At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem “Times”, a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified him that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed.  Jesus was taken to the station-house followed by a riotous throng, and held upon a charge of disorderly conduct.  Next morning the Rev. Dr. Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against him, and Magistrate Pilate sentenced him to six months on Blackwell’s Island, remarking that from this time on he proposed to make an example of those soap-box orators who persist in using threatening and abusive language.  Just as the prisoner was being led away, a detective appeared with a requisition from the Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco, where he is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day explosion.

#The Church Machine#

The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, “Master, we would have a sign of Thee”—­meaning that they wanted him to do some magic, to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God.  He answered by calling them an evil and adulterous generation—­which is exactly what I have said about the Papal machine.  The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in their ancient texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and quoted Karl Marx at them—­“This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”  Because he despised the company of the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own class in the places where they gathered—­the public houses—­the churchly scandal-mongers called him “a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”—­precisely as in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.

But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom.  Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history—­even in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen who dare to preach as Jesus preached.  One by one they are cast out of the Church—­Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J. Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their voices are not silenced, they are like the leaven, to which Jesus compared the kingdom of God—­a woman took it and hid it in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.  The young theological students read, and some of them understand; I know three brothers in one family who have just gone into the Church, and are preaching straight social revolution—­and the scribes and the pharisees have not yet dared to cast them out.