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Library: Historical Documents: Joseph Mccabe: Lies Of Britannica

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The Lies And Fallacies Of
The Encyclopedia Britanica

How Powerful And Shameless Clerical Forces Castrated
A Famous Work Of Reference

by Joseph McCabe

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THE POPE'S EUNUCHS

A few years ago I had occasion to refer in one of my books to the male
soprani of the papal chapel at Rome. These castrated males, sexually
mutilated, as every priest and every Italian knew, for soprani in the choir
of the Sistine Chapel, were the amusement of Rome when it developed a large
degree of skepticism but a grave scandal to the American and British
Catholics who began to arrive about the middle of the last century. One of
the vices which the Spaniards had brought to Italy in the 16th century
along with the Borgia family and the Spanish Roman Emperors was the
falsetto singer. There were artists who could sing falsetto with
distinction, but as the opera gained in popularity in Italy the practice
began of emasculating boys with good voices and retaining them as male
soprani or, as the Italians, with their usual lack of Christian reticence
about sex called them, the castrati. They were in every opera in the 18th
century, but foreign visitors were never reconciled to them. The famous
English weekly,. The Spectator, wrote about "the shrill celestial whine of
eunuchs," and by the end of the 18th century they began to fade out of the
opera-house.

But, as the word "celestial" indicates, they were found also in the choir
of all churches that were proud of their music, particularly in the chapel
of the Vatican Palace. the Sistine Chapel, one of the greatest shrines of
art as well as of virtue and piety in Rome. And the church, clung to their
eunuchs when public opinion almost drove them out of opera. The plea seems
to have been that there was some indelicacy, or risk of it, in having
females in the church choir, so the priests chose to ignore the rather
indelicate nature of the operation of emasculation. The fact was as well
known as the celibacy of the clergy. Grovels standard "Dictionary of Music
and Musicians" (1927) says in a section titled "Castrati":

"Eunuchs were in vogue as singers until comparatively recent times; they
were employed in the choirs of Rome."

So Macmillan's and all other leading dictionaries of music, and English and
American visitors to Rome before 1870 who wrote books rarely failed to
mention, with smirks of humor or frowns of piety, how the beautiful music
of the papal choir was due in large part to manufactured soprani. In the
later years of the last century I talked with elderly men who had, out of
curiosity, dined or lunched with these quaint servants of God.

An American reader wrote me that a Catholic friend, who had doubtless, as
is usual, consulted his pastor, indignantly denied the statement. It was
one of the usual "lies of Freethinkers." For an easily accessible
authority, reliable on such a point, I referred him to the Encyclopedia
Britannica. In all editions to 1928 the article "Eunuchs," after discussing
the barbaric African custom of making eunuchs for the harem, said:

"Even more vile, as being practiced by a civilized European nation, was the
Italian practice of castrating boys to prevent the natural development of
the voice, in order to train them as adult soprano singers, such as might
formerly be found in the Sistine Chapel. Though such mutilation is a crime
punishable with severity, the supply of soprani never failed as long as
these musical powers were in demand in high quarters. Driven long ago from
the Italian stage by public opinion they remained the musical glory and the
moral shame of the papal choir till the accession of Pope Leo XII, one of
whose first acts was to get rid of them."

My correspondent replied, to my astonishment, that there was no such
passage in the Britannica, and I began the investigation of which I give
the results in the present little book. I found at once that in the 14th
edition, which was published in 1929, the passage had been scandalously
mutilated, the facts about church choirs suppressed, and the reader given
an entirely false impression of the work of Leo XII. In this new edition
the whole of the above passage is cut out and this replaces it:

"The Italian practice of castrating boys in order to train them as adult
soprano singers ended with the accession of Pope Leo XIII."

The reader is thus given to understand that the zealous Pope found the
shameless practice lingering in the opera-houses and forbade it. The fact,
in particular, that the Church of Rome had until the year 1878 not only
permitted this gross mutilation but required it for the purpose of its most
sacred chapel -- that Pope Pius IX, the first Pope to be declared
infallible by the Church, the only modern Pope for whom the first official
stage of canonization was demanded, sat solemnly on his throne in the
Sistine Chapel for 20 years listening to "the shrill celestial whine of
eunuchs" -- were deliberately suppressed. Those facts are so glaringly
inconsistent with the claims of Catholic writers in America that the
suppression was clearly due to clerical influence, and I looked for the
method in which it had been applied.

The Encyclopedia is, as its name implies, an ancient British institution
inspired by the great French Encyclopedia of the 18th century. As the
American reading public increased it served both countries, and by 1920 the
special needs of American readers and the great development of science and
technics made it necessary to prepare an entirely recast edition. It now
had an American as well as a British staff and publishing house. and it was
dedicated to King George and President Hoover. The last trace of the
idealism of its earlier publishers disappeared. What bargains were secretly
made to secure a large circulation we do not know but when the work was
completed in 1928 the Westminster Catholic Federation which corresponds to
the Catholic Welfare organization in America, made this boast in its annual
report:

"The revision of the Encyclopedia Britannica was undertaken with a view to
eliminate matter which was objectionable from a Catholic point of view and
to insert what was accurate and unbiased. The whole of the 28 volumes were
examined, objectionable parts noted, and the reasons for their deletion or
amendment given. There is every reason to hope that the new edition of the
Britannica will he found very much more accurate and impartial than its
predecessors."

This blazing Indiscretion seems to have struck sparks in the publishing
offices in London and New York -- later reprints of this emasculated
edition have the imprint of "The University of Chicago," which seems to
have taken over the responsibility -- for on August 9, 1929, a singular
public notice appeared in what is called the Agony Column of the London
Times. I should explain to American readers that the first page of this
famous paper is given up to advertisements and public and private notices
and the two central columns are so much used by separated and
broken-hearted lovers ("Ethel. Where are you? I suffer agony for you. Your
adoring George," etc.) and ladies who have lost their pets or are in need
of money etc., that many frivolous folk take the paper for the humor of
those two columns. One of the longest notices that ever appeared in it was
that of August 9., It rung:

"Westminster Catholic Federation (in large type). On behalf of the
Westminster Catholic Federation we desire to state that it has been brought
to our attention that the wording of the second paragraph of the report of
the Vigilance Sub-Committee of the Federation, (page 18 of the Federation's
21st Annual Report) concerning the forthcoming edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica has apparently given rise to a misunderstanding. We therefore
wish to make it clear that it was far from our intention in the above-
mentioned report to suggest that the Federation has exercised any influence
whatever upon the editing of the Encyclopedia. Such a suggestion would be
devoid of any vestige of foundation. The facts are that the Federation
offered to the Editor of the Encyclopedia its assistance in checking
statements of fact appearing in articles in the previous edition dealing
with the Catholic Church in its historical, doctrinal, or theological
aspects. This offer was accepted, and the Federation was thus enabled to
draw attention to certain errors of date and other facts regarding the
teaching and discipline of the Catholic Church. Beyond this the Federation
has had no hand whatever in the preparation or editing of articles for the
new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica on whatever subject, and any
suggestions to the contrary is, as we have said, without the slightest
foundation.

A.J., London, W.C.2."

I have stressed the essential part of this singular message so that the
reader will bear in mind that Catholic authorities gave the public their
solemn assurance that they had requested -- demanded might be a better word
-- only alterations of wrong dates and statements about the teaching and
discipline of the Church.

Penitence is a familiar and beautiful practice in the Catholic world but we
common folk like to have truth even in penitence. The example I have
already given of the suppression of material facts and a natural comment on
them in regard to eunuch singers and the entirely false impression conveyed
by the sentences which Catholics supplied gives the lie at once to this
apology. Undisputed facts which are strictly relevant to an examination of
Catholic claims have been suppressed. They have nothing to do with dates or
the teaching and discipline of the Church. It is an axiom of Catholic moral
theology that suppression of the truth is a suggestion of untruth," and the
substituted passage goes beyond this. I propose to show that this
introduction of a, painfully familiar Catholic policy has been carried
right through the Encyclopedia. Naturally the immense majority of its
articles do not in any way relate to the church, and I do not claim that I
have compared every short notice or every sentence in longer articles, in
the 11th and 14th editions of the Britannica. Even these short unsigned
notices, referring to such matters as popes and saints, have often been
falsified, and I give a few examples. But I am mainly concerned with
important alterations. There are still passages in the Encyclopedia which
the Catholic clergy do not like. Writers who are still alive may have
objected to the adulteration of their work, or the facts may be too
notorious for the editors to permit interference. But I give here a mass of
evidence of the corrupt use of the great power which the Catholic Church
now has: a warning of what the public may expect now that that Church has,
through its wealth and numbers, secured this pernicious influence on
publications, the press, the radio, and to an increasing extent on
education and even the cinema.

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CASTRATING THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

It will be useful to give first the outcome of a somewhat cursory survey,
page by page, of the first few volumes of the Encyclopedia. More important
-- in their bearing on the Church -- articles in later volumes commonly
have the initial X at the close, which seems to be the cloak of the
Catholic adulterator. This will enable any reader to compare for himself
passages in the 11th and the 14th editions, but the conspirator shows his
hand even in large numbers of short unsigned, especially biographical,
notices. It is, of course, understood that the work had to be considerably
abbreviated to accommodate new developments of science and life, in the
14th edition, but when you find that the curtailing consists in suppressing
an unpleasant judgment or a fact about a Pope while unimportant statements
of fact are untouched, and when you find the life of a saintly man or the
flattering appreciation of his work little affected while the life or work
of a heretic is sacrificed, you have a just suspicion.

An example is encountered early in the first volume in the short notices of
the Popes Adrian I and Adrian II. Adrian was the Pope of Charlemagne's
time, and every historian knows that the emperor came, as he shows in his
letters, to despise the Pope and to defy him on a point of doctrine; 'for
at that time the use and veneration of statues in the churches was made a
doctrinal issue between East and West. The notice of Adrian in the older
edition of the Encyclopedia was one of those inexpert paragraphs by some
man who knew nothing about the importance of the quarrel, but a priestly
hand has untruthfully inserted in the new edition:

"The friendly relations between Pope and Emperor were not disturbed by the
difference which arose between them on the question of the veneration of
images."

Here, instead of abbreviating, the editor gratuitously inserts new matter,
and it is untruthful. The Pope, whose safety depended upon the favor of
Charlemagne, said little, it is true, but at a time when "the veneration of
images" -- as historians persist in calling statues. -- was the greatest
issue in the Church, Charlemagne put his own name to a book in which Roman
practice and theory were denounced as sinful, the whole Gallician Church
was got to support him, and the timid protests of the Pope were
contemptuously ignored.

The touch in the notice of Pope Adrian II has just as little to do with
dates and discipline and is just the suppression of a fact which the Church
does not like. The real interest of the Pope is that he presided over the
Church in the latter part of the 9th century, the time when it was sinking
into its deepest degradation. The appalling coarseness of life is seen in
the fact that the Pope's daughter was abducted by the son of a bishop and
brother of a leading cardinal, and when the Pope got the Emperor to send
troops, he murdered them. The notice of the Pope in the 11th edition adds
that "his (the noble abductor) reputation suffered but a momentary
eclipse," which is perfectly true, for the abducting family were high both
in church and nobility and the Romans in large part supported them. But the
sentence has been cut out of the new edition. Little touches of that sort,
not always condensing the text but always -- and generally untruthfully --
in the interest of the Church occur repeatedly.

Such articles as "Agnosticism" and "Atheism". did not concern the Catholic
Church in particular and were left to more honest but hardly less bigoted
clerical writers. I need say of them only that they reflect the cloudy
ideas of some theologian and tell the reader no more about the situation in
these matters today than if they had been written by a Hindu swami. A
different procedure is found when we come to "Alban." The old notice. said
that he is usually styled "the proto-martyr of Britain," and added "but it
is impossible to determine with certainty whether he ever existed, as no
mention of him occurs till the middle of the 6th century"; which is
correct. But these zealots for correctness of dates and discipline have, in
the new edition, turned him into an indisputably real saint and martyr. He
is now "the first martyr of Britain" and all hints of dispute about his
historicity are cut out.

We pass to "Albertos Magnus" -- why an Encyclopedia in English should not
say Albert the Great is not explained; possibly the epithet is less
offensive to the eye in Latin -- and this article is condensed (as the
whole new editions had to be) in a peculiarly clerical manner. The original
writer had never properly informed the reader that Albert was so much
indebted to Aristotle for his "science" that he was known to Catholic
contemporaries as "the Ape of Aristotle" and that he was apt to be so
inaccurate that he described Plato (Who lived a century before the Stoic
school was founded) as a Stoic. These things are sacrificed in the sacred
cause of abbreviation but new compliments, such as that Bacon called Albert
"the most noted of Christian philosophers" are inserted to fill the gaps.

The article "Albigensians" is one in which a modern student would most
surely expect a modern encyclopedia to replace the conventional old article
by one in line with our historical knowledge. Instead of this we get a page
article reduced to half a page, and this is done chiefly by cutting out 25
lines in which the older writer had honestly explained that the Pope turned
the brutal Knights of France upon the Albigensians only when 20 years
preaching failed to make the least impression on them and 10 lines showing
what "vast inquests" of the Inquisition were still needed after years of
slaughter by the Pope's savage "crusaders." We therefore recognize the
anointed hand of the abbreviator. And it is clear that the editor or
sub-editor cheated the public of a most important truth by entrusting this
article to Catholic "correctors of dates and discipline." We now fully
realize the importance from the angle of the history of civilization of
this brilliant but anti-Christian little civilization in the South of
France (close to Arab Spain) and what Europe lost. Of the brutality of the
massacre and the Pope's dishonesty in engineering it the reader is, of
course, given no idea, though these are found in the Pope's extant letters.

Even such articles as that on "Alembert" -- the famous French skeptic and
scientist D'Alembert -- seem to have been handed over to the clerical
shearer, for the proper appreciation of his character and ability and his
work against the Jesuits are the chief material that has been abbreviated,
but we turn with more interest to the "Alexander" Popes. I need not say,
that anybody who expects an up-to-date account of the great Alexandrian
schools of science and of the splendor of life under the early Ptolemies
will be deeply disappointed, but it is chiefly the name of Pope Alexander
VI which here catches the eye,

Catholics long ago abandoned their attempts to whitewash the historical
figure of that amazingly erotic and unscrupulous Spaniard and especially
after the work of the Catholic historian Dr. L. Pastor it is impossible to
suggest outside the Sunday School that there has been any libelling of this
Pope. What the clerical retouchers have mainly done is to remove sentences
in which the older writer correctly, though only casually and incidentally,
let the reader know that such a Pope was possible only because the Church
was then extraordinarily corrupt. He admitted, for instance, that Alexander
bad been notoriously corrupt for years, as a cardinal, when he was elected
Pope:

"Although ecclesiastical corruption was then at its height his riotous mode
of life called down upon him a very severe reprimand from Pope Pius II."

This is cut out, of course, though we still have the letter in which the
Pope -- himself a rake in his early years, by the way -- describes the
cardinal's scandalous life. Cut out also (for abbreviation) is this
passage:

"A characteristic instance of the corruption of the papal court is the fact
that Borgia's daughter Lucrezia lived with his mistress Giulia, who bore
him a daughter, Laura, in 1492 (the year of his consecration as Pope)."

In short, while it would have elicited the scorn of historians to attempt
to suppress all mention of Alexander's mistresses and children the article
of the 11th edition, which was correct as far as it went, is so manipulated
that the reader has no idea that the Cardinal was brazen in his conduct at
the actual time of his election and entertained his mistress, who was
painted on one of the walls of the Vatican Palace as the Virgin Mary, and
his children in the "sacred Palace"; and that this was due to the general
sordid corruption of the Church. Sexual looseness was the least pernicious
of Borgia's vices, but where the old article noticed that his foreign
policy was inspired only by concern to enrich his children and "for this
object he was ready to commit any crime and to plunge all Italy into war,"
this Catholic stickler for accuracy has cut it out.

Soon after Alexander we come to Antonelli. This man was Cardinal Secretary
of State to Pope Gregory XVI and Pope Pius IX, who is counted a saint by
American Catholics. He was the son of a poor wood-cutter and he died a
millionaire: he left $20,000,000 -- leaving a bastard daughter, a countess
to fight greedy relatives for it. He had refused to take priestly orders
because he wanted freedom. His greed, looseness and complete indifference
to the vile condition of the Papal States were known to everybody. In the
11th edition we read of him:

"At Antonelli's death the Vatican finances were found to be in disorder,
with a deficit of, 45,000,000 lire. His personal fortune, accumulated
during office, was considerable and was bequeathed almost entirely to his
family. . . . His activity was directed almost exclusively to the struggle
between the Papacy and the Italian Risorgimento, the history of which is
comprehensible only when the influence exercised by his unscrupulous
grasping and sinister personality is fully taken into account."

The last part of this now reads "Is comprehensible only when his
unscrupulous influence is fully taken into account." Apart from the one
word "unscrupulous" the reader is totally misled as to his character.

The article on Aquinas was already written favorably to the Church and only
a few light touches were needed.. But the eagle eye caught. a sentence,
perfectly accurate but offensive to Catholics, in the short notice of the
noblest figure of the 12th century, Arnold of Biresoi &. It said:

"At the request of the Pope he was seized by order of the Emperor ... and
hanged."

Out goes the reference to the Pope, who had tried for years to catch Arnold
before he acted on a perjured passport from the Emperor; and no idea is
given of the remarkable position of the premature democrat in the history
of European thought.

More amusing is the manipulation of the notice of "Arthur" of Britain. In
the 11th edition he is frankly presented to the reader as a myth, as the
popular conception of him certainly is. All that we can say with any
confidence is that there seems to have been a sort of captain named Arthur
in the ragged military service of one of the half-civilized and wholly
brutal British "kings" after the departure of the Romans. In this new
compendium of modern scholarship (now sponsored by the University of
Chicago) Arthur has been converted into an undisputed and highly
respectable reality; a "King of Britain" who led his Christian armies
against the pagan Anglo-Saxons. And this is done on the authority of a monk
who wrote two and a half centuries later! There is no proof that this fine
achievement is due to the Catholic Federation, but just as detectives look
for the trade-mark of a particular burglar when a bank has been robbed....

"Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria" becomes, by the same process "Athanasius
the Great, saint, and bishop of Alexandria," and so important to us moderns
that, in spite of the needs of space for new thought, the long article (by
a cleric), is lengthened in the new edition. The short article on Atheism,
which follows closely upon it, is, as I said, quite worthless. A British
royal chaplain writes on it as if it were a point in dispute in some
Pacific Island, instead of a burning question of our time. He seems to have
been totally unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that a few years
earlier the majority of American scientists had (in Leuba) declared
themselves Atheists, and that in the seven years before he wrote his
article tens of millions of folk, from Annam across Europe to Chile, had
abandoned the churches to embrace Atheism. Naturally a learned staff which
announces in the preface to the Encyclopedia that it considers that the
wicked materialistic, philosophy of the 19th century has been slain by the
new science thinks such things beneath its notice.

Early in the B's we get the same light touches of the clerical brush. The
long and appreciative article on the great jurist and Atheist Jeremy
Bentham -- that he was an outspoken Atheist is, of course, not stated --
one of the most powerful idealists of the post-Napoleonic period, is
mercilessly cut, while the old notices of the insignificant Pope Benedicts
remain. At least, I notice only one cut. It is said in the old article that
"Benedict IX, perhaps the vilest man who ever wore the tiara -- his almost
immediate successor spoke of his "rapes, murders, and other unspeakable
acts" -- appears to have died impenitent." That is cut out. It saves so
much space.

A long article is inserted in the new edition on "Birth Control": a subject
that had no article in the old edition. This consists of the findings of a
series of conferences on the subject mostly overshadowed by church
influence. These fill several pages while the elementary grounds for seeing
the necessity of it -- the rapid multiplication of population in modern
times -- are barely noticed. A section on the religious attitude is written
by the Rev. Sir James Marchant, a parson of the Church of England who is
fanatically Catholic in sex-matters. It begins with the plump untruth that
"it's now recognized that the objections on religious grounds to birth
control must be fully heard," and it consists mainly of a sort of sermon by
the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, whose views are "shared by many
other religious communities." We should like to hear of one which as a body
has condemned birth control. Then the mysterious X appears at last with a
tendentious summary of the whole article -- against birth control. Strange
stuff for a modern encyclopedia.

Even the article on Bismarck is retouched, mainly in the section which
describes his great struggle with the Catholics of Germany, and the article
"Body and Mind" is as modern as the Athanasian Creed. No evidence appears
that this new article, so profoundly important in view of the advanced
condition of American psychology -- four manuals out of five refuse to
admit "mind" -- was written by a Catholic, so I will be content to say that
it is an affront to American science. Later appears another new article
"Bolshevism." But there was, naturally, no article with that title in the
11th edition so that the Catholic censor knew nothing about it until it
appeared in print. Its accuracy and coldness must have pained him. It is
written by Professor Laski.

I say the Catholic censor but there was obviously team-work on both sides
of the Atlantic, though Gildea is the only sophist mentioned on the
American side. And the next item to catch the clerical eye and raise the
clerical blood-pressure was the fair article on "Giordano Bruno," in the
11th edition. You can almost see the fury with which the three columns are
reduced to less than a column in the 14th edition, and this is done by
cutting out about 100 lines of sober appreciation of the great ex-monk and
scholar's ability and character. Cutting out flowers is not enough. A new
paragraph informs the innocent reader:

"Apart from his disdainful, boasting nature and his attack on contemporary
Christianity, the chief causes of Bruno's down-fall were his rejection of
the Aristotelic astronomy for the Copernican ... and his pantheistic
tendencies."

The undisputed truth is that he was burned alive by the Papacy, which came
to a corrupt agreement with the Venetians in order to get hold of him and
satisfy its bitter hatred of the critic.

"Buddha and Buddhism"' are mangled In the new edition in the most
extraordinary fashion. Twelve pages of sound, useful matter are cut down to
three; as if Buddhism had meantime died in the East and ceased to be of any
interest to westerners. Between the publication of the two editions of the
Encyclopedia a good deal has been written on the creed of Buddha, and it is
quite generally agreed by experts on the religion or on India that he was
an Atheist. Not a single word is said about the question, and the reader is
left at the mercy of every pamphleteer who talks about the "religious
genius" of the man.

More definitely and recognizably Catholic is the tampering with the notice
of St. Catherine. There are two saints of that name, Catherine of
Alexandria and Catherine of Siena, and the 11th edition rightly said:

"Of the former history has nothing to tell ... that St. Catherine actually
existed there is no evidence to disprove, and it is possible that some of
the elements in her legend are due to confusion with the story of Hypatia."

This was moderate enough. We do not have to "disprove" the existence of
martyrs, and the supposed evidence in favor of her historicity is now
rejected even by some Catholic experts on martyrs, while the details are
often comical and the general idea is certainly based upon Hypatia. Yet in
this severely-examined and up-to-date compendium of knowledge we find the
first sentence of the above changed to: Of St. Catherine of Alexandria
history has little to tell." The rest is cut out and, we are brazenly told
that "her actual existence is generally admitted." The article on Catherine
of Siena was already inaccurately favorable to Catholic claims in the 11th
edition, so it is allowed to stand. The masterful Siennese nun had nothing
like the political influence ascribed to her, and it was not she but the
threats of the Romans that brought the Popes back from Avignon to Rome.

In the article "Church history," to which in the new edition, the ominous X
is appended, there are just slight changes here and there in the generally
orthodox article. The treatment is as far removed from modern thought as
Alaska is from Florida. It is much the same with the string of Popes who
had the name Clement, The reader is still not told that many historians
refuse to admit "Clement I" as the first of the Popes -- he is completely
ignored in the Letter of the Romans to the Corinthians of the year 96 A.D.
and many of the other Clements, who were notoriously of disreputable
character, are discreetly retouched, though the earlier notices let them
off lightly. Clement V, a Plrench adventurer, who sold himself to the
French King on vile conditions in order to get the, Papacy, has the words
"in pursuance of the King's wish he summoned the Council of Vienna" (to
hold a trial of the monstrous vices of his predecessor and the still more
scandalous vices of the Knights Templer, as we shall see) changed to:
"Fearing that the state would proceed independently against the alleged
heresies he summoned the Council of Vienna"; which is one sort of
abbreviation and leaves the reader entirely ignorant of the character of
the Pope. Clement VI, a notoriously sensuous and dissipated man, is left in
his Catholic robes. Of Clement VII the earlier edition said: "Though free
from the grosser vices of his predecessors he was a man of narrow outlook
and interests." The whole of this is cut out, suppressing both his vices
and those of his predecessors. Clement XIV is said to have suppressed the
Jesuits only because he thought it necessary for the peace of the Church.
This is a familiar Jesuit claim and an audacious lie. In the bull of
condemnation Clement endorses all the charges against the Jesuits

The article "Conclave" sounds like one that was ripe for the shearer, but
even in the 11th edition it was written by a priest. And it had a Jesuit
touch that the censor is careful not to correct. As the leading authority
it names a Catholic work which, in any case, few have any chance to
consult, while it does not mention the standard history of Papal Conclaves,
that of Petrucelli della Gattina (four volumes of amazing disclosures), of
which there is now an English version (V. Petrie's "Triple Crown," 1935).
But of little tricks of this kind, especially in pressing "Sound"
authorities upon the reader and concealing from him that there are good
critical works that he ought to read, there is so much that it would be
tiresome to trace it all. We will consider larger matters.

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THE TAMING OF HISTORY

The short and worthless note under "Chivalry" in the old Encyclopedia would
in any new edition that frankly aimed to give the reorder summaries of
modern knowledge have been replaced by some account of the present general
agreement of historians that the alleged Age of Chivalry (110-1400 A.D.) is
sheer myth. No leading historical expert on France, Germany, England,
Italy, or Spain during that period recognizes it. They all describe such a
generally sordid character in the class of knights and nobles, particularly
in what are considered by romantic writers the specific virtues of chivalry
-- chastity and the zeal for Justice -- that the student of general history
feels justified in concluding that, on our modern idea of chivalry, this
was precisely the most unchivalrous section of civilized history. Of this
truth not, a syllable is given, not even a hint that the myth is
questioned. So editors, moral essayists and preachers, who take their
history from the Encyclopedia, continue to shame our age with reminders of
the glorious virtues of the later Middle Ages, However, we will return to
this when we come to "Knighthood" and "Troubadours" where we shall find a
little more satisfaction.

The article on "Confucius" in the 11th edition was written by a Protestant
missionary, Dr. Legge, and he was not only a fine scholar of Chinese but a
singularly honest type of missionary. In the 14th edition his excellent
five pages are cut to three. One recognizes the need for abbreviation,
though when one finds a four- page article on Falconry, which is really
rather rare today, 16 pages on football, etc., one feels that the work of
condensing might have been done differently. However in the case of a great
Atheist like Confucius an Encyclopedia that would please the clergy must
not pay too many compliments, and the Catholic X, who probably knows as
little about Chinese as about biochemistry valiantly cuts the work of the
expert to three pages, adding his X to Legge's initials at the foot. One
illustration of the way in which it is done will suffice. Confucius so
notoriously rejected belief in gods and spirits that Legge's statement of
this has to remain. But there is one point on which Christians hold out
desperately, Legge told the truth about it, and X cuts it out.

It is whether Confucius anticipated Christ by many centuries in formulating
the Golden Rule, or, to meet the better-informed apologists, whether
Confucius recommended it only in a negative form. As nothing is more
common, and probably has been since the Stone Age, than to hear folk say,
"Do as you would be done by," or some such phrase, which is the Golden rule
in fireside English, the fuss about it is amusing. However, the champions
of Christ's unique moral genius will have it that Confucius gave it only in
the negative form. "What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to
others." As the Christian decalogue consists almost entirely of negations,
that is not bad. But in the 11th edition Legge goes on to explain that when
a disciple asked the master if it could be expressed in a word he used a
compound Chinese word which means "As Heart" (or Reciprocity), and Legge
says that he conceived the, rule in its most positive and most
comprehensive form. The Rev. Mr. X suppresses this to save space and
Inserts this pointless sentence:

"It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form to give
force to a positive statement."

So the preacher end pamphleteer continue to inform folk on the authority of
J. Logge in the Encyclopedia Britannica that Confucius knew the Golden Rule
only in the inferior negative form.

There was no need to let X loose with his little hatchet upon the article
"Constantine." It was, like "Charlemagne," "Justinian," and most such
articles already subservient to piety and an outrage on historical truth.
Constantine's character is falsified by suppressing facts. For instance, in
profane (and ancient Roman) history you will read that Constantine was
driven from Rome by the scorn of the Romans because he had had his wife and
his son murdered, probably in a fit of jealousy. Here his quitting Rome and
founding Constantinople is represented as a matter of high strategy and a
core for the interests of religion. Not a hint about the "execution" of his
wife, bastard son, and nephew. The Romans compared him to Nero.

In 20 pages on "Crime" we do not get any statistical information whatever
about the relation of crime to religious education, which after all is of
some interest to our age, so, skipping a few minor matters, we come to
"Crusades." Again the article in the old Encyclopedia was so devout and
misleading that X could not improve upon it. It admits that Europe had
become rather boorish owing to the barbaric invasions but claims that it
did provide the Church with the grand force of knight-hood to use against
the wicked Moslem:

"The institution of chivalry represents such a clerical consecration, for
ideal ends and noble purposes, of the martial impulses which the Church had
endeavored to cheek...."

And so on. A lie in every syllable. The knights of Europe were, with rare
exceptions, erotic brutes -- their ladies as bad -- as all authoritative
historians describe them. The Pope -- his words are preserved -- dangled
the loot of the highly civilized East before their eyes in summoning the
first Crusade; and the story, almost from beginning to end, is a mixture of
superstition, greed, and savagery. The only faint reference to the modern
debunking of the traditional fairy tale is:

"When all is said the Crusades remain a wonderful and perpetually
astonishing act in the great drama of human life."

Even a cleric must be 150 years old and ignorant of history to write
honestly like this article.

Pope "Saint" Damasus I retains his nimbus in the new great Encyclopedia
though he is now known to have been an unscrupulous Spanish adventurer and,
as contemporary priests said, "tickler of matrons' ears." A few remarks
that were made in the short article in the 11th edition about the
incredible massacres at his election and the impeachment of him later (for
adultery) in the civil court are cut out. But while "Damasus" is
abbreviated thus by cutting out references to his misdeeds, the article
"Darwin," is shortened by suppressing whole paragraphs of Professor
Poulton's fine appreciation of his character and work and the world-honors
he received. "David" is in this modern encyclopedia treated as much more
important than Darwin, and, while even theologians now often reject him as
a myth or a dim shapeless figure, almost the whole biblical account of him
is given as history.

But I have overlooked the short article on the "Dark Age," which is
nauseous. There was no article in the 11th edition on it, so an obscure
professor at a third-rate British University has been commissioned to write
one. The phrase was, he says, "formerly used to cover the whole period
between the end of the classical civilization and the revival of learning
in the 15th century." Bunk. No historian extended it beyond the end of the
11th century. In short, he copies certain American professors of history
who cater to Catholics and who give no evidence that they can even read
medieval literature. The period is only dark "owing to the insufficiency of
the historical evidence" yet "great intellectual work was done in
unfavorable conditions." No on except an expert today reads any book
written between 420 and 1100 A.D.; and if that doesn't mean a Dark Age we
wonder what the word means. The writer does not even know that it was "the
Father of Catholic History," Cardinal Baronius, who coined the phrase.

Even worse, from the historical angle, is the article "Democracy." It is
said that "there was no room" for the idea of democracy in the Dark Age,"
but "Christianity with its doctrine of brotherhood and its sense of love
and pity had brought into being an idea unknown to the pagan world, the
idea of man's inherent dignity and importance." We resent this dumping of
the sermons of priests into a modern encyclopedia, but it is even worse
when the emancipation of the serfs and the granting of charters to cities
are traced to that source. The purely economic causes of those developments
are treated in every modern manual. What is worse, the writer conceals, or
does not know, that when the democratic aspiration did at length appear in
Italy the Papacy fought it truculently for two centuries. I find only one
scrap of virtue in the article. American Catholics had not yet invented the
myth that Jefferson got the idea of democracy from the Jesuit Suarez, so it
makes no appearance here, but the writer, not anticipating it, says:

"The revolt of the colonies was not, strictly speaking, inspired by a
belief in democracy though it resulted in the establishment of a republic,"

How many times have I pointed that out against the Jesuits!

The article "Education" is another beautiful piece of work -- from the
Catholic angle. The historical part of it was written for the earlier
edition by a strictly orthodox Christian schoolmaster, Welton, and was a
sheer travesty of the history of education as it is now written in all
manuals, yet the article in the new edition is signed "X and C.B."
(Cloudsley Brereton, a British inspector of schools with not the least
authority but with the virtue of faith). In point of fact it is Welton's
original article a little condensed but little altered. They could not well
have made it worse from the historical point of view. The abridgment has
cleared away most of the few good points about Roman education, because any
reference to the system of universal free schooling in Roman days clashes
with the clerical slogan, which is the theme of this article, that the new
religion "gave the world schools." "It was," says the writer, "into this
decaying civilization that Christianity brought new life." Although only a
few catholic schools are mentioned the reader is given the impression that
the new religion inspired a great growth of schools in an illiterate world.
The undisputed truth is that by 350 A.D., before Christianity was
established by force, there were free primary and secondary schools
everywhere, and by 450 A.D. they had all perished: that in 350 the majority
of the workers was literate, and by 450 -- and for centuries afterward --
probably not 1 percent of them could read. Of course it is all put down to
the barbarians. "Most of the public schools disappeared, and such light of
learning as there was kept burning in the monasteries and was confined to
priests and monks." The monks were, as I have repeatedly shown from
Christian writers from Augustine to Benedict, mostly an idle, loose, and
vagrant class, and the few regular houses later established were interested
only in religious education. Pope Gregory I forbade the clergy to open
secular schools.

The article proceeds on these totally false lines through the whole of the
Middle Ages. The work of Charlemagne, which is now acknowledged to have
been paltry and to have perished at his death, is grossly misrepresented,
and the fact that he was inspired in what educational zeal he had by the
school-system of the anti-Papal Lombards is concealed. Not a word is said
about the Lombard system. It is almost as bad in explaining why at last --
six centuries after the Papacy took over the Roman rule -- schools did
begin to spread. There is just one line of reference to the Spanish-Arabs
who inspired it by their restoration of the Roman system of free general
education. Not a word is said about the fact that in Arab- Spain there were
millions of books, finely written on paper and bound, while no abbey in
Europe had more than a few hundred parchments. The origin of the
universities is similarly misrepresented, It is all covered by this
monstrous statement:

"On the whole it may be concluded that in medieval times the provision of
higher instruction was adequate to the demand and that relatively to the
culture of the time the mass of the people were by no means sunk in brutish
ignorance."

"Brutish" is, of course, part of the trick. Read it simply as a denial that
the mass of the people were totally illiterate and then ask your-self how
it is that, even after all the work, of the Jesuits and the Protestants,
still by the middle of the 18th century between 80 and 90 percent of the
people of Europe were illiterate. The writer is so reckless in clerical
myths that he even says that the Age of Chivalry greatly helped:

"The education of chivalry aimed at fitting the noble youth to be a worthy
knight, a just and wise master, and a prudent manager of an estate."

You might just as well pretend that Cinderella is a true account of certain
events in the Middle Ages. The whole long article which is signed X is an
outrage when it is presented to the 20th century. The falsehood is carried
on over the Reformation period and into the supposed account of the real
beginning of education of the people in the 18th century.

I should have to write another encyclopedia if I proposed to analyze the
hundreds of articles in the Britannica which are, like this, just tissues
of clerical false claims, It might be said that, like the religious
literature in which these myths still flourish, the Encyclopedia has to
cater to the religious public. That plea is in itself based upon an
anachronism and on untruth. There is abundant evidence that today the
majority of the reading public, whatever they think about God, do not
accept the Christian religion. In Britain and France the clergy frankly
acknowledge this, and it is concealed only by sophistry in America. But I
am not suggesting that an Encyclopedia that professes to have been
rewritten to bring it into harmony with modern life and thought ought to
exclude religious writers. I say only that when they are entrusted with
articles which are wholly or in part historical they must conform to modern
historical teaching. These articles, judged not by atheistic but by
ordinary historical works, are tissues of untruth; and a good deal of this
untruth, the part which chiefly concerns me here, has been inserted in the
new edition by the Catholic "revisers" who lurk behind the signature X.

As this mark X is in the new edition added to the initials of Mark Pattison
at the foot of the article "Erasmus" we look for adulterations. As,
however, the original article softened the heresies of the great Dutch
humanist there is not much change. Just a few little touches make him less
important and nearer to orthodoxy, and passages reflecting on the foul
state of the Church at the time are excised. With the subject "Evolution,"
on the other hand, no modern editor would dare to allow a Catholic writer
to insert his fantastic views in a publication that professes to be
up-to-date in science. But a place is found for reaction. The British,
Professor Lloyd Morgan is commissioned to write for the new edition a
special article on the evolution of the mind, and it is based upon the
eccentric theory of "emergent evolution" worked out by him in support of
religion, which was dying when he wrote the article and is now quite dead
in the scientific world. Next is added a section on ethics and evolution by
Sir Arthur Thompson, a Unitarian whose peculiar twists of the facts of
science to suit his mysticism have no place whatever outside religious
literature.

The article "Galilee" would be examined eagerly by most critics for
evidence of this clerical "reviser." But even in the 11th edition the
article was written by a Catholic astronomer, Miss Agnes Clerke, and X
seems to have been given the task of cutting her five pages down to two
(while 16 are devoted to football), that gives him opportunities. He leaves
untouched the statement that at the first condemnation Galileo was ordered
to write no more on the subject and "he promised to obey"; which is
seriously disputed and rests on poor evidence. Both Catholic writers refuse
to insert the actual sentence of condemnation, which pledged the Roman
Church to the position that it is "formal heresy" to say that the earth
travels round the sun. When he comes to the second condemnation X
suppresses Miss Clerke's hint that Galileo had ridiculed the Pope in his
Dialogue, which was the main motive of the Pope's vindictive action, and
attributes the procedure to Galileo's supposed breaking of his promise. He
saves a precious line by cutting out Miss Clerke's perfectly true statement
that he was detained in the palace of the Inquisition. In short, it is now
a sound Catholic version of the condemnation of Galileo from first to last,
and it does not warn the reader or take into account in the least the fact
that since Miss Clerke wrote her article Favar has secured and published
(in Italian) new and most important documents on the case, and they have
made the character and conduct of the Pope more contemptible than ever.

The fine eight-page article on Gibbon by the learned Professor Bury in the
earlier edition could not expect to escape. Space must be saved; though one
would hardly realize this when one finds 60 pages devoted to Geometry,
which no one ever learns from an encyclopedia. The reviser condenses the
six and a half pages of Gibbon's life and character to one page and then
sublimely adds his X to Bury's initials as the joint authors of the
article. You can guess how much of Gibbon's greatness is left.

On the other hand the notice of Pope "St." Gregory I, the Pope who forbade
the opening of schools and made the Papacy the richest landowner and
slave-owner in Europe by persuading the rich that the end of the world was
at hand and they had better pass on their property to the church, remains
as fragrant as ever in the new edition. So does the account of Gregory VII
(Hildebrand), the fanatic who violently imposed celibacy upon the clergy
(impelling mobs to attack them and their wives), who put the crown on Papal
Fascism, who used forgeries and started Wars in the interest of the Church,
who hired the savage Normans to fall upon the Romans (who then drove him
into exile), etc. Naturally, the modern reader must not know these things.

The article "Guilds" in the 11th edition; by Dr Gross, is the source of the
monstrous Catholic claim that the Church inspired these medieval
corporations of the workers. It is preserved in all its untruthfulness in
the new edition. After a short and disdainful notice of various profane
theories of the origin of the Guilds he says:

"No. theory of origin can be satisfactory which ignores the influence of
the Christian Church."

It was, as usual, the sublime and unique Christian doctrine of the
brotherhood of man: yet this had been the cardinal principle of Stoicism
and Epicureanism 300 years B.C. The statement is, in the mouth of an expert
on the Guilds, breath-taking in its audacity. The documents preserved in
the Migne (Catholic) collection show clearly that the Guilds were pagan in
origin -- they were most probably relies of the old Roman trade unions --
and that the Church fought them truculently for 100 years after their
appearance in Germany. Gross shows that he has read these documents. He
says that the Guilds were suspected of political conspiracy and opposed on
that ground. On the contrary they were denounced as pagan orgies (suppers,
like those of the Roman unions, at which priests got drunk and behaved
improperly.) X, of course, leaves this pious creed in all its purity.

Haeckel, like Gibbon, gets his distinction reduced in the grim need of
curtailing the old articles: a need which looks peculiar when, a few pages
later, General Smuts is invited to contribute a four-page article on his
ridiculous "Philosophy" (Holism), which has never been taken seriously. But
it favors religion and -- not to put too fine a point on it -- Smuts
rendered high political service to Britain. However while space is so
precious the reviser of the Encyclopedia finds it necessary to add this to
the decimated article on Haeckel: "Although Haeckel occupies no serious
position in the history of philosophy there can be no doubt that he was
very widely read in his own day and that he is very typical of the school
of extreme evolutionary thought."

The last three words give the writer away. It is only the Catholic writer
who makes a distinction between schools of "evolutionary thought." As to
his having been widely read, no scientific work since Darwin's "Origin" had
anything like the circulation of Haeckells "Riddle." It sold millions of
copies in more than 20 languages. And a serious modern writer on Haeckel
would have pointed out that while he despised philosophers and never
claimed to be one, he remarkably anticipated modern thought in insisting
that matter and energy are just two aspects of one reality. Of this
fundamental doctrine of his the writer says not a word.

Even the article "Heresy" of the old edition, though certainly not written
by a heretic, suffers the usual discriminating process of curtailment. The
writer had said:

"As long as the Christian Church was itself persecuted by the pagan empire
it advocated freedom of conscience . . . but almost immediately after
Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire the
persecution of men for religious opinions began."

That of course is cut out. Then a long list of Catholic persecutions in the
Middle Ages is cut out and replaced by this grossly misleading sentence:

"The heresies of the Middle Ages were not matters of doctrine merely
(however important) but were symptoms of spiritual movements common to the
people of many lands and in one way or other threatening the power of the
Roman Catholic system."

An article on the subject which frankly aimed at providing facts for modern
folk would have at least mentioned the death- sentence for heresy, which is
obstinately kept in force in Catholic Canon Law today. Not a word about it,
though on this subject of penalizing religious opinions it is the question
most frequently asked today.

The article "Hospitals" gives us a choice specimen of the art of X-ing. It
consist of two parts, history and modern practice. To the historical
section, which it is of considerable interest to the Catholic propagandist
to misrepresent, X does not append his mark, but he puts it to the section
on modern practice, of which he knows nothing. Was this due to an editorial
or typographical error? Listen. The old article properly gave a gummary
account of the ample provision for the sick in many pre-christian
civilizations, especially the Roman, and added:

"In Christian days no establishments were founded for the relief of the
sick till the time of Constantine."

He might have added that even then they were few and were merely intended
to keep the Christian sick away from the pagan temples of Aesculapius which
were the chief Roman hospitals. All this is cut but and replaced by the
totally misleading or totally false statement:

"But although hospitals cannot be claimed as a direct result of
Christianity no doubt it tended to instill humanist views, and as
civilization grew men and women of many races came to realize that the
treatment of disease in buildings set apart exclusively for the care of the
sick were in fact a necessity in urban districts."

We have several good and by no means anti-Christian histories of hospitals
today. They show a fine record in India under the Buddhists King Asoka and
a creditable record for the Greek-Roman world in imperialist days. They
show also that the Christian record the period of confusion after the fall
of Roman Empire but from 450 to the 18th century is miserable; and thus in
an encyclopedia that advertises that it is rewritten in order to ensure
confidence that the reader is getting what is generally agreed upon by the
experts in each department, writers are permitted to take the reader even
farther away from the truth than -- in articles of this kind -- they were
earlier in the century. A score of articles like this which are supposed to
prove by historical facts the nature of the Christian social inspiration
and social record are cheap and untruthful religious propaganda.

Even in the short notice of Hypatia the clerical surgeon has used his
knife. Short as it was, we shall be told that it had to be curtailed
(though the editor spares eight pages for Icelandic literature) but the
omissions are significant. The earlier article rightly said that she was a
"mathematician and philosopher," and contemporaries speak of her works on
mathematics not philosophy. Yet even the word "mathematician," which does
not take up much space does give us a better idea of the solid character of
Hypatia, is cut out. The earlier writer says that she was "barbarously
murdered by the Nitrian monks and the fanatical Christian mob," that the
Caesareum to which her body was dragged was "then a Christian church" and
that the remains of the aged scholar (as she was) were burned piecemeal.
All the phrases I have italicized (BOLD) are carefully cut out, as is also
the whole of the following passage:

"Most prominent among the actual perpetrators of the crime was Peter the
Reader (cleric), but there seems little reason to doubt the complicity of
Cyril (the archbishop)."

So the "correction of dates" and curtailing some articles to admit new
matter" just happen to take a form which greatly reduces the guilt of the
Christian Church in the foulest crime of the age; for the greatest lady in
the whole Greek world at the time was stripped in the street and her flesh
cut from her bones with broken pottery by monks and people directly
inflamed against her by the archbishop. This is the sort of thing for which
the University of Chicago now stands sponsor.

In the note on "Idealism," which is colorless, I notice that the improvers
of the old Britannica have recommended a work by "J. Royce"; a point which
must rather annoy the professors since Josiah Royce is one of the most
distinguished philosophers America has yet produced. More important is the
great saving of space in reducing the size of the article "Illegitimacy."
In face of the drivel that Catholic apologists talk about influence of
their church on sexual conduct we have been accustomed to point out,
amongst other things, that bastards are far more common in countries where
the Roman and Greek churches are, or were until recent years, more
powerful. In the old Britannica the article gave a wealth of statistics,
particularly about Ireland, to help the student on this point. Out they
have all gone -- to find more space, of course, for cricket and football.
"Illiteracy" is just as little seriously informing for the inquirer who
wants to know whether it is true that the church is the Great Educator.

The article on "Immortality" was much too pious in the old edition of the
Encyclopedia to need any "improvement." It stands, like a hundred other
articles, as a monument of what respectable folk thought in Victorian days.
It was out of date even in 1911. Since then the belief in immortality is
almost dead in philosophy, and the teaching of psychology today
emphatically excludes it. Even theologians doubt it or at least widely
admit that attempts to prove it are futile. Of this state of modern thought
the article gives no more idea than it does of Existentialism.

Similarly, the article "Infallibility" in the old edition was written by a
Catholic and needed no "correction of dates." But it was better not to let
the reader know that it was written by a Catholic, so away go his initials,
The article "Infanticide" would be considered by many more important than
archery and croquet and other genteel sports of our grandmothers, because
it is one of the familiar claims of the apologist that while the ancient
Romans were appallingly callous on the subject the new religion brought the
world a new sense of the importance of even a newborn babe's life. The old
edition was certainly defective in its account of the practice in ancient
Rome but even the little it said has been cut out. An inquirer into the
subject will not get one single ray of light on Roman practice from the new
article; and it is candidly signed X.

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POPES AND INQUISITORS

Then we come to the long string of Popes who adopted the name "Innocent"
when they donned the white robes of "the Vicar of Christ." We know little
about some of them, but others are so well known, and there is so little
dispute about their character, that the name is a mockery. All that the
Catholic editor could do in such cases was to make a few of those neat
little cuts with his scissors that at least make the record seem grayish
instead of black. For instance, under "Innocent III" the old article spoke
about the "horrible massacre" of the Albigensians which he ordered. The
word "horrible" has been cut out; it was, no doubt, too strong an
expression for the fact that only a few hundred thousand men, women, and
children were savagely massacred because they would not bow to Rome. No one
doubts the religious sincerity and strict personal conduct of Innocent III,
but this article does not give the reader the least inkling of the perfidy,
dishonesty, and cruelty into which his fanaticism led him.

It is different with Innocent VIII, an elderly roue who got the papacy in
the fight of the factions and immensely promoted the debauchery of Rome and
the Vatican. The old article said, moderately enough:

"His youth, spent at the Neapolitan court, was far from blameless, and it
is far from certain that he was married to the mother of his numerous
family."

As he was credited by public opinion with only 16 children the censor must
have thought this excessive, so cut out the whole passage. Naturally he cut
out also the later passage: His curia was notoriously corrupt, and he
himself openly practiced nepotism in favoring his children, concerning whom
the epitaph is quoted: "He guiltily begot six sons and as many daughters,
so that Rome has the right to call him Father." Thus he gave to his
undeserving son Franceschetto several towns near Rome and married him to
the daughter of Larenzo de Medici (the greatest prince of Italy).

All this is cut out of the new edition of the Encyclopedia, which was to
appeal to all by its accuracy. There is not the least doubt in history that
the Pope had children, that his son Francheschietto was one of the vilest
and most dissipated young men of Rome, and that Innocent was aware that the
Papal Court was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption. The notice of
the Pope in this edition is a calculated deception of the reader.

It is almost as bad with the notice of Pope Innocent X; and the deception
here is the more wicked because Innocent X ruled after what Catholic
apologists call the Counter-Reformation, which is supposed to have purified
the papacy and the church. The notice in the old edition at least gave a
hint of his character by saying:

"Throughout his pontificate he was completely dominated by his
sister-in-law Donna Olimpia Maidaechini (a woman of masculine spirit).
There is no reason to credit the scandalous reports of an Illicit
attachment. Nevertheless the influence of Donna Olimpia was baneful, and
she made herself thoroughly detested by her inordinate ambition and
rapacity."

This was a mild and inadequate expression of the notorious historical fact
that for 10 years this vile woman openly sold -- clerics, even bishops,
queuing at the door of her palace -- every ecclesiastical office in the
Power of the papacy; and it suppresses entirely the scandal of the Pope's
"nephews," The license granted her was so enormous that folk had every
reason to assume that She had been Innocent's mistress. Yet in the new
edition of the Encyclopedia the main part of the moderate passage I quoted
from the older edition is cut out. An incorrect date, no doubt. Each such
notice of a Pope to the middle of the 17th century is thus doctored, to
protect the modern Catholic myth of a Counter- Reformation.

We come a few pages later to "Inquisition," and here you will expect that X
has surpassed himself. Not a bit of it. He has changed little -- because
the article even in the old edition was written by a French Catholic,
Alphandery. X has just touched it up a little and put his mark at the end
of it. It is as scandalous a piece of deception of the public, since it is
not stated and cannot now easily be verified that Alphandery was a
Catholic, as for the Encyclopedia Americana to have got Japanese
propagandists to write the long section in it on Japan. It opens with a
show of flooring at once the critics of the Inquisition. They are supposed
to say it began in the 12th century, whereas it goes back to the early
church, even to Paul. This is throwing dust in the eyes of the reader.
"Inquisition" does not mean persecution or prosecution for heresy but
"searching out" heresy, and it was the Popes of the early 13th century who
created the elaborately organized detective as well as penal force which we
specifically call the Inquisition.

It next scores by remarking that the early Fathers did not favor Punitive
measures. How on earth could they have dreamed of them under Roman law and
when they were an illicit sect themselves. It says that there was little
persecution for heresy from the 6th to the 12th century, the Dark Age;
which amuses us when we recall that 99 and a fraction percent of the
population of Europe were illiterate and so densely ignorant that folk
could not tell one doctrine from another and just attended Sunday services
in Latin. Then we get the germs of the cowardly and debased modern Catholic
apology: that the church was always reluctant to persecute but the zeal of
the peoples and princes of Europe forced its hand. Of course, both writers
make much of the famous persecution decree of Frederick II -- the great
heretic who appealed to the other kings to abolish the Papacy -- but are
careful not to mention the savage action of the papacy which dictated it or
the fact that Frederick never applied the law. Torture the gentle church
particularly disliked and only borrowed it from secular law: in which the
church had enforced it for centuries for clerical offenses like blasphemy.
They both say: "We must accept the conclusion Of H. C. Lea and Vancandard
that comparatively few people suffered at the stake in the medieval
Inquisition." That is a total perversion of Lea's words -- he refers to the
first half of the Middle Ages when there was no Inquisition -- and they
grossly mislead the reader by coupling Vacandard's name with his. Canon
Vacandard was one of the most reckless of the French apologists.

But I cannot go phrase by phrase through this Catholic rubbish. In spite of
all its sophistry and suppressions it leaves the Inquisition the most
scandalous quasi-judicial procedure that ever disgraced civilization, yet
it is not the full truth. It is true that it does not tell the lie that
American apologists now do -- that the Roman Inquisition never executed men
-- and it does not even mention, much less challenge, the definite figure
of 341,042 victims of the Spanish Inquisition which Llorente, secretary of
the Inquisition, canon of the church, and Knight of the Caroline order,
compiled from its archives. Its sophistry gets it so muddled in regard to
this important question of the spanish Inquisition that it first says the
people regarded heresy as "a national scourge" and the Inquisition as "a
powerful and indispensable agent of public protection," and then tells how
the greed of the Inquisition "rapidly paralyzed commerce and industry." It
does not tell how while Spain was still Catholic the fierce anger of the
people destroyed the Inquisition.

This book would become another encyclopedia if I were to analyze in this
way all the articles, especially on religious matters, that are in this new
edition of the Britannica foisted on the reader as the common teaching of
our historians, philosophers or sociologists, nor can I stop at every
little specimen of the zeal of the group or phalanx of writers who mask
themselves with an X. Even the article "Ionia" has suffered from their
clumsy treatment. In a fine page in the last edition Dr. Hogarth summed up:

"Ionia has laid the world under its debt not only by giving birth to a long
series of distinguished men of letters and science but by originating the
schools of art which prepared the way for the brilliant artistic
development of Athens in the 5th century."

This and the best evidence for it are cut out, but X does not put his
crooked mark here. He appends it to the next section, which is on the
geology of the Ionian Isles! In my own historical Works, I have laid great
stress on the significance of Ionia and I have found my readers puzzled.
They will not get much help from this mutilated article.

The historical section of the article "Italy" -- a country which is
described as 97.12 percent Catholics even now that Communists and
Socialists dominate it -- ought to have been revised, not in a Catholic
sense, for it was far too lenient to the papacy, but to harmonize with the
modern teaching of history. Instead of this being done X is allowed to add
a gushing section on the beautiful accord of the Pope and Mussolini, the
"unexampled scenes of enthusiasm" in Rome when the infamous compact was
signed, and the joy of "300,000,000 Catholics" through-out the world, This
in face of the notorious fact that the Fascists themselves bitterly
attacked Mussolini for signing the Treaty and all that has happened since.
The Chicago professors might ask Professor Salvemini what he thinks of it.
The total impression given to any reader who ploughs through the history of
Italy in this article from the time of Charlemagne onward is, as far as the
relations of the Italians with the Popes are concerned, false; but I doubt
if anybody ever does read these historical articles in encyclopedias from
beginning to end.

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THE JESUITS AND OTHER ROGUES

The article "Society of Jesus" -- even the title has been altered from
"Jesuits," a word which does not smell so sweet -- ought to have been a
happy hunting ground for this Catholic corrector of false dates, but from
the older editions of the Britannica it had already in the 11th edition
been rewritten by a Jesuit. There are, however, or used to be, Jesuits and
Jesuits, and the Father Taunton who initials the article assured me that in
private he went far, but one did not look for that in his professional
work. His article, endorsed and relieved of any leaning to candor, is still
just one of those religious tracts that the Encyclopedia offers the reader
instead of seriously informing and neutral articles on controverted points.
It is a travesty of the real history of the Society, a touching fairy-
tale, mostly based upon what the Jesuit professes to be. Taunton, however,
did let himself go to this extent:

"Two startling and undisputed facts meet the student who pursues the
history of the Society, The first is the universal suspicion and hostility
it has incurred -- not merely from the Protestants whose avowed foe it has
been, nor yet from the enemies of all clericalism and dogma but from every
Catholic state and nation in the world. Its chief enemies have been those
of the household of the Roman Catholic faith."

For this original article gives abundant evidence. The clause I outline
disappears in the sacred cause of abridgment and Father Taunton's too
candid words become:

"The most remarkable fact in the Society's history is the suspicion and
hostility it has incurred within the household of the Roman Catholic
faith."

Much of this, he explains, is due to the superior virtues of the Jesuits
and the dishonesty of their critics. He even ventures to include the
austere and most virtuous Pascal in a group of critics who are described as
"not scrupulous in their quotations." He cuts out the serious criticism of
Jesuit education (in the old article) in order to protect the fiction,
which modern Jesuits have spread, that they were great educators.

But the most deliberate perversion of the truth is seen in the account of
what happened in the 18th century. It is a commonplace of history how the
Catholic kings of France, Spain, and Portugal, stung by revelations of the
greed, hypocrisy, and intrigues of the Jesuits, suppressed the Society in
their dominions and appealed to the Pope to suppress it altogether, which
he did in 1775. We might allow that in the new edition it was necessary to
abridge the account of the crimes of the Jesuits on which the monarch and
the Popes acted but these clerical champions of accuracy in the new edition
of the Encyclopedia have gone far beyond this. Taunton had said:

"The apologists of the Society allege that no motive influenced the Pope
save the love of peace at any price and that he did not believe in the
culpability of the Jesuits. The categorical charges made in the document
(the Pope's bull) rebut this plea."

Taunton gave enough of the Pope's words -- I give a fuller account in my
large "Candid History of the Jesuits" (which is, of course, not mentioned
in the bibliography) -- to prove this. It is all cut out, and the reader is
just given the modern thumping lie of the Jesuits that the Pope expressed
no opinion on the charges against them. And lest any reader or critic
should be able to say that that is just the opinion of a Catholic writer,
Taunton's initials have been suppressed and in this case X has not given
the mark of the crook. I should like to ask the professors of the
University of Chicago what they think of that.

The articles "Jesus" and "Jews" I do not propose to desecrate by analysis.
They are orthodox and venerable with age. They tell the reader what all
theologians but a few rebels thought half a century or more ago. Whether it
is for that sort of thing that you consult a modern encyclopedia.... Well,
please yourself. It is the same with the notice of Joan of Are. In the old
encyclopedia my friend Professor Shotwell, of Columbia, had a fair article
on Joan. It was not quite up to date, but it was mildly critical. Now that
Joan is turned into a saint, as part of the political deal of the Vatican
and the French government, and in spite of the dire need to abridge the old
edition, Shotwell's sober one and a half page notice is replaced by a three
and a half page sermon by a French Catholic. Not a word about modern
military opinion of her -- whether she had any ability at all or was just a
superstitious tonic in a jaded military world -- and not a word about the
new research of Miss Murray and others into the real nature of witchcraft
and their conclusion that Joan was probably a member of the witch cult.

Then come the "John" Popes and prodigious feats of juggling. They had to be
brought down to the customary level of grossly untruthful treatment of
saints, martyrs, popes, and other sacred things in this "modern" work of
reference. Of the character of most of the Johns we know nothing, but three
or four of them were so notoriously vicious and otherwise devoid of
interest that their portraits had to be touched up considerably. John X was
decidedly one of them. Even the old article, admitting discreetly that he
"attracted the attention" of a leading lady of the Roman nobility, allowed
that "she got him elected Pope" in direct opposition to a decree of council
(which X cuts out). But old and new editions introduce John XI as son of
Marozia and reputed son of (Pope Sergius III." This is covering up the most
infamous period of the depravity of the Papacy (or any other religious
authority in the world) not with a veil but with painted boards. The period
was what the Father of Catholic History, Cardinal Baronius, following the
few clerical writers of the period, calls "The Rule of the Whores"; and I
am not here giving a vulgar rendering of the Latin. The period stinks
amazingly even in Cardinal Baronius. The two chief whores who ruled the
Papacy for 30 or 40 years were Theodore. and her daughter Marozia (as
fierce and lustful a cat as you will meet even in the history of the Middle
Ages). Two Popes at least were lovers of these women and one was -- not
reputed to be but certainly was -- the bastard of Marozia and Pope Sergius
and was put on the papal throne by Marozia's orders.

Another son of Marozia's ruled Rome and the papacy for 20 years after the
period that is strictly called "The Rule of the Whores" and he put his own
son, John XII, on the papal throne. There may have been a few Popes as
licentious as this young man was -- I would not be quite of it -- but
certainly not one worse. He, says the contemporary Bishop Liutprand, turned
the papal palace into "a brothel" and an inn. He seduced his father's
mistress and his own sisters and raped pilgrims, he castrated the single
cardinal who criticized him. . . . There was nothing he did not do during
the 10 years of his pontificate, yet the feeble reference to his scandalous
private life in the 11th edition is cut out in the fourteenth, leaving him
one of the Holy Fathers.

It is useless to go into every detail and is enough to say that in the case
of the next scandalous John (XXIII) the work of the reviser is as foul as
ever. He lived and ruled at the height of the Italian Renaissance
(1410-15), and he was a monster of crime in comparison with the notorious
Alexander VI. Neither the writer in the 11th edition (a French Catholic)
nor the one in the 14th (anonymous) tells the undisputed fact that he was
notorious for vice and corruption before he became Pope. In fact neither
hints at irregularities before he was condemned by the Council of
Constance. The older writer then candidly acknowledged that the Council
(300 prelates) endorsed 54 charges against him and that three cardinals he
paid to undertake his defense refused to do so. "Enough charges," he said,
"of immorality, tyranny, ambition and simony were found proved to justify
the severest judgment." As a matter of fact the indictment, which may be
read in any Latin History of the Councils, was a complete Inventory of
crimes and sins. One sentence includes "murder, sacrilege, adultery, rape,
spoliation and theft." And this precious "rectifier" of errors in the new
edition cuts out the whole of this. He just states that the Pope was
suspended but the sentence was irregular in canon law!

Passing on our way to the Leos we note a point here and there that need not
detain us. "Jubilee year" is described as an institution of piety and not a
word said about the greed and corruption of the Pope who established it and
why. Julius II has had the character-sketch in the old edition, though
written by a Catholic, touched up and trimmed until the reader, who may
have read something in regular history about the Pope's children, his heavy
drinking and swearing, and his unscrupulousness, will be surprised to find
how great and virtuous a Pope he was. The greatest nobles of Rome at the
time assure us that he was a sodomist. "Juvenile Offenders" is a title that
ought to meet many searching and varied queries in our time. It completely
fails. Not a word about religion. Not a single statistic. Then we come to
the article "Knighthood and Chivalry," to which we were referred in the
short note Chivalry."

I have made considerable research on this point in medieval history and
have pointed out repeatedly that the belief that there was an Age of
Chivalry (about 1100 to 1400) is one of the Crudest and emptiest of all the
historical myths with which Catholic writers adorn their Middle Ages. No
expert on the period fails to say the opposite. But in the case of this
article I gather that the learned writer of it in the 11th edition, Dr.
Coulton, who died in 1947, would not tolerate any monkey tricks with his
work. He was not a master of the literature of the subject but he does say:

"Such historical evidence as we possess, when carefully scrutinized, is
enough to dispel the illusion that there was any period of the Middle Ages
in which the unselfish championship of God and the Ladies was anything but
a rare exception."

Dr. Coulton has paid too narrow an attention to the faire- tale itself. On
the broad question of the character of the princes, lords, knights, and
ladies of the period, particularly in regard to sex, cruelty, dishonesty,
and injustice, we have mounds. of evidence, and it consistently shows that
this was one of the least chivalrous and most immoral periods in history.

In the long list of the Leo Popes I need notice only the important article
on Leo X, the man who opposed Luther. Here, however, X had not much to do,
The article in the 11th edition was by Carlton Hayes, the Catholic
professor at Columbia. It falsely said that modern research has given us a
"fairer and more honest opinion of Leo X." He was "dignified": the Pope who
enjoyed nothing more than grossly indecent comedies, largely written by his
favorite cardinal, in the sacred palace and banquets at which gluttony was
a joke and the most vulgar adventurers were richly rewarded. He "fasted" --
at the doctor's orders, for his body was gross. With a show of liberality
it admits that he was "worldly," "devoid of moral earnestness or deep
religious feeling," "treacherous and deceptive" (which is explained away as
the common policy of princes at the time). No, X did not find many "dates"
to correct in this Catholic sophistication, but the man who wants truth in
his encyclopedia will. Not the least idea is given of the monstrous
corruption of the papal court under Leo: not a hint that it was so commonly
believed in Rome that he was a sodomist that both his friends and
authorized Biographer Bishop Giovio and the great contemporary historian
Guiccardini notice it and, contrary to the statement of the Catholic
historian Pastor, seem to believe it.

The article "Libraries" is the next on which X employs his subtle art. I
have explained, I think, that X is not one encyclopedic Catholic writer who
does all this marvelous work. The explanation given of the X in the first
volume of the 14th edition is that it is "the initial used for anonymous
writers"; just as the lady whose sins are not to be disclosed in the court
is called by the police Mlle X. In all earlier encyclopedias anonymous
writers, who do the great body of the hack-work of the encyclopedia, did
not need any monogram. But, of course, this was a special arrangement with
the Catholic body. It assumes that Committees of Catholics on both sides of
the Atlantic were appointed to scrutinize all articles bearing upon
Catholic myths and to cut out and modify, no matter on what authority it
rested, any statement that the Catholic clergy do not like. Whether any
other sort of anonymous critics were allowed to do similar work and wear
the mask I do not know. I have not noticed an X anywhere except where truth
has been slain or mutilated by a Catholic sword.

You may wonder why an innocent article on Libraries should excite the
suspicions of the Catholic Knights Errant, but the history of libraries,
like the history of literature or education generally, is even more
dangerous from the Catholic viewpoint than an amorous story or picture. It
tells how the Greeks and Romans had splendid libraries (and literature and
schools); how during the Christian Middle Ages libraries (and schools and
books of interest) were few and paltry to the 12th century; how in the
meantime the Arabs and Persians again had magnificent libraries (and
schools and literature) and in the course of two or three centuries
succeeded in stimulating sluggish Christian countries to have a few decent
libraries. This is real history and of deep sociological significance. But
it is the kind of history Catholics hate as they hate science. So the
historical part of the article is mercilessly but selectively cut.

A point, for instance, on which an inquirer is still apt to consult an
encyclopedia is as to the fate of the greatest library of the ancient
world, that of Alexandria. Said the article in the 1911 edition:

"In 389 or 391 an edict of Theodosius ordered the destruction of the
Serapeum, and the books were pillaged by the Christians."

This is cut out, and we have to be content with a vague admission that the
stupid story that "the Library survived to be destroyed by the Arabs can
hardly be supported." The older writer said that the transfer of imperial
powers from Rome to Constantinople was "a serious blow to literature." This
truth also is cut out. He said that "during the Middle Ages knowledge was
no longer pursued for its own value, but became subsidiary to religious and
theological teaching." Monstrous. Out it goes.

Loisy, the great French scholar, had a couple of pages in the 11th edition.
He was then still a Catholic. He is cut to a paragraph in the 14th edition.
The fame of his scholarship had grown but he had openly quit the Church.
When you see 20 pages devoted to logic, in which few folk take any interest
today, you wonder whether the need of abridgement was really so drastic,
but the pruning shears (and the signature X) appear again in the article
"Lollards," who were deadly enemies of the church. It is the same with the
Lombards. Instead of the short account of their great importance in the
restoration of civilization in Europe being expanded, as modern interest
requires, it is cut down, as the interest of the papacy demands.

"Lourdes" would seem to give X a great opportunity but the old article had
only a few lines on the shrine of Lourdes. They are neatly strengthened.
The older writer generously noted that it was "believed by the Roman
Catholic world" that the Virgin revealed herself here. This becomes
stronger. Lourdes has become famous since the visions of Bernadette
Soubirons and their authentication by a commission of inquiry appointed by
the bishop of Tarbes. As if no serious person doubted them. But you are
referred to Catholic literature for details of the epic story of the growth
and the miracles: a tissue of fabrications.

The article "Martyrs" was in the old edition an edifying Christian,
sermonette, and it remains. Here in a modern and candid encyclopedia, we
should have had a useful Recount of the mass of historical work that has
been done on the martyrs, even by Catholic scholars like the Jesuit
Delehaye and Professor Ehrhard, in the last 50 years. More ancient martyrs
have been martyred with the axe of historical truth than the early
Christians manufactured in 200 years.

In the article "Materialism" you know what to expect. In this and most
other encyclopedias Romanists write on Catholic matters, Methodists on
Methodists matters and so on, but, of course, on such subjects as
Agnosticism, Atheism, Materialism, Naturalism, etc., we must entrust the
work to ignorant and bigoted critics. So we still read how "naive
materialism" is due to "the natural difficulty which persons who have had
no philosophical training experience in observing and appreciating the
importance of the immaterial facts of consciousness." Some reverend
gentleman has been drawing upon his sermons for copy. Not a single word
about the evidence provided by Professor Leuba and others that, on their
own profession, more than 70 percent of the scientific men of America are
"naive materialists." With a fatuousness that makes us groan the clerical
reviser adds to the short article:

"Largely through the influence of Bergson, Alexander, and Lloyd Morgan
contemporary science is turning away from materialism and reaching toward
the recognition of other than mechanical factors in the phenomena, even the
physical phenomena, of Nature."

The encyclopedia Might just as well say that under the influence of Gandhi,
the Grand Lama, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, military men are now turning
away from thoughts of war.

X comes on the scene again in the article on the Medici. Any truthful
account of this famous Florentine family must show us the greatest paradox
-- if you care to call it paradox -- of the Middle Ages; a wonderful art,
superficial refinement, and pursuit of culture covering an abyss of
corruption. The older writer was honest enough to tell a little of the
background, and X generally cuts it out. The great Lorenzo is disinfected,
and he strikes out such passages as this, referring to Cosmo III:

"Cosmos hypocritical zeal for religion compelled his subjects to multiply
services and processions that greatly infringed upon their working hours.
He wasted enormous sums in pensioning converts -- even those from other
countries -- and in giving rich endowments to sanctuaries."

Lorenzo's 20 lines of vices are "abridged" into two, and so on.

"Medicine" ought, like "Libraries," "Hospitals" and a score of other
articles, to show in its historical part the appalling blank in the
civilized record. It did this to some extent in the earlier edition, so the
account of Greek-Roman and Arab-Persian progress is abridged so that the
blank from 500 to 1500 is not so painful to the eye.

"Mithraism" might seem an innocent and remote subject but the modern
inquirer will want to know whether or not it is true that it made more
progress than Christianity in the Roman world and whether it had a superior
morality. The fine article by Professor Grant Showerman in the 11th edition
fairly answered these questions. He said that by the middle of the 3rd
century "it looked like becoming the universal religion" (which is cut
out). He said that it appealed to the Romans by its strongly democratic
note and its high ethic. Here his account is cut to pieces, and we now
learn that it made progress by boasting of an esoteric wisdom and
compromising with paganism. The substance of Showerman's article is kept
but his initials are deleted. Perhaps he demanded that. Of course, nothing
is said about the material borrowings of Christianity from Mithraism or how
Christianity destroyed its rival by violence.

It appears that X (or one of him) is also an expert on Mohammed. He has
reduced an authoritative 12-page article to three and perhaps some will
think that he has shorn the prophets glory. Moses on the other hand passes
into the new edition as "one of the greatest figures in history." You may
have heard that even theologians and liberal Jews are wondering how much
historical knowledge we have of such a person "Beyond question," says this
more accurate new edition, "Moses must be regarded as the founder alike of
Israel's nationality and of Israel's religion." These X's are great at
settling disputed points.

The article, "Monasticism," is a grand opportunity for telling a large
amount of picturesque truth. But, alas even the editor of the 11th edition
had the quaint idea that it ought to be written by a monk. The result is
that X did not find a word to alter. We have the old article in all its
fragrance -- and mendacity. It tells us as much about the new history of
the monastic bodies in Europe as a history of Hitlerism by a Fascist would
tell of events in Europe. Whether or no an encyclopedia is a book in which
you expect the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.... There
are probably simple folk who do.

"Mozart" does not sound of theological interest, but since his Requiem or
"mass for the dead" is said to be "one of the finest of religious
compositions" and is a prime favorite in Catholic ritual it is important to
the church that the public should not learn that he was an apostle and an
anti-clerical Freemason who, in the familiar phraseology of the cleric,
died and was buried like a dog. The article in the old edition did not toll
the whole truth about this, but its misleading of the public was not strong
enough for the reviser so it is made a little more misleading. It is well
known in what circumstances Mozart began to compose his Requiem. A stranger
approached him and offered to pay him to write it, and, as Mozart was
ailing, the story runs that he nervously saw in the offer a warning of his
death. If he did so at any time he must have soon learned that (as it
proved) it was a rich amateur (Count Walsegg) who was really hiring his
genius, but the "reviser" of the article has actually changed the text from
"Mozart worked at it unremittingly, hoping to make it his greatest work" to
"Mozart put his greatest music into it and became more and more convinced
that he was writing it for his own death." After this you would expect a
lovely death in the arms of his holy mother the church, but the clerical
reviser cuts out in the new edition what the expert writer of the article
said. It was:

"His funeral was a disgrace to the court, the public, society itself ...
his body was buried in a pauper's grave."

But the initials of the writer, Sid D. T. Tovey, are kept at the foot of
his mutilated article. This story of a mysterious visitor who gave Mozart
the idea that he was being supernaturally warned of his approaching death
has recently inspired an eloquent article in the pious Reader's Digest.
Naturally readers who turn for verification of it to the great Encyclopedia
will be fully encouraged. The fact is, as the "corrector" probably knew
well, Mozart refused to send for a priest when he became dangerously ill
and when his wife secretly sent for one the man refused to attend so
notorious a heretic. It might be instructive to the inquirer into religious
inspiration in art to know that one of the most beautiful pieces of church
music was composed by a man who emphatically rejected Christianity, but it
would be inconsistent with so much that is said in the Britannica, so the
fact is suppressed.

Nietzsche you would almost expect to find banished altogether from so pious
an encyclopedia, but we have here one of the little mysteries of its
compilation. In spite of the grim need for abridgment the one-column
article in the 11th edition has been replaced by a two-page appreciation of
the great skeptic by his devout follower, Dr. A. Levy. One might quarrel
with it here and there but let us not be meticulous.

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HOW HISTORY IS RE-WRITTEN

There must have been a good deal of maneuvering in the subterranean vaults
in which the new edition of the Britannica was being forged when the time
came for doing an article on the papacy. In the 11th edition the lengthy
treatment of the subject was entrusted to a number of well-known Catholic
writers who were understood to be what were then called "liberal
Catholics." The first section, covering the early centuries and the Dark
Age (to 1100), was written by Mgr. Duchesne and the next by Professor
Luchaire, both said in private clerical circles (to which I once belonged)
to be modernists. Duchesne was an arch-trimmer, and he writes the first
1,000 years of the history of the papacy in such fashion that X finds
nothing to correct. I do not know to what extent there are folk who fancy
that by reading such an article they learn the historical truth, but the
fact is that this long article on the papacy is a travesty of history and a
sheer Catholic tract; and any sub-editor ought to have known what to
expect. It is utterly impossible for any Catholic writer to tell facts,
much less the whole of the facts, on such subjects. How could he, for
instance, tell that few historians outside the church admit that there is
any serious evidence that Peter was ever in Rome. Duchesne placidly
observes that it is "now but little disputed," because a few American
historians who play up to Rome take an indulgent view of the so-called
evidence. I have proved from the most solid Christian document of the time
that the Roman Christians of the 1st century did not believe it.

So the narrative continues on the usual and most untruthful Catholic lines.
All the other churches looked up to the Roman and did not question the
universal authority of its bishop; which is the direct opposite of the
truth, for I have shown in detail that every assertion of Roman authority
over the other churches to the 6th century (when the other churches had
either disappeared or formed the separate Greek Church) was indignantly,
often contemptuously, spurned. There is, of course, not the slightest hint
of the demoralization of the church from about 150 onward. It is a body of
virtuous folk braving its persecutors. And its immense enrichment after the
Conversion of Constantine is explained audaciously by saying that the pagan
emperors had deprived the church of its wealth and Constantine just
restored it! Naturally there is not a word about the dozen persecuting
decrees, even with a death-sentence, which the bishops got from the
Christian emperors and so crushed every religious rival,

This fairy-tale, which it is disgusting to find in a serious encyclopedia,
is sustained throughout the entire 30-page article, but I have not space
here to go much into detail. There was no Dark Age for the church, though
the "barbarian invasions," the usual scapegoat, are admitted to have caused
some irregularities. There is not the least recognition of the need to
explain why the worst degradation of the papacy, from 890 to 1050 began
four centuries after the invasions and deepened for 100 years. The
attainment of the Temporal Power is explained without a word about the
Donation of Constantine, which Catholic historians admit to have been a
forgery, and the development of the monstrous pretensions of the Popes to
power is explained by an argument as ingenious as it is false. Innocent III
was "compelled" -- I have shown from his own letters that he deliberately
and fraudulently engineered it -- to sanction, though he tried to check,
the persecution of the Albigensians. Then the corruption of Europe by the
Renaissance "infected" the good church to some extent, but there is no
proof, for instance, of the fearful charges against John XXIII. No; they
were merely examined and endorsed by a Council of 29 cardinals, 33
archbishops, 150 bishops, 134 abbots, and 100 doctors of law and divinity.
The second two-century period of deep papal degradation is passed over with
the admission that there was one pope, Alexander VI, of abandoned morals.

X then takes up the story and you may bet that it does not lose in piety.
This is how he writes history. At the French Revolution "the Pope fought
against the Terror when the worship of reason was proclaimed." There, of
course, never was a "worship of reason" in France, and the Feast of Reason
and Liberty in Notre Dame was not official, and it was after the official
proclamation of the Worship of the Supreme Being that the Terror followed.
So on to 1929. This is, as I said, a blatant Catholic tract from beginning
to end, and it closes with the usual list of popes all of whom to the year
530 -- including such rogues as Victor, Callistus, and Damasus -- are
described as "Saints." Some of them are fictitious, the majority of quite
unknown character, and half the remainder poor specimens.

Catholics might well boast of their service to their church in getting
permission to correct a few dates and other trifling errors in the earlier
Britannica. Their converts, if educated at all, are generally of the type
who would look for truth in an encyclopedia. Perhaps one ought not to
complain if the editor of an encyclopedia invites a Christian Scientist to
tell the aims and belief of Christian Science, Moslem to tell the tenants
of Islam, and so on, but to allow Catholic propagandists not merely to
explain what the Church's doctrines are but to write 30 pages of historical
mendacity and misrepresentation because. ... Well, you may guess for
yourself what the agreement between the contracting parties was. Where the
Chicago professors come in I don't know.

Presently we come to the article "Pasteur," and of course, that famous
scientist must be claimed as a Catholic, though I have proved a score of
times that he quit the church early in his career, publicly avowed his
Agnostic creed, and died Without any recognition of the church. There was a
fine article on him in the earlier edition by Sir Henry Roscoe, which
concluded:

"Rich in years and honors, but simple-minded and as affectionate as a
child, this great benefactor to his species passed quietly away."

in the new edition this becomes:

"Rich in years and in honors, this simple and devout Catholic, this great
human benefactor. ..."

And there is no X to warn the reader that an anointed hand has altered the
article. That happens in hundreds of cases.

Psychical research was still considered by many in the first decade of this
century to be at least not a waste of time, so three pages were devoted to
it in the 11th edition. In the third decade of the century few took any
serious notice of its futilities, yet. in spite of the tremendous need for
abridgment, the three-page article is replaced by a five-page article by an
enthusiast for the nonsense. The article "Psychology" is, of course,
entirely useless to any inquirer who wants to know, as most thoughtful folk
do want to know, what the modern science makes of the old idea of mind. You
gather that the mind is still as solidly established as the Pope. With
great boldness (it seems to think) the new article alters the definition of
psychology from the science of the mind to "the study of the mind or of
mental phenomena." At the time (1929) there was hardly a manual published
in America that did not define it as "the science of behavior" and reject
the reality of mind. But the new article does not give you the least idea
of the revolution. Two reactionary professors just grind out five pages of
the old academic verbiage. it is like a barrel-organ in Broadway.

"Preaching" is a short article which few folk will ever consult, but there
is here a point of high social interest. When good people read about the
way in which the church kept men in the ways of virtue during the Middle
Ages -- one of the most vicious of historical periods -- they imagine
devout priests preaching the gospel to them every Sunday. It is all a myth,
of course. The faithful just spent half an hour to an hour in church on
Sunday morning while the priest raced through the liturgy of the mass, in
Latin, which quite commonly he did not understand himself. The friars of
the later Middle Ages created quite a sensation when they began to preach
sermons. But does our E. B. tells the reader this? Look up the, orthodox
short article.

"Rationalism" is a companion article to "Agnosticism" "Naturalism," and a
score of other articles. It is just a moldy piece of academic verbiage. It
tells you how once there were bold thinkers like Hume and Kant who thought
that truth was to be learned by the use of reason not intuition, but of the
mental attitude which 99 men out of 100 call Rationalism today, of its
great growth in the 19th century and the reasons for this, it does not say
a word.

The Reformation is still a subject of high popular interest in countries
where the population is divided into Catholics and Protestants, and we may
regret that the fine 20-page article by Professor Coulton in the 11th
edition is reduced to nine pages in the 14th. We do not forget the
imperious need for abridgment though when we notice that 36 pages are
spared for Pottery and Porcelain, that Physical Research gets more room
than ever, and so on, we are a little puzzled. And, as usual, the
abridgment happens to cut out bits that. Catholics do not like. In both
editions the article has the initials of Professor Coulton, a learned
liberal Protestant expert on the Middle Ages who wrote with discretion and
reserve; that is to say, he said far less about the share of the appalling
general corruption of the Church in causing the Reformation and far more
about political conditions than a quite candid historian would today.
However, as Coulton was still alive and active in 1929 I imagine that he
saved his article from the Catholic chopping block.

The article "Relies" also is written by so lenient a Protestant writer that
it is little altered. The reader will not get from it the faintest idea of
the appalling fraud in the manufacture of relies in the early and the
medieval church, the gross traffic in bogus articles, and the exploitation
of the people.

On the important subject of the Renaissance one may congratulate the
editors on having carried into the 14th edition the splendid article by J.
A. Symonds. They could hardly venture to do otherwise, for Symonds is
incomparably the highest authority and best writer on the subject in the
English language. But the cloven hoof appears here and there. We get the
ridiculous contention of certain second-rate American professors that it is
misleading to speak of "the Renaissance," meaning that Christian Europe had
been asleep until the 13th century. There had been a "Carolingian
Renaissance" in the 9th century, an "Ottoman Renaissance" in the 10th. and
so on. Unfortunately it was precisely after these "rebirths" that Europe,
especially Italy, sank to the lowest depth. To call these claims "new
historical research" is bunk. They are symptoms of the demoralizing growth
of Catholic influence in America. What is really new is the research into
the causes of the rebirth of Europe after about 1050, which has shown the
great debt of the Christian world to the Arabs and Jews. Preserved Smith
seems here to do the X-ing and he not only is too pious to tell the truth
about the influence of the Albigensians and the wicked Spanish Arabs but he
appends to Symonds' fine article a rather incoherent page comparing the
Renaissance and the Reformation as "emancipations."

But the Catholics expand gloriously when we come next to the article "The
Roman Catholic Church." In the older edition the introductory part was by
the old-fashioned historian Alison Phillips, and he is now replaced by a
short -- well, say fragment of a sermon -- by no less a person than
Cardinal Bourne (assuring us in effect, that as the Roman Church alone was
founded by Christ we need not pay any attention to other churches) and a
technical account of the structure of the church by a theologian. But the
10 pages of history, now written by a priest, that follow are just the same
undisguised propaganda with a sublime indifference to the facts as
non-Catholic historians tell them, You have here, in fact, the clotted
cream of Catholic controversial literature. served up in an encyclopedia
that promises you an objective statement of modern culture and scholarship.
There are few statements of fact in it that have not been torn to shreds
years ago,

You have the old story of the Christian body surviving 10 persecutions by
the pagans. We thought that it had been agreed by this time that there were
only two general persecutions in 250 years, but this new encyclopedia
accounts says that there were 10 or actually there was one long struggle.
How even Catholic scholars have shown that only a hundred or two of the
many thousands of martyrs claimed have survived scrutiny, how the bishops
of the time describe the enormous body of the faithful abjuring the faith
-- Catholics claim 10,000,000 Christians in the time of Dioclettan and
can't prove 100 martyrs -- and so on, is, of course, not mentioned. The
growth of the church's power, spiritual and temporal, is described in the
usual Catholic manner. Even in the Dark Age -- a phrase that does not soil
this article, of course -- the Roman Church was "the most vigorous
influence for civilization in Western Europe" -- its own theory it took six
or seven centuries to civilize it -- and if it seems to turn its spiritual
power into political repeatedly it was compelled to do this because the
secular princes wanted to "control the souls of men." I should be inclined
to call that the high-water mark of Catholic rhetoric. We are given to
understand that during these centuries (500 to 1300), apart from a little
disorder caused by the barbarian invaders, the church kept the world (and
its clergy, monks, and nuns) virtuous -- that is one of the tallest myths
in history -- but "the pagan Renaissance" and "the general decadence of
morals" which this caused unhappily did penetrate the armor of the church's
virtue a little. it seems that even many of the Popes themselves were too
affected by the general materialism." A grave work of reference offers us
that as a summary of the historical fact that, to say nothing of the
barbarism of the Dark Age and the license of the 12th and 13th centuries,
the papacy itself was so low in tone from 1300 to 1670 that the few popes
who made a serious effort to reform the church -- and that in regard to sex
almost alone -- reigned, collectively, only about 20 years out of the 350
and the general level of conduct in Europe was infamous. And it is equally
false to say that the church purged itself by a Counter-Reformation which
began before and independently of its Protestant critics. The Reformation
began in 1517, and the Vatican and Rome were, as the contemporary Cardinal
Sachetti describes, appallingly corrupt to 1670. This is public instruction
in history up to date, and now under the aegis of the University of
Chicago.

One of the arch-sophists of the American regiment of propagandists, Mgr.
Peter Guilday, is permitted to tell the situation of the church in the
world today. It is enough to repeat what he says about America. He says
that in 1920 there were 22,233,254 Catholics in America so there were
probably about 25,000,000 (the Catholic Directory claimed only 20,000,000)
in 1928. The same church authorities give these enormously conflicting
figures, yet notice how definite they are to the last unit. Naturally he
does not explain that, unlike any other church, the Catholic Church
includes in its figures even the millions who have quit it. On such
positive inquiries as we have it seems that there can hardly be much more
than 15,000,000 real Catholics in America; but it would not do to let
Washington know that.

After this I need not comment on the article "Rome," meaning the city of
Rome. The sketch of its history during the Dark Age and the later Middle
Ages is on a line with what I have just described. Compared with the great
work of Gregoravius, the world-authority on the city, this account is like
a Theosophist's sketch of the life of Mme. Blgvatsky. "Russia" must have
tempted the ghostly censors, but the editor of the Encyclopedia got Durant
to do it, and we miss the clerical touch. "Skepticism" is another subject
on which, you would think, a Catholic would like to write but the article
was already so innocuous and misleading that it was left in all the glory
of its Victorian verbiage. The poor man who has to depend upon
encyclopedias for his information will gather that Skepticism was, like
Rationalism, a malady of the philosophical world in the last century but
that it has died out.

Under "Schools" there was in the 11th edition a (fine 12-page history of
schools in Europe from Greek-Roman days onward. After what we saw about he
articles "Education" and "Libraries" you will be prepared for a burnt
offering. The whole essay, with its excellent account of the Roman system
of free schools for all, and discreet insinuation of the blank illiteracy
and schoollessness of the Dark Age, and some account of the Arab- Persian
achievement, goes by the board. Certainly it was important to provide large
new space for modern school systems, but an informed and honest pedagogist
could have told the historic truth and introduced the results of recent
research into the Spanish Arab-Schools in a page or so. But it would have
been deadly to the claim that Christianity "gave the world schools" or that
the Roman Church cared the toss of a cent about the education of the
children of the workers until secular states started our modern systems.

In passing we note how neatly the Encyclopedia does a little white-washing
of the church in the Dark Age in its article "Salvester II." We do not
question that he was "the most accomplished scholar of his age" -- in
Christendom, the writer ought to have added. He is not to be mentioned in
the same breath as Avicenna (Ibn Sind), the great Persian scholar of the
same age, and could not hold a candle to scores, if not hundreds, of other
contemporary Persian and Arab writers. But what the article and Catholic
writers generally carefully conceal is that he got his learning from the
Arabs -- his chief biographer proves that he actually studied in Cordova
(and had a gay time there) -- and that he was forced by the German Emperor
upon the reluctant and half-barbarous Romans, and they probably poisoned
him off in four years. He was a great collector of books (manuscripts),
but, say's this article ingenuously "it is noteworthy, that he never writes
for a copy of one of the Christian Fathers." Read his life by the expert
and you will smile.

"Slavery" is an article upon which a critic would joyously pounce if he did
not know anything about the Irish professor Ingram, who wrote the long and
fairly good articles in the 11th edition. Ingram was a Positivist and he
let the church off lightly, as Positivists always do; and at the same time
let the public down heavily. But even Ingram's dissertation was a little
too strong, so X was let loose upon it. and he adds his mark to Ingram's
initials as joint author. You know why the subject is important from the
clerical angle. The myth that Christianity "broke the fetters of the slave"
is so strongly established, though it has not an atom of foundation, that
even the late H, G. Wells included it as a historical fact in the first
edition -- he promptly cut it out when I told him how wrong he was -- of
his "Outline of History." Neither St. Paul nor any Christian Father nor any
Pope or great Christian leader, and certainly no Church Council, condemned
slavery until modern times when the wicked "world" was busy extinguishing
it. Even the article in the "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics" makes
this clear. It still existed in Europe, though economic conditions had
greatly restricted it, when, under the blessing of the Spanish Church, it
expanded again into the horrible chapter of African slavery. The proper
treatment of Ingram's article would have been to let the reader understand
this more clearly, to take into account the large amount of scholarly work
which has in regent years greatly modified the old idea of slavery in Rome
in the first three centuries of the present era, and to explain how
economic causes changed slavery to serfdom and then, in most of Europe,
emancipated the serfs. Instead of this X has been permitted to do a little
of his usual tampering with the truth.

"Solomon" has a page and a half of the old credulous glorification, in
spite of all the progress of biblical science. If this and similar articles
which were solemnly read by our grandmothers but are now confined to the
seminaries of the more backward churches, such as the Catholic, had been
cut down to so many explanatory short paragraphs, the editor might have
found room for a couple of useful pages on Social Progress, thought the
subject deserves as much space as football or cricket: and at least a
couple (instead of the scanty and outdated treatment of the subject under
"Psychology") of pages summarizing the results of the important new science
of Social Psychology.

The historical section of the article "Spain" ought to have been almost
entirely rewritten. It was written in the days when historians had not
quite recovered from the Catholic legend that the Arabs had taken over the
beautiful Christian country in the 8th century and held an eccentric rule
over it until the valiant Spaniards overthrew them and made the country
glorious and virtuous once more. For 100 years we have known the truth, and
since this article was written liberal Spanish professors -- Ballesteros,
Ribera. Cordera, etc. -- working on the Arabic manuscripts which have been
hidden in Catholic libraries for centuries so that the orthodox myth should
not be exposed, have shown the real grandeur of the Arab (as opposed to the
later Moorish) civilization. The churches of the Christian monarchs
themselves and the remarkable sexual looseness of the Spanish clergy and
people in all ages have been established, the appalling ruin of the country
after 100 years of Castellan rule has become a platitude of history, and
even the Cambridge History tells the awful story of the Bourbon dynasty in
the 19th century and, in conjunction with the church, its savage war on
liberalism. It Is impossible to understand modern Spain unless you know
these things. The Encyclopedia does not tell them. It completely misleads
the innocent reader and supplies as "authority" an untruthful religious
propagandist

The article on Spiritualism was entrusted to Sir Oliver Lodge, a man who
had betrayed his childlike credulity and unfitness for such a task in his
"Raymond" and other works. There are six pages on "Spirits" and they will
doubtless have a use for experts in distillation (who ought to know all
about it), but on the subject of "Spirit," which is one of the most
confused words in the modern vocabulary, there is not even a paragraph.
Writers, preachers, and politicians talk every day about "spiritual
realities," and we may surely assume that a large number out of their tens
of millions of readers and hearers would like to know precisely what they
mean. From a wide experience I may say that most of them do not know
themselves. One American professor gives us seven different definitions of
the word Spirit. Yet editors who spare many pages for whelks or wall-papers
give no assistance here. Naturally the British (High Tory) journalist,
Garvin, who was the original editor of the 14th edition, knew no more about
these things than Henry Ford or Herbert Hoover did. What the editor whose
name appears on the latest printing of it, Walter Just, knows I can't say,
as his name is not in "Who's Who in America." But there must have been a
regiment of sectional editors, and this is their idea of giving the general
public clear ideas and authenticated facts to enable them to form sound
opinions.

The article "Stoicism" is not much less misleading. There is so much extant
literature of Stoicism -- Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, etc. -- that
it was in modern times impossible to misrepresent it as the philosophy of
Epicures is misrepresented (the early Christians having conveniently burned
the whole of his 200 books). So pious folk swung to the opposite extreme.
It was a religion founded by an austere puritan named Zeno and was too high
and impractical for the people. The article in the Britannica runs on these
lines. The author puts out of all proportion the small and temporary
religious wing of the movement, and misrepresents the character of Zeno,
who, his Greek biographer tells us, used to go with a youth or a young
woman occasionally to show that he had no prejudices of that sort. He fails
entirely to make clear that the central doctrine of the Stoics, the
Brotherhood of Man, was a practical social maxim borrowed from the
gay-living Lydians, and that it was a blend of this with the same central
doctrine of Epicures that worked as an inspiring social influence in the
Greek Roman world for five centuries; and that of the so-called Stoic
emperors only Marcus Aurelius, who let down the Empire, was a Stoic.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

MORE WHITEWASH FOR THE MIDDLE AGES

An article on Surgery is scarcely the place in which you would look for
clerical trickery, and X has not ventured to couple his name with that of
the distinguished expert who writes the article in the 11th edition. But
his work has in the 14th edition been deprived of an essential value. I do
not know many who consult such articles as anatomy, physiology, surgery.
and medicine in an encyclopedia. They are too technical for the general
public, while students have to seek their information in more serious
works. But the historical introduction which the Britannica used to prefix
to its, essays on the more important branches of science and on such
subjects as education, slavery, philanthropy, etc., were useful to a wide
public. Reading the articles in the 14th edition, one would at first think
that the editors had never healed that anybody disputed the claim that the
churches created modern civilization, The truth is, of course, that the
historical introductions to articles on the various elements of our
civilization in the old Britannica made a mockery of the clerical claims
and painfully exposed the barbarism of the Dark Age and the scientific
sterility of the later Middle Ages. In those days the clerical bodies had
not the economic and business organization that they now have, and they had
to be content that they were allowed to write the articles on religious
subjects, that articles dealing with philosophy, psychology, and ethics
were entrusted to men of the old spiritual school, and that the general
historical sections were carried on from the less critical days of the last
century. Now even the scientific parts must be revised. Those introductions
which brought out too prominently the cultural blank of ages in which the
church was supreme must be abbreviated by cutting out significant details,
falsified, or abolished.

In this case the excellent four-page introduction on the historical
development of surgery has disappeared. It had shown that, while there was
appreciable progress in the science in Greece and Alexandria, this was lost
in the general barbarism after Europe became Christian.

"For the 500 years following the work of Paulus of Aegina (the last
distinguished Greek surgeon) there is nothing to record but the names of a
few practitioners of the court and of imitators and compilers.... The 14th
and 15th centuries are almost without interest for surgical history."

The writer admitted, however, that the Arabs and Persians had resumed the
work of the Greeks, and, though they were occasionally hampered by the
religious ban on dissection, they carried the science forward once more. In
point of fact this article ought here to have been strengthened, for in
some respects the Arabs advanced far beyond the Greeks. But all this is as
distasteful to our modern clerical corporations as statues without
fig-leaves, so the whole section has been cut out. We fully recognize that
a great deal more space was needed for modern surgery but there are
hundreds of articles of far less importance to the modern mind that could
have been relegated to the 19th. century trash-basket.

The next article that attracts the critical eye is "Syllabus," the account
of a miserable blunder that the papacy committed in 1864 in condemning a
long series of propositions (on liberalism, toleration, freedom of
conscience, etc.) most of which are now platitudes even to the Republican
or Conservative mind. If Catholic writers in America did not now pretend
that their church had always accepted these principles of social morals and
public life, if they did not lie about the nature of their Syllabus, no one
would complain if this egregious blunder of the rustic-minded Pope Pius IX
were reduced to a short paragraph, provided it was truthful. The article in
the 11th edition was written by a French priest but it did give the reader
some idea of the monstrosity of the condemnation. It has been abbreviated
-- by cutting out all details that conflict with the modern
Catholic-American version of the Syllabus.

We cannot grumble because the lengthy article on the Templars by a
distinguished historian of the last century, Alisen Philips, has been cut
from eight pages to five, but when we see that X has added his unsavory
mark to Philips initials as joint author of the article in the 14th edition
our suspicions are aroused. Few of the general public now have the dimmest
idea, at least in America -- in London and Paris a whole area still bears
their name (the Temple) who these Knights Templars, or Knights of the
Temple of Solomon, were, but their shameful story is an important part of
our moral indictment of the Church in the Middle Ages, and the Catholic
apologist not only misrepresents it but quotes them as a grand example of
the inspiration of his faith. This small society of monastic knights was
formed in Jerusalem about the year 1120 precisely because the Crusaders who
had settled in Palestine were comprehensively and appallingly corrupt; so
corrupt that only eight out of the whole body of knights were willing to
adopt the stricter life. Pious folk, as usual, showered wealth upon the new
monks -- the "brutal pious, simple-minded men," as Professor Langolis calls
them -- and by the end of the century they were a rich and corrupt body all
over Europe. In 1309 the Pope was compelled, by his deal for the tiara with
the French king, to put them on trial for corruption, and a great trial by
the leading lawyers of France, four cardinals appointed by the Pope, and a
number of French prelates was held at Paris.

X improves Philips' article by first distracting attention from the fact
(which even Philips did not accentuate) that the trial of the Templars was
one of the conditions on which the Pope got the French king to secure the
papal throne for him, and then cutting out the worst charges that were made
against the Templars. They were accused of not only a general practice of
sodomy, which (as recent trials in Germany showed) is a normal vice of
celibate religious bodies, but of compelling members of the Order to
practice it. At initiation, it was said, each had to kiss the Grand Prior's
nude rear, spit on the crucifix, and worship an effigy of the devil.
Suppressing these charges certainly cheats the reader, who is given to
understand that their immense wealth just led the monk-knights into
familiar irregularities. The mere fact that priests brought these foul
charges against one of the best known orders of monks in the beautiful 13th
century, before the "pagan Renaissance" tainted Europe (as these revisers
say in a previous article), and that they were proved to the satisfaction
of a group of cardinals, archbishops, and great lawyers is a social
phenomena. So the charges are cut out.

Under a series of horrible tortures (including torture of the genitals)
most of the monk-knights, including the Grand Master and his chief
assistants, admitted the charges. The tortures used are another appalling
reflection on the age and its courts, so these, though well known in
history, are not described in detail, but the reader is invited to regard
confessions made under torture as worthless. What would you think of a body
of monks and knights (of the Age of Chivalry) who, to escape torture, would
confess that they practiced, and their whole body had practiced for
decades, the most degrading vices, besides wholesale drunkenness and other
evils, and that they had sacrificed children to the devil in their
nocturnal orgies. As to the impossible nature of the charges, remember that
the witches, who had begun to spread over Europe, did almost the same
things, except that they healthily detested sodomy and did not sacrifice
children or virgins.

However, we cannot go further into the matter here.

Historians have always been divided as to their guilt -- mainly because
they have inadequate ideas of the character of the time -- but X has
blurred the mild and insufficient account of the trial that Philips gave
and he has -- I would almost say the insolence -- to say in the end that
the Order of the Templars had "deepened and given a religious sanction to
the idea of the chivalrous man and so opened up to a class of people who
for centuries to come were to exercise influence in spheres of activity the
beneficent effects of which are still recognizable in the world." The Age
of Chivalry, we have seen, is a sorry myth, but to speak of the Templars as
one of its ornaments.... it stinks. He adds that they also "checked the
advance of Islam in the East and in Spain." The last check on the advance
of the Moslem in the East had been over nearly a century earlier and they
had made no attempt to advance in Spain for two centuries before the Order
of the Templars was founded.

The articles "Theism" and "Theology" were, of course, so thoroughly sound
from the clerical point of view in the 11th edition that there was no call
for revision. In the article on Theism the space is mainly occupied with a
long account of the old-fashioned proofs of the existence of God:
Cosmological, Teleological, Ontological, Ethical and from Religious
Experience. I do not know how many folk are saved from Atheism every year
by studying these evidences in an encyclopedia, but I think it is a pity
the Catholic censor was not let loose here. Not that he would have
criticized the arguments. They are venerable relies of his own Thomas
Aquinas. But as Fulton Sheen says in his "Religion Without God," "the
Catholic Church practically stands alone today in insisting on the power of
reason to prove God." A blatant exaggeration, like most of what Sheen says,
but wouldn't it have been proper to warn readers that, as William James
said of these arguments, for educated folk "they do but gather dust in our
libraries." See the different article "Theism" in the Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics.

But X comes upon the scene once more "Thirty Years War," the account of the
long and bloody struggle of Protestantism for existence in the 17th
century. In face of the elementary fact that the Catholic powers, led by
the fanatical Spanish Emperor, were entirely on one side -- except France,
which Cardinal Richelieu who defied the Papacy, kept out -- and the
Protestant powers on the other, it would be ludicrous to deny this most
devastating struggle in Europe between the 5th and the 20th century the
title, of a religious war, but Catholic writers try to magnify such
political elements as it had and to conceal from the reader the debasement
of character which it caused and the way in which it set back the progress
of civilization in Europe more than 100 years. Here X uses his pen and his
blue pencil freely and then gaily adds his mark -- it used to be the mark
of folk who could not write their names -- to the initials of the original
writer, Atkinson, as joint author.

Certainly it was necessary and desirable to cut down the dreary eight-page
chronicle of battles and movements of armies, but the main improvement
should have been to make clearer from recent literature the share of the
Vatican and the Jesuits in bringing about the war and the attitude of
Richelieu toward the papacy. X, of course, does the opposite.

Atkinson says in the original article, for instance:

"The war arose in Bohemia, where the magnate, roused; by the systematic
evasion of the guarantees to Protestants, refused to elect the Archduke
Ferdinand to the vacant throne."

This is a mild expression of the fact that the Jesuits had got their pupil
Ferdinand to break his oath to the Protestants, but X changes it to:

"The war arose in Bohemia, where the, Protestant magnates refused to elect
Ferdinand of Austria to the vacant throne."

The Jesuits, who haunted the Catholic camps, are never mentioned, the
Vatican rarely. Richelieu's defiance of the Pope is concealed. The terrific
degradation of character -- one Catholic army of 34,000 men had 127,000
women camp-followers -- and the destruction, especially of the old Bohemian
civilization -- its population of 3,000,000 was reduced to 780,000 -- are
concealed from the reader, while he gets five pages of miserable battles
and outrages (like the burning of Magdeberg with its people in their homes)
that may have served as an inspiration to Hitler.

No candid article on the Thirty Years War would be complete today without
an account of the behavior of Pope Urban VIII, who in the article on him is
simply charged with "nepotism." It was a nepotism, the Catholic princes
then said, and many modern Catholic historians admit, that lost the
Catholic powers the war. For decades the Popes had stored a vast quantity
of gold in the Castle of Saint Angello in anticipation of this war on the
Protestants. The Vatican and the Jesuits were as determined to wipe out
European Protestantism in blood as some are now eager to extinguish
Communism. In the closing years of the war the Catholic generals called for
this fund and said that with it they could secure victory. But the Pope had
distributed most of it, and ultimately distributed all of it, amongst his
miserable relatives. The famous historian L von Rank estimates the sum at,
in modern values, more than $500,000,000. Recent Catholic histories of the
Popes -- Hayward's and Seppelt and Loffler's -- admit the facts. Naturally
X does not say a word about them, and Atkinson apparently did not know
them.

On Toleration there is no article, so we are spared the contortions of the
Catholic writer who proves, as easily as we prove the wickedness of theft,
that in a Catholic country no tolerance must be extended to other sects,
but in all countries where Catholics are in the minority they are entitled
to full toleration, if not privileges. You may have read the bland words of
Mgr, Ryan, the great moral, philosopher of the American Catholic Church, on
the subject: "Error has not the same rights as truth." Whether the X bunch
did not think it advisable to give their views on toleration or the editors
did not think it advisable to publish them is one of the little secrets of
this conspiracy. Certainly those members of the public who are interested
in such questions would find an up-to-date article on religious freedom,
which after all is fairly widely discussed in our time, more useful than a
thousand articles or notices which linger in the Britannica from Victorian
days.

The article on Torquemada, the famous Spanish Inquisitor, in the 11th
edition was written by the Jesuit Father Taunton, and although he was, as I
have earlier noted, more liberal than a good Jesuit ought to be, Catholics
had little fault to find with the article. But his judgment on the
character of the fanatic, which is the only point of interest about him to
us moderns, was repugnant to the Catholic revisers of the 14th edition.
Taunton had said:

"The name of Torqubmada stands for all that is intolerant and narrow,
despotic and cruel. He was no real statesman or minister of the Gospel but
a blind fanatic who failed to see that faith, which is a gift of God,
cannot be imposed on any conscience by force."

This is the general verdict of historians, but the new Britannica must not
give the general verdict of historians when it is distasteful to Catholics.
So the paragraph is cut out. Again, while Father Taunton -- once more in
agreement with our historians -- says that Torquemada burned 10,000 victims
of the Inquisition in 18 years the reviser inserts "but modern research
reduces the list of those burned to 2,000." As no signature is subjoined
while Taunton's initials are suppressed, the reader is given to understand
that this correction of Llorente's figures is given on the authority of the
Britannica. As a matter of fact, what the writer means is that one or two
Catholic priests like Father Gams have been juggling with the figures so as
to bring down enormously Llorente's figure of the total victims of the
Spanish Inquisition. Their work is ridiculous. Llorente was not only for
years in high clerical dignity and esteem in Spain, but, as its secretary,
he had the archives of the Inquisition and copied from them. But this is
one of the new tricks of Catholic writers. Saying that "recent research" or
"recent authorities" have corrected some statement about their church they
give a few names of priests, knowing that the reader never heard of them
and suppressing the "Rev." or "Father." A priest can become an expert on a
section of history as well as any man but he will never tell the whole
truth about it and he will strain or twist the facts at any time in the
interest of his church.

The next article I select for examination reminds us that the Catholic
group of twisters that operates under the banner X -- the straight, not the
crooked, cross -- are not the only pious folk who have been allowed or
summoned to revise the Britannica from a peculiar angle. It is the artable
"Torture." The long and generally sound article in the 11th edition had to
be abridged in the 14th edition and Professor O. W. Keeton, now Professor
of International Law at London University, was entrusted with the work;
doubtless to the annoyance of the X group.

For any attempt to whitewash the Middle Ages is up against the notorious
fact that cruelty and torture, both judicial and extra-judicial, prescribed
in codes of law or practiced by individual rulers (of states or cities) or
owners of serfs, knights, and even 'ladies,' were more common and more
horrible, especially in what is called the brighter (later) part of the
Middle Ages (to the 18th century) than in any other period of civilized
history except, perhaps, in Chine, and in certain ages in Persia. This was
not made plain enough even in the older article by Professor Williams. He
almost confined himself to a study of the prescription of torture in codes
of law, But he did give the reader such warnings as:

"Thus far the law. In practice all the ingenuity of cruelty was exercised
to find out new modes of torment."

Elsewhere he warns that where torture was not prescribed in the law it
"certainly existed in fact." Keeton, who uses Williams' article with few
additions, emits these warnings and just deals with law. The title of the
article is "Torture" not "Torture in Law Codes," and it is the terrific,
horrible daily use of torture that rebukes the church.

The truth is that Keeton is a pious member of the Church of England, and he
is no more willing than X to admit that Christianity kept the world at a
low level of civilization. He makes the general remark that the nations of
Europe borrowed the practice from ancient Rome -- as if a man could excuse
his crimes by pleading that he simply copied them from a civilization which
he professed to regard as pagan and vicious -- and he darkens the case
against the Romans. Even when he reproduced Williams' list of Roman
opponents of torture he has to put St. Augustine on a common level with
Cicero, Seneca, and Ulpian. But Williams had given Augustine's words. He
said that evidence given under torture was unreliable but he "regarded it
as excused by its necessity." Keeton omits this and falsely says that
Augustine "condemned it." When he goes on to name modern critics -- he
cannot name a single one between the 5th century and the 16th -- he does
not seem to know that six out of the eight he names were notorious Skeptics
and the other two were regarded as Skeptics. He can find only one Christian
who condemned the bestiality and he (Augustine) did not condemn it. He does
worse than this. The old article began its section on the Church. It said:

"As far as it could the Church adopted Roman Law. The Church generally
secured the almost entire immunity of the clergy, at any rate of the higher
ranks, from torture by civil tribunals but where laymen were concerned all
persons were equal. In many instances Councils of the Church pronounced
against it; e.g., in a synod at Rome in 384."

The learned professor of international law -- when you want accuracy, of
course, you have to get a professor -- turns this into:

"The Church, although adopting a good deal of Roman law, was at first
definitely opposed to torture."

All that he gives in support of this is the "synod at Rome in 384." And
there was no such synod: see Bishop Hefele's "History of the Councils."
What there was in 384 was a small synod at Bordeaux, on the very fringe of
the Empire, and even there only one bishop censored the torture of
heretics. In France, said the old article, "torture does not seem to have
existed as a recognized practice before the 13th century." Keeton cuts out
the italicized words. As a matter of fact chronicles of the Dark Age
(Glaber in the 10th century, etc.) tell of an appalling volume of torture
(castration, boiling oil, etc.) in France centuries earlier. in the case of
England Keeton contrives to give the reader the idea that torture was much
less, but any full English history shows that in the 12th century, for
instance, England groaned with daily torture as foul as the Chinese. The
whole article is scandalously misleading.

"Trent, the Council of" is an article in regard to which a conscientious
Catholic reviser must take great care that the full truth is not told. The
article in the 11th edition is by a liberal Protestant ecclesiastical
historian and although it did not contain errors and was not calculated to
inflame Catholics, it did not bring out the points which any truthful
dissertation on the subject must emphasize today. Too many of these
professors imagine that it is their business in such article's to give a
dry and accurate string of dates and movements, ignoring the lessons for
our own time. The Catholic apologist wants the modern reader to regard the
Council of Trent as the chief item in the Counter- Reformation or the
Church's own work of purifying itself of abuses quite independently of the
pressure of the Reformers. This, though now a commonplace of American
Catholic literature, is a monstrous distortion of the facts, and as far as
Trent is concerned, the article, even if it gave only the main facts, shows
it.

The Council was forced upon Rome by the German Emperor who threatened to
bring his army to Italy, and was meant primarily to cleanse the whole
church of the comprehensive corruption which the German prelates freely
described in early sittings of the Council. For years Rome refused to
summon it and then decided to make the Council formulate a standard of
doctrine by which it could judge and eventually (in the Thirty Years War)
wipe out the heresy. Several abortive attempts were made to open the
Council, as the Emperor saw (he said) that the Pope (brother of the girl-
mistress of Pope Alexander VI) was bent only on "the suppression of
heresy." In the middle of the struggle this Pope, Paul III, died and, as if
to show that the papal court was determined to protect its gay life, the
cardinals elected an even worse man, Julius III; a man whose gluttony,
heavy drinking, gambling, and delight in obscene comedies are admitted by
the Catholic historian Pastor while the Romans of the time seriously
charged him with sodomy (while he was Pope) with a disreputable Italian boy
whom he made a cardinal. But the Germans intimidated him, and he had to
summon the Council. Mirbt's article in the 11th edition mildly (concealing
the Pope's low character) said:

"Pope Julius II, former Legate Del Monte, could not elide the necessity of
convening the Council again, though personally he took no greater interest
in the scheme than his predecessor in office, and caused it to resume its
labors."

Even this temperate expression of the truth is too much for our Catholic
corrector of dates and other trifles. He alters it to:

Pope Julius III, the former Legate Del Monte, caused the Council to resume
its labors."

With a few touches of that sort he turns Mirbt's half-truth into a travesty
of history. It was not until Julius died that the Vatican got a Pope with a
zeal for chastity (and a furious temper, a love of strong wine and long
banquets, and a shameful nepotist). He lasted four years, and his successor
was a man of the old vicious type, so that, as Pastor admits, "the evil
elements immediately awakened once more into activity." This was half a
century after the beginning of the Reformation and, if Catholic writers
were correct, the Counter Reformation. But I must here be brief. The
Council closed in 1583, and the Papacy was still in a degraded condition a
century later. Yet the revised article on the Council of Trent makes it
appear a zealous and successful effort of virtuous Popes to purify the
church.

The article "Tribonian" may seem negligible from our present angle but it
has an interest. Amongst the feats of Christianity in the early part of the
Dark Age we invariably find the Justinian Code, or the code of law
compiled, it is said, by the Emperor Justinian. As Justinian, who married a
common prostitute, thought about little above the level of the games of the
Hippodrome, this seems incongruous, but it is well known to historians and
jurists that the code was compiled by his great lawyer Tribonian. The
interest is that, as Dean Milman shows, Tribonian was not a Christian but
the last of the great pagan jurists. In the 11th edition this was at least
hinted. In the 14th the whole discussion of his creed and half the
appreciation of his work disappear.

"Ultramontanism" also is doctored in the new edition. Mirbt had given a
perfectly fair account of this extreme version of the claims of the papacy.
Until the last century -- in fact, until 1870 -- there was far more
resentment of the papal claims in the national branches of the church than
there is today, and they used the word ultramontane as a term rather of
contempt for the extreme propapalists. The article has been considerably
modified to conceal from the reader this earlier attitude of defiance of
the Pope on the part of large numbers of Catholics.

"Utilitarianism" is, since the social theory of morality is hardly noticed
in the reactionary article "Ethics," the section in which the reader ought
to be informed on the conception of morals in which is the alternative to
the Christian conception. And it is today a matter of primary importance
that this information should be provided in an encyclopedia. When 70
percent of American scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians
admit and allow the fact to be published that they have no belief in God
and therefore no allegiance to the Christian or theistic code of morals --
when there is plain evidence that this is the attitude of 70 percent of the
better- educated public and that at least half of the general public come
under no Christian influence (in advanced countries where statistics are
not so loose at least 60 to 70 percent) -- an account of the purely
humanist or social conception of moral law, as it is now elaborated in most
manuals of the science of ethics, is far more important than the lives of
hundreds of half-mythical saints or monarchs and accounts of a thousand
objects or ideas in which few are now interested. It is the more urgent
because, owing to the clerical domination in our time of the press, the
radio, and education, our people are confronted daily with the dogmatic
assertion that the Christian conception of morality is the only effective
version and that when it is rejected the social order disintegrates.

From every point of view a thorough and practical statement of the social
theory, supported by ample statistics showing the relation of crime and
other disasters to the degree of religious instruction in a state, is one
of the essential requirements of a modern popular education. Instead, if
our sociologists and pedagogists were as courageous as they are skilful,
they would insist upon the incorporation of that code of conduct in the
school-lessons, whatever other ideas of behavior religious folk liked to
have their children taught in sectarian schools. The dual standard of
conduct today is not one law for the male and one for the woman but the
confusion in ideas of the code of all conduct: yet the new edition of the
Britannica sins worse than the old, which had a good article by Sturt on
the evolution of what used to be called the Utilitarian theory in
philosophy. This old word is now misleading and too academic. The article
is retained on the same grounds as "Skepticism" "Naturalism," etc., written
by clerics or philosophers of the last century. The encyclopedia is careful
to adjust itself to every change in industry or art but it pleases the
reactionary by ignoring as negligible the corresponding changes in social
and political matters, which are far more important.

On the other hand it can find plenty of space for a new, lengthy, and
gorgeously flattering article on the Vatican by a Roman prelate; an article
which talks, for instance, about the tomb of St. Peter as smoothly as if no
one questioned its genuineness, whereas it would be difficult to name a
non-Catholic historian who admits it. Certainly one expects in a modern
encyclopedia an account of both the magnificent Vatican architecture and
the structure and functions of the complex Roman court (curia) of today.
But even this is not truthful when it comes from a Catholic pen. There
ought to be a section, on some such lines an George Seldes's work, at least
on the volume and sources of the Vatican's income and modern policy.

As to the article on the Vatican Council (1870) which follows it is a
temperate objective account by Mirbt adroitly touched up and made
misleading by X. It Is important to know two things about this Council. Its
chief work was that for the first time in the history of the Roman Church
it declared the pope personally infallible by no means in all his
utterances (encyclicals, etc.) but when he claims to use, his gifts of
infallible guidance. The important point to the modern mind is that there
was a massive opposition of the bishops present to accepting such a dogma,
and it was only by the use of bribery and intrigue and after long days of
heated quarrelling -- I have heard the description from men who were
present -- that the Vatican won its way. The second point is that the papal
triumph was rather like the painted scenery of a theater. The papal
theologians had before them the long list of all the doctrinal blunders
that Popes have made since the 4th century and had to frame the definition
in such terms as to exclude these blunders. The world has seethed with
problems as it never did before, and simple-minded Catholics have crowed
over Protestants that they have "a living infallible guide"; but he has
never opened his infallible lips. He has just blundered on with fallible
and reactionary encyclicals as Popes have done since the French Revolution.
Naturally all suspicion of these things has been eliminated from the
article.

Modern-minded inquirers might have expected articles on the Virgin Birth
and Vitalism, but a candid discussion of the former would have exposed the
gulf that is opening on the subject in the theological world itself, and an
article on the latter would either have been too boldly untruthful or it
would have betrayed how materialistic science has become. In an earlier
comment I noted that these "revisers" tell the reader in one article that
under the influence of Bergson, Lloyd Morgan, Sir Arthur Thompson. and
similar men science has become less materialistic. These men were
Vitalists, claiming that there is something more than matter and physical
and chemical energies in living things. They were a clique of scientific,
men or philosophers who allowed religious views to color their science and
had no influence on others. Vitalism is dead. Thousands of thoughtful
Americans would like to know why, while physicists like Millikan and
Compton are always ready to stand lip for the faith, hardly one
distinguished biologist can be persuaded to support them. A truthful
article on Vitalism would have given the answer.

The article on Voltaire in the 11th edition was a five-page essay by
Professor Saintsbury, a paramount and critical authority, yet, although no
one can pretend that recent research has added to or modified our
knowledge, the Vatican detectives were let loose upon it. Some writer who
suppresses his name used Saintsbury's material and falsified his
conclusions. He suppresses such details as the fact that Voltaire built a
church for the pious folk among whom he lived. He inserts these things in
Saintsbury's estimate of Voltaire's character:

"He was inordinately vain and totally unscrupulous in gaining money and in
attacking an enemy, or in protecting himself when he was threatened with
danger."

Saintsbury, who was no blind admirer of Voltaire had said:

"His characteristic is for the most part an almost superhuman cleverness."

Now we read:

"His great fault was an inveterate superficiality."

It is a mean article, preserving the general appearance of the impartiality
of a great literary critic and inserting little touches, hare and there to
spoil it. As Noyes's book is the only addition to the bibliography one
wonders.... But it is one of the few articles of that length in the
Encyclopedia that is not signed. Saintsbury had been less generous than the
famous liberal and learned cleric Dr. Jowett, who says in one of his
letters: "Voltaire has done more good than all the Fathers of the Church
put together." It was not in the interest of accuracy that the anonymous
reviser used his pen.

There is no need here to search every short article that touches religion
in the Encyclopedia for "correction of dates and other trifles., Running
cursorily over the remaining volume I am chiefly interested in the
omissions. I look for some notice of recent psychological research on what
is still called "Will" and I do not find a word except on the legal
document known as a Will or Testament. We hear folk still all round us
talking about strong will and weak will, good will and bad will, the will
to believe, and so on, but the very word is dropping out of manuals of
psychology, and specific research in American psychological laboratories
has reported that there is no such thing as will in mans make-up. We could
chose a hundred short articles to omit in order to give a little space for
these important changes in psychology. But doubtless it would have
encouraged the Materialists, who are damned from the preface of the work
onward.

But let me say one good word for the Encyclopedia before I come to the end
of my list. Only a week ago I read a new novel, by a Catholic writer, who
takes himself seriously. It was based upon the author's firm -- in fact
impudent and, vituperative as far as the rest of us are concerned -- belief
that witches exist today and worship a devil who is as real as Senator
Vandenburg or Mr. Molotov. In fact, the pompous idiot clearly believes that
beautiful but naughty young ladies still fly through the air by night on
brooms! I think he makes his virtuous heroine estimate the speed at about
30 miles an hour. Here, I reflected, is a man who takes his facts and views
about religion from purified Encyclopedia, and I turned to the article
"Witchcraft."

To my astonishment I found that the article in the 14th edition is by
Margaret Murray, whose learned and admirable work on witchcraft ought to
have made a final sweep of these medieval ideas. Of course, there were
witches, millions of them in every century after the 14th, of all ages.
from babies dedicated by their mothers and beautiful young girls to the
aged (who seem to have been the less numerous), of both sexes, of every
social rank and often of high clerical rank. Of course, they believed that
they were worshipping a real devil (the Spirit) and were sexually
promiscuous in their nocturnal meetings, which ended in orgies. There were
no broomsticks, werewolves, or magical powers. The local organizer was
generally dressed in a goat's skin (and often horns) and had probably a
stone or bone or wooden phalli to meet demands on him. Of course, there was
a lot of crookedness. But the "witches" were genuine folk, who, finding
themselves in a world in which hundreds of thousands of "holy persons" grew
fat by preaching a religion of chastity and self torture while in practice
they smiled upon and shared a general license, preferred a frank cult of
the Spirit that blesses human nature and its impulses. Miss Murray was not
granted space enough to explain this fully, or hers would have been one of
the most interesting articles in the new encyclopedia. But we like the
unexpected breath of realism as far as it goes.

Unfortunately, we soon find that this does not mean that the editors were
converted or had a jet of adrenal energy in the 23rd hour. In the article
"Woman" we again detect the hand of the reactionary. We recognize that the
great development of woman's activities in modern times required a large
amount of new space, and that since the editors were determined for some
reason to keep to something like the proportions of the old encyclopedia a
good deal of abridgment was required. But, as happens in scores of cases of
these articles the abridgement has meant the suppression of a vast amount
of material which the Catholic clergy did not like. No sensible man will
regard that as mere coincidence.

Since the reconstruction of the Britannica in 1911 two things happened in
this connection. One was the development of new feminist activities and
organizations for which, we recognize, new space had to be found. The other
was a development of a political sense which led to a vast amount of anti-
clericalism amongst the women. since the beginning of the last century a
small minority of women have pointed out that the historical record of
woman's position and refusal of her rights reflected bitterly on the
Christian churches, especially the Roman, and their claim that
"Christianity was always the great friend of woman" (and of the child, the
sick, the slave, the worker, etc.). This claim was, as usual, a flagrant
defiance of the facts. In the great old civilizations, Egypt and Babylonia,
woman's right to equality was recognized. In the Greek-Roman civilization,
which began with profound injustice to her, she had fairly won her rights
before the end came. But the establishment of Christianity thrust her back
into the category of inferiority and she suffered 14 centuries of gross
injustice; and the champions of her rights from the time of the French
Revolution onward, both in America and Europe, were for the far greater
part Skeptics, and the clergy opposed them until their cause showed promise
of victory in the present century,

The article "Woman" in the 11th edition had an historical introduction
which, though by no means feminist, gave a considerable knowledge of these
facts. It has entirely disappeared from the 14th edition instead of being
strengthened from the large new literature that has appeared since 1914.
Exigencies of space, yes. We know it. But as in the case of dozens of
others articles the clergy wanted these historical sketches buried.

We might say the same about the workers, but even in the oldedition the
editors had not dared to give a sketch of, or a summary of, the facts about
the position of the workers in the Greek-Roman world in imperial days and
then in the Christian world from the 5th century to the 10th. That would
smack of radicalism. A large new literature has since appeared; and
certainly here no one will plead that there is a lack of public interest.
But in this connection we understand the feeling of the editors. Any candid
account today of the privileged position of the workers in imperial Rome
and their awful position during the 14 Christian centuries that followed
would bring a shower of familiar missiles (Reds, Bolsheviks, Atheistic
Communists, Crypto-Communists, etc.). We grant it: But the other side must
grant what obviously follows. They have to suppress a large and pertinent
body of truth in works of public instruction at the bidding of vested
interests, clerical and other, and leave the reactionaries free to
disseminate untruth.

It is the same with the final article I select, "World-War II." The time
will come when truths that are still whispered in military and political
circles will be broadcast, and this article will be charged with
suppressing or obscuring facts which are of great importance for a sound
judgment on the conduct of the war, particularly in regard to the criminal
neglect to make such preparation for it as might have so far intimidated
the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese that they would not have made the
venture. But what concerns me here is the complete and severe suppression
of any reference to the share of religion and the churches in inspiring and
supporting the war or confirming the scandalous period of sloth that
preceded it.

Three things are today certain. The Vatican and its national branches are
red to the shoulders with the blood that was shed. From the outbreak of
Franco's rebellion -- the curtain-raiser of the war -- and the trouble in
Czecho-Slovakia to the year when Russia turned the tide against the Germans
and an Allied victory seemed at least probable the Roman Church, in its own
interest, acted in the closest cooperation with the thugs. One can quote
even Catholic writers (Teeling, etc.) for that, The second is that the
Japanese religion, Shinto and Buddhism alike, were similarly, in fact
openly, working with the blood-drunk Japanese leaders. This was emphasized
at a World Congress of Religions in Chicago several years before the war
broke out. Thirdly, the Protestant churches in America enfeebled the
warning against Japan, in the interest of their missions, the Lutheran
Church in Germany bowed servilely to the Nazis except when Hitler
interfered with its doctrines, and the British churches were equally guilty
in the prewar period. This attitude of the organized religions was of vital
use to the aggressors. But we couldn't tell that, the editors of the
Encyclopedia will protest. And that is just one of the grounds of these
criticisms. The Encyclopedia Britannica does not tell the reader facts and
truths if the clergy do no like them, and that covers a considerable
territory in regard to history, science, and contemporary life. The 14th
edition not only does not tell them but suppresses them if earlier editions
told them, and even allows untruths to be inserted.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

POISONING THE WELLS

By a curious coincidence -- so odd that the reader may be a little
skeptical but I give my word for it -- on the very day on which I write
this page I get a letter from an American correspondent who treasures his
Encyclopedia Britannica and avails himself of a recent offer of the
publishers to send free replies to any questions it may inspire. I gather
that he gets these replies from the University of Chicago. It is always a
graceless and painful thing to distrust any man's faith in academic human
nature but when my friend reads this little book I wonder if he will retain
his confidence in all its robustness.

The professors will doubtless reply at once that I seem to expect an
encyclopedia which is written for the service of the general public to
include Rationalist opinions or at least to allow its writers to make
positive statements on controversial matters, which is a sin against the
ideal of educational publications. To the first of these complaints I would
reply that Rationalism is now the attitude of a much larger proportion of
the reading public than Christian belief is, yet in a thousand signed
articles or short notices in the Britannica Christian writers are permitted
to express their peculiar opinions and convictions freely, it would hardly
be an outrage to expect the editors to allow Rationalists to provide the
accounts of Rationalism, Skepticism, Naturalism, Atheism, Agnosticism and
scores of similar articles which bear upon their position. But that they
have not done so but have invariably hired hostile theologians to mangle
these subjects is the smallest and least important criticism that I have
here expressed. Of course, I do not expect them to act differently.
Rationalism is unorganized and has no influence on the circulation of large
and expensive works that are mainly destined for reference libraries. But
is there any harm in drawing the attention of the public who use the books
to that fact?

Well at least, they will say, McCabe expects to find the views which
Rationalists take on controverted subjects embodied in the work. Again I do
nothing of the kind. I might plead once more that as the majority of the
serious reading public are no longer Christians they have the same right to
have the critical view of a particular issue brought to the notice of
Christian readers as these have to have their views forced upon the
Rationalist. Has the capital invested in the Encyclopedia Britannica been
provided by the Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith, the Catholic
Welfare body, the Knights of Columbus -- somehow my mind asks a question or
two at this point -- the British Catholic Truth Society or Westminster
Federation. the Episcopal Church, the Methodists, or the Baptists? The
earlier editions of the Britannica were published in days when the immense
majority of those who consulted the book were Christians. It chooses to act
today as if there had been no change. We, of course, know why. The cost of
producing such a work and the profit on it have mainly to be secured from
public or college or other institutional libraries, and these are to an
enormous extent, especially in America, subject to a clerical censorship. I
am too faithful a realist to make the welkin ring with my complaints
because the publishers recognized this situation. Or am I churlish because
I draw the attention of the public to the fact that this situation has an
influence on the contents of the book.

I would not even embark upon these considerations only that I know from 50
years experience that what I do say will be ignored or misrepresented and
the public will be distracted from my real criticisms by triumphant
refutations, rich in irony and rhetoric, of something that I did not say.

The candid reader hardly needs me to re-state the chief grounds of my
analysis of the work. The main idea is stated plainly in the introductory
pages. I had occasion a few years ago to take up the matter. I have myself
little need to look for my information, except perhaps a date occasionally,
in encyclopedias, and when I do I generally collate the British, American,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish, all of which are equally available to
me. But I had, as I said, assured a correspondent that he would find proof
of the castrated singers of Roman churches even in the Britannica, and this
led to my discovery that the 14th edition differed materially in article
after article from the 11th. (The 12th, 13th, 15th, and 16th are not
"editions" in the proper sense but reprints). And pursuing this inquiry I
discovered that the editors of the 14th edition had come to some remarkable
secret arrangement with the Catholic Church. I say "secret" because, as I
showed, the Westminster Catholic Federation with which the compact was
made, though American priests assisted in the work, was compelled to make a
public and humiliating disavowal of what it had claimed. Otherwise, the
public would never have heard that there had been any arrangement.

For the first time I have now had the leisure to make an extensive though
not complete comparison of the two editions, and the reader has seen that
the second statement of the Westminster Federation -- that they had simply
altered dates and technical points about their church -- is false. Any
person familiar with these matters will assume that the bargain really was
that if they were permitted to scratch out everything in the 11th edition
that was, in the familiar phrase, "offensive to Catholics," they would
recommend even nuns to admit it into their libraries (possibly with the
anatomical and some other plates cut out) and would not oppose it in the
public libraries. I doubt if it was part of the bargain that they could
insert new matter that was "agreeable to Catholics," except such things as
the cardinal's sermonette on the sin of birth control and the Roman
prelate's publicity of the Vatican (and the genuine tomb of St. Peter).

However, as we have seen, pious zeal cannot be content with mere excisions.
Give a priest an inch and he will take an ell of a lot. He does not learn
casuistry for nothing. Under cover of the need of abbreviation he has
deleted whole paragraphs, even columns of facts which were offensive to him
because they flatly contradicted what he said or wrote, and then, possibly
fearing that he had cut out too much, he inserted sentences or paragraphs
which "put the Catholic point of view." He has taken phrases or paragraphs
of the original writers of the articles and, while retaining their
initials, he has repeatedly turned them inside out or has said that "recent
research" (the gymnastic of some other Catholic apologist) has corrected
his statements.

And I say that for an encyclopedia to allow this and not candidly explain
it to the public but even try to prevent the Catholics disclosing it is a
piece of deception. The writers who did the work had not the decency -- or
were they forbidden? -- to give their names, as other contributors do. It
is therefore possible that the plea may be urged that various groups of
folk were engaged in the work of correcting errors in the 11th edition and
it was thought best to lump all these little men together as Mlle. X. We
are, however, intrigued by the fact that all these alterations,
suppressions, and additions that I have examined uniformly serve the
interests of Catholic propaganda and are generally characterized by the
familiar chief feature of that propaganda -- untruthfulness.

Possibly the plea will be made that most of these are cases of historical
statements, and that the Catholic has a right to object to the inclusion of
any statement upon which historians are not agreed. I have pointed out one
fallacy here. When the Catholic objects that "historians" dispute a point
he generally means that it is disputed by historians of his own church: the
men who say that Peter was buried at Rome and Torquemada burned only 2,000
heretics, that the Dark Age was bright with culture and virtue and the Age
of Chivalry and the Crusaders irradiated the entire world, that the church
was just tainted a little by a wicked world at one time but it soon
purified itself by a Counter-Reformation, that there was horrible butchery
at the French, Russian and Spanish Revolutions, that the Christian church
abolished slavery and gave the world schools, hospitals, democracy, art,
and science, and a thousand other fantastic things. If encyclopedias
propose to embody these self-interested antics of Catholic propagandists
the public ought to know it. In this little work I let them know it. Just
the sort of thing an Atheist would do, yon may reflect.

In not a single one of these criticisms have I complained that a
majority-view of historians or scientists or other experts has been given
to the public without reserve, though it is considered proper in serious
works of history or science to add that there is a dissentient
majority-view. My complaint has been throughout that even the majority-view
of historians has been suppressed or modified and the evidence for them cut
out where the Catholic clergy do not like that particular view to reach the
public because it conflicts with what they say; and that in scores of cases
statements which are peculiar to Catholic writers and opposed to even the
majority-opinion of experts have been allowed to be inserted as ordinary
knowledge. I have given a hundred instances of this many of them grossly
fraudulent and impudent. In short, the 14th edition of the Britannica has
been used for the purpose of Catholic propaganda.

I do not in the least say that it is the only work of public reference that
has been so used. The new Encyclopedia Americana betrays a lamentable
degree of Catholic influence, and even the more scholarly Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics has curried favor with Catholics by entrusting a number
of important articles ("Inquisition," etc.) to Catholic writers, with the
usual disastrous results; while manuals of European, especially medieval,
history by some American professors strain or suppress evidence
scandalously to suit Catholic authorities. I have here merely given the
definite evidence in one field that the Catholic Church uses its enormous
wealth and voting power to poison the wells of truth and to conceal from
the public the facts of history which make a mockery of the fantastic
claims it advances today.

Beyond this I have given many examples of the outdated character of a
monstrous amount of stuff in the Encyclopedia that ought to have been
displaced (instead of sound historical sketches) to make room for new
matter. That is a natural vice of an old encyclopedia; or so we should be
inclined to say if new encyclopedias did not, in order to get the patronage
of reactionary institutions, imitate them. Who wants in a modern
encyclopedia the mass of stuff about saints and martyrs, which are to a
great extent pure fiction and rarely honest, about ancient kings, queens,
and statesmen about whom the sketches lie glibly or are loaded with dates
and events of no use to us, about a thousand points of theology and ritual
which ought to be confined to a religious encyclopedia. It is not alone in
regard to the Catholic Church that our works of reference are so full of
calculated untruths and outdated obsequiousness. Although, as I said, the
section of the public that ever consults one of these large works -- 60 to
70 percent never do -- is predominantly non- Christian we do not expect the
full truth, especially in regard to history, in them. The domination of the
economic corporations of the clergy is too complete to permit that. I have
a small Rationalist Encyclopedia presently appearing in London which I
wrote six or seven years ago. It Will show how different the truth,
gathered from the works of experts, is from the stuff one reads in
encyclopedia-articles on matters affecting one's philosophy of life; though
I fear it will be issued in two expensive volumes, instead of the cheap
fortnightly parts (as originally intended) of my larger American
publications, and my labor will be virtually wasted; for the clergy will
see that public libraries do not get it. It is a lamentable situation, for
from the religious field this modern manipulation of truth extends to many
others. I hope this short investigation will help to open the eyes of the
American public to its new mental slavery.

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