Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-called civilized nation today.  Behind every battle-line in Europe you may see the priests of the Babylonian Fire-god with their bronze images and their ancient incantations; you may see magic spells being wrought, magic standards sanctified, magic bread eaten and magic wine drunk, fetishes blessed and hoodoos lifted, eternity ransacked to find means of inciting soldiers to the mood where they will “go in”.  Throughout all civilization, the phobias and manias of war have thrown the people back into the toils of the priest, and that church which forced Galileo to recant under threat of torture, and had Ferrer shot beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a “rebirth of religion”.

#The Medicine-men#

Andrew D. White tells us that

It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every European country was in the hands of the Church.  Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that “pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God.”

And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as banishers of epidemics.  Who knows what day the Lord may see fit to rebuke the upstart teachers of impious and atheistical inoculation, and scourge the people back into His fold as in the good old days of Moses and Aaron?  Viscount Amberley, in his immensely learned and half-suppressed work, “The Analysis of Religious Belief”, quotes some missionaries to the Fiji islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the subject of a pestilence.  It was the work of a “disease-maker”, who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they blew horns to frighten this disease-maker from his spells.  The missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the affliction—­and thereby revealed that they stood upon the same intellectual level as the heathen they were supposed to instruct!  It appeared that the natives had been at war with their neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist; they had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as punishment for savage presumption!

And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the “Book of Common Prayer” of our most decorous and cultured of churches.  I remember as a little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by the prevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread three times a day; and there came an amiable clerical gentleman and recited the service proper to such pastoral calls:  “Take therefore in good part the visitation of the Lord!” And again, when my mother was ill, I remember how the clergyman read out in church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness, “in mind, body or estate”.  I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaning of these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize that the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his tenements might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his little “flyer” in cotton might prove successful; so that the children in his mills might work with greater speed.