The Profits of Religion

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It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers
are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable
salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the
wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church
that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class,
and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic
Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest
who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but
goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his
pope. In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their
bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious movement for
an Irish Republic.

What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the
exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if
you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you
would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of them
slaves to Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them
must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or
hypocrites. They have caught enough of the spirit of their time
not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and
witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that they do not
believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they
are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods. But
they are part of a machine, and the old men and the rich men who
run the machine have laid down the law. Those who find themselves
tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and
children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted
for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as
by the practice of altruism.

But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift
wings--it may be here before this book sees the light. And who
knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which
we saw in Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burned their
holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as citizens
and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of
exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into
dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. All
those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe nonsense,
because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will suddenly
realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that any
man can go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly
run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten
or fifteen dollars. Do you not think that there may be some who
will choose freedom and self-respect on those terms?

And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the
church because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a
way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and
obtain promotion, to get customers if you are a tradesman, to
extend your practice if you are a professional man? And what
about the millions who go to church because they are poor, and
because life is a desperate struggle, and this is one way to keep
the favor of the boss, to get a little better chance for the
children, to get charity if you fall into need; in short, to
acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who stand
together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent, contented
in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them?

The Church Redeemed

Do I mean that I expect to see the Church--all churches--perish
and pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church answers
one of the fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will
abolish poverty and parasitism, it will make temptations fewer,
and the soul's path through life much easier; but it will not
remove the necessity of struggle for individual virtue, it will
only clear the way for the discovery of newer and higher types of
virtue. Men will gather more than ever in beautiful places to
voice their love of life and of one another; but the places in
which they gather will be places swept clean of superstition and
tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to
cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses, so the
Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its defense of
parasitism and exploitation. I will record the prophecy that by
the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the
Church ever opposed Socialism--true Socialism; just as today they
deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men for
teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right
to commit crime, ever gave away the New World to Spain and
Portugal, ever buried newly-born infants in the cellars of
nunneries.

The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian,
Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their
formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that
refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment
and freedom will leave it without followers. But in the great
religions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be
sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of
old, will preach the living word of God. In many churches today
we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Even in
the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the
books of the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The
Saint", and you will see a genuine and vital protest against the
economic corruption of the Church. In America, the "Knights of
Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a "War
for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y. M. C. A. in the
training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.

This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of
modern common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation
Army. William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his
life into his hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the
lost souls of the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he
persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus--

Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.

Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population.
He had not wanted to engage in charity and material activities;
he feared hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets
us see how utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do
anything for the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same
time helping their diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So the
Salvation army was forced into useful work--old clothes depots,
nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm colonies--until today
the bare list of the various kinds of enterprises it carries on
fills three printed pages. It is all done with the money of the
rich, and is tainted by subservience to authority, but no one can
deny that it is better than "Gibson's Preservative", and the
fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with port.

And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater.
Here and there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job
and preaching the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth
Avenue churches are making attempts at "missions" and
"settlements" in the slums. The more vital churches are gradually
turning themselves into societies for the practical betterment of
their members. Their clergy are running boys clubs and
sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for mothers,
social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs
always before the clergyman's face--that with prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
educational societies and social reforms he thrives.

And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the
churches, like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy
and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs,
they are forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to
engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end
of this--any more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in
politics and industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary
thought can see the main outlines of the future. We see that in
these new church activities the clergy are inspired by things
read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers.
They are responding to the actual, instant needs of their boys in
the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have an effect
upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl
who leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a
munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates,
will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the
clergyman who helps in Y. M. C. A. work in France, or in Red
Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and
formalist forever after. He will have learned, in spite of
himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have learned
co-operation and social solidarity by the method which modern
educators most favor--by doing. Also he will have absorbed a mass
of ideas in news despatches from over the world. He is forced to
read these despatches carefully, because the fate of his own boys
is involved; and we Socialists will see to it that the despatches
are well filled with propaganda!

The Desire of Nations

So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in
the great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal
which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in
dismay: the Church of the future, the Church redeemed by the
spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join.
They call us materialists, and say that we think about nothing
but the belly--and that is true, in a way; because we are the
representatives of a starving class, which thinks about its belly
precisely as does any individual who is ravening with hunger. But
give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of
Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the body," and
then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls;
whereas at present we are led to despise the very word
"spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and
poseurs.

We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to
us. We would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and
self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if
there were in the world institutions conducted by men and women
of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true
morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not
of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not upon
superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what
truth is, and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth
inspiries. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers
we see in the churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to
believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather than
trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift
to train them ourselves--we amateurs, not knowing much about
children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against
organized wrong.

It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it
is a fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need it just
as badly as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race. That
we need it is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our
midst--the schisms which waste the greater part of our
activities, and which are often the result of personal jealousies
and petty vanities. To lift men above such weakness, to make them
really brothers in a great muse--that is the work of "personal
religion" in the true and vital sense of the words.

We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of
the new Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the
dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with
fervor and conviction. Read these lines from "The Desire of
Nations," by Edwin Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer
who is at hand:

And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
To every heart he will its own dream be:
One moon has many phantoms in the sea.
Out of the North the norns will cry to men:
"Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
"Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
"Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"
And social architects who build the State,
Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
"Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"

The Knowable

The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker
the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the
microscope and the telescope, of the new psychology and the new
sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in
ancient Mythologies. And even if this were not so, the business
of the thinker is to follow the facts. The history of all
philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The infant opens
his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out his hands and cries
for it, but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a
while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his mother's
breast and takes a drink of milk.

Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him
to be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the
knowledge immediately and finally, and invents innumerable
systems and creeds. He makes himself believe them, with fire and
torture makes other men believe them; until finally, in the
confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate
his instruments, and he makes the discovery that his tools are
inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite,
while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative,
while the First Cause is absolute.

This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern
philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four
propositions: first, that the universe is limitless in time and
space; second, that matter is composed of simple, indivisible
elements; third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, that
there must be an absolute or first cause. And having proven these
things, he turned round and proved their opposites, with
arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows these
demonstrations and understands them, takes all his metaphysical
learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.

It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear,
that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can
prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth
dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside
foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition,
you take another flight, and come back the way you were before.
So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose of Catholic cheats
like Cardinal Newman and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves
hysterical women like "Mother" Eddy; it serves the
New-thoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it
serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to befuddle the wits
of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a
bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that
it is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the
ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist
who lays down a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a
Christian.

How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a
capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison,
making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read
the books of the "Positivists", and attended their imitation
church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction from them.
In the midst of their dogmatic pronouncements I found myself
remembering how the egg falls apart and reveals a chicken, how
the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly. The spirit of man
is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile occupation to set
limits upon the future. Our business is not to say what men will
know ten thousand years from now, but to content ourselves with
the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a
procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an
act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.

In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify
his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there
is worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is
order in creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which
can be applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for
its mother's breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts
it when he declares that water is made of two parts hydrogen and
one part oxygen, and sets it down for a certainty that this will
always be so--that he is not being played with by some sportive
demon, who will today cause H2O to behave like water, and
tomorrow like benzine.

Nature's Insurgent Son

Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each
bit of knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life
becomes a new thing. Consider, for example, what a different
place the world became to the man who discovered that the force
which laid the forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warm a
cave and make wild grains nutritious! In other words, man can
create life, he can make the world and himself into that which
his reason decides it ought to be. The means by which he does
this is the most magical of all the tools he has invented since
his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of
experimental science--and when one considers that this weapon has
been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three
centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning
of human evolution.

To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and
deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
product--that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this
forth with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man".
We are, at this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous
transition stage, as a child playing with explosives. This child
has found out how to alter his environment in many startling
ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, nor to
what purpose. He finds that certain things are uncomfortable, and
these he proceeds immediately to change. Discovering that grain
fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of drunkards;
discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared
in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that
it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that
captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession
of empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption,
and fall into ruins again.

This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping
blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It
takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a
million million men to produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and
arrow, or democracy. Nature's present impulse appears as a
rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will
emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her
blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son";
but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old
blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of
defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the
breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child
would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the
name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.

What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing
our sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful,
because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific
breeding which will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at
life. We can replace instinct by self-discipline. We can
substitute for the regime of "Nature red in tooth and claw with
ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what he wishes to
be and how to set about to be it. Whether this can happen,
whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great
triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into
the melting pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude
of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely such a
contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who
has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to
perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvellous
new tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact
knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life
of the race.

The New Morality

Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers;
driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism
call the elan vital. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is
an emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of
distress. So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the
final goal is a condition of free and constantly accelerating
growth, in which joy is enduring.

That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It
is a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall
upon the earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other
hand, it is a conceivable thing that man may some day learn to
control the movements of comets, and even of starry systems. It
seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself
master of the forces of his immediate environment--

The untamed giants of nature shall bow down--
The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
From mockery and destruction, and be turned
Unto the making of the soul of man.

It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food
from the elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it
is conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present
prey upon his body, and so put an end to death. It is certain
that he will ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human
qualities as he has created the spurs of the fighting-cock and
the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what genius is, and
the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be
recognized. In the new science of psycho-analysis he has already
begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into
the light of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy
which the psychic researchers are accumulating, he is beginning
to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which may come
to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars, and of
the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are
disclosing.

All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way
of their realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and
submission, the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has
brought with him from his animal past. These make him a slave, a
victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden
of the soul is the task of the modern thinker.

The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that
man is the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save
the law of his own being, no check upon his will save that which
he himself imposes.

The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true
pleasure is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.

The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there
is no authority above reason; no possibility of such authority,
because if such were to appear, reason would have to judge it,
and accept or reject it.

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that
there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can
be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane.
The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine
aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist
is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action
which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility
or hypocrisy tomorrow.

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