That there is a thing called the will
of God which, once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and
what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual
thereof, is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this
will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual are
_controlled_ by this will of God, which rewards or punishes according to
the degree of obedience manifested.--In place of all that pitiable lie
_reality_ has this to say: the _priest_, a parasitical variety of man
who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the
name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he
himself determines the value of all things "the kingdom of God"; he
calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained "the will of
God"; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and
all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the
power of the priestly order. One observes him at work: under the hand of
the Jewish priesthood the _great_ age of Israel became an age of
decline; the Exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was
transformed into a _punishment_ for that great age--during which priests
had not yet come into existence. Out of the powerful and _wholly free_
heroes of Israel's history they fashioned, according to their changing
needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely "godless."
They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: "obedient _or_
disobedient to God."--They went a step further: the "will of God" (in
other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the
priests) had to be _determined_--and to this end they had to have a
"revelation." In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be
perpetrated, and "holy scriptures" had to be concocted--and so, with the
utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamentation over
the long days of "sin" now ended, they were duly published. The "will of
God," it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that
mankind had neglected the "holy scriptures".... But the "will of God"
had already been revealed to Moses.... What happened? Simply this: the
priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest
meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to
the smallest (--not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for
the priest is a great consumer of beefstea