religionists have laid claim
to Lincoln, which claim has been amply refuted; but we are still
awaiting the Church's claim to Paine as one of her devotees.

"And, truly, the case against Christianity is plain and damning. Never,
during the whole of its history has it spoken in a clear voice against
slavery; always, as we have seen, its chief supporters have been
pronounced believers. They have cited religious teaching in its defence,
they have used all the power of the Church for its maintenance.
Naturally, in a world in which the vast majority are professing
Christians, believers are to be found on the side of humanity and
justice. But to that the reply is plain. Men are human before they are
Christians; both history and experience point to the constant lesson of
the many cases in which the claims of a developing humanity override
those of an inculcated religious teaching.

"But the damning fact against Christianity is, not that it found slavery
here when it arrived, and accepted it as a settled institution, not even
that it is plainly taught in its 'sacred' books, but, that it
deliberately created a new form of slavery, and for hundreds of years
invested it with a brutality greater than that which existed centuries
before. A religion which could tolerate this slavery, argue for it, and
fight for it, cannot by any stretch of reasoning be credited with an
influence in forwarding emancipation. Christianity no more abolished
slavery than it abolished witchcraft, the belief in demonism, or
punishment for heresy. It was the growing moral and social sense of
mankind that compelled Christians and Christianity to give up these and
other things." (_C. Cohen: "Christianity, Slavery, and Labor."_)

CHAPTER XVI

CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR

_The mortgage which the peasant has on heavenly property guarantees
the mortgage of the bourgeois on the farms._

MARX.

_The same Christ, the same Buddha, the same Isaiah, can stand at
once for capitalism and communism, for liberty and slavery, for
peace and war, for whatever opposed or clashing ideals you will. For
the life and the power of a church is in the persistent identity of
its symbols and properties. Meanings change anyhow, but things
endure. The rock upon which a church is founded is not the word of
God; the rock upon which a church is founded is the wealth of men._

HORACE M. KALLEN, "Why Religion?"

During the Middle Ages