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.