M. E. Billings

“ So long as imagination creates a god to rule the destinies of men; so long as ignorance can be made to believe that the preacher or priest is in some way a go-between, or agent, between men and the powers in the clouds—that he is a “sky-pilot,” directly commissioned by deity to attend to God’s affairs on earth, and that the priest’s person and office are sacred—just so long will there be possible such a profession as that of the modern priesthood. ”

“ The indictment really is not against the ministers as men—it is against their religion and their profession. There is so close a relation between religious emotion and what is called desire, that scientific men have written treatises and books on the correlation of religion and lust. The more fervent the preacher is godward, the more ardent is he womanward—and piety works the same way with the sisters. Our preacher who has turned state’s evidence blames among other things the pastoral visit and the emotional women who place temptation before the man of God. ”

“ There are many potent reasons for fearing a heresy trial—often the thought of his children’s hungry mouths and bare backs is one reason. It is a good deal easier to admire the men who went to the stake for a conviction than it is to follow them. The truth is, no minister who is honest with himself and who declares what he fully believes will have any reason to fear. ”

“ A married minister betrays a young woman, thereby committing seduction and adultery. There may be a child and a charge of bastardy. He may run away with her, adding elopement and desertion of wife and family, and often divorce. Elopements are numerous, and they are mentioned here only when complicated with adultery or desertion, since the unmarried parson is entitled to his romance, and not to be censured above other men if he makes a runaway match of it—the woman concerned having reached or survived the ages of discretion without any matrimonial alliance at present existing. ”

“ The manly, four-square ministers are the more noticeable because they are exceptional. There are still more ministers who are warmly admired by their congregations, but they are admired rather for professional traits and pulpit graces than for the rugged virtues that count on the street and in the store and office. On the whole, men of honor feel that today it is no honor to be entitled ‘Reverend’; the average man looks somewhat askance at the clergyman.
“Perhaps this is nowhere better illustrated than when a minister leaves his profession and desires to enter business. ”

“ With this wall of secrecy thrown about the priestly life, we know not what immoralities and crimes take place among the clergy and never come to light. While this edition of “Crimes of Preachers” is in preparation a Chicago Catholic priest, in line for distinguished honors from his church, takes an automobile “joy ride,” visits a saloon in the suburbs and ends the outing by stabbing a station agent to the heart. The published offenses of the priests are such, usually, as in the nature of things cannot be covered up. ”

“ It shows that the very apostles of that religion go wrong, that its ministers are profligate, and that in these the theory is condemned before we come to its mere lay exponents who less perfectly understand it.
“People have been taught so long that piety and morality are interchangeable terms, that they believe it without regard to the facts which demonstrate the contrary to be true. When an individual of reputed orthodoxy violates the moral law they accuse him of being a hypocrite and set his religious professions down as mere outward pretense. ”

“ When the man in the pulpit is dependent for his daily bread on the tolerance and good will of the man in the pew; when he feels that he may get butter on his bread or even a little cake now and then if he can only get in the good graces of that smug old sinner sitting down there, it is easy to see how he has been tempted to fawn on him, how he has been tempted to speak of the old humbug’s robbery of the widow and the orphan as one of the achievements of modern commerce and civilization. ”

“ If the religion they spend their lives in expounding does not keep the ministers straight, it is almost useless to ask how much restraining influence that religion has on the laity who only listen once a week.
It is admitted that just as the upright life of a professed Christian is no evidence whatever of the truth of Christian doctrine and history, so the moral delinquency of a believer is no disproof of those things which it is necessary to accept in order to be orthodox. ”

“ Often the preacher is so dead sure that his motive is right, that he does not stop to examine sufficiently his method. He wants to save souls, and if he can do it, as it seems to him, by crooked means more quickly than by straight ones, then he takes the crooked way. He wants to build a church—if he can build it quicker by misrepresentation, by double dealing, by beating any one, he thinks only of the church, and that overweighs any other consideration. [16]
“Take the matter of ministers (and others, too) lying in the stories and illustrations they tell. ”

“ It has become traditionary with them to assume that the non-Christian man is an immoral man; that the sincere believer is the exemplar of the higher life, while the “Infidel,” the unbeliever, illustrates the opposite; and that whatever of morality the civilized world enjoys today it owes to the profession and practice of Christianity. ”

“ A large portion of the crimes are against women or with women. This, perhaps, is not strange when one considers the institution of pastoral visits. While men are away from home attending to their duties in life, the minister is roving about, pretendedly looking after the welfare of his flock, but really making calls upon the women who most attract him. ”

“ So long as the churches say, ‘There’s nothing either good or ill but seeming makes it so,’ the man who can succeed in fooling the people with appearances of virtues, with saintly air and pious phrase will be the man who reaches the top of his profession.
“Then no mortal being can stand for long the fawning and adulation which the preacher is likely to receive, especially from foolish and emotional women. He is sure to come to believe that he is a superior being, one who either can do no wrong or can do only right. ”

“ Now, if the business of the minister is to teach the people how to live, he ought at least to know how to do it himself. His principles are valueless if they will not stand the wear of daily life. Is the trouble with the teachings, with the message, or is it with the man himself? ”

“ Each reader knows that he is one of a goodly company who find comfort and inspiration in its pages. If they should meet each other they would feel like brothers and sisters. They have lived under one intellectual roof, felt the glow of the same fireside, and broken together the bread of life. ”

“ It would be hard to find a man or a woman who has not at some time in life become personally acquainted with a professed exponent of religious truth and high moral ideals who has demonstrated the depths of human depravity.
“Yet the indictment against the profession is of a much more subtle character than that found in journalistic [12] annals of crime or even in personal knowledge of gross faults on the part of clergymen. It would be folly to deny that, taken as a class, ministers live lives as pure and as free from criminal or grossly immoral taint as any other class of persons. ”

“ One of the principal reasons for the disrespect in which the preacher is often regarded by the business world lies in the shamefully unbusinesslike manner in which the preacher has been treated in regard to compensation for his work. If his work is worthless, why not say so and tell him to get out, and do something worth while? If it is worth doing, then he ought to be paid sufficient for a living without being compelled to become a cadger and a pauper. ”

“ Men possessed of a nature that permits them to attack female children are among the most dangerous persons in any community, because they only want the opportunity to repeat the offense. The motive is always with them. The are like the Chicago priest who saw a ‘stimulation to lust’ in Chabas’ picture, ‘September Morn.’ No young girl is safe in the power or presence of that kind of degenerates; and hence when one of them gets into the clutches of the law he should be kept there as long as the statute will permit. ”

“ There are Christian ministers, and they are of the class who have the widest hearing, because they are ‘sensational’ ones, who will tell you that unbelief is synonymous with immorality; that men are wicked because they are Infidels, and are Infidels because they are wicked. They argue that as religion cannot countenance anything that is wrong, the wrongdoer must justify his course by denying the authority of religion, and hence becomes an unbeliever in order that his creed may not conflict with his conduct. ”

“ Mere preaching puts a tremendous strain on a man’s moral fibre. It is the habitual statement of duties and ideals which the preacher knows he does [15] not reach and do. It is the expression of the phrases of character, not necessarily accompanied with their expression in living and doing. It results in the mental habit of considering a duty done as soon as it is declared. It exhausts the moral impetus in phrases. It makes the man act the lie. ”

“ The churches endeavor to and do hide a great deal of the immorality of their ministers. The preachers, who govern the ecclesiastical tribunals, [40] have a fellow feeling for one another. As a general thing, it is only when the clergy are brought before the secular courts that the public can learn the full facts. Comparatively few Catholic priests figure in this record, for the reason that that church is a close corporation which by political influence and by control of its members’ tongues can conceal the crimes of its leaders. ”

“ No doubt the indolent habits of the stall-fed clergy contribute to their incontinence, which is recognized as their predominant weakness. While their offenses otherwise, as these pages show, range all the way from petty larceny to murder, yet the great majority are such as are committed with or against women and girls. The larger figures in the list number cases of adultery, bigamy, desertion, elopement, and seduction. ”

“ And so, when ministers exalt the belief and practice of Christianity as the one highway to the moral life of individuals and nations, it is equally germane to observe with some care whether or not the clergy make good their claims in their own persons. ”

“ If the laymen had money and political influence, which they haven’t, to protect them from prosecution on a charge of which on the face of it they are not guilty, it still would not be as base for them to avail themselves of that advantage as it is for a court to consider the alleged ‘holy calling’ of a minister and withhold adequate punishment for an atrocious crime he confesses that he committed. ”

“ Who has not heard that Infidels deny the existence of hell to relieve their minds of the uncertainty of going there when they die; that they put the Bible aside because it will not permit their indulgences in sin, and that a reform in conduct will be accompanied by a renunciation of their Infidelity and a reacceptance of religion and the Bible? ”

“ The creation story, the flood story, the story of Jonah and the whale, the virgin birth and the other miracles of the Old and New Testaments are not affected by [8] anything a believer in them may do, either good or bad. Therefore we have been asked of what value a list of the crimes of preachers can be to the cause of Freethought and mental liberty. The reply, couched in the language of an editorial article in “The Truth Seeker,” is as follows:
“Christianity, as interpreted by its preachers, affirms a fundamental relation between belief and morals. ”

“ Women should not attend the one or receive the other except in the presence of their fathers or husbands. Another institution of the church could also be done away with to the gain of morality—to wit, the lone studies for the minister annexed to the churches. These furnished rooms are the scenes of many debaucheries. With them, too, should go the side doors or choir entrances. The side door and study of a church in San Francisco were used for assignation purposes, which culminated in murder. A murdered woman was found at the confessional box [42] of a Romish church in New York city. ”

“ A list of ministers, guilty of crimes and immoralities, though of unimpeached orthodoxy, is the answer to this class of falsifying preachers, which any court must accept as historical and lawful evidence against the pretense that good conduct grows out of belief in Christianity. ”

“ When the tyrant takes the education of the other man’s children into his care and keeping, the equality still further disappears. It is The Truth Seeker’s work to make the boasted equality of man actual, and not the catch phrase it now is. ”

“ The preacher in the country and in the old days could get along very well between the neighborly gifts he received and the produce of his little farm or garden when these were added to his small salary. But when, without increase of salary, that same man is placed in the city in our days of swollen prices for necessities, he is hard put to it to keep out of debt and remain honest in the ministry. ”

“ The proposition is worth the notice of the churches; for if true it means that the vocation of a preacher devitalizes a man of his moral stamina.
The religious editor and his contributor disagree on an important point. The editor holds that the fuss [21] made over one minister who goes wrong with his organist is a tribute to the high estimate in which the profession is held. On the other hand, the contributor represents that most ministers are moral skates, and that any high estimate the profession enjoys is due to the few decent exceptions. ”

“ Gregory is ‘highly respected as the pastor of the Baptist church.’ That is benefit of the clergy with the lid off! Now we would like to inquire why there is no public excitement about this miscarriage of justice. The man is married and has three daughters, two of them school teachers, and one a high school graduate, and is hence a middle-aged man who has not the excuse of youthful ardor for his crime. The girls in the California case were old enough to marry or to consent without marriage. ”