The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which he
was conducted by two thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louis at
their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates,
and cardinals. The route followed was circuitous, in order that
he might be carried past the episcopal palace, in front of which
his books were burning, whereat he smiled. Pity from man there
was none to look for, but he sought comfort on high, repeating to
himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon
us!" and when he came in sight of the stake he fell on his knees
and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and said that
he would gladly do so if there were space. A wide circle was
formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to custom, had been
providently empowered to take advantage of final weakening, came
forward, saying, "Dear sir and master, if you will recant your
unbelief and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly
hear your confession; but if you will not, you know right well
that, according to canon law, no one can administer the sacrament
to a heretic." To this Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am
not a mortal sinner." His paper crown fell off and he smiled as
his guards replaced it. He desired to take leave of his keepers,
and when they were brought to him he thanked them for their
kindness, saying that they had been to him rather brothers than
jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German,
telling them that he suffered for errors which he did not hold,
and he was cut short. When bound to the stake, two cartloads of
fagots and straw were piled up around him, and the palsgrave and
vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could
save himself, but only repeated that he had been convicted by
false witnesses on errors never entertained by him. They clapped
their hands and then withdrew, and the executioners applied the
fire. Twice Huss was heard to exclaim, "Christ Jesus, Son of the
living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing up and
blowing the flames and smoke into his face checked further
utterances, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to move
while one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy
was over; the sorely-tried soul bad escaped from its tormentors,
and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him
the praise that no philosopher of old had faced death with more
composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity. No
faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle.
Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the
executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be
reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him.
With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and
thrown into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was
dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the
spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which
they reverenced as relies of their martyr. The next day thanks
were returned to God in a solemn procession in which figured
Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen
cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all the
clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had
delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left
Constance, feeling that his work was done.


Hell-Fire

If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it would
only be in some remote and wholly savage place, such as the
mountains of Hayti, or the Solomon Islands. It could no longer
happen in any civilized country; the reason being, not any
abatement of the pretensions of the priesthood, but solely the
power of science, embodied in the physical arm of a secular
State. The advance of that arm the church has fought
systematically, in every country, and at every point. To quote
Buckle: "A careful study of the history of religious toleration
will prove that in every Christian country where it has been
adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy by the authority of
the secular classes." The wolf of superstition has been driven
into its lair; but it has backed away snarling, and it still
crouches, watching for a chance to spring. The Church which
burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that
the earth moves round the sun--that same church, in the name of
the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the
firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of
this book, it will be solely because of the police. Not being
allowed to burn me here, the clergy will vent their holy
indignation by sentencing me to eternal burning in a future world
which they have created, and which they run to suit themselves.

It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated,
that the measure of the civilization which any nation has
attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of
institutionalized religion. Those peoples which are wholly under
the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans,
Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectual
life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos, and Turks,
who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther on the way
are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a flashlight of
the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick
MacGill:

The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always
told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn
for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you
sorry for the debts that you did not pay," said the priest. "What
is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar
steps. "If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and
took a million years to count every single grain, how long would
it take him to count them all? A long time, you'll say. But that
time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning in hell
while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand,
counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did
not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within
the letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the
letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened, and no
one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it meant.

There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture;
the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one
for agricultural co-operation and the other for political
independence--both of them definitely and specifically
non-religious. This same thing has been true of the movements
which have helped on happier nations, such as the republics of
France and America, which have put an end to the power of the
priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the
mind of the child without its parents' consent.

This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently
not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty
to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though
it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still
permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with
images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and
sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of
devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns
and systematically to infect whole cities full of men, women and
children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city where I
write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees,
even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing,
screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning
paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in Los
Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living
God", upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their
neighbors. The police officers testified that the accused claimed
to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this
possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and
barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling",
about which the newspapers did not go into details. And again, a
week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,
and found tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged
to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft.
Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve
failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed a
whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have
deserved to be whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake
had been made--it was another woman who was the witch. And again
in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly serious news item,
telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and found on his
pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of the head
of Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his neighbors to
witness the miracle, and declared that while he was not
superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened
by chance, and he knew what it was intended to signify--he would
buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the
war!

And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture
think that the battle of the intellect is won, and that it is no
longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting "Religion!"



BOOK TWO

The Church of Good Society

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

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

The Rain Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Babylonian Fire-god

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Medicine-men


Andrew D. White tells us that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Canonization of Incompetence

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

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

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

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

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


Gibson's Preservative

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Elders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Church History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Land and Livings

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

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

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

As an old song puts the matter:

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

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

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

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