CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR
_The mortgage which the peasant has on heavenly property guarantees
the mortgage of the bourgeois on the farms._
MARX.
_The same Christ, the same Buddha, the same Isaiah, can stand at
once for capitalism and communism, for liberty and slavery, for
peace and war, for whatever opposed or clashing ideals you will. For
the life and the power of a church is in the persistent identity of
its symbols and properties. Meanings change anyhow, but things
endure. The rock upon which a church is founded is not the word of
God; the rock upon which a church is founded is the wealth of men._
HORACE M. KALLEN, "Why Religion?"
During the Middle Ages the heads of the Church exercised all the rights
of a feudal lord, and were even more tenacious of their privileges. The
serfs were prohibited from migrating from one part of the country to
another. The daughter of a serf could not marry without the consent of
the lord, who frequently demanded payment for permission; or, worse
still, the infamous "Right of the First Night." The serf was bonded in a
hundred different ways, and it is significant of the esteem in which the
Church was held that in every peasant revolt which occurred, there was
always a direct attack on the Church.
Professor Thorold Rogers, writing of the twelfth century, gives the
following picture of the poorer classes:
"The houses of these villagers were mean and dirty. Brickmaking was a
lost art, stone was found only in a few places. The wood fire was on a
hob of clay. Chimneys were unknown, except in castles and manor houses,
and the smoke escaped through the door or whatever other aperture it
could reach. The floor of the homestead was filthy enough, but the
surroundings were filthier still. Close by the door stood the mixen, a
collection of every abomination--streams from which, in rainy weather,
fertilized the lower meadows, generally the lord's pasture, and polluted
the stream. The house of the peasant cottager was poorer still. Most of
them were probably built of posts wattled and plastered with clay or
mud, with an upper storey of poles reached by a ladder."
"What the lord took he held by right of force; what the Church had it
held by force of cunning. And as, in the long run, the cunning of the
Church was more powerful than the force of the robber-lord, the
priesthood grew in riches until its wealth became a threat to the whole
of the community. In England, in the thirteenth century, the clergy
numbered one in fifty-two of the population, and the possessions of the
Church included a third of the land of England. No opportunity was lost
by the Church to drain money from the people whether they were rich or
poor. The trade done in candles, and sales of indulgences brought in
large sums of money, and there were continuous disputes between the
clergy and the king and the Pope as to the divisions of the spoil. The
picture of the Church watching over the poor, sheltering them from
wrong, tending them in sickness, and relieving them in their poverty
will not do. It is totally without historic foundation. When the poor
revolted, and apart from the great revolts, there were many small and
local outbreaks, the anger of the poor was directed as much against the
Church as it was against the nobles." (_C. Cohen: "Christianity,
Slavery, and Labor."_)
When the downtrodden masses of Spain, Mexico, and Russia revolted
against the tyranny which had held them in the slough of medieval
degradation, they likewise, in recent times, proved that they realized
that their submission was as much caused by the Church, allied as it is
with the state, as by the government itself.
The Church did attend the sick, but its trade was in the miracle cures
and prayers, and so they very much resembled men hawking their own
goods, and attending to their own business. And there is the plain,
historic fact, that in defense of its miracle cures it did what it could
to obstruct the growth of both medical and sanitary science. It did give
alms but these constituted but a small part of what it had previously
taken.
Through all the changes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, it is impossible to detect anxiety on the part of the
Churches, Roman Catholic or Protestant, to better the status of, or
improve the condition of, the working classes. Whatever improvements may
have come about, and they were few enough, came independently of
Christianity, organized or unorganized. Controversies about religious
matters might, and did, grow more acute; controversies about bettering
the position of the working classes only began with the breaking down of
Christianity. And when, as in Germany, there occurred a peasants'
revolt, and the peasants appealed to Luther for assistance, he wrote,
after exhorting the peasants to resignation, to the nobles:
"A rebel is outlawed of God and Kaiser, therefore who can and will first
slaughter such a man does right well, since upon such a common rebel
every man is alike the judge and executioner. Therefore, who can shall
openly or secretly smite, slaughter and stab, and hold that there is
nothing more poisonous, more harmful, more devilish than a rebellious
man."
And in pre-revolutionary France, the Church saw unmoved a state of
affairs almost unimaginable, so far as the masses of the people were
concerned, in their misery and demoralization. And this at a time when
half the land of France, in addition to palaces, chateaux, and other
forms of wealth were possessed by the nobility and clergy, and were
practically free from taxation.
A contemporary observer writes, "Certain savage-looking beings, male and
female, are seen in the country, black, livid, and sunburnt, and
belonging to the soil which they dig and grub with invincible
stubbornness. They stand erect, they display human lineaments, and seem
capable of articulation. They are, in fact, men. They retire at night
into their dens, where they live on black bread, water and roots. They
spare other human beings the trouble of sowing."
In pre-revolutionary France, the clergy, counting monks and nuns,
numbered, in 1762, over 400,000, with total possessions estimated at two
thousand million pounds, producing an annual revenue of about one
hundred and forty millions. The clergy were free from taxation and the
higher members of the order possessed all the rights and privileges of
the feudal nobility. To the end the Church in France, as in our day, in
pre-revolutionary Russia, remained the champion of privilege and
misgovernment.
In England, during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth century, developed the English manufacturing
system. Woman-and child-labor were common in both mines and factories.
The regular working hours were from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M., with six full
days' labor per week. One investigator remarks: "It is a very common
practice with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in
large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and
Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children are sent off by
waggon loads at a time, and are as much lost for ever to their parents
as if they were shipped off for the West Indies. The parishes that bind
them, by procuring a settlement for the children at the end of forty
days, get rid of them for ever; and the poor children have not a human
being in the world to whom they can look up for redress against the
wrongs they may be exposed to from these wholesale dealers in them,
whose object it is to get everything they can possibly wring from their
excessive labor and fatigue."
In the mines conditions were still worse, and a report in 1842 states:
"Children are taken at the earliest ages, if only to be used as living
and waving candlesticks, or to keep rats from a dinner, and it is in
pits of the worst character, too, in which most female children are
employed. It would appear from the practical returns obtained by the
commissioner, that about one-third of the persons employed in coal mines
are under eighteen years of age, and that much more than one-third of
this proportion are under thirteen years of age." In certain mines there
was no distinction of sex so far as underground labor was concerned. The
men worked entirely naked and were assisted by females of all ages, from
girls of six years to women of twenty-one, who were quite naked down to
the waist.
But if oppression was rife, education at a low ebb, and misery
prevalent, the religion of the people was receiving attention. The
period was, in fact, one of revival in religion. The Wesleyan revival
was in full swing, and Evangelical Christianity was making great
advances. Between 1799 and 1804 there were founded, "The British and
Foreign Bible Society," "The London Missionary Society," and "The
Mission To The Jews."
When the Education Bill of 1819 came before the House of Lords, out of
eighteen Bishops who voted on the measure, fifteen voted against it!
Thus the religionists were most active during the period when a
condition approximating white slavery existed. And why should this not
have been so, when the Church is not interested in the social and
economic status of its adherents during their existence on this planet,
but is avowedly concerned with deluding its devotees into a mythical
belief in a life hereafter? The greatest number of slaves and the
greatest degradation of workers is to be found in those times and places
where religious superstition is most powerful.
In our own country, as well as in England, the labor movement has
developed not merely outside the range of organized Christianity, but in
the teeth of the bitterest opposition to it. Christianity, since it came
into power, has always preached to the poor in defense of the privileges
and possessions of the rich.
In a recent publication by Jerome Davis, which is entitled "Labor Speaks
for Itself on Religion," the author has compiled the opinions of labor
leaders in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Russia, Germany,
Czechoslovakia, Mexico, China, Austria, Australia, Belgium, and Japan.
It is a terrific indictment by labor against organized religion. The
author tells us, "Here is labor speaking for itself, and in the by and
large it feels that the Church has not understood or helped it to secure
justice. The majority believe that the Church has a capitalistic bias.
It is a class institution for the upper and middle classes." This is
putting the matter rather mildly when one considers their grievances
expressed in their own words. Again Jerome Davis asks, "Is it possible
that our Church leaders are to some extent blinded by current
conventional standards? Are they so busy sharing the wealth of the
prosperous with others in spiritual quests that they fail to see some
areas of desperate social need? Do they to some degree unconsciously
exchange the gift of prophecy for yearly budgets and business boards?"
James H. Maurer, the president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor,
speaks for labor and the title of his subject is, "Has the Church
Betrayed Labor?" Mr. Maurer's opinion follows: "A worker living from
hand to mouth, and lucky if he is not hopelessly in debt besides,
working at trip-hammer speed when he has work, with no security against
enforced idleness, sickness, and old age, can hardly be expected to
become deeply interested in, or a very enthusiastic listener to sermons
about Lot's disobedient wife, who because she looked back was turned
into a pillar of salt. He is far more concerned about his own overworked
and perhaps underfed wife who, due to the strain of trying to raise his
family on a meager income that permits of no rest or proper medical
care, is slowly but surely turning into a corpse. To go to a church and
listen to a sermon about the sublimeness of being humble and meek, that
no matter how desperate the struggle to live may be one should be
contented and not envy the more fortunate, because God in His infinite
wisdom has ordained that there shall be rich and poor and that no matter
how heavy one's burdens on this earth, one should bear them meekly and
look for reward in the world to come and remember that God loves the
poor--such sermons naturally sound pleasing to the ears of the wealthy
listeners, and the usual reward is a shower of gold and hearty
congratulations by the sleek and well-fed members of the congregation.
But to an intelligent worker such sermons sound like capitalistic
propaganda, upon which he is constantly being fed by every
labor-exploiting concern in the country, and quite naturally he tries to
avoid getting an extra dose of the same kind of buncombe on Sunday....
"In Churches, men have listened for nearly two thousand years to lessons
and sermons about 'the brotherhood of man,' 'the forging of swords of
war into plowshares of peace,' 'man is his brother's helper,' 'peace on
earth, good will toward men,' 'thou shalt not kill,' We are taught to
say the Lord's Prayer, and ask for heaven on earth, and yet, at every
war opportunity, with a very few noble exceptions, the Church, at the
command of the war lords, has scrapped its peace sentiments and turned
its back to the Prince of Peace and Heaven on Earth and has shouted
itself hoarse for hell on earth. And then the spokesmen of the churches
of each nation at war have had the impudence to pray to a just God and
ask Him to play favorites, to use His infinite power on their side and
join in the mad slaughter of His own beloved children. And those
slaughtered are the workers, and their folks at home naturally wonder
why the one big international peace organization on earth, the Church,
at the crack of the war demon's whip, deserts its principles of 'Thou
shalt not kill,' and 'Peace on earth,' and helps to stampede its
followers in the very opposite direction."
Mr. Maurer points out that labor's struggle to have a Federal Child
Labor amendment to the Constitution ratified by the various state
legislatures, and to have such legislation enacted as the Workmen's
Compensation Laws, Mothers' Pensions, and Old Age Pensions, received no
support from the clergy. He concludes by citing this occurrence:
"For a good illustration of what the Church is sometimes guilty of let
us take a glimpse at what happened in Detroit, during the month of
October, 1926, when the American Federation of Labor was holding its
annual convention there. Nearly every church in Detroit sent invitations
to prominent labor officials to speak in their churches before Bible
classes, Sunday schools, and Young Men's Christian Associations. Most of
the invitations were accepted by the labor officials, including
President Green of the A. F. of L. As soon as the big employers learned
about the program they not only frowned upon the idea of allowing their
sacred temples to be contaminated with representatives of the working
class, but put both feet down as hard as they could on the proposition.
Did the clergymen stand firm when men with dollars talked? To their
everlasting shame they did not. Ninety-five percent of them bowed to the
will of Mammon and the representatives of labor were barred from the
sacred temples erected in the name of God and the lowly Nazarene,
proving conclusively to the minds of the average citizen who controls
the churches and whom they serve. Small wonder that many workers have a
poor opinion of the Church, and that so many pews are empty."
J. B. S. Hardman, the editor of _The Advance_, the official journal of
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, gives us his opinion regarding the
religion of labor. "It lulls the social underdog with a sham consolation
for the oppression and exploitation which are his lot, and furnishes the
exploiter and oppressor with graceful distraction and absolution from
his daily practice and meanness. This is the actual basis of Church
activity to-day. The religion of labor is godless, for it seeks to
restore the divinity of man."
James P. Thompson, the national organizer of the Industrial Workers of
the World, heads his article for Jerome Davis, "Religion is the Negation
of the Truth," and in his militant manner proclaims "This organization
designed to praise God and help him run the universe is known as the
Church. The established Church has always been on the side of the rich
and powerful. Its robed representatives, pretending to be Godlike and
favorites of God, having special influence with Him, have ever
functioned as the moral police agents of the ruling classes. At one time
or another, they have asked God to bless nearly everything, from the
slave driver's lash to murderous wars. Thus they strive to extend the
blessings of God to the infamies of men.
"To-day, under Capitalism, they teach the working class the doctrine of
humility: tell them that if they get a slap on one cheek to turn the
other, and, 'blessed are the poor.' They tell us to bear the cross and
wear the crown, that we will get back in the next world what is stolen
from us in this. In other words, they try to chloroform us with stories
of heaven while the robbers plunder the world. For this support the
ruling classes donate liberally to the Church. The organized robbers and
organized beggars support each other."
James P. Noonan, vice-president of the American Federation of Labor,
asks a pertinent question, "Labor observes an increasing tendency on the
part of the Church to regulate what man may eat, drink, or smoke, where
and how he shall spend his Sundays, the character and kind of amusements
he may participate in, and various other activities, many of which seem
more or less trivial; all of which leads the average worker to ponder
rather seriously just why it is that the Church can vigorously advocate
and promote legislation seeking to curtail his liberty to enjoy, in his
own way, the limited number of leisure hours at his disposal, and yet
turn a deaf ear to the cry of tortured men, women, and children for
relief from the curse of low wages, long hours, and scores of other
industrial conditions and abuses which inevitably pave the way for
numberless cases of moral turpitude."
James S. Woodsworth, a former minister, speaking for the Canadian Labor
Party, exclaims: "The Church--a class institution--what does the Church
do to help me and those like me? The Church supported by the wealthy,
yes, 'He who pays the piper calls the tune.' The well-groomed parson,
with his soft tones prophesying smooth things, well, I'm glad I'm not in
his shoes!"
James Simpson, secretary of the Canadian Labor Party, makes this
statement: "I found that the conditions which called for radical change
if the social and economic security of the people was going to be
established did not concern the Church. As an institution it was
concerned in establishing an outlook upon life that would induce men to
do the right, but, if the right was not done, there was very little
distinction drawn between the wrong-doer and the right-doer. This lack
of distinction did not apply so much to what were re-regarded as moral
indiscretions as it did to the larger failures to recognize man's
relationship to man in the industrial and commercial activities of life.
Labor thinks the Church is insincere. It is an exceptional case for a
minister to take a stand on the side of the workers, even when the issue
between the employers and employees is a clear case of the former trying
to enforce conditions upon the latter which are unfair and inhuman."
A. Fenner Brockway, the political secretary of the Independent Labor
Party in England, writes in this manner: "The hymns of the Church are
obsolete; the sermons are very rarely worth listening to; the forms of
worship are unrelated to life; and such inspiration as comes from the
devotion and beauty of some church services and buildings can be found
ever more intimately and fully in the silences and beauty of nature."
George Lansbury is another Englishman speaking for British Labor, and he
tells us that, "Ordinary working people in Britain think very little
about Churches, or about religion. Years ago I was asked, 'Why don't
people accept religion? Why don't the masses go to Church?' I said then,
as I say now, 'They, the masses, believe we Christians do not believe
what we say we believe."
Lenin, Trotzky, Lunacharsky, and Yaroslavsky, are the speakers for
Russian Labor in Soviet Russia. Their attitude toward Church and
Religion is well known....
Arthur Crispien, president of the German Social Democratic Party, gives
us his opinion. "Men should not look upon this earth as a vale of tears
and fly from rude realities to a world of phantasms; they should embrace
the beauties of the world, and realize and fulfill their social rights
and duties. Our work lies in this world. As to the other, each is at
liberty to decide according to his needs."
Karl Mennicke, another former minister, points out the attitude of
German Labor. "For modern labor the feeling that human life is first of
all a matter of eternal life, and only secondarily a matter of this
world, has been entirely lost. The high-strung eschatologic mood, or
expectation of Jesus, has no sounding board in the masses of the
proletariat of to-day. The Christian epoch in history is obviously on
its way to extinction. The eschatological mood of Christianity has been
a handicap, and still is, for the Christian community has difficulty
finding an organic relationship to the creative problems of social
life."
Emanuel Radl speaks of labor and the Church in Czechoslovakia. "In
general the churches play a far lesser part in our public life than in
the United States. People are accustomed to speak of the churches as
exploded institutions that are factors only among the uneducated
classes. The churches are not measuring up in understanding and helping
the poor."
Robert Haberman, representing the Mexican Labor Party, gives a clear-cut
summation of the tyranny that the clergy of that country yoked upon the
masses and the retardation that it has produced. It furnishes striking
and conclusive evidence of the harm that is done when the Church and
State are still integrally intertwined. There is no better example of
the efforts of a reactionary clergy to keep the masses in poverty and
ignorance than is this study of the church in modern Mexico. Mr.
Haberman gives an account of the church activities in old Mexico and
coming to the present, "By the year 1854, the Church had gained
possession of about two-thirds of all the lands of Mexico, almost every
bank, and every large business. The rest of the country was mortgaged to
the Church. Then came the revolution of 1854, led by Benito Juarez. It
culminated in the Constitution of 1857, which secularized the schools
and confiscated Church property. All the churches were nationalized,
many of them were turned into schools, hospitals, and orphan asylums.
Civil marriages were made obligatory. Pope Pius IX immediately issued a
mandate against the Constitution and called upon all Catholics of Mexico
to disobey it. Ever since then, the clergy has been fighting to regain
its lost temporal power and wealth. It has been responsible for civil
wars and for foreign intervention." Under the rule of Diaz, the
constitution was disregarded and the Church was permitted to regain most
of its lost privileges. "The Church bells rang out at sunrise to call
the peons out, with nothing more to eat than some tortillas and chili,
to work all day long in the burning fields, until sunset when the Church
bells rang again to send them home to their mud huts. During their work
they were beaten. On Sundays they were lashed and sent bleeding to Mass.
After Church they had to do Faenas (free work) for the Church, in the
name of some saint or other--either to build a new church or do some
special work for the priests. It is no wonder then, that after the
revolution against Diaz, in many places, as soon as the peons were told
they were free, their first act was to climb up the church steeples and
smash the bells. After that, they rushed inside the churches and
destroyed the statues and paintings of the saints. During the whole
period of havoc and exploitation, _not once_ was the voice of the Church
heard in behalf of the downtrodden. Illiteracy amounted to eighty-six
percent. But the Church helped the further enslavement of the workers.
There was not a church ceremony, birth, marriage, or death, that did not
cost money. The worker had to borrow for each; and the more he borrowed,
the more closely he riveted upon himself the chains of peonage.... The
present conflict started in February, 1926, when Archbishop Jose Mora
del Rio, head of the Church in Mexico, issued a statement in the press
declaring war against the Constitution."
Gideon Chen, speaking for Chinese Labor asserts: "The Christian Church
in China, brought up in a Western greenhouse, with all its achievements
and shortcomings, does not speak a language intelligible to the labor
world."
Karl Kautsky, the Austrian representative of labor, takes the attitude
that, "The less Labor as a whole has to do with Church questions and the
less it is interested in the churches, the more successful will be its
strife for emancipation."
Otto Bauer, another representative of Austrian labor, makes the
assertion: "Capitalism forces the worker into the class struggle. In
this class struggle he comes across the clergy and finds it the champion
of his class adversary. The worker transfers his hate from the clergyman
to religion itself, in whose name this clergyman is defending the
social order of the middle classes. In Austria the bourgeois parties
take advantage of the belief of hundreds of thousands of proletarians in
a Lord in Heaven to keep them in subjection to their earthly masters."
Ernest H. Barker, the general secretary of the Australian Labor Party,
holds forth in an article entitled, "The Church is Weighed and Found
Wanting." He is quite emphatic in his statements. "The attitude of the
Labor Movement in Australia to the Church is one of supreme
indifference. There is little or no point of contact between the two and
apparently neither considers the other in its activities and plan of
campaign.... The Church preaches the brotherhood of man. What
brotherhood can exist between the wealthy receiver of interest, profit,
and rent and the struggling worker who sees his wife dragged down by
poverty and overwork, and his children stunted and dwarfed physically
and intellectually--between the underworked and overfed commercial or
industrial magnate and the underfed, overworked denizen of the slums?
... The Church is put on trial in the minds of men. They ask, 'What did
the Church do when we sought a living wage, shorter hours of work, safer
working conditions, abolition of Sunday work, abolition of child labor?'
The answer is an almost entirely negative one. The few instances when
church officials have helped are so conspicuous as to emphasize the
general aloofness.... In how many of the advanced ideas of our time has
the Church taken the lead? Is it not renowned for being a long way in
the rear rather than in the vanguard of progressive thought and action?
It resents any challenge to its ideas, doctrines, or authority."
Emile Vandervelde, the leader of the Belgian Labor Party, discusses the
personal religious convictions of the Labor leaders in France and
Belgium. "Today as yesterday the immense majority are atheists,
old-fashioned materialists, or at least agnostics, to whom it would
never occur to profess any creed, no matter how liberal it might be."
Toyohiko Kogawa, the secretary of the Japan Labor Federation, says:
"Labor considers the Church too other-worldly. It thinks it has no
concern with the interests of labor; and that the Church has lost her
aim in this world and is looking up only into heaven. And labor forgets
where to go, loses its sense of direction. So labor stops thinking about
religion, and religion stops thinking about industry. The Church has no
principle of economics, and labor has no religious aspiration."
The opinions of these men who are daily in contact with the problem of
social justice the world over surely furnish a tremendous amount of
information regarding both the unconcern of religion upon the
furtherance of social justice and its actual negative and harmful
influence. The devout Sherwood Eddy, a sincere and noble exponent of
social justice, is forced to exclaim; "But I saw that there would be
much more opposition from professing Christians if I preached a gospel
of social justice, than ever there had been from so called 'heathen'
nations in calling them to turn from their idols. Indeed, Mammon is a
much more potent idol, it is more cruel, smeared with more human blood,
than Kali of Siva. They sacrifice goats to Kali and we shudder; we
sacrifice men to Mammon and justify our 'rights.' In simple fact, though
they are not worthy of mention, I have met with more opposition and
misrepresentation, ten times over, in 'Christian' America, than I ever
met in fifteen years in India, or in repeated visits to China, Turkey,
or Russia." (_Sherwood Eddy: "Religion and Social Justice."_)
Religious philosophy is slave philosophy; it teaches of a God who is
personally interested in the individual and who will reward present
misery with future bliss. The demoralizing effect of this infamous
fraud is apparent everywhere. If a worker is constantly assailed with
this nonsense from the pulpit, the result is the production in him of a
mental as well as a physical slavery; it aggravates his mental inertia,
and the force of repetition achieving its effects, he soon resigns
himself to his present miserable state drugged with the delusion of a
better life in the hereafter. He believes that his destiny is
predetermined by God and that he will be rewarded in heaven for his
sufferings on earth.
What a marvelous opiate the ecclesiastics have been injecting into the
minds of the masses! It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that
capital has aided throughout the ages and has stood by religion. The
irony of the situation lies in the fact that the slave will fight so
valiantly for his tyrannical master, that the unscrupulous few who
derive all the benefits, can, like a malignant parasite, suck the
life-blood of its victims while their still living prey submits without
a struggle! The worker, inebriated with his religious delusion, calmly
allows his very substance to be the means through which his parasitic
employer grows fat.
"That was the net result of Christianity, and of the activity of the
Christian Church in spreading abroad a spirit of kindliness, humanity
and brotherhood! The coquetry of Christianity with Labor within the last
generation or two is only what one would expect. But it is clear that
the one constant function of Christianity has been to encourage loyalty
to existing institutions, no matter what their character so long as they
were not unfriendly to the Church. Slavery and the oppression of labor
continued while Christianity was at its strongest and wealthiest; its
own wealth derived from the oppression it encouraged. Slavery died out
when social and economic conditions rendered its continuance more and
more difficult. And the conditions of labor improved when men ceased to
talk of a 'Providential Order,' of 'God's Decree,' and dismissed the
evangelical narcotic served out by the Church, and began to realize that
social conditions were the products of understandable and modifiable
natural forces." (_C. Cohen: "Christianity, Slavery and Labor."_)