perform for the merchants--taking the revolutionary hope of Jesus, for
a kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting it into a dream of a
golden harp in an uncertain future. To appreciate the fullness of this
betrayal, take the prayer which Jesus dictated--so simple, direct and
practical: "Give us this day our daily bread", and put it beside the
hymns which the slave-congregations are trained to sing. In my
neighborhood is a one-roomed building with a plate glass front, upon
which I observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters
the sign "#Glory Mission.#" I approach him, and he drops his work and
welcomes me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I answer
that I am. I have to shout the good tidings into his ear, as he is
very deaf. He presents me with his card, which shows that he bears the
title of "Reverend", also the sobriquet of "Mountain Missionary". I
ask him to permit me to examine the hymn-book which he uses in his
work, and with touching eagerness he presses upon me a well-worn
volume bearing the title "Waves of Glory". I seat myself and note down
a few of the baits it sets out for hungry wage-slaves:
O, there's a plenty, O, there's a plenty,
There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!
Riches in glory, riches in glory,
Royal supply our wants exceed!
Feasting, I'm feasting,
I'm feasting with my Lord!
Beautiful robes, beautiful robes,
Beautiful robes we then shall wear!
Jerusalem the golden,
With milk and honey blest!
Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem,
I'll be there, I'll be there!
Blest Canaan land, bright Canaan land,
I love to be in Canaan land!
Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
As on the highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me!
In the sweet bye and bye
We shall meet on that beautiful shore--
I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I.W.W. who
was executed a few years ago in Utah, and who used this tune in his
little red book of revolutionary chants:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In the glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die!
#Captivating Ideals#
In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero is a
Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his diggings in the
bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into our superior
civilization. The thing that impresses him most is what he calls "the
immortality idea". The person who got that up was a world-genius, he
exclaims. "If you can once get a man to believing in immortality,
there is no more left for you to desire; you can take everything he
owns--you can skin him alive if it pleases you--and he will bear it
all with perfect good humor."
And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the
effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that view
of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the language of
scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiastical
authority, equipped with every tool of modern learning, would set
about voicing the idea that the function of the teaching of Heaven is
to chloroform the poor, so that the rich may continue to rob them in
security?
Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of scholarship,
dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges Chatterton-Hill, of the
University of Geneva. Its title is "The Sociological Value of
Christianity", and from cover to cover it is a warning to the rich of
the danger they run in giving up their religion and ceasing to support
its priests. It explains how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded
in making the individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which
are indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as
indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor makes
plain just what he means by "individual suffering, individual
sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism; and the advantage
of Christianity is that it makes you think that by submitting to these
horrors, you are profiting your own soul. "By making individual
salvation depend on the acceptance of suffering, on the voluntary
sacrifice of egotistical interests, Christianity adapts the individual
to society".
And this, as the professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a
world in which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only
means of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
sacrifice ... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful ideal"
And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this
purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist on
the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering--of that
suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress
if it could."
You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever
you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only
your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned
to elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of
"overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and therefore you are
starving, you have woven too much cloth, and therefore you are naked,
you have finished the world for your masters, and it is time for you
to move out of the way. As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it,
"Your suppression imposes itself as an imperious necessity." And the
function of the Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process,
by "captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest
will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with candle-lights and
images, your ears with sweet music and soothing words; and so you will
perish without raising a finger! "Here," reflects the professor, "we
see how magnificently the teaching of Jesus applies to all classes of
society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the
embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the
capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that
troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he carries
with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith
at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar
materialists, like you and me. "Inequality signifies inequality of
capacity," he explains; but the standard whereby we judge this
capacity "cannot be the standard of the moral law."
The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are
known, but those which govern his moral nature cannot be
known; the moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and
hence is not subject to the law of inequality!
As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as
wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with the
fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for teaching the
Copernican view of the universe; that infallible popes had again and
again condemned this heresy #ex cathedra#. Said the eloquent cardinal:
Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is
stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is
comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these
opposite statements is the very truth #till we know what
motion is#?
#Spook Hunting#
Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian professors
realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is never far from the
thoughts of any of them--for, of course, no man can look at the
present system and not wonder how the poor stand it, and more
especially #why# they stand it. There have been many thinking men who
have given up the miracle-business quite cheerfully, but have stood
appalled at the idea of letting the lower classes find out the truth.
You note that idea continually in the writings of Professor Goldwin
Smith, who was a free-thinker, but also a #bourgeois# publicist, with
a deep sense of responsibility to the money-masters of the world. He
was about as honest a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was
the #beau ideal# of the New York "Evening Post", which indicates his
point of view. He wrote:
It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a
future state, for a short measure of happiness here, has
materially helped to reconcile the less favored members of
the community to the inequalities of the existing order of
things.
When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course called
"Practical Ethics", under a professor by the name of Hyslop. The
course differed from most of the forty that I tried, in that it gave
evidence that the professor was accustomed to read the morning paper.
He had learned that American politics were rotten; his idea of
"Practical Ethics" was to outline in elaborate detail a complete
scheme of constitutional changes which would make it impossible for
the "boss" to control the government. I think I must have been born
with a charm against #bourgeois# thought, for the good professor never
fooled me an instant; I remember I used to smile at the idea of how
quickly the "boss" would brush through his constitutional cobwebs. The
reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity--and of course
long before they could be put into practice, the politicians would be
ready with devices to make them of no effect.
Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to hunting
spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he is a
determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he may
really have bagged some spooks. All I wish to point out here is the
method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to support the
spook-hunting industry. The very same argument as we got from the
University of Geneva and the University of Toronto! Says our head
spook-hunter:
There has been no belief that exercised so much power upon
the poor as that in a future life. The politicians, men of
the world, have known this so well as to postpone the day of
political judgment by it for many years.
And again:
The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and
having abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its
fundamental beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and
the laboring classes.... The spiritual ideal of life has
gone out of the masses as well as the classes, and nothing
is left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.
And again, more menacingly yet:
The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution
that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and
immortality.
What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step up,
ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the Psychical
Research hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as to the cost of
milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!
You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the Wholesale
Pickpockets' Association making use of their incantations. You admired
my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did
not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts. But what do these
quotations mean, unless they mean what I have said? Are not these
three professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any
men of learning you can find in our present-day society?
And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the
young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and
discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who
discovers that professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not
interested in justice among men, but only in collecting funds for
their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach
the rich how to paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonder that
such young students conclude that #bourgeois# thinkers do not know
what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be
kicked out of the temple of truth?
#Running the Rapids#
And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means
to society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the
hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all
the intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support
of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of
us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for
a metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the
wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit
in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead;
and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and
into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along
with the speed of a race-horse.
With every sense alert, you watch for the rocks, and when you see one,
you dip your paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion
draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail to do
it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go
down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen
for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of
life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The paddle
which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but in
most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book;
and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and
Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable
obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.--he casts a holy
wafer upon the foaming torrent.
* * * * *
And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save
yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard
together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in
winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the
Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals
in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital
tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you
are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul,
the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a
means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course
those who think him a voice of God can form no conception of the
dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome
sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees
or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to the
Gentiles.
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You
are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful
and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the
cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever
decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a
prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and
truth. The next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by
law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold
copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate
details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw
your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who
scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in
the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for
nothing--the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out
your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a
civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a
sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
#Birth Control#
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to
the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used
to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these weapons are not
allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider
the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our great
cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying
as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can
not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this
operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There
exists a simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind and
futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as
animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our
great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded
women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling
desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the
grave as fast as they are born--until finally the mother, worn out
with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten
offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair,
make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from
Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated
that in the United States alone there are a million abortions
every year; and consider that all this hideous mass of suffering--a
bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper
correspondent--might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing
formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of
Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the
nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and
courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young
girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose
for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how to keep from becoming
pregnant!
And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors who
perpetrated this infamy under, a so-called "reform" administration in
New York City--and what do you find? The first thing you find is that
they themselves, one and all, practice birth-control with their wives
or their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the
statute-books are crowded with other laws which they make no pretense
of enforcing; for example, the law which forbids the saloons to be
open on Sunday--which law they take the liberty of understanding to
mean that the saloons shall not have their front doors open on Sunday.
You will find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos;
they are afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid
of the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women
of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf
in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of Tradition-worship;
hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers,
who repeat the instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if God were as
blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and could see no difference between
the Garden of Eden, full of all fruits that grow and all creatures
that run and fly and swim, and a modern East Side tenement-room, with
an oil stove and no windows and no water-closet, and the price of
cabbage seven cents a pound!
#Sheep#
There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America.
They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the
West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I
do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more
democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the
liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly
derived from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are
honestly seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor
for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran
scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they
cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and
foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things
because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain
ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three
thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.
You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the
example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all the
rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may
have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist explains this
seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in high
mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when
the leader leaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, without
waiting to see in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains
and no enemies, but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way
the tailor still sews buttons at the back of your dress-coat, because
a couple of hundred years age all gentlemen wore swords; in the same
way our railroad builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and
liable to overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled
by mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in
spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete protection
against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat meat on Friday,
because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodox
Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's sister, because of
something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox Baptist requires total
immersion in a climate quite different from that of Palestine; the
orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise on the
Sabbath.
In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life, tending
sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent thing for them to
rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear
the reading of the best literature of their time. But nowadays the
city slave spends his week-days shut up in an office, poring over a
ledger, or in a sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously,
therefore, the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the
open air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we
human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern
statute-books, and if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries
to play base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next
morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.
In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened,
but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there are tennis courts
built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot
use these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew
taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the swimming pool in the park
is closed to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire
about it, I am told that it is desirable that city employees should
have one day's rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be
possible to relay the employees, so that they might all have one, or
even two days' rest a week, and still give the public their rights on
Sunday, there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when their
peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law enforces a
general boredom, the public may be more disposed to endure the boredom
of sermons.
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving
pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the
picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred
concerts"--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to
mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to the
imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and
Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as
Ibsen and Brieux.