The Profits of Religion Part 16

Feasting, I'm feasting, I'm feasting with my Lord!

Beautiful robes, beautiful robes, Beautiful robes we then shall wear!

Jerusalem the golden, With milk and honey blest!

Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem, I'll be there, I'll be there!

Blest Canaan land, bright Canaan land, I love to be in Canaan land!

Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land, As on the highest mount I stand, I look away across the sea, Where mansions are prepared for me!

In the sweet bye and bye We shall meet on that beautiful sh.o.r.e--

I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I.W.W. who was executed a few years ago in Utah, and who used this tune in his little red book of revolutionary chants:

You will eat, bye and bye, In the glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die!

Captivating Ideals

In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero is a Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his diggings in the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into our superior civilization. The thing that impresses him most is what he calls "the immortality idea". The person who got that up was a world-genius, he exclaims. "If you can once get a man to believing in immortality, there is no more left for you to desire; you can take everything he owns--you can skin him alive if it pleases you--and he will bear it all with perfect good humor."

And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that view of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the language of scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how an ecclesiastical authority, equipped with every tool of modern learning, would set about voicing the idea that the function of the teaching of Heaven is to chloroform the poor, so that the rich may continue to rob them in security?

Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of scholarship, dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges Chatterton-Hill, of the University of Geneva. Its t.i.tle is "The Sociological Value of Christianity", and from cover to cover it is a warning to the rich of the danger they run in giving up their religion and ceasing to support its priests. It explains how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded in making the individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which are indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor makes plain just what he means by "individual suffering, individual sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism; and the advantage of Christianity is that it makes you think that by submitting to these horrors, you are profiting your own soul. "By making individual salvation depend on the acceptance of suffering, on the voluntary sacrifice of egotistical interests, Christianity adapts the individual to society".

And this, as the professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a world in which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only means of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the sacrifice ... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful ideal"

And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering--of that suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could."

You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned to elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of "overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and therefore you are starving, you have woven too much cloth, and therefore you are naked, you have finished the world for your masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way. As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it, "Your suppression imposes itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of the Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process, by "captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with candle-lights and images, your ears with sweet music and soothing words; and so you will perish without raising a finger! "Here," reflects the professor, "we see how magnificently the teaching of Jesus applies to all cla.s.ses of society!"

Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the embarra.s.sing fact that so many of those who survive under the capitalist system are G.o.dless scoundrels. But do you think that troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. "Inequality signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but the standard whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the standard of the moral law."

The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known, but those which govern his moral nature cannot be known; the moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject to the law of inequality!

As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for teaching the Copernican view of the universe; that infallible popes had again and again condemned this heresy ex cathedra. Said the eloquent cardinal:

Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth till we know what motion is?

Spook Hunting

Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian professors realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is never far from the thoughts of any of them--for, of course, no man can look at the present system and not wonder how the poor stand it, and more especially why they stand it. There have been many thinking men who have given up the miracle-business quite cheerfully, but have stood appalled at the idea of letting the lower cla.s.ses find out the truth.

You note that idea continually in the writings of Professor Goldwin Smith, who was a free-thinker, but also a bourgeois publicist, with a deep sense of responsibility to the money-masters of the world. He was about as honest a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was the beau ideal of the New York "Evening Post", which indicates his point of view. He wrote:

It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a future state, for a short measure of happiness here, has materially helped to reconcile the less favored members of the community to the inequalities of the existing order of things.

When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course called "Practical Ethics", under a professor by the name of Hyslop. The course differed from most of the forty that I tried, in that it gave evidence that the professor was accustomed to read the morning paper.

He had learned that American politics were rotten; his idea of "Practical Ethics" was to outline in elaborate detail a complete scheme of const.i.tutional changes which would make it impossible for the "boss" to control the government. I think I must have been born with a charm against bourgeois thought, for the good professor never fooled me an instant; I remember I used to smile at the idea of how quickly the "boss" would brush through his const.i.tutional cobwebs. The reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity--and of course long before they could be put into practice, the politicians would be ready with devices to make them of no effect.

Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to hunting spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he is a determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he may really have bagged some spooks. All I wish to point out here is the method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to support the spook-hunting industry. The very same argument as we got from the University of Geneva and the University of Toronto! Says our head spook-hunter:

There has been no belief that exercised so much power upon the poor as that in a future life. The politicians, men of the world, have known this so well as to postpone the day of political judgment by it for many years.

And again:

The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and having abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its fundamental beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and the laboring cla.s.ses.... The spiritual ideal of life has gone out of the ma.s.ses as well as the cla.s.ses, and nothing is left but a venture on a struggle with wealth.

And again, more menacingly yet:

The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and immortality.

What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step up, ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the Psychical Research hat! So that we may acc.u.mulate statistics as to the cost of milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!

You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the Wholesale Pickpockets' a.s.sociation making use of their incantations. You admired my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts. But what do these quotations mean, unless they mean what I have said? Are not these three professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of learning you can find in our present-day society?

And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the young student of the working-cla.s.s, who goes to these books and discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who discovers that professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in collecting funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonder that such young students conclude that bourgeois thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are prost.i.tutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the temple of truth?

Running the Rapids

And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means to society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all the intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along with the speed of a race-horse.

With every sense alert, you watch for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail to do it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.--he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.

And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course those who think him a voice of G.o.d can form no conception of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome s.e.x-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to the Gentiles.

You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be "collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as they rend the carca.s.s of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing--the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your pet.i.tion, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a sultan in Turkey, or a ba.s.so in an Italian grand opera.

Birth Control

I a.s.sert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our great cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as G.o.ds instead of as animals. Consider the festering ma.s.s of misery in the slums of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born--until finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated that in the United States alone there are a million abortions every year; and consider that all this hideous ma.s.s of suffering--a b.l.o.o.d.y European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper correspondent--might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant!

And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors who perpetrated this infamy under, a so-called "reform" administration in New York City--and what do you find? The first thing you find is that they themselves, one and all, practice birth-control with their wives or their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the statute-books are crowded with other laws which they make no pretense of enforcing; for example, the law which forbids the saloons to be open on Sunday--which law they take the liberty of understanding to mean that the saloons shall not have their front doors open on Sunday.

You will find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos; they are afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid of the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of Tradition-worship; hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers, who repeat the instructions which G.o.d gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if G.o.d were as blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full of all fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and a modern East Side tenement-room, with an oil stove and no windows and no water-closet, and the price of cabbage seven cents a pound!

Sheep

There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America.

They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly derived from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are honestly seeking light, and trying to make their inst.i.tutions a factor for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.

You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all the rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist explains this seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in high mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when the leader leaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, without waiting to see in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains and no enemies, but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still sews b.u.t.tons at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred years age all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled by mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete protection against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat meat on Friday, because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox Baptist requires total immersion in a climate quite different from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise on the Sabbath.

In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life, tending sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent thing for them to rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear the reading of the best literature of their time. But nowadays the city slave spends his week-days shut up in an office, poring over a ledger, or in a sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously, therefore, the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the open air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern statute-books, and if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries to play base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.

In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there are tennis courts built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot use these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the swimming pool in the park is closed to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire about it, I am told that it is desirable that city employees should have one day's rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be possible to relay the employees, so that they might all have one, or even two days' rest a week, and still give the public their rights on Sunday, there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when their peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law enforces a general boredom, the public may be more disposed to endure the boredom of sermons.