Andrew D. White tells us that
It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God."
And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as banishers of epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit to rebuke the upstart teachers of impious and atheistical inoculation, and scourge the people back into His fold as in the good old days of Moses and Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in his immensely learned and half-suppressed work, "The Analysis of Religious Belief", quotes some missionaries to the Fiji islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a "disease-maker", who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they blew horns to frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the affliction—and thereby revealed that they stood upon the same intellectual level as the heathen they were supposed to instruct! It appeared that the natives had been at war with their neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist; they had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as punishment for savage presumption!
And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of Common Prayer" of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I remember as a little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by the prevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread three times a day; and there came an amiable clerical gentleman and recited the service proper to such pastoral calls: "Take therefore in good part the visitation of the Lord!" And again, when my mother was ill, I remember how the clergyman read out in church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness, "in mind, body or estate". I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaning of these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize that the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his tenements might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his little "flyer" in cotton might prove successful; so that the children in his mills might work with greater speed.
Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by incantations, and he answered, "Yes, if you use a little strychnine with it." And that would seem to be the attitude of the present-day Anglican church-member; he calls in the best physician he knows, he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and after that he thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have a chance. It makes the women happy, and after all, there are a lot of things we don't yet know about the world. So he repairs to the family pew, and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributes his mite to the maintenance of an institution which, fourteen Sundays every year, proclaims the terrifying menaces of the Athanasian Creed:
Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick faith. Which faith, except one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be explained that the "Catholick faith" here referred to is not the Roman Catholic, but that of the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. This creed of the ancient Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacing precision—forty-four paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae, closing with the final doom: "This is the Catholick faith: which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."
You see, the founders of this august institution were not content with cultured complacency; what they believed they believed really, with their whole hearts, and they were ready to act upon it, even if it meant burning their own at the stake. Also, they knew the ceaseless impulse of the mind to grow; the terrible temptation which confronts each new generation to believe that which is reasonable. They met the situation by setting out the true faith in words which no one could mistake. They have provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also the "Thirty-nine Articles"—which are thirty-nine separate and binding guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal Church shall be either a man of inferior mentality, or else a sophist and hypocrite. How desperate some of them have become in the face of this cruel dilemma is illustrated by the tale which is told of Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford: that when he was required to recite the "Apostle's Creed" in public, he would save himself by inserting the words "used" between the words "I believe", saying the inserted words under his breath, thus, "I used to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Perhaps the eminent divine never did this; but the fact that his students told it, and thought it funny, is sufficient indication of their attitude toward their "Religion." The son of William George Ward tells in his biography how this leader of the "Tractarian Movement" met the problem with cynicism which seems almost sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are justified in deception; and then lie like a trooper!"
The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence. Consider the power of the Church of England and its favorite daughter here in America; consider their prestige with the press and in politics, their hold upon literature and the arts, their control of education and the minds of children, of charity and the lives of the poor: consider all this, and then say what it means to society that such a power must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction and falsehood. "So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be," runs the church's formula; and this per se and a priori, of necessity and in the nature of the case.
Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science, even the most remote from theological concern. Here is the Reverend Edward Massey, preaching in 1772 on "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation"; declaring that Job's distemper was probably confluent small-pox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation". Here are the Scotch clergy of the middle of the nineteenth century denouncing the use of chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking "to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman". Here is Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; it "contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator"; it "is inconsistent with the fulness of His glory"; it is "a dishonoring view of nature". And the Bishop settled the matter by asking Huxley whether he was descended from an ape through his grandmother or grandfather.
Think what it means, friends of progress, that these ecclesiastical figures should be set up for the reverence of the populace, and that every time mankind is to make an advance in power over Nature, the pioneers of thought have to come with crow-bars and derricks and heave these figures out of the way! And you think that conditions are changed to-day? But consider syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we know so much, and can do almost nothing; consider birth-control, which we are sent to jail for so much as mentioning! Consider the divorce reforms for which the world is crying—and for which it must wait, because of St. Paul! Realize that up to date it has proven impossible to persuade the English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased wife's sister! That when the war broke upon England the whole nation was occupied with a squabble over the disestablishment of the church of Wales! Only since 1888 has it been legally possible for an unbeliever to hold a seat in Parliament; while up to the present day men are tried for blasphemy and convicted under the decisions of Lord Hale, to the effect that "it is a crime either to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion or to hold them up to contempt or ridicule." Said Mr. justice Horridge, at the West Riding Assizes, 1911: "A man is not free in any public place to use common ridicule on subjects which are sacred."
The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London, is "to preserve the standard of outward decency." And you will find that the one essential to prosecution is always that the victim shall be obscure and helpless; never by any chance is he a duke in a drawing-room. I will record an utterance of one of the obscure victims of the British "standard of outward decency", a teacher of mathematics named Holyoake, who presumed to discuss in a public hall the starvation of the working classes of the country. A preacher objected that he had discussed "our duty to our neighbor" and neglected "our duty to God"; whereupon the lecturer replied: "Our national Church and general religious institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about twenty million pounds annually. Worship being thus expensive, I appeal to your heads and your pockets whether we are not too poor to have a God. While our distress lasts, I think it would be wise to put deity upon half pay." And for that utterance the unfortunate teacher of mathematics served six months in the common Gaol at Gloucester!
While men were being tried for publishing the "Free-thinker", the Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you wish to know what an established church can do by way of setting up dullness in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's" writings on theological and religious questions. Read his "Juventus Mundi", in the course of which he establishes, a mystic connection between the trident of Neptune and the Christian Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that the writer of Genesis was an inspired geologist! This writer of Genesis points out in Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times: First, the water population; secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in man." And it seems that this division and sequence "is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact." Hence we must conclude of the writer of Genesis that "his knowledge was divine"! Consider that this was actually published in one of the leading British monthlies, and that it was necessary for Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that so far is it from being true that "a fourfold division and orderly sequence" of water, air and land animals "has been affirmed in our time by natural science", that on the contrary, the assertion is "directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is acquainted with the elements of natural science". The distribution of fossils proves that land animals originated before sea-animals, and there has been such a mixing of land, sea and air animals as utterly to destroy the reputation of both Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine knowledge of Geology.
I have a friend, a well-known "scholar", who permits me the use of his extensive library. I stand in the middle and look about me, and see in the dim shadows walls lined from floor to ceiling with decorous and grave-looking books, bound for the most part in black, many of them fading to green with age. There are literally thousands of such, and their theme is the pseudo-science of "divinity". I close my eyes, to make the test fair, and walk to the shelves and put out my hand and take a book. It proves to be a modern work, "A History of the English Prayer-book in Relation to the Doctrine of the Eucharist". I turn the pages and discover that it is a study of the variations of one minute detail of church doctrine. This learned divine—he has written many such works, as the advertisements inform us—fills up the greater part of his pages with foot-notes from hundreds of authorities, arguments and counter-arguments over supernatural subtleties. I will give one sample of these footnotes—asking the reader to be patient:
I add the following valuable observation, of Dean Goode: ("On Eucharist", II p 757. See also Archbishop Ware in Gibson's "Preservative", vol X, Chap II) "One great point for which our divines have contended, in opposition to Romish errors, has been the reality of that presence of Christ's Body and Blood to the soul of the believer which is affected through the operation of the Holy Spirit notwithstanding the absence of that Body and Blood in Heaven. Like the Sun, the Body of Christ is both present and absent; present, really and truly present, in one sense—that is, by the soul being brought into immediate communion with—but absent in another sense—that is, as regards the contiguity of its substance to our bodies. The authors under review, like the Romanists, maintain that this is not a Real Presence, and assuming their own interpretation of the phrase to be the only true one, press into their service the testimony of divines who, though using the phrase, apply it in a sense the reverse of theirs. The ambiguity of the phrase, and its misapplication by the Church of Rome, have induced many of our divines to repudiate it, etc."
Realize that of the work from which this "valuable observation" is quoted, there are at least two volumes, the second volume containing not less than 757 pages! Realize that in Gibson's "Preservative" there are not less than ten volumes of such writing! Realize that in this twentieth century a considerable portion of the mental energies of the world's greatest empire is devoted to that kind of learning!
I turn to the date upon the volume, and find that it is 1910. I was in England within a year of that time, and so I can tell what was the condition of the English people while printers were making and papers were reviewing and book-stores were distributing this work of ecclesiastical research. I walked along the Embankment and saw the pitiful wretches, men, women and sometimes children, clad in filthy rags, starved white and frozen blue, soaked in winter rains and shivering in winter winds, homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors of divinity, unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative". I walked on Hampstead Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns out for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror, for I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These creatures were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were some new grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could only shamble; they could not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a hand-organ playing, and turned away—the things they did in their efforts to dance were not to be watched. And then I went out into the beautiful English country; cultured and charming ladies took me in swift, smooth motor-cars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and the drink-sodden, starch-poisoned inhabitants—slum-populations everywhere, even on the land! When the newspaper reporters came to me, I said that I had just come from Germany, and that if ever England found herself at war with that country, she would regret that she had let the bodies and the minds of her people rot; for which expression I was severely taken to task by more than one British divine.
The bodies—and the minds; the rot of the latter being the cause of the former. All over England in that year of 1910, in thousands of schools, rich and poor, and in the greatest centres of learning, men like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead languages and dead sciences and dead arts; sending them out to life with no more conception of the modern world than a monk of the Middle Ages; sending them out with minds, made hard and inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to progress, contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and disciplined by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful muddle that was in England during the first two years of the war has not yet been told in print; but thousands know it, and some day it will be written, and it will finish forever the prestige of the British ruling caste. They rushed off an expedition to Gallipoli, and somebody forgot the water-supply, and at one time they had ninety-five thousand cases of dysentery!
They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle through"—they had to come to America for help. As I write, our Congress is voting billions and tens of billions of dollars, and a million of the best of our young manhood are being taken from their homes—because in 1910 the mind of England was occupied with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and the ten volumes of Gibson's "Preservative".
What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged. It means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the church, but in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army and navy. For a test I look up the list of bishops of the Church of England in Whitaker's Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of these functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the suffragans; and that the total salary paid to them amounts to more than nine hundred thousand dollars a year. This, it should be understood, does not include the pay of their assistants, nor the cost of maintaining their religious establishments; it does not include any private incomes which they or their wives may possess, as members of the privileged classes of the Empire. I look up their ages in Who's Who, and I find that there is only one below fifty-three; the oldest of them is ninety-one, while the average age of the goodly company is seventy. There have been men in history who have retained their flexibility of mind, their ability to adjust themselves to new circumstances at the age of seventy, but it will always be found that these men were trained in science and practical affairs, never in dead languages and theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter that he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an opinion on the labor question.
And now—here is the crux of the argument—do these aged gentlemen rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally nothing of their own power; they could not make their own episcopal robes, they could not even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be maintained in all their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to what end?
The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the land among his nobles and prelates. In those days, you understand, a high ecclesiastic was a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his predatory nature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and archbishops, of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependencie of the church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord, I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."
The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held, and always on the same condition—that she shall be "liege man for life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the whole story of the church of England, in the twentieth century as in the eleventh. The balance of power has shifted from time to time; old families have lost the land and new families have gotten it; but the loyalty and homage of the church have been held by the land, as the needle of the compass is held by a mass of metal. Some two hundred and fifty years ago a popular song gave the general impression—
For this is law that I'll maintainUntil my dying day, sir:That whatsoever king shall reignI'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!
So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every injustice that profits the owning class. And always among themselves you find them intriguing and squabbling over the dividing of the spoils; always you find them enjoying leisure and ease, while the people suffer and the rebels complain. One can pass down the corridor of English history and prove this statement by the words of Englishmen from every single generation. Take the fourteenth century; the "Good Parliament" declares that,
Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to benefices of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty. God gave the sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and shorn.
And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers Plowman—
But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets, A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land, Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor, A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord; And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup, He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy. Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands Away to the Orders that have no pity; Money rains upon their altars. There where such parsons be living at ease They have no pity on the poor; that is their "charity". Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad, But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.
Another step through history, and in the early part of the sixteenth century here is Simon Fish, addressing King Henry the Eighth, in the "Supplicacyon for the Beggars", complaining of the "strong, puissant and counterfeit holy and ydell" which "are now increased under your sight, not only into a great nombre, but ynto a kingdome."
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 come, medowe, pasture, grasse, 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 gettith 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 sturdy, idell, holy theves? These be they that have made an hundredth thousand idell hores in your realme. These be they that catche the pokkes of one woman, and here them to an other.
The petitioner 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 masses and then don't say them. "If the Abbot of westminster shulde sing every day as many masses for his founders as he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkes were too few." The petitioner 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!"
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 illustration 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 embarrassing 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 assured that all this was a work of religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure vehicle of God'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 Cashell, 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 5000 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 cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless 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!
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 gods are dead, but in their nameHumanity is sold to shame,While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priestSitteth 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 passed 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 womanWho steals a goose from off the common,And let the greater felon looseWho 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 trespass the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the shore.
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 constitutes 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 noble 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 class, 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 incumbent had a large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate, himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birthday, 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 the top layer the plates and napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you pass the curate, please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call that the curate, because it does the work of a curate."
As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption in American politics; surely I must know that in England they had no such evils! I explained that they did not have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase, was "in tail"; the grafters had, as a matter of divine right, the things which in America they had to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate, a "Millionaire's Club", for admission to which the members paid in cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as their birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself, it is merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England has even more than America. When I explained this, my popularity with the British ruling classes vanished quickly.
As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of the libel laws, which have as their first principle "the greater the truth, the greater the libel". Englishmen read with satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England, the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our American senators have done; they have bought the political parties with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have taken over the press, whether by outright purchase like Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy—both of which methods we Americans know. Within the last decade or two another group has been coming into control; and not merely is this the same class of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the international financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist system. These gentlemen make the world their home—or, as Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit themselves to all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris, democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews wherever they are.
And of course, in buying the English government, these new classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one agent, without rival—the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled my childhood—my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest, and pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:
"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained!"
For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of South Africa—wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly taxed than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So the armies of England were sent to subjugate the country. You might think they would have had the good taste to leave the lowly Jesus out of this affair—but if so, you have missed the essential point about established religion. The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for the populace to revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their "living." During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply. Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation "virile"; nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making "noble natures".
The British God had other ways of improving nations—for example, the opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred million "noble natures" by this method; and also they were making a hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new "virility," undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:
I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history; and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years, than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two centuries.
That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society:
Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China can never meet on a common ground. China views the whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.
And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are clamoring for restriction—and what prevents? Head and front of the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early temperance movement, declares that "among its supporters I cannot recall one Church of England minister of influence." When Asquith brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer, he was confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy, protesting against the act. And what was the basis of their protest? That beer is a food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but also that there was property invested in brewing it, Three hundred and thirty-two clergy of the diocese of Peterborough declared:
We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the present bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave injustice as amounting to a confiscation of private property, spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent people, and provoking deep and widespread resentment, which must do harm to our cause and hinder our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C. Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:
It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr. Asquith's temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through the opposition of clergymen who had invested their savings in brewery stock, the profits of which might have been lessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no prohibition legislation should ever be passed without providing for compensation to the owners of the industry. Today, all over America, appeals are being made to the people to eat less grain; the grain is being shipped to England, some of it to be made into beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the Archbishop of York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices, and in his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time economy!