There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America. They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly derived from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are honestly seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians. You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all the rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist explains this seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in high mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when the leader leaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, without waiting to see in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains and no enemies, but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way the tailor still sews buttons at the back of your dress-coat, because a couple of hundred years ago all gentlemen wore swords; in the same way our railroad builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and liable to overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled by mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete protection against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat meat on Friday, because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodox Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's sister, because of something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox Baptist requires total immersion in a climate quite different from that of Palestine; the orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise on the Sabbath.
In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life, tending sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent thing for them to rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear the reading of the best literature of their time. But nowadays the city slave spends his week-days shut up in an office, poring over a ledger, or in a sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously, therefore, the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the open air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern statute-books, and if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries to play base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.
In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and ............