PROFITS OF RELIGION

Offertory/ Introductory

Book 1: Conquerors

Book 2: Good Society

Book 3: Servant Girls

Book 4: Slavers

Book 5: Merchants

Book 6: Quacks

Book 7: Social Revolution

RELIGION

Profits of Religion

Upton Sinclair

Young Goodman Brown

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne

THEORY

Dada Manifesto

Hugo Ball, 1916

Tristan Tzara, 1918

Surrealist Manifesto

Andre Breton, 1924

Andre Breton, 1925

Andre Breton, 1934

POETRY

My God

Nah Nah Nah

Themes of the Unknown

The Abstract & the Ambiguous

Drunken

DOPPLEGANGER

William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe

The Double

Foydor Dostoevsky

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stephenson

LOUISMARLOWE.COM

BOOK TWO

The Church of Good Society

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

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

The Rain Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Babylonian Fire-god

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Medicine-men

Andrew D. White tells us that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Canonization of Incompetence

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

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

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

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

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

Gibson's Preservative

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Elders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Church History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land and Livings

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

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

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

As an old song puts the matter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graft in Tail

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

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

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

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

Bishops and Beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anglicanism and Alcohol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Cats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffer Little Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand
of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties,
and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects
about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the
contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers
indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction
than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man's
reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if
their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also
exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are
happily extempted; that, "having food and raiment, they should be
therewith content," since their situation in life, with all its
evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and
finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and
the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same
Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly
inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the
temporal well-being of political communities.

The Court Circular

The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to
the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the
sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired
church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this
revolution was purely one of Church politics--in doctrine and
ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America" remained in
every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are
taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself lowly and
reverently to all my betters." The only difference is that
instead of being told "to honour and obey the King," they are
told "to honour and obey the civil authority."

It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same
in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves
with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and
imitation English clothes--so in their Heaven they have provided
an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize
the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow
their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon
absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book--not the English, but
the sturdy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have
not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its
contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I
read:

 Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee,  Casting down their
golden crowns around the glassy sea;  Cherubim and seraphim
bowing down before Thee,  Which wert, and art, and ever more
shall be!

One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal
imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find
that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king ... ..
throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn
begins--

     Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;
      To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.

And the second--

     Christ, whose glory fills the skies---

And the third--

     Lord of all being, throned afar,
      Thy glory flames from sun and star.

There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look
up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as
they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same
ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous,
greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious,
punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless
round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No
member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he
wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family--not even
the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his
mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low
society.

This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried
weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off
in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:

 The Son of God goes forth to war,
      A kingly crown to gain:
  His blood-red banner streams afar:
      Who follows in His train?

This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on
earth; utterly simple and honest--he would not even let anyone
praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he answered,
quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one,
that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with
deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments
upon him in conventional, courtly style:

 The company of angels
      Are praising Thee on high;
  And mortal men, and all things
      Created, make reply:  All Glory, laud and honour,
      To Thee, Redeemer, King. . . . .

The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable
boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful
occupation than that of the saints--casting down their golden
crowns around the glassy sea--unless it be that of the
Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching
these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous
compliments!

But one can understand that such things are necessary in a
monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good
Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely
the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few
can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time
going through costly formalities--not because they enjoy it, but
because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about them
and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is
allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the
horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.

Horn-blowing

I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied it
from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout little boy; one
of my earliest recollections--I cannot have been more than four
years of age--is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the
choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I
remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this
fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it
reverently." When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own
volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during
the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching
Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth
Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the
city will understand that this is a peculiar location--precisely
half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august
of the city's aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy
of the city's slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church,
and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei
gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully
cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made
for them--as all the rest of the world is made for them; the
populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.

The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman;
orthodox, yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could
not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the
rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor,
visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little
kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and
Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school,
where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health
of their souls.

I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would
be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and
the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the
walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but
they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little
morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives
of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord
and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as
practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive
away a pestilence.

I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the
papers, and watching politics and business. I, followed the fates
of my little slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was
getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the
panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty
thieves--all these were paying the policeman and the politician
for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into
trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who
consoled them in prison--but it was the Tammany leader who saw
the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson even
earlier in life than I got mine--that the church was a kind of
amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was
Tammany.

I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good
Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did
nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to
investigate, I discovered the reason--that their incomes came
from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were
contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the
corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it
appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei
gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but
none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against
which they were blowing their religious horns!

So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and
is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part
of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and
cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be
meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device
to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters.
And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great
Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world,
I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I met, not
sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation--until
the venerable institution which had once seemed dignified and
noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.

Trinity Corporation

There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering
brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous
churches in America. As a child I have walked through its church
yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its
gravestones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it
seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the
world's infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning,
this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at
noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to
listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my
young soul; and what is it in reality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Interpretation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again:

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

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

Business men contribute to the Y. M. C. A. because they realize
that if their employes are well cared for and religiously
influenced, they can be of greater service in business!

Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?

Book 3