Review of the Book

The Life of Dr. Edward McGlynn
by Stephen Bell

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October 1937]

Joseph Dana Miller was during this period Editor of Land and Freedom. Many of the editorials published were unsigned. It is therefore possible that Miller was not the author of this article, although the content is thought to be consistent with his own perspectives as Editor.

The appearance of the life of Dr. Edward McGlynn by Stephen Bell tempts us to a brief glance over the years in which the church as an institution has grown from its humble beginnings. At no time did the church appeal to the hearts of the people more effectively then when it spoke in the language of Christ to the disinherited. Its most glorious traditions center around its early history in Rome, the ministrations in Ireland of its "Soggarth Aroons" (the beloved priests) and the heroism of its missionaries. Everywhere its most potent appeal has been, not to the imposing character of the church as an institution, but through the work of its humble and sainted martyrs who have glorified its mission, and among these the name of Edward McGlynn is not the least.

In the reign of Augustus, in an obscure corner of the world, of a race of peasants and fishermen held in subjection by a race of conquerors, the man Jesus was born. The religion of Rome would not have served the purpose of Jesus, for it was essentially aristocratic and purely a state religion. It was a religion which had bred a callous indifference to human suffering and human misery, and it excused injustice because its ideal worship was strength. Such a religion was entirely unsuited in its mere formal ritual, in its cold deification of abstract virtues, to the dawn of liberty, to the time when the Roman yoke was becoming more and more intolerable to the whole world. The religion of Pagan Rome was perfunctory, and religious or spiritual enthusiasm and exaltation were expressly condemned.

Except among the philosophers there was no ethical religion, and to the state religion the great masses of the Roman people were unattached. To the nobles and patricians the state religion was a convenience merely, since it justified the assumption by them of the most extraordinary privileges, and for their emperors the positive deification as gods. It was not this kind of religion that was to arouse a spirit to sweep away a rotting civilization. There was nothing in it to induce the masses of men to make common cause, and there was every- thing in it to perpetuate the separation of classes which the unequal distribution of wealth had created.

In the other hand this new religion spoke in a new tongue, but not in unwelcome accents. Fragmentary as are the words of Christ, repeated to his disciples and orally reported, must have been, in which the new and unfamiliar conception of an All Loving Father who welcomed to his kingdom poor as well as rich was given to the world, these glad tidings were eagerly grasped and formulated into principles for life and conduct. It mattered not how the doctors and philosophers of the new faith wrestled with the more esoteric parts of the creed; that which the masses grasped, which was the real strength of the new religion, was the brotherhood. It told its beautiful story, not to Roman Praetor, but to foreign slave; it whispered its words of emancipation to the helot aching over his task; to the galley slave bending to the oar. It disappointed the aspiring Jew, who dreamed that Israel might play again the part she had once played in the drama of nations that she should be another greater and grander Rome. But the new spirit breathed the language of peace; the conquering of self was declared to be a greater victory than the conquering of a city. It was said to be the kingdom of heaven that had come, and its leader was the Prince of Peace.

It was its passionate charity, its benignant justice, which in the beginning had overthrown the Pagan temples, that constituted the real strength of Christianity. The meek and the poor should inherit the earth and a sweet assurance was borne to the hearts of the disinherited. The moral conscience of the world was already in revolt against the tyrannies and barbarities of Rome, against the more revolting cruelties of slavery, against Pagan gods who possessed every quality but compassion.

In the more obscure corners of Rome the real founders of Christianity, or the earliest names identified with her history, resided in dwellings of misery, amid the hawkers of trifles in localities which must have closely corresponded to the tenement wards of our great cities. Here lived Aquilla and his wife Priscilla when the church was without prelates, when her chief apostles were tramps and vagabonds human oxen of commerce, who along the quays of Rome, amid casks and bundles of ill-smelling merchandise, first heard the name of Jesus.

The new faith taught gentleness and humanity, and for a time the heart of the whole world that was addressed beat true. In the very mode of its acceptance the inner core of the new faith was revealed. It found favor in the eyes of the poor Jew and the Assyrian, but in the free Greek, when he accepted it, was aroused a mere languid acquiescence. To Asia and Syria, accustomed to subjection, it spread like prairie fire. It found a lodgment in Rome itself, largely because the Roman people were sunk in poverty and misery, but to the Roman patrician it was "an odious superstition." It was the selfishness of the Pagan religion which destroyed that religion; that which replaced it was in its inception at least the very negation of self.

But the vision of Jesus receded as the friends and defenders of privilege sought for its perpetuation the alliance of the ermined and sceptered followers of the companion of fishermen. When Rome became Christian she was still Rome. It is true of all creeds that they are purest in revolt; it is true of all creeds that institutionalism weakens their essential strength. In the new faith of Christianity lived the spirit of old Rome. It was from Rome geographically the heart of the faith that she propagated the doctrine in its first stages through all her conquered provinces. The old vessels of the Roman empire were filled with the new wine. The channels of the old conquests became the channels of the new. The imperial dream, which the Master, with a divine gentleness, had put aside, became the ambition and aim of his later disciples. It put itself above nationalities but sought to gather to itself all the springs of power.

The Church taught contempt of the world, while in her inmost heart she pined with a greedy sickness for dominion. She emasculated her worshippers while she grew big with power, and her grip tightened upon thrones while she taught ascetism to her followers. It is little wonder that Compte, observing this, should have superficially concluded that religion was the invention of priests and politicians. For never was there a mode of power so easy to the astute and designing; and never was there a superstructure so surely founded as this, which had dominion for its motive, superstition for its method, and oh, saddest of all! love for its base. The dream of the enfranchisement of man was wrought again upon the anvil of the church to be the instrument of destruction for the ignorant and the poor.

Gradually the spirit of hierarchy the real spirit of old Rome began to manifest itself. At the precise juncture when apparently the church was the strongest the seeds of weakness had been introduced. Nor is it an accident that the forces of Christian sacerdotalism gravitated toward Rome, for it sought to accomplish by subtler measures what Rome had wrought by force of arms. Rome's conception of government at bottom was civil, not religious. But the new power claimed temporal supremacy by virtue of celestial authority. It used its power just as Rome had used hers. It substituted a vital, passionate form of power for a cold and empty one which could not outlive its triumphs in the field. The claim of one was a stubble to the fire of the other. For Rome and her eagles it set up the standard of Christ and his bishops. Its decrees were imperial; it recognized no civil assumptions not sanctioned by the ecclesiastics. It began its conflict for universal power with a dream that dwarfed Rome's. It wrested the spiritual idealism of Christ to the service of empire, and it defaced the image of Christ that it might substitute for a creed of the purest freedom and equality, one of privilege, of the insignificance of the laity, of priestly supremacy and social inequality. And the contrast grew and deepened with the material progress of the church. The revolts against this tendency were at all times active but they were everywhere crushed by a militant hierarchy.

Whatever Christ was he was a man. Whatever else he may serve for, he offered us a practical ideal. Whatever he claimed to be or whatever others claim for him, his conception of life and conduct, and the adaptation of his actions to his theory of life have relation to the purely practical affairs of today. Whatever view we take of him the splendid mystery of the life of the Nazarene is the same. The lesson is the principal thing; the life is the all in all. He did not say, "I am the doctrine," but he did say "I am the way." He did not build temples of worship, but he went out into the cities and the fields and told the story of the Fatherhood. And the common people heard him gladly. Well might the Prankish king, when solicited by his Christian wife to confess Christ, answer with a sneer, "Your god is not even of divine descent he is a mere plebian."

The church may wield a mighty power when it decides to enthrone the plebian Christ. When she does she will not lack adherents. Here and there in her history such times have been, and men have arisen at whose words humanity rose up and girded itself with a strength which, when summoned, the forces of evil, of injustice, of oppression, may in vain assail. Whitfield among the colliers thunders his message, and down cheeks blackened with coal dust from the mines unwonted tears are seen to run. In our day a McGlynn, clinging to the vows of his priesthood and jealous of the canons of his church, appears, and under the inspiration of a mighty impulse Catholic audiences cheer the reading of the Lord's Prayer by an excommunicated priest. Or a Father Damien gives his life for the lepers, and the whole world bows its head and princes make memorials for him. Or in other fields a Father Huntington casts his life with the moral lepers of a great city, and men speak lovingly of him as of one who is indeed doing the Master's work.

Sometimes we speak of the doctrines we hold as a science the science of political economy. And so it is. But it is more than that. It is an ethical and religious message. It is upheld, in essence at least, by many eminent churchmen of the past, teachers and saints of the Roman Catholic faith. It has been declared by the very highest authority as not contrary to Catholic doctrine. The Fatherhood of God carries with it the Brotherhood of Man and the right of all men to God's bounties. The message of Dr. McGlynn is a message for today.