Every offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel, which they bring unto the priest, shall be his.  And every man’s hallowed things shall be his:  whatsoever any man giveth to the priest, it shall be his.

In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the priests of Ceylon first present the gifts to the god, and then eat them.  Among the Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must bring four new robes to the priests; if they do this, the priests wear the robes; if they fail to do it, the dead man appears naked before the judgment-throne.  The devotees are instructed that “he who performs this rite succeeds in both worlds, and obtains a firm footing in both worlds.”  Among the Buddhists, the followers give alms to the monks, and are told specifically what advantages will thereby accrue to them.  In the Aitareyo Brahmanam of the Rig-Veda we read

He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is born from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge), the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and is absorbed into the deity.

Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma, or juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a god.  Among the Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the sacred juice is that of the grape, and the priest is not allowed to throw away what is left of it, but is ordered “reverently to consume it.”  In as much as the priest is the sole judge of how much good sherry wine he shall consecrate previous to the ceremony, it is to be expected that the priests of this cult should be lukewarm towards the prohibition movement, and should piously refuse to administer their sacrament with unfermented and uninteresting grape-juice.

#Priestly Empires#

In every human society of which we have record there has been one class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the “hewers of wood and drawers of water”; and there has been another, much smaller class which has done the directing.  To belong to this latter class is to work also, but with the head instead of the hands; it is also to enjoy the good things of life, to live in the best houses, to eat the best food, to have choice of the most desirable women; it is to have leisure to cultivate the mind and appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and distinctions, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered and regarded—­in short, to have Power.  How to get this Power and to hold it has been the first object of the thoughts of men from the beginning of time.

The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is uncertain, for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed with it.  It will be found that empires based upon military force alone, however cruel they may be, are not permanent, and therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when resistance is paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that the race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds and even thousands of years.  The ancient empires were all priestly empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.