MORE WHITEWASH FOR THE MIDDLE AGES

"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.