giant of labor, restless in
his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy.
Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch
of slumber? There is but one agent, without rival--the Keeper of the
Holy Secrets, the Deputy of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and
Withholder of Eternal Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your
forehead in the dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled
my childhood--my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial
robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest, and
pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:

"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou
dost retain, they are retained!"

#Bishops and Beer#

For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of
South Africa--wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly taxed
than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So the armies of
England were sent to subjugate the country. You might think they would
have had the good taste to leave the lowly Jesus out of this
affair--but if so, you have missed the essential point about
established religion. The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for
the populace to revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing
upon some enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests
and deacons to earn their "living." During the Boer war the blood-lust
of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified
monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of
Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and
children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right
Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply.
Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian
glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta,
who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation "virile";
nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making
"noble natures".

The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example, the
opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India
and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred
million "noble natures" by this method; and also they were making a
hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new
"virility," undertook to destroy some o