men; so go ahead
and kill us too! You serpents, you generation of vipers, how
can you escape the damnation of hell?

At this point, according to the report published in the Jerusalem
"Times", a police sergeant stepped up to the orator and notified him
that he was under arrest; he submitted quietly, but one of his
followers attempted to use a knife, and was severely clubbed. Jesus
was taken to the station-house followed by a riotous throng, and held
upon a charge of disorderly conduct. Next morning the Rev. Dr.
Caiaphas of Old Trinity appeared against him, and Magistrate Pilate
sentenced him to six months on Blackwell's Island, remarking that from
this time on he proposed to make an example of those soap-box orators
who persist in using threatening and abusive language. Just as the
prisoner was being led away, a detective appeared with a requisition
from the Governor, ordering that Jesus be taken to San Francisco,
where he is under indictment for murder in the first degree, it being
charged that his teachings helped to incite the Preparedness Day
explosion.

#The Church Machine#

The Catholics of His time came to Jesus and said, "Master, we would
have a sign of Thee"--meaning that they wanted him to do some magic,
to prove to their vulgar minds that his power came from God. He
answered by calling them an evil and adulterous generation--which is
exactly what I have said about the Papal machine. The Baptists and
Methodists and Presbyterians and other book-worshippers of his time
accused him of violating the sacred commands so definitely set down in
their ancient texts, and to them he answered that the Sabbath was made
for man and not man for the Sabbath; he called them hypocrites, and
quoted Karl Marx at them--"This people honoreth me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me." Because he despised the company of
the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own
class in the places where they gathered--the public houses--the
churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a
wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"--precisely as in the
old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their
meetings in the backrooms of saloons, and precisely as they still
denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.

But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom
of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and
the voice of the carpenter