cannot be confined within the thickest
church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom.
Even in these days, when the power of Mammon is more widespread, more
concentrated and more systematized than ever before in history--even
in these days of Morgan and Rockefeller, there are Christian clergymen
who dare to preach as Jesus preached. One by one they are cast out of
the Church--Father McGlynn, George D. Herron, Alexander Irvine, J.
Stitt Wilson, Austin Adams, Algernon Crapsey, Bouck White; but their
voices are not silenced, they are like the leaven, to which Jesus
compared the kingdom of God--a woman took it and hid it in three
measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The young theological
students read, and some of them understand; I know three brothers in
one family who have just gone into the Church, and are preaching
straight social revolution--and the scribes and the pharisees have not
yet dared to cast them out.

In this book I have portrayed the Christian Church as the servant and
henchman of Big Business, a part of the system of Mammon. Every church
is necessarily a money machine, holding and administering property.
And it is not alone the Catholic Church which is in politics, seeking
favors from the state--the exemption of church property from taxation,
exemption of ministers from military service, free transportation for
them and their families on the railroads, the control of charity and
education, laws to deprive people of amusements on Sunday--so on
through a long list. As the churches have to be built with money, you
find that in them the rich possess the control and demand the
deference, while the poor are humble, and in their secret hearts
jealous and bitter; in other words, the class struggle is in the
churches, as everywhere else in the world, and the social revolution
is coming in the churches, just as it is coming in industry.

It is a fact of deep significance that the majority of ministers are
proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and
beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of
privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The
ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working
people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are
proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out
the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes
for his class inste