Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have shivered and
turned pale had some angel whispered to him what devilish utterances
were some day to proceed from the lips of the little cherub with
shining face and shining robes who acted as the bishop's attendant in
the stately ceremonials of the Church! Truly, even into the goodly
company of the elect, even to the most holy places of the temple,
Satan makes his treacherous way! Even under the consecrated hands of
the bishop! For while the bishop was blessing me and taking me into
the company of the sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers
had reported, that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand
dollars worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the
doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess fifty thousand
dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting the bloodhounds
of the police on the train of a human being. I asked my clergyman
friend about it, and remember his patient explanation--that the bishop
had to know all classes and conditions of men: his wife had to go
among the rich as well as the poor, and must be able to dress so that
she would not be embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was making it
his life-work to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great
Episcopal cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much
time among the rich!
The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had to be
cathedrals--despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St. Paul had
declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made with hands." In
the twenty-five years which have passed since that time the good
Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but the mighty structure
which is a monument to his visitations among the rich towers over the
city from its vantage-point on Morningside Heights. It is called the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and knowing what I know about the
men who contributed its funds, and about the general functions of the
churches of the Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less
holy if it were built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of
the skulls of human beings.
#Spiritual Interpretation#
There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions of
the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that they do
their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who was crucified
as a common criminal because, as they said, "He stirreth up the
people." An embarrassing "Savior" for the church of Good Society, you
might imagine; but they manage to fix him up and make him respectable.
I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day Saturday I
ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole potatoes and roasted
them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the roofs of apartment-houses;
but on Saturday night I went into a tub and was lathered and scrubbed,
and on Sunday I came forth in a newly brushed suit, a clean white
collar and a shining tie and a slick derby hat and a pair of tight
gloves which made me impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and
paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society.
And all church-members go through this same performance; the oldest
and most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week--and
then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of
piety. In this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to
scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder--to turn him
from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-window divinity.
The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and
crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail him
to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to the New
Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of gold in your
hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here is a sledge, in the
form of a dignified and scholarly volume, published by the exclusive
house of Scribner, and written by the Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop
whose train I carried in the stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His
Relation to the Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry
Codman Potter, D.D., L.L.D., D.C.L.--a course of lectures delivered
before the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the
endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the Phelps-Dodge
corporation, which the other day carried out the deportation from
their homes of a thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona. Says my
Bishop:
Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced
pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He did not
abhor the company of rich men; he sought it. He did not
invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of
expenditure.
And do you think that the late Bishop of J.P. Morgan and Company
stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of golden
nails? In the course of this book there will march before us a long
line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their way to the New
Golgotha to crucify the carpenter's son: the Rector of the Money
Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction
Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires'
Club, the Pastor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of
the New Haven, the Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We
shall try the weight of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons,
newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound
their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of
the proletarian Christ.
Here, for example, is Rev. F.G. Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals
at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several books on the
social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid of the carpenter's
denunciations of the rich, and says:
Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as
this, a teaching so slightly distinguished from the
curbstone rhetoric of a modern agitator, can be an adequate
reproduction of the scope and power of the teaching of
Jesus?
The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a gentleman;
he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of universities
where gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of Christian Morals
proceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus' actions; demonstrating
therefrom that there are three proper uses to be made of great wealth:
first, for almsgiving--"The poor ye have always with you!"; second,
for beauty and culture--buying wine for wedding-feasts, and
ointment-boxes and other #objets de vertu#; and third, "stewardship,"
"trusteeship"--which in plain English is "Big Business."
I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can imagine he
is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the proletarian
Founder emerging all new and respectable under the brush of this
capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all his own for reading
the scriptures; he tells us that when there are two conflicting
sayings, the rule of interpretation is that "the more spiritual is to
be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes Jesus say: "Blessed are ye
poor." Another puts it: "Blessed are the poor in spirit." The first
one is crude and literal; obviously the second must be what Jesus
meant! In other words, the professor and his church have made for
their economic masters a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to
wage-slaves, a quality of submissiveness, impotence and futility,
which they call by the name of "spirituality". This virtue they exalt
above all others, and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus
everything which has relation to the realities of life!
So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at
Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," and
explaining:
The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its
radicalism, but in its externalism. It proposes to
accomplish by economic change what can be attained by
nothing less than spiritual regeneration.
And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of New York,
warning us:
It is necessary to remember that something more than
material and temporal considerations are involved. There are
things of more importance to the purposes of God and to the
welfare of humanity than economic readjustments and social
amelioration.
And again:
Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing
upon clergy and laity alike, to address their religious
energies too exclusively to those tasks whereby human life
may be made more abundant and wholesome materially.... We
need constantly to be reminded that spiritual things come
first.
There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen for
whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen and pillars
of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shiny
tophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in
pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating
odors. I picture them as I have seen them at St. George's, where that
aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the
collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in
old-fashioned carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin
statues of insolence; at St. Thomas', where you might see all the
"Four Hundred" on exhibition at once; at St. Mary the Virgin's, where
the choir paraded through the aisles, swinging costly incense into my
childish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alone with nose
upturned, carrying on his back a jewelled robe for which some adoring
female had paid sixty thousand dollars. "Spiritual things come first?"
Ah, yes! "Seek first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall
be added unto you!" And it is so dreadful about the French and German
Socialists, who, as the "Churchman" reports, "make a creed out of
materialism." But then, what is this I find in one issue of the organ
of the "Church of Good Society"?
Business men contribute to the Y.M.C.A. because they realize
that if their employes are well cared for and religiously
influenced, they can be of greater service in business!
Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?
* * * * *
#BOOK THREE#
#The Church of the Servant-girls#
Was it for this--that prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet,
And with hard, overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
Was it for this--that men should make
Thy name a fetter on men's necks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
And women withered out of sex?
Was it for this--that slaves should be--
Thy word was passed to set men free?
Swinburne.
* * * * *
#Charity#
As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and
self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be
at home a large number of other women who live sterile and empty
lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their luckier
sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings; they have
emotions--or, in religious parlance, "souls;" it is necessary to
provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating the property of
their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming #enceinte.# So it
comes about that there are two cathedrals in New York: one, St. John
the Divine, for the society ladies, and the other, St. Patrick's, for
the servant-girls. The latter is located on Fifth Avenue, where its
towering white spires divide with the homes of the Vanderbilts the
interest of the crowds of sight-seers. Now, early every Sunday
morning, before "Good Society" has opened its eyes, you may see the
devotees of the Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each
with a little black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do
inside? What are they taught about life? This is the question to which
we have next to give attention.
Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate of
New York, favored me with his justification of his own career and
activities. He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one man of
the world to another, he said: "The reason I put them into the hands
of Catholics is not religious, but because I find they are efficient
in such matters. They don't ask questions, they do what you want them
to do, and do it economically."
I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the
remark--like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his
mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.
When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long hours and
improper working-conditions which drove him to desperation; they do
not ask if police and politicians are getting a rake-off from the
saloon, or if traction magnates are using it as an agency for the
controlling of votes; they do not plunge into prohibition movements or
good government campaigns--they simply take the man in, at a standard
price, and the patient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and
then turn him out for society to make him drunk again. That is
"charity," and it is the special industry of Roman Catholicism. They
have been at it for a thousand years, cleaning up loathsome and
unsightly messes--"plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder
and sudden death." Yet--puzzling as it would seem to anyone not
religious--there were never so many messes, never so many different
kinds of messes, as now at the end of the thousand years of charitable
activity!
But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building and
rebuilding his web across a door-way; like soldiers under the command
of a ruling class with a "muddling through" tradition--
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have messes
to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away quickly and
without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this service, no matter
what their personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-mill, every coal-mine or
other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital,
with its slave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking"
near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these places to ask information as
to the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims.
The "Mother Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These
concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as a matter of business
it would not do for us to talk about them."
Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as it
is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the work of
vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepers and
ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls. This industry of
vote-getting is a comparatively new one; but the Church has been
handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned
this new way of "democracy," and has established her supremacy over
all rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the
confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual
machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the
supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really
believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings
and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster
their hope of the survival of personality after death!
So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance have been
driven to a more or less reluctant alliance with the Papacy. The
Church is here, and her followers are here, before the war several
hundred thousand of them pouring into the country every year. It is no
longer possible to do without Catholics in America; not merely
do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes
washed, but franchises have to be granted, tariff-schedules
adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police trained and
strikes crushed. Under our native political system, for these
purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes belong to
people of a score of nationalities--Irish and German and Italian
and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and Portuguese and
Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church can handle
these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and editors and
politicians familiar with all these languages?
Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely
moderate--the mere actual expenses of the campaign, the cost of red
fire and torch-lights, of liquor and newspaper advertisements. The
rest may come out of the public till, in the form of exemption from
taxation of church buildings and lands, a share of the public funds
for charities and schools, the control of the police for
saloon-keepers and district leaders, the control of police-courts and
magistrates, of municipal administrations and boards of education, of
legislatures and governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to
flatter our sacred self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme
Court Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary
prestige, some cabinet-members and legislators and justices to attend
High Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholic prelates and
dignitaries.
You think this is empty rhetoric--you comfortable, easy-going,
ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic
shades, absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless
intelligence"--while the world about you slides down into the pit! You
ladies of Good Society, practicing your "sweet little charities,"
pursuing your "dear little ideals," raising your families of one or
two lovely children--while Irish and French-Canadians and Italians and
Portuguese and Hungarians are breeding their dozens and scores, and
preparing to turn you out of your country!
#God's Armor#
You remember "Bishop Blougram's Apology," Browning's study of the
psychology of a modern Catholic ecclesiastic. He is not unaware of
modern thought, this bishop; he is a man of culture, who wants to have
beauty about him, to be a "cabin passenger":
There's power in me and will to dominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else;
In many ways I need mankind's respect,
Obedience, and the love that's born of fear.
He wishes that he had faith--faith in anything; he understands that
faith is all-important--
Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat.
But you cannot get faith just by wishing for it--
But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn!
He tries to imagine himself going on a crusade for truth, but he asks
what there would be in it for him--
State the facts,
Read the text right, emancipate the world--
The emancipated world enjoys itself
With scarce a thank-you. Blougram told it first
It could not owe a farthing,--not to him
More than St. Paul!
So the bishop goes on with his role, but uneasily conscious of the
contempt of intellectual people.
I pine among my million imbeciles
(You think) aware some dozen men of sense
Eye me and know me, whether I believe
In the last winking virgin as I vow,
And am a fool, or disbelieve in her,
And am a knave.
But, as he says, you have to keep a tight hold upon the chain of
faith, that is what
Gives all the advantage, makes the difference,
With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule.
We are their lords, or they are free of us,
Just as we tighten or relax that hold.
So he continues, but not with entire satisfaction, in his role of
shepherd to those whom he calls "King Bomba's lazzaroni," and
"ragamuffin saints."
I wander into a Catholic bookstore and look to see what Bishop
Blougram is doing with his lazzaroni and his ragamuffin saints here in
this new country of the far West. It is easy to acquire the
information, for the saleswoman is polite and the prices fit my purse.
America is going to war, and Catholic boys are being drafted to be
trained for battle; so for ten cents I obtain a firmly bound little
pamphlet called "God's Armor, a Prayer Book for Soldiers." It is
marked "Copyright by the G.R.C. Central-Verein," and bears the "Nihil
Obstat" of the "Censor Theolog." and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes
Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici"--which last you may at first
fail to recognize as a well-known city on the Mississippi River. Do
you not feel the spell of ancient things, the magic of the past
creeping over you, as you read those Latin trade-marks? Such is the
Dead Hand, and its cunning, which can make even St. Louis sound
mysterious!
In this booklet I get no information as to the commercial causes of
war, nor about the part which the clerical vote may have played
throughout Europe in supporting military systems. I do not even find
anything about the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve of a
self-governing people to put an end to feudal rule. Instead I discover
a soldier-boy who obeys and keeps silent, and who, in his inmost
heart, is in the grip of terrors both of body and soul. Poor, pitiful
soldier-boy, marking yourself with crosses, performing genuflexions,
mumbling magic formulas in the trenches--how many billions of you have
been led out to slaughter by the greeds and ambitions of your
religious masters, since first this accursed Antichrist got its grip
upon the hearts of men!
I quote from this little book:
Start this day well by lifting up your heart to God. Offer
yourself to Him, and beg grace to spend the day without sin.
Make the sign of the cross. Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost, behold me in Thy Divine Presence. I adore
Thee and give Thee thanks. Grant that all I do this day be
for Thy Glory, and for the salvation of my immortal soul.
During the day lift your heart frequently to God. Your
prayers need not be long nor read from a book. Learn a few
of these short ejaculations by heart and frequently repeat
them. They will serve to recall God to your heart and will
strengthen you and comfort you.
You remember a while back about the prayer-wheels of the Thibetans.
The Catholic religion was founded before the Thibetan, and is less
progressive; it does not welcome mechanical devices for saving labor.
You have to use your own vocal apparatus to keep yourself from hell;
but the process has been made as economical as possible by kindly
dispensations of the Pope. Thus, each time that you say "My God and my
all," you get fifty days indulgence; the same for "My Jesus, mercy,"
and the same for "Jesus, my God, I love Thee above all things." For
"Jesus, Mary, Joseph," you get three hundred days--which would seem by
all odds the best investment of your spare breath.
And then come prayers for all occasions: "Prayer before Battle";
"Prayer for a Happy Death"; "Prayer in Temptation"; "Prayer before and
after Meals"; "Prayer when on Guard"; "Prayer before a long March";
"Prayer of Resignation to Death"; "Prayer for Those in their Agony"--I
cannot bear to read them, hardly to list them. I remember standing in
a cathedral "somewhere in France" during the celebration of some
special Big Magic. There was brilliant white light, and a suffocating
strange odor, and the thunder of a huge organ, and a clamor of voices,
high, clear voices of young boys mounting to heaven, like the hands of
men in a pit reaching up, trying to climb over the top of one another.
It sent a shudder into the depths of my soul. There is nothing left in
the modern world which can carry the mind so far back into the ancient
nightmare of anguish and terror which was once the mental life of
mankind, as these Roman Catholic incantations with their frantic and
ceaseless importunity. They have even brought in the sex-spell; and
the poor, frightened soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the night with
a prostitute, now prostrates himself before a holy Woman-being who is
lifted high above the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills
of awe and affection which his mother brought to him in early
childhood. Read over the phrases of this "Litany of the Blessed
Virgin":
Holy Mary, Pray for us. Holy Mother of God. Holy Virgin of
Virgins. Mother of Christ. Mother of divine grace. Mother
most pure. Mother most chaste. Mother inviolate. Mother
undefiled. Mother most amiable. Mother most admirable.
Mother of good counsel. Mother of our Creator. Mother of our
Savior. Virgin most prudent. Virgin most venerable. Virgin
most renowned. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful.
Virgin most faithful. Mirror of justice. Seat of wisdom.
Cause of our joy. Spiritual vessel. Vessel of honor.
Singular vessel of devotion. Mystical rose. Tower of David.
Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the covenant. Gate of
heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick. Refuge of sinners.
Comforter of the afflicted. Help of Christians. Queen of
Angels. Queen of Patriarchs. Queen of Prophets. Queen of
Apostles. Queen of Martyrs. Queen of Confessors. Queen of
Virgins. Queen of all Saints. Queen conceived without
original sin. Queen of the most holy Rosary. Queen of Peace,
Pray for us.
#Thanksgivings#