f emotional females to the
church in Rome!

From that time on Christianity has been what I have shown in this
book, the chief of the enemies of social progress. From the days of
Constantine to the days of Bismarck and Mark Hanna, Christ and Caesar
have been one, and the Church has been the shield and armor of
predatory economic might. With only one qualification to be noted:
that the Church has never been able to suppress entirely the memory of
her proletarian Founder. She has done her best, of course; we have
seen how her scholars twist his words out of their sense, and the
Catholic Church even goes so far as to keep to the use of a dead
language, so that her victims may not hear the words of Jesus in a
form they can understand.

'Tis well that such seditious songs are sung Only by
priests, and in the Latin tongue!

But in spite of this, the history of the Church has been one incessant
struggle with upstarts and rebels who have filled themselves with the
spirit of the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount, and of that
bitterly class-conscious proletarian, James, the brother of Jesus.

And here is the thing to be noted, that the factor which has given
life to Christianity, which enables it to keep its hold on the hearts
of men today, is precisely this new wine of faith and fervor which has
been poured into it by generation after generation of poor men who
live like Jesus as outcasts, and die like Jesus as criminals, and are
revered like Jesus as founders and saints. The greatest of the early
Church fathers were bitterly fought by the Church authorities of their
own time. St. Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was turned out of
office, exiled and practically martyred; St. Basil was persecuted by
the Emperor Valens; St. Ambrose excommunicated the tyrannical Emperor
Theodosius; St. Cyprian gave all his wealth to the poor, and was
exiled and finally martyred. In the same way, most of the heretics
whom the Holy Inquisition tortured and burned were proletarian rebels;
the saints whom the Church reveres, the founders of the orders which
gave it life for century after century, were men who sought to return
to the example of the carpenter's son. Let us hear a Christian scholar
on this point, Prof. Rauschenbusch:

The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the
Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic
and communistic ideals. Wiclif was by far the greatest
doct