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?