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

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

     How much farther do you plutes expect to go with your
     grabbing? Do you want to be the only people left on earth?
     Why else do you drive out the workers from all share in
     Nature, and claim everything for yourselves? The earth was
     made for all, rich and poor alike; where do you get your
     title deeds to it? Nature gave everything for all men to use
     alike; it is only your robbery which makes your so-called
     "ownership". Capital has no rights. The land belongs to
     Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.

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

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

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

#The Soap Box#

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

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

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

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

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

#The Church Machine#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#The Church Redeemed#

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

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

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

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

Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population. He had
not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared
hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how
utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for
the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their
diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So the Salvation army was forced
into useful work--old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas
dinners, farm colonies--until today the bare list of the various kinds
of enterprises it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done
with the money of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to
authority, but no one can deny that it is better than "Gibson's
Preservative", and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with
port.

And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater. Here and
there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job and preaching
the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are
making attempts at "missions" and "settlements" in the slums. The more
vital churches are gradually turning themselves into societies for the
practical betterment of their members. Their clergy are running boys
clubs and sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for
mothers, social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always
before the clergyman's face--that with prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
educational societies and social reforms he thrives.

And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches,
like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy and the
congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are
forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a
thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of this--any
more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and
industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary thought can see the
main outlines of the future. We see that in these new church
activities the clergy are inspired by things read, not in ancient
Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers. They are responding to the
actual, instant needs of their boys in the trenches and the camps; and
this is bound to have an effect upon their psychology. Just as we can
say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her old life,
and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in
its debates, will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say
that the clergyman who helps in Y.M.C.A. work in France, or in Red
Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist
forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to adjust
means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and social solidarity
by the method which modern educators most favor--by doing. Also he
will have absorbed a mass of ideas in news despatches from over the
world. He is forced to read these despatches carefully, because the
fate of his own boys is involved; and we Socialists will see to it
that the despatches are well filled with propaganda!

#The Desire of Nations#

So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the
great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do
not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of
the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the
Church which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and
say that we think about nothing but the belly--and that is true, in a
way; because we are the representatives of a starving class, which
thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is
ravening with hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James,
the brother of Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the
body," and then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have
souls; whereas at present we are led to despise the very word
"spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and
poseurs.

We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to us. We
would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and
self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if there
were in the world institutions conducted by men and women of
consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true morality to
the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not of slavery; a
morality founded upon reason, not upon superstition. The men who teach
it must be men who know what truth is, and the passionate loyalty
which the search for truth inspires. They cannot be the pitiful
shufflers and compromisers we see in the churches today, the Jowetts
who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost. Rather than trust our children to such shameless cynics, we
will make shift to train them ourselves--we amateurs, not knowing much
about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against
organized wrong.

It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it is a
fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need it just as badly
as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race. That we need it is
proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our midst--the schisms which
waste the greater part of our activities, and which are often the
result of personal jealousies and petty vanities. To lift men above
such weakness, to make them really brothers in a great cause--that is
the work of "personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the
words.

We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new
Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the dream of it
is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and
conviction. Read these lines from "The Desire of Nations," by Edwin
Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer who is at hand:

  And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
  He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
  To every heart he will its own dream be:
  One moon has many phantoms in the sea.
  Out of the North the norns will cry to men:
  "Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
  The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
  "Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
  The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
  "Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"
  And social architects who build the State,
  Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
  Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
  And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
  "Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
  The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"

#The Knowable#

The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker the
basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the microscope and
the telescope, of the new psychology and the new sociology are more
wonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient Mythologies. And even
if this were not so, the business of the thinker is to follow the
facts. The history of all philosophy might be summed up in this
simile: The infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out
his hands and cries for it; but those in charge do not give it to him,
and so after a while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his
mother's breast and takes a drink of milk.

Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him to
be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the knowledge
immediately and finally, and invents innumerable systems and creeds.
He makes himself believe them, with fire and torture makes other men
believe them; until finally, in the confusion of a million theories,
it occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the
discovery that his tools are inadequate, and all their products
worthless. His mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite;
his knowledge is relative, while the First Cause is absolute.

This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern
philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four propositions:
first, that the universe is limitless in time and space; second, that
matter is composed of simple, indivisible elements; third, that free
will is impossible; and fourth, that there must be an absolute or
first cause. And having proven these things, he turned round and
proved their opposites, with arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any
one who follows these demonstrations and understands them, takes all
his metaphysical learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology
and magic.

It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that
when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can prove
whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension;
you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside
out; and when you get tired of this condition, you take another
flight, and come back the way you were before. So metaphysical
thinking serves the purpose of Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman
and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves hysterical women like
"Mother" Eddy; it serves the New-thoughters, who wish to fill their
bellies with wind; it serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to
befuddle the wits of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they
would a bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that it
is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the ultimate
nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist who lays down
a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a Christian.

How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital
letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an
inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the
"Positivists", and attended their imitation church in London, but I
did not get any satisfaction from them. In the midst of their dogmatic
pronouncements I found myself remembering how the egg falls apart and
reveals a chicken, how the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly.
The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile
occupation to set limits upon the future. Our business is not to say
what men will know ten thousand years from now, but to content
ourselves with the simple statement of what men know #now#. What we
know is a procession of phenomena called an environment; our life
being an act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.

In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify his
faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is
worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is order in
creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which can be
applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for its mother's
breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts it when he declares
that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets
it down for a certainty that this will always be so--that he is not
being played with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H20 to
behave like water, and tomorrow like benzine.

#Nature's Insurgent Son#

Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each bit of
knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life becomes a new
thing. Consider, for example, what a different place the world became
to the man who discovered that the force which laid the forest in
ashes could be tamed and made to warm a cave and make wild grains
nutritious! In other words, man can create life, he can make the world
and himself into that which his reason decides it ought to be, The
means by which he does this is the most magical of all the tools he
has invented since his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool
of experimental science--and when one considers that this weapon has
been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three
centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning of
human evolution.

To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and
deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
product--that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this forth
with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man". We are, at
this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous transition stage, as a
child playing with explosives. This child has found out how to alter
his environment in many startling ways, but he does not yet know why
he wishes to alter it, nor to what purpose. He finds that certain
things are uncomfortable, and these he proceeds immediately to change.
Discovering that grain fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of
drunkards; discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and
prepared in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases
that it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that
captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession of
empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption, and fall
into ruins again.

This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping blindly,
experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It takes a million
eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a million million men to
produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy.
Nature's present impulse appears as a rebellion against her own
methods; man, her creature, will emancipate himself from her law, will
save himself from her blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's
insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task
in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination
because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and
the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child
would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name
of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.

What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing our
sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful, because we
can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breeding which
will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at life. We can replace
instinct by self-discipline. We can substitute for the regime of
"Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin" the regime of man the
creator, knowing what he wishes to be and how to set about to be it.
Whether this can happen, whether the thing which we call civilization
is to be the great triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is
to go back into the melting pot, is a question being determined by an
infinitude of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely
such a contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man
who has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to
perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvellous new
tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact knowledge,
the creator of your own life and in part of the life of the race.

#The New Morality#

Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers;
driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call
the #Г©lan vital#. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an
emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of distress. So
pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the final goal is a
condition of free and constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is
enduring.

That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It is a
perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall upon the
earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other hand, it is a
conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements
of comets, and even of starry systems. It seems certain that if he is
given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate
environment---

  The untamed giants of nature shall bow down---
  The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
  From mockery and destruction, and be turned
  Unto the making of the soul of man.

It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food from
the elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it is
conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present prey upon
his body, and so put an end to death. It is certain that he will
ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human qualities as he has
created the spurs of the fighting-cock and the legs of the greyhound.
He will find out what genius is, and the laws of its being, and the
tests whereby it may be recognized. In the new science of
psycho-analysis he has already begun the work of bringing an infinity
of subconsciousness into the light of day; it may be that in the
evidence of telepathy which the psychic researchers are accumulating,
he is beginning to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which
may come to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars,
and of the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are
disclosing.

All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way of
their realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and submission,
the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him
from his animal past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and
of others; to root them out of the garden of the soul is the task of
the modern thinker.

The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is
the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save the law of
his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself
imposes.

The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true pleasure
is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.

The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there is no
authority above reason; no possibility of such authority, because if
such were to appear, reason would have to judge it, and accept or
reject it.

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there
can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an
immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The
business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft
amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to
adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was
suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy
tomorrow.

This new morality, like all things in a world of strife, is fighting
for existence, using its own weapons, which are reason and love.
Obviously it can use no others, without self-destruction; yet it has
to meet enemies who fight with the old weapons of force and fraud.
Whether it will prevail is more than any prophet can say. Perhaps it
is too much to ask that it should succeed--this insolent effort of the
pigmy man to leap upon the back of his master and fit a bridle into
his mouth. Perhaps it is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few,
the scientists and poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race.
Perhaps the nerve of the pigmy will fail him at the critical moment,
and he will fall from the back of his master, and under his master's
hoofs.

The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and as
scientists we can proclaim it--the human race is in a swift current of
degeneration, which a new morality alone can check. The struggle is at
its height in our time; if it fails, if the fibre of the race
continues to deteriorate, the soul of the race to be eaten out by
poverty and luxury, by insanity and disease, by prostitution, crime
and war--then mankind will slip back into the abyss, the untamed
giants of Nature will resume their ancient sway, and the tides, the
tempest and the lightning will sweep the earth clean again. I do not
believe that this calamity will befall us. I know that in the diseased
social body the forces of resistance are gathering--the Socialist
movement, in the broad sense--the activities of all who believe in the
possibility of reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice
and love. To such people this book goes out: to the truly religious
people, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness here and now,
who believe in brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear pain
and ridicule and privation for the sake of its ultimate achievement.

        From discord and defeat,
      From doubt and lame division,
        We pluck the fruit and eat;
  And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....
      O sorrowing hearts of slaves,
        We heard you beat from far!
      We bring the light that saves,
        We bring the morning star;
  Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things are....

#Envoi#

I have come to the end of my task; but one question troubles me. I
think of the "young men and maidens meek" who will read this book, and
I wonder what they will make of it. We have had a lark together; we
have gone romping down the vista of the ages, swatting every venerable
head that showed itself, beating the dust out of ancient delusions.
You would like all your life to be that kind of lark; but you may not
find it so, and perhaps you will suffer disillusionment and vexation.

I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have nearly
all been gallant and honest, but they have not all been wise, and
therefore not so happy as they might have been. In the course of time
I have formulated to myself the peril to which young radicals are
exposed. We see so much that is wrong in ancient things, it gets to be
a habit with us to reject them. We have only to know that a thing is
old to feel an impulse of impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are
tempted to welcome anything which can prove itself to be
unprecedented. There is a common type of radical whose aim in life is
to be several jumps ahead of mankind; whose criterion of conduct is
that it shocks the bourgeois. If you do not know that type, you may
find him--and her--in the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the
newest red chemicals, smoking the newest brand of cigarettes, and
discussing the newest form of #psycopathia sexualis#. After you have
watched them a while, you realize that these ultra-new people have
fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy, the non sequitur,
and likewise to the oldest form of slavery, which is self-indulgence.

If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon
ignorance, and cultivated by greed, it is also true that much in the
old moral codes is based upon facts which will not change so long as
man is what he is--a creature of impulses, good and bad, wise and
foolish, selfish and generous, and compelled to make choice between
these impulses; so long as he is a material body and a personal
consciousness, obliged to live in society and adjust himself to the
rights of others. What I would like to say to young radicals--if there
is any way to say it without seeming a prig--is that in choosing their
own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and
radical fervor, but wisdom and judgment and hard study.

It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat over
and over the blunders of the past, the blunders of tyranny and
slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient societies;
and surely it is a poor way to begin by repeating in our own persons
the most ancient blunders of the moral life. To light the fires of
lust in our hearts, and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are
trying new experiments in psychology! Who does not know the radical
woman who demonstrates her emancipation from convention by destroying
her nerves with nicotine? Who does not know the genius of revolt who
demonstrates his repudiation of private property by permitting his
lady loves to support him? Who does not know the man who finds in the
phrases of revolution the most effective devices for the seducing of
young girls?

You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the conclusion
that there is anything in it to spare you the duty of getting yourself
moral standards and holding yourself to them. On the contrary, because
your task is the highest and hardest that man has yet undertaken--for
this reason you will need standards the most exacting ever formulated.
Let me quote some words from a teacher you will not accuse of holding
to the slave-moralities:

     Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I
     hear, and not that thou hast escaped a yoke.

     Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke? Free from what?
     What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell me:
     free to what?

     Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang
     thy will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own
     judge, and avenger of thy law?

     Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of
     thy law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into
     the icy breath of isolation.

Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emerge into the sunlight of
knowledge, to take control of a world, and to make it over, not
according to the will of any gods, but according to the law in our own
hearts. For that task we have need of all the resources of our being;
of courage and high devotion, of faith in ourselves and our comrades,
of clean, straight thinking, of discipline both of body and mind. We
go to this task with a knowledge as old as the first moral impulse of
mankind--the knowledge that our actions determine the future of life,
not merely for ourselves but for all the race. For this is one of the
laws of the ancient Hebrews which modern science has not repealed, but
on the contrary has reinforced with a thousand confirmations--that the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and
fourth generations.

I get letters from the readers of my books; nearly always they are
young people, so I feel like the father of a large family. I gather
them now about my knee, and pronounce upon them a benediction in the
ancient patriarchal style. Children and grandchildren of my hopes, for
ages men suffered and fought, so that the world might be turned over
to you. Now the day is coming, the glad, new day which blinds us with
the shining of its wings; it is coming so swiftly that I am afraid of
it. I thought we should have more time to get ready for the taking
over of the world! But the old managers of it went insane, they took
to tearing each other's eyes out, and now they lie dead about us. So,
whether we will or not, we have to take charge of the world; we have
to decide what to do with it, even while we are doing it. Let us not
fail, young comrades; let us not write on the scroll of history that
mankind had to go through yet new generations of wars and tumults and
enslavements, because the youth of the international revolution could
not lift themselves above those ancient personal vices which wrecked
the fair hopes of their fathers--bigotry and intolerance,
vindictiveness and vanity, envy, hatred and malice and all
uncharitableness!

       *       *       *       *       *




INDEX

A

Abbott, Lyman 175-191
Abbott, L.F. 189
Adams 214
Adventists 237
Amberley 52
Anglican Church 47-88
Appeal to Reason 144
Archer 133
Assyria 32
Atkinson 267
Austria 155
Aztecs 32

B

Babists 254
Babylonia 26, 32, 50
Baxter 183
Beilhardt 254
Berkman 288
Besant 250
Bible-students 246
Bismarck 153
Black Magic 253
Blavatsky 23, 256
Blougram 109
Bonzano 121, 126
Booth 298
Bootstrap-lifting 11, 266
Brougher 209
Brown 268
Buchanan 68, 159
Buckle 41
Burns 75

C

Cæsar 161
Cannon 143
Carlyle 163
Carnegie 177
Catholic Church 27, 105-157, 295
Catholic Encyclopedia 67
Centrum 152
Charcot 258
Chatterton-Hill 220
Chinese 74
Christian Endeavor World 216
Christian Science 254-264
Churchman 101, 102
Clark 23
Clough 235
Columbus 115
Conway 127
Curates 71

D

Darwin 56
Day 205
Debs 289
Dixon 204, 205
Dowie 242
Durham 80

E

Eastman 140
Eddy 257, 261
Education 81
England 49, 73, 75
England, Church of 47-88
Episcopal Church 89-102
Eucharist 59

F

Ferrer 51, 133
Fish 65
Flint 78, 79
Fogazzaro 298
Foraker 143
Frederick 163

G

Galileo 51
Gallipoli 61
Garrison 167
Gladstone 57, 58, 81
Goldman 287
Goode 59, 61
Green 63
Gurney 254

H

Hagen 219
Hale 213
Hammurabi 85
Hampton 181
Ha'nish 250
Hanna 122, 142, 153, 213
Harris 72
Harrison 304
Haywood 288
Hebrew 36, 173, 284, 285
Henry the Eighth 66, 67
Hill, Joe 219
Hill, Rev. J.W. 204
Holmes 276
Holy Rollers 242, 243
Hubbard 190
Huss 38, 41
Huxley 56, 58
Hyndman 256
Hyslop 223

I

Inquisition 39, 51
Ireland 43
Isaiah 287

J

Janet 258
Jastrow 32
Jehovah 35, 36
Jesuits 148
Jesus 74, 100, 101, 161,
   172, 174, 175, 176, 197, 221,
   258, 281, 282, 290, 291, 292
Jews 284, 286
Job 25, 26, 55
Joshua 37
Jowett 54
Jungle 190, 194, 197
Junker 152

K

Kaiser 164-166
Kant 303
Kemp 19
King Coal 137
Kingsley 34
Knights of Columbus 123
Koreshanity 248

L

La Follette 260
Landor 34
Lankester 306
Lea 39
Leeky 136
Leo XIII 119, 123
Ligouri 174
Li Hung Chang 75
London 276
Los Angeles 149, 150, 208, 209, 217
L.A. Examiner 149
L.A. Times 44, 151
Lourdes 258
Luther 161, 163

M

MacGill 42
Machen 273
Mallock 77
Malthus 77
Manning 118
Manu 285
Markham 302
Marx 71, 173
Massey 55
Mazdaznan 250
McCabe 148
McDonald 139
Mellen 185
Menace 135
Milton 199
Morality 308
More 85
Morgan 99, 101
Mormon 239, 240
Moses 36, 37

N

Nazarite 29
New Haven 180, 181
New Thought 264
N.Y. Evening Post 223
N.Y. Sun 193
N.Y. Times 211
Nichols 270
Noel 83, 286
Northcliffe 72
Numerology 271

O

Oahspe 248
O'Connell 120
Opium 74
Outlook 175-198

P

Paine 87
Paley 87
Pasadena 150, 208, 276
Patent Medicine 214
Patterson 139
Paul 56, 161, 207
Peabody 99
Peters 204
Phelan 119
Pillsbury 167
Pius IX 116
Plowman 64
Pope 67, 121, 143
Positivists 304
Post 216
Potter 98
Prescott 32
Preston 127
Protestant 201
Prussia 153, 163

Q

Quakers 177
Quay 212
Quigley 129

R

Rauschenbusch 163, 283
Rawson 272
Reformation 163, 201
Religion 16, 17
Rig-Veda 30
Robinson 228
Rockefeller 138, 177, 190, 192, 211
Roosevelt 142
Russell, C.E. 95, 181
Russell, G. 82
Russell, Pastor 247
Ryan 105

S

Sacred Heart 113
Salpetriere 238
Salvation Army 298
Sanday 78
Segur 117
Shaftesbury 74, 82
Shakers 244, 245
Shelley 87, 183
Siam 34
Sinn Fein 295
Smith, Gipsy 217
Smith, Goldwin 223
Soap Box 290
Socialist Movement 311
Spain 131
Spiritualism 275
Stalker 78
Sterling 45
Sunday 207, 210
Swinburne 103
Syracuse 205

T

Tablet 157
Tacitus 170
Taft 142-144
Tammany 93, 143
Thackery 68, 212
Theosophists 254, 255
Thirty-nine Articles 54
Tingley 256
Torrey 203
Tractarian 55
Trinity 94
Trinity Corporation 95
Trowbridge 29

V

Vedder 76
Voltaire 53

W

Waddell 279
Wagner 219
Wall Street 181
Wanamaker 203
Ward 55
Wattles 268
Wesley 170
Westcott 79
White, A.D. 52
White, Bouck 192
Wilberforce 56, 88
William 63
Wilson 169, 186

Y

Yogi 255
York 76

       *       *       *       *       *