is assuredly not swinish.

This adjective, however, fits the opposition as snugly as a coat of
varnish--and by the opposition we mean the group of Protestant churches
commonly called evangelical, to wit, the Methodist, the Baptist, the
Presbyterian and their attendant imitators and inferiors. It is out of
this group that the dominating religious attitude of the American people
arises, and, in particular is from this group that we get our doctrine
that religious activity is not to be challenged, however flagrantly it
may stand in opposition to common honesty and common sense. Under cover
of that artificial toleration--the product, not of a genuine liberalism,
but simply of a mob distrust of dissent--there goes on a tyranny that it
would be difficult to match in modern history. Save in a few large
cities, every American community lies under a sacerdotal despotism whose
devices are disingenuous and dishonourable, and whose power was
magnificently displayed in the campaign for Prohibition--a despotism
exercised by a body of ignorant, superstitious, self-seeking and
thoroughly dishonest men. One may, without prejudice, reasonably defend
the Catholic clergy. They are men who, at worst, pursue an intelligible
ideal and dignify it with a real sacrifice. But in the presence of the
Methodist clergy it is difficult to avoid giving way to the weakness of
indignation. What one observes is a horde of uneducated and inflammatory
dunderheads, eager for power, intolerant of opposition and full of a
childish vanity--a mob of holy clerks but little raised, in intelligence
and dignity, above the forlorn half-wits whose souls they chronically
rack. In the whole United States there is scarcely one among them who
stands forth as a man of sense and information. Illiterate in all save
the elementals, untouched by the larger currents of thought, drunk with
their power over dolts, crazed by their immunity to challenge by their
betters, they carry over into the professional class of the country the
spirit of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the estate
of an idiotic phobia. There is not a village in America in which some
such preposterous jackass is not in eruption. Worse, he is commonly the
leader of its opinion--its pattern in reason, morals and good taste. Yet
worse, he is ruler as well as pattern. Wrapped in his sacerdotal cloak,
he stands above any effective criticism. To question his imbecile ideas
is to stand in contumacy of