The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they have
mixed it up with metaphysic and divinity, and built some four or
five hundred churches, and printed the Mother Church alone knows
how many million pamphlets and books. I once invested three of my
hard-earned dollars for a copy of the Eddy Bible, and let myself
be stunned and blinded by the flapping of metaphysical wings. It
is unadulterated moonshine--as the Platonist and Berkeleyan and
Hegelian and other orthodox collegiate metaphysical magi can
prove to you in one minute. What interests me about the
phenomenon is not the slinging of tremendous words, but the
strictly Yankee use which is made of them. There is no nonsense
about saving your soul in Christian Science; what it is for is to
remove your wen, to nail down your floating kidney, and to enable
you to hustle and make money. We saw in our politics the growth
of a Party of the Full Dinner-Pail; contemporaneous therewith,
and corresponding thereto, we see in our religious life the
development of a Church of the Full Pocket-Book.

It is a strict religion--strictly cash. The heads of the cult do
not issue cheap editions of "Science and Health, With Key to the
Scriptures", to relieve the suffering of the proletariat; no--the
work is copyrighted, in all its varying and contradictory
editions, and the price is from three to seven-fifty, according
to binding. Treatments cost from three dollars to ten, whether
you come and get them or take them over the telephone. And we
have no nonsense about charity, we don't worry about the poor who
fester in our city slums; because poverty is a product of Mortal
Mind, and we offer to all men a way to get rich right off the
bat. You may come to our marble churches and hear people testify
how through the power of Divine Mind they were enabled to
anticipate a rise in the stock-market. If you don't avail
yourself of the opportunity, the fault is yours, and yours also
the punishment.

As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholic hierarchy
is a Bolshevik democracy in comparison. The Church is controlled
by an absolutely irresponsible self-perpetuating body of five
men, who alone dictate its policy. I have in my hand a letter
from a Christian Science healer who was listed as an "authorized
practitioner", and who withdrew from the Church because of its
attitude on public questions. He sends me a copy of his
correspondence with the editors of the "Christian Science
Monitor", containing a detailed analysis of the position of that
paper on such issues as the Ballinger land-frauds. He writes:

I am thoroughly convinced now that the policy of the Church is
consciously plutocratic. The only recommendation I have heard of
the latest appointee to the Board of Directors is that he is one
of the richest men in the movement.

After the Titanic disaster, Senator La Follette brought in a
carefully drawn bill to compel steamship companies to provide
life-boats and trained crews. The "Christian Science Monitor"
opposed this bill; and when my correspondent cited the fact, he
brought out a quaint bit of metaphysical logic, as follows:

One would prefer to travel on a vessel without a single boat,
rather than on some other vessels which were loaded down with
life-boats, where the government of Mind was not understood!


Science and Wealth

The truth is that the brand of Mammon was on our Yankee religion
from the day of its birth. In the first edition of her new Bible
"Mother" Eddy dropped the hint to her readers: "Men of business
have said this science was of great advantage from a secular
point of view." And in her advertisements she threw aside all
pretense, declaring that her work "Affords an opportunity to
acquire a profession by which one can accumulate a fortune." When
her pupils did accumulate, she boasted of their success; nor did
she neglect her own accumulating.

It has been a dozen years since I looked into this cult; in order
to be sure that it has not been purified in the interim, I
proceed to a street corner in my home city, where is a stand with
a sign: "Christian Science Literature." I take four sample
copies of a magazine, the "Christian Science Sentinel", published
by the Mother Church in Boston, and turn to the "Testimonials of
Healing". In the issue of August 11, 1917, Mary C. Richards of
St. Margarets-on-Thames, England, testifies: "Through a number of
circumstances unnecessary to relate, but proving conclusively
that the result came not from man but from God, employment was
found." In the issue of December 2, 1916, Frances Tuttle of
Jersey City, N. J., testifies how her sister was successfully
treated for unemployment by a scientist practitioner. "Every
condition was beautifully met." In the same issue Fred D. Miller
of Los Angeles, Cal., testifies: "Soon after this wonderful truth
came to me, Divine Love led me to a new position with a
responsible firm. The work was new to me, but I have given entire
satisfaction, and my salary has been advanced twice in less than
a year." In the issue of January 27, 1917, Eliza Fryant of
Agricola, Miss., testifies how she cured her little dog of
snake-bite and removed two painful corns from her own foot. In
the issue of August 4, 1917, Marcia E. Gaier, of Everett, Wash.,
testifies how it suddenly occurred to her that because God is
All, she would drop her planning and outlining in regard to real
estate properties, "upon which for nine months all available
material methods were tried to no effect." The result was a
triumph of "Principle".

While working in the yard one morning and gratefully communing
with God, the only power, I suddenly felt that I should stop
working and prepare for visitors on their way to look at the
property. I obeyed this very distinct command, and in about an
hour I greeted two people who had searched almost the entire city
for just what we had to offer. They had been directed to our
place by what to material sense would seem an accident, but we
know it was the divine law of harmony in its universal operation.

After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, in a Christian
Science lecture at Kansas City, Mo., should proclaim:

My friends, do you know that since the world began Christian
Science is the only system which has intelligently related
religion to business? Christian Science shows that since all
ideas belong to Mind, God, therefore all real business belongs to
Him.

As I said, these people have the new-old power of mental healing,
They blunder along with it blindly, absurdly, sometimes with
tragic consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the
pill-doctors know nothing about this power, and regard it with
contempt mingled with fear; so of course the hosts of sufferers
whom the pill-doctors cannot help flock to the healers of the
"Church of Christ, Scientist". According to the custom of those
who are healed by "faith", they swallow line, hook, and sinker,
creed, ritual, metaphysic and divinity. So we see in
twentieth-century America precisely what we saw in B. C.
twentieth-century Assyria--a host of worshippers, giving their
worldly goods without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of
fanatics and partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise
of graft, and harvesting that thing desired of all men, power
over the lives and destinies of others.

And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one
another's Mortal Minds, they drive one another out, they snarl
over the spoils like a pack of hungry animals. Listen to the
Mother, denouncing one of her students--a perfectly amiable and
harmless youth whose only offense was that he had gone his own
way and was healing the sick for the benefit of his own
pocket-book:

Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the
sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put
out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track
with the trophies of thy guilt--I say, Behold the "cloud" no
bigger than a man's hand already rising on the horizon of Truth,
to pour down upon thy guilty head the hailstones of doom.

And again:

The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with
the torture of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall
upon his own sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him
remember this when, in the dark recesses of thought, he is
robbing, committing adultery and killing. When he is attempting
to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the
quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life and
giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is
turning back the reviving sufferer to his bed of pain, clouding
his first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that
hour shall point to the tyrant's fate, who falls at length upon
the sword of justice.


New Nonsense

In a certain city of America is a large building given up
entirely to the whims of pretty ladies. Its floors are not floors
but "Promenades", and have walls of glass, behind which, as you
stroll, you see bonnets from Paris and opera cloaks from London,
furs from Alaska and blankets from Arizona, diamonds from South
Africa and beads from the Philippines, grapes from Spain and
cherries from Japan, fortune-tellers from Arabia and
dancing-masters from Petrograd and "naturopaths" from Vienna.
There are seventy-three shops, by actual count, containing
everything that could be imagined or desired by a pretty lady,
whether for her body, or for that vague stream of emotion she
calls her "soul". One of the seventy-three shops is a
"Metaphysical Library", having broad windows, and walls in pastel
tints, and pretty vases with pink flowers, and pretty gray wicker
chairs in which the reader will please to be seated, while we
probe the mysteries of an activity widely spread throughout
America, called "New Thought."

We begin with a shelf of magazines having mystical titles: Azoth;
Master Mind; Aletheian; Words of Power; Qabalah; Comforter;
Adept; Nautilus; True Word; Astrological Bulletin; Unity; Uplift;
Now. And then come shelves of pretty pamphlets, alluring to the
eye and the purse; also shelves of imposing-looking volumes
containing the lore and magic of a score of races and two score
of centuries--together with the very newest manifestations of
Yankee hustle and graft.

As in the case of Christian Science, these New Thoughters have a
fundamental truth, which I would by no means wish to depreciate.
It is a fact that the mysterious Source of our being is infinite,
and that we are only at the beginning of our thinking about it.
It is a fact that by appeal to it we can perform seeming miracles
of mental and moral regeneration; we can stimulate the flow of
nervous energy and of the blood, thus furthering the processes of
bodily healing. But the fact that God is Infinite and Omnipotent
does not bar the fact that He has certain ways of working, which
He does not vary; and that it is our business to explore and
understand these ways, instead of setting our fancies to work
imagining other ways more agreeable to our sentimentality.

Thus, for example, if we want bread, it is God's decree that we
shall plant wheat and harvest it, and grind and bake and
distribute it. Under conditions prevailing at the moment, it
appears to be His decree that we shall store the wheat in
elevators, and ship it in freight cars, and buy it through a
grain exchange, with capital borrowed from a national bank; in
other words, that our daily bread shall be the plaything of
exploiters and speculators, until such a time as we have the
intelligence to form an effective political party and establish
Industrial Democracy. But when you come to study the ways of God
in the literature of the New Thought, do you find anything about
the Millers' Trust and the Bakers' Trust and how to expropriate
these agencies of starvation? You do not!

What you find is Bootstrap-lifting; you find gentlemen and lady
practitioners shutting their eyes and lifting their hands and
pronouncing Incantations in awe-inspiring voices--or in Capital
Letters and LARGE TYPE: "God is infinite, God is All-Loving, GOD
WILL PROVIDE. Bread is coming to you! Bread is coming to you!!
BREAD IS COMING TO YOU!!!"

You think this is exaggeration? If so, it is because you have
never entered the building of the pretty ladies, and sat in the
gray wicker chairs of the metaphysical library. One of the
highest high-priestesses of the cults of New Nonsense is a lady
named Elizabeth Towne, editor of "The Nautilus"; and Priestess
Elizabeth tells you:

I believe the idea that money wants you will help you to the
right mental condition. Be a pot of honey and let it come.

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 in 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
seance 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 of 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 bad been David's political advisers, Abijah had
stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had resisted Ahab, Elisha had
fanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders against the misrule
of the king of Israel, Isaiah denounces the landlords and the
usurers, Micah charges them with 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.