It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of
organized churchism--the rank materialism of things temporal--not the
teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion--which so long
filled the world with blood and tears.
I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they
should stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them:
"What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage--a human
being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew,
done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I
call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"
Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--will
ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches--or, shall I say, church
fabrics--breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect
and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once
proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the
Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the
government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn.
Before the world-war England and Germany--each claiming to be
Protestant--were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might
be right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be buttered?"
In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty
religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin
to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O
Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!"
"O Churchism," may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy
name!"
I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with
absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men--never any
Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention--with absolute
power. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, what
they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals.
_En masse_ extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always
wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely
wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing
argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.