Elect from every nation,Yet one oer all the earth,Her charter of salvation,One Lord, one Faith, one Birth;One holy name she blesses,Partakes one holy food,And toward one Hope she presses,With every grace endued.
And this one holy institution was found setting at its peak the black flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the modern commercial pirate—"Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:
The editors and publishers of the "Living Church" assume no responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.
And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's champion labor-baiter, the late C. W. Post, that his "Grapenuts" would prevent appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in such cases!
And here is the "Christian Endeavor World", organ of one of the most powerful non-sectarian religious bodies in the country. Some one wrote complaining of its medical advertising, and the answer was:
To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not publishing any fraudulent or unworthy medical advertising...... Trusting that you will be able to understand that we are acting according to our best and sincerest judgment, I remain, yours very truly, The Golden Rule Company, George W. Coleman, Business Manager.
Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud" remarks:
Assuming that the business management of the "Christian Endeavor World" represents normal intelligence, I would like to ask whether it accepts the statement that a pair of "magic foot drafts" applied to the soles of the feet will cure any and every kind of rheumatism in any part of the body? Further, if the advertising department is genuinely interested in declining "fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I would call their attention to the ridiculous claims of Dr. Shoop's medicines, which "cure" almost every disease; to two hair removers, one an "Indian Secret", the other an "accidental discovery", both either fakes or dangerous; to the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which for the sake of decency I do not care to detail in these columns, appear in recent issues of the "Christian Endeavor World".
There came recently to Los Angeles a "world-famous evangelist", known as "Gipsy" Smith. There was a shirt-waist strike at the time, and the girls were starving, and they sent a delegation to this evangelist to ask for help. They told him how they were mistreated, exposed to insults, driven to sell their virtue because their wage would not support life; and to their plea he made answer: "Get Jesus in your hearts, and these questions will take care of themselves!"
So we see the most important of the many services which the churches perform for the merchants—taking the revolutionary hope of Jesus, for a kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting it into a dream of a golden harp in an uncertain future. To appreciate the fullness of this betrayal, take the prayer which Jesus dictated—so simple, direct and practical: "Give us this day our daily bread", and put it beside the hymns which the slave-congregations are trained to sing. In my neighborhood is a one-roomed building with a plate glass front, upon which I observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters the sign "Glory Mission". I approach him, and he drops his work and welcomes me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I answer that I am. I have to shout the good tidings into his ear, as he is very deaf. He presents me with his card, which shows that he bears the title of "Reverend", also the sobriquet of "Mountain Missionary". I ask him to permit me to examine the hymn-book which he uses in his work, and with touching eagerness he presses upon me a well-worn volume bearing the title "Waves of Glory". I seat myself and note down a few of the baits it sets out for hungry wage-slaves:
O, there's a plenty, O, there's a plenty,There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!Riches in glory, riches in glory,Royal supply our wants exceed!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 byeWe shall meet on that beautiful shore—
I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I. W. W. who was hanged three or four 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!
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 title 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 idea!" 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 classes of society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the capitalist system are godless 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?
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 classes 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 constitutional 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 constitutional 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 classes..... The spiritual ideal of life has gone out of the masses as well as the classes, 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 accumulate 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' Association 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-class, 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 prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the temple of truth?
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 God can form no conception of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome sex-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 carcass 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 petition, 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 basso in an Italian grand opera.
I assert 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 slams 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 gods instead of as animals. Consider the festering mass 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 mass of suffering—a bloody 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 God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if God 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!
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 institutions 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 buttons at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred years ago 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.
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred concerts"—which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to the imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and Gaby Deslys—while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as Ibsen and Brieux.
I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full of vermin—in a building housing some five hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise court to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the capital city of Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches! The writer was informed that he would return to this institution regularly every week unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a private club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making the discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday, and by threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows again the importance of understanding the relationship of Superstition and Big Business!
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,And how one ought never to think of one's self,And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking—My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinkingHow pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!How pleasant it is to have money.Clough.
Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a living out of it.
My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found myself in a nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let the devil snare them into resting on the first day of the week, whereas the Bible states distinctly that the Lord "rested on the seventh day". So here is a million dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients and employees, and on Friday at sundown the silence of death settles upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of Saturday, when everything comes suddenly to life again, and there is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I used to call "sterilized dancing"—the men pairing with men and the women with women.
They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with their eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways, because, as not all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every day of the week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training "medical missionaries" to send to Africa, and is teaching these supposed-to-be-scientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and not proven anyhow!
You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment alone in his office, and he will smile and admit that of course it is not necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it is—there are different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know how it is. You have an institution founded upon a certain dogma, and run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing things. It is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay high prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them, which you think more important than teaching abstract notions about their being descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture vegetarian foods for them, and build up an enormous business—so obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.
This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could cite a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of another sect, the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive Methodists, Bible-worshippers not content with the King James version, but going back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a "University", located in one of the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institution with seventy-five students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the "president," who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanse of his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest grammatical errors, such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year witnessed a split, and the founding of a brand new church and "University"—because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so much that the students got no chance to study; also because he sent home a rich man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her fleshly nature.
And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady friend of mine, generously blessed with this world's goods, asks me have I seen the hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies, "Didn't you know there was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and never has anything to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates spiritually." I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave. "He received you?" I ask. "Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh, how he stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.
Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still stranger cult.
On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In this case the plates were written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the Angel thoughtfully provided Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magic stones with which to read the records. They proved to deal with a mystery which has haunted the minds of Bible students for centuries—the fate of the "lost ten tribes of Israel", who were now revealed to have been the ancestors of the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a new religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general; so, on the 6th of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N. Y., there was formally launched the "Church of the Latter Day Saints." Smith turned over to his followers his translation of the miraculous plates, called "The Book of Mormon"; obviously genuine, for it read precisely like the books which we already know are the revealed word of God. But, on chance that this might not be sufficient, we were offered in the preface two documents, the "Testimony of Three Witnesses", and the "Further Testimony of Eight Witnesses". The latter being the shorter, may be quoted:
Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, unto whom this work shall come: That Joseph Smith Jr., the translator of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings there-on, all of which has the appearance of ancient work and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith hath got the plates of which we have spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to witness that which we have seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.
Christian WhitmerJacob WhitmerPeter Whitmer, Jr.John WhitmerHiram PageJoseph Smith, Sr.Hyrum SmithSaml. H. Smith
The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore out the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its divine origin; it was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted, and its followers proceeded to massacre the nearby unbelieving populations, just as the divinely guided Hebrews had done. Driven from place to place, they built at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful temple, according to plans revealed in a vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where they have a magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers. The United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected to their practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have as many wives as they could support; the government confiscated the church's property, and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy, as is done by elderly church members in other parts of the country. Recently the head of the church, who bears the title of "Prophet, Seer and Revelator", was persuaded to permit an examination of one of its secret plates, the "Book of Abraham", by egyptologists, who found that it was ordinary Egyptian hieroglyphics, not "reformed", but containing prayers to the sun-god. But this will of course make no difference to the devout followers of Joseph—any more than it has made to devout Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that the Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and that the four gospels date from the second and third centuries after Christ.
All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults, some of them pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely grotesque. Thus, for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the "Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed himself up in scarlet and purple robes with stars on. Through his Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Company he became enormously wealthy; he finally announced himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to New York, and P. T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white elephant never made such a sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis overwhelmed the old prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and his tabernacle and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the rule of all religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting up, and suing one another in the law-courts.
Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers", ghastly sects which cultivate the religious hysterias, and have spread like a plague among the women of our lonely prairie farms and desert ranches. The "Holy Rollers", who call themselves the "Apostolic Church", have a meeting place here in Pasadena, and any Sunday evening at nine o'clock you may see the Spirit of the Lord taking possession of the worshippers, causing moans and shrieks and convulsions; you may see a woman holding her hands aloft for seventeen minutes by the watch, making chattering sounds like an ape. This is called "talking in tongues" and is a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come back at eleven in the evening, you will find the entire congregation, men and women, prostrate on the floor, or hanging over the benches; and maybe a child moaning in terror, having a devil cast out.
You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself into these convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust", which is "published Monthly (D. V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work and Bible Training School." Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The Pentecostal Baptism", and tells the story of her experiences. She "camped on the Word of God," she declares.
I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the mission told me, "You can go down to the mission and stay there all day. There is plenty of wood, and you can stay there all night." I went down, and there was plenty of "let go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got wonderfully loosed.....
Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God told me it was mine. What was there left for me to pray about. He spoiled my praying and I took up praising. I praised God that He who worked in the Upper Room was working the same in me. I praised, and I praised, and I praised. The devil said to me, "That's mechanical." I said, "I'll praise You Lord, and if You want real praise, You'll have to put the wind in the sails."
That's the way I came through. One morning I was just getting out of bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the enemy likes to call it, began to come. The Lord said, "Let it babble!" I let. The babble increased, and by night I was up to my neck. I let. I still let. That's all. Someone else does the work, and it does not tire you.
And here is another paper. "Meat in Due Season: published monthly, or as often as the Lord leads." The editor quotes the Bible, "Call upon the name of the Lord," and explains that "Call means call." The word appears to have a special meaning to these pentecostal persons—it means working yourself into a frenzy of agitation; as the editor puts it, "you must lay hold of the horns of the altar." He goes on to exhort—the bold face being his:
Pray as if your very life depended upon it! The first few minutes seemingly all the powers of hell will contend every word, the next few, relief in a measure will come, more liberty in calling. In a very little while you will be dead to the room, dead to the chair, dead to everyone around you, dead to all and tremendously alive to your desperate need and emptyness; this conviction will grow as you increase calling upon Him. It maybe you'll weep, it maybe you'll perspire, it maybe your clothing will be deranged, it, maybe your throat will get sore. Never for a moment let your mind rest on the condition of your person. Open your mouth and God has promised to fill it. Ask persistently until the very floor seems to sink beneath you and the fountains of the deep, of your heart let loose. Like David, "pour out your soul" like one would pour water out of a bucket. I have seen hundreds get through right at this point. When self-thought, reticence, decorum, reserve, propriety and dignity had all been thrown to the four winds of heaven. Self was then obliterated and consciousness of person gone. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you saith the scripture, but you must draw near to Him first.
These enthusiasts derive their practices from the Shakers, a sect which originated in England, but was driven by persecution to the New World. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of True Believers in Christ's Second Coming," and were founded by Ann Lee, who, variously termed herself the "Female Christ", the "Holy Comforter", and the "God-anointed Woman". They might be termed the suffragettes of religion, for they pray always to "Our Father and Mother, which are in heaven." They were taught the convenient doctrine that their Founder had "spiritual illumination", so that any evidence of the senses used against her might deceive. She governed through terror, holding that by her mental powers she could inflict torment upon any of her followers. Fortunately she taught absolute celibacy, and so there are now only about a thousand of her disciples.