re of times daily on
passing the church, yet nevertheless the people are rapidly
assimilating the knowledge which elevates and enlightens, and
learning to reject that which terrorizes and deforms the mind, and
just so sure as the last filthy tyrant has been placed for ever
beyond mischief, so will the last priest soon vanish from the land
once contemptuously known as "Holy Russia".

The foregoing is from a revolutionary sympathizer with soviet Russia and
the following is from a reactionary criticizer of it, but both are to
the same effect, that orthodox Christianity is wholly against the
interest of the proletariat and entirely for that of the bourgeoisie:

One of the most striking characteristics of Bolshevism is its
pronounced hatred of religion, and of Christianity most of all. To
the Bolshevik, Christianity is not merely the theory of a mode of
life different from his own; it is an enemy to be persecuted and
wiped out of existence.

To understand this is not difficult. The tendency of the Christian
religion to hold before the believer an ideal of a life beyond
death is diametrically opposed to the ideal of Bolshevism, which
tempts the masses by promising the immediate realization of the
earthly paradise. From that point of view Christianity is not only
a false conception of life; it is an obstacle to the realization of
the Communist ideal. It detaches souls from the objects of sense
and diverts them from the struggle to get the good things of this
life. According to the Bolshevist formula, religion is opium for
the people: and serves as a tool of capitalist domination.

This influence of the churches, in the long run and on the whole has
been and will continue to be the same throughout christendom everywhere
and everywhen, not excepting these United States in the twentieth
century.

Nor is it to any convincing purpose that the representatives of the
owning class contend that kings and priests have lost their supremacy to
presidents and preachers, for it is imperialism in politics which
enthralls and supernaturalism in religion which degrades. The world is
greatly afflicted with both, none of it much, if any, more than our
country.

It seems to us that we see two fundamentally important facts more
clearly than our critics see them: (1) the first step in the way of
salvation for the proletariat is class cons