The Profits of Religion ........................................................................................................................................1

Upton Sinclair..........................................................................................................................................1

OFFERTORY..........................................................................................................................................3

Bootstraplifting .....................................................................................................................................4

Religion ....................................................................................................................................................6

BOOK ONE. The Church of the Conquerors.......................................................................................................7

The Priestly Lie ........................................................................................................................................7

The Great Fear.........................................................................................................................................8

Salve Regina! .........................................................................................................................................10

Fresh Meat.............................................................................................................................................10

Priestly Empires .....................................................................................................................................12

Prayerwheels ........................................................................................................................................13

The ButcherGods .................................................................................................................................14

The Holy Inquisition ..............................................................................................................................15

HellFire ................................................................................................................................................16

BOOK TWO. The Church of Good Society .......................................................................................................18

The Rain Makers ....................................................................................................................................18

The Babylonian Firegod......................................................................................................................19

The Medicinemen................................................................................................................................20

The Canonization of Incompetence.......................................................................................................21

Gibson's Preservative .............................................................................................................................23

The Elders..............................................................................................................................................24

Church History .......................................................................................................................................26

Land and Livings...................................................................................................................................27

Graft in Tail ............................................................................................................................................28

Bishops and Beer...................................................................................................................................29

Anglicanism and Alcohol......................................................................................................................30

Dead Cats ...............................................................................................................................................32

Suffer Little Children .............................................................................................................................33

The Court Circular.................................................................................................................................35

Hornblowing ........................................................................................................................................37

Trinity Corporation................................................................................................................................38

Spiritual Interpretation ...........................................................................................................................39

BOOK THREE. The Church of the Servantgirls ..............................................................................................41

Charity...................................................................................................................................................41

God's Armor ...........................................................................................................................................43

Thanksgivings ........................................................................................................................................45

The Holy Roman Empire .......................................................................................................................46

Temporal Power .....................................................................................................................................48

Knights of Slavery.................................................................................................................................49

Priests and Police...................................................................................................................................49

The Church Militant ...............................................................................................................................51

The Church Triumphant .........................................................................................................................52

God in the Schools .................................................................................................................................53

The Menace ............................................................................................................................................54

King Coal ...............................................................................................................................................56

The Unholy Alliance ..............................................................................................................................58

Secret Service .........................................................................................................................................59

Tax Exemption .......................................................................................................................................59

"Holy History".......................................................................................................................................60

Das Centrum..........................................................................................................................................62

BOOK FOUR. The Church of the Slavers ..........................................................................................................64

Face of Caesar ........................................................................................................................................64

Deutschland ueber Alles........................................................................................................................65

Der Tag..................................................................................................................................................66

King Cotton ............................................................................................................................................67

Witches and Women ..............................................................................................................................68

Moth and Rust ........................................................................................................................................69

To Lyman Abbott ...................................................................................................................................71

The Octopus ...........................................................................................................................................72

The Industrial Shelley ............................................................................................................................73

The Outlook for Graft............................................................................................................................75

Clerical Camouflage..............................................................................................................................77

The Jungle ..............................................................................................................................................78

BOOK FIVE. The Church of the Merchants......................................................................................................79

The Head Merchant ................................................................................................................................80

"Herr Beeble" .........................................................................................................................................81

Holy Oil.................................................................................................................................................82

Rhetorical Blackhanging.....................................................................................................................84

The Great American Fraud....................................................................................................................85

Riches in Glory......................................................................................................................................87

Captivating Ideals..................................................................................................................................88

Spook Hunting.......................................................................................................................................89

Running the Rapids ................................................................................................................................90

Birth Control..........................................................................................................................................91

Sheep ......................................................................................................................................................92

BOOK SIX. The Church of the Quacks ..............................................................................................................94

Tabula Rasa ............................................................................................................................................94

The Book of Mormon............................................................................................................................95

Holy Rolling..........................................................................................................................................96

Bible Prophecy .......................................................................................................................................97

Koreshanity ............................................................................................................................................98

Mazdaznan.............................................................................................................................................99

Black Magic .........................................................................................................................................101

Mental Malpractice..............................................................................................................................102

Science and Wealth ..............................................................................................................................104

New Nonsense.....................................................................................................................................105

"Dollars Want Me"..............................................................................................................................106

Spiritual Financiering..........................................................................................................................108

The Graft of Grace ...............................................................................................................................109

BOOK SEVEN. The Church of the Social Revolution....................................................................................111

Christ and Caesar.................................................................................................................................111

Locusts and Wild Honey ......................................................................................................................112

Mother Earth........................................................................................................................................114

The Soap Box .......................................................................................................................................115

The Church Machine ............................................................................................................................116

The Church Redeemed .........................................................................................................................118

The Desire of Nations..........................................................................................................................119

The Knowable ......................................................................................................................................120

Nature's Insurgent Son.........................................................................................................................121

The New Morality ................................................................................................................................122

Envoi ....................................................................................................................................................123

This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of viewas a Source of Income and a Shield to

Privilege. I have searched the libraries through, and no one has done it before. If you read it, you will see that

it needed to be done. It has meant twentyfive years of thought and a year of investigation. It contains the

I publish the book myself, so that it may be available at the lowest possible price. I am giving my time and

energy, in return for one thing which you may give methe joy of speaking a true word and getting it heard.

The present volume is the first of a series, which will do for Education, Journalism and Literature what has

here been done for the Church: the four volumes making a work of revolutionary criticism, an Economic

Book One: The Church of the Conquerors The Priestly Lie The Great Fear Salve Regina! Fresh Meat Priestly

Book Two: The Church of Good Society The Rain Makers The Babylonian FireGod The Medicinemen

The Canonization of Incompetence Gibson's Preservative The Elders Church History Land and Livings Graft

in Tail Bishops and Beer Anglicanism and Alcohol Dead Cats "Suffer Little Children" The Courtcircular

Book Three: The Church of the Servant Girls Charity God's Armor Thanksgivings The Holy Roman Empire

Temporal Power Knights of Slavery Priests and Police The Church Militant The Church Triumphant God in

the Schools The Menace King Coal The Unholy Alliance Secret Service Tax Exemption Holy History Das

Book Four: The Church of the Slavers The Face of Caesar Deutschland ueber Alles Der Tag King Cotton

Witches and Women Moth and Rust To Lyman Abbott The Octopus The Industrial Shelley The Outlook for

Book Five: The Church of the Merchants The Head Merchant "Herr Beeble" Holy Oil Rhetorical

Blackhanging The Great American Fraud Riches in Glory Captivating Ideals Spook Hunting Running the

Book Six: The Church of the Quacks Tabula Rasa The Book of Mormon Holy Rolling Bible Prophecy

Koreshanity Mazdaznan Black Magic Mental Malpractice Science and Wealth New Nonsense "Dollars Want

Book Seven: The Church of the Social Revolution Christ and Caesar Locusts and Wild Honey Mother Earth

The Soap Box The Church Machine The Church Redeemed The Desire of Nations The Knowable "Nature's

It is a vision I have seen: upon a vast plain, men and women are gathered in dense throngs, crouched in

uncomfortable and distressing positions, their fingers hooked in the straps of their boots. They are engaged in

lifting themselves; tugging and straining until they grow red in the face, exhausted. The perspiration streams

from their foreheads, they show every symptom of distress; the eyes of all are fixed, not upon each other, nor

upon their bootstraps, but upon the sky above. There is a look of rapture upon their faces, and now and then,

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

And so I move on among the sweating and groaning hordes. Being of a sympathetic turn of mind, I cannot

help being distressed by the prevalence of this singular practice among so large a portion of the human race.

How is it possible that none of them should suspect the futility of their procedure? Or can it really be that I

am uncomprehending? That in some way they are actually getting off the ground, or about to get off the

Then I observe a new phenomenon: a man gliding here and there among the bootstraplifters, approaching

from the rear and slipping his hands into their pockets. The position of the spiritual exercisers greatly

facilitates his work; their eyes being cast up to heaven, they do not see him, their thoughts being occupied,

they do not heed him; he goes through their pockets at leisure, and transfers the contents to a bag he carries,

and then moves on to the next victim. I watch him for a while, and finally approach and ask, "What are you

"Oh," I say, puzzled by his matterofcourse tone. "ButI beg pardonare you a thief?"

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

I turn, following his glance, and observe another person approachinga stately figure, clad in scarlet and

purple robes, moving with slow dignity. He gazes about at the sweating and grunting hordes; now and then he

stops and lifts his hands in a gesture of benediction, and proclaims in rolling tones, "Blessed are the

Bootstraplifters, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." He moves on, and after a bit stops and announces

again, "Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh out of the mouth of the prophets and

Watching a while longer, I see this majestic one approach the agent of the Wholesale Pickpockets'

Association. The agent greets him as a friend, and proceeds to transfer to the pockets of his capacious robes a

generous share of the loot which he has collected. The majestic one does not cringe, nor does he make any

effort to hide what is going on. On the contrary he cries aloud, "It is more blessed to give than to receive!"

And again he cries, "The laborer is worthy of his hire!" And a third time he cries, yet more sternly, "Render

unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's!" And the Bootstraplifters pause long enough to answer: "Lord

have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!" Then they renew their straining and tugging.

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

Instantly a frown comes upon his face, and he cries in a voice of thunder, "Blasphemer!" And all the

Bootstraplifters desist from their lifting, and menace me with furious looks. There is a general call for a

policeman of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association; and so I fall silent, and slink away in the throng, and

Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the

Bootstraplifting impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time agono man can

recall how far backthe Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets

could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best

essays in support of the practice. Now their propaganda is everywhere triumphant, and year by year we see an

increase in the rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the cult. The ground is covered with

stately temples of various designs, all of which I am told are consecrated to Bootstraplifting. I come to

where a group of people are occupied in laying the cornerstone of a new white marble structure; I inquire

and am informed it is the First Church of Bootstraplifters, Scientist. As I stand watching, a card is handed to

me, informing me that a lady will do my Bootstraplifting at five dollars per lift.

I go on to another building, which I am told is a library containing volumes in defense of the

Bootstraplifters, published under the auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets. I enter, and find endless vistas

of shelves, also several thousand current magazines and papers. I consult thesefor my legs have given out

in the effort to visit and inspect all phases of the Bootstraplifting practice. I discover that hardly a week

passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred lifetimes I could not

know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems

and offertories of Bootstraplifting. There are the Holy Roman Bootstraplifters, whose priests are fed by

Transubstantiation; the established Anglican Bootstraplifters, whose priests live by "livings"; the Baptist

Bootstraplifters, whose preachers practice total immersion in Standard Oil. There are Yogi Bootstraplifters

with flowing robes of yellow silk; Theosophist Bootstraplifters with green and purple auras; Mormon

Bootstraplifters, Mazdaznan Bootstraplifters, Spiritualist and SpiritFruit, Millerite and Dowieite, Holy

Roller and Holy Jumper, Cometoglory negro, Billy Sunday baseball and Salvation Army bassdrum

Bootstraplifters. There are the thousand varieties of "New Thought" Bootstraplifters; the mystic and

transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme Bootstraplifters; the Elbert Hubbard highart

Bootstraplifters with half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift" and "optimist," the Ralph

Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden Bootstraplifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar per

volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian professors of collegiate metaphysical

Bootstraplifting at several thousand dollars per year each. There are the Nietzschean Bootstraplifters, who

lift themselves to the Superman, and the artforart'ssake, neoPagan Bootstraplifters, who lift themselves

Excepting possibly the lastmentioned group, the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and

exhorters of Bootstraplifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their

own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a

purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstraplifters comes once a year

to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sundayschool Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstraplifters

shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mineslaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of

Bootstraplifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not

reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at

selfelevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with

The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn the sincerity of all who preach the supremacy

of the soul. No; I admit the honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask of the preacher is that he

shall make an effort to practice his doctrine. Let him be tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad like

Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Styliteson these terms I

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian

ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor

concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we

see the formulas of heroic selfdeception made use of by unheroic selfindulgence? What are we to say

when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say

when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the

It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two senses, one good and the other bad. Morality means the

will to righteousness, or it means Anthony Comstock; democracy means the rule of the people, or it means

Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word "Religion". In its true sense Religion is the most fundamental of

the soul's impulses, the impassioned love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and

further it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that sense Religion is a perpetually

selfrenewing force, the very nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing it, I would

But we are denied the pleasure of using the word in that honest sense, because of another which has been

given to it. To the ordinary man "Religion" means, not the soul's longing for growth, the "hunger and thirst

after righteousness", but certain forms in which this hunger has manifested itself in history, and prevails

today throughout the world; that is to say, institutions having fixed dogmas and "revelations", creeds and

rituals, with an administering caste claiming supernatural sanction. By such institutions the moral strivings of

the race, the affections of childhood and the aspirations of youth are made the prerogatives and stock in trade

of ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is the thesis of this book that "Religion" in this sense is a source of income to

If by my jesting at "Bootstraplifting" I have wounded some dear prejudice of the reader, let me endeavor to

speak in a more persuasive voice. I am a man who has suffered, and has seen the suffering of others; I have

devoted my life to analyzing the causes of the suffering, to find out if it be necessary and foreordained, or if

by any chance there be a way of escape for future generations. I have found that the latter is the case; the

suffering is needless, it can with ease and certainty be banished from the earth. I know this with the

knowledge of sciencein the same way that the navigator of a ship knows his latitude and longitude, and the

Come, reader, let us put aside prejudice, and the terrors of the cults of the unknown. The power which made

us has given us a mind, and the impulse to its use; let us see what can be done with it to rid the earth of its

ancient evils. And do not be troubled if at the outset this book seems to be entirely "destructive". I assure you

that I am no crude materialist, I am not so shallow as to imagine that our race will be satisfied with a barren

rationalism. I know that the old symbols came out of the heart of man because they corresponded to certain

needs of the heart of man. I know that new symbols will be found, corresponding more exactly to the needs

of our time. If here I set to work to tear down an old and ramshackle building, it is not from blind

destructfulness, but as an architect who means to put a new and sounder structure in its place. Before we part

When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He

had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual

intelligence. Today we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and

Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, playproducts of the mind;

losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousnessthat not merely did ancient

man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things

that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who

slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal

Men imagined supernatural powers such as they could comprehend. If the lightning god destroyed a hut,

obviously it must be because the owner of the hut had given offense; so the owner must placate the god, using

those means which would be effective in the quarrels of menpresents of roast meats and honey and fresh

fruits, of wine and gold and jewels and women, accompanied by friendly words and gestures of submission.

And when in spite of all things the natural evil did not cease, when the people continued to die of pestilence,

then came the opportunity for hysterical or ambitious persons to discover new ways of penetrating the mind

of the god. There would be dreamers of dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of the

entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds; there would be burning bushes and stone tablets on

mountaintops, and inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands. There would arise special

castes of men and women, learned in these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally

emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves aloof from the common herd, endowed

with special powers and entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles in ways favorable to

themselves and their order; they would proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking with

him in the nighttime, receiving his messengers and angels, acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in

dealing punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of laws and moral codes. They

would wear special costumes to distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to impress

their followers, employing all sensuous effects, architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and

So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and complicated forms, the Priestly Lie. There are a score of great

religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated

creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of "true

believers"; each damns all the others, with more or less heartinessand each is a mighty fortress of Graft.

There will be few readers of this book who have not been brought up under the spell of some one of these

systems of Supernaturalism; who have not been taught to speak with respect of some particular priestly order,

to thrill with awe at some particular sacred rite, to seek respite from earthly woes in some particular

ceremonial spell. These things are woven into our very fibre in childhood; they are sanctified by memories of

joys and griefs, they are confused with spiritual struggles, they become part of all that is most vital in our

lives. The reader who wishes to emancipate himself from their thrall will do well to begin with a study of the

beliefs and practices of other sects than his owna field where he is free to observe and examine without

fear of sacrilege. Let him look into Madame Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine", or her "Isis

Unveiled'!encyclopedias of the fantastic inventions which terror and longing have wrung out of the

tortured soul of man. Here are mysteries and solemnities, charms and spells, illuminations and

transmigrations, angels and demons, guides, controls and mastersall of which it is permissible to refuse to

support with gifts. Let the reader then go to James Freeman Clarke's "Ten Great Religions", and realize how

many billions of humans have lived and died in the solemn certainty that their welfare on earth and in heaven

depended upon their accepting certain ideas and practicing certain rites, all mutually exclusive and

incompatible, each damning the others and the followers of the others. So gradually the realization will come

to him that the test of a doctrine about life and its welfare must be something else than the fact that one was

It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant, nor that his ignorance made him a prey to dread.

The traces of his mental suffering will inspire in us only pity and sympathy; for Nature is a grim

schoolmistress, and not all her lessons have yet been learned. We have a right to scorn and anger only when

we see this dread being diverted from its true function, a stimulus to a search for knowledge, and made into a

means of clamping down ignorance upon the mind of the race. That this has been the deliberate policy of

The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear,

born of it, fed by itand that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived. "The fear of

divine anger", says Prof. Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent through the entire religious literature of Babylonia

And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the Hebrew scriptures: the only difference being

that the Hebrews combined all their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of

wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the thousand wives; and the Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear are

with Him," cries Job. "How then can any man be just before God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a

woman? Behold, even the moon hath no brightness, and the stars are not pure in His sight: How much less

man, that is a worm? And the son of man, which is a worm?" He goes on, in his lyrical rapture, "Sheol is

naked before Him, and Destruction hath no covering. . . . The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at

His rebuke. . . . The thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great

poetry does not in the least alter the fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical perversion of the

The Book of Job has been called a "Wisdomdrama": and what is the denouement of this drama, what is

ancient Hebrew wisdom's last word about life? "Wherefore I abhor myself," says Job, "and repent in dust and

ashes." The poor fellow has done nothing; we have been told at the beginning that he "was perfect and

upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." But the Sabeans and the Chaldeans rob him, and "the

fire of God" falls from heaven and burns up his sheep and his servants, and "a great wind from the

wilderness" kills his sons and daughters; and then his body becomes covered with boilsa phenomenon

caused in part by worry, and the consequent nervous indigestion, but mainly by excess of starch and

deficiency of mineral salts in the diet. Job, however, has never heard of the fasting cure for disease, and so he

takes him a potsherd to scrape himself withal, and he sits among the ashesa highly unsanitary procedure

enforced by his religious ritual. So naturally he feels like a worm, and abhors himself, and cries out: "I know

that Thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can be restrained." By which utter, unreasoning

humility he succeeds in appeasing the Great Fear, and his friends make a sacrifice of seven bullocks and

seven ramsa feast for a whole templeful of priestsand then "the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had

before. . . . And after this Job lived an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons and his sons' sons, even four

You do not have to look very deeply into this "Wisdomdrama" to find out whose wisdom it is. Confess your

own ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers

of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respitein exchange for fresh meat. Here are verses from a

psalm of the ancient Babylonians, which "heathen" chant is identical in spirit and purpose with the utterances

And now let the reader leap three thousand years of human history, of toil and triumph of the intellect of man;

and instead of a Hebrew manuscript or a Babylonian brick there confronts him a little publication, printed on

a modern rotary press in the capital of the United States of America, bearing the date of October, 1914, and

the title "Salve Regina". In it we find "a beautiful prayer", composed by the late cardinal Rampolla; we are

told that "Pius X attached to it an indulgence of 100 days, each time it is piously recited, applicable to the

O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, cast a glance from Heaven, where thou sittest as Queen, upon this poor

sinner, your servant. Though conscious of his unworthiness.... he blesses and exalts thee from his whole heart

as the purest, the most beautiful and the most holy of creatures. He blesses thy holy name. He blesses thy

sublime prerogatives as real Mother of God, ever Virgin, conceived without stain of sin, as coRedemptress

of the human race. He blesses the Eternal Father who chose you, etc. He blesses the Incarnate Word, etc. He

blesses the Divine Spirit, etc. He blesses, exalts and thanks the most august Trinity, etc. O Virgin, holy and

merciful. . . . be pleased to accept this little homage of your servant, and obtain for him also from your divine

And then, looking more closely, we discover the purpose of this "beautiful prayer", and of the neat little paper

which prints it. "Salve Regina" is raising funds for the "National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception", a

home for more priests, and Catholic ladies who desire to collect for it may receive little books which they are

requested to return within three months. Pius X writes a letter of warm endorsement, and sets an example by

giving four hundred dollars "out of his poverty" or, to be more precise, out of the poverty of the pitiful

peasantry of Italy. There is included in the paper a form of bequest for "devoted clients of Our Blessed

Mother", and at the top of the editorial page the most alluring of all baits for the loving hearts of the

flockthat the names of deceased relatives and friends may be written in the collection books, and will be

transferred to the records of the Shrine, and these persons "will share in all its spiritual benefits". In the days

of Job it was with threats of boils and poverty that the Priestly Lie maintained itself; but in the case of this

blackest of all Terrors, transplanted to our free Republic from the heart of the Dark Ages, the wretched

victims see before their eyes the glare of flames, and hear the shrieks of their loved ones writhing in torment

In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I sought earnestly for evidence of a

nonmeateating race; but candor compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig and the

bearhe was vegetarian when he could not help it. The advocates of the reform insist that meat as a diet

causes muddy brains and dulled nerves; but you would certainly never suspect this from a study of history.

What you find in history is that all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the strongest and cleverest get it.

Everywhere you find the subject classes living in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they

rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of liberty, our millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and

geese and turkeys, and hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but save everything for the

summerboarder or the buyer from the city. It would not be too much to say of the cultural records of early

man that they all have to do, directly or indirectly, with the reserving of fresh meat to the masters. In J. T.

Trowbridge's cheerful tale of the adventures of Captain Seaborn, we are told by the cannibal priest how

I suspect that we should have to go back to the days of the caveman to find the first lover of the fleshpots

who put a taboo upon meat, and promised supernatural favors to all who would exercise selfcontrol, and

instead of consuming their meat themselves, would bring it and lay it upon the sacred griddle, or altar, where

the god might come in the nighttime and partake of it. Certainly, at any rate, there are few religions of

record in which such devices do not appear. The early laws of the Hebrews are more concerned with

delicatessen for the priests than with any other subject whatever. Here, for example, is the way to make a

He shall offer his offering up to the Lord, one he lamb of the first year without blemish for a burnt offering,

and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish for a sin offering, and one ram without blemish for peace

offerings, and a basket of unleavened bread, cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, and wafers of unleavened

And the law goes on to instruct the priests to take certain choice, parts and "wave them for a wave offering

before the Lord: this is holy for the priest." What was done with the other portions we are not told; but earlier

Every offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel, which they bring unto the priest, shall be his.

And every man's hallowed things shall be his: whatsoever any man giveth to the priest, it shall be his.

In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the priests of Ceylon first present the gifts to the god,

and then eat them. Among the Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must bring four new robes to the

priests; if they do this, the priests wear the robes; if they fail to do it, the dead man appears naked before the

judgmentthrone. The devotees are instructed that "he who performs this rite succeeds in both worlds, and

obtains a firm footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists, the followers give alms to the monks, and are

told specifically what advantages will thereby accrue to them. In the Aitareyo Brahmairiarn of the RigVeda

He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is born from the womb of Agni and the offerings,

participates in the nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge), the Brahma (sacred

Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma, or juice of a plant, considered to be both a

plant and a god. Among the Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the sacred juice is that of the

grape, and the priest is not allowed to throw away what is left of it, but is ordered "reverently to consume it."

In as much as the priest is the sole judge of how much good sherry wine he shall consecrate previous to the

ceremony, it is to be expected that the priests of this cult should be lukewarm towards the prohibition

movement, and should piously refuse to administer their sacrament with unfermented and uninteresting

In every human society of which we have record there has been one class which has done the hard and

exhausting work, the "hewers of wood and drawers of water"; and there has been another, much smaller class

which has done the directing. To belong to this latter class is to work also, but with the head instead of the

hands; it is also to enjoy the good things of life, to live in the best houses, to eat the best food, to have choice

of the most desirable women; it is to have leisure to cultivate the mind and appreciate the arts, to acquire

graces and distinctions, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and

regardedin short, to have Power. How to get this Power and to hold it has been the first object of the

The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is uncertain, for any man may take up a sword,

and some may succeed with it. It will be found that empires based upon military force alone, however cruel

they may be, are not permanent, and therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when resistance is

paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that the race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds

and even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all priestly empires; the kings ruled because they

obeyed the will of the priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.

Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the Aztecs.... Such was the crafty policy of the priests, who,

by reserving to themselves the business of instruction, were enabled to mould the young and plastic mind

according to their own wills, and to train it early to implicit reverence for religion and its ministers.

To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the maintenance of the priests. The estates were

augmented by the policy or devotion of successive princes, until, under the last Montezuma, they had swollen

And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices, whereby the priestly caste maintained the

At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the prisoners, who for some years had been

reserved for the purpose, were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long. The ceremony

consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives are said to have perished at the shrine of this terrible

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

The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the original legal tribunal was the place where the

image or symbol of the god stood. A legal decision was an oracle or omen, indicative of the will of the god.

The power thus lodged in the priests of Babylonia and Assyria was enormous. They virtually held in their

The temples were the natural depositories of the legal archives, which in the course of centuries grew to

veritably enormous proportions. Records were made of all decisions; the facts were set forth, and duly

attested by witnesses. Business and marriage contracts, loans and deeds of sale were in like manner drawn up

in the presence of official scribes, who were also priests. In this way all commercial transactions received the

written sanction of the religious organization. The temples themselvesat least in the large centresentered

into business relations with the populace. In order to maintain the large household represented by such an

organization as that of the temple of Enlil of Nippur, that of Ningirsu at Lagash, that of Marduk at Babylon,

or that of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings of land were required which, cultivated by agents for the priests,

or farmed out with stipulations for a goodly share of the produce, secured an income for the maintenance of

the temple officials. The enterprise of the temples was expanded to the furnishing of loans at interestin

later periods, at 20%to barter in slaves, to dealings in lands, besides engaging labor for work of all kinds

directly needed for the temples. A large quantity of the business documents found in the temple archives are

concerned with the business affairs of the temple, and we are justified in including the temples in the large

centres as among the most important business institutions of the country. In financial or monetary

transactions the position of the temples was not unlike that of national banks. . . .

And so on. We may venture the guess that the learned professor said more in that last sentence than he

himself intended, for his lectures were delivered in that temple of plutocracy, the University of Pennsylvania,

and paid out of an endowment which specifies that "all polemical subjects shall be positively excluded!"

These priestly empires exist in the world today. If we wish to find them we have only to ask ourselves: What

countries are making no contribution to the progress of the race? What countries have nothing to give us,

For example, Gervaise tells us of the Talapoins, or priests of Siam, that "they are exempted from all public

charges, they salute nobody, while everybody prostrates himself before them. They are maintained at the

public expense." In the same way we read of the negroes of the Caribbean islands that "their priests and

priestesses exercise an almost unlimited power." Miss Kingsley, in her "West African Studies", tells us that if

we desire to understand the institutions of this district, we must study the native's religion.

For his religion has so firm a grasp upon his mind that it influences everything he does. it is not a thing apart,

as the religion of the Europeans is at times. The African cannot say, "Oh, that is all right from a religious

point of view, but one must be practical." To be practical, to get on in the world, to live the day and night

through, he must be right in the religious point of view, namely, must be on working terms with the great

world of spirits around him. The knowledge of this spirit world constitutes the religion of the African, and his

In Lhassa and many other sacred places fanatical pilgrims make circumambulations, sometimes for miles and

miles, and for days together, covering the entire distance lying flat upon their bodies.... From the ceiling of

the temple hang hundreds of long strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so many

flying prayers when hung upfor mechanical praying in every way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus instead of

having to learn by heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to stuff the entire prayerbook into a

prayerwheel, and revolve it while repeating as fast as you can four words meaning, "O God, the gem

emerging from the lotusflower.". . . . The attention of the pilgrims is directed to a large box, or often a big

bowl, where they may deposit whatever offerings they can spare, and it must be said that their religious ideas

are so strongly developed that they will dispose of a considerable portion of their money in this fashion....

The Lamas are very clever in many ways, and have a great hold over the entire country. They are ninety per

cent of them unscrupulous scamps, depraved in every way and given to every sort of vice. So are the women

Lamas. They live and sponge on the credulity and ignorance of the crowds; it is to maintain this ignorance,

upon which their luxurious life depends, that foreign influence of every kind is strictly kept out of the

In this last sentence we have summed up the fundamental fact about institutionalized religion. Wherever

belief and ritual have become the means of livelihood of a class, all innovation will of necessity be taken as

an attack upon that class; it will be literally a crimerobbing the priests of their agelong privileges. And of

course they will oppose the robberusing every weapon of terrorism, both of this world and the next. They

will require the submission, not merely of their own people, but of their neighbors, and their jealousy of rival

priestly castes will be a cause of wars. The story of the early days of mankind is a sickening record of torture

Thus, for example, we read in the Hebrew religious records how the priests were engaged in establishing the

prestige of a fetish called "the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated this fetish and wakened the

And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of

the people fifty thousand and three score and ten men; and the people lamented, because the Lord had smitten

many of the people with a great slaughter. And the men of Bethshemesh said, Who is able to stand before

This terrible old Hebrew divinity said of himself that he was "a jealous god". Throughout the time of his

sway he issued through his ministers precise instructions for the most revolting cruelties, the extermination of

whole nations of men, women and children, whose sole offense was that they did not pay tribute to Jehovah's

priests. Thus, for example, the chief of his prophets, Moses, called the people together, and with all

solemnity, and with many warnings, handed down ten commandments graven upon stone tablets; he went on

to set forth how the people were to set upon and rob their neighbors, and gave them these bloodthirsty

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many

nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites,

and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the Lord thy God

shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant

with them, nor shew mercy unto them: ... But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and

break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. For thou art a

holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself,

The records of this Jehovah are full of similar horrors. He sent his chosen people out to destroy the

Midianites, and they slew all the males, but this was not sufficient, and Moses was wroth, and commanded

them to kill all the married women, and to take the single women "for themselves". We are told that sixteen

thousand single women were spared, of whom "the Lord's tribute was thirty and two!" In the Book of Joshua

we read that he had an interview with a supernatural personage called "the captain of the Lord's host", and

how this captain had given to him a magic spell which would destroy the city of Jericho. The city should be

accursed, "even it and all that are therein, to the Lord"; every living thing except one traitorharlot was to be

slaughtered, and all the wealth of the city reserved to the priestly caste. This was carried out to the letter,

except that "Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the

accursed thing"that is, he hid some gold and silver in his tent; whereupon the army met with a defeat, and

everybody knew that something was wrong, and Joshua rent his clothes and fell to the earth upon his face

before the ark of the Lord, and got another message from Jehovah, to the effect that the guilty man should be

And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the

wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and

all that he had: and they brought them unto the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us?

the Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after

We have no means of knowing what was the character of the unfortunate inhabitants of the city of Jericho,

nor of the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of the victims of Jehovah. To be sure,

we are told by the Hebrew priests that they sacrificed their children to their gods; but then, consider what we

should believe about the Hebrew religion, if we took the word of rival priestly castes! Consider, for example,

that in this twentieth century we saw an orthodox Jew tried in a Russian court of law for having made a

sacrifice of Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a considerable part of the

intelligence and idealism of Russia. We know in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture and all

of the scientific knowledge of Spain; that the Huguenots had most of the conscience and industry of France;

and we know that they were massacred or driven out to death by the priestly castes of the Middle Ages.

Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those mediaeval times, so that we may know what we ourselves

have escaped. In the fifteenth century there was established in Europe the cult of a threeheaded god, whose

priests had won lordship over a continent. They were enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt; they sold

to the rich the license to commit every possible crime, and they held the poor in ignorance and degradation.

Among the comparatively intelligent and freedomloving people of Bohemia there arose a great reformer,

John Huss, himself a priest, protesting against the corruptions of his order. They trapped him into their power

by means of a "safeconduct"which they repudiated because no promise to a heretic could have validity.

They found him guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine that a priest who committed crimes could not

give absolution for the crimes of others; and they held an auto de fewhich means a "sentence of faith." As

The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund (the Emperor) and his nobles, the great officers of

the empire with their insignia, the prelates in their splendid robes. While mass was sung, Huss, as an

excommunicate, was kept waiting at the door; when brought in he was placed on an elevated bench by a table

on which stood a coffer containing priestly vestments. After some preliminaries, including a sermon by the

Bishop of Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the events of that day would confer on him immortal

glory, the articles of which Huss was convicted were recited. In vain he protested that he believed in

transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in polluted hands. He was ordered to hold his tongue,

and on his persisting the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of this he continued to utter protests.

The sentence was then read in the name of the council, condemning him both for his written errors and those

which had been proven by witnesses. He was declared a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic who did not

desire to return to the Church; his books were ordered to be burned, and himself to be degraded from the

priesthood and abandoned to the secular court. Seven bishops arrayed him in priestly garb and warned him to

recant while yet there was time. He turned to the crowd, and with broken voice declared that he could not

confess the errors which he never entertained, lest he should lie to God, when the bishops interrupted him,

crying that they had waited long enough, for he was obstinate in his heresy. He was degraded in the usual

manner, stripped of his sacerdotal vestments, his fingers scraped; but when the tonsure was to be disposed of,

an absurd quarrel arose among the bishops as to whether the head should be shaved with a razor or the

tonsure be destroyed with scissors. Scissors won the day, and a cross was cut in his hair. Then on his head

was placed a conical paper cap, a cubit in height, adorned with painted devils and the inscription, "This is the

The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which he was conducted by two thousand armed men,

with Palsgrave Louis at their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates, and cardinals. The

route followed was circuitous, in order that he might be carried past the episcopal palace, in front of which

his books were burning, whereat he smiled. Pity from man there was none to look for, but he sought comfort

on high, repeating to himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon us!" and when he came

in sight of the stake he fell on his knees and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and said that he

would gladly do so if there were space. A wide circle was formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to

custom, had been providently empowered to take advantage of final weakening, came forward, saying, "Dear

sir and master, if you will recant your unbelief and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly hear

your confession; but if you will not, you know right well that, according to canon law, no one can administer

the sacrament to a heretic." To this Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am not a mortal sinner." His paper

crown fell off and he smiled as his guards replaced it. He desired to take leave of his keepers, and when they

were brought to him he thanked them for their kindness, saying that they had been to him rather brothers than

jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German, telling them that he suffered for errors which he

did not hold, and he was cut short. When bound to the stake, two cartloads of fagots and straw were piled up

around him, and the palsgrave and vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could save

himself, but only repeated that he had been convicted by false witnesses on errors never entertained by him.

They clapped their hands and then withdrew, and the executioners applied the fire. Twice Huss was heard to

exclaim, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing up and blowing

the flamer, and smoke into his face checked further utterances, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to

move while one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy was over; the sorelytried soul bad

escaped from its tormentors, and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him the praise that

no philosopher of old had faced death with more composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity. No

faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle. Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm of

one of the executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be reverenced as a relic, and promised

the man to compensate him. With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and thrown into the

Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered

around the spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which they reverenced as relies of their

martyr. The next day thanks were returned to God in a solemn procession in which figured Sigismund and his

queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen cardinals, two patriarchs, seventyseven bishops, and all the clergy of

the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter

If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it would only be in some remote and wholly savage

place, such as the mountains of Hayti, or the Solomon Islands. It could no longer happen in any civilized

country; the reason being, not any abatement of the pretensions of the priesthood, but solely the power of

science, embodied in the physical arm of a secular State. The advance of that arm the church has fought

systematically, in every country, and at every point. To quote Buckle: "A careful study of the history of

religious toleration will prove that in every Christian country where it has been adopted, it has been forced

upon the clergy by the authority of the secular classes." The wolf of superstition has been driven into its lair;

but it has backed away snarling, and it still crouches, watching for a chance to spring. The Church which

burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that the earth moves round the sunthat same

church, in the name of the same threeheaded god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the firingsquad; if it does

not do the same thing to the author of this book, it will be solely because of the police. Not being allowed to

burn me here, the clergy will vent their holy indignation by sentencing me to eternal burning in a future world

It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any

nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion. Those

peoples which are wholly under the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans, Siamese and

Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectual life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos, and

Turks, who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther on the way are Spaniards and Irish; here, for

example, is a flashlight of the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick MacGill:

The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always told the people if they did not pay their

debts they would burn for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you sorry for the debts that

you did not pay," said the priest. "What is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar steps. "If a

man tried to count the sands on the seashore and took a million years to count every single grain, how long

would it take him to count them all? A long time, you'll say. But that time is nothing to eternity. Just think of

it! Burning in hell while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand, counts all the sand on the

seashore. And this because you did not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within the

letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened,

There is light in Ireland today, and hope for an Irish culture; the thing to be noted is that it comes from two

movements, one for agricultural cooperation and the other for political independenceboth of them

definitely and specifically nonreligious. This same thing has been true of the movements which have helped

on happier nations, such as the republics of France and America, which have put an end to the power of the

priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the mind of the child without its parents' consent.

This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently not yet occurred to any legislature that the State

may owe a duty to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though it has the misfortune to be

born of poisoned parents. It is still permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with images of a

personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of

devildoctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns and systematically to infect whole cities full

of men, women and children with hellfire phobias. In the American city where I write one may see

gatherings of people sunk upon their knees, even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing,

screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning paper and read of the arrest of five men

and seven women in Los Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living God", upon a

charge of having disturbed the peace of their neighbors. The police officers testified that the accused claimed

to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted

like pigs and barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling", about which the newspapers did

not go into details. And again, a week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming, and found

tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged to a religious sect which had found her guilty of

witchcraft. Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve failed, and the "high priest" was

called in, who decreed a whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have deserved to be

whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake had been madeit was another woman who was the

witch. And again in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly serious news item, telling how a certain man

awakened one morning, and found on his pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of the head of

Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his neighbors to witness the miracle, and declared that while he

was not superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened by chance, and he knew what it was

intended to signifyhe would buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the war!

And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture think that the battle of the intellect is won,

and that it is no longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting "Religion!"

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 volumenot as a message

from God to Good Society, but as a landmark of man's agelong struggle against myth and dogma used as a

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 phenomenonthe fact that the heavenly

bodies affect the destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient emolument to justify the

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 counterspell against "excessive rains and floods": the

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 fairystories 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 allby wishing that everything he wished

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 goingI 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 parlormaids, 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

And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killershe 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

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,"

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

And in one of the world's leading nations the people stand up and bare their heads, and sing to their god to

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

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

Prayers such as these are pronounced in every socalled civilized nation today. Behind every battleline in

Europe you may see the priests of the Babylonian Firegod 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

It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely

increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every European country was in the hands of the

Church. Well did a great eclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God."

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 halfsuppressed 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

"diseasemaker", who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they blew horns to frighten this

diseasemaker from his spells. The missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the afflictionand

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

And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of Common Praye" 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

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 presentday Anglican churchmember; 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

Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick faith. Which faith, except

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 precisionfortyfour

paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae, closing with the final doom: "This is the Catholick faith: which except

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 "Thirtynine Articles"which are thirtynine 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 supreme crime of the church today 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

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 smallpox; 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 crowbars and derricks and heave these figures out of the way! And you think

that conditions are changed today? But consider syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we know so much, and

can do almost nothing; consider birthcontrol, which we are sent to jail for so much as mentioning! Consider

the divorce reforms for which the world is cryingand 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

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 drawingroom. 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

While men were being tried for publishing the "Freethinker", 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

seaanimals, and there has been such a mixing of land, sea and air animals as utterly to destroy the reputation

I have a friend, a wellknown "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

gravelooking 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 pseudoscience 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 Prayerbook 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 divinehe

has written many such works, as the advertisements inform usfills up the greater part of his pages with

footnotes from hundreds of authorities, arguments and counterarguments over supernatural subtleties. I

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 sensethat is, by the soul being brought into immediate communion withbut absent

in another sensethat 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

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

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 bookstores 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 handorgan playing, and turned awaythe 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 motorcars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and the drinksodden,

starchpoisoned inhabitantsslumpopulations 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

The bodiesand 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

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

homesbecause in 1910 the mind of England was occupied with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and the ten

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 lawcourts 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 fiftythree; the oldest of them is ninetyone,

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

And nowhere is the crux of the argumentdo 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

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

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

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

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.

But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets, A leader at the loveday, 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

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

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

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

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

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 objectfor 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:

I investigate, and find that my exprofessor 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

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

I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink and grow fat, rich and die; which

If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports of that period, the eighteenth century,

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 backstairs 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

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 presentday England:

You see, the land system of England remainsthe 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 motivebecause 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

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 entailedthat 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 landowner 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

And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church owns landnot 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

About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land owners.; one noble lord alone disposes of

fiftysix such plums; and needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor radical

landtaxes. He gives them to men like himselfautocratic to the poor, easygoing to members of his own

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 pluraliststhat 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 thirtyeight of their thirtynine articles

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 teaparty. 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."

As one of America's head muckrakers, 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 birthright.

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

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 subsidyboth 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

moneylenders, the international financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist system. These

gentlemen make the world their homeor, 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 rivalthe

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 childhoodmy 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!"

For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of South Africawanted 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 affairbut 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 robberclasses 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 bloodlust 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 concentrationcamps, 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,

The British God had other ways of improving nationsfor 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 battleships 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

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

Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China can never meet on a common ground.

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

restrictionand 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 thirtytwo

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

I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but

wartime facilities for research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C. Vedder's "Jesus Christ

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

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 wartime economy!

This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British radicals; they see it at work in every

electionthe publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson confuses them with spirituality.

There are two powerful societies in England employing this deadly combinationthe "AntiSocialist

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 largescale 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

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 brutalsetting forth the ethics of exploitation in the

manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who supplied for capitalist depredation a basis in

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 he gone, and

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 complicationsand so they proceed to set out

all the antiSocialist bugaboos. Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D. D., expounding "The

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

And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D. D., an especially popular clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance

The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through them, of which this is one. Where God has

And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a clergyman, author of a big book attacking

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 antiSocialist

propagandistsneither I or any other man can possibly discover what he really means, or what he really

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 twovolume "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 settledhow do you

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 stationeryan 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 tenderhearted 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

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 schoolsystem 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

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,

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 noblehearted 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 nonprofessors; 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 coldblooded 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

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 Archbishopa

man of apostolic meeknessreplied: "You should be thankful that it was not a live one."

The people had reason for this conductas 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

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."

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

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

fourteen hours a day. This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval

of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was

interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an

established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B. C., to teach the divine

origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted

prince, worshipper of the gods".... so begins the oldest legal code which has come down to us, from 2250 B.

C.; and the coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis. The duty of

submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen

Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the

people petition for increase of grace to hear meekly Thy Word"; and here is this "Word," as little children are

made to learn it by heart. If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know

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 coalcountry, 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 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 mineslaves 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

Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been permitted by an allwise 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 countryto observe

the benefits flowing from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high to so liberally assist

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

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

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 antislavery movement, and also of the

ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to British wageslaves 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 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

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 politicsin 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 slavecatechism, "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

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 clothesso 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 hymnbooknot the English, but the sturdy, independent, democratic American

hymnbook. I have not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its contents is as familiar to me as

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

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, selfconscious 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 Familynot even the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his

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:

This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on earth; utterly simple and honesthe 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 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 saintscasting down their golden crowns around the

glassy seaunless it be that of the Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching these saints,

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 formalitiesnot 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

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 recollectionsI cannot have been more than four years of ageis of

carrying a dustbrush about the house as the choirboy 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 Sundayschool. 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 locationprecisely 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 themas all the rest of the world is made for them; the populace was permitted to

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 Sundayschool,

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 slumboys. 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

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 slumboysand what I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them. The

liquordealers and the brothelkeepers, the panders and the pimps, the crapshooters and the petty

thievesall 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

prisonbut 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 minethat the church was a kind of amiable fake, a pious hornblowing; while

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

reasonthat 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

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 denunciationuntil the venerable institution which had

There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering brownstone 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 noontime, and all the traders

and their wageslaves had to listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my young soul; and

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

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

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

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

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine

how he would have shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what devilish utterances were

some day to proceed from the lips of the little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as the

bishop's attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church! Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect,

even to the most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way! Even under the consecrated

hands of the bishop! For while the bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the sanctified,

I was thinking about what the papers had reported, that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand

dollars worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife

should possess fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting the bloodhounds of the

police on the train of a human being. I asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember his patient

explanationthat 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 lifework to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral;

The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had to be cathedralsdespite the fact that both St.

Stephen and St. Paul had declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made with hands." In the

twentyfive 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

vantagepoint 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

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 apartmenthouses;

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 churchmembers 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 Founderto turn him from a proletarian rebel into a stainedglasswindow 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 PhelpsDodge corporation, which the other day

carried out the deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona. Says my

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

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 Sundayschool Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the weight of their

jewelled sledgesbooks, sermons, newspaperinterviews, afterdinner speecheswherewith 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

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

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

culturebuying wine for weddingfeasts, and ointmentboxes and other objets de vertu; and third,

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 wageslaves, 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

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

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

Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing upon clergy and laity alike, to address their

religious energies too exclusively to those tasks whereby human life may be made more abundant and

wholesome materially..... We need constantly to be reminded that spiritual things come first.

There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen for whom these comfortable sayings are

prepared: the vestrymen and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shiny

tophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in pastel shades, their gracious smiles and

their sweet intoxicating odors. I picture them as I have seen them at St. George's, where that aged wild boar,

Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in

oldfashioned 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

Business men contribute to the Y. M. C. A. because they realize that if their employes are well cared for and

As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and selfsustaining phenomenon. For every one

of these exquisite, sweetsmelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be at home a large

number of other women who live sterile and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their

luckier sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings; they have emotionsor, in religious parlance,

"souls;" it is necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating the property of their

mistresses, also to keep them from becoming enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New

York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the other, St. Patrick's, for the servantgirls. The

latter is located on Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide with the homes of the Vanderbilts the

interest of the crowds of sightseers. Now, early every Sunday morning, before "Good Society" has opened

its eyes, you may see the devotees of the Irish snakecharmer hurrying to their orisons, each with a little

black prayerbook in her hand. What is it they do inside? What are they taught about life? This is the

Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate of New York, favored me with his

justification of his own career and activities. He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one man of the

world to another, he said: "The reason I put them into the hands of Catholics is not religious, but because I

find they are efficient in such matters. They don't ask questions, they do what you want them to do, and do it

I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the remarklike Agassiz when some one gave

When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long hours and improper workingconditions which

drove him to desperation; they do not ask if police and politicians are getting a rakeoff from the saloon, or if

traction magnates are using it as an agency for the controlling of votes; they do not plunge into prohibition

movements or good government campaignsthey simply take the man in, at a standard price, and the patient

slavesisters and attendants get him sober, and then turn him out for society to make him drunk again. That is

"charity," and it is the special industry of Roman Catholicism. They have been at it for a thousand years,

cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes"plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder and sudden

death." Yetpuzzling as it would seem to anyone not religious there were never so many messes, never

so many different kinds of messes, as now at the end of the thousand years of charitable activity!

But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building and rebuilding his web across a doorway; like

soldiers under the command of a ruling class with a "muddling through" tradition

And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have messes to be cleaned up, human

garbageheaps to be carted away quickly and without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this service, no

matter what their personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be. Somewhere in the neighborhood of

every steelmill, every coalmine or other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital, with

its slavesisters and attendants. Once when I was "muckraking" near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these

places to ask information as to the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims. The "Mother

Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as

Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as it is with the work of nursing and

almsgiving, so it is with the work of votegetting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloonkeepers and

wardheelers which the Catholic machine controls. This industry of votegetting is a comparatively new one;

but the Church has been handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned this new way of

"democracy," and has established her supremacy over all rivals. She has the schools for training the children,

the confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the purgatory and the code of

slaveethics. She has the supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really believe what she

teaches; they do not have to listen to tablerappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in

So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance have been driven to a more or less reluctant

alliance with the Papacy. The Church is here, and her followers are here, before the war several hundred

thousand of them pouring into the country every year. It is no longer possible to do without Catholics in

America; not merely do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes washed, but franchises

have to be granted, tariffschedules adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police trained and strikes

crushed. Under our native political system, for these purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes

belong to people of a score of nationalitiesIrish and German and Italian and FrenchCanadian and

Bohemian and Mexican and Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church can handle

these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and editors and politicians familiar with all these languages?

Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely moderatethe mere actual expenses of the

campaign, the cost of red fire and torchlights, of liquor and newspaper advertisements. The rest may come

out of the public till, in the form of exemption from taxation of church buildings and lands, a share of the

public funds for charities and schools, the control of the police for saloonkeepers and district leaders, the

control of policecourts and magistrates, of municipal administrations and boards of education, of

legislatures and governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our sacred selfesteem, a

senator or a justice on the Supreme Court Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige,

some cabinetmembers and legislators and justices to attend High Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholic

You think this is empty rhetoricyou comfortable, easygoing, ultracultured Americans? You professors

in your classic shades, absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence"while the world

about you slides down into the pit! You ladies of Good Society, practicing your "sweet little charities,"

pursuing your "dear little ideals," raising your families of one or two lovely childrenwhile Irish and

FrenchCanadians and Italians and Portuguese and Hungarians are breeding their dozens and scores, and

You remember "Bishop Blougram's Apology," Browning's study of the psychology of a modern Catholic

ecclesiastic. He is not unaware of modern thought, this bishop; he is a man of culture, who wants to have

He wishes that he had faithfaith in anything; he understands that faith is allimportant

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

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

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

So he continues, but not with entire satisfaction, in his role of shepherd to those whom he calls "King

I wander into a Catholic bookstore and look to see what Bishop Blougram is doing with his lazzaroni and his

ragamuffin saints here in this new country of the far West. It is easy to acquire the information, for the

saleswoman is polite and the prices fit my purse. America is going to war, and Catholic boys are being

drafted to be trained for battle; so for ten cents I obtain a firmly bound little pamphlet called "God's Armor, a

Prayer Book for Soldiers." It is marked "Copyright by the G. R. C. CentralVerein," and bears the "Nihil

Obstat" of the "Censor Theolog." and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti.

Ludovici"which last you may at first fail to recognize as a wellknown city on the Mississippi River. Do

you not feel the spell of ancient things, the magic of the past creeping over you, as you read those Latin

trademarks? Such is the Dead Hand, and its cunning, which can make even St. Louis sound mysterious!

In this booklet I get no information as to the commercial causes of war, nor about the part which the clerical

vote may have played throughout Europe in supporting military systems. I do not even find anything about

the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve of a selfgoverning people to put an end to feudal rule. Instead I

discover a soldierboy who obeys and keeps silent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip of terrors both

of body and soul. Poor, pitiful soldierboy, marking yourself with crosses, performing genuflexions,

mumbling magic formulas in the trencheshow many billions of you have been led out to slaughter by the

greeds and ambitions of your religious masters, since first this accursed Antichrist got its grip upon the hearts

Start this day well by lifting up your heart to God. Offer yourself to Him, and beg grace to spend the day

without sin. Make the sign of the cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, behold me in Thy

Divine Presence. I adore Thee and give Thee thanks. Grant that all I do this day be for Thy Glory, and for the

During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your prayers need not be long nor read from a book. Learn a

few of these short ejaculations by heart and frequently repeat them. They will serve to recall God to your

You remember a while back about the prayerwheels of the Thibetans. The Catholic religion was founded

before the Thibetan, and is less progressive; it does not welcome mechanical devices for saving labor. You

have to use your own vocal apparatus to keep yourself from hell; but the process has been made as

economical as possible by kindly dispensations of the Pope. Thus, each time that you say "My God and my

all," you get fifty days indulgence; the same for "My Jesus, mercy," and the same for "Jesus, my God, I love

Thee above all things." For "Jesus, Mary, Joseph," you get three hundred dayswhich would seem by all

And then come prayers for all occasions: "Prayer before Battle"; "Prayer for a Happy Death"; "Prayer in

Temptation"; "Prayer before and after Meals"; "Prayer when on Guard"; "Prayer before a long March";

"Prayer of Resignation to Death"; "Prayer for Those in their Agony"I cannot bear to read them, hardly to

list them. I remember standing in a cathedral "somewhere in France" during the celebration of some special

Big Magic. There was brilliant white light, and a suffocating strange odor, and the thunder of a huge organ,

and a clamor of voices, high, clear voices of young boys mounting to heaven, like the hands of men in a pit

reaching up, trying to climb over the top of one another. It sent a shudder into the depths of my soul. There is

nothing left in the modern world which can carry the mind so far back into the ancient nightmare of anguish

and terror which was once the mental life of mankind, as these Roman Catholic incantations with their frantic

and ceaseless importunity. They have even brought in the sexspell; and the poor, frightened soldierboy,

who has perhaps spent the night with a prostitute, now prostrates himself before a holy Womanbeing who is

lifted high above the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe and affection which his mother

brought to him in early childhood. Read over the phrases of this "Litany of the Blessed Virgin":

Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Mother of God. Holy Virgin of Virgins. Mother of Christ. Mother of divine

grace. Mother most pure. Mother most chaste. Mother inviolate. Mother undefiled. Mother most amiable.

Mother most admirable. Mother of good counsel. Mother of our Creator. Mother of our Savior. Virgin most

prudent. Virgin most venerable. Virgin most renowned. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin

most faithful. Mirror of justice. Seat of wisdom. Cause of our Joy. Spiritual vessel. Vessel of honor. Singular

vessel of devotion. Mystical rose. Tower of David. Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the covenant. Gate

of heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick. Refuge of sinners. Comforter of the afflicted. Help of Christians.

Queen of Angels. Queen of Patriarchs. Queen of Prophets. Queen of Apostles. Queen of Martyrs. Queen of

Confessors. Queen of Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queen conceived without original sin. Queen of the most

For another five centshow cheaply a man of insight can obtain thrills in this fantastic world!I purchase a

copy of the "Messenger of the Sacred Heart", a magazine published in New York, the issue for October,

1917. There are pages of advertisements of schools and colleges with strange titles: "Immaculata Seminary",

"Holy Cross Academy", "Holy Ghost Institute", "Ladycliff", "Academy of Holy Child Jesus". The leading

article is by a Jesuit, on "The Spread of the Apostleship of Prayer among the Young"; and then "Sister

Clarissa" writes a poem telling us "What are Sorrows"; and then we are given a story called "Prayer for

Daddy"; and then another Jesuit father tells us. about "The Hills that Jesus Loved". A third father tells us

about the "Eucharistic Propaganda"; and we learn that in July, 1917, it distributed 11,699 beads, and caused

the expenditure of 57,714 hours of adoration; and then the faithful are given a form of letter which they are to

write to the Honorable Baker, Secretary of War, imploring him to intimate to the French government that

France should withdraw from one of her advances in civilization, and join with mediaeval America in

exempting priests from being drafted to fight for their country. And then there is a "Question Box"just like

the Hearst newspapers, only instead of asking whether she should allow him to kiss her before he has told her

that he loves her, the reader asks what is the Pauline Privilege, and what is the heroic Act, and is Robert a

saint's name, and if food remains in the teeth from the night before, would it break the fast to swallow it

I quoted the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and pointed out how deftly the Church has managed to slip

in a prayer for worldly prosperity. But the Catholic Church does not show any squeamishness in dealing with

its "million imbeciles", its "rough, purblind mass". There is a department of the little magazine entitled

"Thanksgiving", and a statement at the top that "the total number of Thanksgivings for the month is

2,143,911." I am suspicious of that, as of German reports of prisoners taken; but I give the statement as it

stands, not going through the list and picking out the crudest, but taking them as they come, classified by

GENERAL FAVORS: For many of these favors Mass and publication were promised, for others the Badge

of Promoter's Cross was used, for others the prayers of the Associates had been asked.

CaliforniaSeventeen recoveries, six situations, two successful examinations, house rented, stocks sold,

raise in salary, return to religious duties, sight regained, medal won, Baptism, preservation from disease,

contract obtained, success in business, hearing restored, Easter duty made, happy death, automobile sold,

mind restored, house found, house rented, successful journey, business sold, quarrel averted, return of friends,

And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic machine is harvesting the price day by

dayharvesting with that ancient fervor which the Latin poet described as "auri sacra fames". As

Christopher Columbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: "Gold is a wonderful thing. By means of gold we can

The system thus selfrevealed you admit is appalling in its squalor; but you say that at least it is milder and

less perilous than the Church which burned Giordano Bruno and John Huss. But the very essence of the

Catholic Church is that it does not change; semper eadem is its motto: the same yesterday, today and

foreverthe same in Washington as in Rome or Madridthe same in a modern democracy as in the Middle

Ages. The Catholic Church is not primarily a religious organization; it is a political organization, and

proclaims the fact, and defies those who would shut it up in the religious field, The Rev. S. B. Smith, a

Protestants contend that the entire power of the Church consists in the right to teach and exhort, but not in the

right to command, rule, or govern; whence they infer that she is not a perfect society or sovereign state. This

theory is false; for the Church, as was seen, is vested Jure divino with power, (1) to make laws; (2) to define

and apply them (potestas judicialis); (3) to punish those who violate her laws (potestas coercitiva).

And this is not one scholar's theory, but the formal and repeated proclamation of infallible popes. Here is the

"Syllabus of Errors", issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in precise language that

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

It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical power shall require the permission of the civil power in

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

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

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

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

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

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

You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You, who think that liberty of conscience is the

basis of civilization, ought at least to know what the Catholic Church has to say about the matter. Here is

Mgr. Segur, in his "Plain Talk About Protestantism of Today", a book published in Boston and extensively

Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is likewise the soul of modern rationalism and philosophy.

It is one of those impossibilities which only the levity of a superficial reason can regard as admissable. But a

sound mind, that does not feed on empty words, looks upon this freedom of thought only as simply absurd,

You take the liberty of thinking, nevertheless; you feel safe because the Law will protect you. But do you

imagine that this "Law" applies to your Catholic neighbors? Do you imagine that they are bound by the

restraints that bind you? Here is Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical of 1890and please remember that Leo

XIII was the beau ideal of our capitalist statesmen and editors, as wise and kind and gentlesouled a pope as

If the laws of the state are openly at variance with the laws of Godif they inflict injury upon the

Churchor set at naught the authority of Jesus Christ which is vested in the Supreme Pontiff, then indeed it

And consider how many fields there are in which the laws of a democratic state do and forever must

contravene the "laws of God" as interpreted by the Catholic Church. Consider for example, that the Pope, in

his decree Ne Temere, has declared that all persons who have been married by civil authorities or by

Protestant clergymen are living in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of

education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments,

vows of celibacy. To the above list, as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such as birth control,

What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of expressions of that intention, set forth in the boldest

and haughtiest and most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal Manning, in the ProCathedral at

I acknowledge no civil power; I am the subject of no prince; I claim more than thisI claim to be the

supreme judge and director of the consciences of menof the peasant that tills the field, and of the prince

that sits upon the throne; of the household of privacy, and the legislator that makes laws for kingdoms; I am

What this means is, that here in our American democracy the Catholic Church is a rebel; a prisoner of war

who bides his time, watching for the moment to rise in revolt, and meantime making no secret of his

intentions. The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true believers in America, instructed them as to their attitude in

The Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no

hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free

to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the

conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the church, or that it would

be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The

fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means

to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church .... But she would bring forth more

abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of the public

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

Tell us we are Catholics first and Americans or Englishmen afterwards; of course we are. Tell us, in the

conflict between the church and the civil government we take the side of the church; of course we do. Why, if

the government of the United States were at war with the church, we would say tomorrow, To hell with the

government of the United States; and if the church and all the governments of the world were at war, we

would say, To hell with all the governments of the world .... Why is it that in this country, where we have

only seven per cent of the population, the Catholic church is so much feared? She is loved by all her children

and feared by everybody. Why is it that the Pope has such tremendous power? Why, the Pope is the ruler of

the world. All the emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all the presidents of the world, are as these altar

You recall what I said at the outset about Power; the ability to control the lives of other men, to give laws and

moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and regarded. Here is a man swollen to bursting with

this Power. Dressed in his holy robes, with his holy incense in his nostrils, and the faces of the faithful gazing

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

And lest you think that an extreme example of ultramontanist arrogance, listen to the Boston "Pilot", April 6,

It must be borne in mind that even though Cardinals Farley, O'Connell and Gibbons are at heart patriotic

Americans and members of an American hierachy, yet they are as cardinals foreign princes of the blood, to

whom the United States, as one of the great powers of the world, is under an obligation to concede the same

Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American manofwar, he would be entitled to the salutes and to naval

honors reserved for a foreign royal personage, and at any official entertainment at Washington the Cardinal

will outrank not merely every cabinet officer, the speaker of the house and the vicepresident, but also the

Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal personage not of sovereign rank visits New York it is his

Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly Jesus. And what is their attitude towards their

brothers in God, the rank and file of the membership, whose pennies grease the wheels of the ecclesiastical

machine? His Holiness, the Pope, sent over a delegate to represent him in America, and at a convention of the

Federation of Catholic Societies held in New Orleans in November, 1910, this gentleman, Diomede Falconio,

delivered himself on the subject of Capital and Labor. We have heard the slavecode of the Anglican

disciples of Jesus, the revolutionary carpenter; now let us hear the slavecode of his Roman disciples:

Human society has its origin from God and is constituted of two classes of people, the rich and the poor,

Hence it follows that according to the ordinance of God, human society is composed of superiors and

subjects, masters and servants, learned and unlettered, rich and poor, nobles and plebeians.

And lest this should not be clear enough, the Pope sent a second representative, Mgr. John Bonzano, who,

speaking at a general meeting of the German Catholic CentralVerein, St. Louis, 1917, declared:

One of the worst evils that may grow out of the European war is the spreading of the doctrine of Socialism,

and the Catholic Church must be ready to counteract such doctrines. We must be ready to prevent the spread

of Socialism and to work against it. As I understand, you have a society of wealthy people in St. Louis ready

for such a campaign. You have experienced leaders who are masters in their kind of work. They are always

insistent to show that this wealth was and is in close touch with the Church, and therefore it will not fail.

This, you perceive, is the complete thesis of the present book, which therefore no doubt will be entitled to the

'Nihil Obstat" of the "Censor Theolog.", and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti.

Ludovici." No wonder that the "experienced leaders" of America, our captains of industry and exploiters of

labor, are forced, whatever their own faith may be, to make use of this system of subjection. A few years ago

we read in our papers how a Jewish millionaire of Baltimore was presenting a fortune to the Catholic Church,

to be used in its war upon Socialism. The late Mark Hanna, the shrewdest and most farseeing man that Big

Business ever brought into power, said that in twenty years there would be two parties in America, a

capitalist and a socialist; and that it would be the Catholic church that would save the country from

Socialism. That prophecy was widely quoted, and sank into the souls of our steel and railway and money

magnates; from which time you might see, if you watched political events, a new tone of deference to the

Roman Hierarchy on the part of our ruling classes. Today you cannot get an expression of opinion hostile to

Catholicism into any newspaper of importance. The Associated Press does not handle news unfavorable to

the Church, and from top to bottom, the politician takes off his hat when the Sacred Host goes by. Said

I'd like to see the politician who would try to rule against the church in Chicago. His reign would be short

And how is it in our national capital, the palladium of our liberties? As a means of demonstrating the power

of the church and the subservience of our politicians, the Catholics have invented what they call the

"Cardinal's Day Mass": An elaborate procession of high ecclesiastics, dressed in gorgeous robes and jewels,

through the streets of Washington, accompanied by a small army of policemen, paid by nonCatholic

taxpayers. The Cardinal seats himself upon a throne, and our political rulers make obeisance before him. On

Sunday, January 14, 1917, there were present at this political mass the following personages: Four cabinet

members and their wives; the speaker of the House; a large group of senators and representatives; a general

of the army and his wife; an admiral of the navy and his wife; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and his

And understand that the church makes no secret of its purpose in conducting such public exhibitions. Here is

All Catholics must make themselves felt as active elements in daily political life in the countries where they

live. They must penetrate, wherever possible, in the administration of civil affairs; must constantly exert the

utmost vigilance and energy to prevent the usages of liberty from going beyond the limits fixed by God's law.

All Catholics should do all in their power to cause the constitutions of states and legislation to be modeled on

And following these instructions, the Catholics are organized for political work. There are the various

Catholic Societies, such as the Knights of Columbus, secret, oathbound organizations, the military arm of

the Papal Power. These societies boast some three million members, and control not less than that many

votes. The one thing that you can be certain about these votes is that on every public question, of whatever

nature, they will be cast on the side of ignorance and reaction. Thus, it was the influence of the Catholic

Societies which put upon our national statute books the infamous law providing five years imprisonment and

five thousand dollars fine for the sending through the mail of information about the prevention of conception.

It is their influence which keeps upon the statutebooks of New York state the infamous law which permits

divorce only for infidelity, and makes it "collusion" if both parties desire the divorce. It is these societies

which, in every city and town in America, are pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so

that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get Catholics into the public schools and on

schoolboards, so that children may not hear about Galileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in control of

police and on magistrates benches, so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished.

You are shocked at this, you think it a vulgar jest, perhaps; but during a period of "vice raids" in New York I

was told by a captain of police, himself a Catholic, that it was a common thing for them to get priests in their

net. "Of course," the official added, goodnaturedly, "we let them slip out." I understood that he had to do

that; for the Pope, in his "Motu Proprio" decree, has forbidden Catholics to bring a priest into court for any

civil crime whatsoever; he has forbidden Catholic policemen to arrest, Catholic judges to try, and Catholic

lawmakers to make laws affecting any priest of the Church of Rome. And of course we know, upon the

authority of a cardinal, that the Pope is "the sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong." He has held

that position for a thousand years and more; and wherever you consult the police records throughout the

thousand years, you find the same entries concerning Catholic ecclesiastics. I turn to Riley's "Illustrations of

London Life from Original Documents," and I find in the year 1385 a certain chaplain, whose name is

considerately suppressed, had a breviary stolen from him by a loose woman, because he has not given her any

money, either on that night or the one previous. In 1320 John de Sloghtre, a priest, is put in the tower "for

being found wandering about the city against the peace", and Richard Heyring, a priest, is indicted in the

ward of Farringdon and in the ward of Crepelgate "as being a bruiser and nightwalker." That this has been

going on for six hundred years is due, not to any special corruption of the Catholic heart, but to the practice of

clerical celibacy, which is contrary to nature, a transgression of fundamental instinct. It should be noted that

the purpose of this transgression, which pretends to be spiritual, is really economic; it was the means whereby

the church machine built up its power through the Middle Ages. The priests had children then, as they have

them today; but these children not being recognized, the church machine remained the sole heir of the

Knowing what we know today, we marvel that it was possible for Germany to prepare through so many years

for her assault on civilization, and for England to have slept through it all. In exactly the same way, the

historian of a generation from now will marvel that America should have slept, while the New Inquisition

was planning to strangle her. For we are told with the utmost explicitness precisely what is to be done. We

are to see wiped out these gains of civilization for which our race has bled and agonized for many centuries;

the very gains are to serve as the means of their own destruction! Have we not heard Pope Leo tell his faithful

how to take advantage of what they find in Americaour easygoing trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our

We see the army being organized and drilled under our eyes; and we can read upon its banners its purpose

proclaimed. Just as the Prussian military caste had its slogan "Deutschland ueber Alles!" so the Knights of

Their attitude to democratic institutions is attested by the fact that none of their conventions ever fails in its

resolutions to "deeply deplore the loss of the temporal power of Our Father, the Pope." Their subjection to

priestly domination is indicated by such resolutions as this, bearing date of May 13th, 1914:

The Knights of Columbus of Texas in annual convention assembled, prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness,

present filial regards with assurances of loyalty and obedience to the Holy See and request the Papal blessing.

On June 10th, 1912, one T. J. Carey of Palestine, Texas, wrote to Archbishop Bonzano, the Apostolic

Delegate: "Must I, as a Catholic, surrender my political freedom to the Church? And by this I mean the right

to vote for the Democratic, Socialist, or Republican parties when and where I please?" The answer was: "You

should submit to the decisions of the Church, even at the cost of sacrificing political principles." And to the

same effect Mgr. Preston, In New York City, Jan. 1, 1888: "The man who says, 'I will take my faith from

Such is the Papal machine; and not a day passes that it does not discover some new scheme to advance the

Papal glory; a "Catholic battleship" in the United States navy; Catholic chaplains on all ships of the navy;

Catholic holidayssuch as Columbus Dayto be celebrated by all Protestants in America; thirty million

dollars worth of church property exempted from taxation in New York City; mission bells to be set up at the

expense of the state of California; state support for parish schoolsor, if this cannot be had, exemption of

Catholics from taxation for school purposes. So on through the list which might continue for pages.

More than anything else, of course, the Papal machine is concerned with education, or rather, with the

preventing of education. It was in its childish days that the race fell under the spell of the Priestly Lie; it is in

his childish days that the individual can be most safely snared. Suffer little children to come unto the Catholic

priest, and he will make upon their sensitive minds an impression which nothing in after life can eradicate. So

the mainstay of the New Inquisition is the parishschool, and its deadliest enemy is the American school

system. Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus, in his book, "The Rights of Our Little

Catholic parents cannot, in conscience send their children to American public schools, except for very grave

While state education removes illiteracy and puts a limited amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it

The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essential

And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church is fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is

Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at taxing the school buildings, which creates hardships to

the parochial and other private schools. Now it is the free text book law that puts a double burden on the

Catholics. Then again it is the unwise extension of the compulsory school age that forces children to be in

And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools, hear Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking

Within twenty years this country is going to rule the world. Kings and emperors will pass away, and the

democracy of the United States will take their place. The West will dominate the country, and what I have

seen of the Western parochial schools has proved that the generation which follows us will be exclusively

Catholic. When the United States rules the world the Catholic Church will rule the world.

The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to rule? There are not a few Americans who

believe that there have to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be preferable to rule by

Socialists. Before you decide, at least do not fail to consider what history has to tell about priestly

government. We do not have to use our imaginations in the matter, for there was once a Golden Age such as

Archbishop Quigley dreams of, when the power of the church was complete, when emperors and princes paid

homage to her, and the civil authority made haste to carry out her commands. What was the condition of the

people in those times? We are told by Lea, in his "History of the Inquisition" that:

The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved. Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the

Inquisition and its methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin was comparatively unimportant

except as a source of revenue to those who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and

purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The artificial standard thus created is seen in a

revelation of the Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no matter how polluted by sin

and vice, is not so wicked but that he has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many wicked

popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests

who are not heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they may be. Correctness of belief

was thus the sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such a

system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of Pius II, that the Franciscans were

This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who

were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same

holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only

unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when

men had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debauchery and contempt of

sacred things, all the sanctions of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong

became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial

courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in

some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal

oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were accountable, and that, in

comparison with them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he proceeds to

describe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal immorality

which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their

narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of

1379, tells us that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies,

adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom debauchery,

avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness: and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the

fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there occurred no less than fourteen

hundred murders committed in the bagnios, brothels, gamblinghouses, taverns, and other similar places.

When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his Crusaders to destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and cynical

debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of

St. Denis admits was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster at

Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation

of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the

Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as

a model and protector of the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops, through the basest and most

criminal of motives, were habitual accepters of persons; they annointed themselves with the last essence

extracted from their flocks, and there was in them nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.

But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a modern country in which the Catholic Church

has worked its will. Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are turning against the clerical

On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church, interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic

life, ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their hardwon livelihood by trusts and

monopolies established and maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders, placing obstacles in the way of

their children's education, hindering them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and deliberately

ruining those of them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in

Barcelona; they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco; it is dragged into it solely

in defense of the mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The consumos cannot be abolished

We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state cannot justly enforce compulsory education,

even in case of utter illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was an official

investigation of school conditions, the report appearing in the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909. In

1857 there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of schools in each of the 79 provinces: this

requirement being below the very low standards prevailing at that time in other European countries. Yet in

1909 it was found that only four provinces had the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of

increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch up. Seventyfive per cent of the population

were wholly illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government schools at all. The government

owed nearly a million and a half dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private, schools were nearly all

"nuns' schools", which taught only needlework and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were

As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain,

More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these are absolutely destitute of hygienic

conditions. There are schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughter houses, with stables.

One school forms the entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master's table while the last

responses are being said. There is a school into which the children cannot enter until the animals have been

sent out to pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm weather begins the boys faint for want of air

and ventilation. One school is a manureheap in process of fermentation, and one of the local authorities has

said that in this way the children are warmer in winter. One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in

Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there is a bullfight in the town.

These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by the name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded

what he called a "modern school", in which the pupils should be taught science and common sense. He drew,

of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic hierarchy, which saw in the spread of his principles the end of their

mastery of the people. When the Barcelona insurrection took place, they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of

having been its instigator; they had him tried in secret before a military tribunal, convicted upon forged

documents, and shot beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was thoroughly investigated by

William Archer, one of England's leading critics, a man of scrupulous rectitude of mind. His conclusion is

that Ferrer was absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and that his execution was the result of a

Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have quoted form a pretty complete revelation. From first

to last we see in him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible idealist. His ideals are narrow, and his

devotion to them fanatical; but it is devoid, if not of egoism, at any rate of selfinterest and selfseeking. As

he shrank from applying the money entrusted him to ends of personal luxury, so also he shrank from making

There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest idle while their country falls into the

condition of Spain. There are antiCatholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers to discuss the

Church and its records; and this is exasperating to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any

criticism of it as blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe the working out of the doctrine that the

On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein, Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church,

named Jeremiah J. Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The Catholics of the town

made efforts to intimidate the owner of the place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the town,

Father O'Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate

Crowley was surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was six feet three in size, he

was beaten almost to death. At the trial which followed it developed that Father O'Connor and also his

Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military societies, with their uniforms and their armories, are not

maintained for nothing. As Archbishop Quigley declared before the German Catholic Central Verein:

We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do

what the church authorities tell them to do. With these bodies of loyal Catholics ready to step into the breach

And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver,

Colorado, overpowered a police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an antiCatholic lecturer. They

bound and gagged him, took him to a lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing happened

to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev. William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case

the assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to punish them failed, because no jury

can be got to convict a Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most pious Leo XIII has

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to

There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting of this political Church. One of them,

"The Menace," has a circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights of Slavery do not enjoy

reading it. Year after year they have marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the mailsso far,

in vain. They caused an obscenity prosecution, which failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were

blown up with dynamite. At the present time there is a "Catholic Truth Society" with a publication called

"Truth", to oppose the antiCatholic campaign; and that is all right, of courseexcept when the agents who

collect the twodollar subscriptions to this publication make use of Untruth in their laborspromising

absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of those who "come across" with subscriptions. In

the "Bulletin of the American Federation of Catholic Societies" for September, 1915, I find a record of the

ceaseless plotting to bar criticism of the Catholic Church from the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany Catholic

congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the

Federation's "law committee", points out the difficulties in the way of such legislation. You cannot pass a law

against ridiculing religion, because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science, Mormonism, and the

"Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they

can slip into the present law the words "scurrilous and slanderous"; he hopes that this much can be done

You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want to start an American "Kulturkampf." I make

haste, therefore, to restate the main thesis of this book. It is not the New Inquisition which is our enemy

today; it is hereditary Privilege. It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of Superstition as a

You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal corruption of our politics, we used to

attribute it to the "ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty" and you will see how

reformers twenty years ago explained our political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that the

purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that

wherever there was a political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain of industry furnishing

the money for the bribes, and taking some public privilege in return. So we came to realize that political

And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of Supersition in America, this amazing renascence

of Romanism in a democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the poor foreigner who

troubles us. Our human magic would win himour easygoing trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our

openhanded and openhomed and hailfellowwellmet democracy. We should break down the Catholic

machine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy could stop uswere it not for the Steel Trust and the Coal

Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trustthose masters of

America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and selfgoverning, but who want the slavehordes as

No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kulturkampf. It is not the pennies of the servantgirls which build the

towering cathedrals; it is not the twodollar contributions for the salvation of souls which support the

Catholic Truth Society and the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society and the Mary Sodality and

the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and all the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda.

These help, of course; but the main sources of growth are, first, the subsidies of industrial exploiters, the

majority of whom are nonCatholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted as payment for votes

The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial life of America. I will stop long enough to

present an account of one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if space permitted I could

present the same sort of proof for a dozen other industries which I have studiedthe steelmills of Western

Pennsylvania, the meatfactories of Chicago, the glassworks of Southern Jersey, the silkmills of Paterson,

the cottonmills of North Carolina, the woolenmills of Massachusetts, the lumbercamps of Louisiana, the

In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of enormously valuable coalmines owned by the

Rockefellers and other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some twelve or fifteen

thousand in number, come from all the nations of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average

wageslave. I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present sworn testimony, taken by the United States

Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the Italian miners live, as described in a doctor's

Houses up the canyon, socalled, of which eight are habitable, and fortysix simply awful; they are

disreputably disgraceful. I have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack to another to keep

And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former superintendent of the Sociological

The C. F. I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and dugouts that are unfit for the habitation of

human beings and are little removed from the pigsty make of dwellings. And the people in them live on the

very level of a pigsty. Frequently the population is so congested that whole families are crowded into one

And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses whom the Rockefellers employ:

The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most uncouth, ignorant, immoral, and in many

instances, the most brutal set of men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.

Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights, and applies for the protection which the law

"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of the super he was getting too smart."

And when these wageslaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on strike, in the words of the Commission's

Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in the strikers' tent colony were shot to death by

militiamen and guards employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and burned to death when these

And now, what is the position of education in such camps? The Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher,

testified that the school building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were four teachers, the next three,

and the next only two. The teacher of the primary grade had a hundred and twenty children enrolled, ninety

Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was overcrowded entirely, and she could hardly get

And as to the political use made of this deliberately cultivated ignorance, former United States Senator

Patterson testified that the companies controlled all elections and all nominations:

Election returns from the two or three counties in which the large companies operate show that in the

precincts in which the mining camps are located the returns are nearly unanimous in favor of the men or

And now comes the allimportant question. What of the Catholic Church and these evils? The majority of

these mineslaves are Catholics, it is this Church which is charged with their protection. There are priests in

every town, and in nearly every camp. And do we find them lifting their voices in behalf of the miners,

protesting against the starving and torturing of thirty or forty thousand human beings? Do we find Catholic

papers printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic journalists on the scene reporting it,

Catholic lawyers defending the strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their troubles? We do not!

Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre,

who had a word to say for the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached the strikefield was of a

priest who had preached on the text that "Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as a "scab"

and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively, thinking of his church superiors. My informant, a

I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and could not be interested in questions of

worldly greed. Max Eastman, reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an interview with a Catholic sister.

"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people, or to bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it

The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and several clergymen of the Protestant Church

appeared and bore testimony to the outrages which were being committed against the strikers; but of all the

Catholic priests in the district not one appearednot one! Several Protestant clergymen testified that they

had been driven from the coalcampsnot because they favored the unions, but because the companies

objected to having their workers educated at all; but no one ever heard of the Catholic Church having trouble

with the operators. To make sure on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who watched the

whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:

The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies very cordially. The Church was permitted in all

the camps. The impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor what good the Church does,

but I know of no instance, during the Colorado coalstrike or at any other time or place, when the Catholic

Church has taken any special interest in the cause of the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially the men,

Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all power, political, social, and religious, is

economic exploitation. To all other powers and all other organizations it speaks in these words: "Help us, and

you will thrive; oppose us, and you will be destroyed." It has spoken to the Catholic Church, for sixteen

hundred years the friend and servant of every ruling class; and the Church has hastened to fit itself into the

In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so in the Blaine campaign it was possible

for a Republican clergyman to describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the Holy Office

was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old Party was desperately in need of votes, so under the

regime of Mark Hanna, the PresidentMaker, there began a rapprochement between Big Business and the

New Inquisition. Under Hanna the Catholic Church got representation in the Cabinet; under him the

Cardinal's Mass became a government institution, a Catholic College came to the fore in Washington, and

Catholic prelates were introduced in the role of eminent publicists, their reactionary opinions on important

questions being quoted with grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark Hanna himself who founded

the National Civic Federation, upon whose executive committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops might

work hand in glove with Catholic laborleaders for the chloroforming of the American workingclass.

Hanna's biographer naively calls attention to the Presidentmaker's popularity among Catholics, high and

low, and the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland was in frequent correspondence with him, and used

And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower in the

days of Taft, the most pliant tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White House since the days of the

Slave Power. President Taft was himself a Unitarian; yet it was under his administration that the Catholic

Church achieved one of its dearest ambitions, and broke into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can imagine

the powers of the time in conference. It is desired to pack the Court against the possibility of progress; it is

desired to find men who will stand like a rock against changeand who better than those who have been

trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that

Hereditary Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property rights, with a supreme tribunal to

Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the strangest legislative alliance our history ever

saw; a combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the leaders of the Tammany Democracy of

New York. "Bloody shirt" Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish Catholic

mobleaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the draftriots! By this unholy combination a pledge to

reduce the tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its burdens; by this combination the public

lands and resources of the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish Secretary of the Interior. And

of course under such an administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides. Catholic officials

were appointed to public office, Catholic ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor

became a means to political advancement. You might see a hardswearing old political pirate like "Uncle

Joe" Cannon, taking his cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and betaking himself to the

"Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate

on a throne. You might see an emissary of the United States government proceeding to Rome, prostrating

himself before the Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our taxes for lands which the filthy and

sensual friars of the Philippine Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and which the

This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made the most determined efforts to prevent the

spread of radical thought. Because the popular magazines were opposing the plundering of the country, a bill

was introduced into Congress to put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the President himself

devoted all his power to forcing the passage of this bill. At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped

by every sort of persecution. I was at that time in intimate touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I know that

scarcely a month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some new "regulation" especially

designed to limit its circulation. I recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to Washington with a

trunkful of letters from subscribers who complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to

them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic Attorney General and sentenced to prison

From my personal knowledge I can say that under the administration of President Taft the Roman Catholic

Church and the Secret Service of the Federal Government worked hand in hand for the undermining of the

radical movement in America. Catholic lecturers toured the country, pouring into the ears of the public vile

slanders about the private morality of Socialists; while at the same time government detectives, paid out of

public funds, spent their time seeking evidence for these Catholic lecturers to use. I know one man, a radical

laborleader, whose morals happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician, and who was

prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a

dozen others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one casemyselfa man who was asking a

This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in

the suit made no charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our political police evidently

thought it likely that a man who was not living with his wife might have something to hide; so for months my

every move was watched and all my mail intercepted. In such a case one might at first suspect one's private

opponent; but it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for any private agency. Not merely was

my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friendspeople residing in places as far apart as

California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this

matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer was that a study of many labor

cases had taught me the methods of the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence if he can

find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will

be convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case, the matter was not brought to a test, for I

went abroad to live; when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft administration had been

repudiated at the polls, and the Secret Service of the government was no longer at the disposal of the Catholic

Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere recognized as one of the main pillars of

American capitalism. It has some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million communicants, and property

valued at half a billion dollars. Upon this property it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national; which means,

quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of

Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and lighted and cleaned in front of Catholic churches; we pay to

have thieves kept away from them, fires put out in them, records preserved for themall the services of

civilization given to them gratis, and this in a land whose constitution provides that Congress (which includes

all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no law respecting a religious establishment." When

war is declared, and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and friars, priests and

dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the

status of "conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach justice and humanity, decency

In defense of this taxexemption graft, the stock answer is that the property is being used for purposes of

"education" or "charity". It is a school, in which children are being taught that "liberty of conscience is a most

pestiferous error, from which arises revolution, corruption, contempt of sacred things, holy institutions, and

laws." (Pius IX). It is a "House of Refuge", to which wayward girls are committed by Catholic magistrates,

and in which they are worked twelve hours a day in a laundry or a clothing sweatshop. Or it is a

"parishhouse", in which a celibate priest lives under the care of an attractive young "housekeeper". Or it is

a nunnery, in which young girls are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their sisters' plates to

teach them humility, and taught to lie before the altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their "Superiors"

walk upon their bodies to impress the religious virtues. "I was a teacher in the Catholic schools up to a very

recent period," writes the woman friend who tells me of these customs, "and I know about the whole awful

Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of "religious" use has not even the shadow of

justification. In every large city of America you will find acres of land owned by the Catholic machine, and

supposed to be the future site of some institution; but as time goes on and property values increase, the

church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to cash in the profits of its investment, precisely as

does any other real estate speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history of Romanism you find it at this same

game, doing business under the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy name of Christ. Read the letter which

the Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their boundless

A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of

the wealth of Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides cattle and other property. They own

six large sugar refineries, worth from half a million to a million crowns each, and making an annual profit of

100,000 crowns each, while all the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own only three small

refineries. They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet

they continually intrigue for legaciesa woman has recently left them 70,000 crownsand they refuse to

pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit

congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers

still gravely maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be added that the missionaries

were still heavily subsidized by the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only five or six Jesuits to

And if you think this taxexemption privilege should be taken away from the church grafters, let me suggest

a course of procedure. Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and if the letter is not published, go and

see the editor and ask why; so you will learn something about the partnership between Superstition and Big

It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large American city dares to attack the

emoluments of the Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine. As I write,

they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that graftridden city

herald it as an important social event. Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's crook

upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a

grand opera company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city with a pretense to radicalism,

turns loose its starwriterone of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West "rodeo" one

day, and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P. convention the next; and always with his picture, one

inch square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not!

He is a newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the assignment and write like the

devil. To read him now you might think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and he bursts

Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic

Church in the inexorable progress of its immense structure, which rises from the rock of Peter, with its

beacons of faith and devotion piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround the world and the worldly,

was the ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed

And then, a month later, comes another occasion of statethe Twentythird AnnualBanquet of the

Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to make clear

the sociological significance of that function; explaining first, a nationwide organization which has been

proven by congressional investigation and by the publication of its secret documents to be a machine for the

corruption of our political life; and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels have long

since fled; a city in the first crude stage of land speculation, without order, dignity or charm; a city of real

estate agents, who exist by selling climate to new arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectual life is

"boosting", whose standards of truth are those of the horsetrade. Its newspapers publish a table of

temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern California and the East. This device is effective in

the wintertime; but last June, when for five days and nights the temperature was over 110, and several times

In the same way, there is a rule that our earthquake shocks are never mentioned, unless they destroy whole

towns. On the afternoon of Jan. 26th, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of violence sufficient to lift a barn over a

churchsteeple and deposit it in the pastor's front yard. That evening a friend of mine in Los Angeles called

up the office of the "Times" to make inquiry; and although they are only thirteen miles away, and have a

branch office and a special correspondent in Pasadena, the answer was that they had heard nothing about the

cyclone! And next morning I made a careful search of their columns. On the front page I read: "Fourth

Blizzard of Season Raging in East"; also: "Another Earthquake in Guatemala". But not a line about the

Pasadena cyclone That there was plenty of space in that issue, you may judge from the fact that there were

twenty headlines like the followingmany of them representing full page and half page illustrated

Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The Bright Side of Sunshine Land; Come to California:

Southland's Arms Outstretched in Cordial Invitation to the East; Flower Stands Make Gay City Streets;

Southland Climate Big Manufacturing Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los Angeles' Beautiful Homes;

Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are making money hand over fist. It is all the more

delightful, because we are putting our souls into it, we are lending our money to the government and saving

the world for Democracy! Our labor unionists have been driven to other cities, and our Mexican agitators and

I. W. W.'s are in jail; so, in the gilt ballroom of our palatial sixdollaraday hotel the four hundred masters

of our prosperity meet to pat themselves on the back, and they invite the new Catholic bishop to come and

fireandslaughterbreathing "Times"and here is the episcopal picture on the front page, the arms

stretched four columns wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus does love the Merchants

and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is poured out upon them! "You represent, gentlemen, the largest and

the most civilizing secular body in the country. You are the pioneers of American civilization..... I am glad to

be among you; glad that my lines have fallen in this glorious land by the sunset sea, and honored to meet in

intimate acquaintance the big men who have raised here in a few years a city of metropolitan proportions."

And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian of Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them

about the coming classwar. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and respect for vested rights,

strict observance of public faith; on the other a demagog speaking about the tyranny of capitalists and

usurers." And then, of course, the inevitable religious tag: "How will men obey you, if they believe not in

God, who is the author of all authority?" At which, according to the "Times", "prolonged applause and

cheers" from the Merchants and Manufacturers! The editor of the "Times" goes back to his office, and

inspired by this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader" with the statement that: "We have no proletariat in

In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy Alliance, this union of Superstition and the

Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association, we have to go to Europe, where the arrangement has been

working for a thousand years. In Europe today we see the whole world in conflict with a band of criminals

who have been able to master the minds and lives of a hundred million highly civilized people. As I write, the

Junker aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat cut; but there comes a Holy Father to its rescue, with

the cross of Jesus uplifted, and a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna, edited in Berlin, and sent out

from Rome. The Holy Father loves all mankind with a tender and touching love; his heart bleeds at the sight

of bloodshed and suffering, and he pleads the sacred cause of peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

But what was the Holy Father doing through the fortythree years that the Potsdam gang were preparing for

their assault on the world? How was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and good will? He is, you

understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong," and his followers obey him with the

utmost promptness and devotionthey express themselves as "prostrate at his feet." And when the masters

of Prussia came to him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation into the world's greatest military

empire"what did the Roman Church answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause of

peace on earth and goodwill towards men? No, it did not. To Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it

said to Mark Hanna in America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the minds of the young, so

that we may plunder the poor and build our cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish

You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know the very names of the prelates with whom

the mastercynic of the Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the Kulturkampf, and had

failed; but before he repealed the antiCatholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its lesson, and

would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We know how this bargain was carried out; we have the

record of the Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies were the solid rock upon

which the military regime of Prussia was erected. Not a battleship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the

Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a schoolchild was beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New

Inquisition did not shout its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag when the Socialists

were protesting against the torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the deputies of the Holy

Father's political party screaming their rage like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic

Church organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were called, to scab upon the workers and

undermine the revolutionary movement. The Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for the

management of these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious and benevolent Leo XIII:

"They must pay special and principal attention to piety and morality, and their internal discipline must be

directed precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely lose their special character, and come to be

very little better than those societies which take no account of Religion at all."

It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and morality while he is starving! I am quoting from

the Encyclical Letter on "The Condition of Labor," issued in 1891, and addressed "to our Venerable Brethren,

all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the

Apostolic See." The purpose of the letter is "to refute false teaching," and the substance of its message is:

This great labor question cannot be solved except by assuming as a principle that private property must be

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

The chief thing to be secured is the safeguarding, by legal enactment and policy, of private property. Most

of all it is essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude within the line of duty; for if all

may justly strive to benefit their condition, yet neither justice nor the common good allows any one to seize

that which belongs to another, or, under the pretext of futile and ridiculous equality, to lay hands on other

And this, you understand, in lands where rapine and conquest, classtyranny and priestly domination have

been the custom since the dawn of history; in which no propertyright can possibly trace back to any other

basis than force. In Austria, for exampleAustria, the leader and guardian of the Holy AllianceAustria,

which had no Reformation, no Revolution, no KulturkampfAustria, in which the income of the Catholic

Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words, Austria is still to a large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was

Austria which began the warbegan it in a religious quarrel, with a Slav people which does not

acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of the world, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church. So of

course today, when Austria is learning the bitter lesson that they who draw the sword shall perish by the

sword, the heart of the Holy Father is wrung with grief, and he sends out these eloquent peacenotes, written

in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And at the same time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced to prison

It is a curious thing to observethe natural instinct which, all over the world, draws Superstition and

Exploitation together. This war, which is hailed as a war against autocracy, might almost as accurately be

described as a war against the clerical system. Wherever in the world you find the Papal power strong, there

you find sympathy with the Prussian infamy and there you find German intrigue. In Spain, for example; in

Ireland and Quebec, and in the Argentine. The treatment of Belgium was a little too rawtoo many priests

were shot at the outset, and so Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice that he pleads in vain

with the Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The

Kaiser allows the hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace settlement; and meantime the law

forbidding the presence of the Jesuits in Germany has been repealed, and all over the world the propagandists

of this order are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger Casement was raised a Catholic, and so also "Jim" Larkin,

the Irish laborleader who is touring America denouncing the Allies. The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne

opposed and beat conscription in Australia, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery among the ignorant

peasantsoldiers from Sicily which caused the breaking of the Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this

instinct worked that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New York was campaigning for

immediate peace, the Catholic Irish suddenly forgot their ancient horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's Journal"

published nine articles favoring Socialism in a single issue; while even "The Tablet," the diocesan paper,

began to discover that the Socialists were not such bad fellows after all. The same "Tablet" which a few years

ago allowed Father Belford to declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be "stopped with a bullet"!

Note to second edition: Since the above was written, the war fervor has swept America, including even the

rank and file of the Catholics, and what has here been said might seem unfair to persons who have forgotten

the attitude of the Church during the early part of the conflict, and the struggle it cost to bring the hierarchy

into line. It is one of the ironies of history that the most reactionary organization in the world should be

lending its aid to the destruction of the second most reactionary. When the Catholic Church marches forth to

war for Democracy, it is not drawing America down into the pit, but is letting America pull it out of the

pitat least for a time, and the spectacle is one in which all lovers of progress will rejoice.

The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental

paralysis by Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are better than the

Catholic, but not much better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word;

but since this Word is the entire literary product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry,

drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection

of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to do. The "Holy Book" being

full of polygamy, slavery, rape and wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct orders

of God, it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.

They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous form of utterance. If he could come

back to life, and see what men have done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman coin, I

think he would drop dead. As for Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his makeup; when

he ordered, "Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly what he said. The Roman official stamp which he

put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the Reformation on.

In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering the most atrocious and awful misery;

Luther himself knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the priestly landexploiters with

that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever is done

about ituntil at last the miserable peasants attempted to organize and win their own rights. Their demands

do not seem to us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of electing their own pastors, the

abolition of villeinage, the right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction of exorbitant rents,

extra payment for extra labor, andthat universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England,

Mexico or sixteenth century Germanythe restoration to the village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther

would hear nothing of slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline sociology: If they

really wished to follow Christ, they would drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with

spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist without inequalities, etc.

And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon them and denounced them to the princes; he

issued proclamations which might have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the policeforce of

his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to hit him with

the fist until blood flows from the nose." He issued a letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of

Peasants," which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue Pastor of Standard Oil: "The

ass needs to be beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this well, and

therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of

Methodist Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled about the severity of their

repression, for it will save many souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes set to work, and

slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the

Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wageslavery and militarism for four centuries. As a church

The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to 1525, when the whole nation was in

commotion, and a great revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every class and every higher interest

one step nearer to its ideal of life. . . . . The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and creative

when it embraced the whole of human life and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements.

When it became "religious" in the narrow sense, it grew scholastic and spiny, quarrelsome, and impotent to

As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became the state church of Prussia, and Bibleworship

and Devilterror played their part, along with the Mass and the Confessional, in building up the Junker

dream. A court officialthe Oberhofpredigerwas set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were

the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but

he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one

would remain in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how he

He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of pains with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to

them; and for the rest expects to be obeyed by them, as by his Sergeants and Corporals. Indeed, the reverend

men feel themselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants, Corporals, and Captains, to whom obedience is the

So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided Silesia and Poland. His successors ordered all the

Protestant sects into one, so that they might be more easily controlled; from which time the Lutheran Church

has been a department of the Prussian state, in some cases a branch of the municipal authority.

In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded their liberty, it was an ultrapious king of

Prussia who sent his troops and shot them downprecisely as Luther had advised to shoot down the

peasants. At this time the future maker of the German Empire rose in the Landtag and made his bow before

the world; a young Prussian landmagnate, Otto von Bismarck by name, he shook his fist in the face of the

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

The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintained this tradition of his line. It was his custom to tour the

Empire in a train of blue and white cars, carrying as many costumes as any stage favorite, most of them

military; with him on the train went the Prussian god, and there was scarcely a performance at which this god

did not appear, also in military costume. After the failure of the "Kulturkampf," the official Lutheran

religion was ordered to make friends with its ancient enemy, the Catholic Church. Said the Kaiser:

I make no difference between the adherents of the Catholic and Protestant creeds. Let them both stand upon

the foundation of Christianity, and they are both bound to be true citizens and obedient subjects. Then the

German people will be the rock of granite upon which our Lord God can build and complete his work of

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

I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his Royal Majesty,and his lawful successors in the

government,as my most gracious King and Sovereign; promote his welfare according to my ability;

prevent injury and detriment to him; and particularly endeavor carefully to cultivate in the minds of the

people under my care a sense of reverence and fidelity towards the King, love for the Fatherland, obedience

to the laws, and all those virtues which in a Christian denote a good citizen; and I will not suffer any man to

teach or act in a contrary spirit. In particular I vow that I will not support any society or association, either at

home or abroad, which might endanger the public security, and will inform His Majesty of any proposal

made, either in my diocese or elsewhere, which might prove injurious to the State.

And later on this heavenguided ruler conceived the scheme of a BerlinBagdad railway, for which he

needed one religion more; he paid a visit to Constantinople, and made another debut and produced another

godwith the result that millions of Turks are fighting under the belief that the Kaiser is a convert to the

All this was, of course, in preparation for the great event to which all good Germans looked forwardto

This glorious day came, and the fieldgray armies marched forth, and the PaulineLutheran God marched

Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, the German emperor, the spirit of God has

descended. I am His sword, His weapon and His viceregent. Woe to the disobedient and death to cowards and

As to the Prussian state religion, its attitude to the war is set forth in a little book written by a high clerical

personage, the Herr Consistorialrat Dietrich Vorwerk, containing prayers and hymns for the soldiers, and for

Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work daily death and tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in

merciful longsuffering each bullet and each blow which misses its mark. Lead us not into the temptation of

letting our wrath be too tame in carrying out Thy divine judgment. Deliver us and our ally from the Infernal

Enemy and his servants on earth. Thine is the kingdom, the German land; may we, by the aid of Thy

It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetrated the great masterpiece of humor of the warthe hymn in

which he appeals to that God who keeps guard over Cherubim, Seraphim, and Zeppelins. You have to say

over the German form of these words in order to get the effect of their delicious melody"Cherubinen,

Seraphinen, Zeppelinen!" And lest you think that this toomusical clergyman is a rara avis, turn to the little

book which has been published in English under the same title as Herr Vorwerk's "Hurrah and Hallelujah."

Germany is the center of God's plans for the world. Germany's fight against the whole world is in reality the

battle of the spirit against the whole world's infamy, falsehood and devilish cunning.

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

The deepest and most thoughtinspiring result of the war is the German God. Not the national God such as

the lower nations worship, but "our God," who is not ashamed of belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of

It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to denounce the Prussian system; my only purpose is to show

that Bibleworship, precisely as saintworship or totemworship, delivers the worshipper up to the Slavers.

This truth has held in America, precisely as in Prussia. During the middle of the last century there was fought

out a mighty issue in our free republic; and what was the part played in this struggle by the Biblecults? Hear

the testimony of William Lloyd Garrison: "American Christianity is the main pillar of American slavery."

Hear Parker Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church before we could reach the dreadful institution at

In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which represented the churches of the South as well as

of the North, passed by a unanimous vote a resolution to the effect that "Slavery is utterly inconsistent with

the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But in a generation the views of the

entire South, including the Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What was the reason? Had the "law of

God" been altered? Had some new "revelation" been handed down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that a

Yankee by the name of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take the seeds out of short staple cotton. The

cotton crop of the South increased from four thousand bales in 1791 to four hundred and fifty thousand in

There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended upon slaves. According to the custom of

monarchs since the dawn of history, he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he wanted was right and

holy. From one end of the South to the other the pulpits rang with the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to

servants shall he be to his brethren." The learned Bishop Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery", gave the

The Almighty, forseeing the total degredation of the Negro race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under

the descendants of Shem and Japheth, doubtless because he judged it to be their fittest condition.

I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from defenses of the "peculiar institution" in the name of

Jesus Christand not only from the South, but from the North. For it must be understood that leading

families of Massachusetts and New York owed their power to Slavery; their fathers had brought molasses

from New Orleans and made it into rum, and taken it to the coast of Africa to be exchanged for slaves for the

Southern planters. And after this trade was outlawed, the slavegrown cotton had still to be shipped to the

North and spun; so the traders of the North must have divine sanction for the Fugitive Slave law. Here is the

Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The slavery of the negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in the

Old and New Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of New York, giving the decision of a clerical

man of the world: "There is no debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise, and it may continue

And when the slaveholding oligarchy of the South rose in arms against those who presumed to interfere

with this divine institution, the men of God of the South called down blessings upon their armies in words

which, with the proper change of names, might have been spoken in Berlin in August, 1914. Thus Dr.

Thornwell, one of the leading Presbyterian divines of the South: "The triumph of Lincoln's principles is the

deathknell of slavery...... Let us crush the serpent in the egg." And the Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston:

"The war is a war against slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against the Word, Providence and

Government of God." I read in the papers, as I am writing, how the clergy of Germany are thundering against

President Wilson's declaration that that country must become democratic. Here is a manifesto of the German

Evangelical League, made public on the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation:

We especially warn against the heresy, promulgated from America, that Christianity enjoins democratic

institutions, and that they are an essential condition of the kingdom of God on earth.

In exactly the same way the religious bodies of the entire South united in an address to Christians throughout

The recent proclamation of the President of the United States, seeking the emancipation of the slaves of the

South, is in our judgment occasion of solemn protest on the part of the people of God.

To whatever part of the world you travel, to whatever page of history you turn, you find the endowed and

established clergy using the word of God in defense of whatever form of slavedriving may then be popular

and profitable. Two or three hundred years ago it was the custom of Protestant divines in England and

America to burn poor old women as witches; only a hundred and fifty years ago we find John Wesley,

founder of Methodism, declaring that "the giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." And

if you investigate this witchburning, you will find that it is only one aspect of a blot upon civilization, the

Christian Mysogyny. You see, there were two Hebrew legendsone that woman was made out of a man's

rib, and the other that she ate an apple; therefore in modern England a wife must be content with a legal status

Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims is thisthat Christianity has promoted chivalry and respect

for womanhood. In ancient Greece and Rome the woman was the equal and helpmate of man; we read in

Tacitus about the splendid women of the Germans, who took part in public councils, and even fought in

battles. Two thousand years before the Christian era we are told by Maspero that the Egyptian woman was

the mistress of her house; she could inherit equally with her brothers, and had full control of her property. We

are told by Paturet that she was "juridically the equal of man, having the same rights and being treated in the

same fashion." But in presentday England, under the common law, woman can hold no office of trust or

power, and her husband has the sole custody of her person, and of her children while minors. He can steal her

children, rob her of her clothing, and beat her with a stick provided it is no thicker than his thumb. While I

was in London the highest court handed down a decision on the law which does not permit a woman to

divorce her husband for infidelity, unless it has been accompanied by cruelty; a man had brought his mistress

into his home andcompelled his wife to work for and wait upon her, and the decision was that this was not

And if you say that this enslavement of Woman has nothing to do with religionthat ancient Hebrew fables

do not control modern English customsthen listen to the Vicar of Crantock, preaching at St. Crantock's,

London, Aug. 27th, 1905, and explaining why women must cover their heads in church:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these ancient texts; and there is nowhere in

Christendom a clergy which cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes. In the city

where I write, three clergymen are being sent to jail for six months for protesting against the use of the name

of Jesus in the wholesale slaughter of men. Now, I am backing this war. I know that it has to be fought, and I

want to see it fought as hard as possible; but I want to leave Jesus out of it, for I know that Jesus did not

believe in war, and never could have been brought to support a war. I object to clerical cant on the subject;

and I note that an eminent theological authority, "Billy" Sunday, appears to agree with me; for I find him on

the front page of my morning paper, assailing the three pacifist clergymen, and making his appeal not to

I suppose they think they know more than God Almighty, who commanded the sun to stand still while Joshua

won the battle for the Lord; more than the God who made Samson strong so he could slay thousands of his

Right you are, Billy! And if the capitalist system continues to develop unchecked, we shall some day see it

dawn upon the masters of the world how wasteful it is to permit the superannuated workers to perish by slow

starvation. So much more sensible to make use of them! So we shall have a Bible defense of cannibalism; we

shall hear our evangelists quoting Leviticus: "They shall eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters." Or

perhaps some of our leisureclass ladies might make the discovery that the flesh of workingclass babies is

relished by pomeranians and poodles. If so, the Billy Sundays of the twentyfirst century may discover the

text: "Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."

It is especially interesting to notice what happens when the Bible texts work against the interests of the

Slavers and their clerical retainers. Then they are null and voidand no matter how precise and explicit and

unmistakable they may be! Take for example the Sabbath injunction: "Six days shalt thou labor and do all

Occasionally in rural districts a daylabourer is condemned to imprisonment for desecrating the Sabbath by

working in his front garden. The same labourer is punished for breach of contract if he remains away from his

metal, paper or glass works on the Sunday, even if it be from a religious whim. The orthodox Parliament will

hear nothing of Sabbathbreaking if it occurs in the process of expanding capital.

Or consider the attitude of the Church in the matter of usury. Throughout ancient Hebrew history the

moneylender was an outcast; both the law and the prophets denounced him without mercy, and it was made

perfectly clear that what was meant was, not the taking of high interest, but the taking of any interest

whatsoever. The early church fathers were explicit, and the Catholic Church for a thousand years consigned

moneylenders unhesitatingly to hell. But then came the modern commercial system, and the moneylenders

became the masters of the world! There is no more amusing illustration of the perversion of human thought

than the efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape from the dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had

Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuit of the eighteenth century, a doctor of the Church,

now worshipped as St. Alphonsus, presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental usury"; concluding that,

if the borrower pay interest of his own free will, the lender may keep it. In answer to the question whether the

lender may keep what the borrower pays, not out of gratitude, but out of fear that otherwise loans will be

refused to him in future, Ligouri says that "to be usury, it must be paid by reason of a contract, or as justly

due; payment by reason of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual price," Again the great

saint and doctor tells us that "it is not usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of

regaining the principal!" Could the house of J. P. Morgan and Company ask more of their ecclesiastical

The reader may think that such sophistications are now out of date; but he will find precisely the same

knavery in the efforts of presentday Slavers to fit Jesus Christ into the system of competitive

commercialism. Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a carpenter's son, a thoroughly classconscious

proletarian. He denounced the exploiters of his own time with ferocious bitterness, he drove the

moneychangers out of the temple with whips, and he finally died the death of a common criminal. If he had

forseen the whole modern cycle of capitalism and wageslavery, he could hardly have been more precise in

his exortations to his followers to stand apart from it. But did all this avail him? Not in the least!

I place upon the witnessstand an exponent of BibleChristianity whom all readers of our newspapers know

well: a scholar of learning, a publicist of renown; once pastor of the most famous church in Brooklyn; now

editor of our most influential religious weekly; a liberal both in theology and politics; a modernist, an

advocate of what he calls industrial democracy. His name is Lyman Abbott, and he is writing under his own

signature in his own magazine, his subject being "The Ethical Teachings of Jesus". Several times I have tried

to persuade people that the words I am about to quote were actually written and published by this eminent

doctor of divinity, and people have almost refused to believe me. Therefore I specify that the article may be

found in the "Outlook", the bound volumes of which are in all large libraries: volume 94, page 576. The

My radical friend declares that the teachings of Jesus are not practicable, that we cannot carry them out in

life, and that we do not pretend to do so. Jesus, he reminds us, said, 'Lay not up for yourself treasures upon

earth;' and Christians do universally lay up for themselves treasures upon earth; every man that owns a house

and lot, or a share of stock in a corporation, or a life insurance policy, or money in a savings bank, has laid up

for himself treasure upon earth. But Jesus did not say, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." He

said, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves

break through and steal." And no sensible American does. Moth and rust do not get at Mr. Rockefeller's oil

wells, nor at the Sugar Trust's sugar, and thieves do not often break through and steal a railway or an

Strange as it may sound to some of the readers of this book, I count myself among the followers of Jesus of

Nazareth. His example has meant more to me than that of any other man, and all the experiences of my

revolutionary life have brought me nearer to him. Living in the great Metropolis of Mammon, I have felt the

power of Privilege, its scourge upon my back, its crown of thorns upon my head. When I read that article in

the "Outlook", I felt just as Jesus himself would have felt; and I sat down and wrote a letter

This discovery of a new method of interpreting the Bible is one of such very great interest and importance

that I cannot forbear to ask space to comment upon it. May I suggest that Dr. Abbott elaborate this

exceedingly fruitful idea, and write us another article upon the extent to which the teachings of the Inspired

Word are modified by modern conditions, by the progress of invention and the scientific arts? The point of

view which Dr. Abbott takes is one which had never occurred to me before, and I had therefore been

completely mistaken as to the attitude of Jesus on the question. Also I have, like Dr. Abbott, many radical

Jesus goes on to bid his hearers: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they

spin." What an apt simile is this for the "great mass of American wealth," in Dr. Abbott's portrayal of it! "It is

serving the community," he tells us; "it is building a railway to open a new country to settlement by the

homeless; it is operating a railway to carry grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed millions of the

East," etc. Incidentally, it is piling up dividends for its pious owners; and so everybody is happy and Jesus,

if he should come back to earth, could never know that he had left the abodes of bliss above.

Truly, there should be a new school of Bible interpretation founded upon this brilliant idea. Jesus says,

"Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the

synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men." Verily not; for of what avail are trumpets,

compared with the millions of copies of newspapers which daily go forth to tell of Mr. Rockefeller's

benefactions? How transitory are they, compared with the graven marble or granite which Mr. Carnegie sets

There is the paragraph, "Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or

black." I have several among my friends who are Quakers; presumably Dr. Abbott has also; and he should not

fail to point out to them the changes which scientific discovery has wrought in the significance of this

command against swearing. We can now make our hair either white or black, or a combination of both. We

can make it a brilliant peroxide golden; we could, if pushed to an extreme, make it purple or green. So we are

Nor should we forget to examine other portions of the Bible according to this method. "Look not upon the

wine when it is red," we are told. Thanks to the activities of that Capitalism which Dr. Abbott praises so

eloquently, we now make our beverages in the chemical laboratory, and their color is a matter of choice.

Also, it should be pointed out that we have a number of pleasant drinks which are not wine at

all"highballs" and "gin rickeys" and "peppered punches"; also vermouthe and creme de menthe and

Then there are the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." See how

completely our understanding of this command is changed, so soon as we realize that we are free to make

images of molten metal! And that we may with impunity bow down to them and worship them and serve

"The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor

thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates."

This, again, it will be noted, is open to new interpretations. It specifies maidservants, but does not prevent

one's employing as many married women as he pleases. It also says nothing about the various kinds of

laborsaving machinery which we have now taught to work for ussailboats, naptha launches, yachts,

automobiles, and private carsall of which may be busily occupied during the seventh day of the week. The

men who run these machinesthe guides, boatmen, stokers, pilots, chauffeurs, and engineerswould all

indignantly resent being regarded as "servants", and so they do not come under the prohibition any more than

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor

his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." I read this paragraph over for the

first time in quite a while, and I came with a jolt to its last words. I had been intending to point out that it said

nothing about a neighbor's automobile, nor a neighbor's oil wells, sugar trusts, insurance companies and

savings banks. The last words, however, stop one off abruptly. One is almost tempted to imagine that the

Divine Intelligence must have foreseen Dr. Abbott's ingenious method of interpretation, and taken this

precaution against him. And this was a great surprise to mefor, truly, I had not supposed it possible that

such an interpretation could have been foreseen, even by Omniscience itself. I will conclude this

communication by venturing the assertion that it could not have been foreseen by any other person or thing,

in the heavens above, on the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. Dr. Abbott may accept my

congratulations upon having achieved the most ingenious and masterful exhibition of casuistical legerdemain

that it has ever been my fortune to encounter in my readings in the literatures of some thirty centuries and

And I will also add that I respectfully challenge Dr. Abbott to publish this letter. And I announce to him in

advance that if he refuses to publish it, I will cause it to be published upon the first page of the "Appeal to

Reason", where it will be read by some five hundred thousand Socialists, and by them set before several

million followers of Jesus Christ, the world's first and greatest revolutionist, whom Dr. Lyman Abbott has

traduced and betrayed by the most amazing piece of theological knavery that it has ever been my fortune to

Dr. Lyman Abbott published this letter! In his editorial comment thereon he said that he did not know which

of two biblical injunctions to follow: "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be thought like unto

him"; or "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit". I replied by pointing out a

third text which the Reverend Doctor had possibly overlooked: "He that calleth his neighbor a fool shall be in

danger of hellfire." But the Reverend Doctor took refuge in his dignity, and I bided my time and waited for

that revenge which comes sooner or later to us muckrakers. In this case it came speedily. The story is such a

perfect illustration of the functions of religion as oil to the machinery of graft that I ask the reader's

For a couple of decades the political and financial life of New England has been dominated by a gigantic

aggregation of capital, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. It is a "Morgan" concern; its

popular name, "The New Haven", stands for all the railroads of six states, nearly all the trolleylines and

steamshiplines, and a group of the most powerful banks of Boston and New York. It is controlled by a little

group of insiders, who followed the custom of railroadwrecking familiar to students of American industrial

life: buying, up new lines, capitalizing them at fabulous sums, and unloading them on the investing public;

paying dividends out of capital, "passing" dividends as a means of stock manipulation, accumulating

surpluses and cutting "melons" for the insiders, while at the same time crushing labor unions, squeezing

All these facts were perfectly well known in Wall Street, and could not have escaped the knowledge of any

magazine editor dealing with current events. In eight years the "New Haven" had increased its capitalization

1501 per cent; and what that meant, any office boy in "the Street" could have told. What attitude should a

At that time there were still two or three free magazines in America. One of them was Hampton's, and the

story of its wrecking by the New Haven criminals will some day serve in school textbooks as the classic

illustration of that financial piracy which brought on the American social revolution. Ben Hampton had

bought the old derelict "Broadway Magazine", with twelve thousand subscribers, and in four years, by the

simple process of straight truthtelling, had built up for it a circulation of 440,000. In two years more he

would have had a million; but in May, 1911, he announced a series of articles dealing with the New Haven

The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, were so exact that they read today like the reports of the

Interstate Commerce Commission, dated three years later. A representative of the New Haven called upon the

editor of Hampton's with a proof of the first articleobtained from the printer by briberyand was invited

to specify the statements to which he took exception; in the presence of witnesses he went over the article line

by line, and specified two minor errors, which were at once corrected. At the end of the conference he

announced that if the articles were published, Hampton's Magazine would be "on the rocks in ninety days."

Which threat was carried out to the letter. First came a campaign among the advertisers of the magazine,

which lost an income of thousands of dollars a month, almost over night. And then came a campaign among

the banksthe magazine could not get credit. Anyone familiar with the publishing business will understand

that a magazine which is growing rapidly has to have advances to meet each month's business. Hampton

undertook to raise the money by selling stock; whereupon a spy was introduced into his office as bookkeeper,

his list of subscribers was stolen, and a campaign was begun to destroy their confidence.

It happened that I was in Hampton's office in the summer of 1911, when the crisis came. Money had to be

had to pay for a huge new edition; and upon a property worth two millions of dollars, with endorsements

worth as much again, it was impossible to borrow thirty thousand dollars in the city of New York. Bankers,

personal friends of the publisher, stated quite openly that word had gone out that any one who loaned money

to him would be "broken". I myself sent telegrams to everyone I knew who might by any chance be able to

help; but there was no help, and Hampton retired without a dollar to his name, and the magazine was sold

under the hammer to a concern which immediately wrecked it and discontinued publication.

Such was the fate of an editor who opposed the "New Haven". And now, what of those editors who supported

it? Turn to "The Outlook, a Weekly Journal of Current Events," edited by Lyman Abbottthe issue of Dec.

25th, nineteen hundred and nine years after Christ came down to bring peace on earth and goodwill toward

Wall Street. You will there find an article by Sylvester Baxter entitled "The Upbuilding of a Great Railroad."

It is the familiar "slush" article which we professional writers learn to know at a glance. "Prodigious", Mr.

Baxter tells us, has been the progress of the New Haven; this was "a masterstroke", that was

"characteristically sagacious". The road had made "prodigious expenditures", and to a noble end:

"Transportation efficiency epitomizes the broad aim that animated these expenditures and other constructive

activities." There are photographs of bridges and stations"vast terminal improvements", "a masterpiece of

modern engineering", "the highest, greatest and most architectural of bridges". Of the official under whom

these miracles were being wroughtPresident Mellenwe read: "Nervously organized, of delicate

sensibility, impulsive in utterance, yet with an extraordinarily convincing power for vividly logical

presentation." An industrial Shelley, or a Milton, you perceive; and all this prodigious genius poured out for

the general welfare! "To study out the sort of transportation service best adapted to these ends, and then to

provide it in the most efficient form possible, that is the lifetask that President Mellen has set himself."

There was no less than sixteen pages of these rapturesquite a section of a small magazine like the

"Outlook". "The New Haven ramifies to every spot where industry flourishes, where business thrives." "As a

purveyor of transportation it supplies the public with just the sort desired." "Here we have the new efficiency

in a nutshell." In short, here we have what Dr. Lyman Abbott means when he glorifies "the great mass of

American wealth". "It is serving the community; it is building a railway to open a new country to settlement

by the homeless; it is operating a railway to carry grain from the harvests of the West to the unfed millions of

the East," etc. The unfed millionsmy typewriter started to write "underfed millions"are humbly grateful

for these services, and hasten to buy copies of the pious weekly which tells about them.

The "Outlook" runs a column of "current events" in which it tells what is happening in the world; and

sometimes it is compelled to tell of happenings against the interests of "the great mass of American wealth".

The cynical reader will find amusement in following its narrative of the affairs of the New Haven during the

First came the collapse of the road's service; a series of accidents so frightful that they roused even clergymen

and chambers of commerce to protest. A number of the "Outlook's" subscribers are New Haven "commuters",

and the magazine could not fail to refer to their troubles. In the issue of Jan. 4th, 1913, three years and ten

The most numerous accidents on a single road since the last fiscal year have been, we believe, those on the

New Haven. In the opinion of the Connecticut Commission, the Westport wreck would not have occurred if

the railway company had followed the recommendation of the Chief Inspector of Safety Appliances of the

Interstate Commerce Commission in its report on a similar accident at Bridgeport a year ago.

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

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

This collapse of the railroad service started a clamor for investigation by the Interstate Commerce

Commission, which of course brought terror to the bosoms of the plunderers. On Dec. 20, 1913, we find the

"Outlook" "putting the soft pedal" on the public indignation. "It must not be forgotten that such a road as the

New Haven is, in fact if not in terms, a National possession, and as it goes down or up, public interests go

down or up with it," But in spite of all pious admonitions, the Interstate Commerce Commission yielded to

the public clamor, and an investigation was maderevealing such conditions of rottenness as to shock even

the clerical retainers of Privilege. "Securities were inflated, debt was heaped upon debt", reports the horrified

"Outlook"; and when its hero, Mr. Mellenits industrial Shelley, "nervously organized, of delicate

sensibility"admitted that he had no authority as to the finances of the road and no understanding of them,

but had taken all his orders from Morgan, the "Outlook" remarks, deeply wounded: "A pitiable position for

the president of a great railway to assume." A little later, when things got hotter yet, we read:

In the search for truth the Commissioners had to overcome many obstacles, such as the burning of books,

letters and documents, and the obstinacy of witnesses, who declined to testify until criminal proceedings were

begun. The New Haven system has more than three hundred subsidiary corporations in a web of entangling

alliances, many of which were seemingly planned, created and manipulated by lawyers expressly retained for

But do you imagine even that would sicken the pious jackals of their offal? If so, you do not know the

sturdiness of the pious stomach. A compromise was patched up between the government and the thieves who

were too big to be prosecuted; this bargain was not kept by the thieves, and President Wilson declared in a

public statement that the New Haven administration had "broken an agreement deliberately and solemnly

entered into," in a manner to the President "inexplicable and entirely without justification." Which, of course,

seemed to the "Outlook" dreadfully impolite language to be used concerning a "National possession"; it

hastened to rebuke President Wilson, whose statement was "too severe and drastic."

A new compromise was made between the government and the thieves who were too big to be prosecuted,

and the stealing went on. Now, as I work over this book, the President takes the railroads for war use, and

reads to Congress a message proposing that the securities based upon the New Haven swindles, together with

all the mass of other railroad swindles, shall be sanctified and secured by dividends paid out of the Public

purse. New Haven securities take a big jump; and the "Outlook", needless to say, is enthusiastic for the

President's policy. Here is a chance for the big thieves to baptize themselvesor shall we say to have the

water in their stocks made "holy"? Says our pious editor, for the government to take property without full

Anyone familiar with the magazine world will understand that such crooked work as this, continued over a

long period, is not done for nothing. Any magazine writer would know, the instant he saw the Baxter article,

that Baxter was paid by the New Haven, and that the "Outlook" also was paid by the New Haven. Generally

he has no way of proving such facts, and has to sit in silence; but when his board bill falls due and his

landlady is persistent, he experiences a direct and earnest hatred of the crooks of journalism who thrive at his

expense. If he is a Socialist, he looks forward to the day when he may sit on a Publications' Graft

In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the pricethanks to the labors of the Interstate Commerce

Commission. Needless to say, you will not find the facts recorded in the columns of the Outlook; you might

have read it line by line from the palmy days of Mellen to our own, and you would have got no hint of what

the Commission revealed about magazine and newspaper graft. Nor would you have got much more from the

great metropolitan dailies, which systematically "played down" the expose, omitting all the really damaging

details. You would have to go to the reports of the Commissionor to the files of "Pearson's Magazine",

According to the New Haven's books, and by the admission of its own officials, the road was spending more

than four hundred thousand dollars a year to influence newspapers and magazines in favor of its policies.

(President Mellen stated that this was relatively less than any other railroad in the country was spending).

There was a professor of the Harvard Law School, going about lecturing to boards of trade, urging in the

name of economic science the repeal of laws against railroad monopoliesand being paid for his speeches

out of railroad funds! There was a swarm of newspaper reporters, writing on railroad affairs for the leading

papers of New England, and getting twentyfivedollars weekly, or two or three hundred on special occasions.

Sums had been paid directly to more than a thousand newspapers$3,000 to the Boston "Republic", and

when the question was asked "Why?" the answer was, "That is Mayor Fitzgerald's paper." Even the

ultrarespectable "Evening Transcript", organ of the Brahmins of culture, was down for $144 for typing,

mimeographing and sending out "dope" to the country press. There was an item of $381 for 15,000 "Prayers";

and when asked about that President Mellen explained that it referred to a pamphlet called "Prayers from the

Hills", embodying the yearnings of the backcountry people for trolleyfranchises to be issued to the New

Haven. Asked why the pamphlet was called "Prayers", Mr. Mellen explained that "there was lots of biblical

And now we come to the "Outlook"; after five years of waiting, we catch our pious editors with the goods on

them! There appears on the payroll of the New Haven, as one of its regular pressagents, getting sums like

$500 now and thenwould you think it possible?Sylvester Baxter! And worse yet, there appears an item

of $938.64 to the "Outlook", for a total of 9,716 copies of its issue of Dec. 25th, nineteen hundred and nine

years after Christ came to bring peace on earth and good will towards Wall Street!

The writer makes a specialty of fair play, even when dealing with those who have never practiced it towards

him. He wrote a letter to the editor of the "Outlook", asking what the magazine might have to say upon this

matter. The reply, signed by Lawrence F. Abbott, President of the "Outlook" Company, was that the

"Outlook" did not know that Mr. Baxter had any salaried connection with the New Haven, and that they had

paid him for the article at the usual rates. Against this statement must be set one made under oath by the

official of the New Haven who had the disbursing of the corruption fundthat the various papers which used

the railroad material paid nothing for it, and "they all knew where it came from." Mr. Lawrence Abbott states

that "the New Haven Railroad bought copies of the 'Outlook' without any previous understanding or

arrangement as anybody is entitled to buy copies of the 'Outlook'." I might point out that this does not really

say as much as it seems to; for the President of every magazine company in America knows without any

previous understanding or arrangement that any time he cares to print an article such as Mr. Baxter's, dealing

with the affairs of a great corporation, he can sell ten thousand copies to that corporation. The late

unlamented Elbert Hubbard wrote a defense of the Rockefeller slaughter of coalminers, published it in "The

Fra," and came down to New York and unloaded several tons at 26 Broadway; he did the same thing in the

case of the copper strike in Michigan, and again in the case of "The Jungle"and all this without the

Mr. Abbott answers another question: "We certainly did not return the amount to the railroad company."

Well, a sturdy conscience must be a comfort to its possessor. The President of the "Outlook" is in the position

of a pawnbroker caught with stolen goods in his establishment. He had no idea they were stolen; and we

might believe it, if the thief were obscure. But when the thief is the most notorious in the citywhen his

picture has been in the paper a thousand times? And when the thief swears that the broker knew him? And

when the broker's shop is full of other suspicious goods? Why did the "Outlook" practically take back Mr.

Spahr's revelations concerning the Powder barony of Delaware? Why did it support so vigorously the

Standard Oil ticket for the control of the Mutual Life Insurance Companyand with James Stillman, one of

the heads of Standard Oil, president of Standard Oil's big bank in New York, secretly one of its biggest

Also, why does the magazine refuse to give its readers a chance to judge its conduct? Why is it that a search

of its columns reveals no mention of the revelations concerning Mr. Baxternot even any mention of the

$400,000 slush fund of its paragon, of transportation virtues? I asked that question in my letter, and the

president of the "Outlook" Company for some reason failed to notice it. I wrote a second time, courteously

reminding him of the omission; and also of another, equally significanthe had not informed me whether

any of the editors of the "Outlook", or the officers or directors of the Company, were stockholders in the New

Haven. His final reply was that the questions seem to him "wholly unimportant"; he does not know whether

the "Outlook" published anything about the Baxter revelations, nor does he know whether any of the editors

or officers or directors of the "Outlook" Company are or ever have been stockholders of the New York, New

Haven and Hartford Railroad Company. The fact "would not in the slightest degree affect either favorably or

unfavorably our editorial treatment of that corporation." Caesar's wife, it appears is above suspicioneven

I have seen a photograph from "Somewhere in France", showing a wayside shrine with a statue of the Virgin

Mary, innocent and loving, with her babe in her arms. If you were a hostile aviator, you might sail over and

take pictures to your heart's content, and you would see nothing but a saintly image; you would have to be on

the enemy's side, and behind the lines, to make the discovery that under the image had been dug a hole for a

machinegun. When I saw that picture, I thought to myselfthere is capitalist Religion!

You see, if cannon and machineguns are out in the open, they are almost instantly spotted and put out of

action; and so with magazines like "Leslie's Weekly", or "Munsey's", or the "North American Review",

which are frankly and wholly in the interest of Big Business. If an editor wishes really to be effective in

holding back progress, he must protect himself with a camouflage of piety and philanthropy, he must have at

his tongue's end the phrases of brotherhood and justice, he must be liberal and progressive, going a certain

cautious distance with the reformers, indulging in carefully measured fair playgiving a dime with one

Let us have an illustration of this clerical camouflage. Here are the wives and children of the Colorado

coalminers being shot and burned in their beds by Rockefeller gunmen, and the press of the entire country

in a conspiracy of silence concerning the matter. In the effort to break down this conspiracy, Bouck White,

Congregational clergyman, author of "The Call of the Carpenter", goes to the Fifth Avenue Church of

Standard Oil and makes a protest in the name of Jesus. I do not wish to make extreme statements, but I have

read history pretty thoroughly, and I really do not know where in nineteen hundred years you can find an

action more completely in the spirit and manner of Jesus than that of Bouck White. The only difference was

that whereas Jesus took a real whip and lashed the moneychangers, White politely asked the pastor to

discuss with him the question whether or not Jesus condemned the holding of wealth. He even took the

precaution to write a letter to the clergyman announcing in advance what he intended to do! And how did the

clergyman prepare for him? With the sword of truth and the armor of the spirit? Nobut with two or three

dozen strongarm men, who flung themselves upon the Socialist author and hurled him out of the church. So

violent were they that several of White's friends, also one or two casual spectators, were moved to protest;

what happened then, let us read in the New York "Sun", the most bitterly hostile to radicalism of all the

A police billy came crunching against the bones of Lopez's legs. It struck him as hard as a man could swing it

eight times. A fist planted on Lopez's jaw knocked out two teeth. His lip was torn open. A blow in the eye

made it swell and blacken instantly. A minute later Lopez was leaning against the church with blood running

And now, what has the clerical camouflage to say on this proceeding? Does it approve it? Oh no! It was "a

mistake", the "Outlook" protests; it intensifies the hatred which these extremists feel for the church. The

proper course would have been to turn the disturber aside with a soft answer; to give him some place, say in a

park, where he could talk his head off to people of his own sort, while good and decent Christians continued

to worship by themselves in peace, and to have the children of their mineslaves shot and burned in their

The true way to repress cranks is not to suppress them; it is to give them an opportunity to air their theories

before any who wish to learn, while forbidding them to compel those to listen who do not wish to do so.

Or take another case. Twelve years ago the writer made an effort to interest the American people in the

conditions of labor in their packingplants. It happened that incidentally I gave some facts about the

bedevilment of the public's meatsupply, and the public really did care about that. As I phrased it at the time,

I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. There was a terrible clamor, and Congress

was forced to pass a bill to remedy the evils. As a matter of fact this bill was a farce, but the public was

satisfied, and soon forgot the matter entirely. The point to be noted here is that so far as concerned the

atrocious miseries of the workingpeople, it was not necessary even to pretend to do anything. The slaves of

Packingtown went on living and working as they were described as doing in "The Jungle", and nobody gave a

further thought to them. Only the other day I read in my paperwhile we are all making sacrifices in a "War

for Democracy"that Armour and Company had paid a dividend of twentyone per cent, and Swift and

This prosperity they owe in good part to their clerical camouflage. Listen to our pious "Outlook", engaged in

countermining "The Jungle". The "Outlook" has no doubt that there are genuine evils in the packingplants;

To disgust the reader by dragging him through every conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with

lurid excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail and brothelall this is to overreach the object

.... Even things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer screams them out in a sensational way

A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were killed and half a continent was devastated, in

order to abolish chattel slavery and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a thorough study of both these

industrial systems, and I freely admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage slave is better than

that of the chattel slave. The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his

starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of

the policeman's club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and so he has the candle of hope

to light him to his deathbed. But excepting this consideration, and taking the circumstances of the wage

slave from the material point of view alone, I hold it beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave

of 1860 was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was

the Southern master's real concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be kept physically

sound; but it is nobody's business to care anything about the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave

were valuable property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a happy outdoor life, and medical attention if they

fell ill. But the children of the sweatshop or the cottonmill or the canningfactory are raised in a city slum,

and never know what it is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or rest

The system of competitive commercialism, of largescale capitalist industry in its final flowering! I quote

Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut up in foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their

bodies to live. Tonight in Chicago there are ten thousand men, homeless and wretched, willing to work and

begging for a chance, yet starving, and fronting with terror the awful winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there

are a hundred thousand children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives in the effort to earn their

bread! There are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough

to feed their little ones! There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless, waiting for death to

take them from their torments! There are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse

of the wageslave; who toil every hour they can stand and see, for just enough to keep them alive; who are

condemned till the end of their days to monotony and weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to

dirt and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice! And then turn over the page with me, and gaze upon

the other side of the picture. There are a thousandten thousand, maybewho are the masters of these

slaves, who own their toil. They do nothing to earn what they receive, they do not even have to ask for

itit comes to them of itself, their only care is to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in luxury and

extravagancesuch as no words can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul

grow sick and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend

millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets, for little shiny stones with which to

deck their bodies. Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, in

the destroying of useful and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their

fellowcreatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human race! It is all

theirsit comes to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and the

rivers into the oceanso, automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them. The farmer

tills the soil, the miner digs in the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone; the clever

man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired man singsand all the results, the

products of the labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream and poured into their laps!

This is the system. It is the crown and culmination of all the wrongs of the ages; and in proportion to the

magnitude of its exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical camouflage which has been

organized in its behalf. Beyond all question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been made of

Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this bloodthirsty system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a

blasphemy beyond the power of art to express. Read the man's words, furious as those of any modern agitator

that I have heard in twenty years of revolutionary experience: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth!

Sell that ye have and give alms!Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!Woe unto

you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation!Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly

enter into the kingdom of Heaven!Woe unto you also, you lawyers!Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers,

"And this man"I quote from "The Jungle" again"they have made into the highpriest of property and

smug respectability, a divine sanction of all the horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization!

Jewelled images are made of him, sensual priests burn insense to him, and modern pirates of industry bring

their dollars, wrung from the toil of helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit in

cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of dusty divinity!"

Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandists never weary of telling us. Business is the basis of our

material lives, and consequently of our culture. Business men control our politics and dictate our laws;

business men own our newspapers and direct their policy; business men sit on our school boards, and endow

and manage our universities. The Reformation was a revolt of the newlydeveloping merchant classes

against the tyrannies and abuses of feudal clericalism: so in all Protestant Christianity one finds the spirit,

ideals, and language of Trade. We have shown how the symbolism of the Anglican Church is of the palace

and the throne; in the same way that of the nonconformist sects may be shown to be of the countinghouse.

In the view of the middleclass Britisher, the nexus between man and man is cent per cent; and so in their

The first duty of every man under the competitive system is to secure the survival of his own business; so on

so the preacher to the trader figures the divinity as a glorified Merchant keeping books. This Head Merchant

has a monopoly in His line; He knows all His rivals' secrets, so there is no getting ahead of Him, and nothing

to do but obey His Word, as revealed through His clerical staff. The system is oily with protestations of

divine love; but when you read the comments of Luther upon Calvin and of Calvin upon Luther, you

understand that this love is confined to the inside of each denomination. And even so restricted, there is not

always enough to go around. Recently I met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked, "I see by the

papers that you have just finished a church building." "Yes," he answered; "and I have had three offers of a

new church." I did not see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so successful with this one?" The

reply was, "They always take it for granted that you want to change when you've finished a new building,

The business man puts up the money to build the church, he puts up the money to keep it going; and the first

rule of a business man is that when he puts up the money for a thing he "runs" that thing. Of course he sees

that it spreads his own views of life, it helps to maintain his tradition. In the days of Anu and Baal we heard

the proclamation of the divine right of Kings; in these days of Mammon we hear the proclamation of the

divine right of Merchants. Some fifteen years ago the head of our Coal Trust announced during a great strike

that the question would be settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom has given

control of the property interests of this country". And on that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever

their denominations, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath

doctrines are alike, as their weekday practices are alike; whether it is Rockefeller shooting his Bayonne

oilworkers and burning alive the little children of his miners; or smooth John Wanamaker, paying starvation

wages to departmentstore girls and driving them to the streets; or that clergyman who, at a gathering of

society ladies, members of the "Law and Order League" of Denver, declared in my hearing that if he could

have his way he would blow up the home of every coalstriker with dynamite; or the Rev. R. A. Torrey,

Dean of the Bible institute of Los Angeles, who refused to employ union labor on the million dollar building

of the Institute, declaring that "the Church cannot afford to have any dealings with a band of firebugs and

The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association is to justify the

processes of trade, and to preach to clerks and employees the slavevirtues of frugality, humility, and loyalty

to the profit system. The depths of sociological depravity to which some of the agents of this Association

have sunk is difficult of belief. Twelve years ago I was invited to address the booksellers of New York, in

company with a wellknown clergyman of the city, the Reverend Madison C. Peters. This gentleman's

address made such an impression upon me that I recall it even at this distance: a string of jokes spoken with

an effect of rapidfire smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe it better than

to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a SelfMade Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended

a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor of the

Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that

Socialism means free love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so dishonest that he

garbled the writings of this "Herr Beeble", making him say something quite different from what he had meant

to say. I could name several clergymen of various denominations who have stooped to that device against the

Socialists; including the Catholic Father Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and should be stopped with

Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's pulpitslang used to be the talk of New York

when I was a boy; and when I grew up, and came into the Socialist movementbehold, here he was, chief

inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I had a friend, a man who saved my life at a time when I was

practically starving, and to whom therefore I owe my survival as a writer; this friend had been a clergyman in

a Middle Western state, and had preached Jesus as he really was, and so was hated and feared like Jesus. It

happened that he was unhappily married, and permitted his wife to divorce him so that he might marry the

woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the organized hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a

thousand devils with poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he applied his imagination

to my friend's story, producing a novel under the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were reading

the story of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted through the personality of a hegoat. Of late years this

clerical author has turned his energies to negrophobia, and militarism, making millions out of motionpicture

incitements to hatred and terror. The pictures were made here in Southern California, and friends in the

business have described to me the pious propagandist in the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarms of

Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D., D. C. L., L. H. D., a leading light of the

Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is

Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions Department of the Standard Oil

Company; his function being to manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense of the

Rockefeller fortune. It is generally not expected that the makers of rulingclass munitions should face the

dirty and perilous work of the trenches; but ten years ago, during a raid by an active squad of muckrakemen,

Chancellor Day astonished the world by rushing to the front with both arms full of starshells and bombs. He

afterwards put the history of this gallant action into a volume, "The Raid on Prosperity"; and if you want the

The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; an enthusiast and dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whom the

ordinary human virtues have been fused, absorbed, transformed and sublimated into a new supreme virtue of

loyalty to Exploitation, patriotism for Profiteering. He began life as a workingman, he tells us, in the good

old American fashion of hustle for yourself; but he differed from other Americans in that he had an instant,

intuitive recognition of the intellectual and moral excellence of Plutocracy. The first time he met a rich man,

he quivered with rapture, he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So very quickly he was recognized as a proper

person to have charge of a Mental Munition Works; and the ruling classes proceeded to pin medals upon the

The Chancellor knows the masters of our Profit System, those "consummate geniuses of manufacture and

trade by which the earth has yielded up her infinite treasures." And having been at the same time in intimate

daily communion with the Almighty, he can tell us the Almighty's attitude towards these prodigies. "God has

made the rich of this world to serve Him.... He has shown them a way to have this world's goods and to be

rich towards God .... God wants the rich men ....Christ's doctrines have made the world rich, and provide

adequate uses for its riches." Also the Chancellor knows our great corporations, and gives us the Almighty's

views about them; they mean that "the forces with which God built the universe have been put into the hands

of man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy given to Socialism is appalling. It is

insanity." We learn that the income tax is "a doctrine suited to the dark ages, only no age ever has been dark

enough." Somebody raises the issue of "tainted money", and the Chancellor disposes of this matter also. As a

Deputy of Divinity, he settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul permitted meat offered to idols to be eaten in the fear of

God." And then, to make assurance doubly sure, he settles it with plain human logic; and you are astonished

to see how simple, under his handling, the complex problem becomeshow clear and cleancut is the

Every boy knows that one cannot take stolen goods without being a partaker with the thief. But the proceeds

And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenon of Protestant Christianity at the beginning of the

twentieth century. For the benefit of posterity I explain that "Billy" is a baseball player turned Evangelist,

who has brought to the cause of God the crowds and uproar of the diamond; also the commercial spirit of

America's most popular institution. He travels like a circus, with all the pressagent work and newspaper

hurrah; he conducts what are called "revivals", in an enormous "tabernacle" built especially for him in each

city. I cannot better describe the Billy Sunday circus than in the words of a certain Sidney C. Tapp, who

brought suit against the evangelist for $100,000 damages for the theft of the ideas of a book. Says Mr. Tapp

The socalled religious awakening or "trailhitting" is produced by an appeal to the emotions and in stirring

up the senses by a combination of carrying the United States flag in one hand and the Bible in the other,

singing, trumpeting, organ playing, garrulous and acrobatic feats of defendant, by defendant in his talk

leaping from the rostrum to the top of the pulpit, lying prone on the floor of the rostrum on his stomach in the

presence of the vast audience and from thence into a pit to shake hands with the socalled "trailhitters" and

the vulgar use of plaintiff's thoughts contained in said books. Said harangues and vulgarisms of said

defendant and horns, drums, organs and singing by said choir and vast audience which are assembled by

means of said newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit of free and copious flow of

money through religious and patriotic excitement produced by and through the vulgarisms, scurrility,

buffoonery, obscenity and profanity of defendant pretending to be in the interest of the cause of religion

through what he denominates "hitting the trail", the real object being to induce a religious frenzy and

enthusiasm which he announces in advance is to result in large audiences composed of thousands of people

generously contributing vast sums of money on the last day and night of the socalled revival which is

invariably appropriated by the defendant and through which scheme and device defendant has become

As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, and twice each day he holds forth to a crowd of ten or fifteen

thousand; in addition the newspapers print literally pages of his utterances. The entire Protestant clergy for a

score of miles around has been hitched to his triumphal chariot, and driven captive through the streets. Here

in this dignified city of Pasadena, home of millionaire brewers and chewinggum kings, all the churches have

been plastered for weeks with cloth signs: "This Church is Cooperating in the Sunday Campaign." To give a

sample of the intellectual level of the performance, here is what Billy has to say about modern thought:

All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher

criticism, wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out of a beermug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!

Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the platform and smile while Billy thus slangs the

devil; and being themselves, poor fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd, they watch and see how he

does it, and then return to their own churches and try the same stunt; so the manners of the baseball diamond

spread like a contagion. I open my morning paper, and find a picture of an intenselooking clerical

gentleman, the Rev. J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the Baptist Temple. He is discussing certain slanderous

rumors which he has heard about Billy Sunday, and he offers ten thousand dollars reward to anyone who can

The dirty, lowdown, contemptible, weazenbrained, impurehearted, shrivelledsouled, gossipping devils

do not deserve to be noticed..... Scandalmongers, gossiplovers, reputationdestroyers, hypocritical,

blackhearted, greeneyed slanderers..... Corrupt, devilpossessed, vile debauches..... Immoral, sinloving,

vicepracticing, underhanded sneaks..... Carrionloving buzzards and foulsmelling skunks.

You will be prepared after this to hear that when the Socialists were near to carrying Los Angeles, this

clergyman preached a sermon in support of the candidate of "Booze, Gas and Railroads".

In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected youth of our streets from drinking, gambling and

whoring, no one could wish him anything but success; but his besotted ignorance, his childish crudity of

mind, make it impossible that he could have any success except of a delusive nature. He is utterly devoid of a

social sense; utterly unaware of the existence of the forces of capitalism which are causing depravity ten

times as fast as all the evangelists in creation can remedy it. So he is precisely like the Catholics with their

"charity", cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and never stopping to ask why

More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism which he fosters does not help the

development of evil more than his preaching hinders it. The newspapers always report the cost of the

tabernacle, of the "freewill offering", which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in each

"campaign", In each city the expenses are guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting

forces of the community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits their homes, and is in every way one of

the crowd. After the big strike in Paterson, N. J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included, all subscribed a

fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the

radical union movement. This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his whole campaign was conducted

Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich young man, perhaps a thousand times as rich as

any that lived in Palestine. This young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?"

And Billy told him to keep the commandments"Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not

bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother." The young man answered; "All these have I kept from

my youth up." And Billy said: "Yet lackest thou one thing; sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor,

and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this he was very sorrowful,

No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in Palestine. What happened in New York is that

Billy said, "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller said, "Come be my guest at

my palace in the Pocantico Hills; and then we will go together and you may preach submission to my

wageslaves in the oilfactories at Bayonne and elsewhere." And Billy went to the palace, and went and

preached to the wageslaves, telling them to beware the "stinking Socialists", and to concentrate their

attention on the saving of their souls; so the rich young man was delighted, and he sent for all the newspaper

reporters to come to his office at 26 Broadway, and told them what a great and useful man Billy Sunday is.

Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has never been charged with having an excess of

verbally expressed enthusiasm on any subject. But he talked for an hour and a half about the evangelist. He

was full of the subject of Billy Sunday. "Billy did New York a lot of good," he said. He went on to tell of 187

meetings held in 100 different factories, attended by 50,000 men. "That's good work." And he expressed his

satisfaction with Sunday's theology: "He believes the Bible from cover to cover and that is good enough for

me." The Sunday campaign had cost $200,000, and "If it had stopped here, if it was not kept up, it would be

poor business; a poor dividend on the $200,000 and the work invested. But we expect to get dividends in the

It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend largescale merchants while they live, but to bury them

when they die, and to place the seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning this aspect of Bootstraplifting

I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying

eulogies, the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and

sycophanciesall uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous Threnodies which

have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State

parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical blackhanging......

And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil,

kings of Wall Street. When a certain king of Western railroads died, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards

Bishop, likened his heir to the boy Christ; a statement which requires for its appreciation a mention of the fact

that this heir died of syphilis. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly reward in Pennsylvania a United

States senator who had been throughout his lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew

Stanley Quay was his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical connections, was free to state the

He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press, got his grip on the public service, including even

the courts; imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon the last three Presidentsmaking the latter

provide for the offal of his political machine, which even Pennsylvania could no longer stomachand all

without identifying his name with a single measure of public good, without making a speech or uttering a

party watchword, without even pretending to be honest, but solely because, like Judas, he carried the bag and

Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was expressed by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend

Dr. J. S. Ramsey, who stood over the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking a smile declared that he had been

In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our political corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged to no

church, but had backed them all, understanding the main thesis of this book as clearly as the writer of it. In

his home city of Cleveland the eulogy upon him was pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St. Paul's Episcopal

Church; while in the United States Senate the service was performed by the Chaplain, the Rev. Edward

Everett Hale. This is a name wellknown in American letters, as in American religious life; it was borne by a

benevolent old gentleman, a Unitarian and a liberal, who organized "LendaHand Clubs" and such like

amiabilities. "Do You Love This Old Man?" the signs in the streetcars used to ask when I was a boy; and I

promptly answered "Yes"for my mother took the "Ladies' Home Journal", and I swallowed the sentimental

dishwater set out for me. But when I read the Rev. Edward's funeral oration over the Irrev. Mark, I loved

neither of them any longer. "This wholesouled child of God," cried the Rev. Edward, "who believed in

success, and knew how to succeed by using the infinite powers!" You perceive that the Chaplain of the

Millionaires' Club agrees with this book, that the "infinite powers" in America are the powers that prey!

Among the most loathesome products of our native commercial greed is the patent medicine industry, "The

Great American Fraud," as its historian has called it. In 1907 this historian wrote:

Gullible America will spend this year some seventyfive millions of dollars in the purchase of patent

medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of

opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart

depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud,

exploited by the skillfullest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade.

One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes: habitforming laxatives, headache powders full of

acetanilid, soothingsyrups and catarrhcures full of opium and cocaine, cocktails subtly disguised as

"bitters", "sarsaparillas", and "tonics". He shows how the fake testimonials are made up and exploited; how

the confidential letters, telling the secret troubles of men and women, are collected by tens and hundreds of

thousands and advertised and soldso that the victim, as he begins to lose faith in one fake, finds another at

hand, fully informed as to his weakness. He quotes the amazing "Red Clause" in the contracts which the

patentmedicine makers have with thousands of daily and weekly papers, whereby the makers are able to

control the press of the country and prevent legislation against the "Great American Fraud."

There are a thousand religious papers in America, weekly and monthly; and what is their attitude on this

Whether because churchgoing people are more trusting, and therefore more easily befooled than others, or

from some more obscure reason, many of the religious papers fairly reek with patent medicine fakes.

Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancer vampires. He is a patron and prop of religious journalism. It is his

theory that the easiest prey is to be found among readers of church papers. Moreover he has learned from his

fatherinlaw (who built a small church out of bloodmoney) to capitalize his own sectarian associations,

and when confronted recently with a formal accusation he replied, with an air of injured innocence, that he

was a regular attendant at church, and could produce an endorsement from his minister.

And here is the "Church Advocate", of Harrisburg, Pa., which publishes quack advertisements disguised as

As Dr. Smith is, on the face of his own statements, a selfbranded swindler and rascal, you run no risk in

assuming that the Rev. C. H. Forney, D. D., L. L. D., in acting as his journalistic supporter for pay, is just

Will the editor of the "Baptist Watchman" of Boston explain by what phenomenon of logic or elasticity of

ethics he accepts the lucubrations of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of Liquozone, of Actina, that marvelous

twoended mechanical appliance which "cures" deafness at one terminus and blindness at the other, and all

The "Christian Observer" of Louisville replied to a protesting subscriber, suggesting that the "Collier" articles

were written in a spirit of revenge, because "Collier's" could not get patent medicine advertising. When I

asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse for his foundation for the charge, he said that one of the typewriters must

have written the letter! Doubtless also the same highly responsible typewriter imitated the signature with

And here iswould you think it possible?our "Church of Good Society"! It has an organ in Chicago

called the "Living Church", most dignified and decorous. You have to study quite a while to ascertain what

denomination it belongs to; it will not tell you directly, for the Anglician pose is that it is the church

And this one holy institution was found setting at its peak the black flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the

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

And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's champion laborbaiter, the late C. W. Post, that

his "Grapenuts" would prevent appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in such cases!

And here is the "Christian Endeavor World", organ of one of the most powerful nonsectarian religious

bodies in the country. Some one wrote complaining of its medical advertising, and the answer was:

To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not publishing any fraudulent or unworthy medical

advertising ...... Trusting that you will be able to understand that we are acting according to our best and

sincerest judgment, I remain, yours very truly, The Golden Rule Company, George W. Coleman, Business

Assuming that the business management of the "Christian Endeavor World" represents normal intelligence, I

would like to ask whether it accepts the statement that a pair of "magic foot drafts" applied to the soles of the

feet will cure any and every kind of rheumatism in any part of the body? Further, if the advertising

department is genuinely interested in declining "fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I would call their attention

to the ridiculous claims of Dr. Shoop's medicines, which "cure" almost every disease; to two hair removers,

one an "Indian Secret", the other an "accidental discovery", both either fakes or dangerous; to the lying

claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of Figs", which

is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical

constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on

unfortunates suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which for the sake of

decency I do not care to detail in these columns, appear in recent issues of the "Christian Endeavor World".

There came recently to Los Angeles a "worldfamous evangelist", known as "Gipsy" Smith. There was a

shirtwaist strike at the time, and the girls were starving, and they sent a delegation to this evangelist to ask

for help. They told him how they were mistreated, exposed to insults, driven to sell their virtue because their

wage would not support life; and to their plea he made answer: "Get Jesus in your hearts, and these questions

So we see the most important of the many services which the churches perform for the merchantstaking

the revolutionary hope of Jesus, for a kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting it into a dream of a

golden harp in an uncertain future. To appreciate the fullness of this betrayal, take the prayer which Jesus

dictatedso simple, direct and practical: "Give us this day our daily bread", and put it beside the hymns

which the slavecongregations are trained to sing. In my neighborhood is a oneroomed building with a plate

glass front, upon which I observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters the sign "Glory Mission".

I approach him, and he drops his work and welcomes me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I

answer that I am. I have to shout the good tidings into his ear, as he is very deaf. He presents me with his

card, which shows that he bears the title of "Reverend", also the sobriquet of "Mountain Missionary". I ask

him to permit me to examine the hymnbook which he uses in his work, and with touching eagerness he

presses upon me a wellworn volume bearing the title "Waves of Glory". I seat myself and note down a few

I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I. W. W. who was hanged three or four years ago in

In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero is a Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold",

who leaves his diggings in the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into our superior civilization. The

thing that impresses him most is what he calls "the immortality idea". The person who got that up was a

worldgenius, he exclaims. "If you can once get a man to believing in immortality, there is no more left for

you to desire; you can take everything he ownsyou can skin him alive if it pleases youand he will bear it

And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelungor the effort of a young author to be smart? Would

you like to hear that view of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the language of scholarship and

culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiastical authority, equipped with every tool of modern

learning, would set about voicing the idea that the function of the teaching of Heaven is to chloroform the

Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of scholarship, dated 1912, and written by Professor

Georges ChattertonHill, of the University of Geneva. Its title is "The Sociological Value of Christianity",

and from cover to cover it is a warning to the rich of the danger they run in giving up their religion and

ceasing to support its priests. It explains how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded in making the

individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which are indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity,

appear as indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor makes plain just what he means by

"individual suffering, individual sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism; and the advantage of

Christianity is that it makes you think that by submitting to these horrors, you are profiting your own soul.

"By making individual salvation depend on the acceptance of suffering, on the voluntary sacrifice of

egotistical interests, Christianity adapts the individual to society". And this, as the professor explains, is not

an easy thing to do, in a world in which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only means of

causing the rationalized individual to consent to the sacrifice...... is to captivate him with a sufficiently

powerful idea!" And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this purpose. "Jesus, the

socalled humanitarian, never ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of

sufferingof that suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could."

You get this, you "blanketstiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever you areyou disinherited of the earth,

you proletarians who have only your laborpower to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned to

elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of "overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and

therefore you are starving, you have woven too much cloth, and therefore you are naked, you have finished

the world for your masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way. As the sociologist from Geneva

phrases it, "Your suppression imposes itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of the Christian

religion is to make you enjoy the process, by "captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest

will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with candlelights and images, your ears with sweet music and

soothing words; and so you will perish without raising a finger! "Here," reflects the professor, "we see how

Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the embarrassing fact that so many of those who

survive under the capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that troubles him? Not for long.

Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at

any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. "Inequality

signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but the standard whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the

The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known, but those which govern his moral nature

cannot be known; the moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject to the law of

As an exhibition of metaphysical wingpower, that is almost as wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman

when confronted with the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for teaching the Copernican

view of the universe; that infallible popes had again and again condemned this heresy ex cathedra. Said the

Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is

comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth till we

Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian professors realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is

never far from the thoughts of any of themfor, of course, no man can look at the present system and not

wonder how the poor stand it, and more especially why they stand it. There have been many thinking men

who have given up the miraclebusiness quite cheerfully, but have stood appalled at the idea of letting the

lower classes find out the truth. You note that idea continually in the writings of Professor Goldwin Smith,

who was a freethinker, but also a bourgeois publicist, with a deep sense of responsibility to the

moneymasters of the world. He was about as honest a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was the

beau ideal of the New York "Evening Post", which indicates his point of view. He wrote:

It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a future state, for a short measure of happiness here,

has materially helped to reconcile the less favored members of the community to the inequalities of the

When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course called "Practical Ethics", under a professor by

the name of Hyslop. The course differed from most of the forty that I tried, in that it gave evidence that the

professor was accustomed to read the morning paper. He had learned that American politics were rotten; his

idea of "Practical Ethics" was to outline in elaborate detail a complete scheme of constitutional changes

which would make it impossible for the "boss" to control the government. I think I must have been born with

a charm against bourgeois thought, for the good professor never fooled me an instant; I remember I used to

smile at the idea of how quickly the "boss" would brush through his constitutional cobwebs. The reforms

required an elaborate campaign of publicityand of course long before they could be put into practice, the

Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to hunting spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I

know that he is a determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he may really have bagged

some spooks. All I wish to point out here is the method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to

support the spookhunting industry. The very same argument as we got from the University of Geneva and

There has been no belief that exercised so much power upon the poor as that in a future life. The politicians,

men of the world, have known this so well as to postpone the day of political judgment by it for many years.

The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and having abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of

its fundamental beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and the laboring classes..... The spiritual ideal of life

has gone out of the masses as well as the classes, and nothing is left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.

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

What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step up, ladies and gentlemen, and empty your

purses into the Psychical Research hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as to the cost of milk and honey

You read what I had to say about Bootstraplifters, and the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association making use

of their incantations. You admired my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did not

think that I would back my rhetoric with facts. But what do these quotations mean, unless they mean what I

have said? Are not these three professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of learning

And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the young student of the workingclass, who

goes to these books and discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who discovers that

professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in collecting

funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the

minds of the poor! Do you wonder that such young students conclude that bourgeois thinkers do not know

what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the temple of truth?

And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means to society that practically all its moral

teaching should be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all the intellectual

prestige of the Church should be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we

are, all of us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our position,

and I recall a canoetrip in the wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the

bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there comes a slide of smooth green water,

and you go over it, and into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along with the speed

of a racehorse. With every sense alert, You watch for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle

on one side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail

to do it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go downstream, and maybe you are

sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of life, for

the whole of society and for every individual. The paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental

science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his

eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially

formidable obstructiona war, or the gonococcus, or the I. W. W.he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming

And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and

we all go overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in wintertime, and

drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic

criminals in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free yourself

from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to lawcourts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman

bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of gratifying an unclean animal desire.

"It is better to marry than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course those who think him

a voice of God can form no conception of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and

wholesome sexconventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as

You go to a socalled "divorcecourt," which is dominated by this Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose

of barring you from a second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You are not permitted

to tell your own story, for that would be "collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful

and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the crossquestioning of lawyers who have

suppressed for the time whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a

prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the

privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold copies of

the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept and where your wife slept

and what you saw your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as they

rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror

for nothingthe august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your petition, its suspicions having

been excited by the fact that when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a

civilized person, with pity and selfrestraint, instead of like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand

I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is

an unmitigated curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used to slay the

monsters of disease and vicebut these weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be

mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the slams of our great citiesthe degenerate, the

defective, the insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and

painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but

religion objects to this operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a simple,

entirely harmless, and practically costless method of preventing conception, which would enable us to check

the blind and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as animals. Consider the festering

mass of misery in the slums of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified, povertyhounded women,

bearing one halfnurtured infant after another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing

them drop into the grave as fast as they are bornuntil finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor,

gives up and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair,

make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J.

Robinson has estimated that in the United States alone there are a million abortions every year; and consider

that all this hideous mass of sufferinga bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by any

newspaper correspondentmight be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula, which we are not

permitted to give! The Federation of Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statutebooks of the

nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and courts and jails is at the service of religious

bigots, and a young girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling

And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and district attorneys, the commissioners of

correction and doctors who perpetrated this infamy under a socalled "reform" administration in New York

Cityand what do you find? The first thing you find is that they themselves, one and all, practice

birthcontrol with their wives or their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the statutebooks are

crowded with other laws which they make no pretense of enforcing; for example, the law which forbids the

saloons to be open on Sundaywhich law they take the liberty of understanding to mean that the saloons

shall not have their front doors open on Sunday. You will find that they are not at all afraid of the religious

taboos; they are afraid of the religious voteand even more they are afraid of the campaign contributions of

sweatshop manufacturers and landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women of

the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf in sheep's clothing, the trader, making

use of Traditionworship; hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers, who repeat

the instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if

God were as blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full

of all fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and a modern East Side tenementroom,

with an oil stove and no windows and no watercloset, and the price of cabbage seven cents a pound!

There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America. They own more than a billion

dollars' worth of property, and in the West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I do

not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more democratic than the Catholic Church; they

fight valiantly against the liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly derived from

vice. There are among their clergy many men who are honestly seeking light, and trying to make their

institutions a factor for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran scholasticism, narrow and

ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and

foundations to Traditionworship; they have to believe certain things because their ancestors believed them,

they have to act in certain ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three thousand years ago,

You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the example of their leader; if this leader leaps

over a stick, all the rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may have been taken

away in the meantime. The scientist explains this seemingfoolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in

high mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when the leader leaped across an abyss,

the others had to leap, without waiting to see in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains and no

enemies, but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still sews buttons at the back of your

dresscoat, because a couple of hundred years ago all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad

builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars

were hauled by mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in spite of the fact that the

microscope affords him complete protection against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat meat on

Friday, because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased

wife's sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox Baptist requires total immersion in a

climate quite different from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise

In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an openair life, tending sheep and working the fields; so it was an

excellent thing for them to rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear the reading of

the best literature of their time. But nowadays the city slave spends his weekdays shut up in an office,

poring over a ledger, or in a sweatshop, chained to a sewingmachine. Obviously, therefore, the thing to do

on the seventh day is to lure him into the open air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we

human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern statutebooks, and if the city slave goes into

a vacant lot and tries to play baseball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next morning hie is

In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened with

churches, there are tennis courts built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot use

these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the

swimming pool in the park is closed to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire about it, I am told

that it is desirable that city employees should have one day's rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be

possible to relay the employees, so that they might all have one, or even two days' rest a week, and still give

the public their rights on Sunday, there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our politics of

hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous

when their peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law enforces a general boredom, the public may

In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving pictures having come into being since the

days of Puritan, rule, the pictureshows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred concerts"which,

under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free

rein to the imbecilities of "Mutt Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and Gaby Deslyswhile we bar the

I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an experience which once befell me. In the

second decade of this century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose

constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship,

I was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis

on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison

costume, duly set to work upon a stonepile, duly locked up over night in a steelbarred cell full of

verminin a building housing some five hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving

lifeterms under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the

sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise court to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak

to one another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had

their only occupation working for a sweatshop contractor; this on the outskirts of the capital city of

Wilmington, with no less than ninetyone churches! The writer was informed that he would return to this

institution regularly every week unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a private club

court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making the discovery that at the Wilmington

Country Club it was the custom of the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday, and by

threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison. Which

shows again the importance of understanding the relationship of Superstition and Big Business!

Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to write what we will. And what are we

writing? What is our intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and poets

to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I

find that what freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new,

fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a living out of it.

My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigate

hydrotherapy, and found myself in a nest of Seventhday Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd

character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let the devil snare them into resting on the

first day of the week, whereas the Bible states distinctly that the Lord "rested on the seventh day". So here is

a million dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients and employees, and on Friday at sundown the

silence of death settles upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of Saturday, when everything comes

suddenly to life again, and there is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I used to call

They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with their eccentricities; it is really convenient in

some ways, because, as not all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every day of the

week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training "medical missionaries" to send to Africa, and is

teaching these supposedtobescientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and not proven anyhow!

You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment alone in his office, and he will smile and

admit that of course it is not necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it isthere are

different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know how it is. You have an institution founded upon a

certain dogma, and run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing things. It is

especially convenient when servants and nurses have a religious upbringing, and do not steal the

pocketbooks of the patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay high prices to stay in such

a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them, which you think more important than teaching abstract

notions about their being descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture vegetarian foods for them, and

build up an enormous businessso obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.

This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could cite a hundred. The city in which I live is

headquarters of another sect, the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive Methodists,

Bibleworshippers not content with the King James version, but going back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a

"University", located in one of the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institution with

seventyfive students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the "president," who was a preacher with

grease on the ample expanse of his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest

grammatical errors, such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year witnessed a split, and the founding of a

brand new church and "University"because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so much that the

students got no chance to study; also because he sent home a rich man's daughter whose shirtwaists revealed

And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you back to the Libyan desert and the time

of Thais. A lady friend of mine, generously blessed with this world's goods, asks me have I seen the hermit.

"Hermit?" I say, and she replies, "Didn't you know there was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and

never has anything to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates spiritually." I picture my friend

with her large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave. "He

received you?" I ask. "Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh, how he

stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to

explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite physiological phenomena incidental to the

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

On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an

ignorant farmeryouth in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the appearance of

gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places

and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout believers, we hold

ourselves in readiness. In this case the plates were written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the Angel thoughtfully

provided Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magic stones with which to read the records. They

proved to deal with a mystery which has haunted the minds of Bible students for centuries the fate of the

"lost ten tribes of Israel", who were now revealed to have been the ancestors of the American Indians. The

Angel told Smith to found a new religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general; so, on the

6th of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N. Y., there was formally launched the "Church of the Latter

Day Saints." Smith turned over to his followers his translation of the miraculous plates, called "The Book of

Mormon"; obviously genuine, for it read precisely like the books which we already know are the revealed

word of God. But, on chance that this might not be sufficient, we were offered in the preface two documents,

the "Testimony of Three Witnesses", and the "Further Testimony of Eight Witnesses". The latter being the

Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, unto whom this work shall come: That Joseph

Smith Jr., the translator of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the

appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath translated, we did handle with our

hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work and of

curious workmanship. And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto

us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith hath got the plates of which we

have spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to witness that which we have seen, and we lie not, God

The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore out the Angel's prophesies and proved

conclusively its divine origin; it was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted, and its followers

proceeded to massacre the nearby unbelieving populations, just as the divinely guided Hebrews had done.

Driven from place to place, they built at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful temple, according to plans revealed in a

vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where they have a magnificent marble tabernacle,

and some 300,000 followers. The United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected to their

practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have as many wives as they could support; the government

confiscated the church's property, and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy, as is done by elderly

church members in other parts of the country. Recently the head of the church, who bears the title of

"Prophet, Seer and Revelator", was persuaded to permit an examination of one of its secret plates, the "Book

of Abraham", by egyptologists, who found that it was ordinary Egyptian hieroglyphics, not "reformed", but

containing prayers to the sungod. But this will of course make no difference to the devout followers of

Josephany more than it has made to devout Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven

that the Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and that the four gospels date from the

All over America you will find these weird Biblecults, some of them pathetic, some of them dangerous,

some of them merely grotesque. Thus, for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the

"Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed himself up in scarlet and purple robes with stars on.

Through his Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Company he became enormously wealthy; he finally

announced himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to New York,

and P. T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white elephant never made such a sensation. The ridicule of the

metropolis overwhelmed the old prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and his tabernacle and his bank

to his son; straightway, according to the rule of all religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting up,

Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers", ghastly sects which cultivate the religious hysterias,

and have spread like a plague among the women of our lonely prairie farms and desert ranches. The "Holy

Rollers", who call themselves the "Apostolic Church", have a meeting place here in Pasadena, and any

Sunday evening at nine o'clock you may see the Spirit of the Lord taking possession of the worshippers,

causing moans and shrieks and convulsions; you may see a woman holding her hands aloft for seventeen

minutes by the watch, making chattering sounds like an ape. This is called "talking in tongues" and is a sign

of the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come back at eleven in the evening, you will find the entire

congregation, men and women, prostrate on the floor, or hanging over the benches; and maybe a child

You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself into these convulsions. Here is a paper called

"Trust", which is "published Monthly (D. V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work and Bible Training School."

Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The Pentecostal Baptism", and tells the story of her experiences. She "camped on

I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the mission told me, "You can go down to the mission and

stay there all day. There is plenty of wood, and you can stay there all night." I went down, and there was

plenty of "let go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got wonderfully loosed.....

Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God told me it was mine. What was there left for me to

pray about. He spoiled my praying and I took up praising. I praised God that He who worked in the Upper

Room was working the same in me. I praised, and I praised, and I praised. The devil said to me, "That's

mechanical." I said, "I'll praise You Lord, and if You want real praise, You'll have to put the wind in the

That's the way I came through. One morning I was just getting out of bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the

enemy likes to call it, began to come. The Lord said, "Let it babble!" I let. The babble increased, and by night

I was up to my neck. I let. I still let. That's all. Someone else does the work, and it does not tire you.

And here is another paper. "Meat in Due Season: published monthly, or as often as the Lord leads." The

editor quotes the Bible, "Call upon the name of the Lord," and explains that "Call means call." The word

appears to have a special meaning to these pentecostal personsit means working yourself into a frenzy of

agitation; as the editor puts it, "you must lay hold of the horns of the altar." He goes on to exhortthe bold

Pray as if your very life depended upon it! The first few minutes seemingly all the powers of hell will

contend every word, the next few, relief in a measure will come, more liberty in calling. In a very little while

you will be dead to the room, dead to the chair, dead to everyone around you, dead to all and tremendously

alive to your desperate need and emptyness; this conviction will grow as you increase calling upon Him. It

maybe you'll weep, it maybe you'll perspire, it maybe your clothing will be deranged, it, maybe your throat

will get sore. Never for a moment let your mind rest on the condition of your person. Open your mouth and

God has promised to fill it. Ask persistently until the very floor seems to sink beneath you and the fountains

of the deep, of your heart let loose. Like David, "pour out your soul" like one would pour water out of a

bucket. I have seen hundreds get through right at this point. When selfthought, reticence, decorum, reserve,

propriety and dignity had all been thrown to the four winds of heaven. Self was then obliterated and

consciousness of person gone. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you saith the scripture, but you

These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a sect which originated in England, but was driven

by persecution to the New World. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of True Believers in

Christ's Second Coming," and were founded by Ann Lee, who , variously termed herself the "Female Christ",

the "Holy Comforter", and the "Godanointed Woman". They might be termed the suffragettes of religion,

for they pray always to "Our Father and Mother, which are in heaven." They were taught the convenient

doctrine that their Founder had "spiritual illumination", so that any evidence of the senses used against her

might deceive. She governed through terror, holding that by her mental powers she could inflict torment upon

any of her followers. Fortunately she taught absolute celibacy, and so there are now only about a thousand of

This far western country swarms with those fanatics who await the return of Christ, and find in Bible

chronology positive evidence that he is coming on a specified day. Seldom do I give a lecture on Socialism

that some eager old lady does not come up to me and point out how futile are my hopes, because the

Millenium will come before the Revolution. Several times I have come on an item in the newspapers, telling

of a group of people, sometimes whole villages, selling their goods and going out into the fields to shout and

sing and pray, expecting the vision of the Lord and His Angels in the skies. I have in my hand a pamphlet

entitled "Shekineh: The Glory of God in Israel, Facts Mathematically Foretold, of the Soon Coming of Our

Blessed Lord." It is earnestly, yearningly written, in that spirit of feebleminded affectionateness which the

Now dear reader you see that these problems tell a wonderful story which I know are the Eternal Truths of

God. Jesus is soon coming. I believe that from now on we can say, next week perhaps our blessed Lord will

return. Yet the time may not end till the close of the A. M. year, which will be March 20th, 1897. But let us

take up the sickle of God, etc. Oh, my Christian friends, live near the Blessed Christ, and gain eternal life

In the public library I find another pamphlet, entitled "The Our Race," which proves that the "lost ten tribes

of Israel" are not the American Indians, but the Irish! And here is a publication of the "Watch Tower Bible

The great pyramid in Egypt is a witness to all the events of the ages and of our day. The pyramid's downward

passage under "a Draconis" symbolizes the course of Sin. Its first ascending passage symbolizes the Jewish

Age. Its Grand Gallery symbolizes the Gospel Age. Its upper step symbolizes the approaching period of

It is a Sunday morning, and I sit in the California sunshine revising this manuscript, when a

decorouslooking young man approaches, having a sack over his shoulder. "From the Biblestudents," he

says politely, and hands me a little paper, "The Bible Students' Monthly: an Independent, Unsectarian

Religious Newspaper, Specially devoted to the Forwarding of the Laymen's Home Missionary Movement for

the Glory of God and Good of Humanity." The leading article is headed "The Fall of Babylon: Ancient

Babylon a TypeMystic Babylon the Antitype: Why Christendom must Sufferthe Final Outcome." A

The following article is extracted from Pastor Russell's posthumous volume entitled "The Finished Mystery,"

the 7th in the series of his Studies in the Scriptures and published subsequent to his death. Pastor Russell held

the distinction of being the most fearless and powerful writer of modern times on ecclesiastical subjects. In

this posthumous volume, which is called "his last legacy to the Christians on earth," is found a thorough

exposition of every verse in the entire book of Revelation and also an elucidation of the obscure prophecy of

Pastor Russell used to publish a twocolumn sermon in some hundreds of Sunday newspapers, together with

a presentment of his featuressolemn, stiff, whitewhiskered, set off with a "choker" and a black broadcloth

coat. There are five million such faces in America, but if you have an impulse to despair for your country,

remember that it produced Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, as well as Pastor Russell and the Moody and

Sankey hymnbook. I quote one passage from "The Finished Mystery", in order that the reader may know

what it means to "hold the distinction of being the most fearless and powerful writer of modern times on

ecclesiastical subjects." Pastor Russell does not approve of the Methodists, and he quotes twelve verses of

Revelation, line by line and phrase by phrase, showing how the evil course and downfall of the Wesleyan

"But that they should be tormented five months."In symbolic time, 150 years5 X 30 = 150. (Ezek. 4:6.)

Wesley became the first Methodist in 1728. (Rev. 9:1.) When the Methodist denomination, with all the

others, was cast off from favor in 1878 (Rev. 3:14) its powers to torment men by preaching what

Presbyterians describe as "Conscious misery, eternal in duration" came to an end legally, and to a large extent

P. S. A few months pass, and while this book is going to press, "The Finished Mystery" is suppressed by the

Such are the beliefs built on the Bible. But there are other ancient writings with strange nomenclature and

ritual and symbolism, calculated to impress the unlettered; also our prophets have imaginations of their own,

and can invent nomenclature and ritual and symbolism never seen in heaven nor on earth before. Thus there

is Dr. Newo Newi New, who called himself "Archbishop of the Newthot Church," and gathered about him a

harem of devoted females in San Francisco, and was landed in jail for using the mails to defraud. Or there is

"Oahspe, the Cosmic Bible," a work of brandnew revelation with a brandnew view of the universe and all

The reader soon discovers that he must radically revise not only his ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the

order and significance of names and titles commonly applied to the Transcendental Brethren. The great

provinces of Etheria are presided over by chiefs, chosen for their superior development in wisdom and love.

For our solar system to cross one of these provinces requires about 3,000 years, and between them are belts of

high Etherian light which take several years to pass over. The passage of each province is a cycle of earthly

And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed by the Lord to Dr. C. R. Teed of Chicago in the year 1889.

This new seer took the name of Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, "the Shepherd from Joseph, the Stone of

Israel, the SunMan; the illuminating center of the Son of man", and went out on the streets of the city to

preach that the earth is a hollow sphere with the stars inside. The street urchins of the porkpacking

metropolis threw stones at him, and the irreverent newspapers took up his adventures, with the result that

followers gathered, and now there is a flourishing colony in Florida, with a dignified magazine called "The

Flaming Sword", and a collection of propaganda volumes: "The Cellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of

Koreshan Universology and the New Geodesy"; "The Immortal Manhood, the Laws and Processes of its

Attainment in the Flesh"; "The Great Red Dragon, by Lord Chester"; "The Coming of the Shepherd from

Joseph, The Standing of the Great Ensign, by Koresh." The "Religioscience" of this Chicago revelator is

based, first upon some precise measurements of the earth which prove that its surface is concave; and second

upon some philological discoveries very much resembling puns. Thus the "cross of Christ" is explained in a

The highest characteristic of the alchemical law is the cross of Christ with sensual man. The cross means that

the Lord God, in order to perpetuate his own being, descends into the race of sensuality.

The word Heaven means things heaved up, that is, heaved up from their material basis, the earth; thus, the

meteors which fall to the earth are composed of metallic, mineral, and geological substances, being

materialized or actually created in the atmosphere by an alchemicoorganic process from zones or belts

periodically open, which precipitate their contents in the form or shape of meteors."

And perhaps I ought also to quote the "Indicia of Human Progress", by "Berthaldine, Matrona". I don't know

what a "Matrona" isunless it is a female matron. This female matron tells me that now is the "Time of

Restitution", and explains that "the prolification of the human race has reached a fruition of the adultery of

the truth and good of the Lord with the fallacies and evils of the mortal hells"..... We have come, it seems, to

the "age of Pisces", which is "one of the greatest radical prolification"; and what we now need is the "power

of polarization", so that we may join the "White Horse Army of the Most High", which is the organization of

And here is another and even more startling revelation from Chicago, given to a seer by the name of Dr.

Otoman Prince of Adusht Ha'nish, prophet of the Sun God, Prince of Peace, Manthra Magi of Temple El

Katman, Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and Envoy of Mazdaznan living, ViceroyElect and International

Head of MasterThot. If you had happened to live near the town of Mendota, Illinois, and had known the

German grocerboy named Otto Hanisch, you might at first have trouble in recognizing him through this

transmogrification. I have traced his career in the files of the Chicago newspapers, and find him herding

sheep, setting type, preaching prestidigitation, mesmerism, and fake spiritualism, joining the Mormon

Church, then the "Christian Catholic Church in Zion", and then the cult of Brighouse, who claimed to be

Christ returned. Finally he sets himself up in Chicago as a Persian Magi, teaching Yogi breathing exercises

and occult sexlore to the elegant society ladies of the porkpacking metropolis. The Sun God, worshipped

for two score centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on Lake Park Avenue, and the

prophet gives teaparties at which his disciples are fed on lilacblossoms"the white and pinkish for males,

the bluetinted for females". He wears a long flowing robe of pale grey cashmere, faced with white, and

flexible white kid shoes, and he sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner Studies", price five dollars per

The Immaculate Conception and its Repetition; The Secrets of Lovers Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates;

A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jail for six months; but that does not harm his cult, which

now has a temple in Chicago, presided over by a lady called Kalantress and Evangelist; also a "Northern

Stronghold" in Montreal, an "Embassy" in London, an "International Aryana" in Switzerland, and "Centers"

all over America. At the moment of going to press, the prophet himself is in flight, pursued by a warrant

charging him with improper conduct with a number of young boys in a Los Angeles hotel.

I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a farrago of every kind of ancient mysticismpaper and

binding from the Bible, illustrations from the Egyptian, names from the Zoroastrian, health rules from the

Hindoos, laws from the Confuciansprice ten dollars per volume. Would you like to discover your

seventeen senses, to develop them according to the GaLlama principle, and to share the "expansion of the

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

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

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

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

I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of the prophet's arriving there. He takes the front

page with the captivating headline: "Women Didn't Think Till They Put On Corsets". The interview tells

about his mysteriousness, his aloofness, his birdlikediet, and his personal beauty. "Despite his

seventythree years, Ha'nish evidences no sign of age. His keen blue eyes showed no sign of wavering. There

were no wrinkles on his face, and his walk was that of a man of forty." The humor of this becomes apparent

when we mention that at Ha'nish's trial, three or four years ago, he was proven to be thirtyfive years old!

Being thus warned as to the accuracy of American journalism, we shall not be taken in by the repeated

statements that the Mazdaznan prophet is a millionaire. But there is no doubt that he is wealthy; and as all

Americans wish to be wealthy, I will quote his formula of prosperity, his method of accomplishing what

When hungry and you do not know where to get your next piece of bread, do not despair. Thy Father,

allloving, has provided you with everything that will meet all cases of emergency. Place your teeth tightly

together, with tongue pressing against the lower teeth and lips parted. Breathe in, close lips immediately,

exhaling through the nostrils. Breathe again; if saliva forms in your mouth, hold your breath so you can

swallow it first before you exhale. You thus take out of the air the metalsubstance contained therein; you

can even taste the iron which you convert into substance required for making the blood. Should you feel that,

although you have sufficient iron in the blood, there is a lack of copper and zinc and silver, place upper teeth

over lower, keep lower lip tightly to lower teeth, now breathe and you can even taste the metals named. Then

should you feel you need more gold element for your brain functions, place your back teeth together just as if

you were to grind the back teeth, taking short breaths only. You will then learn to know that there is gold and

What all this means is that we have a continent, with a hundred million halfeducated people, materially

prosperous, but spiritually starving; so any man who possesses personality, who looks in any way strange and

impressive, or has hunted up old books in a library, and can pronounce mysterious words in a thrilling

voicesuch a man can find followers. Anybody can do it with any doctrine, from anywhere, Persia or

Patagonia, Pekin or Pompei. I would be willing to wager that if I cared to come out and announce that I had

had a visit from God last night, and to devote such literary and emotional power as I possess to

communicating a new revelation, I could have a temple, a university, and a million dollars within five years

at the outside. And if at the end of five years I were to announce that I had played a joke on the world, some

one of my followers would convince the faithful that I had been an agent of God without knowing it, and that

I would not be understood as believing that all our cults are undiluted fakery, for that would be doing

injustice to some earnest people. There are, in this country, many followers of the Persian reformer, Abbas

Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and who have what I am inclined to think is the purest and most

dignified religion in existence. There was a man named Jacob Beilhardt, who founded a cult in Illinois with

the painful name of "Spirit Fruit Colony", who nevertheless was a man of spiritual insight, a true mystic; he

was honest, and so he failed, and died of a broken heart. Also there are the Christian Scientists and the

Theosophists, so exasperating that one would like to throw them onto the rubbishheap, who yet compel us

to sift over their mountains of chaff for the grains of truth which will bear fruit in future.

While we western races have been exploring the natural world and perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo

students have been exploring the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and Lodge and Janet and

Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us today they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtless they have

hints of other things, upon which our scientists have not yet come. I have friends, perfectly sane and

competent people, who tell me that they can see auras, and use this ability as a means of judging character.

Shall I say that there are no auras, simply because I do not happen to have this gift of seeing them? In the

same way, having read Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living," I am not ready to ridicule the claim of the Yogi

adepts, that they are able to project some kind of astral body, and to communicate with one another from

distant places. But granting such occult powers in a world of economic strife, what follows? Simply new

floods of charlatanism, elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and metaphysic for the deluding and

I have seen the thing working itself out in one case known to me. A young man had a gift of mental healing; I

know, because I saw it work; but it did not always work, and that was annoying. He was penniless and had a

taste for power, and to eke out his erratic endowment he got himself books of Eastern lore, and day by day as

I watched him I could see him becoming more and more impressive, mysterious and forbidding. Today he is

a fullfledged wonderworker, with the language of a dozen mystic cults at his tongue's end, and the reverent

regard of many wealthy ladies. I have never tried to break through his guard, but I feel certain that he is a

This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible. Just as the manufacturer of honest foods is driven out

by the adulterator, so the worker of miracles drives out the sincere investigator. As a result we have here in

America a plague of Eastern cults, with "swamis" using soft yellow robes and soft brown eyes to win the

souls of idle society ladies. These teachers of ancient Hindoo lore despise us as a race of barbarians; but they

There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and institutes and temples and colonies, and a

doctrine as complex and detailed and fantastic as that of the Roman Catholics. I have already referred to the

writings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway Russian army officer's daughter, whose career reads like a tale out

of the Arabian Nights. And there is Annie Besant, who was once an ardent worker in the Socialdemocratic

Federation; H. M. Hyndman tells of his dismay when she went to India and walked in a procession between

two white bulls! Here in California is Madame Tingley, with a colony and a host of followers in a minature

paradise. Men work at moneylending or manufacturing sportinggoods, and when they get old and tired

they make the thrilling discovery that they have souls; the theosophists cultivate these souls and they leave

their money to the soulcause, and there are lawsuits and exposes in the newspapers. For, you see, there is

ferocious rivalry in the game of cultivating millionaire souls; there are slanders and feuds, just as in soulless

affairs. "Don't have anything to do with Madame Tingley," whispers a Theosophist lady to my wife; and

when my wife in all innocence inquires, "Why not?" the awestricken answer comes, "She practices black

Let me add that I do not say that she practices black magic. I do not believe that she could practice it, even if

she wanted toI do not believe in black magic. My purpose is merely to show how theosophists quarrel:

going back to the days of Anu and Baal and the bronze image of the Babylonian firegod:

This is the other side of the fair shield of religious faith. Why, if there be a power which loves and can be

persuaded to aid us, may there not also be a power which hates, and can be persuaded to destroy? No religion

has ever been able to answer this, and therefore none has ever been able to escape from devilterrors. Even

Jesus was pursued by Satan, and the Holy Catholic Church has its ceremonies for the exorcising of demons,

and a most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the

unreality of all evil, their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that they are perfect in Godyet

tormented by a squalid phobia called "Mental Malpractice", or "Malicious Animal Magnetism".

Christian Science is the most characteristic of American religious contributions. Just as Billy Sunday is the

price we pay for failing to educate our baseball players, so Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy is the price

That she had a power to cure disease I do not doubt, because I have a little of it myself. At first my opinion

was that her "Science" made its way by curing the imaginary ailments of the idle rich. If a person has nothing

to do but think that he is sick, you can work easy miracles by persuading him to think that he is well; and if

he has nothing to do but think that he is well, he will help you to build marble churches and maintain

propaganda societies. But recently I have experimented with mental healingenough to satisfy myself that

the subconscious mind which controls our physical functions can be powerfully influenced by the will.

I told the story of some of these experiments in Hearst's Magazine for April, 1914. Suffice it here to say that

if you will lay your hands upon a sick person, forming a vivid mental picture of the bodily changes you

desire, and concentrating the power of your will upon them, you may be surprised by the results, especially if

you possess anything in the way of psychic gifts. You do not have to adopt any theories, you do not have to

do it in the name of any divinity, ancient or modern; the only bearing of such ideas is that they serve to

persuade people to make the experiment, and to make it with persistence and intensity. So it has come about

that "miracles" of healing are associated with "faith"; and so it comes about that scientists are apt to flout the

subject. But read of the work of Janet and Charcot and their followers at the Salpetriere; they have proven

that all kinds of seemingorganic ailments may be entirely hysterical in nature, and may be cured by the

simplest form of suggestion. Understanding this, you may find it more easy to credit the fact that cripples do

sometimes throw away their crutches in the grotto of Lourdes. For my part, I can believe that Jesus performed

all the miracles of healing attributed to him including the raising up of people pronounced to be dead by

the ignorance of that time. I am convinced that in the new science of psychoanalysis we have a universe as

The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they have mixed it up with metaphysic and divinity, and

built some four or five hundred churches, and printed the Mother Church alone knows how many million

pamphlets and books. I once invested three of my hardearned dollars for a copy of the Eddy Bible, and let

myself be stunned and blinded by the flapping of metaphysical wings. It is unadulterated moonshine as the

Platonist and Berkeleyan and Hegelian and other orthodox collegiate metaphysical magi can prove to you in

one minute. What interests me about the phenomenon is not the slinging of tremendous words, but the strictly

Yankee use which is made of them. There is no nonsense about saving your soul in Christian Science; what it

is for is to remove your wen, to nail down your floating kidney, and to enable you to hustle and make money.

We saw in our politics the growth of a Party of the Full DinnerPail; contemporaneous therewith, and

corresponding thereto, we see in our religious life the development of a Church of the Full PocketBook.

It is a strict religionstrictly cash. The heads of the cult do not issue cheap editions of "Science and Health,

With Key to the Scriptures", to relieve the suffering of the proletariat; nothe work is copyrighted, in all its

varying and contradictory editions, and the price is from three to sevenfifty, according to binding.

Treatments cost from three dollars to ten, whether you come and get them or take them over the telephone.

And we have no nonsense about charity, we don't worry about the poor who fester in our city slums; because

poverty is a product of Mortal Mind, and we offer to all men a way to get rich right off the bat. You may

come to our marble churches and hear people testify how through the power of Divine Mind they were

enabled to anticipate a rise in the stockmarket. If you don't avail yourself of the opportunity, the fault is

As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholic hierarchy is a Bolshevik democracy in comparison.

The Church is controlled by an absolutely irresponsible selfperpetuating body of five men, who alone

dictate its policy. I have in my hand a letter from a Christian Science healer who was listed as an "authorized

practitioner", and who withdrew from the Church because of its attitude on public questions. He sends me a

copy of his correspondence with the editors of the "Christian Science Monitor", containing a detailed analysis

of the position of that paper on such issues as the Ballinger landfrauds. He writes:

I am thoroughly convinced now that the policy of the Church is consciously plutocratic. The only

recommendation I have heard of the latest appointee to the Board of Directors is that he is one of the richest

After the Titanic disaster, Senator La Follette brought in a carefully drawn bill to compel steamship

companies to provide lifeboats and trained crews. The "Christian Science Monitor" opposed this bill; and

when my correspondent cited the fact, he brought out a quaint bit of metaphysical logic, as follows:

One would prefer to travel on a vessel without a single boat, rather than on some other vessels which were

The truth is that the brand of Mammon was on our Yankee religion from the day of its birth. In the first

edition of her new Bible "Mother" Eddy dropped the hint to her readers: "Men of business have said this

science was of great advantage from a secular point of view." And in her advertisements she threw aside all

pretense, declaring that her work "Affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which one can

accumulate a fortune." When her pupils did accumulate, she boasted of their success; nor did she neglect her

It has been a dozen years since I looked into this cult; in order to be sure that it has not been purified in the

interim, I proceed to a street corner in my home city, where is a stand with a sign: "Christian Science

Literature." "I take four sample copies of a magazine, the "Christian Science Sentinel", published by the

Mother Church in Boston, and turn to the "Testimonials of Healing". In the issue of August 11, 1917, Mary

C. Richards of St. MargaretsonThames, England, testifies: "Through a number of circumstances

unnecessary to relate, but proving conclusively that the result came not from man but from God, employment

was found." In the issue of December 2, 1916, Frances Tuttle of Jersey City, N. J., testifies how her sister was

successfully treated for unemployment by a scientist practitioner. "Every condition was beautifully met." In

the same issue Fred D. Miller of Los Angeles, Cal., testifies: "Soon after this wonderful truth came to me,

Divine Love led me to a new position with a responsible firm. The work was new to me, but I have given

entire satisfaction, and my salary has been advanced twice in less than a year." In the issue of January 27,

1917, Eliza Fryant of Agricola, Miss., testifies how she cured her little dog of snakebite and removed two

painful corns from her own foot. In the issue of August 4, 1917, Marcia E. Gaier, of Everett, Wash., testifies

how it suddenly occurred to her that because God is All, she would drop her planning and outlining in regard

to real estate properties, "upon which for nine months all available material methods were tried to no effect."

While working in the yard one morning and gratefully communing with God, the only power, I suddenly felt

that I should stop working and prepare for visitors on their way to look at the property. I obeyed this very

distinct command, and in about an hour I greeted two people who had searched almost the entire city for just

what we had to offer. They had been directed to our place by what to material sense would seem an accident,

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

My friends, do you know that since the world began Christian Science is the only system which has

intelligently related religion to business? Christian Science shows that since all ideas belong to Mind, God,

As I said, these people have the newold power of mental healing, They blunder along with it blindly,

absurdly, sometimes with tragic consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the pilldoctors know

nothing about this power, and regard it with contempt mingled with fear; so of course the hosts of sufferers

whom the pilldoctors cannot help flock to the healers of the "Church of Christ, Scientist". According to the

custom of those who are healed by "faith", they swallow line, hook, and sinker, creed, ritual, metaphysic and

divinity. So we see in twentiethcentury America precisely what we saw in B. C. twentiethcentury

Assyriaa host of worshippers, giving their worldly goods without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of

fanatics and partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise of graft, and harvesting that thing desired of all

And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one another's Mortal Minds, they drive one

another out, they snarl over the spoils like a pack of hungry animals. Listen to the Mother, denouncing one of

her studentsa perfectly amiable and harmless youth whose only offense was that he had gone his own way

Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends,

destroy virtue, put out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track with the trophies of thy

guiltI say, Behold the "cloud" no bigger than a man's hand already rising on the horizon of Truth, to pour

The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with the torture of individuals, is repeating

history, and will fall upon his own sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when, in the

dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery and killing. When he is attempting to turn friend

away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life and giving to

the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is turning back the reviving sufferer to his bed of pain,

clouding his first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall point to the tyrant's fate,

In a certain city of America is a large building given up entirely to the whims of pretty ladies. Its floors are

not floors but "Promenades", and have walls of glass, behind which, as you stroll, you see bonnets from Paris

and opera cloaks from London, furs from Alaska and blankets from Arizona, diamonds from South Africa

and beads from the Philippines, grapes from Spain and cherries from Japan, fortunetellers from Arabia and

dancingmasters from Petrograd and "naturopaths" from Vienna. There are seventythree shops, by actual

count, containing everything that could be imagined or desired by a pretty lady, whether for her body, or for

that vague stream of emotion she calls her "soul". One of the seventythree shops is a "Metaphysical

Library", having broad windows, and walls in pastel tints, and pretty vases with pink flowers, and pretty gray

wicker chairs in which the reader will please to be seated, while we probe the mysteries of an activity widely

We begin with a shelf of magazines having mystical titles: Azoth; Master Mind; Aletheian; Words of Power;

Qabalah; Comforter; Adept; Nautilus; True Word; Astrological Bulletin; Unity; Uplift; Now. And then come

shelves of pretty pamphlets, alluring to the eye and the purse; also shelves of imposinglooking volumes

containing the lore and magic of a score of races and two score of centuriestogether with the very newest

As in the case of Christian Science, these New Thoughters have a fundamental truth, which I would by no

means wish to depreciate. It is a fact that the mysterious Source of our being is infinite, and that we are only

at the beginning of our thinking about it. It is a fact that by appeal to it we can perform seeming miracles of

mental and moral regeneration; we can stimulate the flow of nervous energy and of the blood, thus furthering

the processes of bodily healing. But the fact that God is Infinite and Omnipotent does not bar the fact that He

has certain ways of working, which He does not vary; and that it is our business to explore and understand

these ways, instead of setting our fancies to work imagining other ways more agreeable to our sentimentality.

Thus, for example, if we want bread, it is God's decree that we shall plant wheat and harvest it, and grind and

bake and distribute it. Under conditions prevailing at the moment, it appears to be His decree that we shall

store the wheat in elevators, and ship it in freight cars, and buy it through a grain exchange, with capital

borrowed from a national bank; in other words, that our daily bread shall be the plaything of exploiters and

speculators, until such a time as we have the intelligence to form an effective political party and establish

Industrial Democracy. But when you come to study the ways of God in the literature of the New Thought, do

you find anything about the Millers' Trust and the Bakers' Trust and how to expropriate these agencies of

What you find is Bootstraplifting; you find gentlemen and lady practitioners shutting their eyes and lifting

their hands and pronouncing Incantations in aweinspiring voicesor in Capital Letters and LARGE TYPE:

"God is infinite, God is AllLoving, GOD WILL PROVIDE. Bread is coming to you! Bread is coming to

You think this is exaggeration? If so, it is because you have never entered the building of the pretty ladies,

and sat in the gray wicker chairs of the metaphysical library. One of the highest highpriestesses of the cults

of New Nonsense is a lady named Elizabeth Towne, editor of "The Nautilus"; and Priestess Elizabeth tells

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

I look over this Priestess' magazine, and find it full of testimonials and advertisements for the conjuring of

prosperity. "Are you in the success sphere?" asks one exhorter; the next tells you "How to enter the silence.

How to manifest what you desire. The secret of advancement." Another tells: "How a Failure at Sixty Won

Sudden Success; From Poverty to $40,000 a year a Lesson for Old and Young Alike." The lesson, it

appears, is to pay $3.00 for a book called "Power of Will." And here is another book:

Master Key: Which can unlock the Secret Chamber of Success, can throw wide the doors which seem to bar

men from the Treasure House of Nature, and bids those enter and partake who are Wise enough to

Understand and broad enough to Weigh the Evidence, firm enough to Follow their Own Judgment and Strong

I turn to the shelves of pamphlets. Here is a pretty one called "All Sufficiency in All Things," published by

the "Unity School of Christianity", in Kansas City; it explains that God is God, not merely of the Soul, but

This divine Substance is ever abiding within us, and stands ready to manifest itself in whatever form you and

I need or wish, just as it did in Elisha's time. It is the same yesterday, today and forever. Abundant Supply by

the manifestation of the Father within us, from within outward, is as much a legitimate outcome of the Christ

life or spiritual understanding as is bodily healing..... "Know that I am Godall of God, Good, all of Good. I

And here is W. W. Atkinson of Chicago, author of a work called "Mind Power". Would you like to be an

Impressive Personality? Mr. Atkinson will tell you exactly how to do it; he will give you the secret of the

Magnetic Handclasp, of the Intense, Straightintheeye Look; he will tell you what to say, he will write out

for you Incantations which you may pronounce to yourself, to convince yourself that you have Power, that

the INDWELLING PRESENCE with all its MIGHT is yours. Mr. Atkinson rebukes mildly the tendency of

some of his fellow Bootstraplifters to employ these arts for moneymaking; but you notice that his

magazine, "Advanced Thought", does not decline the advertisements of such toopractical practitioners.

Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace Wattles, who tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a

Genius", and in another pamphlet "How to Get What you Want". The thing for you to do is

Saturate your mentality through and through with the knowledge that YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT

TO DO..... Look upon the peanutstand merely as the beginning of the department store, and make it grow;

Hold this consciousness and say with deep, earnest feeling: I CAN succeed! All that is possible to any one is

possible to me. I AM success. I do succeed, for I am full of the Power of Success.

Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the capitalist systema "sodajerker", a

"counterjumper", a bookkeeper for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life are one in ten thousand; but

he comes to the Metaphysical Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry Harrison

Brown, who was first a Unitarian clergyman, and then an extrahigh Bootstraplifter in San Francisco, an

Honorary VicePresident of the International New Nonsense Alliance. Mr. Brown will tell our sodajerker or

counterjumper exactly how to elevate himself by mental machinery. All calculations of probabilities are

delusions of the senses; if you have faith, you can move, not merely mountains, but RikerHegeman's,

Macy's, or the Steel Trust. "How to Promote Yourself " is the title of one of Mr. Brown's pamphlets, in which

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

A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its thirtieth edition, bears the thrilling title of "Dollars Want

I believe that this little monograph is the first utterance of the thought that each individual has the ability so to

radiate his mental forces that he can cause the Dollars to feel him, love him, seek him, and thus draw at will

Dollars are manifestations of the One Infinite Substance as you are, but, unlike you, they are not

SelfConscious. They have no power till you give them power. Make them feel this through your

thoughtvibrations as you feel the importance of your work. They will then come to you to be used.

Poverty is a mental condition. It can be cured only by the Affirmation of Power to cure: I am a part of the

One, and, in the One, I possess all! Affirm this and patiently wait for the manifestation. You have sown the

And our author goes on to hand out packages of these thoughtseeds"Affirmations" as they are called, in

If the symbolism of the Episcopal Church is of the palace, and that of the nonconformist sects of the

countinghouse, that of the International New Nonsense Alliance is of Wall Street and the "ticker". What is

your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?" asks William Morris Nichols in the publication of the " 'Now' Folk",

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

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

Have you an account with the First (and only) Bank of Spirit? If not, then you should at once open one

therewith. For no one can afford to keep less than a large deposit of spiritual funds with that Bank.

Intend the mind in the direction indicated by your desire. Seek for the Light and Guidance by which you may

open up the way for your Spiritual Substance, which governs material supply, to reach you and make you as

rich as you ought to be, in freedom and happiness. All this you can, and when in earnest, will do.

I turn over the advertisements of this publication of the " 'Now' Folk". One offers "The Business Side of New

Thought." Another offers "The Books Without an If", with your money back IF you are not satisfied!

Another offers land in Bolivia for two dollars an acre. Another quotes Shakespeare: " 'Tis the mind that

makes the body rich." Another offers two copies of the "Phrenological Era" for ten cents.

There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which cannot find dupes among the readers of this New

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

The Most Wonderful Book of the Ages: The Acquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, Transcribed from the

Numerology: the Universal Adjuster! Do you know: What you appear to be to others? What you really are?

What you want to be? What would overcome your present and future difficulties? Write to X, Philosopher.

You will receive full particulars of his personal work which is dedicated to your service. No problem is too

And looking in the body of the magazine, you find this Philosopher imparting some of this Understanding.

Would you like, for example, to understand why America entered the War? Nothing easier. The vowels of the

Words United States of America are uieaeoaeia, which are numbered 2951561591, which added make 45, or

4 plus 5 equals 9. You might not at first see what that has to do with the Waruntil the Philosopher points

out that "9 in the number of completion, indicating the end of a cosmic cycle." That, of course, explains

And here is a work on what you perhaps thought to be a dead science, Astrology. It is called "Lucky Hours

for Everybody: A True System of Planetary Hours by Prof. John B. Early. Price One Dollar." It teaches you

Saturn's negative hours are especially good for all matters relating to goldmining..... The Sun negative rules

the emerald, the musical note D sharp, and the number four. The lunar hours are a good time to deal in public

A recent lady visitor informed me that she had made several vain attempts to transact important business in

the hours ruled by Jupiter, usually held to be fortunate, while she was nearly always fortunate in what she

began in the hours ruled by Saturn. Upon investigation I found her name was ruled by the Sun negative, and

that she had Capricorn with Saturn therein as her ascendant at birth, which explains.

And finally, here is a London "scientist", reported in the "Weekly Unity" of Kansas City, who proves his

mental power over twohorse power oil engines which fail to act. "Going a little apart, he came back in a few

minutes and said: 'The engine is all right now and will work satisfactorily.' and without any further difficulty

it did." We are told how Dr. Rawson gave a demonstration of his method to a newspaper reporter the other

day. Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he apparently became absorbed in deep contemplation and

said aloud: "There is no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter; all is spirit and

You might at first find difficulty in believing what can be accomplished by "demonstrations" such as this; not

merely are twohorse power oil engines made to work, but the whole gigantic machine of Prussian militarism

is prevented from working. You may recall how Arthur Machen's magazine story of the Angels of Mons was

taken up and made into a Catholic legend overnight; now here is a NewNonsense legend, complete and

London, Dec. 14.Shellproof and bulletproof soldiers have been discovered on the European

battlefronts. Heroes with "charmed lives" are being made every day, according to Frederick L. Rawson, a

London scientist, who insists he has found the miraculous way by which they are developed. He calls it

"audible treatment". "Practical utilization of the powers of God by right thinking," is the agency through

which Dr. Rawson declares he can so treat a man that he will not be harmed when hundreds of men are being

shot dead beside him. This amazing treatment includes a new type of prayer. It is being administered to

hundreds of men audibly, and to hundreds more by letter. Nothing since the war began has aroused so much

At the taking of a wood there were five hundred yards of "No Man's Land" to be crossed. Our troops could

not get across. Then Capt. , who practices this method of prayer, treated them for an hour before

they started, and not a man was knocked out. He was the only officer left out of eighty in his brigade. He

simply held onto the fact that man is spiritual and perfect and could not be touched. A bullet fired from a

revolver only five yards away hit him over the chest, tore his shirt and went out at the shoulder. But it never

penetrated his chest. He was frequently in a hail of shells and bullets which did not touch him.

All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religions in a world of commercial competition. It happens not

merely to Christian Science and New Thought religions, Mazdaznan and Zionist, Holy Roller and Mormon

religions, but to Catholic and Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Methodist and Baptist religions. For you see,

when you are with the wolves you must howl with them; when you are competing with fakirs you must fake.

The ordinary Christian will read the claims of the New Thought fakers with contempt; but have I not shown

the Catholic Church publishing long lists of moneymiracles? Have I not shown the Church of Good Society,

our exclusive and aristocratic Protestant Episcopal communion, pretending to call rain and to banish

pestilence, to protect crops and win wars and heal those who are "sick in estate"that is, who are in business

The reader will say that I am a cynic, despising my fellows; but that is not so. I am an economic scientist,

analyzing the forces which operate in human societies. I blame the prophets and priests and healers for their

fall from idealism; but I blame still more the competitive wagesystem, which presents them with the

For, you see, the prophet has to have food. He has frequently got along with almost none, and with only a rag

for clothing; in Palestine and India, where the climate is warm, a sincere faith has been possible for short

periods. But the modern prophet who expects to influence the minds of men has to have books and

newspapers; he will find a telephone and a typewriter and postagestamps hardly to be dispensed with, also

in Europe and America some sort of a roof over his meeting place. So the prophet is caught, like all the rest

of us, in the net of the speculator and the landlord. He has to get money, and in order to get it he has to

impress those who already have itpeople whose minds and souls have been deformed by the system of

So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he becomes a martyr, and founds a church which

becomes a church of charlatans. I care not how sincere, how passionately proletarian a religious prophet may

be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive societyto be the founder of an

organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit of wolves. That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it

befell Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Fox and John Calvin and John Wesley.

A friend of mine who has made a study of "Spiritualism" describes to me the conditions in that field. The

mediums are people, mostly women, with a peculiar gift; whether we believe in the survival of personality, or

whether we call it telepathy, does not alter the fact that they have a rare and special sensitiveness, a new

faculty which science must investigate. They come, poor people mostlyfor the welltodo will seldom

give their time to exacting and wearisome experiments. They come, wearing frayed and thin clothing,

shivering with cold, obviously undernourished; and their survival depends upon their producing

"phenomena"which phenomena are capricious, and will not come at call. So, what more natural than that

mediums should resort to faking? That the whole field should be reeking with fraud, and science should be

Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies have been telling us about the wondrous powers of a

mulattowoman, a manicurist at the city's most fashionable hotel. The other day, out of curiosity, my wife

and I went; the moment the "medium" opened her mouth my wife recognized her as the person who has been

trying for several months to get me on the telephone to tell me how the spirit of Jack London is seeking to

communicate with me! The seance was a public one, a gathering composed, half of wealthy and cultured

societywomen, and half of confederates, people with the dialect and manners of a vaudeville troupe. A

megaphone was set in the middle of the floor, the room was made dark, a couple of hymns were sung, and

then the spirit of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke through the megaphone with a Bowery accent, and gave

communications from relatives and friends of the various confederates. "Jesus is with us", said Dr. Holmes.

"The spirit of Jesus bids you to study spiritualism." And then came the voice of a child: "Mamma! Mamma!"

"It is little Georgie!" cried Dr. Holmes; and one of the society ladies started, and answered, and presently

burst into tears. A marvelous piece of evidenceespecially when you recall that the story of this mother's

And this kind of swindling is going on every night in every city of America. It goes on wholesale for months

every summer at Lily Dale, in New York State, where the spiritualists hold their combination of Chautauqua

and Coney Island. And the same thing is going on in the field of mental healing, and of all other "occult"

forces and powers, whether real or imaginary. It is going on with new spiritual fervors, new moral idealisms,

new poetry, new music, new painting, new sculpture. The faker, the charlatan is everywhereusing the

mental and moral and artistic forces of life as a means of delivering himself from economic servitude.

Everywhere I turn I see itcredulity being exploited, and men of practical judgment, watching the game and

seeing through it, made hard in their attitude of materialism. How many men I know who sit by in sullen

protest while their wives drift from one new quackery to another, wasting their income seeking health and

happiness in futile emotionalism! How many kind and sensitive spirits I knowboth men and womenwho

pour their treasures of faith and admiration into the laps of hierophants who began by fooling all mankind and

In each one of the cults of what I have called the "Church of the Quacks", there are thousands, perhaps

millions of entirely sincere, selfsacrificing people. They will read this bookif anyone can persuade them

to read itwith pain and anger; thinking that I am mocking at their faith, and have no appreciation of their

devotion. All that I can say is that I am trying to show them how they are being trapped, how their fine and

generous qualities are being used by exploiters of one sort or another; and how this must continue, world

without end, until there is order in the material affairs of the race, until justice has been established as the law

In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a

high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto

him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to

whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know,

answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with

worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a

disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his

proletarian gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as social

outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength

of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came

when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power

in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise or no less a person than the Emperor

himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work

together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization,

fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus

three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion. How complete and swift was his success

you may judge from the fact that fifty years later we find the Emperor Valentinian compelled to pass an edict

From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this book, the chief of the enemies of social

progress. From the days of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar have

been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of predatory economic might. With only one

qualification to be noted: that the Church has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of her

proletarian Founder. She has done her best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his words out of

their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her

But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one incessant struggle with upstarts and rebels who

have filled themselves with the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of that bitterly

And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has given life to Christianity, which enables it to keep

its hold on the hearts of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and fervor which has been poured into

it by generation after generation of poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and die like Jesus as criminals,

and are revered like Jesus as founders and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers were bitterly fought

by the Church authorities of their own time. St. Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of

office, exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by the Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose

excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was

exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the heretics whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and

burned were proletarian rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres, the founders of the orders which gave it

life for century after century, were men who sought to return to the example of the carpenter's son. Let us

The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired

by democratic and communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest doctrinal reformer before the

reformation; but his eyes, too, were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman Church by joining in a

great national and patriotic movement against the alien domination and extortion of the Church. The

Bohemian revolt made famous by the name of John Huss, was quite as much political and social as religious.

Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a religious prophet. In his famous interview with the dying

Lorenzo de Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting absolution. Of the man he demanded a

living faith in God's mercy. Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his illgotten wealth. Of the

political usurper he demanded the restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence. It is significant that

the dying sinner found it easy to assent to the first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible to concede

This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time long before Jesus; it seems to have been inherent in

the religious character of the Jewsthat stubborn independence, that stiffnecked insistence on the right of a

man to interview God for himself and to find out what God wants him to do; also the inclination to find that

God wants him to oppose earthly rulers and their plundering of the poor. What is it that gives to the Bible the

vitality it has today? Its literary style? To say that is to display the ignorance of the cultured; for elevation of

style is a byproduct of passionate conviction; it is what the Jewish writers had to say, and not the way they

said it, that has given them their hold upon mankind. Was it their insistence upon conscience, their fear of

God as the beginning of wisdom? But that same element appears in the Babylonian psalms, which are as

eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews, yet are read only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful

presence of divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians had that far more than the Hebrews,

and yet we do not cherish their religious books. Or was it the love of man for all things living, the lesson of

charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress? The gentle Buddha had that, and had it long before Christ;

also his priests had metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John the Apostle or Thomas Aquinas.

No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishes the Hebrew sacred writings from all others, and that

is their insistent note of proletarian revolt, their furious denunciations of exploiters, and of luxury and

wantonness, the vices of the rich. Of that note the Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian writing contain not

a trace, and the Egyptian hardly enough to mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it; but the true, naturalborn

rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They were rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today

in Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood which spoke through Ezekiel and Amos

and Isaiah, through John the Baptist and Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through Marx and

Lassalle and Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky and Israel

Zangwill and Morris Hillquit and Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the Joseph Fels endowment.

The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire was 20%; the laws of Manu permitted 24%,

while the laws of the Egyptians only stepped in to prevent more than 100%. But listen to this Hebrew law:

If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a

stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God

that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals

And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants, and commanding that at the end of fifty years

All debtors shall have their debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note that this is not the

raving of agitators, the demand of a minority party; it is the law of the Hebrew land.

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

The landmark law, which sternly forbids encroachment upon peasant rights; consideration for the foreigner;

additional sanitary and food laws; tithe regulations on behalf of widows, orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those

who have no economic independence should eat and be satisfied; that loans should be given cheerfully, not

only without any interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. To withhold a loan because the year of

release is at hand in which the principal is no longer recoverable, is described as a grave sin. When you are

compelled to free your slaves, you must give them sufficient capital to embark upon some industry which

shall prevent their falling back into slavery. A number of holidays are insisted upon. There must be no more

crushing of the poor out of existence, for God cares for these people who have been driven to poverty, and

they shall never cease out of the land. Howbeit there shall be no poor with you, for the Lord will bless you, if

But then prosperity came, and culture, which meant contact with the capitalist ideas of the heathen empires.

The Jews fell from the stern justice of their fathers; and so came the prophets, wildeyed men of the people,

clad in camel's hair and living upon locusts and wild honey, breaking in upon priests and kings and capitalists

with their furious denunciations. And always they incited to class war and social disturbance. I quote Conrad

Nathan and Gad bad been David's political advisers, Abijah had stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had resisted

Ahab, Elisha had fanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders against the misrule of the king of Israel, Isaiah

denounces the landlords and the usurers, Micah charges them with bloodguiltiness; Jeremiah and the latter

prophets, though they strike a more intimate note of personal repentance, strike it as the prelude to that

The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the

nineteenth century thundered against the "Christian" employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses

were cemented with the blood of little children, so Isaiah cries against his generation: "Your governing

classes companion with thieves; behold you build up Sion with blood." Their ceremonial and their Sabbath

keeping are an abomination to God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you. Your

hands are full of blood." The poor man is robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house to

house and field to field, that ye may dwell alone in the midst of the land." "Wash you, make you clean, put

away the evil of your doing from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve

the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord.

Though your sins be bloodcolored, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they

shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye

And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators, following the same tradition, possessed by the

same dream as the ancient Hebrew prophets. I have mentioned Emma Goldman; it may be that the reader is

not familiar with her writings, and does not realize how very Biblical she is, both in point of view and style.

Let me quote a few sentences from a recent issue of her paper, "Mother Earth", on the subject of our ruling

Yes, you idle rich, you may howl about what we mean to do to you! Your riches are rotten and your fine

clothes are falling from your backs. Your stocks and bonds are so tainted that the ink on them should turn to

acid and eat holes in your pockets and your skins. You have piled up your dirty millions, but what wages

have you paid to the poor devils of farm hands you have robbed? And do you imagine they won't remember it

when the revolution comes? You loll on soft couches and amuse yourselves with your mistresses; you think

you are "it" and the world is yours. You send militiamen and shoot down our organizers, and we are helpless.

Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of this tirade is now in jail, where she can no longer defy

the laws of good taste. They always put the ancient prophets in jail; that is the way to know a prophet when

you meet him. Let me quote another prophet who is now behind barsAlexander Berkman, in his "Prison

Memoirs of an Anarchist", discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:

Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it to you? Your grandfather, you say? Your

father? Can you go all the way back and show there is no flaw anywhere in your title? I tell you that the

beginning and the root of your wealth is necessarily in injustice. And why? Because Nature did not make this

man rich and that man poor from the start. Nature does not intend for one man to have capital and another to

be a wageslave. Nature made the earth to be cultivated by all. The idea we Anarchists have of the rich is of

Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I. W. W. Hear what he has to say in a pamphlet addressed to the

How much farther do you plutes expect to go with your grabbing? Do you want to be the only people left on

earth? Why else do you drive out the workers from all share in Nature, and claim everything for yourselves?

The earth was made for all, rich and poor alike; where do you get your title deeds to it? Nature gave

everything for all men to use alike; it is only your robbery which makes your socalled "ownership". Capital

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

The propertied classes are like people who go into a public theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in,

treating as private property what is meant for social use. If each man would take only what he needs, and

leave the balance to those who have nothing, there would be no rich and no poor. The rich man is a thief.

I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know that Emma Goldman and Alexander

Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may read this book, and I don't want them to close it in the

middle and throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to explain my poor joke; the sentiments I have been

quoting are not those of our modern agitators, but of another group of ancient ones. The first is not from

Emma Goldman, nor did I find it in "Mother Earth". I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by orthodox

authorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus. It is exactly what he wrotesave that I have put it into

modern phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order that those familiar with the Bible might

read it without suspicion. The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman, but in those of St.

John Chrysostom, most famous of the early fathers, who lived 374407. The third is not from the pen of "Big

Bill" but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church, 340397, and the fourth is not by Comrade

Debs, but by St. Basil of the Greek Church, 329379. And if the reader objects to my having fooled him for a

minute or two, what will he say to the Christian Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred

This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other as the work of a blasphemous infidel.

Yet it stands in the direct line of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was brought up in the Church,

and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a

man who thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives

or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the

I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the

manner of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, because the word

Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy

word, it meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra highchurch devotees of Jerusalem. The way to

get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church fatherstranslate

him into American. This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will not be necessary to disguise the Bible

style, and we may follow the text exactly. Let me try the twentythird chapter of Matthew, omitting seven

verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St.

Then Jesus mounted upon a soapbox, and began a speech, saying, The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians

fill the Fifth Avenue churches; and it would be all right if you were to listen to what they preach, and do that;

but don't follow their actions, for they never practice what they preach. They load the backs of the

workingclasses with crushing burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a burden, and

everything they do is for show. They wear frockcoats and silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the speakers'

table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, and they occupy the best pews in the churches, and their doings

are reported in all the papers; they are called leading citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be called

leading citizens, for the only useful man is the man who produces. (Applause). And whoever exalts himself

Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics, hypocrites! for you shut up the kingdom of Heaven against

men; you don't go in yourself and you don't let others go in. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and

Presbyterians, hypocrites! for you foreclose mortgages on widows' houses, and for a pretense you make long

prayers. For this you will receive the greater damnation! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Methodists,

hypocrites! for you send missionaries to Africa to make one convert, and when you have made him, he is

twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Applause). Woe unto you, blind guides, with your subtleties of

doctrine, your transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all the rest of it; you fools and blind! Woe unto

you, doctors of divinity and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks into the collectionplate and

you pay no heed to the really important things in the Bible, which are justice and mercy and faith in

goodness. You blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! (Laughter). Woe unto you, doctors of

divinity and Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe yourselves and dress in immaculate clothing but within you

are full of extortion and excess. You blind high churchmen, clean first your hearts, so that the clothes you

wear may represent you. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Baptists, hypocrites! for you are like marble

tombs which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

Even so you appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto

you, doctors of divinity and Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect statues to dead reformers, and put

wreathes upon the tombs of oldtime martyrs. You say, if we had been alive in those days, we would not

have helped to kill those good men. That ought to show you how to treat us at present. (Laughter). But you

are the children of those who killed the good men; so go ahead and kill us too! You serpents, you generation

At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem "Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the

orator and notified him that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his followers attempted to

use a knife, and was severely clubbed. Jesus was taken to the stationhouse followed by a riotous throng, and

held upon a charge of disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared

against him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months on Blackwell's Island, remarking that from

this time on he proposed to make an example of those soapbox orators who persist in using threatening and

abusive language. Just as the prisoner was being led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the

Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he is under indictment for murder in the first

degree, it being charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day explosion.

The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would have a sign of Thee"meaning that

they wanted him to do some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He

answered by calling them an evil and adulterous generationwhich is exactly what I have said about the

Papal machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other bookworshippers of his time

accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to them he

answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and

quoted Karl Marx at them"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." Because

he despised the company of the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own class in

the places where they gatheredthe public housesthe churchly scandalmongers called him "a man

gluttonous and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"precisely as in the old days they used to

sneer at the Socialists for having their meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still

But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest

instinct of the human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest

churchwalls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of

Mammon is more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than ever before in historyeven

in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as Jesus

preached. One by one they are cast out of the ChurchFather McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander

Irvine, J. Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their voices are not silenced they

are like the leaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of Goda woman took it and hid it in three

measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young theological students read, and some of them

understand; I know three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church, and are preaching

straight social revolutionand the scribes and the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.

In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and henchman of Big Business, a part of the

system of Mammon. Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property. And

it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking favors from the statethe exemption of

church property from taxation, exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for them and

their families on the railroads, the control of charity and education, laws to deprive people of amusements on

Sundayso on through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you find that in them the

rich possess the control and demand the deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts

jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the churches, as everywhere else in the world, and

the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.

It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a

miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of privilege. Even in

the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what

working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a

priest who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class

instead of for his pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their bishops and joining the Sinn

What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing

his job. And if you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you would find that precisely the

same force is keeping many of them slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them must

resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or hypocrites. They have caught enough of the

spirit of their time not to enjoy having to pose as miraclemongers, rainmakers and witchdoctors; they

would like to say frankly that they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they are

dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods. But they are part of a machine, and the old men

and the rich men who run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find themselves tempted to think,

remember suddenly that they have wives and children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted

for any other by a lifetime of study of dead things, as well as by the practice of altruism.

But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift wingsit may be here before this book sees

the light. And who knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which we saw in Russia,

when Christian monks assembled and burned their holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as

citizens and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of exploitation is broken, we shall see the

Dead Hand crumble into dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. All those men who stay in

the Church and pretend to believe nonsense, because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly

realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any, man can go into a factory, clean and

wellventilated and humanly run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten or fifteen

dollars. Do you not think that there may be some who will choose freedom and selfrespect on those terms?

And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the church because it is a part of the regime of

respectability, a way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and obtain promotion, to get

customers if you are a tradesman, to extend your practice if you are a professional man? And what about the

millions who go to church because they are poor, and because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one way

to keep the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for the children, to get charity if you fall into need;

in short, to acquire influence with the welltodo and powerful, who stand together, and like to see the poor

humble and reverent, contented in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them?

Do I mean that I expect to see the Churchall churchesperish and pass away? I do not, for I believe that

the Church answers one of the fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will abolish poverty and

parasitism, it will make temptations fewer, and the soul's path through life much easier; but it will not remove

the necessity of struggle for individual virtue, it will only clear the way for the discovery of newer and higher

types of virtue. Men will gather more than ever in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one

another; but the places in which they gather will be places swept clean of superstition and tyranny. As the

Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses, so the

Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its defense of parasitism and exploitation. I will record the

prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the Church ever opposed

Socialismtrue Socialism; just as today they deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men

for teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right to commit crime, ever gave away the

New World to Spain and Portugal, ever buried newlyborn infants in the cellars of nunneries.

The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will,

to drive out their formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that refuses so to adapt itself, the swift

progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it without followers. But in the great religions, which have

a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of old,

will preach the living word of God. In many churches today we can see the beginning of that new

CounterReformation. Even in the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the books of the

"Sillon", and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The Saint", and you will see a genuine and vital protest against

the economic corruption of the Church. In America, the "Knights of Slavery" have been forced by public

pressure to support a "War for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y. M. C. A. in the training camps.

This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern common sense is shown most

interestingly in the Salvation Army. William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his

hands and went out with a bassdrum to save the lost souls of the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he

Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population. He had not wanted to engage in charity and

material activities; he feared hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how utterly

impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for the souls of the slumdwellers without at the same

time helping their diseased and hungerracked bodies. So the Salvation army was forced into useful

workold clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm coloniesuntil today the bare list of the

various kinds of enterprises it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done with the money of the rich, and

is tainted by subservience to authority, but no one can deny that it is better than "Gibson's Preservative", and

And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater. Here and there you will find a real rebel,

hanging onto his job and preaching the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are

making attempts at "missions" and "settlements" in the slums. The more vital churches are gradually turning

themselves into societies for the practical betterment of their members. Their clergy are running boys clubs

and sewingschools for girls, food conservation lectures for mothers, social study clubs for men. You get

prayermeetings and psalmsinging along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always before the

clergyman's facethat with prayermeetings and psalmsinging alone he has a hard time, while with clubs

And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches, like everything else, in its mighty

current; the clergy and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are forced to take

notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of

thisany more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and industry. But we who are trained

in revolutionary thought can see the main outlines of the future. We see that in these new church activities the

clergy are inspired by things read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers. They are

responding to the actual, instant needs of their boys in the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have

an effect upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her

old life, and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates, will never after be a

docile homeslave; so we can say that the clergyman who helps in Y. M. C. A. work in France, or in Red

Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist forever after. He will have learned, in spite

of himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have learned cooperation and social solidarity by the method

which modern educators most favorby doing. Also he will have absorbed a mass of ideas in news

despatches from over the world. He is forced to read these despatches carefully, because the fate of his own

boys is involved; and we Socialists will see to it that the despatches are well filled with propaganda!

So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the great revolutionary current, and swept on

towards a goal which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of the

future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join. They call

us materialists, and say that we think about nothing but the bellyand that is true, in a way; because we are

the representatives of a starving class, which thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is

ravening with hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of Jesus, calls "those things

which are needful to the body," and then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls;

whereas at present we are led to despise the very word "spiritual", which has become the stockintrade of

We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to us. We would be glad to have them trained

in ways of decency and selfcontrol, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if there were in the world

institutions conducted by men and women of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true

morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not of slavery; a morality founded upon reason,

not upon superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what truth is, and the passionate loyalty

which the search for truth inspiries. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers we see in the

churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather

than trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift to train them ourselveswe amateurs,

not knowing much about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against organized wrong.

It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it is a fact nevertheless, that we need a new

religion, need it just as badly as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race. That we need it is proven by the

rivalries and quarrels in our midstthe schisms which waste the greater part of our activities, and which are

often the result of personal jealousies and petty vanities. To lift men above such weakness, to make them

really brothers in a great musethat is the work of "personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the

We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new Church of Humanity; but our children

will see it, and the dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and conviction. Read

these lines from "The Desire of Nations," by Edwin Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer who is

The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the

modern thinker the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the microscope and the telescope, of the

new psychology and the new sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient

Mythologies. And even if this were not so, the business of the thinker is to follow the facts. The history of all

philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches

out his hands and cries for it, but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a while the infant tires of

Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him to be here, and not know how, or whence, or

why. He demands the knowledge immediately and finally, and invents innumerable systems and creeds. He

makes himself believe them, with fire and torture makes other men believe them; until finally, in the

confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the discovery

that his tools are inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is

This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he

proved four propositions: first, that the universe is limitless in time and space; second, that matter is

composed of simple, indivisible elements; third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, that there must be an

absolute or first cause. And having proven these things, he turned round and proved their opposites, with

arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows these demonstrations and understands them, takes

all his metaphysical learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.

It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that when you are dealing with absolutes and

ultimates, you can prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension; you fly into

it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition, you

take another flight, and come back the way you were before. So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose of

Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman and Professor ChattertonHill; it serves hysterical women like

"Mother" Eddy; it serves the Newthoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it serves the charlatans

and mystagogs who wish to befuddle the wits of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a

bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of

Haeckel, and the materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that it is as impossible to

prove the priority of origin and the ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist who lays

How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an Unknowable, like Spencer, and call

ourselves Agnostics with a capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an

inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the "Positivists", and attended their

imitation church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction from them. In the midst of their dogmatic

pronouncements I found myself remembering how the egg falls apart and reveals a chicken, how the worm

suddenly discovers itself a butterfly. The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile

occupation to set limits upon the future. Our business is not to say what men will know ten thousand years

from now, but to content ourselves with the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a

procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an act of adjustment to its changes, and our

In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is automatic. But with the dawn of reason the

thinker has to justify his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is worthwhileness in being,

or in seeking to be; that there is order in creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which can be

applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for its mother's breast, so the most skeptical of scientists

trusts it when he declares that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets it down for

a certainty that this will always be sothat he is not being played with by some sportive demon, who will

Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each bit of knowledge acquired, the environment is

changed, the life becomes a new thing. Consider, for example, what a different place the world became to the

man who discovered that the force which laid the forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warm a cave

and make wild grains nutritious! In other words, man can create life, he can make the world and himself into

that which his reason decides it ought to be. The means by which he does this is the most magical of all the

tools he has invented since his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of experimental scienceand

when one considers that this weapon has been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three

centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning of human evolution.

To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious

and ordered productthat is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this forth with beautiful precision in

his book, "The Kingdom of Man". We are, at this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous transition stage,

as a child playing with explosives. This child has found out how to alter his environment in many startling

ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, nor to what purpose. He finds that certain things are

uncomfortable, and these he proceeds immediately to change. Discovering that grain fermented dispels

boredom, he creates a race of drunkards; discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared in

alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them.

Discovering that captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession of empires, which are

This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating

ruthlessly. It takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a million million men to produce one

ideaalgebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy. Nature's present impulse appears as a rebellion against

her own methods; man, her creature, will emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her

blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the

task in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they

are furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child would

perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is

What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing our sickly infants? We do not have to do

anything so wasteful, because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breeding which will

prevent the unfit from getting a chance at life. We can replace instinct by selfdiscipline. We can substitute

for the regime of "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what he

wishes to be and how to set about to be it. Whether this can happen, whether the thing which we call

civilization is to be the great triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into the melting

pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude of contests between enlightenment and ignorance:

precisely such a contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who has thought his way out

to the light, and comes to urge you to perform the act of selfemancipation, to take up the marvellous new

tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part

Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers; driven by that inner impulse which the

philosophers of Pragmatism call the elan vital. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an emotion of joy;

whenever it is balked, there is one of distress. So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the final goal is

a condition of free and constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is enduring.

That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It is a perfectly conceivable thing that

tomorrow a comet may fall upon the earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other hand, it is a

conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements of comets, and even of starry

systems. It seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate

It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food from the elements without the slow processes

of agriculture; it is conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present prey upon his body, and so

put an end to death. It is certain that he will ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human qualities as he

has created the spurs of the fightingcock and the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what genius is, and

the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be recognized. In the new science of psychoanalysis he

has already begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into the light of day; it may be that in

the evidence of telepathy which the psychic researchers are accumulating, he is beginning to grope his way

into a universal consciousness, which may come to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars, and

All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way of their realization? Ignorance and superstition,

fear and submission, the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him from his animal

past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden of the soul is

The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is the master, or shall become so; that

there is no law, save the law of his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself imposes.

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

The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there is no authority above reason; no possibility of

such authority, because if such were to appear, reason would have to judge it, and accept or reject it.

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there can no more be an immutable law of

conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steeringwheel of an aeroplane. The business of the

pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is

to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism

This new morality, like all things in a world of strife, is fighting for existence, using its own weapons, which

are reason and love. Obviously it can use no others, without selfdestruction; yet it has to meet enemies who

fight with the old weapons of force and fraud. Whether it will prevail is more than any prophet can say.

Perhaps it is too much to ask that it should succeedthis insolent effort of the pigmy man to leap upon the

back of his master and fit a bridle into his mouth. Perhaps it is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, the

scientists and poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race. Perhaps the nerve of the pigmy will fail him at

the critical moment, and he will fall from the back of his master, and under his master's hoofs.

The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and as scientists we can proclaim itthe human

race is in a swift current of degeneration, which a new morality alone can check. The struggle is at its height

in our time; if it fails, if the fibre of the race continues to deteriorate, the soul of the race to be eaten out by

poverty and luxury, by insanity and disease, by prostitution, crime and warthen mankind will slip back into

the abyss, the untamed giants of Nature will resume their ancient sway, and the tides, the tempest and the

lightning will sweep the earth clean again. I do not believe that this calamity will befall us. I know that in the

diseased social body the forces of resistance are gatheringthe Socialist movement, in the broad sensethe

activities of all who believe in the possibility of reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice and

love. To such people this book goes out: to the truly religious people, those who hunger and thirst after

righteousness here and now, who believe in brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear pain and ridicule

I have come to the end of my task; but one question troubles me. I think of the "young men and maidens

meek" who will read this book, and I wonder what they will make of it. We have had a lark together; we have

gone romping down the vista of the ages, swatting, every venerable head that showed itself, beating the dust

out of ancient delusions. You would like all your life to be that kind of lark; but you may not find it so, and

I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have nearly all been gallant and honest, but they

have not all been wise, and therefore not so happy as they might have been. In the course of time I have

formulated to myself the peril to which young radicals are exposed. We see so much that is wrong in ancient

things, it gets to be a habit with us to reject them. We have only to know that a thing is old to feel an impulse

of impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are tempted to welcome anything which can prove itself to be

unprecedented. There is a common type of radical whose aim in life is to be several jumps ahead of mankind;

whose criterion of conduct is that it shocks the bourgeois. If you do not know that type, you may find

himand herin the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the newest red chemicals, smoking the newest

brand of cigarettes, and discussing the newest form of psycopathia sexualis. After you have watched them a

while, you realize that these ultranew people have fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy, the non

If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon ignorance, and cultivated by greed, it is also true

that much in the old moral codes is based upon facts which will not change so long as man is what he isa

creature of impulses, good and bad, wise and foolish, selfish and generous, and compelled to make choice

between these impulses; so long as he is a material body and a personal consciousness, obliged to live in

society and adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would like to say to young radicalsif there is any

way to say it without seeming a prigis that in choosing their own path through life, they will need not

It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat over and over the blunders of the past, the

blunders of tyranny and slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient societies; and surely it is a

poor way to begin by repeating in our own persons the most ancient blunders of the moral life. To light the

fires of lust in our hearts, and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are trying new experiments in

psychology! Who does not know the radical woman who demonstrates her emancipation from convention by

destroying her nerves with nicotine? Who does not know the genius of revolt who demonstrates his

repudiation of private property by permitting his lady loves to support him? Who does not know the man who

finds in the phrases of revolution the most effective devices for the seducing of young girls?

You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the conclusion that there is anything in it to spare you

the duty of getting yourself moral standards and holding yourself to them. On the contrary, because your task

is the highest and hardest that man has yet undertakenfor this reason you will need standards the most

exacting ever formulated. Let me quote some words from a teacher you will not accuse of holding to the

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

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

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

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

Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emerge into the sunlight of knowledge, to take control of a world,

and to make it over, not according to the will of any gods, but according to the law in our own hearts. For that

task we have need of all the resources of our being; of courage and high devotion, of faith in ourselves and

our comrades, of clean, straight thinking, of discipline both of body and mind. We go to this task with a

knowledge as old as the first moral impulse of mankindthe knowledge that our actions determine the future

of life, not merely for ourselves but for all the race. For this is one of the laws of the ancient Hebrews which

modern science has not repealed, but on the contrary has reinforced with a thousand confirmationsthat the

sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations.

I get letters from the readers of my books; nearly always they are young people, so I feel like the father of a

large family. I gather them now about my knee, and pronounce upon them a benediction in the ancient

patriarchal style. Children and grandchildren of my hopes, for ages men suffered and fought, so that the

world might be turned over to you. Now the day is coming, the glad, new day which blinds us with the

shining of its wings; it is coming so swiftly that I am afraid of it. I thought we should have more time to get

ready for the taking over of the world! But the old managers of it went insane, they took to tearing each

other's eyes out, and now they lie dead about us. So, whether we will or not, we have to take charge of the

world; we have to decide what to do with it, even while we are doing it. Let us not fail, young comrades; let

us not write on the scroll of history that mankind had to go through yet new generations of wars and tumults

and enslavements, because the youth of the international revolution could not lift themselves above those

ancient personal vices which wrecked the fair hopes of their fathersbigotry and intolerance, vindictiveness

For twenty years I have been haunted by the dream that I might some day be my own publisher. I was waiting

till I could afford the luxury; but many a man has put off a bold action till he died, so I am publishing this

The reason is that I do not want to be a writer for the rich. I want to be read by workingboys and girls, and

I offer the book at a low price. In the hope of tempting you to go out and get your friends to read it, I have

made a price in quantities which will allow no profit at all. A margin has been figured to cover postage,

stationery, circulars, and the cost of a clerical assistant; but nothing for interest on capital, which is a gift, nor

for the rent of an office, which is my home, nor for the services of manager and press agent, which is myself.

You have read the book, and its fate is yours to decide. If it seems worth while, pass it on to some on else. If

you can afford it, order a number of copies and give them away. If you can't afford it, give your time and be a