mrade Debs, but by St. Basil of
the Greek Church, 329-379. And if the reader objects to my having
fooled him for a minute or two, what will he say to the Christian
Church, which has been fooling him for sixteen hundred years?

#The Soap Box#

This book will be denounced from one end of Christendom to the other
as the work of a blasphemous infidel. Yet it stands in the direct line
of the Christian tradition: written by a man who was brought up in the
Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out
by the formalists and hypocrites in high places; a man who thinks of
Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any
other man that lives or has ever lived on earth; and who has but one
purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream
that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men.

I will go farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for
the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read
his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely,
because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But
this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it
meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church
devotees of Jerusalem. The way to get the spirit of the tirades of
Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church
fathers--translate him into American. This time, since the reader
shares the secret, it will not be necessary to disguise the Bible
style, and we may follow the text exactly. Let me try the twenty-third
chapter of Matthew, omitting seven verses which refer to subtleties of
Hebrew casuistry, for which we should have to go to Lyman Abbott or
St. Alphonsus to find a parallel:

Then Jesus mounted upon a soap-box, and began a speech,
saying, The doctors of divinity and Episcopalians fill the
Fifth Avenue churches; and it would be all right if you were
to listen to what they preach, and do that; but don't follow
their actions, for they never practice what they preach.
They load the backs of the working-classes with crushing
burdens, but they themselves never move a finger to carry a
burden, and everything they do is for show. They wear
frock-coats and silk hats on Sundays, and they sit at the
speakers' table at the banquets of the Civic Federation, and
they occupy the best pews in the churches, and