(6) The marriage relation.  As the Church is subject to
     Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands.

     (7) The headship of man and woman.  The head of every man is
     Christ, but the head of the woman is man.

I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes.  In the city where I write, three clergymen are being sent to jail for six months for protesting against the use of the name of Jesus in the wholesale slaughter of men.  Now, I am backing this war.  I know that it has to be fought, and I want to see it fought as hard as possible; but I want to leave Jesus out of it, for I know that Jesus did not believe in war, and never could have been brought to support a war.  I object to clerical cant on the subject; and I note that an eminent theological authority, “Billy” Sunday, appears to agree with me; for I find him on the front page of my morning paper, assailing the three pacifist clergymen, and making his appeal not to Jesus, but to the blood-thirsty tribal diety of the ancient Hebrews: 

I suppose they think they know more than God Almighty, who commanded the sun to stand still while Joshua won the battle for the Lord; more than the God who made Samson strong so he could slay thousands of his nation’s enemies in a righteous cause.

Right you are, Billy!  And if the capitalist system continues to develop unchecked, we shall some day see it dawn upon the masters of the world how wasteful it is to permit the superannuated workers to perish by slow starvation.  So much more sensible to make use of them!  So we shall have a Bible defense of cannibalism; we shall hear our evangelists quoting Leviticus:  “#They shall eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters.#” Or perhaps some of our leisure-class ladies might make the discovery that the flesh of working-class babies is relished by pomeranians and poodles.  If so, the Billy Sundays of the twenty-first century may discover the text:  “#Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.#”

#Moth and Rust#

It is especially interesting to notice what happens when the Bible texts work against the interests of the Slavers and their clerical retainers.  Then they are null and void—­and no matter how precise and explicit and unmistakable they may be!  Take for example the Sabbath injunction:  “Six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou hast to do.”  Karl Marx records of the pious England of his time that