And this, as the professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a world in which so many people are thinking for themselves.  “The only means of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the sacrifice ... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful ideal” And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used for this purpose.  “Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness of suffering—­of that suffering which a weak and sickly humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could.”

You get this, you “blanket-stiff”, you “husky”, or “wop”, or whatever you are—­you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned to elimination?  There has come, let us say, a period of “overproduction”; you have raised too much food, and therefore you are starving, you have woven too much cloth, and therefore you are naked, you have finished the world for your masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way.  As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it, “Your suppression imposes itself as an imperious necessity.”  And the function of the Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process, by “captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal”!  The priest will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with candle-lights and images, your ears with sweet music and soothing words; and so you will perish without raising a finger!  “Here,” reflects the professor, “we see how magnificently the teaching of Jesus applies to all classes of society!”

Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the capitalist system are godless scoundrels.  But do you think that troubles him?  Not for long.  Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar’s equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me.  “Inequality signifies inequality of capacity,” he explains; but the standard whereby we judge this capacity “cannot be the standard of the moral law.”

The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known, but those which govern his moral nature cannot be known; the moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject to the law of inequality!

As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for teaching the Copernican view of the universe; that infallible popes had again and again condemned this heresy #ex cathedra#.  Said the eloquent cardinal: 

Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest.  How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth #till we know what motion is#?

#Spook Hunting#