The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing
mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by
Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various
Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much
better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon
an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary
product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry,
drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand
years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove
anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to
do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and
wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the
direct orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the
Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.
They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most
dangerous form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and
see what men have done with his little joke about the face of
Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead. As for
Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up;
when he ordered, "Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly
what he said. The Roman official stamp which he put upon the
gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the
Reformation on.
In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were
suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself
knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the
priestly land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which
he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever
is done about it--until at last the miserable peasants attempted
to organize and win their own rights. Their demands do not seem
to us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of
electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the
right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction
of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and--that
universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England,
Mexico or sixteenth century Germany--the restoration to the
village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of
slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline
sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would
drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with
spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist
without inequalities, etc.
And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon
them and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations
which might have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to
the police-force of his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot
answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to hit him
with the fist until blood flows from the nose." He issued a
letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants,"
which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue
Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this
well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a
sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of Methodist
Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled
about the severity of their repression, for it will save many
souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes
set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable
wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the
Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and
militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar, Prof.
Rauschenbusch, puts it:
The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to
1525, when the whole nation was in commotion, and a great
revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every class and
every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal of life. . . .
The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and
creative when it embraced the whole of human life and enlisted
the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When it became
"religious" in the narrow sense, it grew scholastic and spiny,
quarrelsome, and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and noble
life.