man; who is
for the rich profiteer and against the petty burglar and
pickpocket.

If I am told there is no such God as this, I reply that there is,
or there is none. The God of every Christian creed is the God of
the rulers, the God of the idle rich. There never has been any
other God known to the world. This is the God that the church now
worships and always has worshiped.

There are forces in Nature that we do not yet understand, and
therefore should not name. But they can only help us as we learn
what they are and how to use them. It is therefore neither our duty
nor our privilege to pray, nor can any good be thus achieved. It is
for us to observe, to think, and to examine the pretensions of the
privileged. It is for us to understand that there is no God to
raise our wages, and no heaven to compensate us for our poverty and
all the misery it entails in this world.

"Said the parson, 'Be content;
Pay your tithes due, pay your rent;
They that earthly things despise
Shall have mansions in the skies,
Though your back with toil be bent,'
Said the parson, 'be content.'

"Then the parson feasting went
With my lord who lives by rent;
And the parson laughed elate
For my lord has livings great,
They that earthly things revere
May get bishop's mansions here.

"Be content! Be content!
Till your dreary life is spent,
Lowly live and lowly die,
All for mansions in the sky!
Castles here are much too rare,
All may have them--in the air!"

III.

According to Marxian socialism, the history of man arose from the need
of his body for food, raiment and shelter. This is the materialistic
explanation of history, and the following is one of the passages in
which Marx clearly shows that it is true and reasonable:

In the social production which men carry on they enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage
of development of their material powers of production. The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society--the real foundations, on which rise legal and
political superstructures and which correspond to definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social