In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon.  Every church is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property.  And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking favors from the state—­the exemption of church property from taxation, exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday—­so on through a long list.  As the churches have to be built with money, you find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social revolution is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.

It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of privilege.  Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true.  The ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working people suffer and feel.  So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his pope.  In Ireland, as I write, the young priests are defying their bishops and joining the Sinn Fein, a non-religious movement for an Irish Republic.

What is it that keeps the average workingman in subjection to the exploiter?  Simply terror, the terror of losing his job.  And if you could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you would find that precisely the same force is keeping many of them slaves to Tradition.  They are educated men, and thousands of them must resent the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or hypocrites.  They have caught enough of the spirit of their time not to enjoy having to pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and witch-doctors; they would like to say frankly that they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed the whale, and even that they are dubious about Hercules and Achilles and other demigods.  But they are part of a machine, and the old men and the rich men who run the machine have laid down the law.  Those who find themselves tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have wives and children; they have only one profession, they have been unfitted for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well as by the practice of altruism.