The Profits of Religion Part 3

Let them die, but let me live!

Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!

Let them perish, but let me increase!

Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!

O, fire-G.o.d, mighty, exalted among the G.o.ds, Thou art the G.o.d, thou art my lord, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Abate their pride, a.s.suage their malice, and confound their devices.

Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all a.s.saults of our enemies.

Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies.

There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O G.o.d.

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

The Medicine-men

Andrew D. White tells us that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Canonization of Incompetence

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

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

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

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

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

Gibson's Preservative

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

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

The ambiguity of the phrase, and its misapplication by the Church of Rome, have induced many of our divines to repudiate it, etc."

Realize that of the work from which this "valuable observation" is quoted, there are at least two volumes, the second volume containing not less than 757 pages I Realize that in Gibson's "Preservative"

there are not less than ten volumes of such writing! Realize that in this twentieth century a considerable portion of the mental energies of the world's greatest empire is devoted to that kind of learning!

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

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

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

The Elders

What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged. It means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the church, but in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army and navy. For a test I look up the list of bishops of the Church of England in Whitaker's Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of these functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the suffragans; and that the total salary paid to them amounts to more than nine hundred thousand dollars a year. This, it should be understood, does not include the pay of their a.s.sistants, 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 cla.s.ses of the Empire. I look up their ages in Who's Who, and I find that there is only one below fifty-three; the oldest of them is ninety-one, while the average age of the goodly company is seventy.

There have been men in history who have retained their flexibility of mind, their ability to adjust themselves to new circ.u.mstances at the age of seventy, but it will always be found that these men were trained in science and practical affairs, never in dead languages and theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter that he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an opinion on the labor question.

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

The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the land among his n.o.bles 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 bishop.r.i.c.ks, abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependence of the church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord, I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, G.o.d help me."

The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held, and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege man for life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the whole story of the church of England, in the twentieth century as in the eleventh.

The balance of power has s.h.i.+fted 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 compa.s.s is held by a ma.s.s of metal. Some two hundred and fifty years ago a popular song gave the general impression--

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

So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every injustice that profits the owning cla.s.s. 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 pa.s.s down the corridor of English history and prove this statement by the words of Englishmen from every single generation. Take the fourteenth century; the "Good Parliament"

declares that

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

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

But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets, A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land, p.r.i.c.king on a palfrey from manor to manor, A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord; And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup, He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy.

Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands

Away to the Orders that have no pity; Money rains upon their altars.

There where such parsons be living at ease They have no pity on the poor; that is their "charity".

Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad, But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.

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