The Profits of Religion Part 4

They have begged so importunatly that they have gotten ynto their hondes more than a therd part of all youre Realme. The goodliest lordshippes, maners, londes, and territories, are theyres. Besides this, they have the tenth part of all the corne, medowe, pasture, gra.s.se, wolle, coltes, calves, lambes, pigges, gese and chikens. Ye, and they looke so narowly uppon theyre proufittes, that the poore wyves must be countable to thym of every tenth eg, or elles she gett.i.th not her rytes at ester, shal be taken as an heretike.... Is it any merveille that youre people so compleine of povertie?

The Turke nowe, in your tyme, shulde never be abill to get so moche grounde of christendome.... And whate do al these gredy sort of st.u.r.dy, idell, holy theves? These be they that have made an hundredth thousand idell h.o.r.es in your realme.

These be they that catche the pokkes of one woman, and here them to an other.

The pet.i.tioner goes on to tell how they steal wives and all their goods with them, and if any man protest they make him a heretic, "so that it maketh him wisshe that he had not done it". Also they take fortunes for ma.s.ses and then don't say them. "If the Abbot of west-minster shulde sing every day as many ma.s.ses for his founders as he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkes were too few." The pet.i.tioner suggests that the king shall "tie these holy idell theves to the cartes, to be whipped naked about every market towne till they will fall to laboure!"

Church History

King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he took away the property of the religious orders for the expenses of his many wives and mistresses, and forced the clergy in England to forswear obedience to the Pope and make his royal self their spiritual head.

This was the beginning of the Anglican Church, as distinguished from the Catholic; a beginning of which the Anglican clergy are not so proud as they would like to be. When I was a boy, they taught me what they called "church history", and when they came to Henry the Eighth they used him as an ill.u.s.tration of the fact that the Lord is sometimes wont to choose evil men to carry out His righteous purposes.

They did not explain why the Lord should do this confusing thing, nor just how you were to know, when you saw something being done by a murderous adulterer, whether it was the will of the Lord or of Satan; nor did they go into details as to the motives which the Lord had been at pains to provide, so as to induce his royal agent to found the Anglican Church. For such details you have to consult another set of authorities--the victims of the plundering.

When I was in college my professor of Latin was a gentleman with bushy brown whiskers and a thundering voice of which I was often the object--for even in those early days I had the habit of persisting in embarra.s.sing questions. This professor was a devout Catholic, and not even in dealing with ancient Romans could he restrain his propaganda impulses. Later on in life he became editor of the "Catholic Encyclopedia", and now when I turn its pages, I imagine that I see the bushy brown whiskers, and hear the thundering voice: "Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I tell you it is so!"

I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about King Henry the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of England; he is ready with an "economic interpretation", as complete as the most rabid muckraker could desire! It appears that the king wanted a new wife, and demanded that the Pope should grant the necessary permission; in his efforts to browbeat the Pope into such betrayal of duty, King Henry threatened the withdrawal of the "annates" and the "Peter's pence". Later on he forced the clergy to declare that the Pope was "only a foreign bishop", and in order to "stamp out overt expression of disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of terror".

In Anglican histories, you are a.s.sured that all this was a work of religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure vehicle of G.o.d's grace. There were no more "holy idell theves", holding the land of England and plundering the poor. But get to know the clergy, and see things from the inside, and you will meet some one like the Archbishop of Cash.e.l.l, who wrote to one of his intimates:

I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink and grow fat, rich and die; which laudable example _I_ propose for the remainder of my days to follow.

If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew with peculiar intimacy:

I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600 pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?

As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of ca.s.socks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that G.o.dless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.

Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment?

Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him!

Land and Livings

And how is it in the twentieth century? Have conditions been much improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote Robert Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who therefore has still to be recognized by English critics. He writes of the "New Rome", by which he means present-day England:

The G.o.ds are dead, but in their name Humanity is sold to shame, While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest Sitteth with robbers at the feast, Blesses the laden, blood-stained board, Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword, And poureth freely (now as then) The sacramental blood of Men!

You see, the land system of England remains--the changes having been for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon peasantry contented, so he left them their "commons"; but in the eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away. We saw the same thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same motive--because developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas people who have access to the land will not slave in mills and mines.

In England, from the time of Queen Anne to that of William and Mary, the parliaments of the landlords pa.s.sed some four thousand separate acts, whereby more than seven million acres of the common land were stolen from the people. It has been calculated that these acres might have supported a million families; and ever since then England has had to feed a million paupers all the time.

As an old song puts the matter:

Why prosecute the man or woman Who steals a goose from off the common, And let the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose?

In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in British soil: some of them direct descendants of the Normans, others children of the court favorites and panders who grew rich in the days of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts. Seven men own practically all the land of the city and county of London, and collect tribute from seven millions of people. The estates are entailed--that is, handed down from father to oldest son automatically; you cannot buy any land, but if you want to build, the landlord gives you a lease, and when the lease is up, he takes possession of your buildings. The tribute which London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a year. So absolute is the right of the land-owner that he can sue for trespa.s.s the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the sh.o.r.e.

And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church owns land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts; so do the schools and universities in which the clergy are educated.

The income from the holdings of a church const.i.tutes what is called a "living"; these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of the younger sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and scrambled for in exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the eighteenth century.

About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land owners; one n.o.ble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to the poor, easy-going to members of his own cla.s.s, and cynical concerning the grafts of grace.

In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the inc.u.mbent had a large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a thousand pounds, and the inc.u.mbent hired a curate, himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birth-day, to preach a sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that is, clergymen holding more than one "living"--to furnish curates to do their work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting against it without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of their thirty-nine articles than with one thirty-ninth of their income.

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 m.u.f.fins, and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you pa.s.s 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 cla.s.ses; 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 p.r.o.nouncing 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-cla.s.ses 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-l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d's way of making "n.o.ble natures".

The British G.o.d 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 "n.o.ble 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude of the church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to a.s.sert 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 pet.i.tions 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 pet.i.tion, 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 pa.s.sed 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 inst.i.tutions, 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' a.s.sociation, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, and Beer Trade a.s.sociation, and three or four other alcoholic magnates.

In every public library in England and many in America you will find an a.s.sortment 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 cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sions 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: