Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

I look over this Priestess' magazine, and find it full of testimonials and advertisements for the conjuring of prosperity. "Are you in the success sphere?" asks one exhorter; the next tells you "How to enter the silence. How to manifest what you desire. The secret of advancement." Another tells: "How a Failure at Sixty Won Sudden Success; From Poverty to $40,000 a year--a Lesson for Old and Young Alike." The lesson, it appears, is to pay $3.00 for a book called "Power of Will." And here is another book:

Master Key: Which can unlock the Secret Chamber of Success,
can throw wide the doors which seem to bar men from the
Treasure House of Nature, and bids those enter and partake
who are Wise enough to Understand and broad enough to Weigh
the Evidence, firm enough to Follow their Own Judgment and
Strong enough to Make the Sacrifice Exacted.

#"Dollars Want Me"#

I turn to the shelves of pamphlets. Here is a pretty one called "All Sufficiency in All Things," published by the "Unity School of Christianity", in Kansas City; it explains that God is God, not merely of the Soul, but also of the Kansas City stockyards.

This divine Substance is ever abiding within us, and stands
ready to manifest itself in whatever form you and I need or
wish, just as it did in Elisha's time. It is the same
yesterday, today and forever. Abundant Supply by the
manifestation of the Father within us, from within outward,
is as much a legitimate outcome of the Christ life or
spiritual understanding as is bodily healing.... "Know that
I am God--all of God, Good, all of Good. I am Life. I am
Health. I am Supply. I am the Substance."

And here is W.W. Atkinson of Chicago, author of a work called "Mind Power". Would you like to be an Impressive Personality? Mr. Atkinson will tell you exactly how to do it; he will give you the secret of the Magnetic Handclasp, of the Intense, Straight-in-the-eye Look; he will tell you what to say, he will write out for you Incantations which you may pronounce to yourself, to convince yourself that you have #Power#, that the INDWELLING PRESENCE with all its #MIGHT# is yours. Mr. Atkinson rebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellow Bootstrap-lifters to employ these arts for money-making; but you notice that his magazine, "Advanced Thought", does not decline the advertisements of such too-practical practitioners.

Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace Wattles, who tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a Genius", and in another pamphlet "How to Get What you Want". The thing for you to do is--

Saturate your mentality through and through with the
knowledge that YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO.... Look upon
the peanut-stand merely as the beginning of the department
store, and make it grow; you can.

And Mr. Wattles wattles on, in an ecstasy of acquisitiveness:

Hold this consciousness and say with deep, earnest feeling:
I CAN succeed! All that is possible to any one is possible
to me. I AM success. I do succeed, for I am full of the
Power of Success.

Imagine, if you please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the capitalist system--a "soda-jerker", a "counter-jumper", a book-keeper for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life are one in ten thousand; but he comes to the Metaphysical Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarian clergyman, and then an extra-high Bootstrap-lifter in San Francisco, an Honorary Vice-President of the International New Nonsense Alliance. Mr. Brown will tell our soda-jerker or counter-jumper exactly how to elevate himself by mental machinery. All calculations of probabilities are delusions of the senses; if you have faith, you can move, not merely mountains, but Riker-Hegeman's, Macy's, or the Steel Trust. "How to Promote Yourself" is the title of one of Mr. Brown's pamphlets, in which he explains that--

Your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by your
faith. A doubt cuts the connection.

A second pamphlet, which we are told is now in its thirtieth edition, bears the thrilling title of "#Dollars Want Me#!" In it Mr. Brown lays claim to being a pioneer:

I believe that this little monograph is the first utterance
of the thought that each individual has the ability so to
radiate his mental forces that he can cause the Dollars to
feel him, love him, seek him, and thus draw at will all
things needed for his unfoldment from the universal supply.

"What are Dollars?" asks our author; and answers:

Dollars are manifestations of the One Infinite Substance as
you are, but, unlike you, they are not Self-Conscious. They
have no power till you give them power. Make them feel this
through your thought-vibrations as you feel the importance
of your work. They will then come to you to be used.

"What is Poverty?" Mr. Brown asks, and answers himself:

Poverty is a mental condition. It can be cured only by the
Affirmation of Power to cure: I am a part of the One, and,
in the One, I possess all! Affirm this and patiently wait
for the manifestation. You have sown the thought seed.

And our author goes on to hand out packages of these thought-seeds--"Affirmations" as they are called, in the jargon of the New Conjuring:

I desire a deep consciousness of financial freedom.
I desire that the flow of prosperity become equalized.
I desire a greater consciousness of my power to attract the dollar.
The Indwelling Power cares for my purse.
I own whatever I desire.

I can afford to use dollars for my happiness.
I always have a good bank account. I actually see it.
My one idea of the law is to use, use, USE.

#Spiritual Financiering#

If the symbolism of the Episcopal Church is of the palace, and that of the non-conformist sects of the counting-house, that of the International New Nonsense Alliance is of Wall Street and the "ticker". "What is your rating in the Spiritual Bradstreet?" asks William Morris Nichols in the publication of the "'Now' Folk", San Francisco:

Is it low or high? Is your credit with the Bank of the
Universe good or poor? If you draw a spiritual draft are you
sure of its being honored?

If you can answer that last question affirmatively, you are
on the road to become a Master in Spiritual Financiering.

Have you an account with the First (and only) Bank of
Spirit? If not, then you should at once open one therewith.
For no one can afford to keep less than a large deposit of
spiritual funds with that Bank.

And how do you proceed to open your account? It is very simple:

Intend the mind in the direction indicated by your desire.
Seek for the Light and Guidance by which you may open up the
way for your Spiritual Substance, which governs material
supply, to reach you and make you as rich as you ought to
be, in freedom and happiness. All this you can, and when in
earnest, will do.

I turn over the advertisements of this publication of the "'Now' Folk". One offers "The Business Side of New Thought." Another offers "The Books Without an If", with your money back IF you are not satisfied!

Another offers land in Bolivia for two dollars an acre. Another quotes Shakespeare: "Tis the mind that makes the body rich." Another offers two copies of the "Phrenological Era" for ten cents.

There is apparently no delusion of any age or clime which cannot find dupes among the readers of this New Nonsense. One notice commands:

Stop! A Revelation! A Book has been written entitled
"Strands of Gold" or "from Darkness into Light!"

Another announces:

The Most Wonderful Book of the Ages: The Acquarian Gospel of
Jesus the Christ, Transcribed from the Book of God's
Remembrance, the Akashic Records.

And here is an advertisement published in Mr. Atkinson's paper:

Numerology: the Universal Adjuster! Do you know: What you
appear to be to others? What you really are? What you want
to be? What would overcome your present and future
difficulties? Write to x, Philosopher. You will receive full
particulars of his personal work which is dedicated to your
service. No problem is too big or too small for Numerology.
Understanding awaits you.

And looking in the body of the magazine, you find this Philosopher imparting some of this Understanding. Would you like, for example, to understand why America entered the War? Nothing easier. The vowels of the Words United States of America are uieaeoaeia, which are numbered 2951561591, which added make 45, or 4 plus 5 equals 9. You might not at first see what that has to do with the War--until the Philosopher points out that "9 is the number of completion, indicating the end of a cosmic cycle." That, of course, explains everything.

And here is a work on what you perhaps thought to be a dead science, Astrology. It is called "Lucky Hours for Everybody: A True System of Planetary Hours--by Prof. John B. Early. Price One Dollar." It teaches you things like this:

Saturn's negative hours are especially good for all matters
relating to gold-mining.... The Sun negative rules the
emerald, the musical note D sharp, and the number four. The
lunar hours are a good time to deal in public commodities,
and to hire servants of both sexes....

A recent lady visitor informed me that she had made several
vain attempts to transact important business in the hours
ruled by Jupiter, usually held to be fortunate, while she
was nearly always fortunate in what she began in the hours
ruled by Saturn. Upon investigation I found her name was
ruled by the Sun negative, and that she had Capricorn with
Saturn therein as her ascendant at birth, which explains.

And finally, here is a London "scientist", reported in the "Weekly Unity" of Kansas City, who proves his mental power over two-horse power oil engines which fail to act. "Going a little apart, he came back in a few minutes and said: 'The engine is all right now and will work satisfactorily.' and without any further difficulty it did." We are told how Dr. Rawson gave a demonstration of his method to a newspaper reporter the other day. Fixing his gaze as though looking into space, he apparently became absorbed in deep contemplation and said aloud: "There is no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter; all is spirit and manifestation of spirit."

You might at first find difficulty in believing what can be accomplished by "demonstrations" such as this; not merely are two-horse power oil engines made to work, but the whole gigantic machine of Prussian militarism is prevented from working. You may recall how Arthur Machen's magazine story of the Angels of Mons was taken up and made into a Catholic legend over-night; now here is a New-Nonsense legend, complete and perfect, going the rounds of our Nonsense magazines:

London, Dec. 14.--Shell-proof and bullet-proof soldiers have
been discovered on the European battle-fronts. Heroes with
"charmed lives" are being made every day, according to
Frederick L. Rawson, a London scientist, who insists he has
found the miraculous way by which they are developed. He
calls it "audible treatment". "Practical utilization of the
powers of God by right thinking," is the agency through
which Dr. Rawson declares he can so treat a man that he will
not be harmed when hundreds of men are being shot dead
beside him. This amazing treatment includes a new type of
prayer. It is being administered to hundreds of men audibly,
and to hundreds more by letter. Nothing since the war began
has aroused so much talk of modern miracles as have many of
the statements of Dr. Rawson....

At the taking of a wood there were five hundred yards of "No
Man's Land" to be crossed. Our troops could not get across.
Then Capt.----, who practices this method of prayer, treated
them for an hour before they started, and not a man was
knocked out. He was the only officer left out of eighty in
his brigade. He simply held onto the fact that man is
spiritual and perfect and could not be touched. A bullet
fired from a revolver only five yards away hit him over the
chest, tore his shirt and went out at the shoulder. But it
never penetrated his chest. He was frequently in a hail of
shells and bullets which did not touch him.

#The Graft of Grace#

All this is grotesque; but it is what happens to religions in a world of commercial competition. It happens not merely to Christian Science and New Thought religions, Mazdaznan and Zionist, Holy Roller and Mormon religions, but to Catholic and Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Methodist and Baptist religions. For you see, when you are with the wolves you must howl with them; when you are competing with fakirs you must fake. The ordinary Christian will read the claims of the New Thought fakers with contempt; but have I not shown the Catholic Church publishing long lists of money-miracles? Have I not shown the Church of Good Society, our exclusive and aristocratic Protestant Episcopal communion, pretending to call rain and to banish pestilence, to protect crops and win wars and heal those who are "sick in estate"--that is, who are in business trouble?

The reader will say that I am a cynic, despising my fellows; but that is not so. I am an economic scientist, analyzing the forces which operate in human societies. I blame the prophets and priests and healers for their fall from idealism; but I blame still more the competitive wage-system, which presents them with the alternative to swindle or to starve.

For, you see, the prophet has to have food. He has frequently got along with almost none, and with only a rag for clothing; in Palestine and India, where the climate is warm, a sincere faith has been possible for short periods. But the modern prophet who expects to influence the minds of men has to have books and newspapers; he will find a telephone and a typewriter and postage-stamps hardly to be dispensed with, also in Europe and America some sort of a roof over his meeting place. So the prophet is caught, like all the rest of us, in the net of the speculator and the landlord. He has to get money, and in order to get it he has to impress those who already have it--people whose minds and souls have been deformed by the system of parasitism and exploitation.

So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he becomes a martyr, and founds a church which becomes a church of charlatans. I care not how sincere, how passionately proletarian a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive society--to be the founder of an organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit of wolves. That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it befell Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Fox and John Calvin and John Wesley.

A friend of mine who has made a study of "Spiritualism" describes to me the conditions in that field. The mediums are people, mostly women, with a peculiar gift; whether we believe in the survival of personality, or whether we call it telepathy, does not alter the fact that they have a rare and special sensitiveness, a new faculty which science must investigate. They come, poor people mostly--for the well-to-do will seldom give their time to exacting and wearisome experiments. They come, wearing frayed and thin clothing, shivering with cold, obviously undernourished; and their survival depends upon their producing "phenomena"--which phenomena are capricious, and will not come at call. So, what more natural than that mediums should resort to faking? That the whole field should be reeking with fraud, and science should be held back from understanding an extraordinary power of the subconscious mind?

Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies have been telling us about the wondrous powers of a mulatto-woman, a manicurist at the city's most fashionable hotel. The other day, out of curiosity, my wife and I went; the moment the "medium" opened her mouth my wife recognized her as the person who has been trying for several months to get me on the telephone to tell me how the spirit of Jack London is seeking to communicate with me! The #séance# was a public one, a gathering composed, half of wealthy and cultured society-women, and half of confederates, people with the dialect and manners of a vaudeville troupe. A megaphone was set in the middle of the floor, the room was made dark, a couple of hymns were sung, and then the spirit of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke through the megaphone with a Bowery accent, and gave communications from relatives and friends of the various confederates. "Jesus is with us", said Dr. Holmes. "The spirit of Jesus bids you to study spiritualism." And then came the voice of a child: "Mamma! Mamma!" "It is little Georgie!" cried Dr. Holmes; and one of the society ladies started, and answered, and presently burst into tears. A marvelous piece of evidence--especially when you recall that the story of this mother's bereavement had been published in all the papers a couple of months before!

And this kind of swindling is going on every night in every city of America. It goes on wholesale for months every summer at Lily Dale, in New York State, where the spiritualists hold their combination of Chautauqua and Coney Island. And the same thing is going on in the field of mental healing, and of all other "occult" forces and powers, whether real or imaginary. It is going on with new spiritual fervors, new moral idealisms, new poetry, new music, new painting, new sculpture. The faker, the charlatan is everywhere--using the mental and moral and artistic forces of life as a means of delivering himself from economic servitude. Everywhere I turn I see it--credulity being exploited, and men of practical judgment, watching the game and seeing through it, made hard in their attitude of materialism. How many men I know who sit by in sullen protest while their wives drift from one new quackery to another, wasting their income seeking health and happiness in futile emotionalism! How many kind and sensitive spirits I know--both men and women--who pour their treasures of faith and admiration into the laps of hierophants who began by fooling all mankind and ended by fooling themselves!

In each one of the cults of what I have called the "Church of the Quacks", there are thousands, perhaps millions of entirely sincere, self-sacrificing people. They will read this book--if anyone can persuade them to read it--with pain and anger; thinking that I am mocking at their faith, and have no appreciation of their devotion. All that I can say is that I am trying to show them how they are being trapped, how their fine and generous qualities are being used by exploiters of one sort or another; and how this must continue, world without end, until there is order in the material affairs of the race, until justice has been established as the law of man's dealing with his fellows.

* * * * *

#BOOK SEVEN#

#The Church of the Social Revolution#

They have taken the tomb of our Comrade Christ--
Infidel hordes that believe not in man;
Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,
But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.
They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,
They have buried him deep under steel and stone--
But we come leading the great Crusade
To give our Comrade back to his own.

Waddell.

* * * * *

#Christ and Caesar#

In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise 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 limiting the donations of emotional females to the church in Rome!

From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar have been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of predatory economic might. With only one qualification to be noted: that the Church has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of her proletarian Founder. She has done her best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his words out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims may not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.

'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung Only by
priests, and in the Latin tongue!

But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one incessant struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled themselves with the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of that bitterly class-conscious proletarian, James, the brother of Jesus.

And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has given life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on the hearts of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and fervor which has been poured into it by generation after generation of poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and die like Jesus as criminals, and are revered like Jesus as founders and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers were bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their own time. St. Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of office, exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by the Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the heretics whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were proletarian rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres, the founders of the orders which gave it life for century after century, were men who sought to return to the example of the carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar on this point, Prof. Rauschenbusch:

The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the
Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic
and communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest
doctrinal reformer before the reformation; but his eyes,
too, were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman
Church by joining in a great national and patriotic movement
against the alien domination and extortion of the Church.
The Bohemian revolt, made famous by the name of John Huss,
was quite as much political and social as religious.
Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a religious
prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo de
Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's
mercy. Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his
ill-gotten wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the
restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence. It
is significant that the dying sinner found it easy to assent
to the first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible
to concede the last.

#Locusts and Wild Honey#

This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time long before Jesus; it seems to have been inherent in the religious character of the Jews--that stubborn independence, that stiff-necked insistence on the right of a man to interview God for himself and to find out what God wants him to do; also the inclination to find that God wants him to oppose earthly rulers and their plundering of the poor. What is it that gives to the Bible the vitality it has today? Its literary style? To say that is to display the ignorance of the cultured; for elevation of style is a by-product of passionate conviction; it is what the Jewish writers had to say, and not the way they said it, that has given them their hold upon mankind. Was it their insistence upon conscience, their fear of God as the beginning of wisdom? But that same element appears in the Babylonian psalms, which are as eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews, yet are read only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful presence of divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians had that far more than the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their religious books. Or was it the love of man for all things living, the lesson of charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress? The gentle Buddha had that, and had it long before Christ; also his priests had metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John the Apostle or Thomas Aquinas.

No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishes the Hebrew sacred writings from all others, and that is their insistent note of proletarian revolt, their furious denunciations of exploiters, and of luxury and wantonness, the vices of the rich. Of that note the Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian writing contain not a trace, and the Egyptian hardly enough to mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it; but the true, natural-born rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They were rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today in Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood which spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, through John the Baptist and Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through Marx and Lassalle and Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and Morris Hillquit and Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the Joseph Fels endowment.

The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire was 20%; the laws of Manu permitted 24%, while the laws of the Egyptians only stepped in to prevent more than 100%. But listen to this Hebrew law:

If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee,
then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or
a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no
interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy
brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.

And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants, and commanding that at the end of fifty years all debtors shall have their debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note that this is not the raving of agitators, the demand of a minority party; it is the law of the Hebrew land.

There has been of late a great deal of new discovery concerning the early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as follows:

The land-mark law, which sternly forbids encroachment upon
peasant rights; consideration for the foreigner; additional
sanitary and food laws; tithe regulations on behalf of
widows, orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those who have no
economic independence should eat and be satisfied; that
loans should be given cheerfully, not only without any
interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. To
withhold a loan because the year of release is at hand in
which the principal is no longer recoverable, is described
as a grave sin. When you are compelled to free your slaves,
you must give them sufficient capital to embark upon some
industry which shall prevent their falling back into
slavery. A number of holidays are insisted upon. There must
be no more crushing of the poor out of existence, for God
cares for these people who have been driven to poverty, and
they shall never cease out of the land. Howbeit there shall
be no poor with you, for the Lord will bless you, if you
will obey these laws.

But then prosperity came, and culture, which meant contact with the capitalist ideas of the heathen empires. The Jews fell from the stern justice of their fathers; and so came the prophets, wild-eyed men of the people, clad in camel's hair and living upon locusts and wild honey, breaking in upon priests and kings and capitalists with their furious denunciations. And always they incited to class war and social disturbance. I quote Conrad Noel again:

Nathan and Gad had been David's political advisers, Abijah
had stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had resisted Ahab,
Elisha had fanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders
against the misrule of the king of Israel, Isaiah denounces
the landlords and the usurers, Micah charges them with
blood-guiltiness; Jeremiah and the latter prophets, though
they strike a more intimate note of personal repentance,
strike it as the prelude to that national restoration for
which they hunger as exiles.

The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old
Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the
nineteenth century thundered against the "Christian"
employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses were
cemented with the blood of little children, so Isaiah cries
against his generation: "Your governing classes companion
with thieves; behold you build up Sion with blood." Their
ceremonial and their Sabbath keeping are an abomination to
God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes
from you. Your hands are full of blood." The poor man is
robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house
to house and field to field, that ye may dwell alone in the
midst of the land." "Wash you, make you clean, put away the
evil of your doing from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,
judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us
reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be
blood-colored, they shall be as white as snow; though they
be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing
and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye
refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword.

#Mother Earth#

And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators, following the same tradition, possessed by the same dream as the ancient Hebrew prophets. I have mentioned Emma Goldman; it may be that the reader is not familiar with her writings, and does not realize how very Biblical she is, both in point of view and style. Let me quote a few sentences from a recent issue of her paper, "Mother Earth", on the subject of our ruling classes and their social responsibility:

Yes, you idle rich, you may howl about what we mean to do to you!
Your riches are rotten and your fine clothes are falling from your
backs. Your stocks and bonds are so tainted that the ink on them
should turn to acid and eat holes in your pockets and your skins. You
have piled up your dirty millions, but what wages have you paid to the
poor devils of farm hands you have robbed? And do you imagine they
won't remember it when the revolution comes? You loll on soft couches
and amuse yourselves with your mistresses; you think you are "it" and
the world is yours. You send militiamen and shoot down our organizers,
and we are helpless. But wait, comrades, our time is coming.

Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of this tirade is now in jail, where she can no longer defy the laws of good taste. They always put the ancient prophets in jail; that is the way to know a prophet when you meet him. Let me quote another prophet who is now behind bars--Alexander Berkman, in his "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist", discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:

Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it
to you? Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can you go
all the way back and show there is no flaw anywhere in your
title? I tell you that the beginning and the root of your
wealth is necessarily in injustice. And why? Because Nature
did not make this man rich and that man poor from the start.
Nature does not intend for one man to have capital and
another to be a wage-slave. Nature made the earth to be
cultivated by all. The idea we Anarchists have of the rich
is of highwaymen, standing in the street and robbing every
one that passes.

Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I.W.W. Hear what he has to say in a pamphlet addressed to the harvest-hands he is seeking to organize:

How much farther do you 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 so-called
"ownership". Capital has no rights. The land belongs to
Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.

Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist Party for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:

The propertied classes are like people who go into a public
theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as
private property what is meant for social use. If each man
would take only what he needs, and leave the balance to
those who have nothing, there would be no rich and no poor.
The rich man is a thief.

I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may read this book, and I don't want them to close it in the middle and throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to explain my poor joke; the sentiments I have been quoting are not those of our modern agitators, but of another group of ancient ones. The first is not from Emma Goldman, nor did I find it in "Mother Earth". I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by orthodox authorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus. It is exactly what he wrote--save that I have put it into modern phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order that those familiar with the Bible might read it without suspicion. The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman, but in those of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early fathers, who lived 374-407. The third is not from the pen of "Big Bill" but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church, 340-397, and the fourth is not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil of the Greek Church, 329-379. And if the reader objects to my having fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the Christian Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred years?

#The Soap Box#

This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other as the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in the direct line of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a man who thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men.

I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem. The way to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church fathers--translate him into American. This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will not be necessary to disguise the Bible style, and we may follow the text exactly. Let me try the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St. Alphonsus to find a parallel:

Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech,
saying, The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the
Fifth Avenue churches; and it would be all right if you were
to listen to what they preach, and do that; but don't follow
their actions, for they never practice what they preach.
They load the backs of the working-classes with crushing
burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a
burden, and everything they do is for show. They wear
frock-coats and silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the
speakers' table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, and
they occupy the best pews in the churches, and their doings
are reported in all the papers; they are called leading
citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be called
leading citizens, for the only useful man is the man who
produces. (Applause). And whoever exalts himself shall be
abased, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.

Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics, hypocrites!
for you shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men; you don't
go in yourself and you don't let others go in. Woe unto you,
doctors of divinity and Presbyterians, hypocrites! for you
foreclose mortgages on widows' houses, and for a pretense
you make long prayers. For this you will receive the greater
damnation! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Methodists,
hypocrites! for you send missionaries to Africa to make one
convert, and when you have made him, he is twice as much a
child of hell as yourselves. (Applause). Woe unto you, blind
guides, with your subtleties of doctrine, your
transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all the rest of
it; you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity
and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks into
the collection-plate and you pay no heed to the really
important things in the Bible, which are justice and mercy
and faith in goodness. You blind guides, who strain at a
gnat and swallow a camel! (Laughter). Woe unto you, doctors
of divinity and Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe
yourselves and dress in immaculate clothing but within you
are full of extortion and excess. You blind high churchmen,
clean first your hearts, so that the clothes you wear may
represent you. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Baptists, hypocrites! for you are like marble tombs which
appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead
men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you appear
righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and
iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect statues to dead
reformers, and put wreathes upon the tombs of old-time
martyrs. You say, if we had been alive in those days, we
would not have helped to kill those good men. That ought to
show you how to treat us at present. (Laughter). But you are
the children of those who killed the good men; so go ahead
and kill us too! You serpents, you generation of vipers, how
can you escape the damnation of hell?

At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem "Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified him that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed. Jesus was taken to the station-house followed by a riotous throng, and held upon a charge of disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months on Blackwell's Island, remarking that from this time on he proposed to make an example of those soap-box orators who persist in using threatening and abusive language. Just as the prisoner was being led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day explosion.

#The Church Machine#

The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would have a sign of Thee"--meaning that they wanted him to do some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He answered by calling them an evil and adulterous generation--which is exactly what I have said about the Papal machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx at them--"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own class in the places where they gathered--the public houses--the churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"--precisely as in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.

But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history--even in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the Church--Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J. Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their voices are not silenced, they are like the leaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of God--a woman took it and hid it in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young theological students read, and some of them understand; I know three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church, and are preaching straight social revolution--and the scribes and the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.

In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon. Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property. And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking favors from the state--the exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday--so on through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.

It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious movement for an Irish Republic.

What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of them slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or hypocrites. They have caught enough of the spirit of their time not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods. But they are part of a machine, and the old men and the rich men who run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find themselves tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as by the practice of altruism.

But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift wings--it may be here before this book sees the light. And who knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which we saw in Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burned their holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as citizens and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. All those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe nonsense, because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any man can go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten or fifteen dollars. Do you not think that there may be some who will choose freedom and self-respect on those terms?

And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the church because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and obtain promotion, to get customers if you are a tradesman, to extend your practice if you are a professional man? And what about the millions who go to church because they are poor, and because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one way to keep the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for the children, to get charity if you fall into need; in short, to acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who stand together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent, contented in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them?

#The Church Redeemed#

Do I mean that I expect to see the Church--all churches--perish and pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church answers one of the fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will abolish poverty and parasitism, it will make temptations fewer, and the soul's path through life much easier; but it will not remove the necessity of struggle for individual virtue, it will only clear the way for the discovery of newer and higher types of virtue. Men will gather more than ever in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one another; but the places in which they gather will be places swept clean of superstition and tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses, so the Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its defense of parasitism and exploitation. I will record the prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the Church ever opposed Socialism--true Socialism; just as today they deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men for teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right to commit crime, ever gave away the New World to Spain and Portugal, ever buried newly-born infants in the cellars of nunneries.

The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it without followers. But in the great religions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of old, will preach the living word of God. In many churches today we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Even in the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the books of the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The Saint", and you will see a genuine and vital protest against the economic corruption of the Church. In America, the "Knights of Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a "War for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y.M.C.A. in the training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.

This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation Army. William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the lost souls of the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus---

Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.