he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for
him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church.
He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the
Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman
Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise or no less a person than
the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the
new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the
greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious
for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off
laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus
three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion.
How complete and swift was his success you may judge from the fact
that fifty years later we find the Emperor Valentinian compelled to
pass an edict limiting the donations of emotional females to the
church in Rome!
From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this
book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days of
Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar
have been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of
predatory economic might. With only one qualification to be noted:
that the Church has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of
her proletarian Founder. She has done her best, of course; we have
seen how her scholars twist his words out of their sense, and the
Catholic Church even goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead
language, so that her victims may not hear the words of Jesus in a
form they can understand.
'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung Only by
priests, and in the Latin tongue!
But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one incessant
struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled themselves with the
spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of that
bitterly class-conscious proletarian, James, the brother of Jesus.
And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has given
life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on the hearts
of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and fervor which has
been poured into it by generation after generation of poor men who
live like Jesus as outcasts, and die like Jesus as criminals, and are
revered like Jesus as founders and saints. The greatest of the early
Church fathers were bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their
own time. St. Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of
office, exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by
the Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor
Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was
exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the heretics
whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were proletarian rebels;
the saints whom the Church reveres, the founders of the orders which
gave it life for century after century, were men who sought to return
to the example of the carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar
on this point, Prof. Rauschenbusch:
The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the
Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic
and communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest
doctrinal reformer before the reformation; but his eyes,
too, were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman
Church by joining in a great national and patriotic movement
against the alien domination and extortion of the Church.
The Bohemian revolt, made famous by the name of John Huss,
was quite as much political and social as religious.
Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a religious
prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo de
Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's
mercy. Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his
ill-gotten wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the
restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence. It
is significant that the dying sinner found it easy to assent
to the first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible
to concede the last.
#Locusts and Wild Honey#
This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time long
before Jesus; it seems to have been inherent in the religious
character of the Jews--that stubborn independence, that stiff-necked
insistence on the right of a man to interview God for himself and to
find out what God wants him to do; also the inclination to find that
God wants him to oppose earthly rulers and their plundering of the
poor. What is it that gives to the Bible the vitality it has today?
Its literary style? To say that is to display the ignorance of the
cultured; for elevation of style is a by-product of passionate
conviction; it is what the Jewish writers had to say, and not the way
they said it, that has given them their hold upon mankind. Was it
their insistence upon conscience, their fear of God as the beginning
of wisdom? But that same element appears in the Babylonian psalms,
which are as eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews, yet are
read only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful presence of
divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians had that
far more than the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their religious
books. Or was it the love of man for all things living, the lesson of
charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress? The gentle Buddha
had that, and had it long before Christ; also his priests had
metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John the Apostle or Thomas
Aquinas.
No, there is one thing and one only which distinguishes the Hebrew
sacred writings from all others, and that is their insistent note of
proletarian revolt, their furious denunciations of exploiters, and of
luxury and wantonness, the vices of the rich. Of that note the
Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian writing contain not a trace, and
the Egyptian hardly enough to mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it;
but the true, natural-born rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They
were rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today in
Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood which
spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, through John the Baptist
and Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through Marx and
Lassalle and Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and Morris Hillquit and
Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the Joseph Fels endowment.
The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire was 20%;
the laws of Manu permitted 24%, while the laws of the Egyptians only
stepped in to prevent more than 100%. But listen to this Hebrew law:
If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee,
then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or
a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no
interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy
brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.
And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants, and
commanding that at the end of fifty years all debtors shall have their
debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note that this is
not the raving of agitators, the demand of a minority party; it is the
law of the Hebrew land.
There has been of late a great deal of new discovery concerning the
early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as follows:
The land-mark law, which sternly forbids encroachment upon
peasant rights; consideration for the foreigner; additional
sanitary and food laws; tithe regulations on behalf of
widows, orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those who have no
economic independence should eat and be satisfied; that
loans should be given cheerfully, not only without any
interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. To
withhold a loan because the year of release is at hand in
which the principal is no longer recoverable, is described
as a grave sin. When you are compelled to free your slaves,
you must give them sufficient capital to embark upon some
industry which shall prevent their falling back into
slavery. A number of holidays are insisted upon. There must
be no more crushing of the poor out of existence, for God
cares for these people who have been driven to poverty, and
they shall never cease out of the land. Howbeit there shall
be no poor with you, for the Lord will bless you, if you
will obey these laws.
But then prosperity came, and culture, which meant contact with the
capitalist ideas of the heathen empires. The Jews fell from the stern
justice of their fathers; and so came the prophets, wild-eyed men of
the people, clad in camel's hair and living upon locusts and wild
honey, breaking in upon priests and kings and capitalists with their
furious denunciations. And always they incited to class war and social
disturbance. I quote Conrad Noel again:
Nathan and Gad had been David's political advisers, Abijah
had stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had resisted Ahab,
Elisha had fanned the rebellion of Jehu, Amos thunders
against the misrule of the king of Israel, Isaiah denounces
the landlords and the usurers, Micah charges them with
blood-guiltiness; Jeremiah and the latter prophets, though
they strike a more intimate note of personal repentance,
strike it as the prelude to that national restoration for
which they hunger as exiles.
The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old
Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the
nineteenth century thundered against the "Christian"
employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses were
cemented with the blood of little children, so Isaiah cries
against his generation: "Your governing classes companion
with thieves; behold you build up Sion with blood." Their
ceremonial and their Sabbath keeping are an abomination to
God. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes
from you. Your hands are full of blood." The poor man is
robbed. The rich exact usury. "Woe unto you that lay house
to house and field to field, that ye may dwell alone in the
midst of the land." "Wash you, make you clean, put away the
evil of your doing from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,
judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us
reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be
blood-colored, they shall be as white as snow; though they
be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing
and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye
refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword.
#Mother Earth#
And nowadays we have the Socialist and Anarchist agitators, following
the same tradition, possessed by the same dream as the ancient Hebrew
prophets. I have mentioned Emma Goldman; it may be that the reader is
not familiar with her writings, and does not realize how very Biblical
she is, both in point of view and style. Let me quote a few sentences
from a recent issue of her paper, "Mother Earth", on the subject of
our ruling classes and their social responsibility:
Yes, you idle rich, you may howl about what we mean to do to you!
Your riches are rotten and your fine clothes are falling from your
backs. Your stocks and bonds are so tainted that the ink on them
should turn to acid and eat holes in your pockets and your skins. You
have piled up your dirty millions, but what wages have you paid to the
poor devils of farm hands you have robbed? And do you imagine they
won't remember it when the revolution comes? You loll on soft couches
and amuse yourselves with your mistresses; you think you are "it" and
the world is yours. You send militiamen and shoot down our organizers,
and we are helpless. But wait, comrades, our time is coming.
Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of this tirade
is now in jail, where she can no longer defy the laws of good taste.
They always put the ancient prophets in jail; that is the way to know
a prophet when you meet him. Let me quote another prophet who is now
behind bars--Alexander Berkman, in his "Prison Memoirs of an
Anarchist", discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:
Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it
to you? Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can you go
all the way back and show there is no flaw anywhere in your
title? I tell you that the beginning and the root of your
wealth is necessarily in injustice. And why? Because Nature
did not make this man rich and that man poor from the start.
Nature does not intend for one man to have capital and
another to be a wage-slave. Nature made the earth to be
cultivated by all. The idea we Anarchists have of the rich
is of highwaymen, standing in the street and robbing every
one that passes.
Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I.W.W. Hear what he has to
say in a pamphlet addressed to the harvest-hands he is seeking to
organize:
How much farther do you plutes expect to go with your
grabbing? Do you want to be the only people left on earth?
Why else do you drive out the workers from all share in
Nature, and claim everything for yourselves? The earth was
made for all, rich and poor alike; where do you get your
title deeds to it? Nature gave everything for all men to use
alike; it is only your robbery which makes your so-called
"ownership". Capital has no rights. The land belongs to
Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.
Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist Party
for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:
The propertied classes are like people who go into a public
theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as
private property what is meant for social use. If each man
would take only what he needs, and leave the balance to
those who have nothing, there would be no rich and no poor.
The rich man is a thief.
I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know that
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may
read this book, and I don't want them to close it in the middle and
throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to explain my poor joke; the
sentiments I have been quoting are not those of our modern agitators,
but of another group of ancient ones. The first is not from Emma
Goldman, nor did I find it in "Mother Earth". I found it in the
Epistle of James, believed by orthodox authorities to have been James,
the brother of Jesus. It is exactly what he wrote--save that I have
put it into modern phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in
order that those familiar with the Bible might read it without
suspicion. The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander
Berkman, but in those of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early
fathers, who lived 374-407. The third is not from the pen of "Big
Bill" but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church,
340-397, and the fourth is not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil of
the Greek Church, 329-379. And if the reader objects to my having
fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the Christian
Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred years?
#The Soap Box#
This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other
as the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in the direct line
of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was brought up in the
Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out
by the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a man who thinks of
Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any
other man that lives or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one
purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream
that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men.
I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for
the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read
his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely,
because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But
this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it
meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church
devotees of Jerusalem. The way to get the spirit of the tirades of
Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church
fathers--translate him into American. This time, since the reader
shares the secret, it will not be necessary to disguise the Bible
style, and we may follow the text exactly. Let me try the twenty-third
chapter of Matthew, omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of
Hebrew casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or
St. Alphonsus to find a parallel:
Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech,
saying, The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the
Fifth Avenue churches; and it would be all right if you were
to listen to what they preach, and do that; but don't follow
their actions, for they never practice what they preach.
They load the backs of the working-classes with crushing
burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a
burden, and everything they do is for show. They wear
frock-coats and silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the
speakers' table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, and
they occupy the best pews in the churches, and their doings
are reported in all the papers; they are called leading
citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be called
leading citizens, for the only useful man is the man who
produces. (Applause). And whoever exalts himself shall be
abased, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.
Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics, hypocrites!
for you shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men; you don't
go in yourself and you don't let others go in. Woe unto you,
doctors of divinity and Presbyterians, hypocrites! for you
foreclose mortgages on widows' houses, and for a pretense
you make long prayers. For this you will receive the greater
damnation! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Methodists,
hypocrites! for you send missionaries to Africa to make one
convert, and when you have made him, he is twice as much a
child of hell as yourselves. (Applause). Woe unto you, blind
guides, with your subtleties of doctrine, your
transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all the rest of
it; you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity
and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks into
the collection-plate and you pay no heed to the really
important things in the Bible, which are justice and mercy
and faith in goodness. You blind guides, who strain at a
gnat and swallow a camel! (Laughter). Woe unto you, doctors
of divinity and Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe
yourselves and dress in immaculate clothing but within you
are full of extortion and excess. You blind high churchmen,
clean first your hearts, so that the clothes you wear may
represent you. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Baptists, hypocrites! for you are like marble tombs which
appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead
men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you appear
righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and
iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and
Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect statues to dead
reformers, and put wreathes upon the tombs of old-time
martyrs. You say, if we had been alive in those days, we
would not have helped to kill those good men. That ought to
show you how to treat us at present. (Laughter). But you are
the children of those who killed the good men; so go ahead
and kill us too! You serpents, you generation of vipers, how
can you escape the damnation of hell?
At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem
"Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified him
that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his
followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed. Jesus
was taken to the station-house followed by a riotous throng, and held
upon a charge of disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr.
Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against him, and Magistrate Pilate
sentenced him to six months on Blackwell's Island, remarking that from
this time on he proposed to make an example of those soap-box orators
who persist in using threatening and abusive language. Just as the
prisoner was being led away, a detective appeared with a requisition
from the Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco,
where he is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being
charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day
explosion.
#The Church Machine#
The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would
have a sign of Thee"--meaning that they wanted him to do some magic,
to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He
answered by calling them an evil and adulterous generation--which is
exactly what I have said about the Papal machine. The Baptists and
Methodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time
accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in
their ancient texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made
for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and
quoted Karl Marx at them--"This people honoreth me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of
the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own
class in the places where they gathered--the public houses--the
churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a
wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"--precisely as in the
old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their
meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still
denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.
But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom
of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and
the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest
church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom.
Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more
concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history--even
in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen
who dare to preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of
the Church--Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J.
Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their
voices are not silenced, they are like the leaven, to which Jesus
compared the kingdom of God--a woman took it and hid it in three
measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young theological
students read, and some of them understand; I know three brothers in
one family who have just gone into the Church, and are preaching
straight social revolution--and the scribes and the pharisees have not
yet dared to cast them out.
In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and
henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon. Every church
is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property.
And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking
favors from the state--the exemption of church property from taxation,
exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for
them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and
education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday--so on
through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you
find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the
deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts
jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the
churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social revolution
is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.
It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are
proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and
beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of
privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The
ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working
people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are
proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out
the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes
for his class instead of for his pope. In Ireland, as I write, the
young priests are defying their bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a
non-religious movement for an Irish Republic.