The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and
     having abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its
     fundamental beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and
     the laboring classes.... The spiritual ideal of life has
     gone out of the masses as well as the classes, and nothing
     is left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.

And again, more menacingly yet:

     The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution
     that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and
     immortality.

What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step up,
ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the Psychical
Research hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as to the cost of
milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!

You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the Wholesale
Pickpockets' Association making use of their incantations. You admired
my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did
not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts. But what do these
quotations mean, unless they mean what I have said? Are not these
three professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any
men of learning you can find in our present-day society?

And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the
young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and
discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who
discovers that professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not
interested in justice among men, but only in collecting funds for
their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach
the rich how to paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonder that
such young students conclude that #bourgeois# thinkers do not know
what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be
kicked out of the temple of truth?

#Running the Rapids#

And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means
to society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the
hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all
the intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support
of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of
us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for
a metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the
wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit
in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead;
and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and
into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along
with the speed of a race-horse.

With every sense alert, you watch for the rocks, and when you see one,
you dip your paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion
draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail to do
it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go
down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen
for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of
life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The paddle
which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but in
most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book;
and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and
Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable
obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.--he casts a holy
wafer upon the foaming torrent.

       *       *       *       *       *




And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save
yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard
together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in
winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the
Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals
in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital
tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you
are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul,
the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a
means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course
those who think him a voice of God can form no conception of the
dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome
sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees
or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to the
Gentiles.

You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You
are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful
and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the
cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever
decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a
prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and
truth. The next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by
law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold
copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate
details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw
your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who
scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in
the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for
nothing--the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out
your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a
civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a
sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.

#Birth Control#

I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to
the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used
to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these weapons are not
allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider
the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our great
cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying
as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can
not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this
operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There
exists a simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind and
futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as
animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our
great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded
women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling
desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the
grave as fast as they are born--until finally the mother, worn out
with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten
offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair,
make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from
Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated
that in the United States alone there are a million abortions
every year; and consider that all this hideous mass of suffering--a
bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper
correspondent--might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing
formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of
Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the
nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and
courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young
girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose
for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how to keep from becoming
pregnant!

And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors who
perpetrated this infamy under, a so-called "reform" administration in
New York City--and what do you find? The first thing you find is that
they themselves, one and all, practice birth-control with their wives
or their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the
statute-books are crowded with other laws which they make no pretense
of enforcing; for example, the law which forbids the saloons to be
open on Sunday--which law they take the liberty of understanding to
mean that the saloons shall not have their front doors open on Sunday.
You will find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos;
they are afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid
of the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women
of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf
in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of Tradition-worship;
hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers,
who repeat the instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if God were as
blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and could see no difference between
the Garden of Eden, full of all fruits that grow and all creatures
that run and fly and swim, and a modern East Side tenement-room, with
an oil stove and no windows and no water-closet, and the price of
cabbage seven cents a pound!

#Sheep#

There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America.
They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the
West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I
do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more
democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the
liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly
derived from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are
honestly seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor
for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran
scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they
cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and
foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things
because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain
ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three
thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.

You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the
example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all the
rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may
have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist explains this
seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in high
mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when
the leader leaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, without
waiting to see in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains
and no enemies, but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way
the tailor still sews buttons at the back of your dress-coat, because
a couple of hundred years age all gentlemen wore swords; in the same
way our railroad builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and
liable to overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled
by mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in
spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete protection
against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat meat on Friday,
because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodox
Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's sister, because of
something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox Baptist requires total
immersion in a climate quite different from that of Palestine; the
orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise on the
Sabbath.

In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life, tending
sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent thing for them to
rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear
the reading of the best literature of their time. But nowadays the
city slave spends his week-days shut up in an office, poring over a
ledger, or in a sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously,
therefore, the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the
open air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we
human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern
statute-books, and if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries
to play base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next
morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.

In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened,
but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there are tennis courts
built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot
use these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew
taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the swimming pool in the park
is closed to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire
about it, I am told that it is desirable that city employees should
have one day's rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be
possible to relay the employees, so that they might all have one, or
even two days' rest a week, and still give the public their rights on
Sunday, there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when their
peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law enforces a
general boredom, the public may be more disposed to endure the boredom
of sermons.

In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving
pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the
picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred
concerts"--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to
mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to the
imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and
Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as
Ibsen and Brieux.

I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an
experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this century
of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose
constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the
establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve
a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for
playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a
warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison
costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night
in a steel-barred cell full of vermin--in a building housing some five
hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms
under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air
nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise court
to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one
another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their
cells with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a
sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the pious city of
Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches! The writer was
informed that he would return to this institution regularly every week
unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a private
club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making
the discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of
the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday,
and by threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones
arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows again the
importance of understanding this relationship of Superstition and Big
Business!

       *       *       *       *       *




#BOOK SIX#

#The Church of the Quacks#

  They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
  And how one ought never to think of one's self,
  And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
  My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
      How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
      How pleasant it is to have money.

  Clough.

       *       *       *       *       *




#Tabula Rasa#

Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to
write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual
life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and
poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like
freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what
freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical
persons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural
interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a living out
of it.

My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle
Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found myself in a
nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd
character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let
the devil snare them into resting on the first day of the week,
whereas the Bible states distinctly that the Lord "rested on the
seventh day". So here is a million dollar establishment, with a
thousand or two patients and employees, and on Friday at sundown the
silence of death settles upon the place, and stays settled until
sundown of Saturday, when everything comes suddenly to life again, and
there is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I
used to call "sterilized dancing"--the men pairing with men and the
women with women.

They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with their
eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways, because, as not
all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every
day of the week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training
"medical missionaries" to send to Africa, and is teaching these
supposed-to-be-scientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil,
and not proven anyhow!

You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment
alone in his office, and he will smile and admit that of course it is
not necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it
is--there are different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know
how it is. You have an institution founded upon a certain dogma, and
run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing
things. It is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the
patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay high
prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them,
which you think more important than teaching abstract notions about
their being descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture
vegetarian foods for them, and build up an enormous business--so
obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.

This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could cite
a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of another sect,
the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive Methodists,
Bible-worshippers not content with the King James version, but going
back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a "University", located in one of
the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institution with
seventy-five students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the
"president," who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanse of
his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest
grammatical errors, such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year
witnessed a split, and the founding of a brand new church and
"University"--because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so
much that the students got no chance to study; also because he sent
home a rich man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her
fleshly nature.

And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you
back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady friend of
mine, generously blessed with this world's goods, asks me have I seen
the hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies, "Didn't you know there
was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and never has
anything to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates
spiritually." I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rolling
palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave.
"He received you?" I ask. "Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was
your impression of him?" "Oh, how he stank!" I answer that this is the
odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I
have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are
definite physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.

#The Book of Mormon#

Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still
stranger cult.

On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord
delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a
"backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the
appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit
of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make
miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout
believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In this case the plates
were written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the Angel thoughtfully
provided Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magic stones
with which to read the records. They proved to deal with a mystery
which has haunted the minds of Bible students for centuries--the fate
of the "lost ten tribes of Israel", who were now revealed to have been
the ancestors of the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a
new religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general;
so, on the 6th of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N.Y., there
was formally launched the "Church of the Latter Day Saints." Smith
turned over to his followers his translation of the miraculous plates,
called "The Book of Mormon"; obviously genuine, for it read precisely
like the books which we already know are the revealed word of God.
But, on chance that this might not be sufficient, we were offered in
the preface two documents, the "Testimony of Three Witnesses", and the
"Further Testimony of Eight Witnesses". The latter being the shorter,
may be quoted:

     Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people,
     unto whom this work shall come: That Joseph Smith Jr., the
     translator of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of
     which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold;
     and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath translated,
     we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings
     there-on, all of which has the appearance of ancient work
     and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record with
     words of soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto us,
     for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the
     said Smith hath got the plates of which we have spoken. And
     we give our names unto the world, to witness that which we
     have seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.

  Christian Whitmer
  Jacob Whitmer
  Peter Whitmer, Jr.
  John Whitmer
  Hiram Page
  Joseph Smith, Sr.
  Hyrum Smith
  Saml. H. Smith

The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore out
the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its divine origin; it
was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted, and its followers
proceeded to massacre the nearby unbelieving populations, just as the
divinely guided Hebrews had done. Driven from place to place, they
built at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful temple, according to plans revealed
in a vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where
they have a magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers.
The United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected to
their practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have as many
wives as they could support; the government confiscated the church's
property, and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy, as is
done by elderly church members in other parts of the country. Recently
the head of the church, who bears the title of "Prophet, Seer and
Revelator", was persuaded to permit an examination of one of its
secret plates, the "Book of Abraham", by egyptologists, who found that
it was ordinary Egyptian hieroglyphics, not "reformed", but containing
prayers to the sun-god. But this will of course make no difference to
the devout followers of Joseph--any more than it has made to devout
Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that the
Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and that the
four gospels date from the second and third centuries after Christ.

#Holy Rolling#

All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults, some of them
pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely grotesque. Thus,
for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the
"Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed himself up in scarlet
and purple robes with stars on. Through his Zion City Bank and Zion
City Realty Company he became enormously wealthy; he finally announced
himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I remember as a boy how he brought
his gospel to New York, and P.T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white
elephant never made such a sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis
overwhelmed the old prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and
his tabernacle and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the
rule of all religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting
up, and suing one another in the law-courts.

Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers", ghastly sects
which cultivate the religious hysterias, and have spread like a plague
among the women of our lonely prairie farms and desert ranches. The
"Holy Rollers", who call themselves the "Apostolic Church", have a
meeting place here in Pasadena, and any Sunday evening at nine o'clock
you may see the Spirit of the Lord taking possession of the
worshippers, causing moans and shrieks and convulsions; you may see a
woman holding her hands aloft for seventeen minutes by the watch,
making chattering sounds like an ape. This is called "talking in
tongues" and is a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come
back at eleven in the evening, you will find the entire congregation,
men and women, prostrate on the floor, or hanging over the benches;
and maybe a child moaning in terror, having a devil cast out.

You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself into
these convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust", which is "published
Monthly (D.V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work and Bible Training
School." Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The Pentecostal Baptism", and
tells the story of her experiences. She "camped on the Word of God,"
she declares.

     I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the
     mission told me, "You can go down to the mission and stay
     there all day. There is plenty of wood, and you can stay
     there all night." I went down, and there was plenty of "let
     go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got
     wonderfully loosed....

     Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God told
     me it was mine. What was there left for me to pray about. He
     spoiled my praying and I took up praising. I praised God
     that He who worked in the Upper Room was working the same in
     me. I praised, and I praised, and I praised. The devil said
     to me, "That's mechanical." I said, "I'll praise You Lord,
     and if You want real praise, You'll have to put the wind in
     the sails."

     That's the way I came through. One morning I was just
     getting out of bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the
     enemy likes to call it, began to come. The Lord said, "Let
     it babble!" I let. The babble increased, and by night I was
     up to my neck. I let. I still let. That's all. Someone else
     does the work, and it does not tire you.

And here is another paper. "Meat in Due Season: published monthly, or
as often as the Lord leads." The editor quotes the Bible, "Call upon
the name of the Lord," and explains that "Call means #call#." The word
appears to have a special meaning to these pentecostal persons--it
means working yourself into a frenzy of agitation; as the editor puts
it, "you must #lay# hold of the #horns# of the #altar#." He goes on to
exhort--the bold face being his:

     Pray as if your very life depended upon it! The first few
     minutes seemingly all the powers of hell will contend every
     word, the next few, relief in a measure will come, more
     liberty in calling. In a very little while you will be #dead
     to the room, dead to the chair#, dead to everyone around
     you, dead to all and tremendously alive to your desperate
     need and emptyness; this conviction will grow as you
     increase calling upon Him. It maybe you'll weep, it maybe
     you'll perspire, it maybe your clothing will be deranged, it
     maybe your throat will get sore. Never for a moment let your
     mind rest on the condition of your person. Open your mouth
     and God has promised to fill it. Ask persistently until the
     very floor seems to sink beneath you and the fountains of
     the deep, of your heart let loose. Like David, "pour out
     your soul" like one would pour water out of a bucket. I have
     seen hundreds get through right at this point. When
     #self-thought, reticence, decorum, reserve, propriety and
     dignity# had all been thrown to the four winds of heaven.
     Self was then obliterated and consciousness of person gone.
     Draw near to God and He will draw near to you saith the
     scripture, but you must draw near to Him first.

These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a sect
which originated in England, but was driven by persecution to the New
World. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of True
Believers in Christ's Second Coming," and were founded by Ann Lee, who
variously termed herself the "Female Christ", the "Holy Comforter",
and the "God-anointed Woman". They might be termed the suffragettes of
religion, for they pray always to "Our Father and Mother, which are in
heaven." They were taught the convenient doctrine that their Founder
had "spiritual illumination", so that any evidence of the senses used
against her might deceive. She governed through terror, holding that
by her mental powers she could inflict torment upon any of her
followers. Fortunately she taught absolute celibacy, and so there are
now only about a thousand of her disciples.

Bible Prophecy

This far western country swarms with those fanatics who await the
return of Christ, and find in Bible chronology positive evidence that
he is coming on a specified day. Seldom do I give a lecture on
Socialism that some eager old lady does not come up to me and point
out how futile are my hopes, because the Millenium will come before
the Revolution. Several times I have come on an item in the
newspapers, telling of a group of people, sometimes whole villages,
selling their goods and going out into the fields to shout and sing
and pray, expecting the vision of the Lord and His Angels in the
skies. I have in my hand a pamphlet entitled "Shekineh: The Glory of
God in Israel, Facts Mathematically Foretold, of the Soon Coming of
Our Blessed Lord." It is earnestly, yearningly written, in that spirit
of feeble-minded affectionateness which the Bible-sects seem to
encourage:

     Now dear reader you see that these problems tell a wonderful
     story which I know are the Eternal Truths of God. Jesus is
     soon coming. I believe that from now on we can say, next;
     week perhaps our blessed Lord will return. Yet the time may
     not end till the close of the A.M. year, which will be March
     20th, 1897. But let us take up the sickle of God, etc. Oh,
     my Christian friends, live near the Blessed Christ, and gain
     eternal life through Jesus Our Lord!

In the public library I find another pamphlet, entitled "The Our
Race," which proves that the "lost ten tribes of Israel" are not the
American Indians, but the Irish! And here is a publication of the
"Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society," declaring:

     The great pyramid in Egypt is a witness to all the events of
     the ages and of our day. The pyramid's downward passage
     under "a Draconis" symbolizes the course of Sin. Its first
     ascending passage symbolizes the Jewish Age. Its Grand
     Gallery symbolizes the Gospel Age. Its upper step symbolizes
     the approaching period of tribulation and anarchy,
     "Judgment" upon Christendom.

It is a Sunday morning, and I sit in the California sunshine revising
this manuscript, when a decorous-looking young man approaches, having
a sack over his shoulder. "From the Bible-students," he says politely,
and hands me a little paper, "The Bible Students' Monthly: an
Independent, Unsectarian Religious Newspaper, Specially devoted to the
Forwarding of the Lay-men's Home Missionary Movement for the Glory of
God and Good of Humanity." The leading article is headed "The Fall of
Babylon: Ancient Babylon a Type--Mystic Babylon the Antitype: Why
Christendom must Suffer--the Final Outcome." A note explains:

     The following article is extracted from Pastor Russell's
     posthumous volume entitled "The Finished Mystery," the 7th
     in the series of his Studies in the Scriptures and published
     subsequent to his death. Pastor Russell held the distinction
     of being the most fearless and powerful writer of modern
     times on ecclesiastical subjects. In this posthumous volume,
     which is called "his last legacy to the Christians on
     earth," is found a thorough exposition of every verse in the
     entire book of Revelation and also an elucidation of the
     obscure prophecy of Ezekiel. The book contains 608 pages,
     handsomely bound in embossed cloth.

Pastor Russell used to publish a two-column sermon in some
hundreds of Sunday newspapers, together with a presentment of his
features--solemn, stiff, white-whiskered, set off with a "choker" and
a black broadcloth coat. There are five million such faces in America,
but if you have an impulse to despair for your country, remember that
it produced Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, as well as Pastor Russell and
the Moody and Sankey hymn-book. I quote one passage from "The Finished
Mystery", in order that the reader may know what it means to "hold the
distinction of being the most fearless and powerful writer of modern
times on ecclesiastical subjects." Pastor Russell does not approve of
the Methodists, and he quotes twelve verses of Revelation, line by
line and phrase by phrase, showing how the evil course and downfall of
the Wesleyan system were divinely foretold. Thus:

     "But that they should be tormented five months."--In
     symbolic time, 150 years--5x30=150. (Ezek. 4:6.) Wesley
     became the first Methodist in 1728. (Rev. 9: 1.) When the
     Methodist denomination, with all the others, was cast off
     from favor in 1878 (Rev. 3:14) its powers to torment men by
     preaching what Presbyterians describe as "Conscious misery,
     eternal in duration" came to an end legally, and to a large
     extent actually.--Rev. 9:10.

P.S. A few months pass, and while this book is going to press, "The
Finished Mystery" is suppressed by the government and several score
"Bible Students" are landed in jail for sedition.

#Koreshanity#

Such are the beliefs built on the Bible. But there are other ancient
writings with strange nomenclature and ritual and symbolism,
calculated to impress the unlettered; also our prophets have
imaginations of their own, and can invent nomenclature and ritual and
symbolism never seen in heaven nor on earth before. Thus there is Dr.
Newo Newi New, who called himself "Archbishop of the Newthot Church,"
and gathered about him a harem of devoted females in San Francisco,
and was landed in jail for using the mails to defraud. Or there is
"Oahspe, the Cosmic Bible," a work of brand-new revelation with a
brand-new view of the universe and all things therein:

     The reader soon discovers that he must radically revise not
     only his ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the order and
     significance of names and titles commonly applied to the
     Transcendental Brethren. The great provinces of Etheria are
     presided over by chiefs, chosen for their superior
     development in wisdom and love. For our solar system to
     cross one of these provinces requires about 3,000 years, and
     between them are belts of high Etherian light which take
     several years to pass over. The passage of each province is
     a cycle of earthly history, and the crossings are called
     Dawns of Dan.

And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed by the Lord to Dr.
C.R. Teed of Chicago in the year 1889. This new seer took the name of
Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, "the Shepherd from Joseph, the
Stone of Israel, the Sun-Man; the illuminating center of the Son of
man", and went out on the streets of the city to preach that the earth
is a hollow sphere with the stars inside. The street urchins of the
pork-packing metropolis threw stones at him, and the irreverent
newspapers took up his adventures, with the result that followers
gathered, and now there is a flourishing colony in Florida, with a
dignified magazine called "The Flaming Sword", and a collection of
propaganda volumes: "The Cellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of Koreshan
Universology and the New Geodesy"; "The Immortal Manhood, the Laws and
Processes of its Attainment in the Flesh"; "The Great Red Dragon, by
Lord Chester"; "The Coming of the Shepherd from Joseph, The Standing
of the Great Ensign, by Koresh." The "Religio-science" of this Chicago
revelator is based, first upon some precise measurements of the earth
which prove that its surface is concave; and second upon some
philological discoveries very much resembling puns. Thus the "cross of
Christ" is explained in a sense of the word more common among
horse-breeders than among theologians:

     The highest characteristic of the alchemical law is the
     cross of Christ with sensual man. The cross means that the
     Lord God, in order to perpetuate his own being, descends
     into the race of sensuality.

And again, when someone asks about meteors:

     The word Heaven means things heaved up, that is, heaved up
     from their material basis, the earth; thus, the meteors
     which fall to the earth are composed of metallic, mineral,
     and geological substances, being materialized or actually
     created in the atmosphere by an alchemico-organic process
     from zones or belts periodically open, which precipitate
     their contents in the form or shape of meteors."

And perhaps I ought also to quote the "Indicia of Human Progress", by
"Berthaldine, Matrona". I don't know what a "Matrona" is--unless it is
a female matron. This female matron tells me that now is the "Time of
Restitution", and explains that "the prolification of the human race
has reached a fruition of the adultery of the truth and good of the
Lord with the fallacies and evils of the mortal hells" ...We have
come, it seems, to the "age of Pisces", which is "one of the greatest
radical prolification"; and what we now need is the "power of
polarization", so that we may join the "White Horse Army of the Most
High", which is the organization of the "Aquarian age", proclaimed by
Koresh on January 15th, 1891.

#Mazdaznan#

And here is another and even more startling revelation from Chicago,
given to a seer by the name of Dr. Otoman Prince of Adusht Ha'nish,
prophet of the Sun God, Prince of Peace, Manthra Magi of Temple El
Katman, Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and Envoy of Mazdaznan
living, Viceroy-Elect and International Head of Master-Thot. If you
had happened to live near the town of Mendota, Illinois, and had known
the German grocer-boy named Otto Hanisch, you might at first have
trouble in recognizing him through this transmogrification. I have
traced his career in the files of the Chicago newspapers, and find him
herding sheep, setting type, preaching prestidigitation, mesmerism,
and fake spiritualism, joining the Mormon Church, then the "Christian
Catholic Church in Zion", and then the cult of Brighouse, who claimed
to be Christ returned.

Finally he sets himself up in Chicago as a Persian Magus, teaching
Yogi breathing exercises and occult sex-lore to the elegant society
ladies of the pork-packing metropolis. The Sun God, worshipped for two
score centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on
Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at which his
disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms--"the white and pinkish for males,
the blue-tinted for females". He wears a long flowing robe of pale
grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid shoes, and he
sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner Studies", price five
dollars per volume, with information on such subjects as:

     The Immaculate Conception and its Repetition; The Secrets of
     Lovers Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates; Magnetic
     Attraction and Electric Mating.

A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jail for six months;
but that does not harm his cult, which now has a temple in Chicago,
presided over by a lady called Kalantress and Evangelist; also a
"Northern Stronghold" in Montreal, an "Embassy" in London, an
"International Aryana" in Switzerland, and "Centers" all over America.
At the moment of going to press, the prophet himself is in flight,
pursued by a warrant charging him with improper conduct with a number
of young boys in a Los Angeles hotel.

I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a farrago of every
kind of ancient mysticism--paper and binding from the Bible,
illustrations from the Egyptian, names from the Zoroastrian, health
rules from the Hindoos, laws from the Confucians--price ten dollars
per volume. Would you like to discover your seventeen senses, to
develop them according to the Ga-Llama principle, and to share the
"expansion of the magnetic circles"? Here is the way to do it:

     Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one
     exhalation, speak slowly:

     Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth
     hidden by the vase of dazzling light.

     Again inhale for four seconds, and breathe out the following
     sentence upon one exhalation as before:

     Soften the radiation of Thy Illuminating Splendor, that I
     may behold Thy True Being.

I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of the
prophet's arriving there. He takes the front page with the captivating
headline: "Women Didn't Think Till They Put On Corsets". The interview
tells about his mysteriousness, his aloofness, his bird-like-diet, and
his personal beauty. "Despite his seventy-three years, Ha'nish
evidences no sign of age. His keen blue eyes showed no sign of
wavering. There were no wrinkles on his face, and his walk was that of
a man of forty." The humor of this becomes apparent when we mention
that at Ha'nish's trial, three or four years ago, he was proven to be
thirty-five years old!

Being thus warned as to the accuracy of American journalism, we shall
not be taken in by the repeated statements that the Mazdaznan prophet
is a millionaire. But there is no doubt that he is wealthy; and as all
Americans wish to be wealthy, I will quote his formula of prosperity,
his method of accomplishing what might be called the Individual
Revolution:

     When hungry and you do not know where to get your next piece
     of bread, do not despair. Thy Father, all-loving, has
     provided, you with everything that will meet all cases of
     emergency.

     Place your teeth tightly together, with tongue pressing
     against the lower teeth and lips parted. Breathe in, close
     lips immediately, exhaling through the nostrils. Breathe
     again; if saliva forms in your mouth, hold your breath so
     you can swallow it first before you exhale. You thus take
     out of the air the metal-substance contained therein; you
     can even taste the iron which you convert into substance
     required for making the blood. Should you feel that,
     although you have sufficient iron in the blood, there is a
     lack of copper and zinc and silver, place upper teeth over
     lower, keep lower lip tightly to lower teeth, now breathe
     and you can even taste the metals named. Then should you
     feel you need more gold element for your brain functions,
     place your back teeth together just as if you were to grind
     the back teeth, taking short breaths only. You will then
     learn to know that there is gold and silver all around us.
     That our bodies are filled with quite a quantity of gold.

#Black Magic#

What all this means is that we have a continent, with a hundred
million half-educated people, materially prosperous, but spiritually
starving; so any man who possesses personality, who looks in any way
strange and impressive, or has hunted up old books in a library, and
can pronounce mysterious words in a thrilling voice--such a man can
find followers. Anybody can do it with any doctrine, from anywhere,
Persia or Patagonia, Pekin or Pompei. I would be willing to wager that
if I cared to come out and announce that I had had a visit from _God_
last night, and to devote such literary and emotional power as I
possess to communicating a new revelation, I could have a temple, a
university, and a million dollars within five years at the outside.
And if at the end of five years I were to announce that I had played a
joke on the world, some one of my followers would convince the
faithful that I had been an agent of God without knowing it, and that
the leadership had now been turned over to him.

I would not be understood as believing that all our cults are
undiluted fakery, for that would be doing injustice to some earnest
people. There are, in this country, many followers of the Persian
reformer, Abbas Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and who have
what I am inclined to think is the purest and most dignified religion
in existence. There was a man named Jacob Beilhardt, who founded a
cult in Illinois with the painful name of "Spirit Fruit Colony", who
nevertheless was a man of spiritual insight, a true mystic; he was
honest, and so he failed, and died of a broken heart. Also there are
the Christian Scientists and the Theosophists, so exasperating that
one would like to throw them onto the rubbish-heap, who yet compel us
to sift over their mountains of chaff for the grains of truth which
will bear fruit in future.

While we western races have been exploring the natural world and
perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo students have been
exploring the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and
Lodge and Janet and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us today
they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtless they have hints of
other things, upon which our scientists have not yet come. I have
friends, perfectly sane and competent people, who tell me that they
can see auras, and use this ability as a means of judging character.
Shall I say that there are no auras, simply because I do not happen to
have this gift of seeing them? In the same way, having read Gurney's
"Phantasms of the Living," I am not ready to ridicule the claim of the
Yogi adepts, that they are able to project some kind of astral body,
and to communicate with one another from distant places. But granting
such occult powers in a world of economic strife, what follows? Simply
new floods of charlatanism, elaborate and complicated systems of
ritual and metaphysic for the deluding and plundering of the
credulous.

I have seen the thing working itself out in one case known to me. A
young man had a gift of mental healing; I know, because I saw it work;
but it did not always work, and that was annoying. He was penniless
and had a taste for power, and to eke out his erratic endowment he got
himself books of Eastern lore, and day by day as I watched him I could
see him becoming more and more impressive, mysterious and forbidding.
Today he is a full-fledged wonder-worker, with the language of a dozen
mystic cults at his tongue's end, and the reverent regard of many
wealthy ladies. I have never tried to break through his guard, but I
feel certain that he is a deliberate charlatan.

This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible. Just as the
manufacturer of honest foods is driven out by the adulterator, so the
worker of miracles drives out the sincere investigator. As a result we
have here in America a plague of Eastern cults, with "swamis" using
soft yellow robes and soft brown eyes to win the souls of idle society
ladies. These teachers of ancient Hindoo lore despise us as a race of
barbarians; but they stay--whether because of love of man or woman, I
do not pretend to say.

There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and institutes
and temples and colonies, and a doctrine as complex and detailed and
fantastic as that of the Roman Catholics. I have already referred to
the writings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway Russian army officer's
daughter, whose career reads like a tale out of the Arabian Nights.
And there is Annie Besant, who was once an ardent worker in the
Social-democratic Federation; H.M. Hyndman tells of his dismay when
she went to India and walked in a procession between two white bulls!
Here in California is Madame Tingley, with a colony and a host of
followers in a minature paradise. Men work at money-lending or
manufacturing sporting-goods, and when they get old and tired they
make the thrilling discovery that they have souls; the theosophists
cultivate these souls and they leave their money to the soul-cause,
and there are lawsuits and exposГ©s in the newspapers. For, you see,
there is ferocious rivalry in the game of cultivating millionaire
souls; there are slanders and feuds, just as in soulless affairs.
"Don't have anything to do with Madame Tingley," whispers a
Theosophist lady to my Wife; and when my wife in all innocence
inquires, "Why not?" the awe-stricken answer comes, "She practices
black magic!"