The Profits of Religion Part 6

When some one called him "good Master," he answered, quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one, that is, G.o.d." But this simplicity has been taken with deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments upon him in conventional, courtly style:

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

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

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

Horn-blowing

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

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

I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little morals tagged to them, but these lacked relations.h.i.+p to the lives of little slum-boys.

Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive away a pestilence.

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

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

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

Trinity Corporation

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

The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell.

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

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

And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this great corporation, which is simply the English land system complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum. Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total of fifty dollars a month.

The houses were not built for tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the habitation of animals.

The article, in Everybody's Magazine for July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief. To quote the writer again:

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

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have s.h.i.+vered 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 s.h.i.+ning face and s.h.i.+ning 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 explanation--that the bishop had to know all cla.s.ses 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 embarra.s.sed. The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much time among the rich!

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

Spiritual Interpretation

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

I remember something a.n.a.logous in my own boyhood. All day Sat.u.r.day I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the roofs of apartment-houses; but on Sat.u.r.day 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 s.h.i.+ning tie and a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society.

And all church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week--and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder--to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a stained-gla.s.s-window divinity.

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

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

And do you think that the late Bishop of J.P. Morgan and Company stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of golden nails? In the course of this book there will march before us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter's son: the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires'

Club, the Pastor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the weight of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons, newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of the proletarian Christ.

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

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

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

"trustees.h.i.+p"--which in plain English is "Big Business."

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

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

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

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

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

And again:

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

There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen for whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and s.h.i.+ny 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 pa.s.s the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 G.o.d, and the jewelled robes shall be added unto you!" And it is so dreadful about the French and German Socialists, who, as the "Churchman" reports, "make a creed out of materialism." But then, what is this I find in one issue of the organ of the "Church of Good Society"?

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

Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?

BOOK THREE

The Church of the Servant-girls

Was it for this--that prayers like these Should spend themselves about thy feet, And with hard, overlabored knees Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat Bosoms too lean to suckle sons And fruitless as their orisons?

Was it for this--that men should make Thy name a fetter on men's necks, Poor men made poorer for thy sake, And women withered out of s.e.x?

Was it for this--that slaves should be-- Thy word was pa.s.sed to set men free?

Swinburne.