sible by judicious selection
of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything
you wish to do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape
and wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct
orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers
to construct a Bible defense of their system.

They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous
form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and see what men
have done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman
coin, I think he would drop dead. As for Paul, he was a Roman
bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up; when he ordered,
"Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly what he said. The Roman
official stamp which he put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the
salvation of the Slavers from the Reformation on.

In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering
the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself knew about it, he
had denounced the princely robbers and the priestly land-exploiters
with that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing
had been done about it, nothing ever is done about it--until at last
the miserable peasants attempted to organize and win their own rights.
Their demands do not seem to us so very criminal as we read them
today; the privilege of electing their own pastors, the abolition of
villeinage, the right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the
reduction of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor,
and--that universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia,
England, Mexico or sixteenth century Germany--the restoration to the
village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of
slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline
sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would drop the
sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with spiritual, not
temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist without inequalities,
etc.

And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon them
and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations which might
have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to the police-force
of his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot answer a rebel with
reason, but the best answer is to hit him with the fist until blood
flows from the nose." He issued a letter: "Against the Murderous and
Thieving Mo