Waddell.

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#Christ and Caesar#

In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him:  “All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it.  If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine.”  Jesus, as we know, answered and said “Get thee behind me, Satan!” And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with “temporal power;” he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace.  And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel.  The early Christians had “all things in common, except women;” they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him.  He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus’ church.  He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise or no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God.  The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself.  He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world’s greatest religion.  How complete and swift was his success you may judge from the fact that fifty years later we find the Emperor Valentinian compelled to pass an edict limiting the donations of emotional females to the church in Rome!

From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this book, the chief of the enemies of social progress.  From the days of Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar have been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of predatory economic might.  With only one qualification to be noted:  that the Church has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of her proletarian Founder.  She has done her best, of course; we have seen how her scholars twist his words out of their sense, and the Catholic Church even goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead language, so that her victims may not hear the words of Jesus in a form they can understand.

     ’Tis well that such seditious songs are sung Only by
     priests, and in the Latin tongue!

But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one incessant struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled themselves with the spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of that bitterly class-conscious proletarian, James, the brother of Jesus.