made me impotent for mischief.  Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society.  And all church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week—­and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean clothing of piety.  In this same way their ministers of religion are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable Founder—­to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a stained-glass-window divinity.

The man who really lived, the carpenter’s son, they take out and crucify all over again.  As a young poet has phrased it, they nail him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold.  Come with me to the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges!  Here is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and scholarly volume, published by the exclusive house of Scribner, and written by the Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I carried in the stately ceremonials:  “The Citizen in His Relation to the Industrial Situation,” by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter, D.D., L.L.D., D.C.L.—­a course of lectures delivered before the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at Bisbee, Arizona.  Says my Bishop: 

Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced pauperism.  He did not abhor money; he used it.  He did not abhor the company of rich men; he sought it.  He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure.

And do you think that the late Bishop of J.P.  Morgan and Company stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of golden nails?  In the course of this book there will march before us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter’s son:  the Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the Chaplain of the Millionaires’ Club, the Pastor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil.  We shall try the weight of their jewelled sledges—­books, sermons, newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches—­wherewith they pound their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet of the proletarian Christ.

Here, for example, is Rev. F.G.  Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University.  Prof.  Peabody has written several books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid of the carpenter’s denunciations of the rich, and says: