The propertied classes are like people who go into a public theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as private property what is meant for social use.  If each man would take only what he needs, and leave the balance to those who have nothing, there would be no rich and no poor.  The rich man is a thief.

I might go on citing such quotations for many pages; but I know that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Bill Haywood and Gene Debs may read this book, and I don’t want them to close it in the middle and throw it at me.  Therefore let me hasten to explain my poor joke; the sentiments I have been quoting are not those of our modern agitators, but of another group of ancient ones.  The first is not from Emma Goldman, nor did I find it in “Mother Earth”.  I found it in the Epistle of James, believed by orthodox authorities to have been James, the brother of Jesus.  It is exactly what he wrote—­save that I have put it into modern phrases, and changed the swing of the sentences, in order that those familiar with the Bible might read it without suspicion.  The second passage is not in the writings of Alexander Berkman, but in those of St. John Chrysostom, most famous of the early fathers, who lived 374-407.  The third is not from the pen of “Big Bill” but from that of St. Ambrose, a father of the Latin Church, 340-397, and the fourth is not by Comrade Debs, but by St. Basil of the Greek Church, 329-379.  And if the reader objects to my having fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the Christian Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred years?

#The Soap Box#

This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other as the work of a blasphemous infidel.  Yet it stands in the direct line of the Christian tradition:  written by a man who was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a man who thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men.

I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus.  We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach.  But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem.  The way to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church fathers—­translate him into American.  This time, since the reader shares the secret, it will not be necessary to disguise the Bible style, and we may follow the text exactly.  Let me try the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of Hebrew casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or St. Alphonsus to find a parallel: