Why is it that a human document ten thousand years old has the same
effect upon us, as a newspaper story of yesterday? Why is it that we
love or hate the men and women who live in the songs of Homer? Why do we
grieve, or rejoice with those who live in the pages of Plutarch; and
feel deeply moved when David and Jonathan are forced apart; when Joseph
is sold by his brethren; when the song of Solomon voices the deathless
devotion of the country girl for her mountain lover; and when the
fanatical Jeptha is about to slay his innocent, beautiful daughter?
It is because human nature has never changed; what our fathers were, we
are: what Absolom and David felt, we feel.
When the brilliant, wayward Jewish boy goes astray and meets his
untimely fate, we mourn with his broken father as he wails--"O Absolom
my son, O my son Absolom!"
That which women have already been, women continue to be. Helen of Troy
was not essentially different from Madame de Pompadour; Cleopatra was a
more refined Catherine of Russia; Aspasia was the forerunner of Madame
Maintenon: Sappho was another "George Sand;" Lilly Langtry was a modern
Phryne; and Pauline Bonaparte had all the charm and voluptousness of
Nell Gwynne.
One reason why the Old Testament continues to be a modern book is, that
it is so full of human nature. Our first instinct, when we became
violently enraged is, _to kill_. In the Old Testament, they do it.
Considered as a mere human document, there is more raw slaughter in the
Old Testament than any book you ever read, and the details are given
with frightfully fascinating realism.
No cloak is thrown around Jacob and Abraham and Lot. Those citizens are
painted with all the warts on. In some of them, indeed, the warts fill
most of the canvass. That affair of David and the other man's wife: how
modern it is! If you will glance over the daily newspaper, you will find
that somewhere or other in this world of today, another David has seen
the loveliness of Uriah's wife; and the first thing you know this modern
David (in a Derby hat and tailor-made clothes) is running away with
Bathsheba in an automobile. As to Solomon and his harem--including the
Ethiopian woman--the subject is too delicate for polite treatment in a
high class publication. I must leave such matters to Mr. William
Randolph Hearst, whose Sunday editions and monthly outputs deal in "sex"
novels, Gaby Deslys, Lina Cavalieri, Evelyn Thaw, Mrs. Keppel, and
scarlet people generally.
The point I desired to make is that _God made men and women to mate with
one another_, and thus reproduce and perpetuate the human species.
There are no bachelor eagles, no spinster swans, no monks among the
lions, no nuns among the deer. When we want to make a bachelor out of a
horse, we resort to surgery. Most of us know what Mooley, the cow, does
in the Spring time, if she is shut up in the pasture with no other
company than other Mooley cows.
Without pursuing this line of illustration farther, it is sufficient to
say that _all animal nature is under the same law_. Of course, there are
exceptions to all rules. Some men repel women: some women abhor men.
Some men actually marry, believing that they are fit for it and then
discover that they are not. A tragic instance of this was Thomas
Carlyle: another was Frederick the Great. Our President James Buchanan
was wise enough _not_ to marry; and Charles Sumner was so fatuous as to
do so.
But the great law of Nature is, _Mate and reproduce_! It applies to the
flowers, to the plants, to the insects, to the fishes of the sea, and to
the fowls of the air. I have often wondered why we become so accustomed
to the outrageously informal conduct of hens and roosters, pigeons,
ducks, turkeys, &c., that we see it and don't see it: we know it, and
don't know it: it happens right under our eyes, and yet we never learn
anything from it, or think anything about it.
* * * * * * *
Once again, let me say, men and women in their animal natures are just
like other animals. They hunger, they thirst, they are hot, they are
cold, they are sick, they are well, they love, they hate, they fight,
they yearn for mates, and having found mates, _they mate_. Allowed
liberty, this natural tendency leads to wedlock, and legitimate
children. The husband and wife make the Home: the Home is the Gibraltar
of organized civilization; and the children are Posterity, in its
beginning. Thus marriage, the home, and the children are the
conservators of Society.
If a so-called "religion" _forces_ 71,000 American marriageable men and
women into hiding places, where they have physical contact with one
another but cannot marry, _what happens_?
You _know_ what happens. Your common sense tells you what happens. Your
own natural passions tell you what happens.
Those marriageable men and women--many of them young, handsome,
buxom,--are shut off from all the world, by thick walls, barred windows,
locked doors. The young buxom men can get to the young buxom women.
Either in the day-time or in the night, this physical access can be had,
_in secret_.
The men have been taught that they are gifted with supernatural powers;
and that they can forgive each other's sins. The women have been taught
that these men cannot sin, and that in serving these men they will be
serving God. Besides, if they _do_ sin with the priests, the priests can
forgive the sins. This being so, what happens, when the lustful young
priest slips into the cloistered convent, goes to the nun's bed-room and
solicits her to yield to _him_, as Mary yielded to the angel?
(See "Why Priests Should Wed." Page 103.)
The cloistered convent is built like a huge dungeon. The encircling
walls about it, are thick and high. No one enters in unto the unmarried
women excepting the bachelor priests.
_The Law does not enter!_
The Italian Pope draws his line around the dungeons of darkness and
mystery, and the civil authorities dare not go in.
Everybody knows that young women are caged in those hell-holes.
Everybody knows that burly, beefy, red-faced, thick-lipped young priests
glide in and out.
Everybody knows what _he_ would do, if _he_ had the pick of a score of
buxom girls, in a secret place, he being a bachelor and they being
without access to any man but _himself_.
If you were young and had no wife, you know what would happen, if you
were alone in a pretty girl's bed-room, and she were educated to yield
to you in _everything_.
Yet, these impudent rascals, the beefy Irish, Italian and German
priests, ask you to believe that they never even think of touching
those 56,000 American girls that are caged inside those walls:
Nevertheless, you _know_ it is against Nature for these young men not to
want to mate with those women. You _know_ that the cloistered convents
would not be built like Bastilles, and the world shut out, if there were
not something going on in there which they are afraid for the world to
see.
You _know_ that where cloistered convents are _built and managed like
jails, THEY ARE JAILS_!
Yet, those impudent rascals, gliding into the women, and coming out from
the women, tell you that although the women are taught to obey the
priest in all things, the priest never does say or do what every
full-sexed man would do and say, under the same circumstances.
The Turks had their harems, and they knew women--likewise, they knew
men. The Turks had walls, and bars, and locked gates, and sentinels
outside to watch. But the Turks knew how vain are walls, and barred
windows, locked gates and vigilant sentinels. Therefore, the Turks
always kept eunuchs in the harem itself, eunuchs whose watchful eyes
were ever upon those ladies of the harem. And the eunuchs were powerful
men, strong and fierce, _but unsexed_. They had the strength to guard
the women, _without the desire to enjoy_.
But the Roman Pope builds harems in all Christian lands--_harems for his
priests to whom he denies marriage_.
There are no eunuchs to guard these women. The men who go in unto them
are men of like passions as ourselves; and there is no eye to watch, no
tongue that will tell, _after_ the priest has gone inside.
* * * * * * *
Our common sense condemns this enforced celibacy which pagan popes
invented for their own selfish, ambitious purposes. Or rather, the Popes
borrowed it from the Turkish Sultans who would not allow their chosen
body-guard, the Janissaries, to marry. In course of time, the
Janissaries became more powerful than the Sultan, and they had to be
exterminated. The Pope's Janissaries are now more powerful than the
Pope; and the wretchedness of his position is that he can neither
massacre them, nor rob them of their women. Of all the exalted slaves
the world ever saw, the Pope is perhaps the most conspicuous example.
The Jesuits rule the priesthood; the Jesuits rule the cardinals; the
Jesuits rule the Pope--and the Jesuits have the pick of the most
beautiful women throughout the Christian world.
* * * * * * *
On such a system as this--a system which has denied so many millions of
men and women _the God-given right to live according to Nature_, history
ought to have much to say. What is the evidence and the verdict of
impartial History?
Let us try the case: let us call the witnesses and hear their evidence.
If the other side wants to be heard, the court is open. I will give them
as much space for the defense as I take for the prosecution. It shall be
a perfectly fair investigation. Remember, however, that the unmarried
men and the unmarried women have been hiding within the walls of
monasteries and convents, ever since Pope Gregory abolished God's
ordinance of marriage, and declared, virtually, that the Pope's will,
and not that of God Almighty, should govern priests and nuns. Remember
that there has been every effort made at concealment: that the dungeons
could not tell their awful secrets; that the light of day was jealously
shut out. Remember that the nun who willingly submitted to the priest
did not wish to expose their mutual guilt. Remember that the nun who was
_forced_, could seldom escape and give the alarm. Remember that the
babes born in the cloistered convents were seldom seen of men, and that
they could easily be thrown into the hidden vault, where the quick-lime
was ready to eat their bones. Remember that it was to the interest of
popery to screen the priests, and that the rulers of States were in
deadly fear of the wrath of Popes--wrath which sent death to Henry III.
of France, William of Orange, and Henry of Navarre. Remember further,
that when Popes kept acknowledged paramours and bastards in the Vatican,
the priests had nothing to fear on account of their turning the
nunneries into brothels. Those nuns whose vows were not broken, were the
ugly ones, the old and the ailing. The monks had such complete power
over wives through the Confessional, that many women inside the cloister
owed their immunity to the women outside.
There was a time, under popery, when no Italian husband was certain that
his wife's children were _his_: hence, for a time paternal affection in
Italy almost became extinct. There was a time, under popery, when every
Italian wife had an acknowledged lover--her _cicisbeo_--the priests
having paved the way. The husband kept a mistress; the wife, a lover;
and the priest enjoyed both wife and mistress, without bearing the
expense of either.
(See Sismondi's Hist. des Repub. d'Ital.)
There was a time, under popery, when it was assumed that every Spanish
woman had yielded to a priest. And of course a woman who takes one lover
will take another; and thus Spain went to moral perdition, with the
priests and the nuns in the lead.
The same thing was true of Portugal, and of all Southern Europe. Of
Mexico, Central and South America and Cuba, it would be a waste of words
to speak.
* * * * * * *
Pope Gregory VII. introduced the unnatural requirement of celibacy--the
forbidding of men and women to do what God had equipped them to do, and
prompted them, by sexual passions to do--the most powerful passions
known to humanity--passions which if not naturally gratified lead to
crimes of revolting enormity, to loss of health, to loss of mental
balance, to loss of shame, of normal desires, and of reason itself.
(Consult such books as Dr. Sanger's "History of Prostitution;"
Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, &c.)
Soon after enforced celibacy was introduced, an honest priest, Honorius
of Antrim wrote--
"Look at the convents of the nuns, places of debauchery! These
abominable women have not chosen the Virgin, but Phryne and Messalina as
their models. They prostrate themselves before the idol of Priapus!"
(Priapus was the male organ of generation, and was formerly to be seen
throughout Europe, especially at public fountains.)