Forgery in Christianity

The foreword is too long .. more than 30 pages.  I kept the page numbers so it is easy to refer to.

Copyright 1930 by Joseph Wheless
All rights reserved — no part of this book may be reprinted in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

We plead limited reprinting for educational purposes only.  It is almost 100 years old and open for download on the Internet Archive.

 

Dedicated

In grateful appreciation

TO

HENRY L. MENCKEN

Dean of American Letters anb Critics

Theologian Emeritus of
a Treatise on the gods

 

FOREWORD

THE DISEASE AND THE CURE

“ALL TRUTH is safe, and nothing else is
safe; and he who keeps hack the truth, or
withholds it from men, from motives of ex-
pediency, is either a coward or a criminal, or
both ”

Max Muller, The Science of Religion , p. 11.

“The time has come for honest men to de-
nounce false teachers and attack false gods/’

Luther Burbank

M an* is a religious animal — is incurably religious,” are com-
monplaces of clerical rhetoric. The priestly “Doctors of
Divinity” who unctuously utter these pious — and apocryphal
— platitudes — fathered by the wish, — urge the incurable state of
mind — the religious neurosis — of their patients in proof of the
divinely ordered nature of the malady, as patent of the necessity and
importance of their “sacred science” of soul-cure, and the divine
warrant for their continuance in perpetuity in their practice upon
otherwise damned humanity.

It is the ghostly Doctors themselves, however, who by their
quackeries have created the fiction of the disease, and who purposely
keep the patient opiated and on the crutches of Faith, in order to
“make their calling and election sure,” and to perpetuate their thrall-
ing dominion over the mind and money of man. The first recorded
priestly ban — by threat and fear of death — was on Nature’s own
Golden Specific for superstition and priestcraft, — the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge: “Thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that
thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Gen. ii, 17.) A warden
with a flaming sword was posted to guard the Tree: sword, and rack,
and stake, civil and political outlawry, social and business ostracism
and loss of living, odious Odium Theologicum and foul calumny, have

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FOREWORD

ever since been — so far as possible yet are the consecrated weapons
of priestcraft to keep mankind ignorant and obedient to the priests.
“No beast in nature is so implacable as an offended saint,” is axio-
matic of those who prate of loving their enemies. As Jurgen pic-
turesquely says : “The largest lake in Hell is formed by the blood
which the followers of the ‘Prince of Peace 5 have shed in advancing
his cause, 55 — and their selfish own, — as we shall abundantly see in
the following pages.

FAITH IN A FATA!L DECLINE

Howbeit, their pulpits and their press are lugubriously vocal with
Jeremiads bewailing the ever-swelling tide of Unbelief in the land, —
throughout Christendom. The Church statistics, notoriously padded
after the Biblical model of the Censuses in the Wilderness, can claim
at most some forty-odd millions of adherents — many of them by lip-
service and non-paying (therefore negligible), and others many non-
distinguished for piety or common honesty — out of the hundred and
twenty-odd millions of our American population. The Reverend
Rector of Trinity Church in New York City — (one of the wealthiest
deadhand taxfree land monopolists in America) — thus bewails: “In
America we are dealing with a country, the majority of whose in-
habitants are pagans. . . . Only forty percent of the population
acknowledges affiliation with any Church. 55 ( N . F. Times , Mch. 15,
1930.) The ex-Secretary of the Home Missions Council of one of the
great Churches bemoans : “There has been a tremendous revolution
in the history of the Church. . . . The country church is waning
and dying. . . . The revolution under our eyes is found in the mode
of thinking of the whole country. 55 (N. F. Times , Jan. 8, 1930). An
effective cause is found in the recent survey report of the Federal
Council of Churches, to be in “the acceptance of a scientific view of life
. . . general questioning of formerly revered authority . . . with
absolute religious and ethical authority dethroned. . . „ Women have
made no comparable advance in participation in church affairs. . . .
It can hardly be said that the church is an influential factor in the lives
of the working classes. 55 ( N . F. Herald-Tribune „ Jan. 31, 1930.) A
curious confession of likely cause and effect, — in the mental calibre
of the credent — is stated by the Reverend publicity counsel of a
viii

 

FOREWORD

national Church : “Al] sermons should be keyed to the mentality of a
fifteen-year-old youth. , . . Half the people of the United States
have the mentality of a fifteen-year-old youth. Most church-goers
enjoyed the ‘children’s sermon’ more than the one on religious phi-
losophy. . . . The average man can carry only one idea at a time.”
(Herald-Tribune, Jan. 28, 1930.) — Verily, “Of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven.”

All Fools’ Day seems to be a sort of New Year’s for ecclesiastical
statistics and general stock-taking of the faithful: annually at that
time the very religious Christian Herald publishes its collect of fig-
ures on Church membership ; the Catholic Directory emits its own ;
and the generality of Divines gives voice to holy Lamentations and
pious warnings to the Church and to the ungodly. From this year’s
extensive crop a little sheaf is added, the matter being important to
our purposes, and curiously instructive as depicting the accelerated
downward tobogganing of the Faith. The Report of the Christian
Herald discloses : “The total of communicants last year [1929] was
50,006,566,” of which number it assigns a total of 18,051,680 to the
fourteen sects of Catholic dis-Unity ( Herald-Tribune , Apl. 26,
1930) ; though the figures of the Catholic Directory are 20,178,202.
(Z6. Apl. 16, 1930). Under the alarming caption — “Warns Protes-
tant Church it is Lagging,” the Report of the Director of the Church
Survey bemoans: “The Protestant Church in America is not keep-
ing pace with the population. . . . American Protestantism in-
creased from 7 in each 100 of the population in 1800 to 24 in each
100 of the population of 1900. During the past thirty years Protes-
tantism has not increased its ratio of the population as much as one
member more per hundred.” — This is a very notable disclosure: that
for a whole century the very vocal and intolerant Protestant popu-
lation of this country has varied between 7% and 24% of the total
population, and is today less than 25% : — yet this petty minority
dingdongs that this is a “Christian country,” and imposes its lu-
dicrous medieval “Blue Laws” and tyrannous proscriptions — as will
be noted — upon the great anti-clerical majority of the people. And
further striking figures follow from the same source: “A study made
in 1912 — [i. e. before Woman Suffrage], — exclusively in cities,
found two-thirds of the Protestant city membership consisted of

ix

 

women. . . . There has been a steady proportionate decrease of in-
terest in religion among women of the United States. … It was
also found [in this present Survey] that only 18 percent of the
country population is in Church membership, although it is custom-
ary to think of country people as highly religious. — [They, too, are
becoming more educated.] In New York City, the Church population
is reported equally divided among Protestants, Roman Catholics and
Jews. Only about eight percent of the population are members of the
Protestant churches,” — thus only some 24% of the people of New
York City among all three much-divided sects. (N. Y . Times , May
5, 1930.) In a recent abusive set of letters by three True Believers of
the same family name (one a Rev.), addressed to the Editor of a
Metropolitan paper for writing sanely about the Tabooed Subject
of Birth Control, this was denounced as an “insult to over 2,000,000”
Faithful in this City. ( Herald-Tribune , Apl. 12, 1930.) But the
Faithful boast of their 444 churches in Greater New York: if each
had the exaggerated membership of 1,000, — let the reader do his own
figuring and note the result. And foreign immigration of the Faithful
has been sadly curtailed of late by law.

The true significance to the Church of the great slump in its mem-
bership — and hence revenues, is crudely “given away” by the Very
Rev. Episcopal Bishop of Long Island, lamenting like conditions in
his Diocese: “The growth of population during the last decade on
Long Island has been a challenge to the Church. . . . The Episcopal
Bishop of the diocese advocated [in a public address] a drive to
bring into the church the wealthy residents of Long Island.”
( Herald-Tribune , May 6, 1930.) The Most Rev. Episcopal superior
of the last-lamenting has made a famous discovery, and with oracular
gravity which evokes a smile he assigns its cause: “There are no
great poets, painters, writers, nor musicians — [only great Manni-
kins of Bishops] — today, and the cause of this artistic deficiency
can be found in the moderns 5 total disregard for religion.” (Episc.
Bishop of Manhattan: Herald-Tribwne , Apl. 21, 1930.) And the
Highly Rev. Bishop of the National Capital thus portentously, and
truly, glooms : “There is an organized movement, world-wide in scope,
to unsettle Christian ideals and Christian institutions, both in Rus-
sia and elsewhere 55 ( lb. May 13, 1930) ; — which, judging by the age-
x

 

old gigantic failure of both — as herein we shall see, — is not so much
to be wondered.

So far as Russia is concerned — (and the fact and the reason for
it apply as well to every other “Christian” country), — the reason
is truly stated by the pious Editor of Atlantis in a Jeremiad of con-
fession before the Institute of Citizenship just held in Atlanta : “For
a thousand years, ever since Russia became a Christian country, and
more especially in the last 200 years, when the Czar became the offi-
cial head of the Church, the State religion in Russia was one of the
means whereby the Russian people were oppressed , exploited and
kept in ignorance . . . . The Russian people had a score to settle
with the Church after the revolution, and they took full advantage
of it” ( N . Y . Times , Apl. 8, 1930), a like chance for which all Chris-
tendom is looking. The very religious Editor continues to confess:
“It is useless to deny that the Church, in most instances, has lost its
hold upon vast majorities of the people.” (Ibid.) At the Christian
Herald Institute of Religion held this year at Buck Hill Falls, Pa.,
a perfect symposium of Jeremiads bewailed Faith on the Toboggan :
“Unless emphasis on elaborate creeds does not cease, we will deliver
ourselves into the hands of the Humanists for the defeat which we
deserve .” . . . “The Church is simply going to pieces in the small
towns of the Middle West. . . . The paganization of rural America
is going on so fast that if we wait for even the union of closely allied
denominations to be accomplished, it will mean ruination.” . . .
“The greatest difficulty in effecting mergers of churches lies in person-
alities and prejudices.” (Herald-Tribune, May 15, 1930.) Thus today,
after nearly two thousand years of the “sweetness and light” of our
Divine Christian religion, “personalities and prejudices” among those
taught to love even their enemies persist and keep the Fold of Christ
divided into mutually-hating Flocks; precisely so that the olden
Pagan sneer at the early Christians is perfectly befitting their suc-
cessors today: “There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who
differ concerning their faith.” (Lecky, Rationalism in Europe , ii, 81.)

To conclude this review of pregnant figures and confessions, two
luminous revelations are in one day made of cause and effect. Says
the eminent Rev. President of the National Bible Institute : . be-

cause the Bible has ceased to have authority either in the pulpit

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or in the pew. Decline in church attendance and decrease in church
membership are almost invariably traceable to unbelief in the divine
inspiration and authority of the Bible,” — due to increasing knowl-
edge of its true character, as herein revealed, (j Herald-Tribune, May
26, 1930.) And the ghastly irony and joke of the whole huge bank-
ruptcy of Faith is thus exposed by the egregious Pastor of a Brook-
lyn Baptist Flock, who images the Missionary “selling” the Faith
to the benighted Heathen : “ € I have a religion here that will do you
poor heathen a lot of good. Of course it hasn’t succeeded very well
at home , but we are sure it will do you a lot of good/ ” (Ibid.) It’s
just like God told the Jews : You shan’t sell the dead carcasses found
by the way to the Chosen ; “but thou shalt give it unto the stranger
that is in thy gates, that he may eat it ; or thou mayst sell it unto an
alien”! (Deut. xiv, 21.) So the dead cats of Faith are flung out of
the sanctuary as unfit for the Knowing, but are peddled to the igno-
rant heathen for whatever the refuse may bring of clerical revenue.

Like conditions exist in all priest-ridden lands. The Rt. Rev. Arch-
bishop of Canterbury in his call for the decennial Lambeth Confer-
ence for 1930, at which over sixty of the Episcopal bishops of this
country are to attend, sounds a fateful monition : “The new knowl-
edge of the Bible and, still more of the universe in which we live still
confuses and bewilders the beliefs of many of our clergy and people.
There are tendencies in the life of our Church which suggest the prev-
alence of forms of belief . . . which almost exclude belief in God the
Father and God the Holy Spirit.” (Herald-Tribune, Mch. 12, 1930.)
Wails the Rev. Pyke to the annual Assembly of the National
Council of Evangelical Churches of England : “A large part of Eng-
land has lapsed into semi-heathenism ; . . . our half-filled churches.”
(Herald-Tribune, Apl. 20, 1930.) Such creed-searchings and churchly
lamentations over their moribund condition may be multiplied into
volumes.

Some potent cure thus seems to be at work. This curative specific is
simply increasing popular knowledge : “Know the truth and the truth
shall make you free,” is the Golden Recipe for the religious disorder.
What Cicero said of the Pythian Oracles may as truly be applied to
every form of priestcraft : “When men began to be less credulous, their
power vanished.”

 

Day by day, as knowledge increaseth and spreads amongst the
people in the pews as well as among the parsons, does it become more
difficult and embarrassing for the pulpiteers to “put over” their tales
of myth and magic to the hearers of the Word. Even the clergy are
becoming awakened to the stinging truth aimed at priests and the
priest-taught by Prof. Shotwell: “Where we can understand, it is a
moral crime to cherish the un-understood,” and are beginning to feel
the humiliation of their false position. A noted clerical educator, Dr.
Remold Niebuhr, professor of Christian Ethics in that hotbed of every
heresy, the Union Theological Seminary, in his textbook suggestively
entitled Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic , makes this
confession of recognized Dishonesty in the mass of clerical teaching
and preaching: “As a teacher your only interest is to discover the
truth. As a preacher you must conserve other interests besides the
truth . It is your business to deal circumspectly with the whole reli-
gious inheritance lest the virtues [ ?] which are involved in the older
traditions perish through your iconoclasm. That is a formidable task
a/nd a harrassing one; for one can never be quite sure where pedagog-
ical cmtion ends AND DISHONESTY BEGINS” ! (Quoted by Alva
Johnston in N. F. Heraldr-Tribune , Mch. 8, 1930.)

The great Church Father, Bishop St. Augustine (of whom more
hereafter) , was wise to the psychology of — at least — Pagan religion
— the mode of its incipience and the manner of its age-long persist-
ence. The priests and the priest-taught, he tells, instilled the virus of
superstition into their victims when “small and weak,” when they
knew not to resist or healthily to react against the contaminating
inoculation; “then, afterwards, it was necessary that succeeding
generations should preserve the traditions of their ancestors , drinking
in this superstition with their mother’s milk.” (Augustine, City of
God, xxii, 6.) Thinks one that this cunning modus operandi is confined
only to Pagan priestcrafts and superstitions?

If, instead of the saintly Doctors of Hebrao-Christian Divinity,
injecting their saving “opiate of the people” into the cradled babes of
Christ, it were the abhorred Doctors of Mohammedan or Mormon
Divinity who got to the cradles first, — those infant souls would all
but surely be lost to the Christ, and in their God’s tender mercy, as
assured by the sainted Augustine, would spend eternity crawling on

xiii

 

the candent floors of Hell, playing with the “worm that never dies” :
hardly from the cradle to the grave could all the Christian purges
for Sin and pills for Sal[i]vation of Soul, later administered, serve for
effective catharsis of the venom of those Christianly-hated “super-
stitions, drunk in with their mother’s milk.”

This truth is strikingly stated in an eloquent period by Ingersoll,
and stunningly confirmed and confessed by the syndicated Prophet
of Protestantism below to be quoted. The former opens his classic
Why I Am an Agnostic , with these trenchant words :

“For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits
and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashions of our garments, depend
on where we were bom. We are moulded and fashioned by our surround-
ings. Environment is a sculptor — a painter.

“If we had been born in Constantinople, the most of us would have
said: There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ If our
parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been wor-
shippers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana.

“As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and
take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough
for them. . . .

“The Scotch are Calvinists because their fathers were. The Irish are
Catholics because their fathers were. The English are Episcopalians be-
cause their fathers were, and the Americans are divided into a hundred
sects because their fathers were. . . . Children are sometimes superior
to their parents, modify their ideas, change their customs, and arrive at
different conclusions.” ( Works , iv, 5-6; cf. Is It God’s Word ? 2nd. e<L
p. v.)

The truth thus uttered by the great Agnostic finds its confirma-
tion curiously wrung from the lips of the Bellwether of would-be
“reconciliationists” of primitive Superstition and modern Science.
In a metropolitan newspaper carrying his syndicated “Daily Coun-
sel” to the love-lorn and the misty-minded, a Virginia Believer puts
to him challengingly the question direct: “Do you mean to imply
that belief is largely a matter of environment, and if so, would you
not have been as firm a follower of Mahomet as you are of Christ if
you had been born of Mahometan parentage and brought up in that
faith?” For once there was no chance for Conmanian suppleness of
evasion, so the blunt and confusing truth is forced: Yes ! “It is fairly
xiv

 

certain that had I been cradled in Mohametans [sic] I should now
have been turning toward Mecca at the appointed hours” ! ( N . F.
Herald-Tribune , Oct. 29, 1929.) Thus the champion special pleader
for the fast fading faith of Christ confesses away the divinely self-
evident “truth” of his Christian faith, admits that it is the result not
of independent thought and convincing proofs to his mind, but the
inheritance of the cradle and the nursery, — that that towering in-
tellect would today be bearing witness to the “revealed truth” of
a false God and religion, if he had chanced to be “bora that way” !
Allah would to him — and to millions — be true and living God and
Jehovah a crude barbarian myth, but for the accident of birth and
teaching, — a reversal of the whole scheme of salvation! Thus the
Cradle determines the Creed ; it is the virus of the superstition-germ
first injected which infects the credulity-center of the brain and colors
too-oft through life the whole concept of “religious truth” in the
mind of the patient.

The psychology of the priestly maxim — “Disce primum quod
credendum est — Learn first what is to be believed,” and the persistent
virulence of the virus thus injected, is aptly signified by the Rev. Wen-
ner, 83-year old Bellwether of Lutheranism in America, and for 61
years pastor of one of its oldest sheep-folds in New York City: “I
do not think that time has produced many changes in the attitude of
Lutheran worshippers, — because of the stable nature of the religious
education we give the youth of our sect. From the age of six onward
we instruct them in the tenets of our faith, and they usually abide.”
(N. F. Herald-Tribune , Oct. 10, 1929.)

The predilect precept of the Doctors of every brand of Divinity
forever is : “Catch ’em in the cradle, and get ’em inoculated before
they know.” In the bib and rattle period, the childish brain is a soft,
clean surface, “soft as wax to be moulded into vice,” as His Holiness
says : helpless it receives and retains whatever is first impressed or
imposed upon it : true religion or false, Christ or Crishna or Santa
Claus, Holy Ghost or the ghosts of Afric superstition. “Give us a
child until it is seven, and we’ve got it cinched for life,” is the ghoul-
ish axiom of all the Faiths : “Suffer little children to come unto me,
for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven,” — as of the heathen Nirvana.
How godly a work is it to sear the thoughtless child mind with the

 

brand of Faith ; how infamous and damnable to offer to the “imma-
ture” and inept youth in college freedom from the stigma of credulity !
How crude and cruel for the Chinese to bind and cripple for life the
feet of their girl children ; how fiendish the custom of sundry savage
tribes, ignorant of the “Light of the World,” to clamp the infant
heads between boards so as to produce the hideous deformity of skull
so esthetically popular among them ; but how pleasing to gods and
priests to fetter the child mind in the bonds of Faith, and so to dwarf
and deaden the mind’s most precious faculty — Reason! “To suc-
ceed,” eloquently said Ingersoll, “the theologians invade the cradle,
the nursery. In the brain of innocence they plant the seeds of super-
stition. They pollute the minds and imaginations of children. They
frighten the happy with threats of pain — they soothe the wretched
with gilded lies. . . . All of these comforting and reasonable things
are taught by the ministers in their pulpits — by teachers in Sunday
schools and by parents at home. The children are victims. They are
assaulted in the cradle — in their mother’s arms. Then, the school-
master carries on the war against their natural sense, and all the
books they read are filled with the same impossible truths. The poor
children are helpless. The atmosphere they breathe is filled with lies
— lies that mingled with their blood.” (Works, iv, 10). This unholy
cradle-robbing goes on with vehement zest. The Churches, the Fed-
eral Council of Churches, the Vicar of God and his adjutants, all
ply amain the arts of enslaving the babe in the cradle, the child in
the school. In the Encyclical of December 31, 1929, the right of the
Church to the child is proclaimed as above that of parents and State ;
the secular public schools are damned, and the prole of the Faithful
are forbidden to attend and mingle with the “irreligious” State pupils :
“the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, namely, those which are
open to Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is forbidden to Catholic
children,” as such a school is not “a fit place for Catholic students,”
who must be baited with “the supernatural.” ( Current History , Mclu
1930, p. 1091, passim .) Yet the banned and cursed Public Schools of
New York City, forbidden to the Faithful child, the ecclesiastical
City government fills with Faithful teachers for the purpose of “boot-
legging” the forbidden supernaturalism into them ; a work so wide-
spread and active, that the Cardinal Archbishop of the City, address-
xvi

 

in g over 2000 of the Catholic Teachers Association, “praises their
work of teaching faith in City Institutions. 5 * ( N . F. Times , Nov. 25,
1928.) And every rationalist effort to counteract such illegal prop-
aganda and to free the schools from the pernicious influences of super-
stition, is denounced and opposed by the Bible bootleggers of every
brand of Faith ; and in the brave instance of Russia, a medieval orgy of
prayer-assault on High Heaven is made, to counsel God what he
ought to do to the Russians for their “godless 55 efforts to save the chil-
dren of that Church-cursed land from the superstitions of priestcraft.

In an ironical letter to the English press, in which he “enters the
lists against the British critics of Moscow’s anti-clerical policy, 55
George Bernard Shaw, writing under a transparent Russian pseu-
donym, says : “In Russia we take religious questions very seriously.
We protect our children very carefully against proselytizers of our
fantastic sects until they are old enough to make up their own minds.
To us, it is inconceivable that a government would tolerate the incul-
cation upon helpless children of beliefs that will not stand the most
strenuous scientific examination or in which the teachers themselves
do not honestly believe. . . . We cannot understand why the so-called
Articles of Religion, which have been described by one of the most
learned and intellectually gifted of your churchmen as capable of be-
ing professed only by ‘fools, bigots or liars, 5 are deliberately taught
as divine truths in your schools. . . . Russia is setting an example of
intellectual and moral integrity to the whole world, while England
is filling its temples with traders, persecuting its clergy, and bringing
up children to be scoffers to whom religion means nothing but hypoc-
risy and humbug. 55 (Herald-Tribune, Apl. 7, 1930.)

Thus the Church enchains the Reason. The proudest boast today
of the Church for its ex-Pagan Saint Augustine, is that : “as soon as a
contradiction — [between his “philosophy 55 and his religious doc-
trines] — arises, he never hesitates to subordinate his philosophy to
religion, reason to faith “I (Cath. Encyc. ii, 86.) So this great ex-
Pagan Saint of the Church surrenders his reason to faith, and avers :
“I would not believe the Gospels to be true, unless the authority of
the Catholic Church constrained me 55 ! (Augustine, De Genesi.)

Ingersoll, in one of his glowing, devastating periods of oratory,
said: “Somebody ought to tell the truth about the Bible! 55 That I

xvii

 

have already essayed quite comprehensively to do. In my recent
work, Is It God’s Word? (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1926, 2nd
and 3rd Editions), I devote some five hundred pages to “An Exposi-
tion of the Fables and Mythology of the Bible and of the Impostures
of Theology , 1 99 as my thesis is defined in my sub-title. “A farrago of
^palpable nonsense,” in the words of the Dean of American critics, is
about all that remains of Holy Writ as the pretended “Word of
God,” as the result of that searching analysis.

That’ study was limited, in most part, to the sacred texts for the
internal evidences, which themselves so abundantly afford, of their
own falsity and primitive-minded fatuity. On the other phase of in-
quiry I there limited myself to the suggestive remark : “The gospels
are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates”
(p. 279 ; cf. p. 400), purposing then to complement the work by this
sequel or companion volume, treating the frauds and forgeries of re-
ligion and the Church.

Taking up now more particularly the second phase of my subject,
I here propose to treat of the inveterate forgeries, frauds, impostures,
and mendacities of Priestcraft and its Theology. I shall be explicit
and plain spoken, and unmistakably state my purpose and my proofs*
For nearly two thousand years the priestcraft of Christendom, for
purposes of domination by fear and greedy exploitation through im-
posture upon credulity, has consigned to earthly fire and sword* and
to eternal damnation all who dared to dissent or to protest; the
priestly word “miscreant,” misbeliever, has become the synonym for
everything foul and criminal in human nature. The day of reckoning
and of repudiation is at hand; Priestcraft has here its destroying
answer, in very plain and unafraid words.

This book is a grave indictment, impossible to be made or to be
credited unless supported at every point by incontrovertible facts.
These I promise to produce and array in due and devastating order.

THE INDICTMENT

I charge, and purpose to prove, from unimpeachable texts and
historical records, and by authoritative clerical confessions, beyond
the possibility of denial, evasion, or refutation:
xviii

 

1. That the Bible, in its every Book, and in the strictest legal and
moral sense, is a huge forgery.

2. That every Book of the New Testament is a forgery of the Chris-
tian Church ; and every significant passage in those Books, on which
the fabric of the Church and its principal Dogmas are founded, is
a further and conscious later forgery, wrought with definite fraudu-
lent intent.

3. Especially, and specifically, that the “famous Petrine text” —
“Upon this Rock I will build my church” — the cornerstone of the gi-
gantic fabric of imposture, — and the other, “Go, teach all nations,” —
were never uttered by the Jew Jesus, but are palpable and easily-
proven late Church forgeries.

4. That the Christian Church, from its inception in the first little
Jewish-Christian religious societies until it reached the apex of its
temporal glory and moral degradation, was a vast and tireless
Forgery-mill.

5. That the Church was founded upon, and through the Dark Ages
of Faith has battened on — (yet languishes decadently upon) — monu-
mental and petty forgeries and pious frauds, possible only because of
its own shameless mendacity and through the crass ignorance and su-
perstition of the sodden masses of its deluded votaries, purposely kept
in that base condition for purposes of ecclesiastical graft and aggran-
dizement through conscious and most unconscionable imposture.

6. That every conceivable form of religious lie, fraud and imposture
has ever been the work of Priests ; and through all the history of the
Christian Church, as through all human history, has been — and, so
far as they have not been shamed out of it by skeptical ridicule and
exposure, yet is, the age-long stock in trade and sole means of existence
of the priests and ministers of all the religions.

7. That the clerical mind, which “reasons in chains,” is, from its
vicious and vacuous “education,” and‘ the special selfish interests of
the priestly class, incapable either of the perception or the utterance
of truth, in matters where the interests of priestcraft are concerned.

As the Catholic-Protestant-Skeptic Bayle, of seventeenth century
fame, said: “I am most truly a Protestant ; for I protest indifferently
against all systems and all sects” of religious imposture.

 

My accusal, therefore, is not limited in purpose, scope or effect to
any one Church or sect, but is aimed alike at all of the discordant
factions of ancient Jewish and more modern Christian faith. For,
as has been well said, “Faith is not knowledge, no more than that three
is four, but eminently contained in it ; so that he that knows, believes,
and something more; but he that believes many times does not know —
nay, if he doth barely and merely believe, he doth never know.” The
same critical cleric at another place said: “still less was it ever in-
tended that men should so prostitute their reason, as to believe with
infallible faith what they are unable to prove with infallible argu-
ments.” (Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants , pp. 66, 4*12.) With
infallible facts I purpose to blast the false pretenses of Priest-forged
Faith.

It is matter of fact, that for some 1500 years of this Era there was
but one “True Church” of Christ ; and that Church claims with con-
scious pride the origin and authorship of all the New Testament
Books, out of its own Holy bosom, by its own canonized Saints. The
New Testament Books are, therefore, distinctively Catholic docu-
ments. That Church, therefore, — if these its credentials and documents
are forgeries, — as from its own records I shall prove — itself forged all
the Books of the New Testament and all the documents of religious
dogma and propaganda the forgery of which shall be proved in this
book, and did itself perpetrate all the pious frauds herein revealed,
and is their chief beneficiary. All the other Christian sects, however, are
sprung or severed from the original One True Church ; — “all other
forms of the Christian religion . . . originated by secession from the
True Church, . . . and their founders . . . were externally members
of the Church.” (CE* vii, 367.) All these Protestant sects, therefore,
with full knowledge of the guilty facts and partakers in the frauds,
found their claim to Divinity — and priestly emoluments — upon and
through those tainted titles, and thus yet fully share the guilt as ac-
complices after the fact. The “Reformed” Sects, on breaking away
from the old Monopoly of Forgery, appropriated the least clumsy and
more plausible of the pious Counterfeit of Christianity, and for the
centuries since have industriously and knowingly been engaged in
passing the stolen counterfeit upon their own unsuspecting flocks ; they
are therefore equally guilty with the original Forgers of the Faith,
xx

 

OUTLINE OF CASE AND PROOFS

The proofs of my indictment are marvellously easy. They are to
be found in amplest store of history and accredited ecclesiastic au-
thorities, and in abounding incautious admissions made by the ac-
credited spokesmen of the Accused : upon these I shall freely and fully
draw for complete proofs of my every specification. These damning
things of the Church, scattered through many clerical volumes and
concealed in many archives, are not well known to the pious or preoc-
cupied layman. My task is simply to bring together the documentary
proofs and expose them before the astonished eyes of the modem
reader ; that is the prime merit of my work. To accomplish this purpose
with unimpeachable certitude, I need and make no apology for the
liberal use of quotation marks in presenting the ensuing startling ar-
ray of accusations and confessions; to be followed by the plenary
proofs.

As in the judicial process, I shall, before proceeding to the con-
crete proofs, define first the crime charged, and outline the scope of
the evidence to be presented. I shall first make a prima facie justifica-
tion of the charges, by citing a few generalities of confession of guilt,
with corroborations by weighty supporting authorities, and thus
create the proper “atmosphere” for the appreciation of the facts.
Then shall come the shaming proofs in astounding detail.

FORGERY DEFINED

Forgery, in legal and moral sense, is the utterance or publication,
with intent to deceive or defraud, or to gain some advantage, of a
false document, put out by one person in the name of and as the gen-
uine work of another, who did not execute it, or the subsequent altera-
tion of a genuine document by one who did not execute the original.
This species of falsification extends alike to all classes of writings,
promissory notes, the coin or currency of the realm, to any legal or
private document, or to a book. All are counterfeit or forged if not
authentic and untampered.

A definition by a high ecclesiastical authority may appropriately
be cited, as it thoroughly defines the chronic clerical crime. The Cath –
olic Encyclopedia thus defines the crime :

xxi

 

“Forgery (Lat. falsum ) differs very slightly from fraud. It consists in
the deliberate untruthfulness of an assertion, or in the deceitful presenta-
tion of an object, and is based on an intention to deceive and to injure
while using the externals of honesty. Forgery is truly a falsehood and is
a fraud, but it is something more. … A category consists in making use
of such forgery , and is equivalent to forgery proper . . . . The Canonical
legislation [dealt principally with] the production of absolutely false
documents and the alteration of authentic … for the sake of certain
advantages. . . .

“Canon law connects forgery and the use of forged documents, on the
presumption that he who would make use of such documents must he either
the author or instigator of the forgery . In canon law forgery consists not
only in the fabrication or substitution of an entirely false document, but
even by partial substitution, or by any alteration affecting the sense and
bearing of an authentic document or any substantial point, such as names,
dates, signature, seal, favour granted, by erasure, by scratching out or
writing one word over another, and the like.” ( Catholic Encyclopedia ,
vi, 135, 136.)

Under every phase and phrase of this its own clerico-legal defini-
tion, the Church is guilty, — is most guilty.

A “beginning of miracles” of confession of ecclesiastical guilt of
forgery of Church documents is made in the same above article by
the Encyclopedia ,* — very many others will follow in due course from
the same source:

“Substitution of false documents and tampering with genuine ones was
quite a trade in the Middle Ages. Innocent III (1198) points out nine
species of forgery [of ecclesiastical records] which had come under hi $
notice.” (CF. vi, 136.)

But such frauds of the Church were not confined to the Middle
Ages ; they begin even with the beginning of the Church and infest
every period of its history for fifteen hundred years and defile nearly
every document, both of “Scriptures” and of Church aggrandizement.
As truly said by Collins, in his celebrated Discourse of Free Thinking:

“In short, these frauds are very common in all hooks which are pub-
lished hy priests or priestly men . . . . For it is certain they may plead the
authority of the Fathers for Forgery, Corruption and mangling of
Authors, with more reason than for any of their Articles of Faith/’ (p, 96.)
xxii

 

Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the great “Father of Church His-
tory” (32 4 a, 3>.) whom Niebuhr terms “a very dishonest writer,” —
of which we shall see many notable instances, — says this : “But it is not
our place to describe the sad misfortunes which finally came upon [the
Christians], as we do not think it proper, moreover, to record their
divisions and unnatural conduct to each other before the persecution
— [by Diocletian, 305 a. d.]. Wherefore we have decided to relate
nothing concernmg them except things in which we can vindicate the
Divine judgment. . . . But we shall introduce into this history in
general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and
afterwards to posterity.” {Ecclesiastical History , viii, 2 ; NfyPNF. i,
323-324.)

Eusebius himself fraudulently “subscribed to the [Trinitarian]
Creed formed by the Council of Nicaea, but making no secret, in the
letter which he wrote to his own Church, of the non-natwral sense in
which he accepted it.” {Cath. Encyc . v, 619.) As St. Jerome says,
“Eusebius is the most open champion of the Arian heresy,” which
denies the Trinity. (Jerome, Epist. 84, 2; NfyPNF. vi, 176.) Bishop
Eusebius, as we shall see, was one of the most prolific forgers and liars
of his age of the Church, and a great romancer ; in his hair-raising
histories of the holy Martyrs, he assures us “that on some occasions the
bodies of the martyrs who had been devoured by wild beasts, upon the
beasts being strangled, were found alive in their stomachs, even after
having been fully digested” ! (quoted, Gibbon, History , Ch. 37 ; Lard-
ner, iv, p. 91 ; Diegesis , p. 272). To such an extent had the “pious
frauds of the theologians been thus early systematized and raised to
the dignity of a regular doctrine,” that Bishop Eusebius, “in one of
the most learned and elaborate works that antiquity has left us, the
Thirty-second Chapter of the Twelfth Book of his Evangelical Prep-
aration, bears for its title this scandalous proposition: ‘How it may
be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as a Medicine, and for the
Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived 5 55 — (quoting the Greek
title; Gibbon, Vindication, p. 76).

St. John Chrysostom, the “Golden Mouthed, 55 in his work On the
Priesthood, has a curious panygeric on the clerical habit of telling lies :
“Great is the force of deceit ! provided it is not excited by a treacherous
intention. 55 {Coirm* on 1 Cor . ix, 19; Diegesis , p. 309.) Chrysostom

xxiii

 

was one of the Greek Fathers of the Church, concerning whom Dr.
(later Cardinal) Newman thus apologetically spoke: “The Greek
Fathers thought that, when there was a justa causa , an untruth need
not be a lie . . . . Now, as to the just cause, . . . the Greek Fathers
make them such as these — self-defense, charity, zeal for God’s honour,
and the like.” (Newman, Apology for His Life, Appendix G, p. 34*5-
6.) He says nothing of his favorites, the Latin Fathers; but we shall
hear them described, and amply see them at work lying in their zeal
for God’s honor, and to their own dishonor.

The Great Latin Father St. Jerome (c. 34*0-4*20), who made the
celebrated Vulgate Version of the Bible, and wrote books of the most
marvelous Saint-tales and martyr-yarns, thus describes the approved
methods of Christian propaganda, of the Fathers, Greek and Latin
alike, against the Pagans :

“To confute the opposer, now this argument is adduced and now that.
One argues as one pleases, saying one thing while one means another. . . .
Origen, Methodius, Eusebius, and Apollinaris write at great length against
Celsus and Porphyry. Consider how subtle are the arguments, how in-
sidious the engines with which they overthrow what the spirit of the devil
has wrought. Sometimes, it is true, they are compelled to say not what they
think but what is needful . . . .

“I say nothing of the Latin authors, of Tertullian, Cyprian, Minutius,
Victorianus, Lactantius, Hilary, lest I should appear not so much to be
defending myself as to be assailing others. I will only mention the APOS-
TLE PAUL. , . . He, then, if anyone, ought to be calumniated; we should
speak thus to him: The proofs which you have used against the Jews and
against other heretics bear a different meaning in their own contexts to
that which they bear in your Epistles. We see passages taken cap-
tive by your pen and pressed into service to win you a victory, which
in volumes from which they are taken have no controversial bearing at
all . . . the line so often adopted by strong men in controversy — of justi-
fying the means by the result ” (Jerome, Epist. to Pammachus, xlviii, 13;
N$PNF. vi, 72-73 ; See post, p. 230.)

Of Eusebius and the others he again says, that they “presume at
the price of their soul to assert dogmatically whatever first comes into
their head.” (Jerome, Epist. li, 7; id. p. 88.) And again, of the incen-
tive offered by the gullible ignorance of the Faithful, for the glib
mendacities of the priests : “There is nothing so easy as by sheer volu-
xxiv

 

FOREWORD

bility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation.”
( Epist . lii, 8 ; p. 93.) Father Jerome’s own high regard for truth and
his zeal in propaganda of fables for edification of the ignorant ex-
pagan Christians is illustrated in numberless instances. He tells us of
the river Ganges in India, which 4< has its source in Paradise” ; that in
India “are also mountains of gold, which however men cannot ap-
proach by reason of the griffins, dragons, and huge monsters which
haunt them; for such are the guardians which avarice needs for its
treasures.” {Epist. cxxv, 6 ; NfyPNF. vi, 245.) He reaches the climax
in his famous Lives of sundry Saints. He relates with all fervor the
marvelous experiences of the “blessed hermit Pauhis,” who was 113
years of age, and for sixty years had lived in a hole in the ground in
the remotest recesses of the desert; his nearest neighbor was St.
Anthony, who was only ninety and lived in another hole four days’
journey away. The existence and whereabouts of Paulus being revealed
to Anthony in a vision, he set out afoot to visit the holy Paulus. On
the way, “all at once he beholds a creature of mingled shape, half horse
half man, called by the poets Hippo-centaur,” with whom he holds
friendly converse. Later “he sees a mannikin with hooked snout, homed
forehead, and extremities like goat’s feet,” this being one of the desert
tribe “whom the Gentiles worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs,
and Incubi,” and whose strange language Anthony was rejoiced to
find that he could understand, as they reasoned together about the
salvation of the Lord. “Let no one scruple to believe this incident,”
pleads Father Jerome ; “its truth is supported by” one of these crea-
tures that was captured and brought alive to Alexandria and sent
embalmed to the emperor at Antioch. Finally holy Anthony reached
the retreat of the blessed Paulus, and was welcomed. As they talked, a
raven flew down and laid a whole loaf of bread at their feet. “See,” said
Paulus, “the Lord truly loving, truly merciful, has sent us a meal. For
the last sixty years I have always received half a loaf ; but at your
coming the Lord has doubled his soldier’s rations.” During the visit
Paulus died; Anthony “saw Paulus in robes of snowy white ascending
on high among a band of angels, and the choirs of prophets and apos-
tles.” Anthony dragged the body out to bury it, but was without means
to dig a grave ; as he was lamenting this unhappy circumstance, ‘‘be-
hold, two lions from the recesses of the desert with manes flying on

xxv

 

their necks came rushing along; they came straight to the corpse
of the blessed old man,” fawned on it, roared in mourning, then with
their paws dug a grave just wide and deep enough to hold the corpse;
came over and licked the hands and feet of Anthony, and ambled away.
(Jerome, Life of Paulus the First Hermit , NfyPNF. vi, 299 seq.)

So gross and prevalent was the clerical habit of pious lies and pre-
tenses “to the glory of God,” that St. Augustine, about 395 a. d.,
wrote a reproving treatise to the Clergy, De Mendacio (On Lying),
which he found necessary to supplement in 420 with another book,
Contra Mendacium (Against Lying). This work, says Bishop Words-
worth, “is a protest against these ‘pious frauds’ which have brought
discredit and damage on the cause of the Gospel, and have created
prejudice against it, from the days of Augustine to our own times.”
(A Church History , iv, 93, 94.) While Augustine disapproves of
downright lying even to trap heretics, — a practice seemingly much
in vogue among the good Christians : “It is more pernicious for Cath-
olics to lie that they may catch heretics, than for heretics to lie that
they may not be found out by Catholics” ( Against Lying 9 ch. 5;
NfyPNF. iii, 483) ; yet this Saint heartily approves and argues in sup-
port of the chronic clerical characteristics of suppressio veri , of sup-
pression or concealment of the truth for the sake of Christian “edifi-
cation,” a device for the encouragement of credulity among the
Faithful which has run riot through the centuries and flourishes today
among the priests and the ignorant pious : “It is lawful, then, either
to him that discourses, disputes, and preaches of things eternal, or to
him that narrates or speaks of things temporal pertaining to edifi-
cation of religion or piety, to conceal at fitting times whatever seems
fit to he concealed ; but to tell a lie is never lawful, therefore neither to
conceal by telling a lie.” (Augustine, On Lymg 9 ch. 19 ; N$PNF. iii,
466.) The great Bishop did not, however, it seems, reck his own rede
when it came to preaching unto edification, for in one of his own ser-
mons he thus relates a very notable experience: “I was already Bishop
of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some servants of Christ
there to preach the Gospel. In this country we saw many men and
women without heads , who had two great eyes in their breasts ; and in
countries still more southly, we saw people who had but one eye in
their foreheads.” (Augustine, Sermon 37; quoted in Taylor, Syn~
xxvi

 

tagma , p. 52 ; Diegesis , p. 271 ; Doane, Bible Myths, p. 437.) To the
mind’s eye the wonderful spectacle is represented, as the great Saint
preached the word of God to these acephalous Faithful: we see the
whole congregation of devout and intelligent Christians, without heads,
watching attentively without eyes, listening intently without ears, and
understanding perfectly without brains, the spirited and spiritual ha-
rangue of the eloquent and veracious St. Augustine. And every hearer
of the Sermon in which he told about it, believed in fulness of faith
and infantile credulity every word of the noble Bishop of Hippo, giving
thanks to God that the words of life and salvation had been by him
carried to so remarkable a tribe of God’s curious children.

Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), in one momentary lapse in his
own arduous labors of propagating ‘‘lies to the glory of God,” made
the pious gesture, “God does not need our lies” ; but His Church evi-
dently did, for the pious work went lyingly on ; a work given immense
impetus by His Holiness Gregory himself, in his mendacious Did’
logues and other papal output, — with little abatement unto this day.

A further admission of the inveteracy of ecclesiastical forgery and
fraud may be cited from the Catholic Encyclopedia. Speaking depre-
catingly of the “incredible liberty of discussion” which to the shock
and scandal of the pious prelates “prevailed in Rome under the spell
of the Renaissance,” — when men’s minds were beginning to awaken,
from the intellectual and moral stupor of the Dark Ages of Faith,
the Catholic thesaurus of archaic superstition and “Catholic Truth,”
admits :

‘This toleration of evil [ sic; L e. : — the free discussion of Church
doctrines and documents] — bore one good consequence: it allowed his-
torical criticism to begin fair. There was need for a revision which is not
yet complete, ranging over all that has been handed down from the Middle
Ages under the style and title of the Fathers, the Councils, the Roman and
other official archives. In all these departments forgery and interpola-
tions as well as ignorance had wrought mischief on a great scale.” (CE.
xii, 768.)

To these preliminary confessions of the guilty Church may be added
the corroborating testimony of several eminently accredited historical
authorities.

xxvn

 

Middleton, in his epochal Free Inquiry into the lying habits and
miracles of the Churchmen, says : “Many spurious books were forged
in the earliest times of the Church, in the name of Christ and his
apostles, which passed upon all the Fathers as genuine and divine
through several successive ages.” (Middleton, Free Inquiry , Ini .
Disc. p. xcii ; London, 174*9.)

The same author, whose book set England ringing with its expo-
sures of the lies and fraudulent miracles of the Church, makes this
acute and accurate summing up of his evidences :

“It will not appear strange to those who have given any attention to
the history of mankind, which will always suggest this sad reflection: That
the greatest zealots in religion, or the leaders of sects and parties, what-
ever purity or principles they pretend to, have seldom scrupled to make
use of a commodious lie for the advancement of what they call the truth.
And with regard to these very Fathers, there is not one of them, as an
eminent writer of ecclesiastical history declares, who made any scruple
in those ages of using the hyperbolical style to advance the honor of God
and the salvation of men.” ( Free Inq . p. 83; citing Jo., Hist . Eccles . p.
681.)

Lecky, the distinguished author of the History of European
Morals , devotes much research into what he describes as “the deliber-
ate and apparently perfectly unscrupulous forgery of a whole
literature, destined to further the propagation either of Christianity
as a whole, or of some particular class of tenets.” (Lecky, Hist . of
European Morals , vol. i, p. 375.)

In his very notable History of Rationalism, speaking of that
Christian “epoch when faith and facts did not cultivate an acquaint-
ance,” the same author, Lecky, thus describes the state of intellectual
and moral obliquity into which the Church had forced even the ablest
classes of society:

“During that gloomy period the only scholars in Europe were priests
and monks, who conscientiously believed that no amount of falsehood was
reprehensible which conduced to the edification of the people. . . . All
their writings, and more especially their histories, became tissues of the
wildest fables, so grotesque and at the same time so audacious, that they
were the wonder of succeeding ages. And the very men who scattered these
fictions broadcast over Christendom, taught at the same time that credulity
xxviii

 

was a virtue and skepticism a crime.” (Lecky, Hist, of Rationalism , i ,
396 .)

In the same work last quoted, Lecky again, speaking of what he
terms “the pious frauds of theologians, 5 * which, he shows were “sys-
tematized and raised to the dignity of a regular doctrine, 55 says of the
pious Fathers :

“The Fathers laid down as a distinct proposition that pious frauds were
justifiable and even laudable, and if they had not laid this down they would
nevertheless have practiced them as a necessary consequence of their doc-
trine of exclusive salvation. Immediately all ecclesiastical literature be-
came tainted with* a spirit of the most unblushing mendacity. Heathenism
was to be combatted, and therefore prophecies of Christ by Orpheus and
the Sibyls were forged, lying wonders were multiplied. . . . Heretics
were to be convinced, and therefore interpolations of old writings or com-
plete forgeries were habitually opposed to the forged Gospels. . . . The
tendency . . . triumphed wherever the supreme importance of dogmas
was held. Generation after generation it became more universal; it contin-
ued till the very sense of truth and the very love of truth seemed blotted
out from the minds of men.” (Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i,
396 – 7 .)

There is thus disclosed a very sharp and shaming contrast between
the precept of the Lord Buddha : “Thou shalt not attempt, either by
words or action, to lead others to believe that which is not true, 55 and
the confessed debasing principle of the Church, that the maintenance
of its creed — (even by the methods of fraud, forgery and imposture
above hinted and to be evidenced) — is superior to the principles of
morality :

“To undo the creed is to undo the Church. The integrity of the rule of
faith is more essential to the cohesion of a religious society than the strict
practice of its moral precepts”! ( CE . vii, 269 ).

With its consciousness of the shifty and shady practices of its
“sacred 55 profession, the Christian priestcraft differs not from the
Pagan in the sneer of Cicero : “ Cato mirari se aiebat , quod non rideret
haruspex , cum Jiamspicem mdisset , — Cato used to wonder how one of
our priests can forbear laughing when he sees another. 55 (Quoted
Opera , Ed. Gron., p. 3806.) We shall see all too well that the Pagan

xxix

 

FOREWORD

estimate holds good for the Christian ; that, as said by the “universal
scholar” Grotius: “Ecclesiastical history consists of nothing but
the wickedness of the governing clergy, — Qui legit historiam Eccle –
siasticam, quid legit nisi Episcoporum vicia ?” ( Epistolce , p. 7,
col. 1).

The universality of the frauds and impostures of the Church, above
barely hinted at, and the contaminating influence of such example, are
by now sufficiently evident; they will be seen to taint and corrupt
every phase of the Church and of the ecclesiastical propaganda of the
Faith. As is well said by Middleton in commenting on these and like
pious practices of the Holy Church : “And no man surely can doubt,
but that those, who would either forge, or make use of forged books,
would, in the same cause, and for the same ends, make use of forged
miracles” (A Free Inquiry , Introd . Discourse , p. lxxxvii) ; — as well
as of forged Gospels, Epistles, Creeds, Saint-tales — vast extensions
of pious frauds of which we shall see a plethora of examples.

The proofs here to be arrayed for conviction are drawn from
original sources, chiefly those inexhaustible mines of priestly perver-
sions of fact and truth, the labored and ludricrous volumes of the
“Fathers of the Church,” and its most accredited modern American
spokesman, the Catholic Encyclopedia . Hence it cannot be justly
complained that this presentation of facts of Church history is unfair
or untrue; all but every fact of secular and of Church history herein
recounted to the shame and guilt of Holy Church is taken verbatim
from the Church’s own histories and historians. These clerical works
of confession and confusion are for the most part three ponderous
sets of volumes ; they are readily accessible for verification of my re-
citals, and for further instances, in good libraries and bookshops ; the
libraries of the Union Theological Seminary and of Columbia Uni-
versity, in New York City, were the places of the finds here recorded.
Cited so often, space will be saved for more valuable uses by citing by
their initials, — which will become very familiar — my chief ecclesiasti-
cal authorities, towit :

The Ante-Nicene Fathers , cited as ANF. ; A Collection of the extant
Writings of all the Founders of Christianity down to the Council of
Nicaea, or Nice, in 325 a. d. American Reprint, eight volumes. The
Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, N. Y., 1885.

XXX

 

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , cited as NfyPNF,; First and
Second Series ; many volumes ; same publishers.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, cited as CE.; fifteen volumes and index,
published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop Farley ; New York,
Robert Appleton Co., 1907-9.

The Encyclopedia Biblica , cited as EB., four volumes; Adam &
Charles Black, London, 1899 ; American Reprint, The Macmillan Co.,
New York, 1914.

The clerical confessions of lies and frauds in the ponderous vol-
umes of the Catholic Encyclopedia alone suffice, and to spare, to wreck
the Church and to destroy utterly the Christian religion. We shall see.

RELIGIOUS LAWS OF OUTLAWRY

The land, the religious world, even today is ringing with the furious
din of religious intolerance, bigotry and persecution; pestiferous
Medieval laws are imposed to stop the voice of Science teaching truths
which impugn the ignorant myths of Bible and Theology. Tennessee
and several States of the Union have passed laws making criminal
the ^ teaching of scientific facts which contradict “the story of the
divine creation of man as taught in the Bible,” and like Hillbilly legis-
lation is sought in all the States. The True Church lays down this
amazing limitation on learning: “When a clearly defined dogma
contradicts a scientific assertion, the latter has to he revised ”! ( CE .
xiii, 607.) The civilized portion of the world haa just been shocked
at the potential judicial murder and outrage sanctioned by law in
North Carolina, as likewise in a number of other States, making out-
laws of honest persons who, as parties in interest or witnesses in ac-
tions civil and criminal, refuse to take the ridiculous and degrading
Form of Oath “upon the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God, in token
of his engagement to speak* the truth, as he hopes to be saved in the
way and method of salvation pointed out in that blessed volume ; and
in further token that, if he should swerve from the truth, he may be
justly deprived of all the blessings of the Gospel, and be made liable to
that vengeance which he has imprecated on his own head.” ( Consol .
Stat. N. C 1919 , sec. 3189.)

Under this infamous statute, in the late so-called Gastonia, N. C.

xxxi

 

murder trial, the wife of one of the defendants, who had testified that
her husband was not present and had no part in the shooting, was
challenged as a witness and impeached, her testimony discredited, and
her husband convicted for want of her evidently candid testimony :
but true or not, the principle of infamy is the same — a citizen on trial
for his liberty was refused the benefit of evidence under this damnable
statute, and he and his wife made outlaws — refused “the equal pro-
tection of the law”! In Maryland, later in the same year 1929, a
chicken-thief, caught in the act of robbery by the owner, was dis-
charged in court because the owner of the property, a Freethinker,
was not permitted under the infamous similar statute of that godly
State to give testimony in court against the criminal : the case would
have been the same, if the life or liberty of the Infidel citizen had been
at stake, — he was an outlaw denied the “equal protection of the law” !
The benighted State of Arkansas — (“Now laugh!”) — declares in-
famously in its Constitution: “No person who denies the being of a
God shall hold any office m the civil government of this State , nor be
competent to testify as a witness in any court 99 ! ( Const . Ark., Art.
XIX, sec. 26.) Under this accursed act of outlawry, Charles Lee
Smith, of New York City, a native of Arkansas, went to his home city
of Little Rock in the Fall of 1928 to oppose the degrading proposition
proposed as a law in a popular initiative election, forbidding the
teaching of Evolution in the State-supported schools and universities ;
he made some remarks reflecting upon the personal integrity of the
Almighty, as well as denying his existence; twice was he arrested,
thrown into jail, convicted, and was denied the right to testify as a
witness in his own behalf ; he is today on bail to answer to the decision
of the Supreme Court of that State, an outlaw, denied the “equal pro-
tection of the law” of the land ! The hypocrisy and self-stultification
imposed by such detestable laws, is finely illustrated: At the recent
annual meeting of the American Law Institute, I denounced this
Article to a leader of the Arkansas Bar, and appealed to him to
“start something” to get rid of it. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled
in sympathy, and said : “It is in the Constitution, and too difficult to
get it out.” Then, dropping into Spanish, so that others at the table
might not understand, he added : “Yo no creo nada, — y no digo nada —
I believe nothing — and I say nothing” ! While these infamies are in-

 

flicted upon the citizens of this country by law imposed by a bigoted
and ignorant minority of superstitious parsons and their docile dupes ;
— aye, even if imposed by an overwhelming majority, or by authentic
decree of God himself, — the free and fearless defiers of Church and
despisers of its Superstition will fight it on to the death, till every
trace of these infamies is purged out of the statute books of these
sovereign States ! This is due and solemn notice and defiance to the
intolerant religious oppressors and their deluded dupes.

Medieval laws against the fictitious crime of “Blasphemy” survive
in a dozen American States, protecting by law the Christian super-
stition of the old Hebrew God. A model of them all is this infamous
enactment of the Church-ridden Massachusetts: “Whoever wilfully
blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeli-
ously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of
the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ
or the Holy Ghost — [the whole Divine Family], — or by cursing or
contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt or ridicule, the
holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished
by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by fine of not
more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good be-
havior.” (Gen. Lam Mass., 1921; Chap. 272, sec. 36.) Expressed
contempt is held in lighter pecuniary estimation in the Yankee “Nut-
meg State,” the fine being only $100.00, plus the year in gaol. (Gen.
Stat . Corm ., 1918, sec. 6395.) In both States, under these infamous
laws, persons have been indicted, tried and convicted within the past
two years ! Throughout the Union are odious religious statutes, “Blue
Laws” and Sunday Laws, penalizing innocuous diversions and activi-
ties of the people on days of religious Voodoo : Sunday, as we shall
see, being a plagiarization from the religion of Mithras, and created
a secular holiday — not a religious Holy Day — by law of the Pagan
Constantine. Such laws sometimes prove troublesome to the pious
Puritans themselves ; an amusing instance of their boomerang effect
being now chronicled to the annoyed and sneering world. Some “400”
of the True Believers of the “Holy Name Society” of St. Peter’s R. C.
Church of New Brunswick, in the saintly State of New Jersey, includ-
ing several City “Fathers” stuck their legs under the loaded tables of
the local hostlery for a “Holy Communion Breakfast” the past Sun-

xxxiii

 

day ; as they began to eat they discovered to their pious dismay that
there was no bread on the tables, although the reservation had long
before been made, with particular stress on a special brand of rolls,
made only in the godless town of Newark. Consternation reigned, with
much confusion and hurried telephoning by the management. In the
midst of it came a ’phone call from the driver of the roll-delivery truck,
from the local Hoosgow : “I’ve been arrested for the violation of sec-
tion 316 of the Laws of 1798, which prohibits the delivery of bread
and rolls on the Sabbath and also forbids a man to kiss his wife on
that day” ! Some of the sachems called the chief of police and angrily
demanded that this holy law be violated by delivering the blessed rolls ;
the driver was arraigned before the Recorder, who “released him with
a warning,” and he consummated the violation by delivering the for-
bidden rolls to the angry Holy Namers. ( Herald-Tribunc> May 14*,
1930.)

Now, throughout the State, and in far off Ohio, at the instigation
of the parsons, these pestiferous pious laws are being forced into en-
forcement, headlined — “Blue Law Net Busy in Jersey,” and recorded:
“Hundreds of names and addresses were in the possession of the police
today because their owners played golf, tennis or radios, bought or
sold gasoline, cigarettes or groceries, or operated trolley cars, busses
or trains in this capital city (of Trenton) on the Sabbath,” with
much more of detail ; and in the same column, a dispatch from Dover,
Ohio, that the police used tear-gas bombs to dislodge the operator
from the projection-box of a local “movie” theater, who, with the
owner and four employees, was “arrested for violation of the Sunday
closing law”! (N. F. Sun , May 26, 1930.) And all this medieval ab-
surdity of repressive penal legislation to enforce obsolete religious
observance by disbelievers, in a land whose every constitution pro-
claims the complete separation of State and Church ! But for the de-
fiance of fearless heroes of Rationalism who have through the ages
contended, and suffered martyrdom by rack and stake in defense of
human liberty, rack and stake and fiendish torture would yet be the
penalty, rather than fine and jail, for violators of the odious proscrip-
tions of Church and Church-minded, Church-driven, politicians. To
know fully the insidious and intensive efforts being made throughout
our country by the dupes of priestcraft to undermine and destroy the
xxxiv

 

liberties and rights of free men in the interest of canting religious
Pharisaism, bent on rule and ruin, every true friend of freedom and
enemy of the Church, should read intently and keep ever at hand for
an arsenal of defense, Maynard Shipley’s stirring book, The War on
‘Modern Science; A Short History of the Fundamentalist Attacks on
Evolution and Modernism — (Knopf, 1929), — which to read doth
“make the angry passions rise” in righteous wrath against these pious
conspirators against American liberties and the innate rights of man.
The Church, too, through the ages has been and yet nefariously is
“in politics,” seeking to dictate and dominate and impose its malign
superstitions by law : witness the two last presidential campaigns, and
the pernicious activities of the Methodist Board of Intolerance, Med-
dling and Public Nuisance, as now being revealed by the Lobbying In-
vestigation Committee of the United States Senate, whereby it is
shown seeking to suborn and subordinate all to its intolerant super-
stitious dominance. In most European countries the True Church
maintains its blatant “Catholic Party” in the elections and in the
parliaments ; here its operations are via the “grape-vine route,” but
effective, as through the corrupt machinations of St. Tammany;
while the Methodist Party and the Baptist Party, and their allies the
Ku Klux Klan pursue the same evil ends through vocal frightening of
cheap politicians and of large sections of the people and press. The
very pious Editor of the Christian Herald has just published a book
on “The Church in Politics,” in which with cynical frankness he
asserts its right and discloses its odious methods.

These odious things are all the work and blighting effects of the
unholy Odmrn Theologicum of Priestcraft, poisoning men’s minds
with the rancors of obsolete superstitious beliefs.

Remove the cause, the cure is automatically and quickly effected.
To contribute to the speedier consummation of this supreme boon is
the motive and justification of this book. It gives to the unctuous
quack “Doctors of Divinity” a copious dose out of their own nauseous
Pharmacopaeia of Priestly Mendacity. As its takes its deadly effect
upon themselves, haply their “incurably religious” duped patients
may begin to evidence hopeful symptoms of a wholesome, speedy and
complete cure from their priest-made malady.

“Fraud,” says Ingersoll, “is hateful to its victims.” The compelling

xxxv

proofs of duplicious fraud of priestcraft and Church exposed in this
book must convince even the most credulous and devout Believer, that
the system of “revealed religion” which he “drew in with his mother’s
milk” and has in innocent ignorance suffered in his system ever since,
is simply a veneered Paganism, unrevealed and untrue; is a huge
scheme of priestly imposture to exploit the credulous and to live in
power and wealth at his expense. Luther hit the bull’s-eye of the Sys-
tem — before he established another to pass the same old counterfeit :
The Church exists mostly for wealth and self-aggrandizement ; to quit
paying money to the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of
years. This is the sovereign remedy. Let him that hath ears to hear,
hear ; and govern himself accordingly. Every awakened Believer must
feel outraged in his dignity and self-respect, and in disgust must re-
pudiate the Creed and its impostors.

When a notorious Criminal is arraigned at the bar of Justice and
put to trial for deeds of crime and shame, it is his crimes, his criminal
career and record, which are the subject of inquiry, — which are ex-
posed and denounced — for conviction. No weight in attenuation is
accorded to sundry sporadic instances — (if any) — between crimes
or as cloaks for crime — of his canting piety and gestures of benevo-
lence towards his victims, the dupes of his duplicity. Thus the Church
and its Creed are here arraigned on their record of Crime, — “extenu-
ating naught, naught setting down in malice”; — simply exposing
truly its own convicting record and confessions of its criminality, for
condign judgment upon it.

Goliath of Gath was a very big Giant ; but a small pebble, artfully
slung, brought him to a sudden and violent collapse, a huge corpse.
This TNT. bomb of a book, loaded with barbfed facts , is flung full in-
facia ecclesue — into the face of the Forgery-founded Church and all
her discordant broods. The “gates of hell” will be exploded!

But yesteryear the Church of God in might
Has stood against the world; now lies she here,

And none so poor to do her reverence!

Joseph Wheless

New York City
780 Riverside Drive
June 1, 1930
xxxvi

Still sketching why this old news book is important today: The Weaponization of Faith: Meet the current crusaders and their spiderwebs – https://sovereignista.com/2025/07/31/the-weaponization-of-faith-meet-the-current-crusaders-and-their-spiderwebs/