The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we
would have a sign of Thee"--meaning that they wanted him to do
some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came
from God. He answered by calling them an evil and adulterous
generation--which is exactly what I have said about the Papal
machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other
book-worshippers of his time accused him of violating the sacred
commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to
them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man
for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx
at them--"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their
heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of the
respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own
class in the places where they gathered--the public houses--the
churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a
wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"--precisely as in
the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having
their meetings in the back-rooms of saloons, and precisely as
they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.
But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the
Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human
heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within
the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs
in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is
more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than
ever before in history--even in these days of Morgan and
Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as
Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the
Church--Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J.
Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but
their voices are not silenced they are like the leaven, to which
Jesus compared the kingdom of God--a woman took it and hid it in
three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young
theological students read, and some of them understand; I know
three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church,
and are preaching straight social revolution--and the scribes and
the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.
In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant
and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon.
Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and
administering property. And it is not alone the Catholic Church
which is in politics, seeking favors from the state--the
exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of
ministers from military service, free transportation for them and
their families on the railroads, the control of charity and
education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday--so on
through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money,
you find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the
deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts
jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the
churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social
revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in
industry.
It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers
are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable
salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the
wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church
that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class,
and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic
Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest
who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but
goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his
pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their
bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious movement for
an Irish Republic.
What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the
exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if
you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you
would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of them
slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them
must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or
hypocrites. They have caught enough of the spirit of their time
not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and
witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that they do not
believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they
are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods. But
they are part of a machine, and the old men and the rich men who
run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find themselves
tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and
children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted
for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as
by the practice of altruism.
But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift
wings--it may be here before this book sees the light. And who
knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which
we saw in Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burned their
holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as citizens
and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of
exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into
dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. All
those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe nonsense,
because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly
realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any
man can go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly
run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten
or fifteen dollars. Do you not think that there may be some who
will choose freedom and self-respect on those terms?
And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the
church because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a
way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and
obtain promotion, to get customers if you are a tradesman, to
extend your practice if you are a professional man? And what
about the millions who go to church because they are poor, and
because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one way to keep
the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for the
children, to get charity if you fall into need; in short, to
acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who stand
together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent, contented
in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them?