Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England. They are the sons of the less influential ruling families, and of the clergy; they have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and possess the one essential qualification, that they are gentlemen. Their average price is two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their function was made clear to me when I attended my first English tea-party. There was a wicker table, perhaps a foot and a half square, having three shelves, one below the other--on the top layer the plates and napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you pass the curate, please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call that the curate, because it does the work of a curate."

#Graft in Tail#

As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption in American politics; surely I must know that in England they had no such evils! I explained that they did not have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase, was "in tail"; the grafters had, as a matter of divine right, the things which in America they had to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate, a "Millionaire's Club", for admission to which the members paid in cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as their birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself, it is merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England has even more than America. When I explained this, my popularity with the British ruling classes vanished quickly.

As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of the libel laws, which have as their first principle "the greater the truth, the greater the libel". Englishmen read with satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England, the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our American senators have done; they have bought the political parties with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have taken over the press, whether by outright purchase like Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy--both of which methods we Americans know. Within the last decade or two another group has been coming into control; and not merely is this the same class of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the international financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist system. These gentlemen make the world their home--or, as Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit themselves to all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris, democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews wherever they are.

And of course, in buying the English government, these new classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one agent, without rival--the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled my childhood--my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest, and pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:

"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained!"

#Bishops and Beer#

For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of South Africa--wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly taxed than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So the armies of England were sent to subjugate the country. You might think they would have had the good taste to leave the lowly Jesus out of this affair--but if so, you have missed the essential point about established religion. The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for the populace to revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their "living." During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply. Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation "virile"; nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making "noble natures".

The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example, the opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred million "noble natures" by this method; and also they were making a hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new "virility," undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:

I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is
terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless,
unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history;
and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years,
than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two
centuries.

That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society:

Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and
China can never meet on a common ground. China views the
whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a
fiscal.

And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are clamoring for restriction;--and what prevents? Head and front of the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early temperance movement, declares that "among its supporters I cannot recall one Church of England minister of influence." When Asquith brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer, he was confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy, protesting against the act. And what was the basis of their protest? That beer is a food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but also that there was property invested in brewing it. Three hundred and thirty-two clergy of the diocese of Peterborough declared:

We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the
present bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave
injustice as amounting to a confiscation of private
property, spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent
people, and provoking deep and widespread resentment, which
must do harm to our cause and hinder our aims.

I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C. Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:

It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr.
Asquith's temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through
the opposition of clergymen who had invested their savings
in brewery stock, the profits of which might have been
lessened by the bill.

Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no prohibition legislation should ever be passed without providing for compensation to the owners of the industry. Today, all over America, appeals are being made to the people to eat less grain; the grain is being shipped to England, some of it to be made into beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the Archbishop of York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices, and in his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time economy!

#Anglicanism and Alcohol#

This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British radicals; they see it at work in every election--the publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson confuses them with spirituality. There are two powerful societies in England employing this deadly combination--the "Anti-Socialist Union" and the "Liberty and Property Defense League." If you scan the lists of the organizers, directors and subsidizers of these satanic institutions, you find Tory politicians and landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy, and large-scale dealers in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting called by the "Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to a denunciation of Socialism by W.H. Mallock, a master sophist of Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a dozen members of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary of the Federated Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, and Beer Trade Association, and three or four other alcoholic magnates.

In every public library in England and many in America you will find an assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations, and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these writings are brutal--setting forth the ethics of exploitation in the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who supplied for capitalist depredation a basis in pretended natural science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he
cannot get subsistence from his parents, and if society does
not Want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he
is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no cover for him. She
tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own
orders.

Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth century; but it was found that for some reason this failed to stop the growth of Socialism, and so in our time the clerical defenders of Privilege have grown subtle and insinuating. They inform us now that they have a deep sympathy with our fundamental purposes; they burn with pity for the poor, and they would really and truly wish happiness to everyone, not merely in Heaven, but right here and now. However, there are so many complications--and so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist bug-a-boos. Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D.D., expounding "The Ethics of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:

Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands
to another may be inspired by the same passions as have
blinded the present holders to their own highest good, and
may be accompanied with injustice as extreme as has ever
been manifested by the rich and powerful.

And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D.D., an especially popular clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on wage-slavery:

The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run
through them, of which this is one. Where God has been so
patient, it is not for us to be impatient.

And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing us back to the faith of our fathers:

The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social
arrangements, but to personal vices.

I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just what, if anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our time. I find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of Durham, as being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop Westcott, whether he is talking to a high society congregation, or to one of workingmen, shows "an exquisite sense of knowing always where to stop." So I consulted the Bishop's volume, "The Social Aspects of Christianity" and I see at once why he is popular with the anti-Socialist propagandists--neither I or any other man can possibly discover what he really means, or what he really wants done.

I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I kept on the good Bishop's trail, I might in the end find something a plain man could understand; so I got the beautiful two-volume "Life of Brooke Westcott, by his Son"--and there I found an exposition of the social purposes of bishops! In the year 1892 there was a strike in Durham, which is in the coal country; the employers tried to make a cut in wages, and some ten thousand men walked out, and there was a long and bitter struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at last the masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as arbitrator, and the dispute was triumphantly settled--how do you suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!

I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the NAIVETÉ with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the story of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came out from the conference "all smiles, and well satisfied with the result of his day's work." As for his followers, they were in ecstacies; they "seized and waltzed one another around on the carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flower show ball. Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer ourselves hoarse." The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more communication on episcopal stationery--an order to all his clergy to "offer their humble and hearty thanks to God for our happy deliverance from the strife by which the diocese has been long afflicted." Strange to say, there were a few varlets in Durham who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop, and one of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he made reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life. The biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he had been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not permitted to; while the working people, who didn't want to live on tea and toast, were compelled to!

#Dead Cats#

For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been fighting with every resource at their command the liberal and enlightened men of England who wished to educate the masses of the people. In 1807 the first measure for a national school-system was denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as "derogatory to the authority of the Church." As a counter-measure, his supporters established the "National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the Established Church"; and the founder of the organization, a clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and insisted that the children of the workers "should not be taught beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops, setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" that "the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and precepts of revealed religion." In 1850 a bill for secular education was denounced as presenting to the country "a choice between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870, Forster, author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the parsons were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into savages."

As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of London laid down the formula of exploitation: "Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do not make the least alteration of civil property."

Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the cultured classes of England:

In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest
political controversies of the last fifty years, whether
they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce,
whether they affected religion, whether they affected the
bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject
they touched, these leisured classes, these educated
classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.

The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes ", for he belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the record will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform measures which Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It opposed all the social reforms of Lord Salisbury. This noble-hearted Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to the end only a few. He expressed himself as distressed and puzzled "to find support from infidels and non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers."

And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of Bishops voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; The House of Bishops opposed Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerning this establishment Lord Salisbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase: "This vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life." He told the Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform, because he knew that they would never begin. Another member of the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russel, has written of their record and adventures:

They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody
penal code; they were the resolute opponents of every
political or social reform; and they had their reward from
the nation outside parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his
palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep
an engagement to preach lest the congregation should stone
him. The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his life
after preaching at St. Bride's, Fleet Street. Archbishop
Howley, entering Canterbury for his primary visitation, was
insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a circuitous route
to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the mob. On the 5th
of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester were burnt
in effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop
Howley's chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown
at him, when the Archbishop--a man of apostolic
meekness--replied: "You should be thankful that it was not a
live one."

The people had reason for this conduct--as you will always find they have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote another member of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives "an instance, of the procedure of Church and State about this period":

In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led
by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a
week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the
neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal
was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided
that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay
them. The parson, who had at first promised his help, now
turned against them, and the masters promptly reduced the
wage to 7s., with a threat of further reduction. Loveless
then formed an agricultural union, for which all seven were
arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to the assizes.
The prison chaplain tried to bully them into submission. The
judge determined to convict them, and directed that they
should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III,
specially passed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore.
The grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were
farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen of the
prevailing type. The judge summed up as follows: "Not for
anything that you have done, or that I can prove that you
intend to do, but for an example to others I consider it my
duty to pass the sentence of seven years' penal
transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and
every one of you."

#Suffer Little Children#

The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by them, He did not consider them superfluous. "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven", He said; and His Church is the inheritor of this tradition--"feed my lambs". There were children in Great Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin's "Industrial History of England":

Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark
cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in
want of hands, who would come and examine their height,
strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave
oweners in the American markets. After that the children
were simply at the mercy of their oweners, nominally as
apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no
wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed and
clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places
could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the
parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that
one idiot should be taken by the mill owener with every
twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was
even worse than that of the others. The secret of their
final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some
idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the
other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of
their labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many
modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force
continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a
day, by day and by night.

In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of children nine years of age to fourteen hours a day. This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, worshipper of the gods" ... so begins the oldest legal code which has come down to us, from 2250 B.C.; and the coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis. The duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people petition for "increase of grace to hear meekly Thy Word"; and here is this "Word," as little children are made to learn it by heart. If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know where to find it.

My duty towards my neighbour is ... To honour and obey the
King, and all that are put in authority under him; To submit
myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual pastors,
and masters: To order myself lowly and reverently to all my
betters.... Not to covet nor desire other men's goods; But
to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do
my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please
God to call me.

A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers was Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in which they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly known as "Little Hell." In this place two hundred people were crowded into nineteen houses. "There is not one creature in it that can give a cup of broth if it would save a life." In one winter eighteen perished of "a putrid fever", and the clergyman "could not raise a six-pence to save a life."

And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them her pious self. "In suffering by the scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place she explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to be grateful to the rich!

Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite
all ranks of people together, to show the poor how
immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show
both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.
It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages
you derive from the government and constitution of this
country--to observe the benefits flowing from the
distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high
to so liberally assist the low.

It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by
this pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night
and burned an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a
tragic consequence, for one of the "common people," known as
Robert, "was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear
at Sunday School next day. This fall from grace occasioned
intense remorse in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his
mind for many months," records Martha More, "and despair
seemed at length to take possession of him." Hannah had some
conversation with him, and read him some suitable passages
from "The Rise and Progress". "At length the Almighty was
pleased to shine into his heart and give him comfort."

Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in
any way unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the
letters of Shelley how his father tormented him with
Archdeacon Paley's "Evidences" as a cure for atheism. This
eminent churchman wrote a book, which he himself ranked
first among his writings, called "Reasons for Contentment,
addressed to the Labouring Classes of the British Public."
In this book he not merely proved that religion "smooths all
inequalities, because it unfolds a prospect which makes all
earthly distinctions nothing"; he went so far as to prove
that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters were
less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a
day.

Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of
the labouring part of mankind must be so called) imposes,
are not hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a
pleasure. It is an exercise of attention and contrivance,
which, whenever it is successful, produces satisfaction....
This is lost among abundance.

And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement, and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot. Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion is to remind the poor

That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the
hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge
its duties, and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that
the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are
not worth the contest; that the peace of mind, which
Religion offers indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more
true satisfaction than all the expensive pleasures which are
beyond the poor man's reach; that in this view the poor have
the advantage; that if their superiors enjoy more abundant
comforts, they are also exposed to many temptations from
which the inferior classes are happily exempted; that,
"having food and raiment, they should be therewith content,"
since their situation in life, with all its evils, is better
than they have deserved at the hand of God; and finally,
that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and the
true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same
Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same
heavenly inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of
Christianity on the temporal well-being of political
communities.

THE COURT CIRCULAR

The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this revolution was purely one of Church politics--in doctrine and ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America" remained in every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters." The only difference is that instead of being told "to honour and obey the King," they are told "to honour and obey the civil authority."

It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and imitation English clothes--so in their Heaven they have provided an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book--not the English, but the sturdy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I read:

Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim bowing down before Thee,
Which wert, and art, and ever more shall be!

One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king," "throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn begins--

Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;
To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.

And the second--

Christ, whose glory fills the skies--

And the third--

Lord of all being, throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star.

There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous, greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious, punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family--not even the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low society.

This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:

The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain:

His blood-red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?

This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on earth; utterly simple and honest--he would not even let anyone praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he answered, quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one, that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments upon him in conventional, courtly style:

The company of angels
Are praising Thee on high;
And mortal men, and all things
Created, make reply:
All Glory, laud and honour,
To Thee, Redeemer, King....

The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful occupation than that of the saints--casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea--unless it be that of the Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous compliments!

But one can understand that such things are necessary in a monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time going through costly formalities--not because they enjoy it, but because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about them and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.

#Horn-blowing#

I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied it from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout little boy; one of my earliest recollections--I cannot have been more than four years of age--is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it reverently." When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the city will understand that this is a peculiar location--precisely half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august of the city's aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy of the city's slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church, and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made for them--as all the rest of the world is made for them; the populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.

The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman; orthodox, yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor, visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school, where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health of their souls.

I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive away a pestilence.

I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the papers, and watching politics and business. I followed the fates of my little slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty thieves--all these were paying the policeman and the politician for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who consoled them in prison--but it was the Tammany leader who saw the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson, even earlier in life than I got mine--that the church was a kind of amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was Tammany.

I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to investigate, I discovered the reason--that their incomes came from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against which they were blowing their religious horns!

So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters. And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world, I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I met, not sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation--until the venerable institution which had once seemed dignified and noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.

#Trinity Corporation#

There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous churches in America. As a child I have walked through its church yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its grave-stones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the world's infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my young soul; and what is it in reality?

The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell. Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of the great landlords of New York. In the early days it bought a number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has grown up around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere from forty to a hundred million dollars. The true amount has never been made public; to quote Russell's words:

The real owners of the property are the communicants of the
church. For 94 years none of the owners has known the extent
of the property, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom,
nor what is done with the money. Every attempt to learn even
the simplest fact about these matters has been baffled. The
management is a self perpetuating body, without
responsibility and without supervision.

And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this great corporation, which is simply the English land system complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum. Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total of fifty dollars a month. The houses were not built for tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the habitation of animals.

The article, in Everybody's Magazine for July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief. To quote the writer again:

Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is
an owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and
benevolent institution all possible credit for a spirit of
improvement manifested anywhere, but I can find no such
manifestation. I have tramped the Eighth Ward day after day
with a list of Trinity properties in my hand, and of all the
tenement houses that stand there on Trinity land, I have not
found one that is not a disgrace to civilization and to the
City of New York.

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what devilish utterances were some day to proceed from the lips of the little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as the bishop's attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church! Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect, even to the most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way! Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For while the bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported, that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess fifty thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting the bloodhounds of the police on the train of a human being. I asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember his patient explanation--that the bishop had to know all classes and conditions of men: his wife had to go among the rich as well as the poor, and must be able to dress so that she would not be embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much time among the rich!

The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had to be cathedrals--despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St. Paul had declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made with hands." In the twenty-five years which have passed since that time the good Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but the mighty structure which is a monument to his visitations among the rich towers over the city from its vantage-point on Morningside Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and knowing what I know about the men who contributed its funds, and about the general functions of the churches of the Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it were built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the skulls of human beings.

#Spiritual Interpretation#

There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who was crucified as a common criminal because, as they said, "He stirreth up the people." An embarrassing "Savior" for the church of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up and make him respectable.

I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day Saturday I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the roofs of apartment-houses; but on Saturday night I went into a tub and was lathered and scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in a newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tie and a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week--and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder--to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-window divinity.

The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and scholarly volume, published by the exclusive house of Scribner, and written by the Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I carried in the stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His Relation to the Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter, D.D., L.L.D., D.C.L.--a course of lectures delivered before the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:

Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced
pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He did not
abhor the company of rich men; he sought it. He did not
invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of
expenditure.

And do you think that the late Bishop of J.P. Morgan and Company stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of golden nails? In the course of this book there will march before us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter's son: the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club, the Pastor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the weight of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons, newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of the proletarian Christ.

Here, for example, is Rev. F.G. Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid of the carpenter's denunciations of the rich, and says:

Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as
this, a teaching so slightly distinguished from the
curbstone rhetoric of a modern agitator, can be an adequate
reproduction of the scope and power of the teaching of
Jesus?

The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a gentleman; he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of universities where gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of Christian Morals proceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus' actions; demonstrating therefrom that there are three proper uses to be made of great wealth: first, for almsgiving--"The poor ye have always with you!"; second, for beauty and culture--buying wine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other #objets de vertu#; and third, "stewardship," "trusteeship"--which in plain English is "Big Business."

I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can imagine he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the proletarian Founder emerging all new and respectable under the brush of this capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all his own for reading the scriptures; he tells us that when there are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretation is that "the more spiritual is to be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor." Another puts it: "Blessed are the poor in spirit." The first one is crude and literal; obviously the second must be what Jesus meant! In other words, the professor and his church have made for their economic masters a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a quality of submissiveness, impotence and futility, which they call by the name of "spirituality". This virtue they exalt above all others, and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus everything which has relation to the realities of life!

So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," and explaining:

The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its
radicalism, but in its externalism. It proposes to
accomplish by economic change what can be attained by
nothing less than spiritual regeneration.

And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of New York, warning us:

It is necessary to remember that something more than
material and temporal considerations are involved. There are
things of more importance to the purposes of God and to the
welfare of humanity than economic readjustments and social
amelioration.

And again:

Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing
upon clergy and laity alike, to address their religious
energies too exclusively to those tasks whereby human life
may be made more abundant and wholesome materially.... We
need constantly to be reminded that spiritual things come
first.