Part 11 (2/2)
BOOK FOUR
The Church of the Slavers
Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn, The eye-b.a.l.l.s fierce, the features grim!
And merrily from night to morn We chaunt his praise and wors.h.i.+p him-- Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!
A wondrous G.o.d! most fit for those Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer; Blood on his heavenly altar flows, h.e.l.l's burning incense fills the air, And Death attests in street and lane The hideous glory of his reign.
--Buchanan
Face of Caesar
The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry, drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to do. The ”Holy Book” being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct orders of G.o.d, it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.
They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and see what men have done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead. As for Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up; when he ordered, ”Servants obey your masters,” he meant exactly what he said. The Roman official stamp which he put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the Reformation on.
In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the priestly land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever is done about it--until at last the miserable peasants attempted to organize and win their own rights.
Their demands do not seem to us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and--that universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England, Mexico or sixteenth century Germany--the restoration to the village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of slaves a.s.serting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist without inequalities, etc.
And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon them and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations which might have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the police-force of his ”City of Brotherly Love”: ”One cannot answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to hit him with the fist until blood flows from the nose.” He issued a letter: ”Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants,” which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue Pastor of Standard Oil: ”The a.s.s needs to be beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand.
G.o.d knew this well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a sword.” He implored these rulers, after the fas.h.i.+on of Methodist Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: ”Do not be troubled about the severity of their repression, for it will save many souls.” With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar, Prof. Rauschenbusch, puts it:
The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to 1525, when the whole nation was in commotion, and a great revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every cla.s.s and every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal of life.... The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and creative when it embraced the whole of human life and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When it became ”religious” in the narrow sense, it grew scholastic and spiny, quarrelsome, and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and n.o.ble life.
Deutschland ueber Alles
As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became the state church of Prussia, and Bible-wors.h.i.+p and Devil-terror played their part, along with the Ma.s.s and the Confessional, in building up the Junker dream. A court official--the Oberhofprediger--was set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects.
He said: ”If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks.” And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how he kept them from thinking:
He recognizes the uses of Religion; takes a good deal of pains with his Preaching Clergy; will suggest texts to them; and for the rest expects to be obeyed by them, as by his Sergeants and Corporals. Indeed, the reverend men feel themselves to be a body of Spiritual Sergeants, Corporals, and Captains, to whom obedience is the rule, and discontent a thing not to be indulged in by any means.
So the soldiers stayed in the ranks, and Frederick raided Silesia and Poland. His successors ordered all the Protestant sects into one, so that they might be more easily controlled; from which time the Lutheran Church has been a department of the Prussian state, in some cases a branch of the munic.i.p.al authority.
In 1848, when the people of various German states demanded their liberty, it was an ultra-pious king of Prussia who sent his troops and shot them down--precisely as Luther had advised to shoot down the peasants. At this time the future maker of the German Empire rose in the Landtag and made his bow before the world; a young Prussian land-magnate, Otto von Bismarck by name, he shook his fist in the face of the new German liberalism, and incidentally of the new German infidelity:
Christianity is the solid basis of Prussia; and no state erected upon any other foundation can permanently exist.
The present Hohenzollern has diligently maintained this tradition of his line. It was his custom to tour the Empire in a train of blue and white cars, carrying as many costumes as any stage favorite, most of them military; with him on the train went the Prussian G.o.d, and there was scarcely a performance at which this G.o.d did not appear, also in military costume. After the failure of the ”Kultur-kampf,” the official Lutheran religion was ordered to make friends with its ancient enemy, the Catholic Church. Said the Kaiser:
I make no difference between the adherents of the Catholic and Protestant creeds. Let them both stand upon the foundation of Christianity, and they are both bound to be true citizens and obedient subjects. Then the German people will be the rock of granite upon which our Lord G.o.d can build and complete his work of Kultur in the world.
And here is the oath required of the Catholic clergy, upon their admission to equality of trustworthiness with their Protestant confreres:
I will be submissive, faithful and obedient to his Royal Majesty,--and his lawful successors in the government,--as my most gracious King and Sovereign; promote his welfare according to my ability; prevent injury and detriment to him; and particularly endeavor carefully to cultivate in the minds of the people under my care a sense of reverence and fidelity towards the King, love for the Fatherland, obedience to the laws, and all those virtues which in a Christian denote a good citizen; and I will not suffer any man to teach or act in a contrary spirit. In particular I vow that I will not support any society or a.s.sociation, either at home or abroad, which might endanger the public security, and will inform His Majesty of any proposal made, either in my diocese or elsewhere, which might prove injurious to the State.
<script>