Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 22

But let us take a look at our text. The rainbow is a sign, I believe, that the Prohibitionists once carried the country and would have made a complete success of the cold water cure had not the Rum Demon engineered the Ark. Still it does not necessarily follow that a rainbow chaser is a fellow on the hot trail of a blind tiger. He may be one who hopes to raise the wage rate by means of a tariff wall, or expects John Bull to a.s.sist Uncle Sam in the remonetization of silver. A rainbow-chaser, in the common acceptance of the term, is a fellow who mistakes shadow for substance and wanders off the plank turnpike into bogs and briar patches. Satan appears to have been the first victim of the rainbow-chasing fad--to have bolted the Chicago convention and run for president on the reform ticket. At a very early age I began to doubt the existence of a personal devil, whereupon my parent on my father's side proceeded to argue the matter in the good old orthodox way, but failed to get more than half the hussy out of my hide. But we will not quarrel about the existence or non-existence of a party who Milton a.s.sures us slipped on a political orange peel. We know that frauds and fakes exist, that hypocrites and humbugs abound.

Whether this be due to the pernicious activity of a horned monster or to evil inherent in the human heart, I will not a.s.sume to say. We may call that power the devil which is forever at war with truth, is the father of falsehood, whether it be an active personality or only a vicious principle.

Under the direction of this devil, real or abstract, the world has gone rainbow chasing and fallen deep into the Slough of Despond. Conditions have become so desperate that it were well for you and I, who are in the world and of it, to abate somewhat our partisan rancor, our sectarian bitterness, and take serious counsel together. Desperate, I say, meaning thereby not only that it becomes ever more difficult for the workman to win his modic.u.m of bread and b.u.t.ter, to provide his own hemlock coffin in which to go to hades--or elsewhere; but that honor, patriotism, reverence--all things which our fathers esteemed as more precious than pure gold--have well-nigh departed, that the social heart is dead as a salt herring; that all is becoming brummagem and pinch-beck, leather and prunella; that a curse hath fallen upon the womb of the world, and it no longer produces heaven-inspired men but only some pitiful simulacra thereof, some worthless succedona for such, who strive not to do their G.o.d-given duty though the world reward them with a gibbet, but to win wages of gold and grub, to obtain idle praise by empty plausibility. They aspire to ride the topmost wave, not of a tempestuous ocean which tries the heart of oak and the hand of iron, but of some pitiful sectarian mud-puddle or political goose pond. Under the guidance of these shallow self-seekers we have abandoned the Ark of the Covenant with its Brotherhood of Man, its solemn duties and sacred responsibilities, and are striving to manage matters mundane on a basis of brute selfishness, with a conscience or a creed of following the foolish rainbow of a fatuous utilitaria and getting even deeper into the bogs.

I have frequently been called a "chronic kicker," but do not object to the epithet. There's need of good l.u.s.ty kickers, those whose No. 1 tootsie-wootsies are copper- toed, for the world is lull of devilish things that deserve to die. Lest any should accuse me of the awful sin of using slang, and thereby break my heart, I hasten to say that the Bible twice employs the word "kick" in the same sense that I used it here. In fact, a goodly proportion of our so-called slang is drawn from the same high source, being vinegar to the teeth of pietistical purists, but quite good enough for G.o.d. Some complain that I should build instead of tearing down, should preserve and not destroy.

The complaint is well founded if it be wrong to attack falsehood, to exterminate the industrial wolves and social rottenness, to destroy the tares sown by the devil and give dollar wheat a chance to arise and hump itself. In determining what should be preserved and what destroyed, we may honestly disagree; but I think all will concede that what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently an age of artificiality--that there is little genuine left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston propose to expel from politics for dereliction of duty.

Somehow an old bachelor always reminds me of a rainbow; not because he looks like one in the least, but rather because he's so utterly useless for all practical purposes.

He also reminds me of a rainbow-chaser, because what he is compelled to admire is beyond his reach. When hope deferred hath made him heart-sick he begins to growl at the girls--and for the same reason that a mastiff barks at the moon. You will notice that a mastiff seldom barks much at anything he can get hold of and bite.

We are solemnly a.s.sured that the world is steadily growing better; and I suppose that's so, for in days of old they crucified men head downwards for telling the truth, while now they only hammer them over the head with six-shooters and drag 'em around a Baptist college campus with a rope. All that a reformer now needs is a hard head and a rubber neck. The cheerful idiot, alias the optimist, is forever prating of the world's progress.

Progress is a desirable thing only when we make it in the right direction. It may be sure and swift down a soaped plank into wild ocean depths; or it may be with painful steps and slow toward the eternal mountain tops where breaks the great white light of G.o.d, and there's no more of darkness and of death. Progress industrial, the productive power of labor multiplied by two, by ten; and with such improved weapons for waging war upon the grisly gorgon of want, nearly nine millions of the industrial army in India alone died upon their s.h.i.+elds.

Hosannahs mounting in costly churches here, the starving babe tugging at the empty breast of the dead mother there!-- and we send to the famine-sufferers many bibles and hymn- books, little bacon and beans. Bibles and hymn-books are excellent things in their ways, but do not possess an absorbing interest for the man with an aching void concealed about his system. Starving people ask a Christian world for grub, and it gives them forty'leven different brands of saving grace--each warranted the only genuine --most of these elixirs of life ladled out by hired missionaries who serve G.o.d for the long green, and who are often so deplorably ignorant that they couldn't tell a religious thesis from an ichthyosaurian.

Progress in religion until there's no longer a divine message from on high, no G.o.d in Israel; only a fas.h.i.+onable pulpiteering to minister to languid minds, the cultivation of foolish fads and the flaunting of fine feathers-- the church becoming a mere Vanity Fair or social clearing- house, a kind of esthetic forecourt to hades instead of the gate to heaven. At the opposite extreme we find blatant blackguardism by so-called evangelists, who were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma, yet who set up as instructors of the ma.s.ses in the profound mysteries of the Almighty. Men who would get s.h.i.+pwrecked in the poetry of Shakespeare, or lost in the philosophy of one of his fools, pretend to interpret the plans of Him who writes his thoughts in flaming words on the papyri of immensity, whose sentences are astral fire.

Progress in science until we learn that the rainbow was not built to allay the fears of the roachin family, but is old as the sun and the sea; that bourbon whisky drills the stomach full o' blow-holes and that the purest spring water is full o' bacteria and we must boil it or switch to beer; that Havana cigars give us tobacco heart, pastry is the hand-maid of dyspepsia, while even the empurpled grape is but a John the Baptist for appendicitis; that a rich thief has kleptomania and should be treated at a fas.h.i.+onable hospital instead of a plebian penitentiary, while even the rosebud of beauty is aswarm with bacilli, warning the sons of men to keep their distance on pain of death. If all the doctors discovered be true then life isn't half worth living--is stale, flat and unprofitable as a Republican nomination in Texas. When the poet declared that men do not die for love, the doctors had not yet learned that a cornfed kiss that cracks like a dynamite gun may be equally dangerous. I think the bolus-builders are chasing rainbows--that if I wait for death until I'm killed with kisses old Methuselah won't be a marker.

Our car of progress, of which we hear so much, has carried us from the Vates' vision of Milton and Dante to Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel--to the raucous twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind adown the s.h.i.+ning blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green- sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who are best qualified to build soft-soap or take a fall out of the corrugated bosom of a washboard. We now have poetry, so-called, everywhere--in books and magazine innumerable, even sandwiched in between reports of camp-meetings, political pow-wows and newspaper ads. for patent liver pills. O, that the featherless jaybirds now trying to twitter in long-primer type would apply the soft pedal unto themselves, would add no more to life's dissonance and despair! Most of our modern poets are bowed down with more than Werterean woe. Their sweethearts are cruel or fate unkind; they've got cirrhosis of the liver or palpitation of the heart, and needs must spill their scalding tears over all humanity. It seems never to have occurred to the average verse architect that not a line of true poetry was ever written by mortal man; that even the song of Solomon and the odes of Anacreon are but as the jingling of sweet bells out of tone, a dissonance in the divine harmony; that you can no more write poetry than you can paint the music of childhood's laughter, or hear the dew-beaded jasmine bud breathing its sensuous perfume to the morning sun. The true poets are those whose hearts are harps of a thousand strings, ever swept by unseen hands--those whose lips are mute because the soul of man hath never learned a language. Those we call master-poets and crown with immortelles but caught and fixed some far off echo of deep calling unto deep--the lines of Byron or a Burns, a Ta.s.so or a Tennyson are but the half-articulate cries of a soul stifling with the splendor of its own imaginings.

But we were speaking of progress when diverted by the discordant clamor of featherless crows. I am no pecterist with my face ever to the past. I realize that there has been no era without its burden of sorrow, no time without its fathomless lake of tears; that the past seems more glorious than the present because the heart casts a glamour over days that are dead. From the dust and glare of the noon of life we cast regretful glances back to the dewy morn, and as eve creeps on the shadows reach further back until they link the cradle and the grave and all is dark. I would not blot from heaven the star of hope, nor mock one earnest effort of mankind; but I would warn this world that its ideals are all wrong, that it's going forward backwards, is chasing foolish rainbows that lead to barbarism. Palaces and gold, fame and power--these by thy G.o.ds, O! Israel--mere fly-specked eidolons worthy no man's wors.h.i.+p.

When we have adopted higher ideals; when success is no longer a synonym for vain show; when the man of millions who toils and wails for more is considered mad; when we realize that all the world's wealth cannot equal the splendor of the sunset sky 'neath which the poorest trudge, the astral fire that flames at night's high noon above the meanest hut; that only G.o.d's omnipotence can recall one wasted hour, restore the bloom of youth, or bid the loved and lost return to glad our desolate hearts with the lambent light of eyes that haunt all our waking dreams, the music of laughter that has become a wailing cry in memory's desolate halls; when we cease chasing lying rainbows in the empty realm of Make-Believe and learn for a verity that the kendal green of the workman may be more worthy of honor than the purple of the prince --why then the world will have no further need of iconoclasts to frankly rehea.r.s.e its faults, and my words of censure will be transformed into paeans of praise.

"Sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet And soft as their parting tear."

We have "progressed" from the manly independence and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek protection of the consuls of other countries from the spirit that made our flag respected in every land and honored on every sea, to the anserine cackle of "jingoism"

whenever an American manifests a love of country or professes a national pride. What is "jingoism?" It is a word coined by enemies of this country and used by toad-eaters. It is a term which, under various t.i.tles, has been applied to every American patriot since our gran'- sires held the British lion up by the caudal appendage and beat the sawdust out of the impudent brute--since they appealed from a crack-brained king to the justice of heaven and wrote the charter of our liberties with the bayonet on the back of Cornwallis' buccaneers. Its synonym was applied to Thomas Paine, the arch-angel of the Revolution, whose pen of fire made independence imperative--who through seven long years of blood and tears fanned Liberty's flickering flames with his deathless faith that the Omnipotent arm of G.o.d would uphold the banner of the free. From the brain of that much-maligned and long-suffering man Columbia sprang full-panoplied, like Minerva from the brow of Olympian Jove. And what has been his reward? In life he was bitterly belied by the foes of freedom and the slaves of superst.i.tion; in death a mighty wave of calumny rolls above his grave. Greater men have lived and died and been forgotten, but a n.o.bler heart ne'er beat and broke--grander soul ne'er struggled toward the light or bowed before the ever-living G.o.d.

When the colonists stood debating whether to bear their present ills or fly to other they knew not of, he seized the gage of battle and flung it full and fair in Britain's haughty face. When defeat followed defeat, when the new-born nation was bankrupt and its soldiers starving in the field; when coward lips did from their color fly and men brave as Roman tribunes wept tears of grim despair, his voice rang out again and again like that of some ancient prophet of Israel cheering on the fainting legions of the Lord, and again, and again, and yet again the ragged barefoot Continentals set their b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the bayonet, until from the very ashes of defeat dear Liberty arose Phoenix-like, a G.o.ddess in her beauty, a t.i.tan in her strength.

The term "jingoist;" or its equivalent, was applied to Was.h.i.+ngton and Henry, to Jefferson and Jackson. It was applied to James G. Blaine, the typical American of his time--a man from beneath whose very toe-nails enough intellect might be sc.r.a.ped to make an hundred Clevelands or McKinleys. All were jingoes in their day and generation, because all preferred the t.i.tle of sovereign to that of subject; because all believed that Columbia should be mistress of her own fate, the architect of her own fortune, instead of an appendage of England, or political orphan under a European protectorate, because all believed that she should protect her humblest citizen from wrong and outrage wheresoever he may be, though it cost every dollar of the nation's treasure and every drop of the nation's blood--and if that be jingoism then I, too, am a jingo from alpha to omega, from beginning to end.

Who are those who recalcitrate about jingoism? They are people who have never forgiven Almighty G.o.d for suffering them to be born American sovereigns instead of British subjects. They are those whose ideal man is some stupid, forked, radish "stuck o'er with t.i.tles, hung 'round with strings," and anxious to board with a wealthy American wife to avoid honest work. They are the people whose G.o.d is the dollar, their country the stock exchange, and who suspect that a foreign policy with as much backbone as a scared rabbit would knock some of the wind and water out of their bogus "securities." It is those who would sell their citizens.h.i.+p for a copper cent and throw in their risen Lord as lagniappe, who are forever prating of "jingoism" and pleading for peace at any price. And these unclean harpies of greed and gall have been too long permitted to dominate this government.

The result is that the greatest nation known to human history--the sum and crown of things--is an object of general insult. If it be rumored that we contemplate protecting American citizens in Cuba, every European government emits a growl--there's talk of rebuking Uncle Sam's "presumption," of standing him in a corner to cool. If it be suggested that we annex an island--at the earnest request of all its inhabitants worth the hanging--there more minatory caterwauling by the European courts, while even the Mikado of j.a.pan gets his little Ebenezer up, and the Ahkound of Swat, the Nizan of Nowhere and the grand gyasticutus of Jimple- cute intimate that they may send a yaller-legged policeman across the Pacific in a soap-box to pull the tail- feathers out of the bird o' freedom if it doesn't crawl humbly back upon its perch. If a fourth-cla.s.s power insults our flag we accept a flippant apology. If our citizens are wrongfully imprisoned we wait until they are starved, shot, or perish of blank despair in dungeons so foul that a hog would die therein of a broken heart; then humbly ask permission to investigate, report that they are dead, and feel that we have discharged our duty.

Why? Because this nation is dominated by the dollar--is in the hands of those who have no idea of honor unless it will yield somewhat to eat, no use for patriotism unless it can be made to pay. When we concluded to protect our citizens from Weylerian savagery, instead of sending a wars.h.i.+p to Havana to read the riot act if need be in villainous saltpetre we had our amba.s.sador crawling about the European courts humbly begging permission of the powers, and as we got no permission we did no protecting.

When the church people elect me president of this Republic I'll have ante-mortem investigations when American citizens are held prisoners by foreign powers, and those ent.i.tled to Old Glory's protection will get it in one time and two motions if Uncle Sam has to shuck his seer-sucker and fight all Europe to a finish. I shall certainly ask no foreign prince, potentate or power for permission to protect American citizens in the western world.

There'll be one plank in my platform as broad as a boulevard and as long as a turnpike, and it will be to the effect that the nation which wrongs an American citizen must either apologize with its nose in the sand or reach for its six-shooter. I'd rather see my country made a desolation forever and a day, its flag torn from the heavens, its name erased from the map of the world and its people sleeping in heroes' sepulchres, than to see it a mark for scorn, an object of contempt.

In continually crying "Peace! Peace!" Uncle Sam is chasing a rainbow that has a dynamite bomb under either end. If history be philosophy teaching by example what is the lesson we have to learn? In little more than a century we've had four wars, and only by the skin of our teeth have we escaped as many more, yet we not only refuse to judge the future by the past, but ignore the solemn admonitions of Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson and stand naked before our enemies. We have no merchant marine to develop these hardy sailors who once made our flag the glory of the sea. We have a little navy, commanded chiefly by political pets who couldn't sail a catboat into New York harbor without getting aground or falling overboard. We have an army, about the size of a comic opera company, officered largely by society swells who cannot even play good poker, are powerful only on dress parade. We have a few militia companies, scattered from Sunrise to Lake Chance, composed chiefly of boys and commanded by home-made colonels, who couldn't hit a flock o' barns with a howitzer loaded to scatter; who show up at state encampments attired in gaudy uniforms that would make Solomon ashamed, and armed with so-called swords that wouldn't cut hot b.u.t.ter or perforate a rubber boot. And that's our immediate fighting force. Uncle Sam is a Philadelphia tenderfoot flouris.h.i.+ng a toy pistol at a Mexican fandango. When I succeed Mr. McKinley I'll weed every dude and dancing master out of the army and navy and put on guard old war dogs who can tell the song of a ten-inch sh.e.l.l from the boom-de-aye of a sham battle. I'll call the attention of my Hardsh.e.l.l Baptist Congress to Was.h.i.+ngton's advice that while avoiding overgrown military establishments, we should be careful to keep this country on a respectable defensive posture, and that if that advice is not heeded, I'll distribute the last slice of federal pie among the female Prohibitionists of Kansas. If this is to be a government of, for and by a lot of nice old ladies, I'll see to it that none of my official grannies grow a beard or wear their bronchos clothespin fas.h.i.+on. And I'll warrant you that were this nation ruled by sure-enough women instead of by a lot of anaemic he-peons of the money-power, Columbia would not be caught unprepared when "the spider's web woven across the cannon's throat shakes its threaded tears in the wind no more."

To the American patriot familiar with the rapid development of this country it seems that the hour must a.s.suredly come when its lightest wish will be the world's law-- when foreign potentates will pay homage to the sovereigns of a new and greater Rome; but let us not be too sanguine, for nations, like individuals, have their youth, their l.u.s.ty manhood and their decay; and despite the rapid increase in men and money there are startling indications that Uncle Sam has already pa.s.sed the zenith of his power.

"First freedom, then glory, when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption--barbarism at last."

Freedom we have won, and glory, yet both have failed-- we have become, not the subjects of native Caesars, but the serfs of foreign Shylocks. Wealth we now have, and Oriental vice, and corruption that reaches even from the senate chamber through every stratum of society. That we are approaching barbarism may be inferred from the magnificence of the plutocrat and the poverty of the working people. The first reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn, while if the latter protest against this grievous injustice they are branded as noisy Bryanites or lampooned as lippy Populists. To the superficial observer, a nation seems to be forging forward long after it has really begun to retrograde.

There's an era of splendor, of Lucullus feasts, of Bradley- Martin b.a.l.l.s and Seeley dinners; there's grand parade of soldiery and s.h.i.+ps, miles of costly palaces, and wealth poured out like water in foolish pageantry; there's refinement of manners into affectation, dilettantism, epicureanism--but 'tis "the gilded halo hovering 'round decay."

The heart of that nation is dead, its soul hath departed, and no antiseptic known to science will prevent putrefaction.

How is it with us? Forty thousand people own one-half of the wealth between two oceans, while 250,000 own more than 80 per cent. of all the values created by the people. What is the result? Money is omnipotent.

Power is concentrated in the hands of a little coterie of plutocrats--the people are sovereigns de jure and slaves de facto. A mongrel Anglomaniaism is spreading among our wealthy, like mange in a pack o' lobo wolves. Our plutocrats have become ashamed of their country--probably because it permits them to practice a brutal predacity --and now cultivate foreign customs, ape foreign fas.h.i.+ons, and purchase as husbands for their daughters the upper- servants of European potentates--people who earned their t.i.tles of n.o.bility by chronic boot-licking or sacrificing their female relatives to the G.o.d of infamy. Year after year these t.i.tled paupers--these shameless parodies on G.o.d's masterpiece--paddle across the pond to barter their tawdy dishonor for boodle, to sell their shame-crested coronets to porcine-souled American parvenues, who if sp.a.w.ned by slaves and born in h.e.l.l would disgrace their parentage and dishonor their country. Our toadies and t.i.tle- wors.h.i.+ppers now have a society called the "Order of the Crown," composed of puppies who fondly imagine that they have within their royal hides a taint of the impure blood that once coursed through the veins of corrupt and barbarous kings. Perchance these dudelets and dudines will yet discover that they are descended in a direct line from King Adam the First and are heirs to the throne of Eden. Our country is scarce half developed, yet it is already rank with decadence and smells of decay. Our literature is "yellow," our pulpit is jaundiced, our society is rotten to the core and our politics shamefully corrupt --yet people say there's no need of iconoclasts! Perhaps there isn't. The iconoclasts used hammers, while those who purify our social atmosphere and make this once again a government of, for and by the people may have to empty gatling guns and load them with carbolic acid.

National decay and racial retrogression may be inferred from the fact that alleged respectable white women have been married to black men by eastern ministers who insist on solving the race problem for G.o.d and the South by giving to the typical American of the future the complexion of a new saddle and the perfume of a Republican powwow.

When these ethnological experts tire of life, they should-- come to Texas. When white people lose their racial pride they've nothing left that justifies the appointment of a receiver. We hear a great deal about "race prejudice,"

and I want to say right here that there's just enough of it in my composition to inspire an abiding faith that the white man should be, must be, will be, lord paramount of this planet. I promise you that when you elect me to the presidency, nothing that's black, yaller or tan gets an office under my administration. I shall certain not follow Mark Hanna's understudy and fill the departments at Was.h.i.+ngton with big, fat, saucy blacks, to employ white women as stenographers and white men as messenger boys.

There's lots of good in the Senegambian--lots of it; but not in a thousand years will he be fit for American sovereignty. Half the white people are not fit for it, else instead of a wooden-headed hiccius doctius we'd have Billy Bryan in the presidential chair today. Whenever I look at McKinley, I think of Daniel Webster--not because Bill resembles old Dan, but because he doesn't. I like the negro in his place and his place is in the cotton patch, instead of in politics, despite the opinion of those who have studied him only through the rose-tinted lorgnette of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." I also like the Anglomaniac in his place, and that is the geographical center of old England, with John Bull's trade-mark seared with a hot iron on the western elevation of his architecture as he faces the rising sun to lace his shoes. As between the n.i.g.g.e.r and the Anglomaniac, I much prefer the former. The full-blooded n.i.g.g.e.r is a fool positive, but the Anglomaniac is an a.s.s superlative. The first is faithful to those who feed him; the latter is a sneaking enemy to the country that has conferred upon him every benefit.

Despite the optimistic cackle anent the march of science, industrial progress, and all that sort o' thing, it appears to be the general consensus of opinion that there's something radically wrong. There's no lack of remedies-- the political drug store is full of panaceas, each with the trade-mark of some peculiar school of therapeutics blown in the bottle. Strange that all these catholicons for earthly ills propose to inaugurate the millennium by improving the pecuniary condition of the people--as though the want of money in this or the other pocket were the only evil. Certainly a better distribution of wealth were desirable, but a general dissemination of G.o.d's grace were far preferable. Given that, all worthy reforms will follow; without it we will continue to chase foolish rainbows to our fall, Dives becoming more insolent, Lazarus left more and more to the care of the dogs. I do not mean that by acquiring a case of the camp-meeting jerks we will solve the riddle which the Sphinx of Time is propounding to this republic--that we will find the solution of all life's problems in the amen-corner. Not exactly.

The average church is about the last place to which we need look for relief. It's too often a lying rainbow painted on the dark mist of ignorance by the devil's own artist.

It promises more and performs less than a Republican candidate for Congress. I've noticed that shouting hosannahs has little tendency to make one more truthful --that when a man professes himself the chief of sinners, he may feel obligated to substantiate his statement. I've never known a man to borrow any money of the bank on the unctuosity of his amen, but I have known people who could double-discount Satan himself at dodging an honest debt, to weep real water because I declined to come into their sectarian penfold and be measured for a suit of angelic pin-feathers. There are many church people who will slander you unmercifully for dissenting from their religious dogma, then seize the first opportunity to stick you with a plugged dime or steal your dog. There are wors.h.i.+ppers who do not consider in outward rites and specious forms religion satisfied; but these never acc.u.mulate vast fortunes. The path to heaven is too steep to be scaled by a man weighted down with seven million dollars. He may be long on hope and faith, but he's short on charity, and without charity religion is as big a fraud as McKinley's international bimetallism. Charity is a word that is awfully misunderstood. If a man's income be $5,000 a year and he gives half of it to the less fortunate, he's a pretty decent fellow, but if he reserves for himself half of a $100,000 income while people are going hungry to bed, he's simply a brute. With a world full of woe and want, what right has any professed follower of Jesus to shove $50,000 a year down his jeans?

The true test of a man's charity is the sum which he reserves for himself; hence when Jno. D. Rockefeller--my good Baptist brother who's building collegiate monuments to his own memory with other people's money--reserves tens o' millions in excess of his needs and imagines himself full to the muzzle with the grace of G.o.d, he's simply chasing a rainbow that may land him in Malebolge with the dull sudden plunk of a Republican campaign promise hitting the tidal wave of prosperity. Imagine Jesus Christ with John D.'s money--loaning it at 5 per cent. a month!

Why if he'd had half so much cash he'd never have been crucified. Those who clamored for his death would have run him for mayor of Jerusalem on the reform ticket and tried to work him for his last dollar.

If all who call themselves Christians were Christlike, then indeed might there be hope for humanity; but what is there to inspire belief that the church will ever win the world from a foolish quest of rainbows? What hope in Talmage, with his nightmare visions and stertorous dreams, his pilgrimings to Palestine and rummaging among the mummified cats and has-been kings of ancient Egypt for "Scriptural evidence?" What hope for a people so mentally emasculate that they can patiently listen to his jejune wind-jamming, can read and relish his irremediable tommyrot? What hope in Sam Jones and other noisy ignorami of that ilk, with their wild war on dancing and the euchre deck, the drama and decollete? Be these the strongholds of Abriman in his ceaseless war on Oromasdes?

Does the Prince of Darkness, who once did fill the wondering cosmos with the clangor of celestial steel, now front the hosts of Heaven armed with a euchre-deck? Is Tara Boom-de-aye the battle-hymn and the theater hat the blazing gonfalon of him who strove with Omnipotence for universal empire? Does Lucifer expect to become lord paramount of all the gleaming worlds that hang like jewels pendant in heaven's imperial concave by persuading some miserable son of Adam to work his toes on Sunday, dance with the girls on Monday or play seven-up for the cigars? O Jonesy, Jonesy! would to heaven that thou and all thy brother blabsters and bubblyjocks would go hang yourselves, for you know naught of the war that rages ever like a sulphurous siroc in the human soul. Ye are but insects that infest great Igdrasyl, the ash tree that upholds the universe. One atheistical Stephen Girard playing Good Samaritan in a plague-swept city while the preachers. .h.i.t the turnpike; one deistical Tom Paine, braving the guillotine for the rights of man; one Father Damien, freely laying down his life for the miserable lepers of Molokai; one sweet-faced sister of charity bravely battling with the reeking slums of a great city, striving to drag souls from that seething maelstrom of sin, were worth legions of those sanctified lollypops who prate of sacrificing all for their Savior, yet never risk life or gold in the service of their G.o.d.

"Work is wors.h.i.+p," said the old monks who carried the cross into the Western wilds despite all hards.h.i.+ps, in defiance of all dangers--men for whom life was no Momusmasque, but a battle and a march, men who sacrificed all for other's sake, accepting without a sigh disease and death as worldly reward. Those monks were real men, and real men are ever the world's heroes and its hope.

The soul of a real man is never hidden behind the cowardly superficies of policy or expediency--his heart is an open book which he who runs may read. Deceive he cannot, for the lie blooms only on the lips of cowards. Public opinion he may treat with kingly contempt, but self-respect is dearer to him than life, though dowered with a monarch's scepter and all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. There's something in the words of a woman, spoken during the civil war, which indicates that despite all artificiality and folly, beneath the cheap gilding and showy lacquer of life, the heart of the race still beats steady and strong; that above the infinitude of goose-speech and the trumpeting of tin- horns on the housetops may still be heard "the ever-pealing tones of old Eternity." From out the mad h.e.l.l of the fight a wounded hero was borne to the hospital. Neither pain nor approaching death could break the courage of that heart of oak, but a prurient little preacher, one of those busy smooth-bore bigots whose mission seems to be to cast a shadow on the very sun, convinced the stricken man that he was an awful sinner, whereupon he began crying out that he was doomed to be d.a.m.ned. The nurse, a muscular woman who believed with the old monks that "work is wors.h.i.+p," took the parson by the pendulous 8 x 10 ear, led him aside and sweetly said: "Mr. Goody Two-Shoes, if I catch you in this ward again I'll throw you out of the window." The brimstone peddler felt that he had an urgent "call" to other fields.

He stood not upon the order of his going, but hit the dim and shadowy distance like Nancy Hanks. He couldn't even wait to pray for his persecutor or take up a collection.

In vain the nurse strove to soothe her patient by telling him that the man who gave his life for his native land cannot miss heaven's mercy--he but wailed the louder that he was lost. "You came to me a hero," she cried, "and you shall not leave me a coward. If you must go to h.e.l.l, go like a man." If Romans nursed by a she-wolf became demiG.o.ds, what might not Americans be sprung from the loins of such a lioness! Milton has almost made Satan respectable by endowing him with an infernal heroism, by making him altogether and irremediably bad, instead of a moral mugwump--by giving him a heart for any fate instead of picturing him as willing to wound and yet afraid to strike.

By G.o.d's grace, I mean not the kind you catch at camp- meetings with sand-fleas, wood-ticks and other gifts of the Holy Ghost; but rather an end everlasting to brummagem and make-believe, a return to the Ark of the Covenant, a recognition of that fact that the soul is not the stomach --that a man owes debts to his fellows which cannot be cast up at the end of the month and discharged with a given number of dollars. Man was not made for himself alone, but all were made for each and each for all. The doctrine which now prevails of "every man for himself,"

is the dogma of the devil. It means universal war, shameful wrong and brutal outrage--the strong become intolerable tyrants, the weak go to the wall. It transforms this beautiful world into a basket of adders, each biting, hissing, striving to get its foolish head above its fellows.

If the Christian religion contained naught else of worth, its doctrine of self-sacrifice should earn for it the respect of every Atheist in the universe. Through the fogs of ignorance and the clouds of superst.i.tion that enshrouded the Biblical ages that touch of the divine s.h.i.+nes like a pilot star.

That Persian poet who prated of "the sorry scheme of things" would deserve pity were he not beneath contempt.

He imagined that there was a screw loose in the universe because his quest of pleasure slipped its trolley-pole and could not make the bubble Joy to dance in Folly's cup.

Millions make continual moan that they are not happy when they ought to be thankful that they are not hanged.