But Daniel knew that was a time (as it is even now in 1898) when a pressure was being brought to bear on the Committee of the Judiciary at the National Capitol, by a steadily increasing number of men, who (engaged in a religio-politico pull, year after year,) were trying to thrust on this country a creedal-constitution, by putting in a compulsory-religion amendment. Though the National Constitution distinctly provides for the exercise of liberty of conscience, and for the full right of the individual to self-government and self-expression. He believed intelligent, alert persons all knew that the insertion of the proposed words would not amend but would annul and abrogate the National Constitution of this American Republic; a Constitution whose preamble states, that we hold it to be self-evident that men are born free, and have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and whose whole tenor is to protect the individual in freedom of thought and self-expression, and to protect every one from being politically discriminated against on account of religious or non-religious views.
Daniel knew that at a recent hearing at the National Capitol, the Chairman of the Judiciary had said to the man who was editor of a paper called the Christian Statesman, and the maker of the little “Christian Manual,” in conformity with which he more or less modestly expected to have our American constitutional-liberty annihilated: “I see you refer to God the Father and to the Lord Jesus Christ as Ruler of the Nation? Why not to the Holy Spirit?” And in reply to this, the Doctor of Divinity had made answer: “It is not revealed to us that the Holy Spirit has relations to nations.”
So after such an answer as that, of course Daniel was sure that while people might not blame the man who, as a subject of the British lion, was little likely to have had it revealed to him that a HOLY Spirit has relations to nations, yet that their common sense would recognize that the ignorance which an unfortunate-national-environment had brought upon this Doctor of Divinity did not very specially fit him to go about trying to wipe out other people’s Constitution with his little “Manual.”
Daniel knew that lofty souls from Africa, Asia, the nations of the Mediterranean and the islands of the sea (represented here as voting citizens allegiant to our National Constitution) had age-long been taught that life, Life Itself, is dependent on that Holy Spirit—the feminine in Deity—which continuously broods all-that-is into order; and he claimed no government but the one dominated by that desecrator of womanhood, Henry Tudor, and his followers, would wish to thrust the Holy Spirit out of “relations to nations”; and that that government (?) whose hand is against every other knows well that if it can but starve, evict, stupefy and slay our people through annihilating their national money, their national lands, their religious liberty and (that once protective agency) their patriotic navy and army made up of American citizens, it can then easily entrap what is left into the present religio-politico-pull, which is bent on establishing on earth that particular form of hell that riots wherever that plundering, preaching, prostituting government (?) makes its lair.
It was a wild epoch. And the increasing ecclesiastic assumptions of a new influx of salary-seeking teachers (?) was on the way to injure the simple purity of faith with which the religiously-philosophical science of the evolution of man had previously been bettering American society; and some men’s hearts were failing them for fear.
But Daniel Daksha, who had been a simple-souled, devoted man from his cradle-days upward, and who had suffered many things for the truth’s sake, had no fear. For he was a prophet, and had known that in the last days it would come to pass that “the mountain of the Lord’s house would be exalted and would be established in the top of the mountains, and that all peoples would flow up to it.” He believed this was “the Woman Age,” and he was not among the men whose hope of existence lies in swamping women’s power, either by its subjection to animal-abuse in the home or in the shambles; wherein he believed the new movement was putting woman up as a licensed article, sellable for revenue to the would-be on-coming government of the brute, by the brute, and for the brute,—a would-be on-coming style of government which, in its nature, counts woman out of it, because she is human; and the brute-rule has set itself to consume her, when having annihilated her individuality, religiously and politically, it shall then have turned her into a “commodity,”—a commodity to be bought and sold in marriage and out, for the consumption of that brute-rule, to whom “it is not revealed that the Holy Spirit has relations to nations.”
In view of all these things, the Dakshas were more than content to have at their home not whist-parties and dancing-parties, but free discussions of these things.
CHAPTER VI.
One evening after Judge Elkhorn’s arrival in the family when many guests were present, he opened up his warfare with Robert against credulity.
Robert with a glance laid the discussion in Ethel’s hands, and then she said: “But if you should succeed in annihilating the reverence which people have for their different forms of religion, and should get them to believe they have nothing to do but eat, drink and die and decay, would they not so eat, drink and be merry as to decay before they died, and yet live long enough to multiply what you call ‘dangerous classes’?”