Part 17 (1/2)
In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits ”sacred concerts”--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to the imbecilities of ”Mutt & Jeff” and the obscenities of Anna Held and Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as Ibsen and Brieux.
I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose const.i.tution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the establishment by the state of any form of wors.h.i.+p, I was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full of vermin--in a building housing some five hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under circ.u.mstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the suns.h.i.+ne or the sky. They had no exercise court to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the pious city of Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches! The writer was informed that he would return to this inst.i.tution regularly every week unless he abandoned his G.o.dless habit of playing tennis on a private club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making the discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday, and by threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows again the importance of understanding this relations.h.i.+p of Superst.i.tion and Big Business!
BOOK SIX
The Church of the Quacks
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf, And how one ought never to think of one's self, And how pleasures of thought surpa.s.s eating and drinking-- My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
Clough.
Tabula Rasa
Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a living out of it.
My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found myself in a nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let the devil snare them into resting on the first day of the week, whereas the Bible states distinctly that the Lord ”rested on the seventh day”. So here is a million dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients and employees, and on Friday at sundown the silence of death settles upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of Sat.u.r.day, when everything comes suddenly to life again, and there is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I used to call ”sterilized dancing”--the men pairing with men and the women with women.
They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with their eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways, because, as not all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every day of the week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training ”medical missionaries” to send to Africa, and is teaching these supposed-to-be-scientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and not proven anyhow!
You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment alone in his office, and he will smile and admit that of course it is not necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it is--there are different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know how it is. You have an inst.i.tution founded upon a certain dogma, and run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smas.h.i.+ng things. It is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay high prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them, which you think more important than teaching abstract notions about their being descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture vegetarian foods for them, and build up an enormous business--so obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.
This is but one ill.u.s.tration of a sort of thing of which I could cite a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of another sect, the ”Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene”; primitive Methodists, Bible-wors.h.i.+ppers not content with the King James version, but going back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a ”University”, located in one of the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an inst.i.tution with seventy-five students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the ”president,” who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanse of his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest grammatical errors, such as ”you was” and ”I seen”. The past year witnessed a split, and the founding of a brand new church and ”University”--because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so much that the students got no chance to study; also because he sent home a rich man's daughter whose s.h.i.+rt-waists revealed too much of her fleshly nature.
And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady friend of mine, generously blessed with this world's goods, asks me have I seen the hermit. ”Hermit?” I say, and she replies, ”Didn't you know there was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and never has anything to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates spiritually.” I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave.
”He received you?” I ask. ”Yes, he was quite polite.” ”And what was your impression of him?” ”Oh, how he stank!” I answer that this is the odor of sanct.i.ty, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.
The Book of Mormon
Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still stranger cult.
On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a ”backwoods” part of New York State, some plates which had ”the appearance of gold”. As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In this case the plates were written in ”reformed Egyptian”; but the Angel thoughtfully provided Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magic stones with which to read the records. They proved to deal with a mystery which has haunted the minds of Bible students for centuries--the fate of the ”lost ten tribes of Israel”, who were now revealed to have been the ancestors of the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a new religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general; so, on the 6th of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N.Y., there was formally launched the ”Church of the Latter Day Saints.” Smith turned over to his followers his translation of the miraculous plates, called ”The Book of Mormon”; obviously genuine, for it read precisely like the books which we already know are the revealed word of G.o.d.
But, on chance that this might not be sufficient, we were offered in the preface two doc.u.ments, the ”Testimony of Three Witnesses”, and the ”Further Testimony of Eight Witnesses”. The latter being the shorter, may be quoted:
Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, unto whom this work shall come: That Joseph Smith Jr., the translator of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings there-on, all of which has the appearance of ancient work and of curious workmans.h.i.+p. And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith hath got the plates of which we have spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to witness that which we have seen, and we lie not, G.o.d bearing witness of it.
Christian Whitmer Jacob Whitmer Peter Whitmer, Jr.
John Whitmer Hiram Page Joseph Smith, Sr.
Hyrum Smith Saml. H. Smith
The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore out the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its divine origin; it was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted, and its followers proceeded to ma.s.sacre the nearby unbelieving populations, just as the divinely guided Hebrews had done. Driven from place to place, they built at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful temple, according to plans revealed in a vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where they have a magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers.
The United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected to their practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have as many wives as they could support; the government confiscated the church's property, and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy, as is done by elderly church members in other parts of the country. Recently the head of the church, who bears the t.i.tle of ”Prophet, Seer and Revelator”, was persuaded to permit an examination of one of its secret plates, the ”Book of Abraham”, by egyptologists, who found that it was ordinary Egyptian hieroglyphics, not ”reformed”, but containing prayers to the sun-G.o.d. But this will of course make no difference to the devout followers of Joseph--any more than it has made to devout Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that the Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and that the four gospels date from the second and third centuries after Christ.
Holy Rolling