The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition - Upton Sinclair (best reads of all time .TXT) 📗
- Author: Upton Sinclair
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Doubtless the reader is well satisfied that the author of this tirade is now in jail, where she can no longer defy the laws of good taste. They always put the ancient prophets in jail; that is the way to know a prophet when you meet him. Let me quote another prophet who is now behind bars—Alexander Berkman, in his "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist", discussing the same subject of plutocratic pretension:
Tell me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it to you? Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can you go all the way back and show there is no flaw anywhere in your title? I tell you that the beginning and the root of your wealth is necessarily in injustice. And why? Because Nature did not make this man rich and that man poor from the start. Nature does not intend for one man to have capital and another to be a wage-slave. Nature made the earth to be cultivated by all. The idea we Anarchists have of the rich is of highwaymen, standing in the street and robbing every one that passes.
Or take "Big Bill" Haywood, chief of the I.W.W. Hear what he has to say in a pamphlet addressed to the harvest-hands he is seeking to organize:
How much farther do you plutes expect to go with your grabbing? Do you want to be the only people left on earth? Why else do you drive out the workers from all share in Nature, and claim everything for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor alike; where do you get your title deeds to it? Nature gave everything for all men to use alike; it is only your robbery which makes your so-called "ownership". Capital has no rights. The land belongs to Nature, and we are all Nature's sons.
[289] Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist Party for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets:
The propertied classes are like people who go into a public theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as private property what is meant for social use. If each man would take only what he needs, and leave the balance to those who have nothing, there would be no rich and no poor. The rich man is a thief.
I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may read this book, and I don't want them to close it in the middle and throw it at me. Therefore let me hasten to explain my poor joke; the sentiments I have been quoting are not those of our modern agitators, but of another group of ancient ones. The first is not from Emma Goldman, nor did I find it in "Mother Earth". I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by orthodox authorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus. It is exactly what he wrote—save that I have put it into modern phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order that those familiar with the Bible might read it without suspicion. The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman, but in those of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early fathers, who lived 374-407. The third is not from the pen of "Big Bill" but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church, 340-397, and the fourth is not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil of the Greek Church, 329-379. And if the reader objects to my having fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the Christian [290] Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred years?
The Soap Box
This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other as the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in the direct line of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a man who thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men.
I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem. The way to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church fathers—translate him into American. This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will not be necessary to disguise the Bible style, and we may follow the text exactly. Let me try the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St. Alphonsus to find a parallel:
[291]
Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech, saying, The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the Fifth Avenue churches; and it would be all right if you were to listen to what they preach, and do that; but don't follow their actions, for they never practice what they preach. They load the backs of the working-classes with crushing burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a burden, and everything they do is for show. They wear frock-coats and silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the speakers' table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, and they occupy the best pews in the churches, and their doings are reported in all the papers; they are called leading citizens and pillars of the church. But don't you be called leading citizens, for the only useful man is the man who produces. (Applause). And whoever exalts himself shall be abased, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.
Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Catholics, hypocrites! for you shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men; you don't go in yourself and you don't let others go in. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Presbyterians, hypocrites! for you foreclose mortgages on widows' houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers. For this you will receive the greater damnation! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Methodists, hypocrites! for you send missionaries to Africa to make one convert, and when you have made him, he is twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Applause). Woe unto you, blind guides, with your subtleties of doctrine, your transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all the rest of it; you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks into the collection-plate and you pay no heed to the really important things in the Bible, which are justice and mercy and faith in goodness. You blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! (Laughter). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Anglicans, hypocrites! for you bathe yourselves and dress in immaculate clothing but within you are full of extortion and excess. You blind high churchmen, clean first your hearts, so that the clothes you wear may represent you. Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Baptists, hypocrites! for you are like marble tombs which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so [292] you appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Applause). Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Unitarians, hypocrites! because you erect statues to dead reformers, and put wreathes upon the tombs of old-time martyrs. You say, if we had been alive in those days, we would not have helped to kill those good men. That ought to show you how to treat us at present. (Laughter). But you are the children of those who killed the good men; so go ahead and kill us too! You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell?
At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem "Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified him that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed. Jesus was taken to the station-house followed by a riotous throng, and held upon a charge of disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months on Blackwell's Island, remarking that from this time on he proposed to make an example of those soap-box orators who persist in using threatening and abusive language. Just as the prisoner was being led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day explosion.
The Church Machine
The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would have a sign of Thee"—meaning that they wanted him to do some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He answered [293] by calling them an evil and adulterous generation—which is exactly what I have said about the Papal machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx at them—"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own class in the places where they gathered—the public houses—the churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"—precisely as in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.
But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history—even in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the Church—Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J. Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey,
[294] Bouck White; but their voices are not silenced, they are like the leaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of God—a woman took it and hid it in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The
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