CLERGY NEEDS SYMPATHY, NOT BLAME.
It is also claimed that God's ministry has offered its testimony in behalf of the defense. It is not my purpose to say anything against the clergy, because if there is an abused and ill-treated class of men on the face of the earth to-day, who need pity and prayer and succor, it is the men who have dedicated their lives to the Christ who was killed by the rich of His time, and who are now dependent for their living, their children's food and their wives' clothing, upon the blended piety and pride, the virtues and vanities of the rich of to-day.
In all that inconsistent barbarism, which we call civilization, there is no man who needs sympathy so much and deserves blame so little as he who is attempting at the same time to preach for God and to get his living from God's enemies, to build monuments to the Christ who lived and died for the poor, and gain the material and cost of these monuments by flattering those who are grinding the faces of the poor.
Many clergymen have told me how their hearts have bled for the victims of social injustice; how in anguish they have wept over the piteous cries for help uttered by their dying brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ; how, bursting with indignation, they have longed to strike a blow against the brutality that crushes Christ's little ones in order to grind from their bones and blood colossal and unnatural fortunes. But they said, "We must conceal our tears and swallow our indignation, though it chokes us. We dare not speak out—we could neither destroy the tyrant nor save the victims. We would only succeed in dragging down our own wives and little ones into that dark stream of poverty, from which those who have once fallen in can never hope to rise. First of all, we must live—and then do what little we can to temper the reign of injustice and oppression. The overthrow and destruction of this system of injustice rests upon the shoulders of God and the common people."
I would ask the workmen of the country who are rapidly leaving the churches not to judge the clergy harshly, because the majority are dumb in your behalf and because a few openly and blatantly champion the cause of the oppressors.
But I must also ask you to place no confidence in their testimony in this political trial, for their lips often utter words their hearts fain would withhold, and they often pray for success to the banner for which they cannot fight.
Let us not condemn them because they are bound with chains of dependence, but let us rather include them among those whom we shall liberate when we establish a POLITICAL SYSTEM WHICH SHALL SET ALL MEN FREE.
In the case of "The American People versus the Money Lending and Bondholding Class," we find that the long, flowing garb of the ministerial witness, that at first inspired our confidence in his testimony, because of the holy office it suggested, is made of the very cloth, a part of the plunder, the disapperance of which is the basis of the present trial. The testimony of such a witness, cajoled, terrorized, and a sharer in the booty taken, is also without value.