Chapter 2-2

2.

"All ye are brethren."
Are all men really brethren? Negro and Indian, Blackfellow, Malmuck, and Coolie, the well-born, the base-bred, beer-soaked loafer, and hero-hearted patriot, belted chieftain and ignoble mechanic-slave, pot of iron and pot of clay?

What proof is there that the brotherhood-of-man hypothesis is in accordance with nature? On what trustworthy biologic, historic or other evidence does it rest? If it is natural, then rivalry, competition and strife are unnatural. (And it is proposed to prove in this book, that strife, competition, rivalry and the wholesale destruction of feeble types of men is not only natural, but highly necessary.) Has 'brotherhood' ever been tried upon earth? Where, when and with what final result? Is not self-assertion nobler, grander, and more truly heroic than self-denial? Is not self-abasement but another term for voluntary vassalage, voluntary burden-bearing?

Christ might well and truthfully have said unto his followers "Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will bind you in unbreakable bonds, and load you down like an ass between two burdens."

The 'poor and ignorant' were his first followers, the vagrants, the disinherited shiftless classes; and to this very day, the poorer and more ignorant men and women are, the more eager are they to follow his religious ideals, or the political millennialisms that are distilled out of his delusions.

"If we only lived as Christ lived, what a beautiful world this would be,' saith all thoughtless ones. If we lived as Christ lived, there would be none of us left to live. He begat no children; he labored not for his bread; he possessed neither house nor home; he merely talked. Consequently, he must have existed on charity or have stolen bread. "If we all lived like Christ," would there have been anyone left to labor, to be begged from, to be stolen from? "If we all lived like Christ" is, thus a self-evident absurdity.

No wonder that it is recorded: "Not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called: but God chose the foolish things of the world, and God chose the weak things of the world, and the things that are despised." Nothing else would have anything to do with him. Christ was indeed, the prophet of the credulous rabble during three years of active agitation, and it abandoned him in his hour of need (what always happens under similar circumstances) for the rabble is ever cowardly, ungenerous, suspisious, unfathomable-base. It has never yet had a leader of commanding ability (either in peace or war) that it did not ultimately desert or betray, i.e. if he did not take the precaution to make himself its master.

After permitting Christ to be butchered, the mob thereupon set him up as their Divinity and erected altars to his renown. Slaves, women, madmen, magdalenes, were the earlest Christians, and to this hour, women, children, slaves and lunatics are the raw material of the Christian Church.

Primitive Christianity cunningly appealed to the imagination of a world of superstitious slaves (eager for some mode of escape that meant not the giving and receiving of battle-strokes). It organized them for the overthrow of Heroic Principles; and substituted for a genuine nobility based on battle-selection, a crafty theocracy founded upon priest-craft, hell-craft, alms-giving, politicalisms and all that is impure and subterranean. It is a doctrine at the disgraceful in its antecedents, its teachers and in itself. Truly has it been called 'the fatal dower of Constantine,' for it has suffocated or is suffocating the seeds of Heroism.

Both ancient and modern Christianism and all that has its root therein is the negation of everything grand, noble, generous, heroic, and the glorification of everything feeble, atrocious, dishonorable, dastardly. The cross is now, and ever has been, an escutcheon of shame. It represents a gallows, and a semite slave swinging thereon. For two thousand years it has absolutely overturned human reason, overthrown commonsense, infected the world with madness, submissiveness, degeneracy.

Truly, there is a way which seemeth right unto a people, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.

Sound the loud timbrel,

O'er lands and o'er waves;

The Israelite triumphs!

The nations are - graves!