class-tyranny and priestly domination have been the custom since the
dawn of history; in which no property-right can possibly trace back to
any other basis than force. In Austria, for example--Austria, the
leader and guardian of the Holy Alliance--Austria, which had no
Reformation, no Revolution, no Kultur-kampf--Austria, in which the
income of the Catholic Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words,
Austria is still to a large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was
Austria which began the war--began it in a religious quarrel, with a
Slav people which does not acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of
the world, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church. So of
course to-day, when Austria is learning the bitter lesson that they
who draw the sword shall perish by the sword, the heart of the Holy
Father is wrung with grief, and he sends out these eloquent
peace-notes, written in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And at the same
time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced to prison for
life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!
It is a curious thing to observe--the natural instinct which, all over
the world, draws Superstition and Exploitation together. This war,
which is hailed as a war against autocracy, might almost as accurately
be described as a war against the clerical system. Wherever in the
world you find the Papal power strong, there you find sympathy with
the Prussian infamy and there you find German intrigue. In Spain, for
example; in Ireland and Quebec, and in the Argentine. The treatment of
Belgium was a little too raw--too many priests were shot at the
outset, and so Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice
that he pleads in vain with the Vatican, which stands firm by its
beloved Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The Kaiser
allows the hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace
settlement; and meantime the law forbidding the presence of the
Jesuits in Germany has been repealed, and all over the world the
propagandists of this order are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger
Casement was raised a Catholic, and so also "Jim" Larkin, the Irish
labor-leader who _is_ touring America denouncing the Allies. The
Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beat conscription in
Australia, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery among the
ignorant peasant-soldiers from Sicily which caused the breaking of the
Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct worked that, in
the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New York was campaigning
for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish suddenly forgot their ancient
horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's Journal" published nine articles
favoring Socialism in a single issue; while even "The Tablet," the
diocesan paper, began to discover that the Socialists were not such
bad fellows after all. The same "Tablet" which a few years ago allowed
Father Belford to declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be
"stopped with a bullet"!
P. S. The reader will be interested to know that for the
statements on page 155, Upton Sinclair was described as a
"scoundrel" by a former prime minister of the Austrian
Empire, and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a
court trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns--about $7
in American money.
* * * * *
#BOOK FOUR#
#The Church of the Slavers#
Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
And merrily from night to morn
We chaunt his praise and worship him--
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!
A wondrous god! most fit for those
Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;
Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
Hell's burning incense fills the air,
And Death attests in street and lane
The hideous glory of his reign.
--Buchanan
* * * * *
#Face of Caesar#
The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing
mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic
Exploitation. From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are
better than the Catholic, but not much better. The Catholics stand
upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word; but since this
Word is the entire literary product, history and biography, science
and legislation, poetry, drama and fiction of a whole people for
something like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection
of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything
you wish to do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape
and wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct
orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers
to construct a Bible defense of their system.
They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous
form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and see what men
have done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman
coin, I think he would drop dead. As for Paul, he was a Roman
bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up; when he ordered,
"Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly what he said. The Roman
official stamp which he put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the
salvation of the Slavers from the Reformation on.
In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering
the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself knew about it, he
had denounced the princely robbers and the priestly land-exploiters
with that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing
had been done about it, nothing ever is done about it--until at last
the miserable peasants attempted to organize and win their own rights.
Their demands do not seem to us so very criminal as we read them
today; the privilege of electing their own pastors, the abolition of
villeinage, the right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the
reduction of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor,
and--that universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia,
England, Mexico or sixteenth century Germany--the restoration to the
village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of
slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline
sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would drop the
sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with spiritual, not
temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist without inequalities,
etc.
And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon them
and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations which might
have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the police-force
of his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot answer a rebel with
reason, but the best answer is to hit him with the fist until blood
flows from the nose." He issued a letter: "Against the Murderous and
Thieving Mob of Peasants," which might have come from the Reverend
Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be
beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand.
God knew this well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's
tail, but a sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of
Methodist Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be
troubled about the severity of their repression, for it will save many
souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes set to
work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable wretches;
they completely aborted the social hopes of the Reformation, and cast
humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and militarism for four
centuries. As a church scholar, Prof. Rauschenbusch, puts it:
The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from
1517 to 1525, when the whole nation was in commotion, and a
great revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every
class and every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal
of life.... The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly
religious and creative when it embraced the whole of human
life and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and
movements. When it became "religious" in the narrow sense,
it grew scholastic and spiny, quarrelsome, and impotent to
awaken high enthusiasm and noble life.
#Deutschland ueber Alles#
As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became the
state church of Prussia, and Bible-worship and Devil-terror played
their part, along with the Mass and the Confessional, in building up
the Junker dream. A court official--the Oberhofprediger--was set up,
and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals
in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist
and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects.
He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain
in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells
with jocular approval how he kept them from thinking:
He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of
pains with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to them;
and for the rest expects to be obeyed by them, as by his
Sergeants and Corporals. Indeed, the reverend men feel
themselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants, Corporals,
and Captains, to whom obedience is the rule, and discontent
a thing not to be indulged in by any means.
So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided Silesia and
Poland. His successors ordered all the Protestant sects into one, so
that they might be more easily controlled; from which time the
Lutheran Church has been a department of the Prussian state, in some
cases a branch of the municipal authority.
In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded their
liberty, it was an ultra-pious king of Prussia who sent his troops and
shot them down--precisely as Luther had advised to shoot down the
peasants. At this time the future maker of the German Empire rose in
the Landtag and made his bow before the world; a young Prussian
land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck by name, he shook his fist in the face
of the new German liberalism, and incidentally of the new German
infidelity:
Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no state
erected upon any other foundation can permanently exist.
The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintained this tradition of
his line. It was his custom to tour the Empire in a train of blue and
white cars, carrying as many costumes as any stage favorite, most of
them military; with him on the train went the Prussian god, and there
was scarcely a performance at which this god did not appear, also in
military costume. After the failure of the "Kultur-kampf," the
official Lutheran religion was ordered to make friends with its
ancient enemy, the Catholic Church. Said the Kaiser:
I make no difference between the adherents of the Catholic
and Protestant creeds. Let them both stand upon the
foundation of Christianity, and they are both bound to be
true citizens and obedient subjects. Then the German people
will be the rock of granite upon which our Lord God can
build and complete his work of Kultur in the world.
And here is the oath required of the Catholic clergy, upon their
admission to equality of trustworthiness with their Protestant
confreres:
I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his Royal
Majesty,--and his lawful successors in the government,--as
my most gracious King and Sovereign; promote his welfare
according to my ability; prevent injury and detriment to
him; and particularly endeavor carefully to cultivate in the
minds of the people under my care a sense of reverence and
fidelity towards the King, love for the Fatherland,
obedience to the laws, and all those virtues which in a
Christian denote a good citizen; and I will not suffer any
man to teach or act in a contrary spirit. In particular I
vow that I will not support any society or association,
either at home or abroad, which might endanger the public
security, and will inform His Majesty of any proposal made,
either in my diocese or elsewhere, which might prove
injurious to the State.
And later on this heaven-guided ruler conceived the scheme of a
Berlin-Bagdad railway, for which he needed one religion more; he paid
a visit to Constantinople, and made another debut and produced another
god--with the result that millions of Turks are fighting under the
belief that the Kaiser is a convert to the faith of Mohammed!
#Der Tag.#
All this was, of course, in preparation for the great event to which
all good Germans looked forward--to which all German officers drank
their toasts at banquets--the Day.
This glorious day came, and the field-gray armies marched forth, and
the Pauline-Lutheran God marched with them. The Kaiser, as usual,
acted as spokesman:
Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On
me, the German emperor, the spirit of God has descended. I
am His sword, His weapon and His viceregent. Woe to the
disobedient and death to cowards and unbelievers.
As to the Prussian state religion, its attitude to the war is set
forth in a little book written by a high clerical personage, the Herr
Consistorialrat Dietrich Vorwerk, containing prayers and hymns for the
soldiers, and for the congregations at home. Here is an appeal to the
Lord God of Battles:
Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work daily
death and tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful
long-suffering each bullet and each blow which misses its
mark. Lead us not into the temptation of letting our wrath
be too tame in carrying out Thy divine judgment. Deliver us
and our ally from the Infernal Enemy and his servants on
earth. Thine is the kingdom, the German land; may we, by the
aid of Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the fame and the glory.
It is this Herr Consistorialrat who has perpetrated the great
masterpiece of humor of the war--the hymn in which he appeals to that
God who keeps guard over Cherubim, Seraphim, and Zeppelins. You have
to say over the German form of these words in order to get the effect
of their delicious melody--"Cherubinen, Seraphinen, Zeppelinen!" And
lest you think that this too-musical clergyman is a rara avis, turn to
the little book which has been published in English under the same
title as Herr Vorwerk's "Hurrah and Hallelujah." Here is the Reverend
S. Lehmann:
Germany is the center of God's plans for the world.
Germany's fight against the whole world is in reality the
battle of the spirit against the whole world's infamy,
falsehood and devilish cunning.
And here is Pastor K. Koenig:
It was God's will that we should will the war.
And Pastor J. Rump:
Our defeat would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity. We
fight for the cause of Jesus within mankind.
And here is an eminent theological professor:
The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is
the German God. Not the national God such as the lower
nations worship, but "our God," who is not ashamed of
belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart.
#King Cotton#
It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to denounce the
Prussian system; my only purpose is to show that Bible-worship,
precisely as saint-worship or totem-worship, delivers the worshipper
up to the Slavers. This truth has held in America, precisely as in
Prussia. During the middle of the last century there was fought out a
mighty issue in our free republic; and what was the part played in
this struggle by the Bible-cults? Hear the testimony of William Lloyd
Garrison: "American Christianity is the main pillar of American
slavery." Hear Parker Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church
before we could reach the dreadful institution at all."
In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which represented
the churches of the South as well as of the North, passed by a
#unanimous# vote a resolution to the effect that "Slavery is utterly
inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our
neighbor as ourselves." But in a generation the views of the entire
South, including the Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What
was the reason? Had the "law of God" been altered? Had some new
"revelation" been handed down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that
a Yankee by the name of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take
the seeds out of short staple cotton. The cotton crop of the South
increased from four thousand bales in 1791 to four hundred and fifty
thousand in 1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in 1860.
There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended upon
slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn of history,
he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he wanted was right
and holy. From one end of the South to the other the pulpits rang with
the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to servants shall he be to his
brethren." The learned Bishop Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery",
gave the standard interpretation of this text:
The Almighty, forseeing the total degredation of the Negro
race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under the
descendants of Shem and Japheth, doubtless because he judged
it to be their fittest condition.
I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from defenses
of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus Christ--and not
only from the South, but from the North. For it must be understood
that leading families of Massachusetts and New York owed their power
to Slavery; their fathers had brought molasses from New Orleans and
made it into rum, and taken it to the coast of Africa to be exchanged
for slaves for the Southern planters. And after this trade was
outlawed, the slave-grown cotton had still to be shipped to the North
and spun; so the traders of the North must have divine sanction for
the Fugitive Slave law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The
slavery of the negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in
the Old and New Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of New
York, giving the decision of a clerical man of the world: "There is no
debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise, and it may
continue through the Millenium."
And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in arms against
those who presumed to interfere with this divine institution, the men
of God of the South called down blessings upon their armies in words
which, with the proper change of names, might have been spoken in
Berlin in August, 1914. Thus Dr. Thornwell, one of the leading
Presbyterian divines of the South: "The triumph of Lincoln's
principles is the death-knell of slavery.... Let us crush the serpent
in the egg." And the Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: "The war is a
war against slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against
the Word, Providence and Government of God." I read in the papers, as
I am writing, how the clergy of Germany are thundering against
President Wilson's declaration that that country must become
democratic. Here is a manifesto of the German Evangelical League, made
public on the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation:
We especially warn against the heresy, promulgated from
America, that Christianity enjoins democratic institutions,
and that they are an essential condition of the kingdom of
God on earth.
In exactly the same way the religious bodies of the entire South
united in an address to Christians throughout the world, early in the
year 1863:
The recent proclamation of the President of the United
States, seeking the emancipation of the slaves of the South,
is in our judgment occasion of solemn protest on the part of
the people of God.
#Witches and Women#
To whatever part of the world you travel, to whatever page of history
you turn, you find the endowed and established clergy using the word
of God in defense of whatever form of slave-driving may then be
popular and profitable. Two or three hundred years ago it was the
custom of Protestant divines in England and America to hang poor old
women as witches; only a hundred and fifty years ago we find John
Wesley, founder of Methodism, declaring that "the giving up of
witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." And if you
investigate this witch-burning, you will find that it is only one
aspect of a blot upon civilization, the Christian Mysogyny. You see,
there were two Hebrew legends--one that woman was made out of a man's
rib, and the other that she ate an apple; therefore in modern England
a wife must be content with a legal status lower than a domestic
servant.
Perhaps the most comical of the clerical claims is this--that
Christianity has promoted chivalry and respect for womanhood. In
ancient Greece and Rome the woman was the equal and helpmate of man;
we read in Tacitus about the splendid women of the Germans, who took
part in public councils, and even fought in battles. Two thousand
years before the Christian era we are told by Maspero that the
Egyptian woman was the mistress of her house; she could inherit
equally with her brothers, and had full control of her property. We
are told by Paturet that she was "juridically the equal of man, having
the same rights and being treated in the same fashion." But in
present-day England, under the common law, woman can hold no office of
trust or power, and her husband has the sole custody of her person,
and of her children while minors. He can steal her children, rob her
of her clothing, and beat her with a stick provided it is no thicker
than his thumb. While I was in London the highest court handed down a
decision on the law which does not permit a woman to divorce her
husband for infidelity, unless it has been accompanied by cruelty; a
man had brought his mistress into his home and compelled his wife to
work for and wait upon her, and the decision was that this was not
cruelty in the meaning of the law!
And if you say that this enslavement of Woman has nothing to do with
religion--that ancient Hebrew fables do not control modern English
customs--then listen to the Vicar of Crantock, preaching at St.
Crantock's, London, Aug. 27th, 1905, and explaining why women must
cover their heads in church:
(1) Man's priority of creation. Adam was first formed, then
Eve.
(2) The manner of creation. The man is not of the woman, but
the woman of the man.
(3) The purport of creation. The man was not created for the
woman, but the woman for the man.
(4) Results in creation. The man is the image of the glory
of God, but woman is the glory of man.
(5) Woman's priority in the fall. Adam was not deceived; but
the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.
(6) The marriage relation. As the Church is subject to
Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands.
(7) The headship of man and woman. The head of every man is
Christ, but the head of the woman is man.
I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these
ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which
cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes. In
the city where I write, three clergymen are being sent to jail for six
months for protesting against the use of the name of Jesus in the
wholesale slaughter of men. Now, I am backing this war. I know that it
has to be fought, and I want to see it fought as hard as possible; but
I want to leave Jesus out of it, for I know that Jesus did not believe
in war, and never could have been brought to support a war. I object
to clerical cant on the subject; and I note that an eminent
theological authority, "Billy" Sunday, appears to agree with me; for I
find him on the front page of my morning paper, assailing the three
pacifist clergymen, and making his appeal not to Jesus, but to the
blood-thirsty tribal diety of the ancient Hebrews:
I suppose they think they know more than God Almighty, who
commanded the sun to stand still while Joshua won the battle
for the Lord; more than the God who made Samson strong so he
could slay thousands of his nation's enemies in a righteous
cause.