is not always enough to go
around. Recently I met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked,
"I see by the papers that you have just finished a church building."
"Yes," he answered; "and I have had three offers of a new church." I
did not see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so successful
with this one?" The reply was, "They always take it for granted that
you want to change when you've finished a new building, because you
make so many enemies!"

The business man puts up the money to build the church, he puts up the
money to keep it going; and the first rule of a business man is that
when he puts up the money for a thing he "runs" that thing. Of course
he sees that it spreads his own views of life, it helps to maintain
his tradition. In the days of Anu and Baal we heard the proclamation
of the divine right of Kings; in these days of Mammon we hear the
proclamation of the divine right of Merchants. Some fifteen years ago
the head of our Coal Trust announced during a great strike that the
question would be settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His
Infinite Wisdom has given control of the property interests of this
country". And on that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever
their denominations, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath doctrines are alike, as their
week-day practices are alike; whether it is Rockefeller shooting his
Bayonne oil-workers and burning alive the little children of his
miners; or smooth John Wanamaker, paying starvation wages to
department-store girls and driving them to the streets; or that
clergyman who, at a gathering of society ladies, members of the "Law
and Order League" of Denver, declared in my hearing that if he could
have his way he would blow up the home of every coal-striker with
dynamite; or the Rev. R.A. Torrey, Dean of the Bible institute of Los
Angeles, who refused to employ union labor on the million dollar
building of the Institute, declaring that "the Church cannot afford to
have any dealings with a band of fire-bugs and murderers!"

#"Herr Beeble"#

The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association is to justify the processes of trade, and
to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of frugality,
humility, and loyalty to the profit system. The depths of sociological
depravity to which some of the agents of this Association have sunk is
difficult of belief