Through a thousand different channels, current politico-economic belief is dominated by the base communistic cabala of the ‘man of many sorrows;’ yet as a practical theorem, it is hardly ever critically examined. Why is it that the suggested social solutions promulgated by Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and other Asiatic cataleptics, are accepted so meekly by us, upon trust? If these men were anything, they were crude socialist reformers with mis-shapen souls, preachers of ‘a new heaven, and a new earth,’ that is to say, demagogues — politicians-of-the-slums; and out of the slums, nothing that is noble can ever be born.
As agitators, Jesus and his modern continuators shall be exclusively considered in these pages. However, it must be distinctly understood that the spiritual and temporal in all cosmogonies, are so intricately interwoven, that it is almost impossible to completely divorce them. Like the Siamese twins, Gods and Governments are inextricably bound together; so much so indeed, that if you kill one, the other cannot live. Hence the open or secret alliance, that has always existed between the politician and the priest.
Whatever their primitive purity (or impurity), all operative creedal philosophies are essentially civil and military codes, police regulations. ‘Religion is a power, a political engine, and if there was no God, I would have to invent one,’ said the great Napoleon. In letter and in spirit, Christianity is above all things a political theory, and a theory that often takes the form of raging hysterics.
Religions are the matrix in which public institutions are generally molded. This has ever been well understood by the dominant leaders of mankind, from Numa to Brigham Young, from Solon to Loyola, from Constantine to the lowest Levite hireling, who gets paid in dimes and cents for his unctuous mock — dithyrambs.
‘All ye are brethren.’
Are all men really brethren? — Negro and Indian, Blackfellow, Kalmuck, and Coolie — the well-born, and the base-bred,[2] — beer-soaked loafer, and hero-hearted patriot — belted chieftain and ignoble mechanic-slave, — pot of iron and pot of clay?
What proof is there that the brotherhood-of-man hypothesis is in accordance with nature? On what trustworthy biologic, historic or other evidence does it rest? If it is natural, then rivalry, competition, and strife are unnatural. (And it is proposed to prove in this book, that strife, competition, rivalry, and the wholesale destruction of feeble types of men, is not only natural, but highly necessary.) Has ‘brotherhood’ ever been tried upon earth? Where, when and with what final result? Is not self-assertion nobler, grander and more truly heroic than self-denial? Is not self-abasement but another term for voluntary vassalage; voluntary burden-bearing?
Christ might well and truthfully have said unto his followers ‘Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will bind you in unbreakable bonds, and load you down like an ass between two burdens.’
The ‘poor and ignorant’ were his first followers — the vagrants, the disinherited shiftless classes: and to this very day, the poorer and more ignorant men and women are, the more eager are they to follow his religious ideals, or the political millennialisms that are distilled out of his delusions.
‘If we only lived as Christ lived, what a beautiful world this would be,’ saith all thoughtless ones. If we lived as Christ lived, there would be none of us left to live. He begat no children; he labored not for his bread; he possessed neither house nor home; he merely talked. Consequently he must have existed on charity, or have stolen bread. ‘If we all lived like Christ,’ would there have been anyone left to labor, to be begged from, to be stolen from? ‘If we all lived like Christ’ is thus a self-evident absurdity.
No wonder that it is recorded: ‘Not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called; but God chose the foolish things of the world, and God chose the weak things of the world, and the things that are despised.’ Nothing else would have anything to do with him. Christ was indeed, the prophet of the credulous rabble during three years of active agitation, and it abandoned him in his hour of need (what always happens under similar circumstances) for the rabble is ever cowardly, ungenerous, suspicious, unfathomably base. It has never yet had a leader of commanding ability (either in peace or in war) that it did not ultimately desert or betray, i.e. if he did not take the precaution to make himself its master.
After permitting Christ to be butchered, the mob thereupon set him up as their Divinity, and erected altars to his renown. Slaves, women, madmen, lepers, magdalenes, were the earliest Christians, and to this hour, women, children, slaves and lunatics are the raw material of the Christian Church.
Primitive Christianity cunningly appealed to the imagination of a world of superstitious slaves (eager for some mode of escape that meant not the giving and receiving of battle-strokes.) It organized them for the overthrow of Heroic Principles; and substituted, for a genuine nobility based on battle-selection, a crafty theocracy founded upon priest-craft, hell-craft, alms-giving, politicalisms, and all that is impure and subterranean. It is a doctrine at once disgraceful in its antecedents, its teachers, and in itself. Truly has it been called ‘the fatal dower of Constantine,’ for it has suffocated, or is suffocating the seeds of Heroism.
Both ancient and modern Christianism and all that has its root therein, is the negation of everything grand, noble, generous, heroic, and the glorification of everything feeble, atrocious, dishonorable, dastardly. The cross is now, and ever has been, an escutcheon of shame. It represents a gallows, and a Semite slave swinging thereon. For two thousand years it has absolutely overturned human reason, overthrown common sense, infected the world with madness, submissiveness, degeneracy.
Truly, there is a way which seemeth right unto a people, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.
Is the Golden Rule a rational rule? — Is it not rather a menial rule — a coward rule — a best-policy rule? Why is it ‘right’ for one man to do unto others as he would have others do to him and, what is right? If ‘others’ are unable to injure him or ‘do good’ to him, why should he consider them at all? Why should he take any more notice of them than of so many worms? If they are endeavoring to injure him, and able to do it, why should he refrain from returning the compliment? Should he not combat them, does not that give them carte-blanche to injure and destroy him? May it not be ‘doing good’ to others, to war against them, to annihilate them? May it not also be ‘good’ for them to war against others? (Again, what is ‘good’?)
Is it reasonable to ask preying animals, to do unto others as they would be done by? — If they acted accordingly would they, could they survive? If some only accepted the Golden Rule as their guiding moral maxim, would they not become a prey to those who refused to abide thereby?
Upon what reasonable and abiding sanction does this ‘Rule’ rest? — Has it ever been in actual operation among men? — Can it ever be successfully practiced on earth — or anywhere else? — Did Jesus Christ practice it himself upon all occasions? — Did His apostles, his ‘sons of thunder’ practice it? — Did Peter the boaster do so, when he ‘denied Him’ for fear of arrest at the camp-fire? — Did Judas the financier, when he sold him for net cash? Also, how many of his modern lip-servants actually practice it in their daily business intercourse with each other? How Many?