In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero
is a Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his
diggings in the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into
our superior civilization. The thing that impresses him most is
what he calls "the immortality idea". The person who got that up
was a world-genius, he exclaims. "If you can once get a man to
believing in immortality, there is no more left for you to
desire; you can take everything he owns--you can skin him alive
if it pleases you--and he will bear it all with perfect good
humor."
And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the
effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that
view of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the
language of scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how
an ecclesiastical authority, equipped with every tool of modern
learning, would set about voicing the idea that the function of
the teaching of Heaven is to chloroform the poor, so that the
rich may continue to rob them in security?
Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of
scholarship, dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges
Chatterton-Hill, of the University of Geneva. Its title is "The
Sociological Value of Christianity", and from cover to cover it
is a warning to the rich of the danger they run in giving up
their religion and ceasing to support its priests. It explains
how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded in making the
individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which are
indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as
indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor
makes plain just what he means by "individual suffering,
individual sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism;
and the advantage of Christianity is that it makes you think that
by submitting to these horrors, you are profiting your own soul.
"By making individual salvation depend on the acceptance of
suffering, on the voluntary sacrifice of egotistical interests,
Christianity adapts the individual to society". And this, as the
professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a world in
which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only means
of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
sacrifice...... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful
idea!" And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used
for this purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never
ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness
of suffering--of that suffering which a weak and sickly
humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could."
You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or
whatever you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians
who have only your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones
who are condemned to elimination? There has come, let us say, a
period of "overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and
therefore you are starving, you have woven too much cloth, and
therefore you are naked, you have finished the world for your
masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way. As the
sociologist from Geneva phrases it, "Your suppression imposes
itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of the
Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process, by
"captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest
will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with
candle-lights and images, your ears with sweet music and soothing
words; and so you will perish without raising a finger! "Here,"
reflects the professor, "we see how magnificently the teaching of
Jesus applies to all classes of society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the
embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the
capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that
troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he
carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical
wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out
of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. "Inequality
signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but the standard
whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the standard of the
moral law."
The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known,
but those which govern his moral nature cannot be known; the
moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject
to the law of inequality!
As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as
wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with
the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for
teaching the Copernican view of the universe; that infallible
popes had again and again condemned this heresy ex cathedra. Said
the eloquent cardinal:
Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary,
and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at
rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is
the very truth till we know what motion is?