In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus,
we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and
showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and
the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee,
and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to
whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship
me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said
"Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would
have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he
chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death
of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his
church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian
gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except
women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted
catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.
But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one
defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces
which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again,
to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new
revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous
power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed
the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself,
suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so
that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory
of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for
their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off
laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from
Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest
religion. How complete and swift was his success you may judge
from the fact that fifty years later we find the Emperor
Valentinian compelled to pass an edict limiting the donations of
emotional females to the church in Rome!
From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this
book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days
of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and
Caesar have been one, and the Church has been the shield and
armor of predatory economic might. With only one qualification to
be noted: that the Church has never been able to suppress
entirely the memory of her proletarian Founder. She has done her
best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his words
out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so far as
to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims may
not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.
'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!
But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one
incessant struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled
themselves with the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on
the Mount, and of that bitterly class-conscious proletarian,
James, the brother of Jesus.
And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has
given life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on
the hearts of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and
fervor which has been poured into it by generation after
generation of poor men who live like Jesus as outcasts, and die
like Jesus as criminals, and are revered like Jesus as founders
and saints. The greatest of the early Church fathers were
bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their own time. St.
Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of office,
exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by the
Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor
Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was
exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the
heretics whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were
proletarian rebels; the saints whom the Church reveres, the
founders of the orders which gave it life for century after
century, were men who sought to return to the example of the
carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar on this point,
Prof. Rauschenbusch:
The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the
Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic and
communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest doctrinal
reformer before the reformation; but his eyes, too, were first
opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman Church by joining in
a great national and patriotic movement against the alien
domination and extortion of the Church. The Bohemian revolt made
famous by the name of John Huss, was quite as much political and
social as religious. Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a
religious prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo
de Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's mercy.
Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his ill-gotten
wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the restoration of
the liberties of the people of Florence. It is significant that
the dying sinner found it easy to assent to the first, hard to
assent to the second, and impossible to concede the last.