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Title: The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation

Author: Upton Sinclair

Release date: December 1, 1998 [eBook #1558]
Most recently updated: March 4, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1558

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFITS
OF RELIGION: AN ESSAY IN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION ***

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

THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
OFFERTORY
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 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
Face of Caesar
Deutschland ueber Alles
Der Tag.
King Cotton
Witches and Women
Moth and Rust
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
Reader:

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,