who favor radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself–autocratic to the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical concerning the grafts of grace.
In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent had a large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate, himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King’s birthday, to preach a sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists–that is, clergymen holding more than one “living”–to furnish curates to do their work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting against it without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of their thirty-nine articles than with one thirty-ninth of their income.
There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England. They are the sons of the less influential ruling families, and of the clergy; they have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and possess the one essential qualification, that they are gentlemen. Their average price is two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their function was made clear to me when I attended my first English tea-party. There was a wicker table, perhaps a foot and a half square, having three shelves, one below the other the top layer the plates and napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, “Will you pass the curate, please?” I looked puzzled, and she pointed. “We call that the curate, because it does the work of a curate.”
Graft in Tail
As one of America’s head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption in American politics; surely I must know that in England they had no such evils! I explained that they did not have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase, was “in tail”; the grafters had, as a matter of divine right, the things which in America they had to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate, a “Millionaire’s Club”, for admission to which the members paid in cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as their birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself, it is merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England has even more than America. When I explained this, my popularity with the British ruling classes vanished quickly.
As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of the libel laws, which have as their first principle “the greater the truth, the greater the libel”. Englishmen read with satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England, the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our American senators have done; they have bought the political parties with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have taken over the press, whether by outright purchase like Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy–both of which methods we Americans know. Within the last decade or two another group has been coming into control; and not merely is this the same class of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the international financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist system. These gentlemen make the world their home–or, as Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit themselves to all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris, democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews wherever they are.
And of course, in buying the English government, these new classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one agent, without rival–the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled my childhood–my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest, and pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:
“Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained!”
Bishops and Beer
For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of South Africa–wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly taxed than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So the armies of England were sent to subjugate the country. You might think they would have had the good taste to leave the lowly Jesus out of this affair–but if so, you have missed the essential point about established religion. The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for the populace to revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their “living.” During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply. Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation “virile”; nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God’s way of making “noble natures”.
The British God had other ways of improving nations–for example, the opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred million “noble natures” by this method; and also they were making a hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new “virility,” undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:
I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history; and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years, than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two centuries.
That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society:
Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China can never meet on a common ground. China views the whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.
And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are clamoring for restriction–and what prevents? Head and front of the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early temperance movement, declares that “among its supporters I cannot recall one Church of England minister of influence.” When Asquith brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer, he was confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy, protesting against the act. And what was the basis of their protest? That beer is a food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but also that there was property invested in brewing it, Three hundred and thirty-two clergy of the diocese of Peterborough declared:
We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the present bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave injustice as amounting to a confiscation of private property, spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent people, and provoking deep and widespread resentment, which must do harm to our cause and hinder our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C. Vedder’s “Jesus Christ and the Social Question,” we read:
It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr. Asquith’s temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through the opposition of clergymen who had invested their savings in brewery stock, the profits of which might have been lessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no prohibition legislation should ever be passed without providing for compensation to the owners of the industry. Today, all over America, appeals are being made to the people to eat less grain; the grain is being shipped to England, some of it to be made into beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the Archbishop of York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices, and in his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time economy!
Anglicanism and Alcohol
This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British radicals; they see it at work in every election–the publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson confuses them with spirituality. There are two powerful societies in England employing this deadly combination–the “Anti-Socialist Union” and the “Liberty and Property Defense League.” If you scan the lists of the organizers, directors and subsidizers of these satanic institutions, you find Tory politicians and landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy, and large-scale dealers in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting called by the “Liberty and Property Defense League,” to listen to a denunciation of Socialism by W. H. Mallock, a master sophist of Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a dozen members of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary of the Federated Brewers’ Association, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, and Beer Trade Association, and three or four other alcoholic magnates.
In every public library in England and many in America you will find an assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations, and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these writings are brutal–setting forth the ethics of exploitation in the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who supplied for capitalist depredation a basis in pretended natural science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, and if society does not want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he is. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders.
Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth century; but it was found that for some reason this failed to stop the growth of Socialism, and so in our time the clerical defenders of Privilege have grown subtle and insinuating. They inform us now that they have a deep sympathy with our fundamental purposes; they burn with pity for the poor, and they would really and truly wish happiness to everyone, not merely in Heaven, but right here and now. However, there are so many complications–and so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist bug-a-boos. Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D. D., expounding “The Ethics of Jesus,” and admonishing us extremists:
Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands to another may be inspired by the same passions as have blinded the present holders to their own highest good, and may be accompanied with injustice as extreme as has ever been manifested by the rich and powerful.
And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D. D., an especially popular clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on wage-slavery:
The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through them, of which this is one. Where God has been so patient, it is not for us to be impatient.
And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing us back to the faith of our fathers:
The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social arrangements, but to personal vices.
I study Professor Flint’s volume in the effort to find just what, if anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our time. I find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of Durham, as being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop Westcott, whether he is talking to a high society congregation, or to one of workingmen, shows “an exquisite sense of knowing always where to stop.” So I consulted the Bishop’s volume, “The Social Aspects of Christianity” and I see at once why he is popular with the anti-Socialist propagandists–neither I or any other man can possibly discover what he really means, or what he really wants done.
I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I kept on the good Bishop’s trail, I might in the end find something a plain man could understand; so I got the beautiful two-volume “Life of Brooke Westcott, by his Son”–and there I found an exposition of the social purposes of bishops! In the year 1892 there was a strike in Durham, which is in the coal country; the employers tried to make a cut in wages, and some ten thousand men walked out, and there was a long and bitter struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at last the masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as arbitrator, and the dispute was triumphantly settled–how do you suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!
I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the naivete with which the Bishop’s biographer and son tells the story of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came out from the conference “all smiles, and well satisfied with the result of his day’s work.” As for his followers, they were in ecstacies; they “seized and waltzed one another around on the carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flower show ball. Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer ourselves hoarse.” The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more communication on episcopal stationery–an order to all his clergy to “offer their humble and hearty thanks to God for our happy deliverance from the strife by which the diocese has been long afflicted.” Strange to say, there were a few varlets in Durham who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop, and one of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he made reference to the Bishop’s comfortable way of life. The biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he had been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not permitted to; while the working people, who didn’t want to live on tea and toast, were compelled to!
Dead Cats
For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been fighting with every resource at their command the liberal and enlightened men of England who wished to educate the masses of the people. In 1807 the first measure for a national school-system was denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as “derogatory to the authority of the Church.” As a counter- measure, his supporters established the “National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the Established Church”; and the founder of the organization, a clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and insisted that the children of the workers “should not be taught beyond their station.” In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council of Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops, setting forth the decree of “their lordships” that “the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and precepts of revealed religion.” In 1850 a bill for secular education was denounced as presenting to the country “a choice between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil.” In 1870, Forster, author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the parsons were disputing, the children of the poor were “growing into savages.”
As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of London laid down the formula of exploitation: “Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do not make the least alteration of civil property.”
Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the cultured classes of England:
In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.
The “Great Commoner” did not add “these religious classes,” for he belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the record will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform measures which Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It opposed all the social reforms of Lord Shaftesbury. This noble-hearted Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to the end only a few. He expressed himself as distressed and puzzled “to find support from infidels and non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers.”
And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of Bishops voted solidly against the Employers’ Liability Law. The House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; the House of Bishops opposed Womans’ Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerning this establishment Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase: “this vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life.” He told the Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform, because he knew that they would never begin. Another member of the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russell, has written of their record and adventures:
They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody penal code; they were the resolute opponents of every political or social reform; and they had their reward from the nation outside Parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep an engagement to preach lest the congregation should stone him. The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his life after preaching at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for his primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the mob. On the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester were burnt in effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop Howley’s chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown at him, when the Archbishop–a man of apostolic meekness–replied: “You should be thankful that it was not a live one.”
The people had reason for this conduct–as you will always find they have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote another member of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives “an instance of the procedure of Church and State about this period”:
In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at first promised his help, now turned against them, and the masters promptly reduced the wage to 7s., with a threat of further reduction. Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for which all seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to the assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them into submission. The judge determined to convict them, and directed that they should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III, specially passed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore. The grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing type. The judge summed up as follows: “Not for anything that you have done, or that I can prove that you intend to do, but for an example to others I consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven years’ penal transportation across His Majesty’s high seas upon each and every one of you.”
Suffer Little Children
The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by them, He did not consider them superfluous. “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven”, He said; and His Church is the inheritor of this tradition–“feed my lambs”. There were children in Great Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin’s “Industrial History of England”:
Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night.
In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of children nine years of age to four-teen hours a day. This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B. C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order. “Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, worshipper of the gods”…. so begins the oldest legal code which has come down to us, from 2250 B. C.; and the coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis. The duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in the church’s every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people petition for increase of grace to hear meekly “Thy Word”; and here is this “Word,” as little children are made to learn it by heart. If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know where to find it.
My duty towards my neighbour is…..
To honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority under him;
To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters:
To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters …. Not to covet nor desire other men’s goods; But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.
A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers was Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the coal-country, to teach this “catechism” to the children of the starving miners. The “Mendip Annals” is the title of a book in which they tell of their ten years’ labors in a village popularly known as “Little Hell.” In this place two hundred people were crowded into nineteen houses. “There is not one creature in it that can give a cup of broth if it would save a life.” In one winter eighteen perished of “a putrid fever”, and the clergyman “could not raise a sixpence to save a life.”
And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover you find in the “Mendip Annals” no single word of social protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the mental powers of England’s most popular woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them her pious self. “In suffering by the scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered no scarcity of religious instruction.” And in another place she explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to be grateful to the rich!
Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite all ranks of people together, to show the poor how immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself. It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages you derive from the government and constitution of this country–to observe the benefits flowing from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high to so liberally assist the low.
It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by this pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night and burned an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic consequence, for one of the “common people,” known as Robert, “was overtaken by liquor,” and was unable to appear at Sunday School next day. This fall from grace occasioned intense remorse in Robert. “It preyed dreadfully upon his mind for many months,” records Martha More, “and despair seemed at length to take possession of him.” Hannah had some conversation with him, and read him some suitable passages from “The Rise and Progress”. “At length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give him comfort.”
Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in any way unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the letters of Shelley how his father tormented him with Archdeacon Paley’s “Evidences” as a cure for atheism. This eminent churchman wrote a book, which he himself ranked first among his writings, called “Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Labouring Classes of the British Public.” In this book he not merely proved that religion “smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a prospect which makes all earthly distinctions nothing”; he went so far as to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters were less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a day.
Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of the labouring part of mankind must be so called) imposes, are not hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a pleasure. It is an exercise of attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is successful, produces satisfaction….. This is lost among abundance.
And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement, and also of the ruthless “Combination Laws,” which denied to British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot. Wilberforce published a “Practical View of the System of Christianity”, in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as “the basis of all politics,” he explained that the purpose of religion is to remind the poor:
That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties, and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man’s reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are happily extempted; that, “having food and raiment, they should be therewith content,” since their situation in life, with all its evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the temporal well-being of political communities.
The Court Circular
The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this revolution was purely one of Church politics–in doctrine and ritual the “Protestant Episcopal Church of America” remained in every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are taught the same slave-catechism, “to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters.” The only difference is that instead of being told “to honour and obey the King,” they are told “to honour and obey the civil authority.”
It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and imitation English clothes–so in their Heaven they have provided an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book–not the English, but the sturdy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I read:
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee, Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea; Cherubim and seraphim bowing down before Thee, Which wert, and art, and ever more shall be!
One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal imagery. I turn at random to the part headed “General,” and find that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not “king … .. throne,” or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn begins–
Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory; To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.
And the second–
Christ, whose glory fills the skies—
And the third–
Lord of all being, throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star.
There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous, greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious, punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family–not even the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter’s wife for his mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low society.
This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:
The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain:
His blood-red banner streams afar: Who follows in His train?
This carpenter’s son was one of the most unpretentious men on earth; utterly simple and honest–he would not even let anyone praise him. When some one called him “good Master,” he answered, quickly, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one, that is, God.” But this simplicity has been taken with deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments upon him in conventional, courtly style:
The company of angels
Are praising Thee on high;
And mortal men, and all things
Created, make reply: All Glory, laud and honour, To Thee, Redeemer, King. . . . .
The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful occupation than that of the saints–casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea–unless it be that of the Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous compliments!
But one can understand that such things are necessary in a monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time going through costly formalities–not because they enjoy it, but because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about them and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.
Horn-blowing
I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied it from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout little boy; one of my earliest recollections–I cannot have been more than four years of age–is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I remember asking if I might say the “Lord’s prayer” in this fascinating play; and my mother’s reply: “If you say it reverently.” When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the city will understand that this is a peculiar location–precisely half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august of the city’s aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy of the city’s slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church, and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made for them–as all the rest of the world is made for them; the populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.
The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman; orthodox, yet the warmest man’s heart I have ever known. He could not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor, visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school, where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health of their souls.
I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive away a pestilence.
I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the papers, and watching politics and business. I, followed the fates of my little slum-boys–and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty thieves–all these were paying the policeman and the politician for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who consoled them in prison–but it was the Tammany leader who saw the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson even earlier in life than I got mine–that the church was a kind of amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was Tammany.
I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to investigate, I discovered the reason–that their incomes came from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against which they were blowing their religious horns!
So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters. And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world, I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I met, not sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation–until the venerable institution which had once seemed dignified and noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.
Trinity Corporation
There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous churches in America. As a child I have walked through its church yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its gravestones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the world’s infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my young soul; and what is it in reality?
The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell. Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of the great landlords of New York. In the early days it bought a number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has grown up around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere from forty to a hundred million dollars. The true amount has never been made public; to quote Russell’s words:
The real owners of the property are the communicants of the church. For 94 years none of the owners has known the extent of the property, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom, nor what is done with the money. Every attempt to learn even the simplest fact about these matters has been baffled. The management is a self perpetuating body, without responsibility and without supervision.
And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this great corporation, which is simply the English land system complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum. Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total of fifty dollars a month. The houses were not built for tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the habitation of animals. The article, in Everybody’s Magazine for July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief. To quote the writer again:
Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent institution all possible credit for a spirit of improvement manifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation. I have tramped the Eighth Ward day after day with a list of Trinity properties in my hand, and of all the tenement houses that stand there on Trinity land, I have not found one that is not a disgrace to civilization and to the City of New York.
It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what devilish utterances were some day to proceed from the lips of the little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as the bishop’s attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church! Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect, even to the most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way! Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For while the bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported, that the bishop’s wife had been robbed of fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the doctrine of Jesus that a bishop’s wife should possess fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting the blood-hounds of the police on the train of a human being. I asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember his patient explanation–that the bishop had to know all classes and conditions of men: his wife had to go among the rich as well as the poor, and must be able to dress so that she would not be embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much time among the rich!
The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had to be cathedrals–despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St. Paul had declared that “the Lord dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” In the twenty-five years which have passed since that time the good Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but the mighty structure which is a monument to his visitations among the rich towers over the city from its vantage-point on Morningside Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and knowing what I know about the men who contributed its funds, and about the general functions of the churches of the Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it were built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the skulls of human beings.
Spiritual Interpretation
There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who was crucified as a common criminal because, as they said, “He stirreth up the people.” An embarrassing “Savior” for the church of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up and make him respectable.
I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day Saturday I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the roofs of apartment-houses; but on Saturday night I went into a tub and was lathered and scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in a newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tie and a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week –and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder–to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-window divinity.
The man who really lived, the carpenter’s son, they take out and crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and scholarly volume, published by the exclusive house of Scribner, and written by the Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I carried in the stately ceremonials: “The Citizen in His Relation to the Industrial Situation,” by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter, D. D., L. L. D., D. C. L.–a course of lectures delivered before the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:
Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He did not abhor the company of rich men; he sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure.
And do you think that the late Bishop of J. P. Morgan and Company stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of golden nails? In the course of this book there will march before us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter’s son: the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires’ Club, the Pastor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the weight of their jewelled sledges–books, sermons, newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches–wherewith they pound their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of the proletarian Christ.
Here, for example, is Rev. F. G. Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid of the carpenter’s denunciations of the rich, and says:
Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as this, a teaching so slightly distinguished from the curbstone rhetoric of a modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the scope and power of the teaching of Jesus?
The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a gentleman; he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of universities where gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of Christian Morals proceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus’ actions; demonstrating therefrom that there are three proper uses to be made of great wealth: first, for almsgiving–“The poor ye have always with you!”; second, for beauty and culture–buying wine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other objets de vertu; and third, “stewardship,” “trusteeship”–which in plain English is “Big Business.”
I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can imagine he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the proletarian Founder emerging all new and respectable under the brush of this capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all his own for reading the scriptures; he tells us that when there are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretation is that “the more spiritual is to be preferred.” Thus, one gospel makes Jesus say: “Blessed are ye poor.” Another puts it: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The first one is crude and literal; obviously the second must be what Jesus meant! In other words, the professor and his church have made for their economic masters a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a quality of submissiveness, impotence and futility, which they call by the name of “spirituality”. This virtue they exalt above all others, and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus everything which has relation to the realities of life!
So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at Harvard, writing on “Jesus Christ and the Social Question,” and explaining:
The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its radicalism, but in its externalism. It proposes to accomplish by economic change what can be attained by nothing less than spiritual regeneration.
And here is “The Churchman,” organ of the Episcopalians of New York, warning us:
It is necessary to remember that something more than material and temporal considerations are involved. There are things of more importance to the purposes of God and to the welfare of humanity than economic readjustments and social amelioration.
And again:
Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing upon clergy and laity alike, to address their religious energies too exclusively to those tasks whereby human life may be made more abundant and wholesome materially….. We need constantly to be reminded that spiritual things come first.
There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen for whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shiny top-hats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating odors. I picture them as I have seen them at St. George’s, where that aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in old-fashioned carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin statues of insolence; at St. Thomas’, where you might see all the “Four Hundred” on exhibition at once; at St. Mary the Virgin’s, where the choir paraded through the aisles, swinging costly incense into my childish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alone with nose upturned, carrying on his back a jewelled robe for which some adoring female had paid sixty thousand dollars. “Spiritual things come first?” Ah, yes! “Seek first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall be added unto you!” And it is so dreadful about the French and German Socialists, who, as the “Churchman” reports, “make a creed out of materialism.” But then, what is this I find in one issue of the organ of the “Church of Good Society”?
Business men contribute to the Y. M. C. A. because they realize that if their employes are well cared for and religiously influenced, they can be of greater service in business!
Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?
BOOK THREE
The Church of the Servant-girls
Was it for this–that prayers like these Should spend themselves about thy feet, And with hard, overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
Was it for this–that men should make Thy name a fetter on men’s necks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake, And women withered out of sex?
Was it for this–that slaves should be– Thy word was passed to set men free? Swinburne.
Charity
As everyone knows, the “society lady” is not an independent and self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite, sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be at home a large number of other women who live sterile and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their luckier sisters. But these “domestics” also are human beings; they have emotions–or, in religious parlance, “souls;” it is necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating the property of their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the other, St. Patrick’s, for the servant-girls. The latter is located on Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide with the homes of the Vanderbilts the interest of the crowds of sight-seers. Now, early every Sunday morning, before “Good Society” has opened its eyes, you may see the devotees of the Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each with a little black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do inside? What are they taught about life? This is the question to which we have next to give attention.
Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate of New York, favored me with his justification of his own career and activities. He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one man of the world to another, he said: “The reason I put them into the hands of Catholics is not religious, but because I find they are efficient in such matters. They don’t ask questions, they do what you want them to do, and do it economically.”
I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the remark–like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.
When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long hours and improper working-conditions which drove him to desperation; they do not ask if police and politicians are getting a rake-off from the saloon, or if traction magnates are using it as an agency for the controlling of votes; they do not plunge into prohibition movements or good government campaigns–they simply take the man in, at a standard price, and the patient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and then turn him out for society to make him drunk again. That is “charity,” and it is the special industry of Roman Catholicism. They have been at it for a thousand years, cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes–“plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder and sudden death.” Yet–puzzling as it would seem to anyone not religious–there were never so many messes, never so many different kinds of messes, as now at the end of the thousand years of charitable activity!
But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building and rebuilding his web across a doorway; like soldiers under the command of a ruling class with a “muddling through” tradition–
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have messes to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away quickly and without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this service, no matter what their personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be. Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-mill, every coal-mine or other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital, with its slave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was “muck-raking” near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these places to ask information as to the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims. The “Mother Superior” received me with a look of polite dismay. “These concerns pay us!” she said. “You must see that as a matter of business it would not do for us to talk about them.”
Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as it is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the work of vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepers and ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls. This industry of vote-getting is a comparatively new one; but the Church has been handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned this new way of “democracy,” and has established her supremacy over all rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster their hope of the survival of personality after death!
So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance have been driven to a more or less reluctant alliance with the Papacy. The Church is here, and her followers are here, before the war several hundred thousand of them pouring into the country every year. It is no longer possible to do without Catholics in America; not merely do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes washed, but franchises have to be granted, tariff-schedules adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police trained and strikes crushed. Under our native political system, for these purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes belong to people of a score of nationalities–Irish and German and Italian and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church can handle these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and editors and politicians familiar with all these languages?
Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely moderate–the mere actual expenses of the campaign, the cost of red fire and torch-lights, of liquor and newspaper advertisements. The rest may come out of the public till, in the form of exemption from taxation of church buildings and lands, a share of the public funds for charities and schools, the control of the police for saloon-keepers and district leaders, the control of police-courts and magistrates, of municipal administrations and boards of education, of legislatures and governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our sacred self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme Court Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige, some cabinet-members and legislators and justices to attend High Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholic prelates and dignitaries.
You think this is empty rhetoric–you comfortable, easy-going, ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic shades, absorbed in “the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence”–while the world about you slides down into the pit! You ladies of Good Society, practicing your “sweet little charities,” pursuing your “dear little ideals,” raising your families of one or two lovely children–while Irish and French-Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Hungarians are breeding their dozens and scores, and preparing to turn you out of your country!
God’s Armor
You remember “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” Browning’s study of the psychology of a modern Catholic ecclesiastic. He is not unaware of modern thought, this bishop; he is a man of culture, who wants to have beauty about him, to be a “cabin passenger”:
There’s power in me and will to dominate Which I must exercise, they hurt me else; In many ways I need mankind’s respect,
Obedience, and the love that’s born of fear.
He wishes that he had faith–faith in anything; he understands that faith is all-important–
Enthusiasm’s the best thing, I repeat.
But you cannot get faith just by wishing for it–
But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn!
He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade for truth, but he asks what there would be in it for him–
State the facts,
Read the text right, emancipate the world– The emancipated world enjoys itself
With scarce a thank-you.
Blougram told it first
It could not owe a farthing,–not to him More than St. Paul!
So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasily conscious of the contempt of intellectual people.
I pine among my million imbeciles
(You think) aware some dozen men of sense Eye me and know me, whether I believe
In the last winking virgin as I vow, And am a fool, or disbelieve in her,
And am a knave.
But, as he says, you have to keep a tight hold upon the chain of faith, that is what
Gives all the advantage, makes the difference, With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule. We are their lords, or they are free of us, Just as we tighten or relax that hold.
So he continues, but not with entire satisfaction, in his role of shepherd to those whom he calls “King Bomba’s lazzaroni,” and “ragamuffin saints.”
I wander into a Catholic bookstore and look to see what Bishop Blougram is doing with his lazzaroni and his ragamuffin saints here in this new country of the far West. It is easy to acquire the information, for the saleswoman is polite and the prices fit my purse. America is going to war, and Catholic boys are being drafted to be trained for battle; so for ten cents I obtain a firmly bound little pamphlet called “God’s Armor, a Prayer Book for Soldiers.” It is marked “Copyright by the G. R. C. Central-Verein,” and bears the “Nihil Obstat” of the “Censor Theolog.” and the “Imprimatur” of “Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici”–which last you may at first fail to recognize as a well-known city on the Mississippi River. Do you not feel the spell of ancient things, the magic of the past creeping over you, as you read those Latin trade-marks? Such is the Dead Hand, and its cunning, which can make even St. Louis sound mysterious!
In this booklet I get no information as to the commercial causes of war, nor about the part which the clerical vote may have played throughout Europe in supporting military systems. I do not even find anything about the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve of a self-governing people to put an end to feudal rule. Instead I discover a soldier-boy who obeys and keeps silent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip of terrors both of body and soul. Poor, pitiful soldier-boy, marking yourself with crosses, performing genuflexions, mumbling magic formulas in the trenches–how many billions of you have been led out to slaughter by the greeds and ambitions of your religious masters, since first this accursed Antichrist got its grip upon the hearts of men!
I quote from this little book:
Start this day well by lifting up your heart to God. Offer yourself to Him, and beg grace to spend the day without sin. Make the sign of the cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, behold me in Thy Divine Presence. I adore Thee and give Thee thanks. Grant that all I do this day be for Thy Glory, and for the salvation of my immortal soul.
During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your prayers need not be long nor read from a book. Learn a few of these short ejaculations by heart and frequently repeat them. They will serve to recall God to your heart and will strengthen you and comfort you.
You remember a while back about the prayer-wheels of the Thibetans. The Catholic religion was founded before the Thibetan, and is less progressive; it does not welcome mechanical devices for saving labor. You have to use your own vocal apparatus to keep yourself from hell; but the process has been made as economical as possible by kindly dispensations of the Pope. Thus, each time that you say “My God and my all,” you get fifty days indulgence; the same for “My Jesus, mercy,” and the same for “Jesus, my God, I love Thee above all things.” For “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” you get three hundred days–which would seem by all odds the best investment of your spare breath.
And then come prayers for all occasions: “Prayer before Battle”; “Prayer for a Happy Death”; “Prayer in Temptation”; “Prayer before and after Meals”; “Prayer when on Guard”; “Prayer before a long March”; “Prayer of Resignation to Death”; “Prayer for Those in their Agony”–I cannot bear to read them, hardly to list them. I remember standing in a cathedral “somewhere in France” during the celebration of some special Big Magic. There was brilliant white light, and a suffocating strange odor, and the thunder of a huge organ, and a clamor of voices, high, clear voices of young boys mounting to heaven, like the hands of men in a pit reaching up, trying to climb over the top of one another. It sent a shudder into the depths of my soul. There is nothing left in the modern world which can carry the mind so far back into the ancient nightmare of anguish and terror which was once the mental life of mankind, as these Roman Catholic incantations with their frantic and ceaseless importunity. They have even brought in the sex-spell; and the poor, frightened soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the night with a prostitute, now prostrates himself before a holy Woman-being who is lifted high above the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe and affection which his mother brought to him in early childhood. Read over the phrases of this “Litany of the Blessed Virgin”:
Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Mother of God. Holy Virgin of Virgins. Mother of Christ. Mother of divine grace. Mother most pure. Mother most chaste. Mother inviolate. Mother undefiled. Mother most amiable. Mother most admirable. Mother of good counsel. Mother of our Creator. Mother of our Savior. Virgin most prudent. Virgin most venerable. Virgin most renowned. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin most faithful. Mirror of justice. Seat of wisdom. Cause of our Joy. Spiritual vessel. Vessel of honor. Singular vessel of devotion. Mystical rose. Tower of David. Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the covenant. Gate of heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick. Refuge of sinners. Comforter of the afflicted. Help of Christians. Queen of Angels. Queen of Patriarchs. Queen of Prophets. Queen of Apostles. Queen of Martyrs. Queen of Confessors. Queen of Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queen conceived without original sin. Queen of the most holy Rosary. Queen of Peace, Pray for us.
Thanksgivings
For another five cents–how cheaply a man of insight can obtain thrills in this fantastic world!–I purchase a copy of the “Messenger of the Sacred Heart”, a magazine published in New York, the issue for October, 1917. There are pages of advertisements of schools and colleges with strange titles: “Immaculata Seminary”, “Holy Cross Academy”, “Holy Ghost Institute”, “Ladycliff”, “Academy of Holy Child Jesus”. The leading article is by a Jesuit, on “The Spread of the Apostleship of Prayer among the Young”; and then “Sister Clarissa” writes a poem telling us “What are Sorrows”; and then we are given a story called “Prayer for Daddy”; and then another Jesuit father tells us about “The Hills that Jesus Loved”. A third father tells us about the “Eucharistic Propaganda”; and we learn that in July, 1917, it distributed 11,699 beads, and caused the expenditure of 57,714 hours of adoration; and then the faithful are given a form of letter which they are to write to the Honorable Baker, Secretary of War, imploring him to intimate to the French government that France should withdraw from one of her advances in civilization, and join with mediaeval America in exempting priests from being drafted to fight for their country. And then there is a “Question Box”–just like the Hearst newspapers, only instead of asking whether she should allow him to kiss her before he has told her that he loves her, the reader asks what is the Pauline Privilege, and what is the heroic Act, and is Robert a saint’s name, and if food remains in the teeth from the night before, would it break the fast to swallow it before Holy Communion. (No, I am not inventing this.)
I quoted the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and pointed out how deftly the Church has managed to slip in a prayer for worldly prosperity. But the Catholic Church does not show any squeamishness in dealing with its “million imbeciles”, its “rough, purblind mass”. There is a department of the little magazine entitled “Thanksgiving”, and a statement at the top that “the total number of Thanksgivings for the month is 2,143,911.” I am suspicious of that, as of German reports of prisoners taken; but I give the statement as it stands, not going through the list and picking out the crudest, but taking them as they come, classified by states:
GENERAL FAVORS: For many of these favors Mass and publication were promised, for others the Badge of Promoter’s Cross was used, for others the prayers of the Associates had been asked.
Alabama–Jewelry found, relief from pain, protection during storm.
Alaska–Safe return, goods found.
Arizona–Two recoveries, suitable boarding place, illness averted, safe delivery.
British Honduras–Successful operation.
California–Seventeen recoveries, six situations, two successful examinations, house rented, stocks sold, raise in salary, return to religious duties, sight regained, medal won, Baptism, preservation from disease, contract obtained, success in business, hearing restored, Easter duty made, happy death, automobile sold, mind restored, house found, house rented, successful journey, business sold, quarrel averted, return of friends, two successful operations.
And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic machine is harvesting the price day by day–harvesting with that ancient fervor which the Latin poet described as “auri sacra fames”. As Christopher Columbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: “Gold is a wonderful thing. By means of gold we can even get souls into Paradise.”
The Holy Roman Empire
The system thus self-revealed you admit is appalling in its squalor; but you say that at least it is milder and less perilous than the Church which burned Giordano Bruno and John Huss. But the very essence of the Catholic Church is that it does not change; semper eadem is its motto: the same yesterday, today and forever–the same in Washington as in Rome or Madrid–the same in a modern democracy as in the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church is not primarily a religious organization; it is a political organization, and proclaims the fact, and defies those who would shut it up in the religious field, The Rev. S. B. Smith, a Catholic doctor of divinity, explains in his “Elements of Ecclesiastical Law”:
Protestants contend that the entire power of the Church consists in the right to teach and exhort, but not in the right to command, rule, or govern; whence they infer that she is not a perfect society or sovereign state. This theory is false; for the Church, as was seen, is vested Jure divino with power, (1) to make laws; (2) to define and apply them (potestas judicialis); (3) to punish those who violate her laws (potestas coercitiva).
And this is not one scholar’s theory, but the formal and repeated proclamation of infallible popes. Here is the “Syllabus of Errors”, issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in precise language that
The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.
It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical power shall require the permission of the civil power in order to the exercise of its authority.
Then in the same Syllabus the rights and powers of the Church are affirmed thus:
She has the right to require the state not to leave every man free to profess his own religion.
She has the right to exercise her power without the permission or consent of the state.
She has the right of perpetuating the union of church and state.
She has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others.
She has the right to prevent the state from granting the public exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating from it.
She has the power of requiring the state not to permit free expression of opinion.
You see, the Holy Office is unrepentant and unchastened. You, who think that liberty of conscience is the basis of civilization, ought at least to know what the Catholic Church has to say about the matter. Here is Mgr. Segur, in his “Plain Talk About Protestantism of Today”, a book published in Boston and extensively circulated by American Catholics:
Freedom of thought is the soul of Protestantism; it is likewise the soul of modern rationalism and philosophy. It is one of those impossibilities which only the levity of a superficial reason can regard as admissable. But a sound mind, that does not feed on empty words, looks upon this freedom of thought only as simply absurd, and, what is more, as sinful.
You take the liberty of thinking, nevertheless; you feel safe because the Law will protect you. But do you imagine that this “Law” applies to your Catholic neighbors? Do you imagine that they are bound by the restraints that bind you? Here is Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical of 1890–and please remember that Leo XIII was the beau ideal of our capitalist statesmen and editors, as wise and kind and gentle-souled a pope as ever roasted a heretic. He says:
If the laws of the state are openly at variance with the laws of God–if they inflict injury upon the Church–or set at naught the authority of Jesus Christ which is vested in the Supreme Pontiff, then indeed it becomes a duty to resist them, a sin to render obedience.
And consider how many fields there are in which the laws of a democratic state do and forever must contravene the “laws of God” as interpreted by the Catholic Church. Consider for example, that the Pope, in his decree Ne Temere, has declared that all persons who have been married by civil authorities or by Protestant clergymen are living in “filthy concubinage”! Consider, in the same way, the problems of education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To the above list, as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such as birth control, which have arisen since his time.
What the Church means is to rule. Her literature is full of expressions of that intention, set forth in the boldest and haughtiest and most uncompromising manner. For example, Cardinal Manning, in the Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, speaking in the name of the Pope:
I acknowledge no civil power; I am the subject of no prince; I claim more than this–I claim to be the supreme judge and director of the consciences of men—of the peasant that tills the field, and of the prince that sits upon the throne; of the household of privacy, and the legislator that makes laws for kingdoms; I am the sole, last supreme judge of what is right and wrong.
Temporal Power
What this means is, that here in our American democracy the Catholic Church is a rebel; a prisoner of war who bides his time, watching for the moment to rise in revolt, and meantime making no secret of his intentions. The pious Leo XIII, addressing all true believers in America, instructed them as to their attitude in captivity:
The Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church …. But she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of the public authority.
Accordingly, here is Father Phelan of St. Louis, addressing his flock in the “Western Watchman”, June 27, 1913:
Tell us we are Catholics first and Americans or Englishmen afterwards; of course we are. Tell us, in the conflict between the church and the civil government we take the side of the church; of course we do. Why, if the government of the United States were at war with the church, we would say tomorrow, To hell with the government of the United States; and if the church and all the governments of the world were at war, we would say, To hell with all the governments of the world …. Why is it that in this country, where we have only seven per cent of the population, the Catholic church is so much feared? She is loved by all her children and feared by everybody. Why is it that the Pope has such tremendous power? Why, the Pope is the ruler of the world. All the emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all the presidents of the world, are as these altar boys of mine. The Pope is the ruler of the world.
You recall what I said at the outset about Power; the ability to control the lives of other men, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and regarded. Here is a man swollen to bursting with this Power. Dressed in his holy robes, with his holy incense in his nostrils, and the faces of the faithful gazing up at him awe-stricken, hear him proclaim:
The Church gives no bonds for her good behavior. She is the judge of her own rights and duties, and of the rights and duties of the state.
And lest you think that an extreme example of ultramontanist arrogance, listen to the Boston “Pilot”, April 6, 1912, speaking for Cardinal O’Connell, whose official organ it is:
It must be borne in mind that even though Cardinals Farley, O’Connell and Gibbons are at heart patriotic Americans and members of an American hierachy, yet they are as cardinals foreign princes of the blood, to whom the United States, as one of the great powers of the world, is under an obligation to concede the same honors that they receive abroad.
Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American man-of-war, he would be entitled to the salutes and to naval honors reserved for a foreign royal personage, and at any official entertainment at Washington the Cardinal will outrank not merely every cabinet officer, the speaker of the house and the vice-president, but also the foreign ambassadors, coming immediately next to the chief magistrate himself.
Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal personage not of sovereign rank visits New York it is his duty to make the first call on Cardinal Farley.
Knights of Slavery
Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly Jesus. And what is their attitude towards their brothers in God, the rank and file of the membership, whose pennies grease the wheels of the ecclesiastical machine? His Holiness, the Pope, sent over a delegate to represent him in America, and at a convention of the Federation of Catholic Societies held in New Orleans in November, 1910, this gentleman, Diomede Falconio, delivered himself on the subject of Capital and Labor. We have heard the slave-code of the Anglican disciples of Jesus, the revolutionary carpenter; now let us hear the slave-code of his Roman disciples:
Human society has its origin from God and is constituted of two classes of people, the rich and the poor, which respectively represent Capital and Labor.
Hence it follows that according to the ordinance of God, human society is composed of superiors and subjects, masters and servants, learned and unlettered, rich and poor, nobles and plebeians.
And lest this should not be clear enough, the Pope sent a second representative, Mgr. John Bonzano, who, speaking at a general meeting of the German Catholic Central-Verein, St. Louis, 1917, declared:
One of the worst evils that may grow out of the European war is the spreading of the doctrine of Socialism, and the Catholic Church must be ready to counteract such doctrines. We must be ready to prevent the spread of Socialism and to work against it. As I understand, you have a society of wealthy people in St. Louis ready for such a campaign. You have experienced leaders who are masters in their kind of work. They are always insistent to show that this wealth was and is in close touch with the Church, and therefore it will not fail.
This, you perceive, is the complete thesis of the present book, which therefore no doubt will be entitled to the “Nihil Obstat” of the “Censor Theolog.”, and the “Imprimatur” of “Johannes Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici.” No wonder that the “experienced leaders” of America, our captains of industry and exploiters of labor, are forced, whatever their own faith may be, to make use of this system of subjection. A few years ago we read in our papers how a Jewish millionaire of Baltimore was presenting a fortune to the Catholic Church, to be used in its war upon Socialism. The late Mark Hanna, the shrewdest and most far-seeing man that Big Business ever brought into power, said that in twenty years there would be two parties in America, a capitalist and a socialist; and that it would be the Catholic church that would save the country from Socialism. That prophecy was widely quoted, and sank into the souls of our steel and railway and money magnates; from which time you might see, if you watched political events, a new tone of deference to the Roman Hierarchy on the part of our ruling classes. Today you cannot get an expression of opinion hostile to Catholicism into any newspaper of importance. The Associated Press does not handle news unfavorable to the Church, and from top to bottom, the politician takes off his hat when the Sacred Host goes by. Said Archbishop Quigley, speaking before the children of the Mary Sodality:
I’d like to see the politician who would try to rule against the church in Chicago. His reign would be short indeed.
Priests and Police
And how is it in our national capital, the palladium of our liberties? As a means of demonstrating the power of the church and the subservience of our politicians, the Catholics have invented what they call the “Cardinal’s Day Mass”: An elaborate procession of high ecclesiastics, dressed in gorgeous robes and jewels, through the streets of Washington, accompanied by a small army of policemen, paid by non-Catholic taxpayers. The Cardinal seats himself upon a throne, and our political rulers make obeisance before him. On Sunday, January 14, 1917, there were present at this political mass the following personages: Four cabinet members and their wives; the speaker of the House; a large group of senators and representatives; a general of the army and his wife; an admiral of the navy and his wife; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and his wife, and another Justice of the Supreme Court and his wife.
And understand that the church makes no secret of its purpose in conducting such public exhibitions. Here is the pious Pope Leo XIII again, in his Encyclical of Nov. 1, 1885:
All Catholics must make themselves felt as active elements in daily political life in the countries where they live. They must penetrate, wherever possible, in the administration of civil affairs; must constantly exert the utmost vigilance and energy to prevent the usages of liberty from going beyond the limits fixed by God’s law. All Catholics should do all in their power to cause the constitutions of states and legislation to be modeled on the principles of the true Church.
And following these instructions, the Catholics are organized for political work. There are the various Catholic Societies, such as the Knights of Columbus, secret, oath-bound organizations, the military arm of the Papal Power. These societies boast some three million members, and control not less than that many votes. The one thing that you can be certain about these votes is that on every public question, of whatever nature, they will be cast on the side of ignorance and reaction. Thus, it was the influence of the Catholic Societies which put upon our national statute books the infamous law providing five years imprisonment and five thousand dollars fine for the sending through the mail of information about the prevention of conception. It is their influence which keeps upon the statute-books of New York state the infamous law which permits divorce only for infidelity, and makes it “collusion” if both parties desire the divorce. It is these societies which, in every city and town in America, are pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get Catholics into the public schools and on school-boards, so that children may not hear about Galileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates benches, so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished.
You are shocked at this, you think it a vulgar jest, perhaps; but during a period of “vice raids” in New York I was told by a captain of police, himself a Catholic, that it was a common thing for them to get priests in their net. “Of course,” the official added, good-naturedly, “we let them slip out.” I understood that he had to do that; for the Pope, in his “Motu Proprio” decree, has forbidden Catholics to bring a priest into court for any civil crime whatsoever; he has forbidden Catholic policemen to arrest, Catholic judges to try, and Catholic law-makers to make laws affecting any priest of the Church of Rome. And of course we know, upon the authority of a cardinal, that the Pope is “the sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong.” He has held that position for a thousand years and more; and wherever you consult the police records throughout the thousand years, you find the same entries concerning Catholic ecclesiastics. I turn to Riley’s “Illustrations of London Life from Original Documents,” and I find in the year 1385 a certain chaplain, whose name is considerately suppressed, had a breviary stolen from him by a loose woman, because he has not given her any money, either on that night or the one previous. In 1320 John de Sloghtre, a priest, is put in the tower “for being found wandering about the city against the peace”, and Richard Heyring, a priest, is indicted in the ward of Farringdon and in the ward of Crepelgate “as being a bruiser and nightwalker.” That this has been going on for six hundred years is due, not to any special corruption of the Catholic heart, but to the practice of clerical celibacy, which is contrary to nature, a transgression of fundamental instinct. It should be noted that the purpose of this transgression, which pretends to be spiritual, is really economic; it was the means whereby the church machine built up its power through the Middle Ages. The priests had children then, as they have them today; but these children not being recognized, the church machine remained the sole heir of the property of its clergy.
The Church Militant
Knowing what we know today, we marvel that it was possible for Germany to prepare through so many years for her assault on civilization, and for England to have slept through it all. In exactly the same way, the historian of a generation from now will marvel that America should have slept, while the New Inquisition was planning to strangle her. For we are told with the utmost explicitness precisely what is to be done. We are to see wiped out these gains of civilization for which our race has bled and agonized for many centuries; the very gains are to serve as the means of their own destruction! Have we not heard Pope Leo tell his faithful how to take advantage of what they find in America–our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy?
We see the army being organized and drilled under our eyes; and we can read upon its banners its purpose proclaimed. Just as the Prussian military caste had its slogan “Deutschland ueber Alles!” so the Knights of Slavery have their slogan: “Make America Catholic!”
Their attitude to democratic institutions is attested by the fact that none of their conventions ever fails in its resolutions to “deeply deplore the loss of the temporal power of Our Father, the Pope.” Their subjection to priestly domination is indicated by such resolutions as this, bearing date of May 13th, 1914:
The Knights of Columbus of Texas in annual convention assembled, prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, present filial regards with assurances of loyalty and obedience to the Holy See and request the Papal blessing.
On June 10th, 1912, one T. J. Carey of Palestine, Texas, wrote to Archbishop Bonzano, the Apostolic Delegate: “Must I, as a Catholic, surrender my political freedom to the Church? And by this I mean the right to vote for the Democratic, Socialist, or Republican parties when and where I please?” The answer was: “You should submit to the decisions of the Church, even at the cost of sacrificing political principles.” And to the same effect Mgr. Preston, In New York City, Jan. 1, 1888: “The man who says, ‘I will take my faith from Peter, but I will not take my politics from Peter,’ is not a true Catholic.”
Such is the Papal machine; and not a day passes that it does not discover some new scheme to advance the Papal glory; a “Catholic battle-ship” in the United States navy; Catholic chaplains on all ships of the navy; Catholic holidays—such as Columbus Day–to be celebrated by all Protestants in America; thirty million dollars worth of church property exempted from taxation in New York City; mission bells to be set up at the expense of the state of California; state support for parish schools–or, if this cannot be had, exemption of Catholics from taxation for school purposes. So on through the list which might continue for pages.
More than anything else, of course, the Papal machine is concerned with education, or rather, with the preventing of education. It was in its childish days that the race fell under the spell of the Priestly Lie; it is in his childish days that the individual can be most safely snared. Suffer little children to come unto the Catholic priest, and he will make upon their sensitive minds an impression which nothing in after life can eradicate. So the mainstay of the New Inquisition is the parish-school, and its deadliest enemy is the American school system. Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus, in his book, “The Rights of Our Little Ones”:
Catholic parents cannot, in conscience send their children to American public schools, except for very grave reasons approved by the ecclesiastical authorities.
While state education removes illiteracy and puts a limited amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it cannot be said to have a beneficial influence on civilization in general.
The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essential physical and moral education are sufficiently provided for.
And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church is fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is necessary; as “America”, the organ of the Jesuits, explains:
Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at taxing the school buildings, which creates hardships to the parochial and other private schools. Now it is the free text book law that puts a double burden on the Catholics. Then again it is the unwise extension of the compulsory school age that forces children to be in school until they are 16 to 18 years old.
And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools, hear Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking before the children of the Mary Sodality in the Holy Name Parish-School:
Within twenty years this country is going to rule the world. Kings and emperors will pass away, and the democracy of the United States will take their place. The West will dominate the country, and what I have seen of the Western parochial schools has proved that the generation which follows us will be exclusively Catholic. When the United States rules the world the Catholic Church will rule the world.
The Church Triumphant
The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that there have to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be preferable to rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at least do not fail to consider what history has to tell about priestly government. We do not have to use our imaginations in the matter, for there was once a Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreams of, when the power of the church was complete, when emperors and princes paid homage to her, and the civil authority made haste to carry out her commands. What was the condition of the people in those times? We are told by Lea, in his “History of the Inquisition” that:
The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved. Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and its methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin was comparatively unimportant except as a source of revenue to those who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The artificial standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests who are not heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they may be. Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness: and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders committed in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his Crusaders to destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St. Denis admits was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector of the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops, through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual accepters of persons; they annointed themselves with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.
God in the Schools
But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will. Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are turning against the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to Rafael Shaw’s “Spain From Within”:
On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church, interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life, ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children’s education, hindering them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in Barcelona; they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The consumos cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are financially interested in their continuance.
We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that “the state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter illiteracy.” How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was an official investigation of school conditions, the report appearing in the “Heraldo de Madrid” for November, 1909. In 1857 there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of schools in each of the 79 provinces: this requirement being below the very low standards prevailing at that time in other European countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four provinces had the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch up. Seventy-five per cent of the population were wholly illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and a half dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools were nearly all “nuns’ schools”, which taught only needle-work and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were “cruel and disgusting.”
As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as