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FAITH IN A FATAL DECLINE
Howbeit, their pulpits and their press are lugubriously vocal with Jeremiads bewailing the ever-swelling tide of Unbelief in the land,—throughout Christendom. The Church statistics, notoriously padded after the Biblical model of the Censuses in the Wilderness, can claim at most some forty-odd millions of adherents—many of them by lip-service and non-paying (therefore negligible), and others many non-distinguished for piety or common honesty—out of the hundred and twenty-odd millions of our American population. The Reverend Rector of Trinity Church in New York City—(one of the wealthiest dead-hand tax-free land monopolists in America)—thus bewails: “In America we are dealing with a country, the majority of whose inhabitants are pagans. ... Only forty percent of the population acknowledges affiliation with any Church.” (N. Y. Times, March 15, 1930.) The ex-Secretary of the Home Missions Council of one of the great Churches bemoans: “There has been a tremendous revolution in the history of the Church. ... The country church is waning and dying. ... The revolution under our eyes is found in the mode of thinking of the whole country.” (N.Y. Times, Jan. 8, 1930). An effective cause is found in the recent survey report of the Federal Council of Churches, to be in “the acceptance of a scientific view of life ... general questioning of formerly revered authority ... with absolute religious and ethical authority dethroned. ... Women have made no comparable advance in participation in church affairs. ... It can hardly be said that the church is an influential factor in the lives of the working classes.” (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Jan. 31, 1930.) A curious confession of likely cause and effect,—in the mental calibre of the credent—is stated by the Reverend publicity counsel of a [viii] national Church: “All sermons should be keyed to the 2 mentality of a fifteen-year-old youth. ... Half the people of the United States have the mentality of a fifteen-year-old youth. Most church-goers enjoyed the ‘children's sermon' more than the one on religious philosophy. ... The average man can carry only one idea at a time.” (Herald-Tribune, Jan. 28, 1930.)—Verily, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
All Fools' Day seems to be a sort of New Year's for ecclesiastical statistics and general stock-taking of the faithful: annually at that time the very religious Christian Herald publishes its collect of figures on Church membership; the Catholic Directory emits its own; and the generality of Divines gives voice to holy Lamentations and pious warnings to the Church and to the ungodly. From this year's extensive crop a little sheaf is added, the matter being important to our purposes, and curiously instructive as depicting the accelerated downward tobogganing of the Faith, The Report of the Christian Herald discloses: “The total of communicants last year (1929) was 50,006,566,” of which number it assigns a total of 18,051,680 to the fourteen sects of Catholic dis-Unity (Herald-Tribune, April 26, 1930); though the figures of the Catholic Directory are 20,178,202. (Ib. April. 16, 1930). Under the alarming caption—“Warns Protestant Church it is Lagging,” the Report of the Director of the Church Survey bemoans: “The Protestant Church in America is not keeping pace with the population. ... American Protestantism increased from 7 in each 100 of the population in 1800 to 24 in each 100 of the population of 1900. During the past thirty years Protestantism has not increased its ratio of the population as much as one member more per hundred.”—This is a very notable disclosure: that for a whole century the very vocal and intolerant Protestant population of this country has varied between 7% and 24% of the total population, and is today less than 25%:—yet this petty minority dingdongs that this is a “Christian country,” and imposes its ludicrous medieval “Blue Laws” and tyrannous proscriptions—as will be noted—upon the great anti-clerical majority of the people. And further striking figures follow from the same source: “A study made in 1912—[i.e. before Woman Suffrage],—“exclusively in cities, found two-thirds of the Protestant city membership consisted of [ix] women. ... There has been a steady proportionate decrease of interest in religion among women of the United States. ... It was also found [in this present Survey] that only 18 percent of the country population is in Church membership, although it is customary to think of country people as highly religious.—[They, too, are becoming more educated.] In New York City, the Church population is reported equally divided among Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jews. Only about eight percent of the population are members of the Protestant churches,”—thus only some 24% of the people of New York City among all three much-divided sects. (N.Y. Times, May 5, 1930.) In a recent abusive set of letters by three True Believers of the same family name (one a Rev.), addressed to the Editor of a Metropolitan paper for writing sanely about the Tabooed Subject of Birth Control, this was denounced as an “insult to over 2,000,000” Faithful in this City. (Herald-Tribune, April 12, 1930.) But the Faithful boast of their 444 churches in Greater New York: if each had the exaggerated membership of 1,000,—let the reader do his own figuring and note the result. And foreign immigration of the Faithful has been sadly curtailed of late by law. 3
The true significance to the Church of the great slump in its membership—and hence revenues, is crudely “given away” by the Very Rev. Episcopal Bishop of Long Island, lamenting like conditions in his Diocese: “The growth of population during the last decade on Long Island has been a challenge to the Church. ... The Episcopal Bishop of the diocese advocated [in a public address] a drive to bring into the church the wealthy residents of Long Island.” (Herald-Tribune, May 6, 1930.) The Most Rev. Episcopal superior of the last-lamenting has made a famous discovery, and with oracular gravity which evokes a smile he assigns its cause: “There are no great poets, painters, writers, nor musicians—[only great Manikins of Bishops]—today, and the cause of this artistic deficiency can be found in the moderns' total disregard for religion.” (Episc. Bishop of Manhattan: Herald-Tribune, April. 21, 1930.) And the Highly Rev. Bishop of the National Capital thus portentously, and truly, glooms: “There is an organized movement, world-wide in scope, to unsettle Christian ideals and Christian institutions, both in Russia and elsewhere” (Ib. May 13, 1930);—which, judging by the age-old gigantic failure of both—as herein we shall see,—is not so much to be wondered.
So far as Russia is concerned—(and the fact and the reason for it apply as well to every other “Christian” country),—the reason is truly stated by the pious Editor of Atlantis in a Jeremiad of confession before the Institute of Citizenship just held in Atlanta: “For a thousand years, ever since Russia became a Christian country, and more especially in the last 200 years, when the Czar became the official head of the Church, the State religion in Russia was one of the means whereby the Russian people were oppressed, exploited and kept in ignorance. The Russian people had a score to settle with the Church after the revolution, and they took full advantage of it” (N.Y. Times, April 8, 1930), a like chance for which all Christendom is looking. The very religious Editor continues to confess: “It is useless to deny that the Church, in most instances, has lost its hold upon vast majorities of the people.” (Ibid.) At the Christian Herald Institute of Religion held this year at Buck Hill Falls, Pa., a perfect symposium of Jeremiads bewailed Faith on the Toboggan: “Unless emphasis on elaborate creeds does not cease, we will deliver ourselves into the hands of the Humanists for the defeat which we deserve.” ... “The Church is simply going to pieces in the small towns of the Middle West. ... The paganization of rural America is going on so fast that if we wait for even the union of closely allied denominations to be accomplished, it will mean ruination.” ... “The greatest difficulty in effecting mergers of churches lies in personalities and prejudices.” (Herald-Tribune, May 15, 1930.) Thus today, after nearly two thousand years of the “Sweetness and light” of our Divine Christian religion, “personalities and prejudices” among those taught to love even their enemies persist and keep the Fold of Christ divided into mutually-hating Flocks; precisely so that the olden Pagan sneer at the early Christians is perfectly befitting their successors today: “There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith.” (Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, ii, 31.) 4
To conclude this review of pregnant figures and confessions, two luminous revelations are in one day made of cause and effect. Says the eminent Rev. President of the National Bible Institute: “... because the Bible has ceased to have authority either in the pulpit or in the pew. Decline in church attendance and decrease in church membership are almost invariably traceable to unbelief in the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible,”—Due to increasing knowledge of its true character, as herein revealed. (Herald-Tribune, May 26, 1930.) And the ghastly irony and joke of the whole huge bankruptcy of Faith is thus exposed by the egregious Pastor of a Brooklyn Baptist Flock, who images the Missionary “selling” the Faith to the benighted Heathen: “'I have a religion here that will do you poor heathen a lot of good. Of course it hasn't succeeded very well at home, but we are sure it will do you a lot of good.'” (Ibid.) It's just like God told the Jews: You shan't sell the dead carcasses found by the way to the Chosen; “but thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayst sell it unto an alien”! (Deut. xiv, 21.) So the dead cats of Faith are flung out of the sanctuary as unfit for the Knowing, but are peddled to the ignorant heathen for whatever the refuse may bring of clerical revenue.
Like conditions exist in all priest-ridden lands. The Rt. Rev. Archbishop of Canterbury in his call for the decennial Lambeth Conference for 1930, at which over sixty of the Episcopal bishops of this country are to attend, sounds a fateful monition: “The new knowledge of the Bible and still more of the universe in which we live still confuses and bewilders the beliefs of many of our clergy and people. There are tendencies in the life of our Church which suggest the prevalence of forms of belief ... which almost exclude belief in God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.” (Herald-Tribune, March 12, 1930.) Wails the Rev. Pyke to the annual Assembly of the National Council of Evangelical Churches of England: “A large part of England has lapsed into semi-heathenism; ... our half-filled churches.” (Herald-Tribune, April 20, 1930.) Such creed-searchings and churchly lamentations over their moribund condition may be multiplied into volumes.
Some potent cure thus seems to be at work. This curative specific is simply increasing popular knowledge: “Know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” is the Golden Recipe for the religious disorder. What Cicero said of the Pythian Oracles may as truly be applied to every form of priestcraft: “When men began to be less credulous, their power vanished.”
Day by day, as knowledge increaseth and spreads amongst the people in the pews as well as among the parsons, does it become more difficult and embarrassing for the pulpiteers to “put over” their tales of myth and magic to the hearers of the Word. Even the clergy are becoming awakened to the stinging truth aimed at priests and the priest-taught by Prof. Shotwell: “Where we can understand, it is a moral crime to cherish the ununderstood,” and are beginning to feel the humiliation of their false Position. A noted clerical educator, Dr. Reinold Niebuhr, professor of Christian Ethics in that hotbed of every heresy, the Union Theological Seminary, in his textbook suggestively entitled ‘Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic,' makes this confession of recognized Dishonesty in the mass 5 of clerical teaching and preaching: “As a teacher your only interest is to discover the truth. ‘As a preacher you must conserve other interest besides the truth.' It is your business to deal circumspectly with the whole religious inheritance lest the virtues [?] which are involved in the older traditions perish through your iconoclasm. That is a formidable task and a harassing one; for one can never be quite sure where pedagogical caution ends AND DISHONESTY BEGINS”! (Quoted by Alva Johnston in N.Y. Herald-Tribune, March 8, 1930.)
The great Church Father, Bishop St. Augustine (of whom more hereafter), was wise to the psychology of—at least—Pagan religion—the mode of its incipience and the manner of its age-long persistence. The priests and the priest-taught, he tells, instilled the virus of superstition into their victims when “small and weak,” when they knew not to resist or healthily to react against the contaminating inoculation; “then, afterwards, it was necessary that succeeding generations should preserve the traditions of their ancestors, drinking in this superstition with their mother's milk.” (Augustine, City of God, xxii, 6.) Thinks one that this cunning modus operandi is confined only to Pagan priestcrafts and superstitions?
If, instead of the saintly Doctors of Hebrew-Christian Divinity, injecting their saving “opiate of the people” into the cradled babes of Christ, it were the abhorred Doctors of Mohammedan or Mormon Divinity who got to the cradles first,—those infant souls would all but surely be lost to the Christ, and in their God's tender mercy, as assured by the sainted Augustine, would spend eternity crawling on the candent floors of Hell, playing with the “worm that never dies”: hardly from the cradle to the grave could all the Christian purges for Sin and pills for Salvation of Soul, later administered, serve for effective catharsis of the venom of those Christianly-hated “superstitions, drunk in with their mother's milk.”
This truth is strikingly stated in an eloquent period by Ingersoll, and stunningly confirmed and confessed by the syndicated Prophet of Protestantism below to be quoted. The former opens his classic Why I Am an Agnostic, with these trenchant words: “For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashions of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings. Environment is a sculptor—a painter.
“If we had been born in Constantinople, the most of us would have said: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshippers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana.
“As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them. ... 6
“The Scotch are Calvinists because their fathers were. The Irish are Catholics because their fathers were. The English are Episcopalians because their fathers were, and the Americans are divided into a hundred sects because their fathers were. ... Children are sometimes superior to their parents, modify their ideas, change their customs, and arrive at different conclusions.”
The truth thus uttered by the great Agnostic finds its confirmation curiously wrung from the lips of the Bellwether of would-be “reconciliationists” of primitive Superstition and modern Science. In a metropolitan newspaper carrying his syndicated “Daily Counsel” to the lovelorn and the misty-minded, a Virginia Believer puts to him challengingly the question direct: “Do you mean to imply that belief is largely a matter of environment, and if so, would you not have been as firm a follower of Mahomet as you are of Christ if you had been born of Mahometan parentage and brought up in that faith?” For once there was no chance for Conmanian suppleness of evasion, so the blunt and confusing truth is forced: Yes! “It is fairly certain that, had I been cradled in Mohametans [sic] I should now have been turning toward Mecca at the appointed hours”! (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Oct. 29, 1929.) Thus the champion special pleader for the fast fading faith of Christ confesses away the divinely self-evident “truth” of his Christian faith, admits that it is the result not of independent thought and convincing proofs to his mind, but the inheritance of the cradle and the nursery,—that that towering intellect would today be bearing witness to the “revealed truth” of a false God and religion, if he had chanced to be “born that way”! Allah would to him—and to millions—be true and living God and Jehovah a crude barbarian myth, but for the accident of birth and teaching,—a reversal of the whole scheme of salvation! Thus the Cradle determines the Creed; it is the virus of the superstition-germ first injected which infects the credulity-center of the brain and colors too-oft through life the whole concept of “religious truth” in the mind of the patient.The psychology of the priestly maxim—“Disce primum quod credendum est—Learn first what is to be believed,” and the persistent virulence of the virus thus injected, is aptly signified by the Rev. Wenner, 83-year old Bellwether of Lutheranism in America, and for 61 years pastor of one of its oldest sheep-folds in New York City: “I do not think that time has produced many changes in the attitude of Lutheran worshippers,—because of the stable nature of the religious education we give the youth of our sect. From the age of six onward we instruct them in the tenets of our faith, and they usually abide.” (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Oct. 10, 1929.)
The predilect precept of the Doctors of every brand of Divinely forever is: “Catch 'em in the cradle, and get 'em inoculated before they know.” In the bib and rattle period, the childish brain is a soft, clean surface, “soft as wax to be molded into vice,” as His Holiness says: helpless it receives and retains whatever is first impressed or imposed upon it: true religion or false, Christ or Crishna or Santa Claus, Holy Ghost or the ghosts of Afric superstition. “Give us a child until it is seven, and we've got it cinched for life,” is the ghoulish axiom of all the 7 Faiths: “Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven,”—as of the heathen Nirvana. How godly a work is it to sear the thoughtless child mind with the brand of Faith; how infamous and damnable to offer to the “immature” and inept youth in college freedom from the stigma of credulity! How crude and cruel for the Chinese to bind and cripple for life the feet of their girl children; how fiendish the custom of sundry savage tribes, ignorant of the “Light of the World,” to clamp the infant heads between boards so as to produce the hideous deformity of skull so aesthetically popular among them; but how pleasing to gods and priests to fetter the child mind in the bonds of Faith, and so to dwarf and deaden the mind's most precious faculty—Reason! “To succeed,” eloquently said Ingersoll, “the theologians invade the cradle, the nursery. In the brain of innocence they plant the seeds of superstition. They pollute the minds and imaginations of children. They frighten the happy with threats of pain—they soothe the wretched with gilded lies. ... All of these comforting and reasonable things are taught by the ministers in their pulpits—by teachers in Sunday schools and by parents at home. The children are victims. They are assaulted in the cradle—in their mother's arms. Then, the school-master carries on the war against their natural sense, and all the books they read are filled with the same impossible truths. The poor children are helpless. The atmosphere they breathe is filled with lies—lies that mingled with their blood.” This unholy cradle-robbing goes on with vehement zest. The Churches, the Federal Council of Churches, the Vicar of God and his adjutants, all ply amain the arts of enslaving the babe in the cradle, the child in the school. In the Encyclical of December 31, 1929, the right of the Church to the child is proclaimed as above that of parents and State; the secular public schools are damned, and the prole of the Faithful are forbidden to attend and mingle with the “irreligious” State pupils: “the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, namely, those which are open to Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is forbidden to Catholic children,” as such a school is not “a fit place for Catholic students,” who must be baited with “the supernatural.” (Current History, March 1930, p. 1091, passim.) Yet the banned and cursed Public Schools of New York City, forbidden to the Faithful child, the ecclesiastical City government fills with Faithful teachers for the purpose of “boot-legging” the forbidden supernaturalism into them; a work so wide-spread and active, that the Cardinal Archbishop of the City, addressing over 2000 of the Catholic Teachers Association, “praises their work of teaching faith in City Institutions.” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 25, 1928.) And every rationalist effort to counteract such illegal propaganda and to free the schools from the pernicious influences of superstition, is denounced and opposed by the Bible bootleggers of every brand of Faith; and in the brave instance of Russia, a medieval orgy of prayer-assault on High Heaven is made, to counsel God what he ought to do to the Russians for their “godless” efforts to save the children of that Church-cursed land from the superstitions of priestcraft.
In an ironical letter to the English press, in which he “enters the lists against the British critics of Moscow's anti-clerical policy,” George Bernard Shaw, writing under a transparent Russian pseudonym, says: “In Russia we take religious questions 8 very seriously. We protect our children very carefully against proselytizers of our fantastic sects until they are old enough to make up their own minds. To us, it is inconceivable that a government would tolerate the inculcation upon helpless children of beliefs that will not stand the most strenuous scientific examination or in which the teachers themselves do not honestly believe. ... We cannot understand why the so-called Articles of Religion, which have been described. by one of the most learned and intellectually gifted of your churchmen as capable of being professed only by ‘fools, bigots or liars,' are deliberately taught as divine truths in your schools. ... Russia is setting an example of intellectual and moral integrity to the whole world, while England is filling its temples with traders, persecuting its clergy, and bringing up children to be scoffers to whom religion means nothing but hypocrisy and humbug.” (Herald-Tribune, April 7, 1930.)
Thus the Church enchains the Reason. The proudest boast today of the Church for its ex-Pagan Saint Augustine, is that: “as soon as a contradiction—[between his “philosophy” and his religious doctrines]—arises, he never hesitates to subordinate his philosophy to religion, reason to faith”! (Cath. Encyc. ii, 86.) So this great ex-Pagan Saint of the Church surrenders his reason to faith, and avers: “I would not believe the Gospels to be true, unless the authority of the Catholic Church constrained me”! (Augustine, De Genesi.)
Ingersoll, in one of his glowing, devastating periods of oratory, said: “Somebody ought to tell the truth about the Bible!” That I have already essayed quite comprehensively to do. In my recent work, Is It God's Word? (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1926, 2 nd and 3 rd Editions), I devote some five hundred pages to “An Exposition of the Fables and Mythology of the Bible and of the Impostures of Theology,” as my thesis is defined in my sub-title. “A farrago of palpable nonsense,” in the words of the Dean of American critics, is about all that remains of Holy Writ as the pretended “Word of God,” as the result of that searching analysis.
That study was limited, in most part, to the sacred texts for the internal evidences, which themselves so abundantly afford, of their own falsity and primitive-minded fatuity. On the other phase of inquiry I there limited myself to the suggestive remark: “The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates” (p. 279; cf. p. 400), purposing then to complement the work by this sequel or companion volume, treating the frauds and forgeries of religion and the Church.
Taking up now more particularly the second phase of my subject, I here propose to treat of the inveterate forgeries, frauds, impostures, and mendacities of Priestcraft and its Theology. I shall be explicit and plain spoken, and unmistakably state my purpose and my proofs. For nearly two thousand years the priestcraft of Christendom, for purposes of domination by fear and greedy exploitation through imposture upon credulity, has consigned to earthly fire and sword, and to eternal damnation all who dared to dissent or to protest; the priestly word “miscreant,” 9 misbeliever, has become the synonym for everything foul and criminal in human nature. The day of reckoning and of repudiation is at hand; Priestcraft has here its destroying answer, in very plain and unafraid words.
This book is a grave indictment, impossible to be made or to be credited unless supported at every point by incontrovertible facts. These I promise to produce and array in due and devastating order.
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