I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be the Church in which I was brought up. Reading this statement, some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I search my heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were chanted in my childish ears! I take up the book of ritual, done in aristocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old worn volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the volume—not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used as a source of income and a shield to privilege. In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled the field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer", I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still, or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good Society" has discovered astronomy! But if any astronomer attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy, let him at least stop to consider my "economic interpretation" of the phenomenon—the fact that the heavenly bodies affect the destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as astrologer.
But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference! Has any utmost precision of barometer been able to drive the priest out of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most civilized of countries; not in that most decorous and dignified of institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I study with care the passage wherein the clergyman appears as controller of the fate of crops. I note a chastened caution of phraseology; the church will not repeat the experience of the sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons to bringing water, and then could not make them stop! The spell invokes "moderate rain and showers"; and as an additional precaution there is a counter-spell against "excessive rains and floods": the weather-faucet being thus under exact control.
I turn the pages of this "Book of Common Prayer", and note the remnants of magic which it contains. There are not many of the emergencies of life with which the priest is not authorized to deal; not many natural phenomena for which he may not claim the credit. And in case anything should have been overlooked, there is a blanket order upon Providence: "Graciously hear us, that those evi............