The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would have a sign of Thee"—meaning that they wanted him to do some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He answered by calling them an evil and adulterous generation—which is exactly what I have said about the Papal machine. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx at them—"This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own class in the places where they gathered—the public houses—the churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"—precisely as in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their meetings in the back-rooms of saloons, and precisely as they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists. But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom. Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history—even in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of the Church—Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J. Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their voices are not silenced they are like the leaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of God—a woman took it and hid it in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young theological students read, and some of them understand; I know three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church, and are preaching straight social revolution—and the scribes and the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.
In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon. Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property. And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking favors from the state—the exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday—so on through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.
It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are pro............