There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in
America. They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property,
and in the West and South they dominate the intellectual life of
the country. I do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them.
They are far more democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight
valiantly against the liquor traffic and those forms of graft
which are obvious, or directly derived from vice. There are among
their clergy many men who are honestly seeking light, and trying
to make their institutions a factor for progress. But they are
caught in the spirit of Lutheran scholasticism, narrow and
ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they cannot help it, because
they are pledged by their creeds and foundations to
Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things because
their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain ways,
because of certain facts which existed in the world three
thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.
You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the
example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all
the rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the
stick may have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist
explains this seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once
lived in high mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly
rushing herds; when the leader leaped across an abyss, the others
had to leap, without waiting to see in the dust and confusion.
Now there are no mountains and no enemies, but the sheep still
jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still sews buttons
at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred years
ago all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad
builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to
overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled by
mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in
spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete
protection against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat
meat on Friday, because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that
day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's
sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox
Baptist requires total immersion in a climate quite different
from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy
fresh air and exercise on the Sabbath.
In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life,
tending sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent
thing for them to rest from labor one day of the week, and to
gather in temples to hear the reading of the best literature of
their time. But nowadays the city slave spends his week-days shut
up in an office, poring over a ledger, or in a sweat-shop,
chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously, therefore, the thing to
do on the seventh day is to lure him into the open air, and
persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we human sheep?
We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern statute-books, and
if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries to play
base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next
morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.
In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and
enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there
are tennis courts built and paid for out of public funds, my own
included; yet I cannot use these tennis courts on Sunday, because
of the ancient Hebrew taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the
swimming pool in the park is closed to me, the library is closed
nearly all day. If I enquire about it, I am told that it is
desirable that city employees should have one day's rest a week;
but when I ask why it might not be possible to relay the
employees, so that they might all have one, or even two days'
rest a week, and still give the public their rights on Sunday,
there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when
their peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law
enforces a general boredom, the public may be more disposed to
endure the boredom of sermons.
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving
pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule,
the picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred
concerts"--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come
to mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to
the imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna
Held and Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our
times, such as Ibsen and Brieux.
I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an
experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this
century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American
democracy, whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and
forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship, I
was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state
prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I
was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate,
duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a
stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full
of vermin--in a building housing some five hundred wretches,
black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under
circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air
nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise
court to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to
speak to one another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and
walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had their only
occupation working for a sweat-shop contractor; this on the
outskirts of the capital city of Wilmington, with no less than
ninety-one churches! The writer was informed that he would return
to this institution regularly every week unless he abandoned his
godless habit of playing tennis on a private club court on
Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making the
discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom
of the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every
Sunday, and by threatening to employ detectives and have these
mighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows
again the importance of understanding the relationship of
Superstition and Big Business!