view all this uproar in the _Frauenzimmer_ with high satisfaction. It
gives me delight to see a taboo violated, and that delight is doubled
when the taboo is one that is wholly senseless. Sex is more important
to women than to men, and so they ought to be free to discuss it as
they please, and to hatch and propagate whatever ideas about it occur
to them. Moreover, I can see nothing but nonsense in the doctrine
that their concern with such matters damages their charm. So far as
I am concerned, a woman who knows precisely what a Graafian follicle
is is just as charming as one who doesn’t--just as charming, and
far less dangerous. Charm in women, indeed, is a variable star, and
shows different colors at different times. When their chief mark was
ignorance, then the most ignorant was the most charming; now that
they begin to think deeply and indignantly there is charm in their
singular astuteness. But I am inclined to believe that they have not
yet attained to a genuine astuteness in the new field of sex. To the
contrary, it seems to me that a fundamental error contaminates their
whole dealing with the subject, and that is the error of assuming that
sexual questions, whether social, physiological, or pathological, are
of vast and even paramount importance to mankind in general--in brief,
that sex is really a first-rate matter.
I doubt it. I believe that in this department men show better judgment
than women, if only because their information is older and their
experience wider. Their tendency is to dismiss the whole thing
lightly, to reduce sex to the lowly estate of an afterthought and a
recreation, and under that tendency there is a sound instinct. I do not
believe that the lives of normal men are much colored or conditioned,
either directly or indirectly, by purely sexual considerations. I
believe that nine-tenths of them would carry on all the activities
which engage them now, and with precisely the same humorless diligence,
if there were not a woman in the world. The notion that man would not
work if he lacked an audience, and that the audience must be a woman,
seems to me to be a hollow sentimentality. Men work because they want
to eat, because they want to feel secure, because they long to shine
among their fellows, and for no other reason. A man may crave his
wife’s approbation, or some other woman’s approbation, of his social
graces, of his taste, of his generosity and courage, of his general
dignity in the world, but long before he ever gives thought to such
things and long after he has forgotten them he craves the approbation
of his fellow men. Above all, he craves the approbation of his fellow
craftsmen--the men who understand exactly what he is trying to do, and
are expertly competent to judge his doing of it. Can you imagine a
surgeon putting the good opinion of his wife above the good opinion of
other surgeons? If you, can, then you can do something that I cannot.
Here, of course, I do not argue absurdly that the good opinion of
his wife is nothing to him. Obviously, it is a lot, for if it does
not constitute the principal reward of his work, then it at least
constitutes the principal joy of his hours of ease, when his work is
done. He wants his wife to respect and admire him; to be able to make
her do it is also a talent. But if he is intelligent he must discover
very early that her respect and admiration do not necessarily run
in direct ratio to his intrinsic worth, that the qualities and acts
that please her are not always the qualities and acts that are most
satisfactory to the censor within him--in brief, that the relation
between man and woman, however intimate they may seem, must always
remain a bit casual and superficial--that sex, at bottom, belongs to
comedy and the cool of the evening and not to the sober business that
goes on in the heat of the day. That sober business, as I have said,
would still go on if woman were abolished and heirs and assigns were
manufactured in rolling-mills. Men would not only work as hard as they
do to-day; they would also get almost as much satisfaction out of their
work. For of all the men that I know on this earth, ranging from poets
to ambassadors and from bishops to statisticians, I know none who
labors primarily because he wants to please a woman. They are all hard
at it because they want to impress other men and so please themselves.
Women, plainly enough, are in a far different case. Their emancipation
has not yet gone to the length of making them genuinely free. They have
rid themselves, very largely, of the absolute need to please men, but
they have not yet rid themselves of the impulse to please men. Perhaps
they never will: one might easily devise a plausible argument to that
effect on biological grounds. But sufficient unto the day is the
phenomenon before us: they have got rid of the old taboo which forbade
them to think and talk about sex, and they still labor under the old
superstition that sex is a matter of paramount importance. The result,
in my judgment, is an absurd emission of piffle. In every division
there is vast and often ludicrous exaggeration. The campaign for birth
control takes on the colossal proportions of the war for democracy.
The venereal diseases are represented to be as widespread, at least
in men, as colds in the head, and as lethal as apoplexy or cancer.
Great hordes of viragoes patrol the country, instructing school-girls
in the mechanics of reproduction and their mothers in obstetrics. The
light-hearted monogamy which produced all of us is denounced as an
infamy comparable to cannibalism. Laws are passed regulating the mating
of human beings as if they were horned cattle and converting marriage
into a sort of coroner’s inquest. Over all sounds the battle-cry of
quacks and zealots at all times and everywhere: _Veritas liberabit vos!_
The truth? How much of this new gospel is actually truth? Perhaps two
per cent. The rest is idle theorizing, doctrinaire nonsense, mere
scandalous rubbish. All that is worth knowing about sex--all, that
is, that is solidly established and of sound utility--can be taught
to any intelligent boy of sixteen in two hours. Is it taught in the
current books, so enormously circulated? I doubt it. Absolutely without
exception these books admonish the poor apprentice to renounce sex
altogether--to sublimate it, as the favorite phrase is, into a passion
for free verse, Rotary or the League of Nations. This admonition is
silly, and, I believe, dangerous. It is as much a folly to lock up sex
in the hold as it is to put it in command on the bridge. Its proper
place is in the social hall. As a substitute for all such nonsense I
drop a pearl of wisdom, and pass on. To wit: the strict monogamist
never gets into trouble.
VII. PROTESTANTISM IN THE REPUBLIC
That Protestantism in this great Christian realm is down with a
wasting disease must be obvious to every amateur of ghostly pathology.
The denominational papers are full of alarming reports from its
bedside, and all sorts of projects for the relief of the patient. One
authority holds that only more money is needed to work a cure--that
if the Christian exploiters and usurers of the country would provide
a sufficient slush fund, all the vacant pews could be filled, and the
baptismal tanks with them. Another authority argues that the one way to
save the churches is to close all other places of resort and amusement
on the Sabbath, from delicatessen shops to road-houses, and from movie
parlors to jazz palaces. Yet another proposes a mass attack by prayer,
apparently in the hope of provoking a miracle. A fourth advocates a
vast augmentation of so-called institutional effort, _i. e._, the
scheme of putting bowling alleys and courting cubicles into church
cellars, and of giving over the rest of every sacred edifice to debates
on the Single Tax, boxing matches, baby shows, mental hygiene clinics,
lectures by converted actors, movie shows, raffles, non-voluptuous
dances, and evening classes in salesmanship, automobile repairing,
birth control, interior decoration, and the art and mystery of the
realtor. A fifth, borrowing a leaf from Big Business, maintains that
consolidation and reorganization are what is needed--that the existence
of half a dozen rival churches in every American village profits the
devil a great deal more than it profits God. This last scheme seems to
have won a great deal of support among the pious. At least a score of
committees are now trying to draw up plans for concrete consolidations,
and even the Southern and Northern Methodists, who hate each other
violently, have been in peaceful though vain negotiation.
On the merits of these conflicting remedies I attempt no pronouncement,
but I have been at some pains to look into the symptoms and nature
of the disease. My report is that it seems to me to be analogous to
that malady which afflicts a star in the heavens when it splits into
two halves and they go slambanging into space in opposite directions.
That, in brief, is what appears to be the matter with Protestantism
in the United States to-day. One half of it is moving, with slowly
accelerating speed, in the direction of the Harlot of the Seven
Hills: the other is sliding down into voodooism. The former carries
the greater part of Protestant money with it; the latter carries the
greater part of Protestant enthusiasm, or, as the word now is, pep.
What remains in the middle may be likened to a torso without either
brains to think with or legs to dance--in other words, something that
begins to be professionally attractive to the mortician, though it
still makes shift to breathe. There is no lack of life on the higher
levels, where the most solvent Methodists and the like are gradually
transmogrified into Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians shin up the
ancient bastions of Holy Church, and there is no lack of life on the
lower levels, where the rural Baptists, by the route of Fundamentalism,
the Anti-Saloon League, and the Ku Klux Klan, rapidly descend to the
dogmas and practices of the Congo jungle. But in the middle there is
desiccation and decay. Here is where Protestantism was once strongest.
Here is the region of the plain and godly Americano, fond of devotion
but distrustful of every hint of orgy--the honest fellow who suffers
dutifully on Sunday, pays his share, and hopes for a few kind words
from the pastor when his time comes to die. He stands to-day on a
burning deck. It is no wonder that Sunday automobiling begins to get
him in its clutches. If he is not staggered one day by his pastor’s
appearance in surplice and stole, he is staggered the day following
by a file of Ku Kluxers marching up the aisle. So he tends to absent
himself from pious exercises, and the news goes about that there
is something the matter with the churches, and the denominational
papers bristle with schemes to set it right, and many up-and-coming
pastors, tiring of preaching and parish work, get excellent jobs as
the executive secretaries of these schemes, and go about the country
expounding them to the faithful.
The extent to which Protestantism, in its upper reaches, has succumbed
to the harlotries of Rome seems to be but little apprehended by the
majority of connoisseurs. I was myself unaware of the whole truth until
last Christmas, when, in the pursuit of a quite unrelated inquiry,
I employed agents to attend all the services held in the principal
Protestant basilicas of an eminent American city, and to bring in the
best reports they could formulate upon what went on in the lesser
churches. The substance of these reports, in so far as they related
to churches patronized by the well-to-do, was simple: they revealed a
headlong movement to the right, an almost precipitate flight over the
mountain. Six so-called Episcopal churches held midnight services on
Christmas Eve in obvious imitation of Catholic midnight masses, and one
of them actually called its service a solemn high mass. Two invited the
nobility and gentry to processions, and a third concealed a procession
under the name of a pageant. One offered Gounod’s St. Cecilia mass
on Christmas morning, and another the Messe Solennelle by the same
composer; three others, somewhat more timorous, contented themselves
with parts of masses. One, throwing off all pretense and euphemism,
summoned the faithful to no less than three Christmas masses, naming
them by name--two low and one high. All six churches were aglow with
candles, and two employed incense.
But that was not the worst. Two Presbyterian churches and one Baptist
church, not to mention five Lutheran churches of different synods, had
choral services in the dawn of Christmas morning, and the one attended
by the only one of my agents who got up early enough--it was in a
Presbyterian church--was made gay with candles, and had a palpably
Roman smack. Yet worse: a rich and conspicuous Methodist church,
patronized by the leading Wesleyan wholesalers and money-lenders of the
town, boldly offered a mediæval carol service. Mediæval? What did that
mean? The Middle Ages ended on July 16, 1453, at 12 o’clock meridian,
and the Reformation was not launched by Luther until October 31, 1517,
at 10.15 A. M. If mediæval, in the sense in which it was here used,
does not mean Roman Catholic, then I surely went to school in vain.
My agent, born a Methodist, reported that the whole ceremony shocked
him excessively. It began with trumpet blasts from the church spire
and it concluded with an Ave Maria by a vested choir! Candles rose
up in glittering ranks behind the chancel rail, and above them glowed
a shining electric star. God help us all, indeed! What next? Will the
rev. pastor, on some near to-morrow, defy the lightnings of Jahveh by
appearing in alb and dalmatic? Will he turn his back upon the faithful?
Will he put in a telephone-booth for auricular confession? I shudder to
think of what old John Wesley would have said about that vested choir
and that shining star. Or Bishop Francis Asbury. Or the Rev. Jabez
Bunting. Or Robert Strawbridge, that consecrated man.
Here, of course, I do not venture into the contumacy of criticising; I
merely marvel. A student of the sacred sciences all my life, I am well
learned in the dogmas and ceremonials of the sects, and know what they
affect and what they abhor. Does anyone argue that the use of candles
in public worship would have had the sanction of the _Ur_-Wesleyans,
or that they would have consented to _Blasmusik_ and a vested choir?
If so, let the sciolist come forward. Down to fifty years ago, in
fact, the Methodists prohibited Christmas services altogether, as
Romish and heathen. But now we have ceremonies almost operatic, and the
sweet masses of Gounod are just around the corner! As I have said, the
Episcopalians--who, in most American cities, are largely ex-Methodists
or ex-Presbyterians, or, in New York, ex-Jews--go still further. In
three of the churches attended by my agents Holy Communion was almost
indistinguishable from the mass. Two of these churches, according to
information placed at my disposal by the police, are very fashionable;
to get into one of them is almost as difficult as ordering a suit of
clothes from Poole. But the richer the Episcopalian, the more eager
he is to forget that he was once baptized by public outcry or total
immersion. The Low Church rectors, in the main, struggle with poor
congregations, born to the faith but deficient in buying power. As bank
accounts increase the fear of the devil diminishes, and there is bred
a sense of beauty. This sense of beauty, in its practical effects, is
identical with the work of the Paulist Fathers. To-day, indeed, even
the Methodists who remain Methodists begin to wobble. Tiring of the
dreadful din that goes with the orthodox Wesleyan demonology, they take
to ceremonials that grow more and more stately and voluptuous. The
sermon ceases to be a cavalry charge, and becomes soft and _pizzicato_.
The choir abandons “Throw Out the Life-Line” and “Are You Ready for
the Judgment Day?” and toys with Händel. The rev. pastor throws off
the uniform of a bank cashier and puts on a gown. It is an evolution
that has, viewed from a tree, a certain merit. The stock of nonsense
in the world is sensibly diminished and the stock of beauty augmented.
But what would the old-time circuit-riders say of it, imagining them
miraculously brought back from hell?
So much for the volatilization that is going on above the diaphragm.
What is in progress below? All I can detect is a rapid descent to
mere barbaric devil-chasing. In all those parts of the Republic where
Beelzebub is still as real as Babe Ruth or Dr. Coolidge, and men
drink raw fusel oil hot from the still--for example, in the rural
sections of the Middle West and everywhere in the South save a few
walled towns--the evangelical sects plunge into an abyss of malignant
imbecility, and declare a holy war upon every decency that civilized
men cherish. First the Anti-Saloon League, and now the Ku Klux Klan
and the various Fundamentalist organizations, have converted them
into vast machines for pursuing and butchering unbelievers. They have
thrown the New Testament overboard, and gone back to the Old, and
particularly to the bloodiest parts of it. Their one aim seems to be
to break heads, to spread terror, to propagate hatred. Everywhere they
have set up enmities that will not die out for generations. Neighbor
looks askance at neighbor, the land is filled with spies, every man
of the slightest intelligence is suspect. Christianity becomes a
sort of psychic cannibalism. Unfortunately, the doings of the rustic
gentlemen of God who furnish steam for this movement have been
investigated but imperfectly, and in consequence too little is known
about them. Even the sources of their power, so far as I know, have
not been looked into. My suspicion is that it has increased as the
influence of the old-time country-town newspapers has declined. These
newspapers, in large areas of the land, once genuinely molded public
opinion. They attracted to their service a shrewd and salty class of
rustic philosophers, mainly highly alcoholized; they were outspoken
in their views and responded only slightly to the prevailing crazes.
In the midst of the Bryan uproar, a quarter of a century ago, scores
of little weeklies in the South and Middle West kept up a gallant
battle for sound money and the Hanna idealism. There were red-hot
Democratic papers in Pennsylvania, and others in Ohio; there were
Republican sheets in rural Maryland, and even in Virginia. The growth
of the big city dailies is what chiefly reduced them to puerility.
As communications improved every yokel began following Brisbane, Dr.
Frank Crane, and Mutt and Jeff. The rural mail carrier began leaving a
24-page yellow in every second box. The hinds distrusted and detested
the politics of these great organs, but enjoyed their imbecilities.
The country weekly could not match the latter, and so it began to
decline. It is now in a low state everywhere in America. Half of it is
boiler-plate and the other half is cross-roads gossip. The editor is
no longer the leading thinker of his town; instead, he is commonly a
broken and despairing man, cadging for advertisements and hoping for a
political job. He used to aspire to the State Senate; now he is content
with the post of town bailiff or road supervisor.
His place has been taken by the village pastor. The pastor got into
public affairs by the route of Prohibition. The shrewd shysters who
developed the Anti-Saloon League made a politician of him, and once
he had got a taste of power he was eager for more. It came very
quickly. As industry penetrated to the rural regions the new-blown
Babbitts began to sense his capacity for safeguarding the established
order, and so he was given the job: he became a local Billy Sunday.
And, simultaneously the old-line politicians, taught a lesson by the
Anti-Saloon League, began to defer to him in general, as they had
yielded to him in particular. He was consulted about candidacies; he
had his say about policies. The local school-board soon became his
private preserve. The wandering cony-catchers of the tin-pot fraternal
orders found him a useful man. He was, by now, a specialist in all
forms of public rectitude, from teetotalism to patriotism. He was put
up on days of ceremony to sob for the flag, vice the county judge,
retired. When the Klan burst upon the peasants all of his new duties
were synthetized. He was obviously the chief local repository of its
sublime principles, theological, social, ethnological and patriotic.
In every country town in America to-day, wherever the Klan continues
to rowel the hinds, its chief engine is a clerk in holy orders. If the
Baptists are strong, their pastor is that engine. Failing Baptists, the
heroic work is assumed by the Methodist parson, or the Presbyterian, or
the Campbellite. Without these sacerdotal props the Invisible Empire
would have faded long ago.
What one mainly notices about these ambassadors of Christ, observing
them in the mass, is their vast lack of sound information and sound
sense. They constitute, perhaps, the most ignorant class of teachers
ever set up to lead a civilized people; they are even more ignorant
than the county superintendents of schools. Learning, indeed, is not
esteemed in the evangelical denominations, and any literate plowhand,
if the Holy Spirit inflames him, is thought to be fit to preach. Is
he commonly sent, as a preliminary, to a training camp, to college?
But what a college! You will find one in every mountain valley of
the land, with its single building in its bare pasture lot, and its
faculty of half-idiot pedagogues and broken-down preachers. One man, in
such a college, teaches oratory, ancient history, arithmetic and Old
Testament exegesis. The aspirant comes in from the barnyard, and goes
back in a year or two to the village. His body of knowledge is that
of a street-car motorman or a vaudeville actor. But he has learned the
clichés of his craft, and he has got him a long-tailed coat, and so he
has made his escape from the harsh labors of his ancestors, and is set
up as a fountain of light and learning.
It is from such ignoramuses that the lower half of American
Protestantdom gets its view of the cosmos. Certainly Fundamentalism
should not be hard to understand when its sources are inspected.
How can the teacher teach when his own head is empty? Of all that
constitutes the sum of human knowledge he is as innocent as an Eskimo.
Of the arts he knows absolutely nothing; of the sciences he has
never so much as heard. No good book ever penetrates to those remote
“colleges,” nor does any graduate ever take away a desire to read
one. He has been warned, indeed, against their blandishments; what
is not addressed solely to the paramount business of saving souls
is of the devil. So when he hears by chance of the battle of ideas
beyond the sky-rim, he quite naturally puts it down to Beelzebub. What
comes to him, vaguely and distorted, is unintelligible to him. He is
suspicious of it, afraid of it--and he quickly communicates his fears
to his dupes. The common man, in many ways, is hard to arouse; it is a
terrific job to ram even the most elemental ideas into him. But it is
always easy to scare him.
That is the daily business of the evangelical pastors of the Republic.
They are specialists in alarms and bugaboos. The rum demon, atheists,
Bolsheviki, the Pope, bootleggers, the Jews,--all these have served
them in turn, and in the demonology of the Ku Klux Klan all have been
conveniently brought together. The old stock company of devils has been
retired, and with it the old repertoire of private sins. The American
peasant of to-day finds it vastly easier to claw into heaven than he
used to. Personal holiness has now been handed over to the Holy Rollers
and other such survivors from a harsher day. It is sufficient now
to hate the Pope, to hate the Jews, to hate the scientists, to hate
all foreigners, to hate whatever the cities yield to. These hatreds
have been spread in the land by rev. pastors, chiefly Baptists and
Methodists. They constitute, with their attendant fears, the basic
religion of the American clod-hopper to-day. They are the essence of
the new Protestantism, second division, American style.