Part 1

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CRIMES OF PREACHERS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

TENTH EDITION.

Transcribed out of the Original Newspapers, and with Previous Transcriptions Diligently Compared and Revised.

"THESE BE THY GODS, O ISRAEL."

"By their fruits shall ye know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?"

New York THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY 62 Vesey Street

CRIMES OF PREACHERS.

In the year 1906 the Young Men's Christian Association of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, rejected the application of an actor for membership on the ground that one of his profession could not be a moral person. Viewing the action as a slur cast on the whole theatrical profession, Mr. Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, offered to give one thousand dollars to charity if it could be shown that actors, man for man, were not as good as ministers of the gospel. No champion of the cloth appearing to claim Mr. Dixey's money on that proposition, he went further and offered another thousand dollars if there could not be found a minister in jail for every state in the Union. This second challenge was likewise ignored by the clergy and the association which had provoked it, but Mr. Dixey made a few inquiries as to the proportion of ministers to actors among convicts. His research, which was far short of being thorough, discovered 43 ministers and 19 actors in jail. The investigation, so far as the ministers were concerned, could have touched only the fringe of the matter, for in eight months of the year 1914 the publishers of this work counted more than seventy reported offenses of preachers for which they were or deserved to be imprisoned, and of course the count included only those cases reported in newspapers that reached the office through an agency which scans only the more important ones. There had been nothing like a systematic reading of the press of the country for these cases. Judged by 1914, the clerical convicts in 1906 must have far exceeded the number developed by Mr. Dixey's census.

The foregoing incident is introduced here to explain the nature of this work, "Crimes of Preachers," which, like Mr. Dixey's challenge to the clergy in behalf of his profession, is the reply we have to make to the preachers in behalf of the unbelievers in their religion.

The clergy assume to be the teachers and guardians of morality, and assert not only that belief in their astonishing creeds is necessary to an upright life, but, by implication, that a profession of faith is in a sense a guarantee of morality. It has become traditionary with them to assume that the non-Christian man is an immoral man; that the sincere believer is the exemplar of the higher life, while the "Infidel," the unbeliever, illustrates the opposite; and that whatever of morality the civilized world enjoys today it owes to the profession and practice of Christianity.

Now, it is wholly legitimate that systems should be judged by the correspondence between the claims made for them and their actual performances. When Mrs. Eddy, for an instance, rose up and asserted that Christian Science was the key to health, investigation into the health of persons professing and practicing Christian Science became at once a proper inquiry. And so, when ministers exalt the belief and practice of Christianity as the one highway to the moral life of individuals and nations, it is equally germane to observe with some care whether or not the clergy make good their claims in their own persons. The inquiry would be of great interest and permissible even were Christianity offered only for our free acceptance or rejection; but the investigation assumes the binding nature of a civic duty when, on the strength of these clerical pretensions, the preachers of Christianity claim and are allowed to enjoy privileges and immunities from the state that are not granted to other citizens. There are many "benefits of the clergy" besides those bestowed on them personally in the shape of half-fares, freedom from civic and military duties, and the license under the papal decree which forbids that any priest shall be brought into a civil or criminal court without the approval of his ecclesiastical superior. In the United States church property valued at a billion and a half dollars escapes taxation on the plea that it is devoted to improving the morals of the community, and the ministers have a virtual monopoly of the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday, on the strength of the same unproved theory. The plea is questioned and denied by the publishers of this book, who quote the evidences in disproof, among these being the fact of the immorality of the clergy themselves. If the religion they spend their lives in expounding does not keep the ministers straight, it is almost useless to ask how much restraining influence that religion has on the laity who only listen once a week.

It is admitted that just as the upright life of a professed Christian is no evidence whatever of the truth of Christian doctrine and history, so the moral delinquency of a believer is no disproof of those things which it is necessary to accept in order to be orthodox. The creation story, the flood story, the story of Jonah and the whale, the virgin birth and the other miracles of the Old and New Testaments are not affected by anything a believer in them may do, either good or bad. Therefore we have been asked of what value a list of the crimes of preachers can be to the cause of Freethought and mental liberty. The reply, couched in the language of an editorial article in "The Truth Seeker," is as follows:

"Christianity, as interpreted by its preachers, affirms a fundamental relation between belief and morals. It claims that its system of morals is revealed and perfect; and not only this, but also that good morals are out of the question unless we believe in the Christian religion.

"There are Christian ministers, and they are of the class who have the widest hearing, because they are 'sensational' ones, who will tell you that unbelief is synonymous with immorality; that men are wicked because they are Infidels, and are Infidels because they are wicked. They argue that as religion cannot countenance anything that is wrong, the wrongdoer must justify his course by denying the authority of religion, and hence becomes an unbeliever in order that his creed may not conflict with his conduct. Who has not heard that Infidels deny the existence of hell to relieve their minds of the uncertainty of going there when they die; that they put the Bible aside because it will not permit their indulgences in sin, and that a reform in conduct will be accompanied by a renunciation of their Infidelity and a reacceptance of religion and the Bible?

"The preachers who promulgate these principles often proceed from the general to the particular. Having asserted the correlation of unbelief with moral turpitude, they give pretended illustrative instances, and they do not seem to understand that the force of their argument is lessened by the fact that they are obliged to invent cases and to deal with imaginary characters. Some, of course, prefer to libel known and representative Freethinkers instead of exercising the faculty of invention and defaming unbelievers who are pure myths.

"A list of ministers, guilty of crimes and immoralities, though of unimpeached orthodoxy, is the answer to this class of falsifying preachers, which any court must accept as historical and lawful evidence against the pretense that good conduct grows out of belief in Christianity. It shows that the very apostles of that religion go wrong, that its ministers are profligate, and that in these the theory is condemned before we come to its mere lay exponents who less perfectly understand it.

"People have been taught so long that piety and morality are interchangeable terms, that they believe it without regard to the facts which demonstrate the contrary to be true. When an individual of reputed orthodoxy violates the moral law they accuse him of being a hypocrite and set his religious professions down as mere outward pretense. But here their mental narrowness is shown, for the immoral person may be thoroughly sincere. The more firmly he believes, the stronger may be his confidence that no mere human weakness on his part can deprive him of the benefits of his religion. For according to the code we are all sinners, and the function of religion is not so much to keep us from personal sin as to save us from its natural consequences. One has fallen already in Adam and is therefore totally depraved, which is the limit of depravity. How, then, can his own sins count against him, when he cannot be depraved beyond 'totally'? His concern is to escape the consequences of the fall, which is accomplished by accepting the Christian scheme of salvation. His own transgressions can be adjusted by prayer and repentance. He conceives of divine mercy as infinite--there is no reaching the end of it; hence with unlimited credit he may draw on his account whenever he feels sinfully disposed."

It is unlikely, however, that the believer performs this mental operation before reaching a determination to do that which is wrong. Were he capable of analyzing the plan of salvation in that manner he might doubt it. But he is like other men in the same environment, and, like them, when inclination prompts, he falls. Conduct, in the last analysis, is a matter of common sense, in which the minister and the believer are likely to be at a disadvantage as compared with the Rationalist. In our own minds we are pretty well convinced of the reason why ministers go wrong--they have more opportunities and, among the faithful, are under less suspicion and observation than the laity. Nevertheless we are not averse to hearing other explanations of their tendency to fall.

A few years ago the Rev. Dr. Madison C. Peters, a New York clergyman, offered a theory and remedy.

"The average minister," said Dr. Peters, "has only to preach a twenty-minute or half-hour sermon on Sunday, and this, with a mid-week meeting, constitutes his week's work. The rest of the days he is often loafing, trying to kill time. Even the weekly sermon may not be his own effort. He may be either too lazy or too ignorant to compose a sermon of his own, so he simply treats the congregation to a rehash of some other man's work, and for this he often receives a good salary. Do you wonder that the worst passions of these men become inflamed by their lives of idleness? They are only human. They eat and drink of the choicest products of the earth; they visit only the homes of the wealthy, where they are sumptuously entertained; they do not try to keep the body in subjection to the spirit by any kind of restraint or mortification, and so their carnal passion becomes the master of their being, and they fall away from grace, shocking the community and scandalizing the church of God. I would make all work for their money."

No doubt the indolent habits of the stall-fed clergy contribute to their incontinence, which is recognized as their predominant weakness. While their offenses otherwise, as these pages show, range all the way from petty larceny to murder, yet the great majority are such as are committed with or against women and girls. The larger figures in the list number cases of adultery, bigamy, desertion, elopement, and seduction.

That the immorality of the clergy is recognized as a matter that needs explanation is shown by an article entitled "Why Ministers Go Wrong," extracted from the "Baptist Standard" (Chicago), in which orthodox weekly it appeared in the latter part of the year 1913. The article, whose author is a minister, is surprising mainly because of its frankness and not because it tells anything not previously known or surmised. The writer says:

"Do ministers of the churches, that is clergymen, priests and preachers, go wrong in any greater proportion than do doctors, lawyers or teachers? If one answers the question mathematically, no; if one answers the question in the light of our moral standards for ministers of the gospel, the negative answer will not be so readily and decidedly given. There are few issues of the daily newspaper without at least a single item narrating the fall of a clergyman. It would be hard to find a man or a woman who has not at some time in life become personally acquainted with a professed exponent of religious truth and high moral ideals who has demonstrated the depths of human depravity.

"Yet the indictment against the profession is of a much more subtle character than that found in journalistic annals of crime or even in personal knowledge of gross faults on the part of clergymen. It would be folly to deny that, taken as a class, ministers live lives as pure and as free from criminal or grossly immoral taint as any other class of persons. The indictment takes rather the form of a general impression, amounting almost to a conviction, that the minister does not have the clear-cut and high standards which the business world demands.

"Business men feel that there is something about the 'cloth' that makes its wearer a 'doubtful proposition' when it comes to square dealing between men. A prominent lawyer in Chicago said, only the other day, 'I dread seeing a clergyman enter my office; I do not want his business; he does not have the commercial honor of the man of affairs.' He went on to give instances of ministers who disregarded their business obligations and even ignored the sanctity of the oath at the bar of justice.

"It is a well-known fact among houses accustomed to extend credit that ministers are the slowest to pay, and the most difficult from whom to collect. In the smaller towns it would be difficult to find a grocer without an uncollected account against some minister who had left the place. Over five years ago such a preacher boasted in his farewell sermon that all his bills were paid in the village, and he 'owed not any man'; he should have said that he had paid not any man, and some of his bills are still unpaid.

"A charitable organization in Chicago allowed a minister in a village nearby to become indebted to it. He promised to pay the small account at a certain date; but a year from that time, although many letters had been written, the bill was unpaid. Nor was settlement made until this prominent minister on a good salary was sent a sight draft for the amount.

"A struggling professor in an Eastern city consented to pick out a few books for a preacher up State, and to have them charged to his own account, being assured that payment would be made at once. The books were sent, but the cash never was forthcoming, and after a lengthy correspondence, in which many excuses were offered, the professor had to count his loss as the price he had paid for a lesson in trusting the 'cloth.'

"Such evidence could be extended indefinitely. The facts back of it, with the many other instances of which these few are but slightly indicative, have produced the decided opinion in the business world that the minister is unreliable, and that the ministry does not stand of necessity for admirable manliness.

"There are many exceptions. The manly, four-square ministers are the more noticeable because they are exceptional. There are still more ministers who are warmly admired by their congregations, but they are admired rather for professional traits and pulpit graces than for the rugged virtues that count on the street and in the store and office. On the whole, men of honor feel that today it is no honor to be entitled 'Reverend'; the average man looks somewhat askance at the clergyman.

"Perhaps this is nowhere better illustrated than when a minister leaves his profession and desires to enter business. He finds there a strong prejudice against his past; it is regarded as unfitting him for work. When such a man goes into an office, experience shows that he is likely to lack the qualities that make for trustworthiness in details in the individual and for harmony in a large force of employees.

"Now, if the business of the minister is to teach the people how to live, he ought at least to know how to do it himself. His principles are valueless if they will not stand the wear of daily life. Is the trouble with the teachings, with the message, or is it with the man himself?

"The first reason ministers go wrong is because they are men. They are not angels; they are not the reincarnated ideal saints that the sisters and the sisterly brethren like to think they are. Because they are men they have human frailties. But, while that does account for the fact that ministers steal and break the express commandments the same as other men, it does not account for the fact that they are held below par in commercial esteem.

"As a profession the ministry seems to offer a premium on the pretender, the impostor, the hypocrite. So long as there are the intentional pretenders and the unconscious hypocrites in the church they will enjoy the ministry of the pretender and hypocrite. So long as the churches say, 'There's nothing either good or ill but seeming makes it so,' the man who can succeed in fooling the people with appearances of virtues, with saintly air and pious phrase will be the man who reaches the top of his profession.

"Then no mortal being can stand for long the fawning and adulation which the preacher is likely to receive, especially from foolish and emotional women. He is sure to come to believe that he is a superior being, one who either can do no wrong or can do only right. Steady feeding on flattery unfits him for sound counsel regarding his shortcomings; he gets into the habit of judging his own actions, not by any undeviating principles, but by the measure of praise they receive.

"There are peculiar temptations incident to the work of any man who appears to weak minds as a demi-god on occasions, whose work makes unusual demands on his nerve forces, and who is obliged to work almost exclusively with women. There is not only the temptation to license in personal virtue coupled with opportunity in pastoral visitation; there is the tendency to conformity to feminine standards, so that the man becomes womanly and usually a poor kind of an old woman at that.

"Mere preaching puts a tremendous strain on a man's moral fibre. It is the habitual statement of duties and ideals which the preacher knows he does not reach and do. It is the expression of the phrases of character, not necessarily accompanied with their expression in living and doing. It results in the mental habit of considering a duty done as soon as it is declared. It exhausts the moral impetus in phrases. It makes the man act the lie.

"Intellectual dishonesty results from habitual standing as a special pleader; as the defender of ground which has not been honestly, candidly examined. The preacher seldom goes back to the evidence; he argues from the conclusions of others. He stands as an authority in that in which he frequently has made no original, unprejudicial examination.

"Intellectual dishonesty comes as a result of cowardice in regard to the declaration of his own honest convictions. He is perhaps unconsciously persuaded to teach what the church teaches rather than what he would teach if he gave himself a chance to think. Creeds may be small matters, after all, but the teaching of a creed in which we do not believe is no small matter in its effects on the teacher. There are many potent reasons for fearing a heresy trial--often the thought of his children's hungry mouths and bare backs is one reason. It is a good deal easier to admire the men who went to the stake for a conviction than it is to follow them. The truth is, no minister who is honest with himself and who declares what he fully believes will have any reason to fear. The church may cast him out, but he will find a thousand voices and hearts to echo to any honest truth in his own.

"Often the preacher is so dead sure that his motive is right, that he does not stop to examine sufficiently his method. He wants to save souls, and if he can do it, as it seems to him, by crooked means more quickly than by straight ones, then he takes the crooked way. He wants to build a church--if he can build it quicker by misrepresentation, by double dealing, by beating any one, he thinks only of the church, and that overweighs any other consideration.

"Take the matter of ministers (and others, too) lying in the stories and illustrations they tell. We have all heard preachers tell as happening to them some incident which we read when we were boys; perhaps before they were born. The man is so carried away with desire to impress the truth on you that he consents to lie to make the illustration more personal and forceful. That makes it none the less a lie; but after he has told it that way a few times, he forgets that it is a lie.

"One of the principal reasons for the disrespect in which the preacher is often regarded by the business world lies in the shamefully unbusinesslike manner in which the preacher has been treated in regard to compensation for his work. If his work is worthless, why not say so and tell him to get out, and do something worth while? If it is worth doing, then he ought to be paid sufficient for a living without being compelled to become a cadger and a pauper.

"The old donation party may have had a good beginning, but it has had a bad effect on the minister's character. Add to the moral results of being compelled to digest frozen potatoes, wooden turnips and other donation specimens, the experience of being forced into the attitude, at least annually, of a beggar, and one will begin to appreciate the difficulty the preacher has in maintaining his self-respect. When one makes it hard for a man to respect himself, how long is one likely to respect him?

"When the man in the pulpit is dependent for his daily bread on the tolerance and good will of the man in the pew; when he feels that he may get butter on his bread or even a little cake now and then if he can only get in the good graces of that smug old sinner sitting down there, it is easy to see how he has been tempted to fawn on him, how he has been tempted to speak of the old humbug's robbery of the widow and the orphan as one of the achievements of modern commerce and civilization. It has always been 'hard hitting the devil over the back if you are feeding his belly.'