And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it
means to society that practically all its moral teaching should
be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight
thinking? That all the intellectual prestige of the Church should
be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate
evasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in the most terrific
social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our
position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario,
hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the bow of
the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there
comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into
a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along
with the speed of a race-horse. With every sense alert, You watch
for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one
side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of
the danger. If by any chance you fail to do it, over you go, and
your partner with you, and all your belongings go down-stream,
and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for
several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of
life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The
paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental
science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no
paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurs
words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees
an especially formidable obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus,
or the I. W. W.--he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.
And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could
save yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go
overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into
the trenches in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud,
because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and
kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find
yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free
yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to
law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman
bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means
of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of
course those who think him a voice of God can form no conception
of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and
wholesome sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among
the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the
Apostle to the Gentiles.
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire.
You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the
pitiful and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under
the cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time
whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly
the details of a prescribed procedure, at the cost of all
sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the
privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt
court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the
newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept
and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have
been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as
they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps,
you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing--the
august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your
petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave
like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of
like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.