Upton Sinclair

“ How many men I know who sit by in sullen protest while their wives drift from one new quackery to another, wasting their income seeking health and happiness in futile emotionalism! How many kind and sensitive spirits I know—both men and women—who pour their treasures of faith and admiration into the laps of hierophants who began by fooling all mankind and ended by fooling themselves!
In each one of the cults of what I have called the "Church of the Quacks", there are thousands, perhaps millions of entirely sincere, self-sacrificing people. ”

“ 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". ”

“ BOOK FOUR — The Church of the Slavers See, underneath the Crown of Thorn, The eye-balls fierce, the features grim! And merrily from night to morn We chaunt his praise and worship him— Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet Christian and Jew and Atheist meet! A wondrous god! most fit for those Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer; Blood on his heavenly altar flows, Hell's burning incense fills the air, And Death attests in street and lane The hideous glory of his reign. ”

“ There is nothing left in the modern world which can carry the mind so far back into the ancient nightmare of anguish and terror which was once the mental life of mankind, as these Roman Catholic incantations with their frantic and ceaseless importunity. They have even brought in the sex-spell; and the poor, frightened soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the night with a prostitute, now prostrates himself before a holy Woman-being who is lifted high above the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe and affection which his mother brought to him in early childhood. ”

“ Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Methodists, hypocrites! for you send missionaries to Africa to make one convert, and when you have made him, he is twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Applause) . Woe unto you, blind guides, with your subtleties of doctrine, your transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all the rest of it; you fools and blind! Woe unto you, doctors of divinity and Episcopalians, hypocrites! for you drop your checks into the collection-plate and you pay no heed to the really important things in the Bible, which are justice and mercy and faith in goodness. ”

“ And when he comes into the world gone wrong, He will rebuild her beauty with a song. To every heart he will its own dream be: One moon has many phantoms in the sea. Out of the North the norns will cry to men: "Baldur the Beautiful has come again!" The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead: "Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!" The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice: "Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!" And social architects who build the State, Serving the Dream at citadel and gate, Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum. ”

“ I do not even find anything about the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve of a self-governing people to put an end to feudal rule. Instead I discover a soldier-boy who obeys and keeps silent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip of terrors both of body and soul. Poor, pitiful soldier-boy, marking yourself with crosses, performing genuflections, mumbling magic formulas in the trenches—how many billions of you have been led out to slaughter by the greeds and ambitions of your religious masters, since first this accursed Antichrist got its grip upon the hearts of men! ”

“ I have made a thorough study of both these industrial systems, and I freely admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage slave is better than that of the chattel slave. The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the policeman's club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and so he has the candle of hope to light him to his death-bed. ”

“ Why is it that in this country, where we have only seven per cent of the population, the Catholic church is so much feared? She is loved by all her children and feared by everybody. Why is it that the Pope has such tremendous power? Why, the Pope is the ruler of the world. All the emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all the presidents of the world, are as these altar boys of mine. The Pope is the ruler of the world. ”

“ It is one of the ironies of history that the most reactionary organization in the world should be lending its aid to the destruction of the second most reactionary. When the Catholic Church marches forth to war for Democracy, it is not drawing America down into the pit, but is letting America pull it out of the pit—at least for a time, and the spectacle is one in which all lovers of progress will rejoice. ”

“ It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat over and over the blunders of the past, the blunders of tyranny and slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient societies; and surely it is a poor way to begin by repeating in our own persons the most ancient blunders of the moral life. To light the fires of lust in our hearts, and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are trying new experiments in psychology! Who does not know the radical woman who demonstrates her emancipation from convention by destroying her nerves with nicotine? ”

“ Ignorance and superstition, fear and submission, the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him from his animal past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden of the soul is the task of the modern thinker.
The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save the law of his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself imposes.
The new morality is a morality of joy. ”

“ Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week—and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder—to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-window divinity.
The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and crucify all over again. ”

“ But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift wings—it may be here before this book sees the light. And who knows but then we may see in America that wonderful sight which we saw in Russia, when Christian monks assembled and burned their holy books, and petitioned the state to take them in as citizens and human beings? It is my belief that when the power of exploitation is broken, we shall see the Dead Hand crumble into dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to the air. ”

“ It is the crown and culmination of all the wrongs of the ages; and in proportion to the magnitude of its exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical camouflage which has been organized in its behalf. Beyond all question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this blood-thirsty system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a blasphemy beyond the power of art to express. ”

“ The first few minutes seemingly all the powers of hell will contend every word, the next few, relief in a measure will come, more liberty in calling. In a very little while you will be dead to the room, dead to the chair, dead to everyone around you, dead to all and tremendously alive to your desperate need and emptyness; this conviction will grow as you increase calling upon Him. It maybe you'll weep, it maybe you'll perspire, it maybe your clothing will be deranged, it, maybe your throat will get sore. Never for a moment let your mind rest on the condition of your person. ”

“ They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets, for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies. Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human race! ”

“ That we need it is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our midst—the schisms which waste the greater part of our activities, and which are often the result of personal jealousies and petty vanities. To lift men above such weakness, to make them really brothers in a great muse—that is the work of "personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the words.
We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and conviction. ”

“ RELIGION
The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn the sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul. No; I admit the honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask of the preacher is that he shall make an effort to practice his doctrine. Let him be tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad like Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites—on these terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above economic science.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. ”

“ Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born-until finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. ”

“ The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you sorry for the debts that you did not pay," said the priest. "What is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar steps. "If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and took a million years to count every single grain, how long would it take him to count them all? ”

“ So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and say that we think about nothing but the belly—and that is true, in a way; because we are the representatives of a starving class, which thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is ravening with hunger. ”

“ He has to get money, and in order to get it he has to impress those who already have it—people whose minds and souls have been deformed by the system of parasitism and exploitation.
So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he becomes a martyr, and founds a church which becomes a church of charlatans. I care not how sincere, how passionately proletarian a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive society—to be the founder of an organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit of wolves. ”

“ Our business is not to say what men will know ten thousand years from now, but to content ourselves with the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.
In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be ”

“ Just as we can say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates, will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the clergyman who helps in Y. M. C. A. work in France, or in Red Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and social solidarity by the method which modern educators most favor—by doing. ”

“ You recall what I said at the outset about Power; the ability to control the lives of other men, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and regarded. Here is a man swollen to bursting with this Power. Dressed in his holy robes, with his holy incense in his nostrils, and the faces of the faithful gazing up at him awe-stricken, hear him proclaim:
The Church gives no bonds for her good behavior. ”

“ It would make us happy if there were in the world institutions conducted by men and women of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not upon superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what truth is, and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth inspires. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers we see in the churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives in the effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones! There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless, waiting for death to take them from their torments! There are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse of the wage-slave ”

“ The two courts have the same ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous, greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious, punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family—not even the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low society. ”

“ So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters. And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world, I saw the attitude of the church to such work ”

“ The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful occupation than that of the saints—casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea—unless it be that of the Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous compliments!
But one can understand that such things are necessary in a monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely the same thing as Heaven ”

“ It dawned upon us that wherever there was a political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, and taking some public privilege in return. So we came to realize that political corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.
And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of Superstition in America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the poor foreigner who troubles us. ”