Socialism and the Pope

market," although millions are starving for want of bread and perishing for want of warmth and stimulant, the Church must raise its hands in prayer, and adore the God of Property.

When Socialists speak of socializing the land, they are met with cries of "confiscation" and "compensation." In the beginning of Edward VI.'s reign Acts were passed against enclosures, but they were ignored-the landlords were more powerful than any Government. Bernard Gilpin, preaching before the King in 1552 (three years after the Kent rebellion), said:-

"Be the poor man's cause never so manifest the rich shall for money find six or seven Councillors that shall stand with subtleties and sophisms to cloak an evil matter and hide a known truth. Such boldness have the covetous cormorants that now their robberies, extortion and open oppression have no end or limits. No banks can keep in their violence. As for turning poor men out of their holding they take it for no offense but say their land is their own and they turn them out of their shrouds like mice. Thousands in England through such, beg now from door to door, which once kept honest houses...Poor men are daily hunted out of their livings; there is no covert or den can keep them safe."

"Poor men who once kept honest houses" were termed "unemployed," "thieves" and "vagabonds." During Tudor times they were massacred by Act of Parliament. In the reign of "Bluff King Hal," otherwise Bluebeard the Second, 72,000 were put to death. During Edward's reign they were branded, hanged, or sold as slaves. During Elizabeth's reign "these rogues were trussed up apace, and there was not one year commonly wherein 300 or 400 of them were not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place or another." Later were driven men, women and little children into hellish factories of Capitalism, and the clergy blessed the murderers and destroyers!

Denis Tilden Lynch, who told the story of "Boss Tweed," the king of New York corruptionists, termed the third quarter of the nineteenth century in American history, "A Grim Generation." It was not merely grim. It was hysterical and hypocritical. It was the period of grab and pseudo-romance, a post-revolutionary period of land and money-grabbing, of "revivals," and of that phenomenon of phenomena, the "Great Preacher, Henry Ward Beecher. The story of Henry Ward Beecher puts Sinclair Lewis's story of "[sic]Elmer Gantry" in the shade, and emphasizes once more the accuracy of the old dictum: "Truth is stranger than fiction."

In 1927, Paxton Hibben published through the George H. Doran Company, his documentary history of "the greatest preacher of all times," under the title: "Henry Ward Beecher, An American Portrait."

Paxton depicts the fearful and wonderful amount of hypocrisy that went to make up the showman-preacher career of Henry Ward Beecher: the theatricality, the publicity stunts, the religious commercialism, the love of the limelight, the sexual impulses and