When any species of wrong-doing can wear the disguise of righteousness, the blindest among us can see how dangerous that kind of crime may become—how hard to prove, punish and put down.

There are immense Arabian plains where nomad robbers have practised their profession, from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; yet those plains and the nomad bands that pitch their tents beneath the Oriental sun remain very much as they were in the days of Abraham.

But where robbery has disguised itself as Law, and one class has aimed the law-making machine at the others, saying "Stand and deliver!" whole regions have become deserts, and great peoples have been blotted out.

In fact, the highwayman, the cattle-lifter and the pickpocket have never in the least affected the destinies of nations. The pirate and the buccaneer have never been able to destroy the commerce of the seas, beggar provinces, and change noble harbors into neglected pools.

It is when the robbers intrench themselves in Parliaments, Reichstags and Congresses, and the robbery takes the form of "Law," that spoliation becomes destructive. Bank laws and money-contraction laws beat down more victims than armies. Protective Tariff "laws," infinitely more ruinous than all the Lafittes and Captain Kidds, drive the American flag from the seas, while on land they make a thousand Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, Guggenheims, McCormicks and Armours, at the same time that they are casting millions of the despoiled out of house and home.

There are realms where religious mendicancy keeps to the primitive forms of the beggar\'s bowl and pouch. It is the free-will offering.

In these countries of voluntary tributes, religious feeling has branched [Pg 4]into the fewest channels, has lost the least of its original force, and maintains today its most impregnable position. But where the priestly caste was able to intrench its mendicancy in Law, and arrogantly say to the laity, "Pay me one-tenth of all thou hast!" religion was first to well-nigh lose its beauty and its strength, and like, the Rhine, almost disappear into the intricate morasses of subdivisions.

Ten thousand virulent disputes about tithes ushered in the diabolisms of the French Revolution; and many of my readers will remember how Charles Dickens, when a Parliamentary reporter, dropped his pencil in tears, unable to go on, as Daniel O\'Connell described one of the tragedies of a tithe-riot in Ireland.

When Religion went forth as Christ sent it forth, it demanded nothing for the priest. Yet, the same religion, organized into an episcopacy, afterwards wrote the tax of one-tenth upon the statute-book, and sold the widow\'s cow to pay the priest for his prayer. In those days, it must have been a gruesome spectacle as the burly parson, a picture of physical fullness, stood in the background, personifying Law and Religion, while the bailiff raided the cotter\'s wretched premises, pounced upon pigs and poultry, or dragged household goods off to public sale. Yet, during centuries of outrage, pain and starvation, this sort of robbery disguised itself with a double domino of Law and Religion.

Forgive me, if I digress briefly to mention how vividly I was reminded of all this, by the thrifty, business-like manner in which Bishop P. J. Donohue, of Wheeling, West Virginia, sold out a laboring man, S. W. Hawley, for rent, in the year of our Crucified Lord, 1913.

To satisfy the debt due to this most worshipful Bishop of God, the following personal property was seized, and advertised for sale, to-wit: 3 bed springs and 3 beds, 3 mattresses, 1 stove, 2 tables, 10 chairs, 3 pictures, 1 broom, 4 comforts, 2 blankets, 3 quilts, 4 pillows, and some dishes.

(It was further stated that Hawley\'s back was broken, while working in the coal mines.)

George Alfred Townsend, who was so well known to journalism as "Gath," wrote a novel which he called "The Entailed Hat." The book would have lived gloriously, had it not been for the hat: the sternly absurd conditions which this[Pg 5] idea about the Entailed Hat fastened upon the author, killed his novel.

But there was in it one passage which lingers yet in my recollection, after the lapse of more than 30 years. There were two brothers, shrewd, pushing, flinty Jews, who drove hard bargains, hard collections, and filled a store-room with household plunder sold for debt, and bought in by the Jews, to be resold at a profit. "Gath" gave tongue to each article of this pitiful domestic furniture, torn from the homes of the poor, and auctioned at public outcry.

The old rickety cradle spoke of the babes that had lain in it, and of the mother-songs that had been sung over it, as the foot which moves the world softly pedalled the wooden rockers.

The loom and the spindle had their stories to tell: the table and the dishes spoke of the plain meals and unpretentious hospitalities of the lowly: the chairs remembered the humble hearth and fireside, and many a circle of bright faces they had helped to form around the cheerful glow of the burning logs.

The silent clock, with no life of moving hands on its dust-covered face, spoke of how the short and simple annals of the poor had been measured by it, how it had timed the marriage and the funeral, the birth and death; and how it had missed the toil-hardened hands that used to wind it up, every night.

And so on—the dirge of the Household Goods!

As my eye ran over the items of the poor man\'s goods ordered to sale for the most worshipful Bishop Donohue—the consecrated disciple of Christ who didn\'t even have as much of a home as the foxes and the birds—I might have thought of one or two blistering passages in the glorious old Code of Moses; I might have recalled some of the bitterest of the words of Jesus Christ, against those rich, haughty, unmerciful lordlings who grind the faces of the poor.

But I did not: on the contrary, that passage in "Gath\'s" novel rose out of the mist of 30 years, and brought back the plaintive lament of the household goods, seized, carried away, and sold into strange hands to pay a trifling debt. "Gath," following literary tradition, most canonically chose Jews to act as shylocks: it would never have occurred to him that a consecrated Bishop of Jesus Christ could sell the poor Christian\'s blanket off the bed, sell the bed itself, sell the table at which the family ate, and the chairs that they sat on. Not[Pg 6] only the mattress on which the tired limbs of labor stretched themselves to rest, and the pillows upon which the aching head had lain, but the very broom which swept the floor, had to be seized to satisfy the rent of this godly landlord, the Bishop of a homeless Christ!

To make this picture perfect, the family Bible ought to have been levied on—and this Catholic Bishop ought to have bought it in. Having acquired the Book in that manner, a natural curiosity might have prompted him to read it.

One thing, however, the most worshipful Bishop might yet do: he might take the proceeds of the sale of Hawley\'s beds, mattresses, pillows, stove, dishes, comforts, blankets, chairs and broom—and contribute the whole sum to Foreign Missions.

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"Thou shalt not commit adultery!"

All Christians take their laws and their religion more or less from the Jews. Who the Jews took it from, is another question. Skeptical scholars say that they took it from the older peoples of the East, of the Nile, the Euphrates: orthodox Christianity maintains that they took it by revelation direct from Jehovah. Therefore, every sect in Christendom stands committed to the proposition that God Almighty, clothed in all His terrors, with the clouds darkening the skies, the thunders for His heralds and the lightenings for the flaming swords that went before His face, came down to Sinai, and wrote upon the everlasting tablets,

"Thou shalt not commit adultery!"

(Doway Bible: Deut. xx:14. I will hereafter use this Roman Catholic version as the true one, thus avoiding any dispute with papists as to the accuracy of my quotations.)

In this Doway, or Douay, a version of the Book, we are somewhat patly told that the first thing which Adam did, after having been dispossessed of Eden, was to know "Eve his wife, who conceived and brought forth Cain, saying, I have gotten a man through God."

Then she brought forth Abel; and before six other verses are ended, we learn that the brothers are at enmity because of religion, and that one has killed the other.

How Adam and Eve were to have propagated the human race, had Eve not listened to the snake; or whether they were to have propagated it at all, is a mystery which our finite minds were evidently not expected to fathom. Nevertheless, Saint[Pg 7] Augustine made a heroic effort to answer the riddle; and his classic theological work, "The City of God," contains his theory, still discreetly veiled in the original Latin, which, being interpreted, is considerably nastier than any other English that I ever perused in a classical theological work.

The first occupation of Adam outside of Paradise ought to have some weight with us, as a time-honored precedent. That wicked mankind, and Noe came out of the Ark, together with all those animals, birds, reptiles, &c., the very first command given him was, that he and his family should increase and multiply. Apparently, their obedience to this command was so prompt and effective that the Lord never reproached him or his descendants for any neglect of duty in that particular.

"And God blessed Noe and his sons: and said unto them, Increase and multiply, and fill the earth."

It is true that Noe got drunk, soon after this; but the diligent casuists, who follow every perilous passage in the Douay Bible with their indefatigable notes, tell us that Noe did not commit a sin by getting drunk, "because he knew not the strength of it," the wine.

(Thus does ignorance excuse the sinner, when the casuists need the defense.)

And through the Mosaic Code, breathes the same spirit and purpose: it can fairly be summed up in the phrase, Thou shalt marry!

Every encouragement is given to wedlock and to large families: polygamy itself, had its reason, in those hot climates where puberty is reached at so early an age, and where the child-bearing woman is so quickly aged into unfitness for mating with the robust husband. It was partly because the Mosaic law gave so little excuse for immorality, that adultery was so cruelly punished. And the vigor of the Jewish type, for so many centuries, amid so many barbarous persecutions, and in spite of such wide geographical dispersions, is the most splendid monument to the eternal wisdom of the command—

Marry! Increase and multiply! Fill the earth with lawfully begotten children! Honor the Home! Preserve your Race! Do not breed promiscuously! DO NOT MONGRELIZE!

In short,

"Do not commit adultery."

As Moses minutely regulated the patriarchal household,[Pg 8] making the nomad Jew\'s wife the queen of his tent, so Paul the Apostle carefully instructed the model priest, admonishing him to be content with one wife, and to be watchful over the conduct of his family, "having his children in subjection with all chastity."

(I may add that St. Paul lays down the law in a manner that condemns the Christian bishops who sell out their humble fellows who are unable to pay rent and tithes.)

The priests of Assyria and of Egypt were married men. The priests of the Jews were married men: the priests of the Romans were married men. The Bishops, or Popes, of Rome were married men, during the first four hundred years after Christ.

(See Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport\'s "Love Affairs of the Vatican," 3rd Edition, 1912, p. 9.)

Let no one misunderstand me: I freely admit that there are exceptional men and women who voluntarily choose the unmarried life. There have always been such exceptions to the rule, and there probably always will be: the reasons need not be discussed.

Those reasons do not necessarily imply a lack of virility: some men simply prefer not to take a wife; some women just naturally fear the loss of independence, or they never meet the King who will take no denial, or they nobly burden their lives with duties which demand self-sacrifice.

The six Vestals of old Rome were voluntary celibates: such men as Paul, Ben Zoma, Montaigne, Spinoza, were voluntary bachelors. It might have been far happier for John Wesley, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin, had they persisted in the single state.

But enforced spinsterhood and bachelorhood, is a frightfully different thing. To say to men and women who have taken certain "vows," that they shall never seek happiness in marriage, never escape mental and physical longing and anguish, because of such "vows," is to put the selfish will of an earthly priesthood above the will of God.

It is impossible to conceive of a crucifixion of humanity more unnatural, more indefensible, and more necessarily horrible in its consequences.

Enforced celibacy in normal priests, simply means adultery, hidden behind walls and disguised as religion. Therefore, when adultery has to be tolerated, as an incident to a certain[Pg 9] form of Christianity, the crime eludes the law, the illicit intercourse of the sexes identifies itself with a religious system, and it becomes as impossible to control as does the robber who gains control of the machinery of government. When the robber is the Law, who is to punish the criminal? When adultery is elevated into a system which is recognized as a religion, who is to punish the adulterer?

Robbery enthroned in the law, and advancing its demands too far, has to be dealt with by revolutions. Thus it was in England, when the Great Charter was won. Thus it was in the Revolution of 1688. Thus it was in Switzerland, in France, in the American Colonies, in Italy, in Germany, and even in Spain and Portugal—not to mention South America, and Mexico.

Adultery, interwoven in a religious system, was one of the main-springs of the Revolution in Germany, in England, in Holland and in the States of the libertine Popes, themselves.

The enormous popular support given to Calvin, Luther, and Knox, to Henry VIII., to Garibaldi, to Bolivar, and to Juarez, was largely fanned and fed by the intense wrath of the people against the pope-protected immorality of the priests—the adultery which could not be punished because it was interwoven into the system of popery.

The Popes could not punish the priests, because the Popes were equally criminal. The system required celibacy: the system was against the law of God: the system gave the priest absolute power over women, and secret access to them. The system needed the unmarried priest, and the system had to pay the price. The adultery of the priest had to be cloaked and tolerated, for the simple reason that it was incidental and inseparable.

But who made the system? Not God, nor the Bible, nor the Apostles, nor the early Fathers of the Primitive Church: the system was peculiarly the work of Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII.

It was this Pope who formulated the dogma of universal dominion.

It was Gregory who said that, "The world derives its light from two sources, the sun and the moon, the former symbolizing the Papacy, the latter the Civil State."

In Gregory\'s mind, the entire Christian world was his Empire. The temporal Princes were his vassals, every King[Pg 10]dom of Europe was his fief, every crown, his to give and to take away. The keys of Heaven and of Hell were in his hands; he was the Infallible representative of Jehovah; and when he spoke, nations must shout, "The voice of the Pope, is the voice of God!"

To defend such a power and advance its banners, a disciplined and devoted soldiery was necessary: hence, the priests who could not take wives and have children. A family would divide their allegiance. Hence, also, the convent and the confessional, to furnish an outlet to the ungovernable natural desires of full-sexed men.

During the three frozen winter days of 1077, when a barefooted Emperor of Germany stood outside the castle-gate at Canossa, in the snow, this Gregory VII. spent the time inside with his Mistress, the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. When the Pope finally professed himself satisfied with the Emperor\'s penitence and submission, he figuratively placed his foot upon the Emperor\'s neck. The Church had conquered the Civil State. The priest was above the King. To C?sar nothing was left, save what the Pope might graciously concede. The things that had been C?sar\'s, in Christ\'s time, were now the Pope\'s. Thus, the Fisherman not only wore one crown, but three, the tiara. He was lord of Earth, lord of Heaven, lord of Hell.

Under the Gregorian theory, God had become a silent partner in the government of Creation, oppressed by the logical necessity of endorsing every decree of the Infallible Italian priest. Jehovah was become a sort of Roy Faineant: the Italian Pope was Mayor of the Palace. To vary the illustration, the Almighty was become a King of England, and the Pope, Prime Minister. What the Premier tells the King to say, the King says; and then the Premier assures the world that what he has told the King to say is, "the King\'s speech."

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