_ [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sin,—The sum and
substance of Professor Ernest Barker's most interesting article, "Christianity and Communism," is that while Communism uses force' as a means -of asserting itself, "an enforced ideal is a thing utterly opposed to Christianity:": This rather smug pronouncement would carry more weight if Christianity had-lived up-to its ideals. When we reflect, however, upon such events as the Crusades, the conquest of the New World, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; Spanish history of the past two centuries and the recent conquest of Abyssinia, which- it- now. transpires had the unstinted support of the Roman Church, we see how utterly false Christianity has been to those ideals. - • - - The Press, strangely beholden to priestcraft; is to no small extent to blame for present-day clerical evils, for it seldom shows them up in their true colour's. It sees the gradual sWeeping away of religious systems no less perVerted_ and corrupt than those of Biblical times, but so far have Christian priests dragged humanity from Christ and the Truth that Editors sitr -of those who take punitive action that they are atheists and vandals. Perhaps iconoclasts of former times were similarly condemned it the outset.
Christian priests accept just so much of the Mosaic Law as suits their book. Thus, if someone, destitute and MIMI- ployed, helps himself to the contents of an offertory-box as David helped himself to the shew-bread, they say "Let this man be imprisoned. Qr if someone shoots their son or daughter, "Let this man be hanged." When the Mosaic Law obstructs the march of sacerdotalism, however (graven images, God's name in vain, having other gods, desecrating the Sabbath) it is, in effect, "The Mosaic Law be hanged." But nation after nation is discovering that what Christ intended to be a life-line has, owing to priestly rapacity and corruption, become a trip-rope and for some nations a veritable hangman's noose.
Brutal though their methods of extirpation are, very much of that which the " Godless set up is in closer accord with Gospel teaching than that which they overthrow. The so-called Godlessness, or hatred of God, today, is hatred of God and Christ as interpreted and presented by the priests, that is. the God of a religion rotten with polytheism, idolatry and self-seeking ; not the God of the Bible, not the Christ of the Gospels who spent His life condemning the social injustice, militarism, -poverty and destitution which is today turning. millions of human beings into wild animals. TO read of the Bible God or of the Gospel Christ -id 'virtually 'prohibited throughout the major portion of Christendom. God has, of course, been known by names innumerable in world history. Baal was God and Huitzilopochtli was God. Odium and hatred ultimately attached to them and to God under other names because of the priestly wickedness done in their names. If our Western civilisation ever collapses, as well it may, and a yellow or a black one succeeds it, can we expect that the descendants of Abyssinians, negroes and South-American Indians will not look with odium and hatred on those gods which tolerated the enslavement, exploitation and disembowel- ling of their ancestors ?
Although Spaniards have for centuries been steeped in the very essence of Roman Christianity, how utterly superficial has been its teaching is manifest today in the inhuman atrocities committed by both belligerents in the Civil War— atrocities which do not lose by comparison with any perpetrated before the advent of Christ. But there is other work with which the Church there has busied itself, work which has by no means been superficially or unprofitably carried out. When the Prime Minister, Don Manuel Azaiia, nationalised Church property and dissolved the Jesuit Order, in 1931, the value of that property was found to be no less than £109,000,000, and even a Spanish priest himself has expressed surprise at the manner in which pesetas flowed into the Bishops' Palaces "for the salvation of souls." Stupendous though this sum is, it represents but a fraction of the total clerical hoard, for the Jesuit Order alone is said to have owned one-third of the industrial wealth of the country. Negligent though the priests have been, then, in cleansing Spanish souls, they 'Cannot be said to have displayed a similar negligence and incom- petence in making Spanish pockets "come clean," for camou- flaged behind a façade of righteousness, they have plainly been " soaking " the,populace. This has to a large extent been made possible by the fact that 45 per cent, of the Spanish population is illiterate, and illiteracy and ignorance of the Scriptures are of course the sheet-anchor of clerical corruption.
- The writer remembers that, 35 years ago, Malta. longed to be rid of Malta fever as the Spaniards long to be rid of their priests; The victims of the fever were invariably dieted on goats' milk. The .deathroll became so heavy that a Medical 0mm-fission from England came upon the scene. Eventually it traced the cause of the disease to this very milk, and I believe that many of the world's troubles today are similarly. the outcome of a -diet of perverted Christianity.—Your
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