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

#Hell-Fire#

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *




#BOOK TWO#

#The Church of Good Society#

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

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

  Sterling.

       *       *       *       *       *




#The Rain Makers#

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

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

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

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

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

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

#The Babylonian Fire-god#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#The Medicine-men#

Andrew D. White tells us that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#The Canonization of Incompetence#

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

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

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

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

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

#Gibson's Preservative#

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

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

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

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

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

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

#The Elders#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets,
  A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land,
  Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor,
  A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord;
  And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup,
  He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy.
  Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands

  Away to the Orders that have no pity;
  Money rains upon their altars.
  There where such parsons be living at ease
  They have no pity on the poor; that is their "charity".
  Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad,
  But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all
  And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.

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

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

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

#Church History#

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

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

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

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

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

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

     I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious
     King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600
     pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be
     made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only
     prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?
     As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of
     cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the
     court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that
     godless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel
     Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.
     Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment?
     Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in
     German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the
     clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because
     the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics
     would not listen to him!

#Land and Livings#

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

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

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

As an old song puts the matter:

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

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