Upton Sinclair - The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition

U >> Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition

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Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the
church's opposition to every advance in every field of science, even
the most remote from theological concern. Here is the Reverend Edward
Massey, preaching in 1772 on "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of
Inoculation"; declaring that Job's distemper was probably confluent
small-pox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil; that
diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin; and that
the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation". Here
are the Scotch clergy of the middle of the nineteenth century
denouncing the use of chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking
"to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman". Here is Bishop
Wilberforce of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of natural
selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; it
"contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator"; it "is
inconsistent with the fulness of His glory"; it is "a dishonoring view
of nature". And the Bishop settled the matter by asking Huxley whether
he was descended from an ape through his grandmother or grandfather.

Think what it means, friends of progress, that these ecclesiastical
figures should be set up for the reverence of the populace, and that
every time mankind is to make an advance in power over Nature, the
pioneers of thought have to come with crow-bars and derricks and heave
these figures out of the way! And you think that conditions are
changed to-day? But consider syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we
know so much, and can do almost nothing; consider birth-control, which
we are sent to jail for so much as mentioning! Consider the divorce
reforms for which the world is crying--and for which it must wait,
because of St. Paul! Realize that up to date it has proven impossible
to persuade the English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister! That when the war broke upon England the whole nation
was occupied with a squabble over the disestablishment of the church
of Wales! Only since 1888 has it been legally possible for an
unbeliever to hold a seat in Parliament; while up to the present day
men are tried for blasphemy and convicted under the decisions of Lord
Hale, to the effect that "it is a crime either to deny the truth of
the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion or to hold them up
to contempt or ridicule." Said Mr. Justice Horridge, at the West
Riding Assizes, 1911: "A man is not free in any public place to use
common ridicule on subjects which are sacred."

The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London, is "to
preserve the standard of outward decency." And you will find that the
one essential to prosecution is always that the victim shall be
obscure and helpless; never by any chance is he a duke in a
drawing-room. I will record an utterance of one of the obscure victims
of the British "standard of outward decency", a teacher of mathematics
named Holyoake, who presumed to discuss in a public hall the
starvation of the working classes of the country. A preacher objected
that he had discussed "our duty to our neighbor" and neglected "our
duty to God"; whereupon the lecturer replied: "Our national Church and
general religious institutions cost us, upon accredited computation,
about twenty million pounds annually. Worship being thus expensive, I
appeal to your heads and your pockets whether we are not too poor to
have a God. While our distress lasts, I think it would be wise to put
deity upon half pay." And for that utterance the unfortunate teacher
of mathematics served six months in the common Gaol at Gloucester!

While men were being tried for publishing the "Free-thinker", the
Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you wish to
know what an established church can do by way of setting up dullness
in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's" writings on
theological and religious questions. Read his "Juventus Mundi", in the
course of which he establishes a mystic connection between the trident
of Neptune and the Christian Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that
the writer of Genesis was an inspired geologist! This writer of
Genesis points out in Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in
an orderly succession of times: First, the water population; secondly,
the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly,
the land population consummated in man." And it seems that this
division and sequence "is understood to have been so affirmed in our
time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated
conclusion and established fact." Hence we must conclude of the writer
of Genesis that "his knowledge was divine"! Consider that this was
actually published in one of the leading British monthlies, and that
it was necessary for Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that
so far is it from being true that "a fourfold division and orderly
sequence" of water, air and land animals "has been affirmed in our
time by natural science", that on the contrary, the assertion is
"directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is acquainted
with the elements of natural science". The distribution of fossils
proves that land animals originated before sea-animals, and there has
been such a mixing of land, sea and air animals as utterly to destroy
the reputation of both Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine
knowledge of Geology.

#Gibson's Preservative#

I have a friend, a well-known "scholar", who permits me the use of his
extensive library. I stand in the middle and look about me, and see in
the dim shadows walls lined from floor to ceiling with decorous and
grave-looking books, bound for the most part in black, many of them
fading to green with age. There are literally thousands of such, and
their theme is the pseudo-science of "divinity". I close my, eyes, to
make the test fair, and walk to the shelves and put out my hand and
take a book. It proves to be a modern work, "A History of the English
Prayer-book in Relation to the Doctrine of the Eucharist". I turn the
pages and discover that it is a study of the variations of one minute
detail of church doctrine. This learned divine--he has written many
such works, as the advertisements inform us--fills up the greater part
of his pages with foot-notes from hundreds of authorities, arguments
and counter-arguments over supernatural subtleties. I will give one
sample of these footnotes--asking the reader to be patient:

I add the following valuable observation, of Dean Goode:
("On Eucharist", II p 757. See also Archbishop Ware in
Gibson's "Preservative", vol. N, Chap II) "One great point
for which our divines have contended, in opposition to
Romish errors, has been the reality of that presence of
Christ's Body and Blood to the soul of the believer which is
affected through the operation of the Holy Spirit
notwithstanding the absence of that Body and Blood in
Heaven. Like the Sun, the Body of Christ is both present and
absent; present, really and truly present, in one
sense--that is, by the soul being brought into immediate
communion with--but absent in another sense--that is, as
regards the contiguity of its substance to our bodies. The
authors under review, like the Romanists, maintain that this
is not a Real Presence, and assuming their own
interpretation of the phrase to be the only true one, press
into their service the testimony of divines who, though
using the phrase, apply it in a sense the reverse of theirs.
The ambiguity of the phrase, and its misapplication by the
Church of Rome, have induced many of our divines to
repudiate it, etc."

Realize that of the work from which this "valuable observation" is
quoted, there are at least two volumes, the second volume containing
not less than 757 pages I Realize that in Gibson's "Preservative"
there are not less than ten volumes of such writing! Realize that in
this twentieth century a considerable portion of the mental energies
of the world's greatest empire is devoted to that kind of learning!

I turn to the date upon the volume, and find that it is 1910. I was in
England within a year of that time, and so I can tell what was the
condition of the English people while printers were making and papers
were reviewing and book-stores were distributing this work of
ecclesiastical research. I walked along the Embankment and saw the
pitiful wretches, men, women and sometimes children, clad in filthy
rags, starved white and frozen blue, soaked in winter rains and
shivering in winter winds, homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors
of divinity, unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative". I walked on
Hampstead Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns
out for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror,
for I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These creatures
were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were some new
grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could only shamble;
they could not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a hand-organ
playing, and turned away--the things they did in their efforts to
dance were not to be watched. And then I went out into the beautiful
English country; cultured and charming ladies took me in swift, smooth
motor-cars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and the drink-sodden,
starch-poisoned inhabitants--slum-populations everywhere, even on the
land! When the newspaper reporters came to me, I said that I had just
come from Germany, and that if ever England found herself at war with
that country, she would regret that she had let the bodies and the
minds of her people rot; for which expression I was severely taken to
task by more than one British divine.

The bodies--and the minds; the rot of the latter being the cause of
the former. All over England in that year of 1910, in thousands of
schools, rich and poor, and in the greatest centres of learning, men
like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead languages and dead sciences
and dead arts; sending them out to life with no more conception of the
modern world than a monk of the Middle Ages; sending them out with
minds made hard and inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to
progress, contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight,
this terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and
disciplined' by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful
muddle that was in England during the first two years of the war has
not yet been told in print; but thousands know it, and some day it
will be written, and it will finish forever the prestige of the
British ruling caste. They rushed off an expedition to Gallipoli, and
somebody forgot the water-supply, and at one time they had ninety-five
thousand cases of dysentery!

They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of
their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle through"--they
had to come to America for help. As I write, our Congress is voting
billions and tens of billions of dollars, and a million of the best of
our young manhood are being taken from their homes--because in 1910
the mind of England was occupied with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and
the ten volumes of Gibson's "Preservative".

#The Elders#

What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged. It
means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the church, but
in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army and navy. For a
test I look up the list of bishops of the Church of England in
Whitaker's Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of these
functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the suffragans; and
that the total salary paid to them amounts to more than nine hundred
thousand dollars a year. This, it should be understood, does not
include the pay of their assistants, nor the cost of maintaining their
religious establishments; it does not include any private incomes
which they or their wives may possess, as members of the privileged
classes of the Empire. I look up their ages in Who's Who, and I find
that there is only one below fifty-three; the oldest of them is
ninety-one, while the average age of the goodly company is seventy.
There have been men in history who have retained their flexibility of
mind, their ability to adjust themselves to new circumstances at the
age of seventy, but it will always be found that these men were
trained in science and practical affairs, never in dead languages and
theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter that he worked
seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an opinion on the labor
question.

And now--here is the crux of the argument--do these aged gentlemen
rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally nothing of
their own power; they could not make their own episcopal robes, they
could net even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be
maintained in all their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to
what end?

The roots of the English Church are in the English land system, which
is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from the days of
William the Norman, who took possession of Britain with his sword, and
in order to keep possession for himself and his heirs, distributed the
land among his nobles and prelates. In those days, you understand, a
high ecclesiastic was a man of war, who did not stoop to veil his
predatory nature under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and
archbishops of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like
the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the
same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English
chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependence of the
church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted
from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt
before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my lord,
I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and
I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me."

The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held,
and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege man for
life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the whole story of
the church of England, in the twentieth century as in the eleventh.
The balance of power has shifted from time to time; old families have
lost the land and new families have gotten it; but the loyalty and
homage of the church have been held by the land, as the needle of the
compass is held by a mass of metal. Some two hundred and fifty years
ago a popular song gave the general impression--

For this is law that I'll maintain
Until my dying day, sir:
That whatsoever king shall reign
I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!

So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and
Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every injustice
that profits the owning class. And always among themselves you find
them intriguing and squabbling over the dividing of the spoils; always
you find them enjoying leisure and ease, while the people suffer and
the rebels complain. One can pass down the corridor of English history
and prove this statement by the words of Englishmen from every single
generation. Take the fourteenth century; the "Good Parliament"
declares that

Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to benefices
of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly
obtain one of twenty. God gave the sheep to be pastured, not
to be shaven and shorn.

And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers Plowman--

But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets,
A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land,
Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor,
A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord;
And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup,
He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy.
Badly have lords done to give their heirs' lands

Away to the Orders that have no pity;
Money rains upon their altars.
There where such parsons be living at ease
They have no pity on the poor; that is their "charity".
Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad,
But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all
And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.

Another step through history, and in the early part of the sixteenth
century here is Simon Fish, addressing King Henry the Eighth, in the
"Supplicacyon for the Beggars", complaining of the "strong, puissant
and counterfeit holy and ydell" which "are now increased under your
sight, not only into a great nombre, but ynto a kingdome."

They have begged so importunatly that they have gotten ynto
their hondes more than a therd part of all youre Realme. The
goodliest lordshippes, maners, londes, and territories, are
theyres. Besides this, they have the tenth part of all the
corne, medowe, pasture, grasse, wolle, coltes, calves,
lambes, pigges, gese and chikens. Ye, and they looke so
narowly uppon theyre proufittes, that the poore wyves must
be countable to thym of every tenth eg, or elles she gettith
not her rytes at ester, shal be taken as an heretike.... Is
it any merveille that youre people so compleine of povertie?
The Turke nowe, in your tyme, shulde never be abill to get
so moche grounde of christendome.... And whate do al these
gredy sort of sturdy, idell, holy theves? These be they that
have made an hundredth thousand idell hores in your realme.
These be they that catche the pokkes of one woman, and here
them to an other.

The petitioner goes on to tell how they steal wives and all their
goods with them, and if any man protest they make him a heretic, "so
that it maketh him wisshe that he had not done it". Also they take
fortunes for masses and then don't say them. "If the Abbot of
west-minster shulde sing every day as many masses for his founders as
he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkes were too few." The
petitioner suggests that the king shall "tie these holy idell theves
to the cartes, to be whipped naked about every market towne till they
will fall to laboure!"

#Church History#

King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he took away
the property of the religious orders for the expenses of his many
wives and mistresses, and forced the clergy in England to forswear
obedience to the Pope and make his royal self their spiritual head.
This was the beginning of the Anglican Church, as distinguished from
the Catholic; a beginning of which the Anglican clergy are not so
proud as they would like to be. When I was a boy, they taught me what
they called "church history", and when they came to Henry the Eighth
they used him as an illustration of the fact that the Lord is
sometimes wont to choose evil men to carry out His righteous purposes.
They did not explain why the Lord should do this confusing thing, nor
just how you were to know, when you saw something being done by a
murderous adulterer, whether it was the will of the Lord or of Satan;
nor did they go into details as to the motives which the Lord had been
at pains to provide, so as to induce his royal agent to found the
Anglican Church. For such details you have to consult another set of
authorities--the victims of the plundering.

When I was in college my professor of Latin was a gentleman with bushy
brown whiskers and a thundering voice of which I was often the
object--for even in those early days I had the habit of persisting in
embarrassing questions. This professor was a devout Catholic, and not
even in dealing with ancient Romans could he restrain his propaganda
impulses. Later on in life he became editor of the "Catholic
Encyclopedia", and now when I turn its pages, I imagine that I see the
bushy brown whiskers, and hear the thundering voice: "Mr. Sinclair, it
is so because I tell you it is so!"

I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about King
Henry the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of England;
he is ready with an "economic interpretation", as complete as the most
rabid muckraker could desire! It appears that the king wanted a new
wife, and demanded that the Pope should grant the necessary
permission; in his efforts to browbeat the Pope into such betrayal of
duty, King Henry threatened the withdrawal of the "annates" and the
"Peter's pence". Later on he forced the clergy to declare that the
Pope was "only a foreign bishop", and in order to "stamp out overt
expression of disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of
terror".

In Anglican histories, you are assured that all this was a work of
religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure vehicle of
God's grace. There were no more "holy idell theves", holding the land
of England and plundering the poor. But get to know the clergy, and
see things from the inside, and you will meet some one like the
Archbishop of Cashell, who wrote to one of his intimates:

I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to
eat, drink and grow fat, rich and die; which laudable
example _I_ propose for the remainder of my days to follow.

If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports of
that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew with peculiar
intimacy:

I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious
King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600
pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be
made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only
prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?
As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of
cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the
court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that
godless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel
Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.
Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment?
Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in
German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the
clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because
the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics
would not listen to him!

#Land and Livings#

And how is it in the twentieth century? Have conditions been much
improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote
Robert Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who therefore
has still to be recognized by English critics. He writes of the "New
Rome", by which he means present-day England:

The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of Men!

You see, the land system of England remains--the changes having been
for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon
peasantry contented, so he left them their "commons"; but in the
eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away. We saw the same
thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same
motive--because developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas
people who have access to the land will not slave in mills and mines.
In England, from the time of Queen Anne to that of William and Mary,
the parliaments of the landlords passed some four thousand separate
acts, whereby more than seven million acres of the common land were
stolen from the people. It has been calculated that these acres might
have supported a million families; and ever since then England has had
to feed a million paupers all the time.

As an old song puts the matter:

Why prosecute the man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
And let the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose?

In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in
British soil: some of them direct descendants of the Normans, others
children of the court favorites and panders who grew rich in the days
of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts. Seven men own practically
all the land of the city and county of London, and collect tribute
from seven millions of people. The estates are entailed--that is,
handed down from father to oldest son automatically; you cannot buy
any land, but if you want to build, the landlord gives you a lease,
and when the lease is up, he takes possession of your buildings. The
tribute which London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a
year. So absolute is the right of the land-owner that he can sue for
trespass the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes
on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the
shore.

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