The Works of Joseph M^cCabe

Fifty Years on the Rationalist Front By Issac Goldberg

What is a Jesuit? The question is asked still in every civilised land, and the answer is a confusing mass of contradictions.

Between the hypocrisy of the lower clergy and the ascetic excesses of the higher, the bulk of humanity went its gay way along the broad road.

Being a True Account of His Life and Work

I showed that at every period during the 5,000 years of history when men developed a higher culture Atheism appeared.

I then held the eccentric opinion that the first object of any science was to tell us the nature of the reality or realities it studied.

Exempted from taxation for the "useful public service" of teaching that baptism by means of total ducking is the only device by which men can keep out of hell.

Monasticism, inseparable as it is from every great religious system, seems to emanate spontaneously from the fundamental religious idea.

Being a Sketch of the Progress of the Rationalist Spirit in the 19th Century

The searching crisis through which the nation is passing must have the effect of securing grave consideration for many aspects of our life and institutions.

Thus in every land where Christianity spread the slain and resurrected god, and the dramatic annual celebration of his death and resurrection, were quite familiar. It was Tammuz all over the plains of Mesopotamia, from Ur of the Chaldees to Jerusalem.

"No avenging Jewish God, no Satanic devil, no fiery hell, is of any interest to me," he said. Jesus? He liked the literary figure, but "the clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviors."

A Verbatim Report On Two Nights' Debate Held At The Town Hall, Holborn, on Thursday and Friday evenings, March 9 and 10, 1911

Or Why I Left the Church. It is a familiar practice of the rhetorical defender of a religious sect to compare the calm security of his Church... to the security of an island that is sheltered by a rockbound coast from the sleepless fury of the ocean.

There are few subjects on which so much solemn nonsense has been written as on the nature of conscience and moral law.

The chief paradox of our age is the survival of the Church of Rome.

Amongst these propositions which Catholics were sternly forbidden to entertain was almost every principle of the American Constitution that had any reference to religion.

I need say of them only that they reflect the cloudy ideas of some theologian and tell the reader no more about the situation in these matters today than if they had been written by a Hindu swami.

In contrast, Romanism is treated with a generosity that must have touched the hearts, if not the pockets, of its supporters.

Modern science rediscovered the atoms of Democritus, analysed the universe into innumerable swarms of these tiny particles, and then showed how the infinite variety of things could be built up by their combinations.

Poor Firmicus concluded that the devil had revealed or inspired these things to the pagan nations before Christ was born, in order to spoil the success of the Christian Church when it should be founded. "The devil has his Christs!" he exclaimed.

How could a gang, smaller than that which looted New York in 1860 or St. Louis in 1890, take over a whole country, make a corrupt fortune that beggars Tammany, and have a very fair chance of becoming super-emperors?

The color chosen by the Popes is White. Their flag, it is true, White and Gold, to remind us that they are Kings and need a royal revenue of a billion a year.

It is vitally necessary in the case of Germany. References to the Church in that country suggests to the reader at one moment that it is tremendously wealthy and powerful.

How high Spain would have risen if men had continued to build on that superb foundation of that old Moorish civilization!

So the plot, using the international organization of the Roman Church to lull suspicion in other countries, was unified and took on cosmic proportions.

The latest to hand reminds us how in a world which permits Catholics to intrigue in every newspaper office and every political lobby the Pope can command respectful attention for any eccentricity, audacity, or mendacity he cares to perpetrate.

Ten years ago that appalling greed which is the principal dynamo of the barbaric energy that is wrecking the world expressed itself in four plausible ambitions: those of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperialistic Japan, and the (spiritually) Imperialistic Vatican.

But the most amazing feature of all is the story of the relations of the Vatican with the Soviet civilization. In all that maelstrom of emotion that agitated the press and peoples of the world when mighty Russia entered the war nothing was more intriguing than the wavering and discordant note of the Catholic press.

By the end of the 5th Century they were all ruined and the race from rim to rim of the known world was almost back in barbarism. We cannot compare our age with that awful beginning of the Dark Age, but since then not one of the tragedies that have cast their shadow upon a large area of the earth approaches in magnitude of evil and volume of suffering the world-wide degradation of our time.

...it must, whenever wealth and privilege are threatened, associate with any forces which disown the democratic restraints of our age and by violence and bloodshed suppress the critics of privilege and seek an extension of their wealth and power.

It is one illustration of the evil that is done by the Black International in America in putting its own interests before national interests or those of the race. The aspect of this that concerns us here is that press and politicians say that the Church of Rome is so important an institution in America that they are bound to consult its wishes and are naturally reluctant to see anything wrong in its proceedings.

The first letter I received told me that the land is entirely Fascist, which I knew; that all the priests belong to the Fascist party, which is also called Catholic Action and holds its meetings in the Churches, and that every boy or youth works in it. The local newspapers praise the Germans every day as well as the Italians.

But the richest and most powerful Church in America still gathers folk, in dazzling New York or nerve-racking Chicago or aristocratic Washington, to hear the preacher tell about the legions of devils that hunger for their souls and the vast lakes of fire underground into which they may slip at any moment.

But many feel it very difficult to believe that the Roman Church, which they thought they knew well, is capable of this conspiracy against civilization.

The religious life of a good half of them consists in dodging the devil by going to Church once a week for half an hour and faintly hearing a priest in the far distance mumble prayers in Latin.

This involved a larger use than ever of its second weapon, suppression of truth and mendacity, in the lands that were not yet conquered, and I have endeavored to expose this and enable the reader to understand the Church.

The bandits wanted the international influence of the Vatican to help to dupe the world about their designs; and they promised it a very large share of the spoils of victory by annihilating its critic's and recovering its lost provinces for it.