. Twelve years ago I was invited to address the
book-sellers of New York, in company with a well-known clergyman of
the city, the Reverend Madison C. Peters. This gentleman's address
made such an impression upon me that I recall it even at this
distance: a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire
smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe
it better than to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters
of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on
Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous
clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill.
He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism means
free love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so
dishonest that he garbled the writings of this "Herr Beeble", making
him say something quite different from what he had meant to say. I
could name several clergymen of various denominations who have stooped
to that device against the Socialists; including the Catholic Father
Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and should be stopped with
bullets.

Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's pulpit-slang
used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy; and when I grew up,
and came into the Socialist movement--behold, here he was, chief
inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I had a friend, a man who
saved my life at a time when I was practically starving, and to whom
therefore I owe my survival as a writer; this friend had been a
clergyman in a Middle Western state, and had preached Jesus as he
really was, and so was hated and feared like Jesus. It happened that
he was unhappily married, and permitted his wife to divorce him so
that he might marry the woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the
organized hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils
with poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he
applied his imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel under
the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were reading the
story of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted through the personality of
a he-goat. Of late years this clerical author has turned his energies
to negrophobia and militarism, making millions out of motion-picture
incitements to hatred and terror. The pictures were made here in
Southern California, and friends in the business have described to me
the pious propagandis