Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist
Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves.
But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting
walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity
that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their
role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at
self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets'
Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of
interference.

#Religion#

The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn the
sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul. No; I admit the
honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask of the preacher
is that he shall make an effort to practice his doctrine. Let him be
tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad like Nietzsche; let him
stand upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites--on
these terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above
economic science.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about
himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny
his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its
weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be
harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the
formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic
self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to
the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to
say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual
heritage of mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty
and greed? What I say is--Bootstrap-lifting!

It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two senses, one
good and the other bad. Morality means the will to righteousness, or
it means Anthony Comstock; democracy means the rule of the people, or
it means Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word "Religion". In its
true sense Religion is the most fundamental of the soul's impulses,
the impassioned love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the
desire to foster and further it. In that sense every thinking man must
be religious; in that sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing
force, the very nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought
of assailing it, I would make clear that I hold it beyond assailment.

But we a