him most is what he calls "the
immortality idea". The person who got that up was a world-genius, he
exclaims. "If you can once get a man to believing in immortality, there
is no more left for you to desire; you can take everything he owns--you
can skin him alive if it pleases you--and he will bear it all with
perfect good humor."

And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the effort
of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that view of
the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the language of
scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiastical
authority, equipped with every tool of modern learning, would set about
voicing the idea that the function of the teaching of Heaven is to
chloroform the poor, so that the rich may continue to rob them in
security?

Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of scholarship,
dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges Chatterton-Hill, of
the University of Geneva. Its title is "The Sociological Value of
Christianity", and from cover to cover it is a warning to the rich of
the danger they run in giving up their religion and ceasing to support
its priests. It explains how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded
in making the individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which
are indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as
indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor
makes plain just what he means by "individual suffering, individual
sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism; and the advantage
of Christianity is that it makes you think that by submitting to
these horrors, you are profiting your own soul. "By making individual
salvation depend on the acceptance of suffering, on the voluntary
sacrifice of egotistical interests, Christianity adapts the individual
to society". And this, as the professor explains, is not an easy thing
to do, in a world in which so many people are thinking for themselves.
"The only means of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
sacrifice...... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful idea!"
And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this
purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist
on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering--of that
suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress if
it could."

You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever
you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only
your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned to
elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of "overproduction";
you have raised too much food, and therefore you are starving, you have
woven too much cloth, and therefore you are naked, you have finished the
world for your masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way.
As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it, "Your suppression imposes
itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of the Christian
religion is to make you enjoy the process, by "captivating you with a
sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest will fill your nostrils with
incense, your eyes with candle-lights and images, your ears with sweet
music and soothing words; and so you will perish without raising a
finger! "Here," reflects the professor, "we see how magnificently the
teaching of Jesus applies to all classes of society!"

Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the
embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the capitalist
system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that troubles him? Not
for long. Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar's
equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at any moment he may
soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you
and me. "Inequality signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but
the standard whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the standard of
the moral law."

The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known, but
those which govern his moral nature cannot be known; the moral nature
appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject to the law of
inequality!

As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as wonderful
as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with the fact that his
divinely guided church had burned men for teaching the Copernican view
of the universe; that infallible popes had again and again condemned
this heresy ex cathedra. Said the eloquent cardinal:

Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and
science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest. How
can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth
till we know what motion is?



Spook Hunting

Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian professors
realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is never far from the
thoughts of any of them--for, of course, no man can look at the present
system and not wonder how the poor stand it, and more especially why
they stand it. There have been many thinking men who have given up the
miracle-business quite cheerfully, but have stood appalled at the idea
of letting the lower classes find out the truth. You note that idea
continually in the writings of Professor Goldwin Smith, who was a
free-thinker, but also a bourgeois publicist, with a deep sense of
responsibility to the money-masters of the world. He was about as honest
a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was the beau ideal of the
New York "Evening Post", which indicates his point of view. He wrote:

It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a future state,
for a short measure of happiness here, has materially helped to
reconcile the less favored members of the community to the inequalities
of the existing order of things.

When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course called
"Practical Ethics", under a professor by the name of Hyslop. The course
differed from most of the forty that I tried, in that it gave evidence
that the professor was accustomed to read the morning paper. He had
learned that American politics were rotten; his idea of "Practical
Ethics" was to outline in elaborate detail a complete scheme of
constitutional changes which would make it impossible for the "boss"
to control the government. I think I must have been born with a charm
against bourgeois thought, for the good professor never fooled me an
instant; I remember I used to smile at the idea of how quickly the
"boss" would brush through his constitutional cobwebs. The reforms
required an elaborate campaign of publicity--and of course long before
they could be put into practice, the politicians would be ready with
devices to make them of no effect.

Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to hunting
spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he is a determined
and courageous man, and it seems possible that he may really have bagged
some spooks. All I wish to point out here is the method he uses in
seeking to persuade the heedless rich to support the spook-hunting
industry. The very same argument as we got from the University of Geneva
and the University of Toronto! Says our head spook-hunter:

There has been no belief that exercised so much power upon the poor as
that in a future life. The politicians, men of the world, have known
this so well as to postpone the day of political judgment by it for many
years.

And again:

The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and having
abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its fundamental beliefs,
has lost its power over the poor and the laboring classes..... The
spiritual ideal of life has gone out of the masses as well as the
classes, and nothing is left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.

And again, more menacingly yet:

The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution that the poor
will not sacrifice both wealth and immortality.

What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step up,
ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the Psychical Research
hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as to the cost of milk and
honey in Jerusalem the Golden!

You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the Wholesale
Pickpockets' Association making use of their incantations. You admired
my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did
not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts. But what do these
quotations mean, unless they mean what I have said? Are not these three
professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of
learning you can find in our present-day society?

And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the young
student of the working-class, who goes to these books and discovers
that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who discovers that
professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not interested in
justice among men, but only in collecting funds for their specialty;
that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach the rich how to
paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonder that such young students
conclude that bourgeois thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are
prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the temple of
truth?



Running the Rapids

And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means to
society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the hands
of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all the
intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support of
vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of us,
caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for a
metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds
of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the
bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there
comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into a
torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along with the
speed of a race-horse. With every sense alert, You watch for the rocks,
and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one side or the other and
with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance
you fail to do it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your
belongings go down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool,
and not seen for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the
voyage of life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The
paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but
in most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book;
and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and Hebrew,
and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable obstruction--a
war, or the gonococcus, or the I. W. W.--he casts a holy wafer upon the
foaming torrent.

And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save
yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard
together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches
in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the
Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals in
control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital tragedy,
and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged
to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman
bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of
gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry than to
burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course those who
think him a voice of God can form no conception of the dignity and grace
of love, and if you want sound and wholesome sex-conventions, you will
be as apt to find them among the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among
the followers of the Apostle to the Gentiles.

You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a second
chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You are not
permitted to tell your own story, for that would be "collusion;" you
listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful and shameful
details of your domestic misfortune, under the cross-questioning of
lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever decent instincts they
may possess, and follow blindly the details of a prescribed procedure,
at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you
find that the privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by
corrupt court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the
newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept and
where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have been thrown
out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as they rend the
carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps, you find that you
have gone through this horror for nothing--the august court with its
Roman Catholic judge throws out your petition, its suspicions having
been excited by the fact that when you discovered your domestic
tragedy, you sought to behave like a civilized person, with pity and
self-restraint, instead of like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an
Italian grand opera.



Birth Control

I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by minds
enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to the
race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used to
slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these weapons are not allowed
to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider the
misery which is piling itself up in the slams of our great cities---the
degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying as never
before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and painless method
of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce
their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and
so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a simple,
entirely harmless, and practically costless method of preventing
conception, which would enable us to check the blind and futile
fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as animals.
Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our great cities;
consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded women, bearing one
half-nurtured infant after another, struggling desperately to feed and
care for them, and seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are
born-until finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives
up and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women,
in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the primitive
savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson
has estimated that in the United States alone there are a million
abortions every year; and consider that all this hideous mass of
suffering--a bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by
any newspaper correspondent--might be avoided by the use of a simple
sterilizing formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation
of Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the
nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and
courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young
girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for
telling poverty-ridden, slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant!

And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors who
perpetrated this infamy under a so-called "reform" administration in New
York City--and what do you find? The first thing you find is that they
themselves, one and all, practice birth-control with their wives or
their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the statute-books
are crowded with other laws which they make no pretense of enforcing;
for example, the law which forbids the saloons to be open on
Sunday--which law they take the liberty of understanding to mean that
the saloons shall not have their front doors open on Sunday. You will
find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos; they
are afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid of the
campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and landlords, who
cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women of the slums
were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf in sheep's
clothing, the trader, making use of Tradition-worship; hiding behind
the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers, who repeat the
instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply
and replenish the earth." As if God were as blind as a Fifth Avenue
preacher, and could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full
of all fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and
a modern East Side tenement-room, with an oil stove and no windows and
no water-closet, and the price of cabbage seven cents a pound!



Sheep

There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America.
They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the West
and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I do not
wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more democratic
than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the liquor
traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly derived
from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are honestly
seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor for
progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran scholasticism,
narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they cannot help
it, because they are pledged by their creeds and foundations to
Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things because their
ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain ways, because of
certain facts which existed in the world three thousand years ago, but
which now are known only to historians.

You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the example
of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all the rest will
leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may have
been taken away in the meantime. The scientist explains this
seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in high mountains,
and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when the leader
leaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, without waiting to see
in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains and no enemies,
but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still
sews buttons at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred
years ago all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad
builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to overturn,
because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled by mules. In the same
way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in spite of the fact that the
microscope affords him complete protection against disease; the orthodox
Catholic will not eat meat on Friday, because he thinks Jesus was
crucified on that day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased
wife's sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox
Baptist requires total immersion in a climate quite different from that
of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and
exercise on the Sabbath.

In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life, tending
sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent thing for them to
rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear
the reading of the best literature of their time. But nowadays the city
slave spends his week-days shut up in an office, poring over a ledger,
or in a sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously, therefore,
the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the open air,
and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we human sheep? We
write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern statute-books, and if the
city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries to play base-ball, we send
a policeman and take him to jail, and next morning he is fined five
dollars, and probably loses his job.

In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened,
but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there are tennis courts
built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot
use these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew taboo.
My mail is not delivered to me, the swimming pool in the park is closed
to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire about it, I am
told that it is desirable that city employees should have one day's
rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be possible to relay the
employees, so that they might all have one, or even two days' rest a
week, and still give the public their rights on Sunday, there is no
answer. But I know the answer, having probed our politics of hypocrisy.
There is a "church vote" at which all politicians tremble; there are
clergymen, humanly jealous when their peculiar graft is threatened, and
hoping that if the law enforces a general boredom, the public may be
more disposed to endure the boredom of sermons.

In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving pictures
having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the picture-shows
are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred concerts"--which, under
the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to mean any sort of vaudeville;
so what we have is a free rein to the imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and
the obscenities of Anna Held and Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest
moralists of our times, such as Ibsen and Brieux.

I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an
experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this century
of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy,
whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the
establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve a
sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for playing a
game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly
sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to
work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell
full of vermin--in a building housing some five hundred wretches, black
and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under circumstances which
never permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the sunshine
or the sky. They had no exercise court to their prison, and the inmates
were not permitted to speak to one another, but ate their meals in dead
silence, and walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had
their only occupation working for a sweat-shop contractor; this on
the outskirts of the capital city of Wilmington, with no less than
ninety-one churches! The writer was informed that he would return to
this institution regularly every week unless he abandoned his godless
habit of playing tennis on a private club court on Sunday; he only
escaped the painful punishment by making the discovery that at the
Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of the leading officials of
the city and state to play golf every Sunday, and by threatening to
employ detectives and have these mighty ones arrested and sent to
their own prison. Which shows again the importance of understanding the
relationship of Superstition and Big Business!



BOOK SIX -- The Church of the Quacks

   They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
    And how one ought never to think of one's self,
    And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
  My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
        How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
        How pleasant it is to have money.
                                   Clough.



Tabula Rasa

Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to
write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual
life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and
poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom;
I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what freedom means
in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start
some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new
cult around it, and earn a living out of it.

My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle
Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found myself in a
nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd
character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let the
devil snare them into resting on the first day of the week, whereas the
Bible states distinctly that the Lord "rested on the seventh day". So
here is a million dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients
and employees, and on Friday at sundown the silence of death settles
upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of Saturday, when
everything comes suddenly to life again, and there is a little
celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I used to call
"sterilized dancing"--the men pairing with men and the women with women.

They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with their
eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways, because, as not
all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every
day of the week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training
"medical missionaries" to send to Africa, and is teaching these
supposed-to-be-scientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and
not proven anyhow!

You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment alone
in his office, and he will smile and admit that of course it is not
necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it
is--there are different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know
how it is. You have an institution founded upon a certain dogma, and
run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing
things. It is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the patients.
People will come from all over the country, and pay high prices to stay
in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them, which you
think more important than teaching abstract notions about their being
descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture vegetarian foods for
them, and build up an enormous business--so obtaining that Power which
is the thing desired of men.

This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could cite a
hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of another sect,
the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive Methodists,
Bible-worshippers not content with the King James version, but going
back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a "University", located in one of
the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institution with
seventy-five students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the
"president," who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanse of
his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest
grammatical errors, such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year
witnessed a split, and the founding of a brand new church and
"University"--because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so
much that the students got no chance to study; also because he sent
home a rich man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her
fleshly nature.

And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you
back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady friend of mine,
generously blessed with this world's goods, asks me have I seen the
hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies, "Didn't you know there was a
hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and never has anything to do
with the world. He has no books; he contemplates spiritually." I picture
my friend with her large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies,
drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave. "He received you?" I ask.
"Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh,
how he stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my friend
thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to her that I
am not jesting, but that there are definite physiological phenomena
incidental to the ecstatic life.



The Book of Mormon

Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still
stranger cult.

On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the
Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in
a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the
appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit
of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make
miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout
believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In this case the plates were
written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the Angel thoughtfully provided
Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magic stones with which to
read the records. They proved to deal with a mystery which has haunted
the minds of Bible students for centuries--the fate of the "lost ten
tribes of Israel", who were now revealed to have been the ancestors of
the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a new religion,
and gave him prophecies concerning things in general; so, on the 6th
of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N. Y., there was formally
launched the "Church of the Latter Day Saints." Smith turned over to his
followers his translation of the miraculous plates, called "The Book of
Mormon"; obviously genuine, for it read precisely like the books which
we already know are the revealed word of God. But, on chance that this
might not be sufficient, we were offered in the preface two documents,
the "Testimony of Three Witnesses", and the "Further Testimony of Eight
Witnesses". The latter being the shorter, may be quoted:

Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, unto whom
this work shall come: That Joseph Smith Jr., the translator of this
work, has shewn unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have
the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath
translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings
there-on, all of which has the appearance of ancient work and of curious
workmanship. And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the
said Smith has shewn unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a
surety that the said Smith hath got the plates of which we have spoken.
And we give our names unto the world, to witness that which we have
seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.

  Christian Whitmer
  Jacob Whitmer
  Peter Whitmer, Jr.
  John Whitmer
  Hiram Page
  Joseph Smith, Sr.
  Hyrum Smith
  Saml. H. Smith

The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore out
the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its divine origin; it
was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted, and its followers
proceeded to massacre the nearby unbelieving populations, just as the
divinely guided Hebrews had done. Driven from place to place, they built
at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful temple, according to plans revealed in a
vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where they
have a magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers. The
United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected to their
practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have as many wives
as they could support; the government confiscated the church's property,
and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy, as is done by elderly
church members in other parts of the country. Recently the head of
the church, who bears the title of "Prophet, Seer and Revelator", was
persuaded to permit an examination of one of its secret plates, the
"Book of Abraham", by egyptologists, who found that it was ordinary
Egyptian hieroglyphics, not "reformed", but containing prayers to
the sun-god. But this will of course make no difference to the devout
followers of Joseph--any more than it has made to devout Catholics and
Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that the Bible legends
and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and that the four gospels
date from the second and third centuries after Christ.



Holy Rolling

All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults, some of them
pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely grotesque. Thus,
for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the "Christian
Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed himself up in scarlet and purple
robes with stars on. Through his Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty
Company he became enormously wealthy; he finally announced himself as
"Elijah the Restorer." I remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to
New York, and P. T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white elephant never
made such a sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis overwhelmed the
old prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and his tabernacle
and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the rule of all
religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting up, and suing
one another in the law-courts.

Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers", ghastly sects
which cultivate the religious hysterias, and have spread like a plague
among the women of our lonely prairie farms and desert ranches. The
"Holy Rollers", who call themselves the "Apostolic Church", have a
meeting place here in Pasadena, and any Sunday evening at nine o'clock
you may see the Spirit of the Lord taking possession of the worshippers,
causing moans and shrieks and convulsions; you may see a woman holding
her hands aloft for seventeen minutes by the watch, making chattering
sounds like an ape. This is called "talking in tongues" and is a sign
of the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come back at eleven in the
evening, you will find the entire congregation, men and women, prostrate
on the floor, or hanging over the benches; and maybe a child moaning in
terror, having a devil cast out.

You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself into these
convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust", which is "published Monthly
(D. V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work and Bible Training School."
Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The Pentecostal Baptism", and tells the
story of her experiences. She "camped on the Word of God," she declares.

I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the mission told me,
"You can go down to the mission and stay there all day. There is plenty
of wood, and you can stay there all night." I went down, and there
was plenty of "let go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got
wonderfully loosed.....

Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God told me it was
mine. What was there left for me to pray about. He spoiled my praying
and I took up praising. I praised God that He who worked in the Upper
Room was working the same in me. I praised, and I praised, and I
praised. The devil said to me, "That's mechanical." I said, "I'll praise
You Lord, and if You want real praise, You'll have to put the wind in
the sails."

That's the way I came through. One morning I was just getting out of
bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the enemy likes to call it, began
to come. The Lord said, "Let it babble!" I let. The babble increased,
and by night I was up to my neck. I let. I still let. That's all.
Someone else does the work, and it does not tire you.

And here is another paper. "Meat in Due Season: published monthly, or
as often as the Lord leads." The editor quotes the Bible, "Call upon the
name of the Lord," and explains that "Call means call." The word appears
to have a special meaning to these pentecostal persons--it means working
yourself into a frenzy of agitation; as the editor puts it, "you must
lay hold of the horns of the altar." He goes on to exhort--the bold face
being his:

Pray as if your very life depended upon it! The first few minutes
seemingly all the powers of hell will contend every word, the next few,
relief in a measure will come, more liberty in calling. In a very little
while you will be dead to the room, dead to the chair, dead to everyone
around you, dead to all and tremendously alive to your desperate need
and emptyness; this conviction will grow as you increase calling upon
Him. It maybe you'll weep, it maybe you'll perspire, it maybe your
clothing will be deranged, it, maybe your throat will get sore. Never
for a moment let your mind rest on the condition of your person. Open
your mouth and God has promised to fill it. Ask persistently until the
very floor seems to sink beneath you and the fountains of the deep, of
your heart let loose. Like David, "pour out your soul" like one would
pour water out of a bucket. I have seen hundreds get through right at
this point. When self-thought, reticence, decorum, reserve, propriety
and dignity had all been thrown to the four winds of heaven. Self was
then obliterated and consciousness of person gone. Draw near to God and
He will draw near to you saith the scripture, but you must draw near to
Him first.

These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a sect which
originated in England, but was driven by persecution to the New World.
The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of True Believers in
Christ's Second Coming," and were founded by Ann Lee, who, variously
termed herself the "Female Christ", the "Holy Comforter", and the
"God-anointed Woman". They might be termed the suffragettes of religion,
for they pray always to "Our Father and Mother, which are in heaven."
They were taught the convenient doctrine that their Founder had
"spiritual illumination", so that any evidence of the senses used
against her might deceive. She governed through terror, holding that by
her mental powers she could inflict torment upon any of her followers.
Fortunately she taught absolute celibacy, and so there are now only
about a thousand of her disciples.



Bible Prophecy

This far western country swarms with those fanatics who await the return
of Christ, and find in Bible chronology positive evidence that he is
coming on a specified day. Seldom do I give a lecture on Socialism that
some eager old lady does not come up to me and point out how futile are
my hopes, because the Millenium will come before the Revolution. Several
times I have come on an item in the newspapers, telling of a group of
people, sometimes whole villages, selling their goods and going out into
the fields to shout and sing and pray, expecting the vision of the
Lord and His Angels in the skies. I have in my hand a pamphlet entitled
"Shekineh: The Glory of God in Israel, Facts Mathematically Foretold,
of the Soon Coming of Our Blessed Lord." It is earnestly, yearningly
written, in that spirit of feeble-minded affectionateness which the
Bible-sects seem to encourage:

Now dear reader you see that these problems tell a wonderful story which
I know are the Eternal Truths of God. Jesus is soon coming. I believe
that from now on we can say, next week perhaps our blessed Lord will
return. Yet the time may not end till the close of the A. M. year, which
will be March 20th, 1897. But let us take up the sickle of God, etc.
Oh, my Christian friends, live near the Blessed Christ, and gain eternal
life through Jesus Our Lord!

In the public library I find another pamphlet, entitled "The Our Race,"
which proves that the "lost ten tribes of Israel" are not the American
Indians, but the Irish! And here is a publication of the "Watch Tower
Bible and Tract Society," declaring:

The great pyramid in Egypt is a witness to all the events of the ages
and of our day. The pyramid's downward passage under "a Draconis"
symbolizes the course of Sin. Its first ascending passage symbolizes the
Jewish Age. Its Grand Gallery symbolizes the Gospel Age. Its upper step
symbolizes the approaching period of tribulation and anarchy, "Judgment"
upon Christendom.

It is a Sunday morning, and I sit in the California sunshine revising
this manuscript, when a decorous-looking young man approaches, having a
sack over his shoulder. "From the Bible-students," he says politely, and
hands me a little paper, "The Bible Students' Monthly: an Independent,
Unsectarian Religious Newspaper, Specially devoted to the Forwarding of
the Laymen's Home Missionary Movement for the Glory of God and Good of
Humanity." The leading article is headed "The Fall of Babylon: Ancient
Babylon a Type--Mystic Babylon the Antitype: Why Christendom must
Suffer--the Final Outcome." A note explains:

The following article is extracted from Pastor Russell's posthumous
volume entitled "The Finished Mystery," the 7th in the series of his
Studies in the Scriptures and published subsequent to his death. Pastor
Russell held the distinction of being the most fearless and powerful
writer of modern times on ecclesiastical subjects. In this posthumous
volume, which is called "his last legacy to the Christians on earth,"
is found a thorough exposition of every verse in the entire book of
Revelation and also an elucidation of the obscure prophecy of Ezekiel.
The book contains 608 pages, handsomely bound in embossed cloth.

Pastor Russell used to publish a two-column sermon in some hundreds of
Sunday newspapers, together with a presentment of his features--solemn,
stiff, white-whiskered, set off with a "choker" and a black broadcloth
coat. There are five million such faces in America, but if you have
an impulse to despair for your country, remember that it produced Mark
Twain and Artemus Ward, as well as Pastor Russell and the Moody and
Sankey hymn-book. I quote one passage from "The Finished Mystery", in
order that the reader may know what it means to "hold the distinction
of being the most fearless and powerful writer of modern times on
ecclesiastical subjects." Pastor Russell does not approve of the
Methodists, and he quotes twelve verses of Revelation, line by line
and phrase by phrase, showing how the evil course and downfall of the
Wesleyan system were divinely foretold. Thus:

"But that they should be tormented five months."--In symbolic time, 150
years--5 X 30 = 150. (Ezek. 4:6.) Wesley became the first Methodist in
1728. (Rev. 9:1.) When the Methodist denomination, with all the others,
was cast off from favor in 1878 (Rev. 3:14) its powers to torment men by
preaching what Presbyterians describe as "Conscious misery, eternal in
duration" came to an end legally, and to a large extent actually--Rev.
9:10.

P. S. A few months pass, and while this book is going to press, "The
Finished Mystery" is suppressed by the government and several score
"Bible Students" are landed in jail for sedition.



Koreshanity

Such are the beliefs built on the Bible. But there are other ancient
writings with strange nomenclature and ritual and symbolism, calculated
to impress the unlettered; also our prophets have imaginations of their
own, and can invent nomenclature and ritual and symbolism never seen in
heaven nor on earth before. Thus there is Dr. Newo Newi New, who called
himself "Archbishop of the Newthot Church," and gathered about him a
harem of devoted females in San Francisco, and was landed in jail for
using the mails to defraud. Or there is "Oahspe, the Cosmic Bible," a
work of brand-new revelation with a brand-new view of the universe and
all things therein:

The reader soon discovers that he must radically revise not only his
ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the order and significance of names
and titles commonly applied to the Transcendental Brethren. The great
provinces of Etheria are presided over by chiefs, chosen for their
superior development in wisdom and love. For our solar system to cross
one of these provinces requires about 3,000 years, and between them are
belts of high Etherian light which take several years to pass over.
The passage of each province is a cycle of earthly history, and the
crossings are called Dawns of Dan.

And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed by the Lord to Dr.
C. R. Teed of Chicago in the year 1889. This new seer took the name of
Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, "the Shepherd from Joseph, the Stone
of Israel, the Sun-Man; the illuminating center of the Son of man", and
went out on the streets of the city to preach that the earth is a hollow
sphere with the stars inside. The street urchins of the pork-packing
metropolis threw stones at him, and the irreverent newspapers took up
his adventures, with the result that followers gathered, and now there
is a flourishing colony in Florida, with a dignified magazine called
"The Flaming Sword", and a collection of propaganda volumes: "The
Cellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of Koreshan Universology and the
New Geodesy"; "The Immortal Manhood, the Laws and Processes of its
Attainment in the Flesh"; "The Great Red Dragon, by Lord Chester"; "The
Coming of the Shepherd from Joseph, The Standing of the Great Ensign, by
Koresh." The "Religio-science" of this Chicago revelator is based, first
upon some precise measurements of the earth which prove that its surface
is concave; and second upon some philological discoveries very much
resembling puns. Thus the "cross of Christ" is explained in a sense of
the word more common among horse-breeders than among theologians:

The highest characteristic of the alchemical law is the cross of
Christ with sensual man. The cross means that the Lord God, in order to
perpetuate his own being, descends into the race of sensuality.

And again, when someone asks about meteors:

"The word Heaven means things heaved up, that is, heaved up from their
material basis, the earth; thus, the meteors which fall to the earth
are composed of metallic, mineral, and geological substances,
being materialized or actually created in the atmosphere by an
alchemico-organic process from zones or belts periodically open, which
precipitate their contents in the form or shape of meteors."

And perhaps I ought also to quote the "Indicia of Human Progress", by
"Berthaldine, Matrona". I don't know what a "Matrona" is--unless it is
a female matron. This female matron tells me that now is the "Time of
Restitution", and explains that "the prolification of the human race
has reached a fruition of the adultery of the truth and good of the Lord
with the fallacies and evils of the mortal hells"..... We have come,
it seems, to the "age of Pisces", which is "one of the greatest radical
prolification"; and what we now need is the "power of polarization", so
that we may join the "White Horse Army of the Most High", which is the
organization of the "Aquarian age", proclaimed by Koresh on January
15th, 1891.



Mazdaznan

And here is another and even more startling revelation from Chicago,
given to a seer by the name of Dr. Otoman Prince of Adusht Ha'nish,
prophet of the Sun God, Prince of Peace, Manthra Magi of Temple El
Katman, Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and Envoy of Mazdaznan living,
Viceroy-Elect and International Head of Master-Thot. If you had happened
to live near the town of Mendota, Illinois, and had known the German
grocer-boy named Otto Hanisch, you might at first have trouble in
recognizing him through this transmogrification. I have traced his
career in the files of the Chicago newspapers, and find him herding
sheep, setting type, preaching prestidigitation, mesmerism, and fake
spiritualism, joining the Mormon Church, then the "Christian Catholic
Church in Zion", and then the cult of Brighouse, who claimed to be
Christ returned. Finally he sets himself up in Chicago as a Persian
Magi, teaching Yogi breathing exercises and occult sex-lore to the
elegant society ladies of the pork-packing metropolis. The Sun God,
worshipped for two score centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has
a new shrine on Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at
which his disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms--"the white and pinkish
for males, the blue-tinted for females". He wears a long flowing robe of
pale grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid shoes,
and he sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner Studies", price five
dollars per volume, with information on such subjects as:

The Immaculate Conception and its Repetition; The Secrets of Lovers
Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates; Magnetic Attraction and Electric
Mating.

A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jail for six months;
but that does not harm his cult, which now has a temple in Chicago,
presided over by a lady called Kalantress and Evangelist; also
a "Northern Stronghold" in Montreal, an "Embassy" in London, an
"International Aryana" in Switzerland, and "Centers" all over America.
At the moment of going to press, the prophet himself is in flight,
pursued by a warrant charging him with improper conduct with a number of
young boys in a Los Angeles hotel.

I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a farrago of
every kind of ancient mysticism--paper and binding from the Bible,
illustrations from the Egyptian, names from the Zoroastrian, health
rules from the Hindoos, laws from the Confucians--price ten dollars per
volume. Would you like to discover your seventeen senses, to develop
them according to the Gallama principle, and to share the "expansion of
the magnetic circles"? Here is the way to do it:

Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one exhalation, speak
slowly:

Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth hidden by the
vase of dazzling light.

Again inhale for four seconds, and breathe out the following sentence
upon one exhalation as before:

Soften the radiation of Thy Illuminating Splendor, that I may behold Thy
True Being.

I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of the prophet's
arriving there. He takes the front page with the captivating headline:
"Women Didn't Think Till They Put On Corsets". The interview tells about
his mysteriousness, his aloofness, his bird-like-diet, and his personal
beauty. "Despite his seventy-three years, Ha'nish evidences no sign
of age. His keen blue eyes showed no sign of wavering. There were no
wrinkles on his face, and his walk was that of a man of forty." The
humor of this becomes apparent when we mention that at Ha'nish's trial,
three or four years ago, he was proven to be thirty-five years old!

Being thus warned as to the accuracy of American journalism, we shall
not be taken in by the repeated statements that the Mazdaznan prophet
is a millionaire. But there is no doubt that he is wealthy; and as all
Americans wish to be wealthy, I will quote his formula of prosperity,
his method of accomplishing what might be called the Individual
Revolution:

When hungry and you do not know where to get your next piece of bread,
do not despair. Thy Father, all-loving, has provided you with everything
that will meet all cases of emergency. Place your teeth tightly
together, with tongue pressing against the lower teeth and lips parted.
Breathe in, close lips immediately, exhaling through the nostrils.
Breathe again; if saliva forms in your mouth, hold your breath so you
can swallow it first before you exhale. You thus take out of the air the
metal-substance contained therein; you can even taste the iron which you
convert into substance required for making the blood. Should you feel
that, although you have sufficient iron in the blood, there is a lack of
copper and zinc and silver, place upper teeth over lower, keep lower lip
tightly to lower teeth, now breathe and you can even taste the metals
named. Then should you feel you need more gold element for your brain
functions, place your back teeth together just as if you were to grind
the back teeth, taking short breaths only. You will then learn to know
that there is gold and silver all around us. That our bodies are filled
with quite a quantity of gold.



Black Magic

What all this means is that we have a continent, with a hundred million
half-educated people, materially prosperous, but spiritually starving;
so any man who possesses personality, who looks in any way strange and
impressive, or has hunted up old books in a library, and can pronounce
mysterious words in a thrilling voice--such a man can find followers.
Anybody can do it with any doctrine, from anywhere, Persia or Patagonia,
Pekin or Pompei. I would be willing to wager that if I cared to come out
and announce that I had had a visit from God last night, and to devote
such literary and emotional power as I possess to communicating a new
revelation, I could have a temple, a university, and a million dollars
within five years at the outside. And if at the end of five years I
were to announce that I had played a joke on the world, some one of my
followers would convince the faithful that I had been an agent of God
without knowing it, and that the leadership had now been turned over to
him.

I would not be understood as believing that all our cults are undiluted
fakery, for that would be doing injustice to some earnest people. There
are, in this country, many followers of the Persian reformer, Abbas
Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and who have what I am inclined to
think is the purest and most dignified religion in existence. There was
a man named Jacob Beilhardt, who founded a cult in Illinois with the
painful name of "Spirit Fruit Colony", who nevertheless was a man of
spiritual insight, a true mystic; he was honest, and so he failed, and
died of a broken heart. Also there are the Christian Scientists and the
Theosophists, so exasperating that one would like to throw them onto the
rubbish-heap, who yet compel us to sift over their mountains of chaff
for the grains of truth which will bear fruit in future.

While we western races have been exploring the natural world and
perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo students have been exploring
the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and Lodge and Janet
and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us today they had hints of a
long time ago; and doubtless they have hints of other things, upon which
our scientists have not yet come. I have friends, perfectly sane and
competent people, who tell me that they can see auras, and use this
ability as a means of judging character. Shall I say that there are no
auras, simply because I do not happen to have this gift of seeing them?
In the same way, having read Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living," I am
not ready to ridicule the claim of the Yogi adepts, that they are able
to project some kind of astral body, and to communicate with one another
from distant places. But granting such occult powers in a world of
economic strife, what follows? Simply new floods of charlatanism,
elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and metaphysic for the
deluding and plundering of the credulous.

I have seen the thing working itself out in one case known to me. A
young man had a gift of mental healing; I know, because I saw it work;
but it did not always work, and that was annoying. He was penniless
and had a taste for power, and to eke out his erratic endowment he got
himself books of Eastern lore, and day by day as I watched him I could
see him becoming more and more impressive, mysterious and forbidding.
Today he is a full-fledged wonder-worker, with the language of a dozen
mystic cults at his tongue's end, and the reverent regard of many
wealthy ladies. I have never tried to break through his guard, but I
feel certain that he is a deliberate charlatan.

This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible. Just as the
manufacturer of honest foods is driven out by the adulterator, so the
worker of miracles drives out the sincere investigator. As a result we
have here in America a plague of Eastern cults, with "swamis" using
soft yellow robes and soft brown eyes to win the souls of idle society
ladies. These teachers of ancient Hindoo lore despise us as a race of
barbarians; but they stay--whether because of love of man or woman, I do
not pretend to say.

There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and institutes
and temples and colonies, and a doctrine as complex and detailed and
fantastic as that of the Roman Catholics. I have already referred to the
writings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway Russian army officer's daughter,
whose career reads like a tale out of the Arabian Nights. And there is
Annie Besant, who was once an ardent worker in the Social-democratic
Federation; H. M. Hyndman tells of his dismay when she went to India and
walked in a procession between two white bulls! Here in California is
Madame Tingley, with a colony and a host of followers in a miniature
paradise. Men work at money-lending or manufacturing sporting-goods, and
when they get old and tired they make the thrilling discovery that they
have souls; the theosophists cultivate these souls and they leave their
money to the soul-cause, and there are lawsuits and exposes in the
newspapers. For, you see, there is ferocious rivalry in the game of
cultivating millionaire souls; there are slanders and feuds, just as
in soulless affairs. "Don't have anything to do with Madame Tingley,"
whispers a Theosophist lady to my wife; and when my wife in all
innocence inquires, "Why not?" the awe-stricken answer comes, "She
practices black magic!"

Let me add that I do not say that she practices black magic. I do not
believe that she could practice it, even if she wanted to--I do not
believe in black magic. My purpose is merely to show how theosophists
quarrel: going back to the days of Anu and Baal and the bronze image of
the Babylonian fire-god:

 Let them die, but let me live!  Let them be put under a ban, but
let me prosper! Let them perish, but let me increase! Let them become
weak, but let me wax strong!



Mental Malpractice

This is the other side of the fair shield of religious faith. Why, if
there be a power which loves and can be persuaded to aid us, may there
not also be a power which hates, and can be persuaded to destroy? No
religion has ever been able to answer this, and therefore none has ever
been able to escape from devil-terrors. Even Jesus was pursued by Satan,
and the Holy Catholic Church has its ceremonies for the exorcising
of demons, and a most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our
friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of all evil,
their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that they
are perfect in God--yet tormented by a squalid phobia called "Mental
Malpractice", or "Malicious Animal Magnetism".

Christian Science is the most characteristic of American religious
contributions. Just as Billy Sunday is the price we pay for failing to
educate our base-ball players, so Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy is
the price we pay for failing to educate our farmer's daughters.

That she had a power to cure disease I do not doubt, because I have a
little of it myself. At first my opinion was that her "Science" made its
way by curing the imaginary ailments of the idle rich. If a person has
nothing to do but think that he is sick, you can work easy miracles by
persuading him to think that he is well; and if he has nothing to do
but think that he is well, he will help you to build marble churches
and maintain propaganda societies. But recently I have experimented
with mental healing--enough to satisfy myself that the subconscious mind
which controls our physical functions can be powerfully influenced by
the will.

I told the story of some of these experiments in Hearst's Magazine for
April, 1914. Suffice it here to say that if you will lay your hands upon
a sick person, forming a vivid mental picture of the bodily changes you
desire, and concentrating the power of your will upon them, you may be
surprised by the results, especially if you possess anything in the way
of psychic gifts. You do not have to adopt any theories, you do not
have to do it in the name of any divinity, ancient or modern; the only
bearing of such ideas is that they serve to persuade people to make the
experiment, and to make it with persistence and intensity. So it has
come about that "miracles" of healing are associated with "faith"; and
so it comes about that scientists are apt to flout the subject. But read
of the work of Janet and Charcot and their followers at the Salpetriere;
they have proven that all kinds of seeming-organic ailments may be
entirely hysterical in nature, and may be cured by the simplest form of
suggestion. Understanding this, you may find it more easy to credit the
fact that cripples do sometimes throw away their crutches in the grotto
of Lourdes. For my part, I can believe that Jesus performed all the
miracles of healing attributed to him--including the raising up of
people pronounced to be dead by the ignorance of that time. I am
convinced that in the new science of psycho-analysis we have a universe
as vast as the universe of the atom or of the stars.

The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they have mixed
it up with metaphysic and divinity, and built some four or five hundred
churches, and printed the Mother Church alone knows how many million
pamphlets and books. I once invested three of my hard-earned dollars for
a copy of the Eddy Bible, and let myself be stunned and blinded by the
flapping of metaphysical wings. It is unadulterated moonshine--as the
Platonist and Berkeleyan and Hegelian and other orthodox collegiate
metaphysical magi can prove to you in one minute. What interests me
about the phenomenon is not the slinging of tremendous words, but the
strictly Yankee use which is made of them. There is no nonsense about
saving your soul in Christian Science; what it is for is to remove your
wen, to nail down your floating kidney, and to enable you to hustle and
make money. We saw in our politics the growth of a Party of the Full
Dinner-Pail; contemporaneous therewith, and corresponding thereto,
we see in our religious life the development of a Church of the Full
Pocket-Book.

It is a strict religion--strictly cash. The heads of the cult do
not issue cheap editions of "Science and Health, With Key to the
Scriptures", to relieve the suffering of the proletariat; no--the work
is copyrighted, in all its varying and contradictory editions, and the
price is from three to seven-fifty, according to binding. Treatments
cost from three dollars to ten, whether you come and get them or take
them over the telephone. And we have no nonsense about charity, we don't
worry about the poor who fester in our city slums; because poverty is a
product of Mortal Mind, and we offer to all men a way to get rich right
off the bat. You may come to our marble churches and hear people testify
how through the power of Divine Mind they were enabled to anticipate
a rise in the stock-market. If you don't avail yourself of the
opportunity, the fault is yours, and yours also the punishment.

As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholic hierarchy is
a Bolshevik democracy in comparison. The Church is controlled by an
absolutely irresponsible self-perpetuating body of five men, who alone
dictate its policy. I have in my hand a letter from a Christian Science
healer who was listed as an "authorized practitioner", and who withdrew
from the Church because of its attitude on public questions. He sends me
a copy of his correspondence with the editors of the "Christian Science
Monitor", containing a detailed analysis of the position of that paper
on such issues as the Ballinger land-frauds. He writes:

I am thoroughly convinced now that the policy of the Church is
consciously plutocratic. The only recommendation I have heard of the
latest appointee to the Board of Directors is that he is one of the
richest men in the movement.

After the Titanic disaster, Senator La Follette brought in a carefully
drawn bill to compel steamship companies to provide life-boats and
trained crews. The "Christian Science Monitor" opposed this bill; and
when my correspondent cited the fact, he brought out a quaint bit of
metaphysical logic, as follows:

One would prefer to travel on a vessel without a single boat, rather
than on some other vessels which were loaded down with life-boats, where
the government of Mind was not understood!



Science and Wealth

The truth is that the brand of Mammon was on our Yankee religion from
the day of its birth. In the first edition of her new Bible "Mother"
Eddy dropped the hint to her readers: "Men of business have said this
science was of great advantage from a secular point of view." And in
her advertisements she threw aside all pretense, declaring that her
work "Affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which one can
accumulate a fortune." When her pupils did accumulate, she boasted of
their success; nor did she neglect her own accumulating.

It has been a dozen years since I looked into this cult; in order to be
sure that it has not been purified in the interim, I proceed to a street
corner in my home city, where is a stand with a sign: "Christian Science
Literature." I take four sample copies of a magazine, the "Christian
Science Sentinel", published by the Mother Church in Boston, and turn to
the "Testimonials of Healing". In the issue of August 11, 1917, Mary
C. Richards of St. Margarets-on-Thames, England, testifies: "Through a
number of circumstances unnecessary to relate, but proving conclusively
that the result came not from man but from God, employment was found."
In the issue of December 2, 1916, Frances Tuttle of Jersey City, N. J.,
testifies how her sister was successfully treated for unemployment by
a scientist practitioner. "Every condition was beautifully met." In the
same issue Fred D. Miller of Los Angeles, Cal., testifies: "Soon after
this wonderful truth came to me, Divine Love led me to a new position
with a responsible firm. The work was new to me, but I have given entire
satisfaction, and my salary has been advanced twice in less than a
year." In the issue of January 27, 1917, Eliza Fryant of Agricola,
Miss., testifies how she cured her little dog of snake-bite and removed
two painful corns from her own foot. In the issue of August 4, 1917,
Marcia E. Gaier, of Everett, Wash., testifies how it suddenly occurred
to her that because God is All, she would drop her planning and
outlining in regard to real estate properties, "upon which for nine
months all available material methods were tried to no effect." The
result was a triumph of "Principle".

While working in the yard one morning and gratefully communing with God,
the only power, I suddenly felt that I should stop working and prepare
for visitors on their way to look at the property. I obeyed this very
distinct command, and in about an hour I greeted two people who had
searched almost the entire city for just what we had to offer. They
had been directed to our place by what to material sense would seem an
accident, but we know it was the divine law of harmony in its universal
operation.

After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, in a Christian Science
lecture at Kansas City, Mo., should proclaim:

My friends, do you know that since the world began Christian Science is
the only system which has intelligently related religion to business?
Christian Science shows that since all ideas belong to Mind, God,
therefore all real business belongs to Him.

As I said, these people have the new-old power of mental healing,
They blunder along with it blindly, absurdly, sometimes with tragic
consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the pill-doctors know
nothing about this power, and regard it with contempt mingled with fear;
so of course the hosts of sufferers whom the pill-doctors cannot help
flock to the healers of the "Church of Christ, Scientist". According to
the custom of those who are healed by "faith", they swallow line,
hook, and sinker, creed, ritual, metaphysic and divinity. So we see
in twentieth-century America precisely what we saw in B. C.
twentieth-century Assyria--a host of worshippers, giving their worldly
goods without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of fanatics and
partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise of graft, and
harvesting that thing desired of all men, power over the lives and
destinies of others.

And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one another's
Mortal Minds, they drive one another out, they snarl over the spoils
like a pack of hungry animals. Listen to the Mother, denouncing one of
her students--a perfectly amiable and harmless youth whose only offense
was that he had gone his own way and was healing the sick for the
benefit of his own pocket-book:

Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine
of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out Truth, and
murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track with the trophies of
thy guilt--I say, Behold the "cloud" no bigger than a man's hand already
rising on the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty head the
hailstones of doom.

And again:

The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with the
torture of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall upon his own
sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when, in
the dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery
and killing. When he is attempting to turn friend away from friend,
ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread
of life and giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he
is turning back the reviving sufferer to his bed of pain, clouding his
first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall
point to the tyrant's fate, who falls at length upon the sword of
justice.



New Nonsense

In a certain city of America is a large building given up entirely to
the whims of pretty ladies. Its floors are not floors but "Promenades",
and have walls of glass, behind which, as you stroll, you see bonnets
from Paris and opera cloaks from London, furs from Alaska and blankets
from Arizona, diamonds from South Africa and beads from the Philippines,
grapes from Spain and cherries from Japan, fortune-tellers from Arabia
and dancing-masters from Petrograd and "naturopaths" from Vienna. There
are seventy-three shops, by actual count, containing everything that
could be imagined or desired by a pretty lady, whether for her body,
or for that vague stream of emotion she calls her "soul". One of the
seventy-three shops is a "Metaphysical Library", having broad windows,
and walls in pastel tints, and pretty vases with pink flowers, and
pretty gray wicker chairs in which the reader will please to be seated,
while we probe the mysteries of an activity widely spread throughout
America, called "New Thought."

We begin with a shelf of magazines having mystical titles: Azoth; Master
Mind; Aletheian; Words of Power; Qabalah; Comforter; Adept; Nautilus;
True Word; Astrological Bulletin; Unity; Uplift; Now. And then come
shelves of pretty pamphlets, alluring to the eye and the purse; also
shelves of imposing-looking volumes containing the lore and magic of a
score of races and two score of centuries--together with the very newest
manifestations of Yankee hustle and graft.

As in the case of Christian Science, these New Thoughters have a
fundamental truth, which I would by no means wish to depreciate. It is
a fact that the mysterious Source of our being is infinite, and that we
are only at the beginning of our thinking about it. It is a fact that
by appeal to it we can perform seeming miracles of mental and moral
regeneration; we can stimulate the flow of nervous energy and of the
blood, thus furthering the processes of bodily healing. But the fact
that God is Infinite and Omnipotent does not bar the fact that He has
certain ways of working, which He does not vary; and that it is our
business to explore and understand these ways, instead of setting
our fancies to work imagining other ways more agreeable to our
sentimentality.

Thus, for example, if we want bread, it is God's decree that we shall
plant wheat and harvest it, and grind and bake and distribute it. Under
conditions prevailing at the moment, it appears to be His decree that we
shall store the wheat in elevators, and ship it in freight cars, and buy
it through a grain exchange, with capital borrowed from a national
bank; in other words, that our daily bread shall be the plaything
of exploiters and speculators, until such a time as we have the
intelligence to form an effective political party and establish
Industrial Democracy. But when you come to study the ways of God in the
literature of the New Thought, do you find anything about the Millers'
Trust and the Bakers' Trust and how to expropriate these agencies of
starvation? You do not!

What you find is Bootstrap-lifting; you find gentlemen and lady
practitioners shutting their eyes and lifting their hands and
pronouncing Incantations in awe-inspiring voices--or in Capital Letters
and LARGE TYPE: "God is infinite, God is All-Loving, GOD WILL PROVIDE.
Bread is coming to you! Bread is coming to you!! BREAD IS COMING TO
YOU!!!"

You think this is exaggeration? If so, it is because you have never
entered the building of the pretty ladies, and sat in the gray wicker
chairs of the metaphysical library. One of the highest high-priestesses
of the cults of New Nonsense is a lady named Elizabeth Towne, editor of
"The Nautilus"; and Priestess Elizabeth tells you:

I believe the idea that money wants you will help you to the right
mental condition. Be a pot of honey and let it come.

I look over this Priestess' magazine, and find it full of testimonials
and advertisements for the conjuring of prosperity. "Are you in the
success sphere?" asks one exhorter; the next tells you "How to enter the
silence. How to manifest what you desire. The secret of advancement."
Another tells: "How a Failure at Sixty Won Sudden Success; From Poverty
to $40,000 a year--a Lesson for Old and Young Alike." The lesson, it
appears, is to pay $3.00 for a book called "Power of Will." And here is
another book:

Master Key: Which can unlock the Secret Chamber of Success, can throw
wide the doors which seem to bar men from the Treasure House of Nature,
and bids those enter and partake who are Wise enough to Understand and
broad enough to Weigh the Evidence, firm enough to Follow their Own
Judgment and Strong enough to Make the Sacrifice Exacted.



"Dollars Want Me"

I turn to the shelves of pamphlets. Here is a pretty one called
"All Sufficiency in All Things," published by the "Unity School of
Christianity", in Kansas City; it explains that God is God, not merely
of the Soul, but also of the Kansas City stockyards.

This divine Substance is ever abiding within us, and stands ready to
manifest itself in whatever form you and I need or wish, just as it did
in Elisha's time. It is the same yesterday, today and forever. Abundant
Supply by the manifestation of the Father within us, from within
outward, is as much a legitimate outcome of the Christ life or spiritual
understanding as is bodily healing..... "Know that I am God--all of
God, Good, all of Good. I am Life. I am Health. I am Supply. I am the
Substance."

And here is W. W. Atkinson of Chicago, author of a work called "Mind
Power". Would you like to be an Impressive Personality? Mr. Atkinson
will tell you exactly how to do it; he will give you the secret of the
Magnetic Handclasp, of the Intense, Straight-in-the-eye Look; he will
tell you what to say, he will write out for you Incantations which you
may pronounce to yourself, to convince yourself that you have Power,
that the INDWELLING PRESENCE with all its MIGHT is yours. Mr. Atkinson
rebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellow Bootstrap-lifters to
employ these arts for money-making; but you notice that his magazine,
"Advanced Thought", does not decline the advertisements of such
too-practical practitioners.

Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace Wattles, who
tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a Genius", and in another pamphlet "How
to Get What you Want". The thing for you to do is--

Saturate your mentality through and through with the knowledge that YOU
CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO..... Look upon the peanut-stand merely as the
beginning of the department store, and make it grow; you can.

And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of acquisitiveness:

Hold this consciousness and say with deep, earnest feeling: I CAN
succeed! All that is possible to any one is possible to me. I AM
success. I do succeed, for I am full of the Power of Success.

Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the
capitalist system--a "soda-jerker", a "counter-jumper", a book-keeper
for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life are one in ten
thousand; but he comes to the Metaphysical Library, and pays the price
of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry Harrison Brown, who was first
a Unitarian clergyman, and then an extra-high Bootstrap-lifter in San
Francisco, an Honorary Vice-President of the International New Nonsense
Alliance. Mr. Brown will tell our soda-jerker or counter-jumper
exactly how to elevate himself by mental machinery. All calculations of
probabilities are delusions of the senses; if you have faith, you can
move, not merely mountains, but Riker-Hegeman's, Macy's, or the Steel
Trust. "How to Promote Yourself" is the title of one of Mr. Brown's
pamphlets, in which he explains that--

Your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by your faith. A doubt
cuts the connection.

A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its thirtieth edition,
bears the thrilling title of "Dollars Want Me!" In it Mr. Brown lays
claim to being a pioneer:

I believe that this little monograph is the first utterance of the
thought that each individual has the ability so to radiate his mental
forces that he can cause the Dollars to feel him, love him, seek him,
and thus draw at will all things needed for his unfoldment from the
universal supply.

"What are Dollars?" asks our author; and answers:

Dollars are manifestations of the One Infinite Substance as you are,
but, unlike you, they are not Self-Conscious. They have no power till
you give them power. Make them feel this through your thought-vibrations
as you feel the importance of your work. They will then come to you to
be used.

"What is Poverty?" Mr. Brown asks, and answers himself:

Poverty is a mental condition. It can be cured only by the Affirmation
of Power to cure: I am a part of the One, and, in the One, I possess
all! Affirm this and patiently wait for the manifestation. You have sown
the thought seed.

And our author goes on to hand out packages of these
thought-seeds--"Affirmations" as they are called, in the jargon of the
New Conjuring:

 I desire a deep consciousness of financial freedom.  I desire
that the flow of prosperity become equalized. I desire a greater
consciousness of my power to attract the dollar. The Indwelling Power
cares for my purse. I own whatever I desire. I can afford to use dollars
for my happiness. I always have a good bank account. I actually see it.
My one idea of the law is to use, use, USE.



Spiritual Financiering

If the symbolism of the Episcopal Church is of the palace, and that
of the non-conformist sects of the counting-house, that of the
International New Nonsense Alliance is of Wall Street and the "ticker".
"What is your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?" asks William Morris
Nichols in the publication of the "'Now' Folk", San Francisco:

Is it low or high? Is your credit with the Bank of the Universe good or
poor? If you draw a spiritual draft are you sure of its being honored?

If you can answer that last question affirmatively, you are on the road
to become a Master in Spiritual Financiering.

Have you an account with the First (and only) Bank of Spirit? If not,
then you should at once open one therewith. For no one can afford to
keep less than a large deposit of spiritual funds with that Bank.

And how do you proceed to open your account? It is very simple:

Intend the mind in the direction indicated by your desire. Seek for the
Light and Guidance by which you may open up the way for your Spiritual
Substance, which governs material supply, to reach you and make you as
rich as you ought to be, in freedom and happiness. All this you can, and
when in earnest, will do.

I turn over the advertisements of this publication of the "'Now' Folk".
One offers "The Business Side of New Thought." Another offers "The Books
Without an If", with your money back IF you are not satisfied!
Another offers land in Bolivia for two dollars an acre. Another quotes
Shakespeare: "'Tis the mind that makes the body rich." Another offers
two copies of the "Phrenological Era" for ten cents.

There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which cannot find
dupes among the readers of this New Nonsense. One notice commands:

Stop! A Revelation! A Book has been written entitled "Strands of Gold"
or "From Darkness into Light!"

Another announces:

The Most Wonderful Book of the Ages: The Acquarian Gospel of Jesus the
Christ, Transcribed from the Book of God's Remembrance, the Akashic
Records.

And here is an advertisement published in Mr. Atkinson's paper:

Numerology: the Universal Adjuster! Do you know: What you appear to be
to others? What you really are? What you want to be? What would overcome
your present and future difficulties? Write to X, Philosopher. You will
receive full particulars of his personal work which is dedicated to
your service. No problem is too big or too small for Numerology.
Understanding awaits you.

And looking in the body of the magazine, you find this Philosopher
imparting some of this Understanding. Would you like, for example, to
understand why America entered the War? Nothing easier. The vowels of
the Words United States of America are uieaeoaeia, which are numbered
2951561591, which added make 45, or 4 plus 5 equals 9. You might not at
first see what that has to do with the War--until the Philosopher points
out that "9 in the number of completion, indicating the end of a cosmic
cycle." That, of course, explains everything.

And here is a work on what you perhaps thought to be a dead science,
Astrology. It is called "Lucky Hours for Everybody: A True System of
Planetary Hours by Prof. John B. Early. Price One Dollar." It teaches
you things like this:

Saturn's negative hours are especially good for all matters relating to
gold-mining..... The Sun negative rules the emerald, the musical note D
sharp, and the number four. The lunar hours are a good time to deal in
public commodities, and to hire servants of both sexes.....

A recent lady visitor informed me that she had made several vain
attempts to transact important business in the hours ruled by Jupiter,
usually held to be fortunate, while she was nearly always fortunate in
what she began in the hours ruled by Saturn. Upon investigation I found
her name was ruled by the Sun negative, and that she had Capricorn with
Saturn therein as her ascendant at birth, which explains.

And finally, here is a London "scientist", reported in the "Weekly
Unity" of Kansas City, who proves his mental power over two-horse power
oil engines which fail to act. "Going a little apart, he came back in
a few minutes and said: 'The engine is all right now and will work
satisfactorily.' and without any further difficulty it did." We are
told how Dr. Rawson gave a demonstration of his method to a newspaper
reporter the other day. Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he
apparently became absorbed in deep contemplation and said aloud: "There
is no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter; all
is spirit and manifestation of spirit."

You might at first find difficulty in believing what can be accomplished
by "demonstrations" such as this; not merely are two-horse power
oil engines made to work, but the whole gigantic machine of Prussian
militarism is prevented from working. You may recall how Arthur Machen's
magazine story of the Angels of Mons was taken up and made into a
Catholic legend over-night; now here is a New-Nonsense legend, complete
and perfect, going the rounds of our Nonsense magazines:

London, Dec. 14.--Shell-proof and bullet-proof soldiers have been
discovered on the European battle-fronts. Heroes with "charmed lives"
are being made every day, according to Frederick L. Rawson, a London
scientist, who insists he has found the miraculous way by which they are
developed. He calls it "audible treatment". "Practical utilization of
the powers of God by right thinking," is the agency through which Dr.
Rawson declares he can so treat a man that he will not be harmed when
hundreds of men are being shot dead beside him. This amazing treatment
includes a new type of prayer. It is being administered to hundreds of
men audibly, and to hundreds more by letter. Nothing since the war
began has aroused so much talk of modern miracles as have many of the
statements of Dr. Rawson.......

At the taking of a wood there were five hundred yards of "No Man's Land"
to be crossed. Our troops could not get across. Then Capt. --------, who
practices this method of prayer, treated them for an hour before they
started, and not a man was knocked out. He was the only officer left
out of eighty in his brigade. He simply held onto the fact that man is
spiritual and perfect and could not be touched. A bullet fired from a
revolver only five yards away hit him over the chest, tore his shirt
and went out at the shoulder. But it never penetrated his chest. He was
frequently in a hail of shells and bullets which did not touch him.



The Graft of Grace

All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religions in a world of
commercial competition. It happens not merely to Christian Science and
New Thought religions, Mazdaznan and Zionist, Holy Roller and Mormon
religions, but to Catholic and Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Methodist
and Baptist religions. For you see, when you are with the wolves you
must howl with them; when you are competing with fakirs you must fake.
The ordinary Christian will read the claims of the New Thought fakers
with contempt; but have I not shown the Catholic Church publishing long
lists of money-miracles? Have I not shown the Church of Good Society,
our exclusive and aristocratic Protestant Episcopal communion,
pretending to call rain and to banish pestilence, to protect crops and
win wars and heal those who are "sick in estate"--that is, who are in
business trouble?

The reader will say that I am a cynic, despising my fellows; but that is
not so. I am an economic scientist, analyzing the forces which operate
in human societies. I blame the prophets and priests and healers
for their fall from idealism; but I blame still more the competitive
wage-system, which presents them with the alternative to swindle or to
starve.

For, you see, the prophet has to have food. He has frequently got along
with almost none, and with only a rag for clothing; in Palestine and
India, where the climate is warm, a sincere faith has been possible for
short periods. But the modern prophet who expects to influence the minds
of men has to have books and newspapers; he will find a telephone and
a typewriter and postage-stamps hardly to be dispensed with, also in
Europe and America some sort of a roof over his meeting place. So the
prophet is caught, like all the rest of us, in the net of the speculator
and the landlord. He has to get money, and in order to get it he has
to impress those who already have it--people whose minds and souls have
been deformed by the system of parasitism and exploitation.

So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he becomes a
martyr, and founds a church which becomes a church of charlatans. I care
not how sincere, how passionately proletarian a religious prophet may
be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive
society--to be the founder of an organization of fools, conducted by
knaves, for the benefit of wolves. That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it
befell Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Fox and John Calvin
and John Wesley.

A friend of mine who has made a study of "Spiritualism" describes to me
the conditions in that field. The mediums are people, mostly women, with
a peculiar gift; whether we believe in the survival of personality, or
whether we call it telepathy, does not alter the fact that they have
a rare and special sensitiveness, a new faculty which science must
investigate. They come, poor people mostly--for the well-to-do will
seldom give their time to exacting and wearisome experiments. They
come, wearing frayed and thin clothing, shivering with cold, obviously
undernourished; and their survival depends upon their producing
"phenomena"--which phenomena are capricious, and will not come at call.
So, what more natural than that mediums should resort to faking? That
the whole field should be reeking with fraud, and science should be held
back from understanding an extraordinary power of the subconscious mind?

Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies have been telling us
about the wondrous powers of a mulatto-woman, a manicurist at the city's
most fashionable hotel. The other day, out of curiosity, my wife and I
went; the moment the "medium" opened her mouth my wife recognized her
as the person who has been trying for several months to get me on
the telephone to tell me how the spirit of Jack London is seeking to
communicate with me! The seance was a public one, a gathering composed,
half of wealthy and cultured society-women, and half of confederates,
people with the dialect and manners of a vaudeville troupe. A megaphone
was set in the middle of the floor, the room was made dark, a couple of
hymns were sung, and then the spirit of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke
through the megaphone with a Bowery accent, and gave communications from
relatives and friends of the various confederates. "Jesus is with us",
said Dr. Holmes. "The spirit of Jesus bids you to study spiritualism."
And then came the voice of a child: "Mamma! Mamma!" "It is little
Georgie!" cried Dr. Holmes; and one of the society ladies started,
and answered, and presently burst into tears. A marvelous piece of
evidence--especially when you recall that the story of this mother's
bereavement had been published in all the papers a couple of months
before!

And this kind of swindling is going on every night in every city of
America. It goes on wholesale for months every summer at Lily Dale,
in New York State, where the spiritualists hold their combination of
Chautauqua and Coney Island. And the same thing is going on in the field
of mental healing, and of all other "occult" forces and powers, whether
real or imaginary. It is going on with new spiritual fervors, new moral
idealisms, new poetry, new music, new painting, new sculpture. The
faker, the charlatan is everywhere--using the mental and moral and
artistic forces of life as a means of delivering himself from economic
servitude. Everywhere I turn I see it--credulity being exploited, and
men of practical judgment, watching the game and seeing through it, made
hard in their attitude of materialism. How many men I know who sit by in
sullen protest while their wives drift from one new quackery to
another, wasting their income seeking health and happiness in futile
emotionalism! How many kind and sensitive spirits I know--both men and
women--who pour their treasures of faith and admiration into the laps
of hierophants who began by fooling all mankind and ended by fooling
themselves!

In each one of the cults of what I have called the "Church of the
Quacks", there are thousands, perhaps millions of entirely sincere,
self-sacrificing people. They will read this book--if anyone can
persuade them to read it--with pain and anger; thinking that I am
mocking at their faith, and have no appreciation of their devotion.
All that I can say is that I am trying to show them how they are
being trapped, how their fine and generous qualities are being used by
exploiters of one sort or another; and how this must continue, world
without end, until there is order in the material affairs of the race,
until justice has been established as the law of man's dealing with his
fellows.



BOOK SEVEN -- The Church of the Social Revolution

 They have taken the tomb of our Comrade Christ--
   Infidel hordes that believe not in man;
  Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,
      But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.
  They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,
      They have buried him deep under steel and stone--
  But we come leading the great Crusade
      To give our Comrade back to his own.
                            Waddell.



Christ and Caesar

In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are
told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all
the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto
him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for
that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou,
therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know,
answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it;
he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;"
he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of
a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church
followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early
Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as
social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions
and boiled in oil.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for
he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for
him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He
came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church
had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and
the subtle worm assumed the guise of no less a person than the Emperor
himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so
that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God.
The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization,
fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got
everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he
had got the world's greatest religion. How complete and swift was his
success you may judge from the fact that fifty years later we find the
Emperor Valentinian compelled to pass an edict limiting the donations of
emotional females to the church in Rome!

From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this
book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days of
Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar
have been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of predatory
economic might. With only one qualification to be noted: that the Church
has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of her proletarian
Founder. She has done her best, of course; we have seen how her scholars
twist his words out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes
so far as to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims may
not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.

 'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung
  Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!

But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one incessant
struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled themselves with
the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of that
bitterly class-conscious proletarian, James, the brother of Jesus.

And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has given life
to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on the hearts of men
today, is precisely this new wine of faith and fervor which has been
poured into it by generation after generation of poor men who live like
Jesus as outcasts, and die like Jesus as criminals, and are revered like
Jesus as founders and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers
were bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their own time. St.
Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of office, exiled
and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by the Emperor
Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor Theodosius;
St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was exiled and
finally martyred. In the same way, most of the heretics whom the Holy
Inquisition tortured and burned were proletarian rebels; the saints whom
the Church reveres, the founders of the orders which gave it life for
century after century, were men who sought to return to the example
of the carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar on this point,
Prof. Rauschenbusch:

The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the Humiliati
and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic and communistic
ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest doctrinal reformer before the
reformation; but his eyes, too, were first opened to the doctrinal
errors of the Roman Church by joining in a great national and patriotic
movement against the alien domination and extortion of the Church. The
Bohemian revolt made famous by the name of John Huss, was quite as much
political and social as religious. Savonarola was a great democrat as
well as a religious prophet. In his famous interview with the dying
Lorenzo de Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's mercy. Of
the millionaire he demanded restitution of his ill-gotten wealth. Of the
political usurper he demanded the restoration of the liberties of the
people of Florence. It is significant that the dying sinner found
it easy to assent to the first, hard to assent to the second, and
impossible to concede the last.



Locusts and Wild Honey

This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time long before
Jesus; it seems to have been inherent in the religious character of the
Jews--that stubborn independence, that stiff-necked insistence on the
right of a man to interview God for himself and to find out what God
wants him to do; also the inclination to find that God wants him to
oppose earthly rulers and their plundering of the poor. What is it that
gives to the Bible the vitality it has today? Its literary style? To say
that is to display the ignorance of the cultured; for elevation of style
is a by-product of passionate conviction; it is what the Jewish writers
had to say, and not the way they said it, that has given them their hold
upon mankind. Was it their insistence upon conscience, their fear of
God as the beginning of wisdom? But that same element appears in the
Babylonian psalms, which are as eloquent and as sincere as those of the
Hebrews, yet are read only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful
presence of divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians
had that far more than the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their
religious books. Or was it the love of man for all things living, the
lesson of charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress? The gentle
Buddha had that, and had it long before Christ; also his priests had
metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John the Apostle or Thomas
Aquinas.

No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishes the Hebrew
sacred writings from all others, and that is their insistent note of
proletarian revolt, their furious denunciations of exploiters, and of
luxury and wantonness, the vices of the rich. Of that note the Assyrian
and Chaldean and Babylonian writing contain not a trace, and the
Egyptian hardly enough to mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it; but
the true, natural-born rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They
were rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today in
Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood which
spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, through John the Baptist and
Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through Marx and Lassalle and
Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and Morris Hillquit and Abraham Cahan and
Emma Goldman and the Joseph Fels endowment.

The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire was 20%; the
laws of Manu permitted 24%, while the laws of the Egyptians only stepped
in to prevent more than 100%. But listen to this Hebrew law:

If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou
shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he
may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear
thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.

And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants, and
commanding that at the end of fifty years All debtors shall have their
debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note that this is
not the raving of agitators, the demand of a minority party; it is the
law of the Hebrew land.

There has been of late a great deal of new discovery concerning the
early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as follows:

The land-mark law, which sternly forbids encroachment upon peasant
rights; consideration for the foreigner; additional sanitary and food
laws; tithe regulations on behalf of widows, orphans, foreigners,
etc.; that those who have no economic independence should eat and be
satisfied; that loans should be given cheerfully, not only without any
interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. To withhold a
loan because the year of release is at hand in which the principal is no
longer recoverable, is described as a grave sin. When you are compelled
to free your slaves, you must give them sufficient capital to embark
upon some industry which shall prevent their falling back into slavery.
A number of holidays are insisted upon. There must be no more crushing
of the poor out of existence, for God cares for these people who have
been driven to poverty, and they shall never cease out of the land.
Howbeit there shall be no poor with you, for the Lord will bless you, if
you will obey these laws.

But then prosperity came, and culture, which meant contact with the
capitalist ideas of the heathen empires. The Jews fell from the stern
justice of their fathers; and so came the prophets, wild-eyed men of
the people, clad in camel's hair and living upon locusts and wild honey,
breaking in upon priests and kings and capitalists with their furious
denunciations. And always they incited to class war and social
disturbance. I quote Conrad Noel again:

Nathan and Gad bad been David's political advisers, Abijah had stirred
Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had resisted Ahab, Elisha had fanned the
rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders against the misrule of the king of
Israel, Isaiah denounces the landlords and the usurers, Micah charges
them with blood-guiltiness; Jeremiah and the latter prophets, though
they strike a more intimate note of personal repentance, strike it
as the prelude to that national restoration for which they hunger as
exiles.

The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old Testament point of
view. Just as the prophets of the nineteenth century thundered against
the "Christian" employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses were
cemented with the blood of little children, so Isaiah cries against his
generation: "Your governing classes companion with thieves; behold you
build up Sion with blood." Their ceremonial and their Sabbath keeping
are an abomination to God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will
hide mine eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood." The poor man is
robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house to house and
field to field, that ye may dwell alone in the midst of the land." "Wash
you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doing from before mine
eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the
oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us
reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be blood-colored, they
shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the
land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword."



Mother Earth

And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators, following
the same tradition, possessed by the same dream as the ancient Hebrew
prophets. I have mentioned Emma Goldman; it may be that the reader is
not familiar with her writings, and does not realize how very Biblical
she is, both in point of view and style. Let me quote a few sentences
from a recent issue of her paper, "Mother Earth", on the subject of our
ruling classes and their social responsibility:

Yes, you idle rich, you may howl about what we mean to do to you! Your
riches are rotten and your fine clothes are falling from your backs.
Your stocks and bonds are so tainted that the ink on them should turn
to acid and eat holes in your pockets and your skins. You have piled up
your dirty millions, but what wages have you paid to the poor devils of
farm hands you have robbed? And do you imagine they won't remember it
when the revolution comes? You loll on soft couches and amuse yourselves
with your mistresses; you think you are "it" and the world is yours. You
send militiamen and shoot down our organizers, and we are helpless. But
wait, comrades, our time is coming.

Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of this tirade is
now in jail, where she can no longer defy the laws of good taste. They
always put the ancient prophets in jail; that is the way to know a
prophet when you meet him. Let me quote another prophet who is now
behind bars--Alexander Berkman, in his "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist",
discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:

Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it to you?
Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can you go all the way back
and show there is no flaw anywhere in your title? I tell you that the
beginning and the root of your wealth is necessarily in injustice. And
why? Because Nature did not make this man rich and that man poor from
the start. Nature does not intend for one man to have capital and
another to be a wage-slave. Nature made the earth to be cultivated by
all. The idea we Anarchists have of the rich is of highwaymen, standing
in the street and robbing every one that passes.

Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I. W. W. Hear what he has
to say in a pamphlet addressed to the harvest-hands he is seeking to
organize:

How much farther do you piutes expect to go with your grabbing? Do you
want to be the only people left on earth? Why else do you drive out the
workers from all share in Nature, and claim everything for yourselves?
The earth was made for all, rich and poor alike; where do you get your
title deeds to it? Nature gave everything for all men to use alike; it
is only your robbery which makes your so-called "ownership". Capital has
no rights. The land belongs to Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.

Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist Party for
President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:

The propertied classes are like people who go into a public theatre and
refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as private property what
is meant for social use. If each man would take only what he needs, and
leave the balance to those who have nothing, there would be no rich and
no poor. The rich man is a thief.

I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know that
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may
read this book, and I don't want them to close it in the middle and
throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to explain my poor joke; the
sentiments I have been quoting are not those of our modern agitators,
but of another group of ancient ones. The first is not from Emma
Goldman, nor did I find it in "Mother Earth". I found it in the Epistle
of James, believed by orthodox authorities to have been James, the
brother of Jesus. It is exactly what he wrote--save that I have put it
into modern phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order
that those familiar with the Bible might read it without suspicion. The
second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman, but in those
of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early fathers, who lived
374-407. The third is not from the pen of "Big Bill" but from that of
St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church, 340-397, and the fourth is
not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil of the Greek Church, 329-379. And
if the reader objects to my having fooled him for a minute or two, what
will he say to the Christian Church, which has been fooling him for
sixteen hundred years?



The Soap Box

This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other as
the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in the direct line
of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was brought up in the
Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by
the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a man who thinks of Jesus
more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man
that lives or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in
all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus
dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men.

I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for
the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read
his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely,
because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But this
is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it meant
the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of
Jerusalem. The way to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do
with him what we did with the early church fathers--translate him into
American. This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will not
be necessary to disguise the Bible style, and we may follow the text
exactly. Let me try the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, omitting seven
verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew casuistry, for which we
should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St. Alphonsus to find a parallel:

Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech, saying, The
doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the Fifth Avenue churches;
and it would be all right if you were to listen to what they preach, and
do that; but don't follow their actions, for they never practice what
they preach. They load the backs of the working-classes with crushing
burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a burden, and
everything they do is for show. They wear frock-coats and silk hats
on Sundays, and they sit at the speakers' table at the banquets of the
Civic Federation, and they occupy the best pews in the churches, and
their doings are reported in all the papers; they are called leading
citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be called leading
citizens, for the only useful man is the man who produces. (Applause).
And whoever exalts himself shall be abased, and whoever humbles himself
shall be exalted.

Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics, hypocrites! for you
shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men; you don't go in yourself
and you don't let others go in. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity
and Presbyterians, hypocrites! for you foreclose mortgages on widows'
houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers. For this you will
receive the greater damnation! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Methodists, hypocrites! for you send missionaries to Africa to make one
convert, and when you have made him, he is twice as much a child of
hell as yourselves. (Applause). Woe unto you, blind guides, with your
subtleties of doctrine, your transubstantiation and consubstantiation
and all the rest of it; you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors of
divinity and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks into
the collection-plate and you pay no heed to the really important things
in the Bible, which are justice and mercy and faith in goodness. You
blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! (Laughter). Woe
unto you, doctors of divinity and Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe
yourselves and dress in immaculate clothing but within you are full of
extortion and excess. You blind high churchmen, clean first your hearts,
so that the clothes you wear may represent you. Woe unto you, doctors of
divinity and Baptists, hypocrites! for you are like marble tombs which
appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones
and all uncleanness. Even so you appear righteous to men, but inside you
are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto you, doctors of
divinity and Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect statues to dead
reformers, and put wreathes upon the tombs of old-time martyrs. You say,
if we had been alive in those days, we would not have helped to kill
those good men. That ought to show you how to treat us at present.
(Laughter). But you are the children of those who killed the good men;
so go ahead and kill us too! You serpents, you generation of vipers, how
can you escape the damnation of hell?

At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem
"Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified him
that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his followers
attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed. Jesus was taken to
the station-house followed by a riotous throng, and held upon a charge
of disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity
appeared against him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months
on Blackwell's Island, remarking that from this time on he proposed
to make an example of those soap-box orators who persist in using
threatening and abusive language. Just as the prisoner was being
led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the Governor,
ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he is under
indictment for murder in the first degree, it being charged that his
teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day explosion.



The Church Machine

The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would have
a sign of Thee"--meaning that they wanted him to do some magic, to
prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He answered by
calling them an evil and adulterous generation--which is exactly what
I have said about the Papal machine. The Baptists and Methodists and
Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time accused him of
violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in their ancient
texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not
man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx at
them--"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far
from me." Because he despised the company of the respectables, and went
among the humble and human folk of his own class in the places where
they gathered--the public houses--the churchly scandal-mongers called
him "a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and
sinners"--precisely as in the old days they used to sneer at the
Socialists for having their meetings in the back-rooms of saloons, and
precisely as they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.

But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom
of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and
the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest
church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom.
Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more
concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history--even in
these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who
dare to preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the
Church--Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J. Stitt
Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their voices
are not silenced they are like the leaven, to which Jesus compared the
kingdom of God--a woman took it and hid it in three measures of meal
till the whole was leavened. The young theological students read, and
some of them understand; I know three brothers in one family who
have just gone into the Church, and are preaching straight social
revolution--and the scribes and the pharisees have not yet dared to cast
them out.

In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and
henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon. Every church
is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property. And
it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking
favors from the state--the exemption of church property from taxation,
exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for
them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and
education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday--so on through
a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you find that
in them the rich possess the control and demand the deference, while the
poor are humble, and in their secret hearts jealous and bitter; in other
words, the class struggle is in the churches, as everywhere else in the
world, and the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it
is coming in industry.

It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are
proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and
beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of
privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The ordinary
priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working people
suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian
rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out the political
orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class
instead of for his pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests
are defying their bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious
movement for an Irish Republic.

What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the
exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if you could
get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you would find that
precisely the same force is keeping many of them slaves to Tradition.
They are educated men, and thousands of them must resent the dilemma
which compels them to be either fools or hypocrites. They have caught
enough of the spirit of their time not to enjoy having to pose as
miracle-mongers, rain-makers and witch-doctors; they would like to say
frankly that they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale,
and even that they are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other
demigods. But they are part of a machine, and the old men and the
rich men who run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find
themselves tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and
children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted for any
other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as by the practice
of altruism.

But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift wings--it may
be here before this book sees the light. And who knows but then we
may see in America that wonderful sight which we saw in Russia, when
Christian monks assembled and burned their holy books, and petitioned
the state to take them in as citizens and human beings? It is my belief
that when the power of exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead
Hand crumble into dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to
the air. All those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe
nonsense, because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly
realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any man can
go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly run, and by
four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten or fifteen dollars.
Do you not think that there may be some who will choose freedom and
self-respect on those terms?

And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the church
because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a way to make the
acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and obtain promotion, to get
customers if you are a tradesman, to extend your practice if you are a
professional man? And what about the millions who go to church because
they are poor, and because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one
way to keep the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for
the children, to get charity if you fall into need; in short, to acquire
influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who stand together, and like
to see the poor humble and reverent, contented in that state of life to
which it has pleased God to call them?



The Church Redeemed

Do I mean that I expect to see the Church--all churches--perish and
pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church answers one of the
fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will abolish poverty and
parasitism, it will make temptations fewer, and the soul's path through
life much easier; but it will not remove the necessity of struggle for
individual virtue, it will only clear the way for the discovery of newer
and higher types of virtue. Men will gather more than ever in beautiful
places to voice their love of life and of one another; but the places
in which they gather will be places swept clean of superstition and
tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to cleanse
itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses, so the Social Revolution
will compel it to repudiate its defense of parasitism and exploitation.
I will record the prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic
authorities will be denying that the Church ever opposed Socialism--true
Socialism; just as today they deny that the Church ever tortured
Galileo, ever burned men for teaching that the earth moves around the
sun, ever sold the right to commit crime, ever gave away the New World
to Spain and Portugal, ever buried newly-born infants in the cellars of
nunneries.

The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew,
Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their formalists and
traditionalists. If there is any church that refuses so to adapt itself,
the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it without
followers. But in the great religions, which have a soul of goodness and
sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints
who, as of old, will preach the living word of God. In many churches
today we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Even in
the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the books of
the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The Saint", and you
will see a genuine and vital protest against the economic corruption
of the Church. In America, the "Knights of Slavery" have been forced by
public pressure to support a "War for Democracy", and even to compete
with the Y. M. C. A. in the training camps. They are doing good work, I
am told.

This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern
common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation Army. William
Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his hands and
went out with a bass-drum to save the lost souls of the slums. He was
stoned and jailed, but he persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus--

  Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
  Unwashed legions with the ways of death.

Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population. He
had not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared
hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how utterly
impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for the souls
of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their diseased
and hunger-racked bodies. So the Salvation army was forced into useful
work--old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm
colonies--until today the bare list of the various kinds of enterprises
it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done with the money
of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to authority, but no one can
deny that it is better than "Gibson's Preservative", and the fox-hunting
parsons filling themselves with port.

And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater. Here and
there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job and preaching the
proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are making
attempts at "missions" and "settlements" in the slums. The more vital
churches are gradually turning themselves into societies for the
practical betterment of their members. Their clergy are running boys
clubs and sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for
mothers, social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always
before the clergyman's face--that with prayer-meetings and psalm-singing
alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and educational societies and
social reforms he thrives.

And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches, like
everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy and the congregations
are confronted by pressing national needs, they are forced to take
notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a thousand practical
activities. No one can see the end of this--any more than he can see
the end of the vast upheaval in politics and industry. But we who
are trained in revolutionary thought can see the main outlines of
the future. We see that in these new church activities the clergy are
inspired by things read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily
newspapers. They are responding to the actual, instant needs of their
boys in the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have an effect
upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl who
leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a munition
factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates, will never
after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the clergyman who helps
in Y. M. C. A. work in France, or in Red Cross organization in America,
will be less the bigot and formalist forever after. He will have
learned, in spite of himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have
learned co-operation and social solidarity by the method which modern
educators most favor--by doing. Also he will have absorbed a mass of
ideas in news despatches from over the world. He is forced to read these
despatches carefully, because the fate of his own boys is involved; and
we Socialists will see to it that the despatches are well filled with
propaganda!



The Desire of Nations

So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the great
revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do not
forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of the
future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the Church
which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and say
that we think about nothing but the belly--and that is true, in a way;
because we are the representatives of a starving class, which thinks
about its belly precisely as does any individual who is ravening with
hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of
Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the body," and then we
will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls; whereas at
present we are led to despise the very word "spiritual", which has
become the stock-in-trade of parasites and poseurs.

We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to us. We
would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and self-control,
of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if there were in the world
institutions conducted by men and women of consecrated life who would
specialize in teaching a true morality to the young. But it must be a
morality of freedom, not of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not
upon superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what truth
is, and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth 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 muse--that is the work of
"personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the words.

We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new
Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the dream of it
is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and conviction.
Read these lines from "The Desire of Nations," by Edwin Markham, in
which he tells of the new Redeemer who is at hand:

 And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
  He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
  To every heart he will its own dream be:
  One moon has many phantoms in the sea.
  Out of the North the norns will cry to men:
  "Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
  The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
  "Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
  The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
  "Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"
  And social architects who build the State,
  Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
  Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
  And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
  "Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
  The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"



The Knowable

The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker the
basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the microscope and
the telescope, of the new psychology and the new sociology are more
wonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient Mythologies. And even
if this were not so, the business of the thinker is to follow the facts.
The history of all philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The
infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out his hands and
cries for it, but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a
while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his mother's breast and
takes a drink of milk.

Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him to
be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the knowledge
immediately and finally, and invents innumerable systems and creeds.
He makes himself believe them, with fire and torture makes other men
believe them; until finally, in the confusion of a million theories, it
occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the discovery
that his tools are inadequate, and all their products worthless. His
mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is
relative, while the First Cause is absolute.

This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern
philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four propositions:
first, that the universe is limitless in time and space; second, that
matter is composed of simple, indivisible elements; third, that free
will is impossible; and fourth, that there must be an absolute or first
cause. And having proven these things, he turned round and proved their
opposites, with arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows
these demonstrations and understands them, takes all his metaphysical
learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.

It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear,
that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can prove
whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension;
you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside
out; and when you get tired of this condition, you take another flight,
and come back the way you were before. So metaphysical thinking serves
the purpose of Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman and Professor
Chatterton-Hill; it serves hysterical women like "Mother" Eddy; it
serves the New-thoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it
serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to befuddle the wits of the
populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a bottomless swamp; they
avoid, not merely the idealism of Platonists and Hegelians, but the
monism of Haeckel, and the materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The
simple fact is that it is as impossible to prove the priority of
origin and the ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the
scientist who lays down a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a
Christian.

How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital
letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an
inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the
"Positivists", and attended their imitation church in London, but I
did not get any satisfaction from them. In the midst of their dogmatic
pronouncements I found myself remembering how the egg falls apart and
reveals a chicken, how the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly.
The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile
occupation to set limits upon the future. Our business is not to say
what men will know ten thousand years from now, but to content ourselves
with the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a
procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an act of
adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the conviction that this
adjustment is possible and worth while.

In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify
his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is
worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is order in
creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which can be applied.
Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for its mother's breast, so
the most skeptical of scientists trusts it when he declares that water
is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets it down for
a certainty that this will always be so--that he is not being played
with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H2O to behave like
water, and tomorrow like benzine.



Nature's Insurgent Son

Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each bit of
knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life becomes a new
thing. Consider, for example, what a different place the world became
to the man who discovered that the force which laid the forest in ashes
could be tamed and made to warm a cave and make wild grains nutritious!
In other words, man can create life, he can make the world and himself
into that which his reason decides it ought to be. The means by which he
does this is the most magical of all the tools he has invented since
his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of experimental
science--and when one considers that this weapon has been understood and
deliberately employed for but two or three centuries, he realizes that
we are indeed only at the beginning of human evolution.

To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and deliberate
acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered product--that is
the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this forth with beautiful
precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man". We are, at this time, in
an uncomfortable and dangerous transition stage, as a child playing with
explosives. This child has found out how to alter his environment in
many startling ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it,
nor to what purpose. He finds that certain things are uncomfortable,
and these he proceeds immediately to change. Discovering that grain
fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of drunkards; discovering
that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared in alluring
combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that it takes an
encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that captives taken in war
can be made to work, he makes a procession of empires, which are eaten
through with luxury and corruption, and fall into ruins again.

This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping blindly,
experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It takes a million
eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a million million men to
produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy. Nature's
present impulse appears as a rebellion against her own methods; man, her
creature, will emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from
her blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son"; but,
being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering
way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective
eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defective
eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child would perish at once in the
course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new line of
degenerates is started.

What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing our
sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful, because we
can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breeding which will
prevent the unfit from getting a chance at life. We can replace instinct
by self-discipline. We can substitute for the regime of "Nature red in
tooth and claw with ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what
he wishes to be and how to set about to be it. Whether this can happen,
whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great triumph
of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into the melting
pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude of contests between
enlightenment and ignorance: precisely such a contest as occurs now,
when you, the reader, encounter a man who has thought his way out to the
light, and comes to urge you to perform the act of self-emancipation,
to take up the marvellous new tools of science, and to make yourself,
by means of exact knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of
the life of the race.



The New Morality

Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers; driven
by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call the elan
vital. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an emotion of joy;
whenever it is balked, there is one of distress. So pleasure and pain
are the guides of life, and the final goal is a condition of free and
constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is enduring.

That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It is
a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall upon the
earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other hand, it is a
conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements
of comets, and even of starry systems. It seems certain that if he is
given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate
environment--

  The untamed giants of nature shall bow down--
  The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
  From mockery and destruction, and be turned
  Unto the making of the soul of man.

It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food from the
elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it is conceivable
that he may master the bacteria which at present prey upon his body, and
so put an end to death. It is certain that he will ascertain the laws of
heredity, and create human qualities as he has created the spurs of
the fighting-cock and the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what
genius is, and the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be
recognized. In the new science of psycho-analysis he has already begun
the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into the light
of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy which the psychic
researchers are accumulating, he is beginning to grope his way into a
universal consciousness, which may come to include the joys and griefs
of the inhabitants of Mars, and of the dark stars which the spectroscope
and the telescope are disclosing.

All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way of their
realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and submission, the old
habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him from his
animal past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and of others;
to root them out of the garden of the soul is the task of the modern
thinker.

The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is
the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save the law
of his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself
imposes.

The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true pleasure is
the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.

The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there is no
authority above reason; no possibility of such authority, because if
such were to appear, reason would have to judge it, and accept or reject
it.

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there can
no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable
position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of
the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting
currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a
constantly changing environment. An action which was suicide yesterday
becomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy tomorrow.

This new morality, like all things in a world of strife, is fighting for
existence, using its own weapons, which are reason and love. Obviously
it can use no others, without self-destruction; yet it has to meet
enemies who fight with the old weapons of force and fraud. Whether it
will prevail is more than any prophet can say. Perhaps it is too much
to ask that it should succeed--this insolent effort of the pigmy man
to leap upon the back of his master and fit a bridle into his mouth.
Perhaps it is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, the scientists
and poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race. Perhaps the nerve of
the pigmy will fail him at the critical moment, and he will fall from
the back of his master, and under his master's hoofs.

The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and as
scientists we can proclaim it--the human race is in a swift current of
degeneration, which a new morality alone can check. The struggle is at
its height in our time; if it fails, if the fibre of the race continues
to deteriorate, the soul of the race to be eaten out by poverty and
luxury, by insanity and disease, by prostitution, crime and war--then
mankind will slip back into the abyss, the untamed giants of Nature will
resume their ancient sway, and the tides, the tempest and the lightning
will sweep the earth clean again. I do not believe that this calamity
will befall us. I know that in the diseased social body the forces
of resistance are gathering--the Socialist movement, in the broad
sense--the activities of all who believe in the possibility of
reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice and love. To
such people this book goes out: to the truly religious people, those
who hunger and thirst after righteousness here and now, who believe in
brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear pain and ridicule and
privation for the sake of its ultimate achievement.

     From the edge of harsh derision,
           From discord and defeat,
      From doubt and lame division,
           We pluck the fruit and eat;
  And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....
      O sorrowing hearts of slaves,
           We heard you beat from far!
      We bring the light that saves,
           We bring the morning star;
Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things are...



Envoi

I have come to the end of my task; but one question troubles me. I
think of the "young men and maidens meek" who will read this book, and
I wonder what they will make of it. We have had a lark together; we have
gone romping down the vista of the ages, swatting, every venerable head
that showed itself, beating the dust out of ancient delusions. You would
like all your life to be that kind of lark; but you may not find it so,
and perhaps you will suffer disillusionment and vexation.

I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have nearly all
been gallant and honest, but they have not all been wise, and therefore
not so happy as they might have been. In the course of time I have
formulated to myself the peril to which young radicals are exposed. We
see so much that is wrong in ancient things, it gets to be a habit with
us to reject them. We have only to know that a thing is old to feel an
impulse of impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are tempted to welcome
anything which can prove itself to be unprecedented. There is a common
type of radical whose aim in life is to be several jumps ahead of
mankind; whose criterion of conduct is that it shocks the bourgeois. If
you do not know that type, you may find him--and her--in the newest
of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the newest red chemicals, smoking
the newest brand of cigarettes, and discussing the newest form of
psycopathia sexualis. After you have watched them a while, you realize
that these ultra-new people have fallen victim to the oldest form of
logical fallacy, the non sequitur, and likewise to the oldest form of
slavery, which is self-indulgence.

If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon ignorance,
and cultivated by greed, it is also true that much in the old moral
codes is based upon facts which will not change so long as man is what
he is--a creature of impulses, good and bad, wise and foolish, selfish
and generous, and compelled to make choice between these impulses; so
long as he is a material body and a personal consciousness, obliged to
live in society and adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would
like to say to young radicals--if there is any way to say it without
seeming a prig--is that in choosing their own path through life, they
will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and
judgment and hard study.

It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat over and
over the blunders of the past, the blunders of tyranny and slavery, of
luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient societies; and surely it
is a poor way to begin by repeating in our own persons the most ancient
blunders of the moral life. To light the fires of lust in our hearts,
and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are trying new experiments
in psychology! Who does not know the radical woman who demonstrates her
emancipation from convention by destroying her nerves with nicotine? Who
does not know the genius of revolt who demonstrates his repudiation of
private property by permitting his lady loves to support him? Who
does not know the man who finds in the phrases of revolution the most
effective devices for the seducing of young girls?

You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the conclusion
that there is anything in it to spare you the duty of getting yourself
moral standards and holding yourself to them. On the contrary, because
your task is the highest and hardest that man has yet undertaken--for
this reason you will need standards the most exacting ever formulated.
Let me quote some words from a teacher you will not accuse of holding to
the slave-moralities:

Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I hear, and not
that thou hast escaped a yoke.

Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke?

Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell
me: free to what?

Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang thy will
above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own judge, and avenger of thy
law?

Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of thy law.
So is a stone flung out into empty space and into the icy breath of
isolation.

Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emerge into the sunlight
of knowledge, to take control of a world, and to make it over, not
according to the will of any gods, but according to the law in our own
hearts. For that task we have need of all the resources of our being;
of courage and high devotion, of faith in ourselves and our comrades, of
clean, straight thinking, of discipline both of body and mind. We go
to this task with a knowledge as old as the first moral impulse of
mankind--the knowledge that our actions determine the future of life,
not merely for ourselves but for all the race. For this is one of the
laws of the ancient Hebrews which modern science has not repealed, but
on the contrary has reinforced with a thousand confirmations--that the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and
fourth generations.

I get letters from the readers of my books; nearly always they are young
people, so I feel like the father of a large family. I gather them now
about my knee, and pronounce upon them a benediction in the ancient
patriarchal style. Children and grandchildren of my hopes, for ages men
suffered and fought, so that the world might be turned over to you. Now
the day is coming, the glad, new day which blinds us with the shining of
its wings; it is coming so swiftly that I am afraid of it. I thought we
should have more time to get ready for the taking over of the world! But
the old managers of it went insane, they took to tearing each other's
eyes out, and now they lie dead about us. So, whether we will or not, we
have to take charge of the world; we have to decide what to do with it,
even while we are doing it. Let us not fail, young comrades; let us not
write on the scroll of history that mankind had to go through yet new
generations of wars and tumults and enslavements, because the youth
of the international revolution could not lift themselves above
those ancient personal vices which wrecked the fair hopes of their
fathers--bigotry and intolerance, vindictiveness and vanity, envy,
hatred and malice and all uncharitableness!



Reader:

For twenty years I have been haunted by the dream that I might some day
be my own publisher. I was waiting till I could afford the luxury; but
many a man has put off a bold action till he died, so I am publishing
this book without being able to afford it.

The reason is that I do not want to be a writer for the rich. I want to
be read by working-boys and girls, and by poor students.

I offer the book at a low price. In the hope of tempting you to go out
and get your friends to read it, I have made a price in quantities which
will allow no profit at all. A margin has been figured to cover postage,
stationery, circulars, and the cost of a clerical assistant; but nothing
for interest on capital, which is a gift, nor for the rent of an office,
which is my home, nor for the services of manager and press agent, which
is myself.

You have read the book, and its fate is yours to decide. If it seems
worth while, pass it on to someone else. If you can afford it, order a
number of copies and give them away. If you can't afford it, give your
time and be a book-agent.





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