Another member of Mr. Fisher’s family, who had previously spoken to me pleasantly when she met me on the street but who regarded me as nothing but hired help after I had accepted employment, wrote about the social activities of our first families on Columbia Street and the second and third families in Doss’s Addition. I was occasionally permitted to describe the pitiful doings of the Catholics, the Lutherans and other curious humans down near the ice plant, and the weekly dances given by the abandoned young people at our chief source of civic pride, the insane asylum. But the functions of Society were obviously beyond the descriptive powers of a mere printer’s devil. It was bad enough that such a person had to set the type. Nevertheless I attended these functions, and gained great comfort by inserting my name in the list of those present, and by adding the important and vital information that dainty and delicious refreshments had been served and a good time had by all. If it was a birthday party the host was wished many happy returns of the day. It was my belief at that time that it was against the law to publish an account of a social event without so stating. It was not always true; frequently the refreshments were not delicious and no one had a good time, but in those days I did not have that high regard for the truth that I have since acquired through labors on the great metropolitan journals; indeed, a night seldom passes now that I do not ask myself: “Have I written the truth to-day?” The answer, has, so far, eluded me. But Mr. Fisher, and to an even greater extent the Brothers Denman, sole owners of the News, frankly tried to please the advertisers and the subscribers; there was not then that fine spirit of independence which is such an essential part of modern journalism.
I advanced rapidly on the Times, and eventually was receiving $7 a week and had appointed myself to so many editorships that my cards filled two pockets. I was satisfied, and probably would have remained so for some years, but the end of my allotted time in Farmington was drawing near. I went to Northeast Missouri to visit relatives, and Mr. Fisher discharged me for over-staying my leave. This was a terrific blow; it seemed to me that my journalistic career had been cut off in the flower of its youth. I went to work in a lumber yard, and kept the job until the first carload of cement came in. But after I had pulled and tugged at the ninety-eight-pound sacks for ten hours I concluded that the lumber business held out no glowing promise for a young man who wished to retain his health and have leisure for a reasonable amount of traffic with Satan.
So I resigned and went to Quincy, Ill., where after considerable negotiations I obtained a job as reporter on the Quincy Journal and embarked on a career in daily journalism. So far this has kept me in the cities, where the opportunities for sin are vastly more numerous than in the small towns, but where there is less sin in proportion to the number of inhabitants. This is true despite the horde of wailing prophets and professional devil-chasers and snoopers whose principal occupation is violent and false denunciation of every city large enough to have an electric-light plant. And in a city one can, by diligent search, find a few people who will admit that a man’s religion, or his lack of religion, is his own affair.
CONCLUSIONS OF A MAN GONE TO THE DEVIL
If there is anything in religious inheritance, or in the influence of a religious environment, I should be, if not an actual Pastor of a flock, at least one of the most devout of the faithful, a snooping Brother concerned only with good works. But instead of carrying on the work of my forefathers I find myself full of contempt for the Church, and disgust for the forms of religion. To me such things are silly; I cannot understand how grown people can believe in them, or how they can repress their giggles as they listen to the ministerial platitudes and perform such mummeries as are the rule in all churches.
Never since the night of my “conversion” have I gone into a church to worship. I have frequently entered such dens of righteousness, but my visits, except for a few that I made soon after Brother McConnell’s revival meeting to please my father and mother, have been on newspaper assignment or out of curiosity. I have inquired into the doctrine of almost every sect that has adherents in America, but in none of them have I been able to find any sign of a true and beneficent God. I can see only groups of sanctimonious, self-seeking Little Jack Horners chasing about poking their fingers into someone else’s pie, and then shouting gleefully: “Look at me, God! Look what I found! Ooooh! Ain’t it nice and smutty?” They cannot practice their religion without prancing and cavorting before the public eye; they are constantly showing off. They are not so much concerned with the glory of God as with the glory of the front page. And what time they are not whirling giddily in such imbecilities, they are engaged in disgusting squabbles among themselves as to who shall have the local agency for purveying religion; they want to copyright salvation in the name of their particular sect.
On all sides we hear that religion is the greatest thing in the world and that mankind’s chief need is more of it. But it is my conviction that mankind would be infinitely better off with less of it, and probably best off with none of it. Nothing has ever caused more trouble. The whole history of religion is a record of war, murder, torture, rape, massacre, distrust, hypocrisy, anguish, persecution and continual and unseemly bickering; it is a rare church that has not been the scene of disorderly brawls. It has divided towns and nations into bitter factions; it has turned brother against sister and father against son; it has blighted romances; it is a prime cause of insanity; there is hardly anything harmful to the human race that it has not done as it pursued its meddlesome, intolerant way down the ages. Its followers proclaim loudly that their particular belief is synonymous with love, and bawl threats and epithets against anyone who denies it; but in truth religion comes more nearly to being synonymous with hatred and revenge, with each sect praying to God to grant it special privileges and to damn the others.
I have never at any time regretted my complete withdrawal from all forms of religion and churchly ceremony. During many years of my childhood, while mental and physical habits were forming, these things kept me in constant terror; I was horrified by the thought of the awful things that God was preparing to do to me; I was fearful and miserable lest I give birth to an idea that was not perfectly righteous and in keeping with His commands as laid down by His agents. The Bible, which I necessarily interpreted in the light of what I had been taught, caused me more nightmares than any other book I have ever read, and I was vastly more alarmed by the tales of the fires of Hell related to me by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters than I was in later life by the thunder of German artillery or the crackle of machine-gun bullets.
Since I left Farmington I have been near death many times, both as a soldier in France and from the natural illnesses incident to civil life. At least three times I have been told that I had but a few hours to live. Yet even then I did not feel the need of religion, nor for a preacher or a priest to pray over me to a God that neither of us knew, and perform ceremonies founded on pagan rites. How can an intelligent God pay any attention to a last-minute deathbed repentance that it is so obviously the result of fear and nothing else? The religionist expects God to wash all his sins off the slate merely because, when he is about to die, he says he is sorry. If there be a God, cannot He look into such a shrunken little soul and see that there is nothing in it but a fear of death and a horror of the unknown?
I am not an atheist, because for all I know to the contrary there may be a God, or any number of Gods, but to me the God worshiped by my forefathers and by the religionists of to-day is a cruel, preposterous creation conceived by a people who felt the need of chastisement. He is a celestial traffic cop, hounded by whimpering weaklings who beseech Him to tell them they are on the right road, and yet keep trying to show Him which way the traffic should go. In the Christian and Jewish conceptions of the Heavenly Father I can see nothing that is fit for a civilized man to worship; indeed, the nearer a man approaches civilization and intelligence, the less need there is for him to worship anything. Conversely it is the stupid, illiterate man, knowing neither how to read nor how to think, who is most often the religious fanatic. He understands nothing and is afraid of everything; he goes through life as a small boy goes past a graveyard at night, whistling to keep up his courage. He requires religion and its twin, superstition, to give him strength to contemplate the wonders of the sunset and the falling rain.