Mark you, I'm no tramp in America. This is the house of my fathers. They helped hew it out of the Virginia wilderness. They helped put Old Glory in the heavens, and to keep it there for more than a hundred years, still it appears that I have no rights in this country which a foreigner with the smell of the steerage still upon him is bound to respect, if he chances to be a Baptist preacher.
Talk to me about the Church of Rome muzzling free speech when the A.P.A. would mob an American citizen for defending his character from the infamous falsehoods of a foreign tramp! "Throw him out!" Why throw him out? I'll tell you: The sanctified buzzards had gone there with appetites sharpened for a mess of carrion, and they were afraid I'd kill their cook. "Throw him out!" But I noticed that those who were splitting their faces as wide as Billy Kersands' were glued to their seats. They wanted somebody else to throw him out. They were anxious to see a gang of three or four hundred sanctified hoodlums trample upon me, but there was not one among the self- constituted protectors of this mighty American Nation with sufficient "sand" to lead the mob. If there were no better Americans than those trailing in the wake of the Rev. Joseph Slattery, like buzzards following a bad smell, I'd take a cornstalk, clean out the whole shooting-match and stock the country with niggers and yaller dogs. If such cattle were sired by Satan, damned by Sycorax and born in hell they would dishonor their parents and disgrace their country.
Slattery insists that Catholics believe thus-and-so, and that no man with such a faith concealed about his person can be a good American citizen. I don't know about that; but I do know that if the Catholics act in strict accordance with their religious creed they are the only people in this country that do so. I've learned that you can't judge a man by his catechism. Slattery assures us that he has discarded the Pope and taken Christ for his immediate guide. The latter commands his followers to pray for those who despitefully use them; but if Slattery did any praying for the "Apostle" during his sojourn in this city he managed to keep that fact a profound secret. Christ enjoins patience and humility. He tells his followers to turn the other cheek to the smiter; yet Slattery assured the ladies Wednesday night that he was "a great believer in muscular Christianity." Then he placed his 250 pounds of stall-fed beef in fighting attitude and declared he'd "like to have his enemies come at him one at a time"—to be prayed for, I presume. If Christ taught "muscular Christianity" I have inadvertently overlooked a bet. Christ commands us to love our enemies, but doesn't suggest that we should manifest our affection by lying about 'em. He rebuked those who tattled about a common courtesan, yet Slattery defamed decent women. No, you can't judge a man by his creed. If the allegiance of the Catholics to the Pope is of the same character as that of Slattery to the Lord Jesus Christ, Uncle Sam need not lie awake o' nights to worry about "Papal plots."
Had Slattery been truly a Christian, instead of black- guarding me when protected by the presence of ladies, he would have put up a fervent prayer for my immediate conversion to the Baptist faith. But his milk of human kindness had soured—he was short on Christian charity and long on gall.
"Faith, hope and charity," says St. Paul; "and the greatest of these is charity." And he might have added that it's also the scarcest. Perhaps that's what makes it so valuable—the supply is ever equal to the demand.
Speaking of charity reminds me of my experience with the Protestant preachers of San Antonio, some of whom, I understand, are aiding and abetting this A.P.A. movement, "designed to preserve the priceless liberty of free speech." While editor of the morning paper of that city I was in the habit of writing a short sermon for the Sunday edition, for the benefit of those who could not go to church, I supposed that the ministers would sanction my clerical efforts, but they didn't. They wanted no assistance in saving souls, considered that they should be accorded a monopoly in that line and were entitled to all the emoluments. They proceeded to thunder at me from the pulpit, and sometimes three or four perspiring pulpiteers were pounding away at me at the same time—and incidentally making me very popular. I dropped into a swell church one Sunday morning to get a little grace— a building that cost up in the six figures while people were living in $4 jackals and subsisting on 50 cents a week within sound of its bells—and the minister was holding a copy of the Express aloft in one hand and a Bible in the other and demanding of his congregation: "Which will you take—Brann or God?" Well, they seemed to think that if they couldn't have both they'd best take God, though some of the sinners on the back seats were a trifle subsequent in making up their minds.
I kept hammering away—preaching to my little congregation of fifteen or twenty thousand readers every Sunday, as I now do to ten times that many a month—until finally the Ministerial Association met, perorated, whereased, resoluted and wound up by practically demanding of the proprietor of the Express that I be either muzzled or fired. And all this time the Catholic priests said never a word—and San Antonio is a Catholic city. But the Baptist ministers were running a sneaking boycott! Yet the Church of Rome is the boa-constrictor that's trying to throttle the American right of free speech!
The Y.M.C.A. invited me to lecture on Humbugs, and that scared the Ministerial Association nearly to death. They thought I was after 'em now sure, so they went to the officials of the Y.M.C.A. and made them cancel the date. And the only Protestant minster in the entire city who did not join in this attempt to throttle free speech was an Episcopalian—and the Episcopalians are not Protestants to hurt. Yet when these ministers, who are now so fearful that the Church of Rome will muzzle somebody, found that they couldn't drive me out of town; that they couldn't take the bread from the mouths of my babes because I had dared utter my honest thoughts like a freeman; that I was to continue to edit the Express so long as I liked, they came fawning about me like a lot of spaniels afraid of the lash! But not one of them ever tried to convert me. Not one of them ever tried, by kindly argument, to convince me that I was wrong. Not one of them ever invited me to church—or prayed for me, so far as I could learn. Perhaps they thought I was past redemption.
Slattery cautions you not to send your children to convent schools, declaring that he "never yet saw a nun who was an educated woman." That statement, standing alone, ought to convince every one blessed with a thinking apparatus that Slattery's a fraud. Some of the best educated women in this world have entered convents. Women upon whose tuition fortunes have been expended are now making convent schools deservedly popular with the intelligent people.
He says ignorance is the correlative of Catholicism, and points to Spain as proof of this startling assertion. There was a time when Spain stood in the very forefront of civilization, in the van of human progress, the arbiter of the world's political destiny,—and Spain was even more Catholic then than it is to-day. Nations and civilizations have their youth, their lusty manhood and their decay, and it were idle to attribute the decline of Spain to Catholicism as the decadence of Greece to Paganism. The Catholic church found Spain a nation of barbarians and brought it up to that standard of civilization where a Spanish monarch could understand the mighty plans of Columbus. It was her Catholic Majesty, Queen Isabella, who took from her imperial bosom the jewels with which to buy a world—who exchanged the pearls of the Orient for the star of Empire. The Catholic church found England a nation of barbarians and brought it up, step by step, until Catholic barons wrung from King John at Runnymede the Great Charter—the mother of the American Constitution. It found Ireland a nation of savages and did for it what the mighty power of the Caesars could not—brought it within the pale of civilization. But for the Roman Catholic Church Slattery might be wearing a breech clout, digging roots with his finger nails and gorging himself with raw meat in Ireland to-day instead of insulting the intelligence of American audiences and wringing money from fanatics and fools by warring upon the political institutions of their fathers.