Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/81

Rh in a curious predicament between the two. One tells him that after death the organism is resolved to its constituent elements; the other describes how certain persons not only remained uncorrupted by death, but awoke again to life. And both doctrines are presented to him under the authority of the State, the taxes he pays are applied on their salaries, and the teachings of both are declared by the Government to be equally true and necessary. Which professor is the unlucky citizen to believe? The theologian? Then the State is taxed to support a willful liar as professor of physiology, his theories and assertions must be arbitrary deceptions, and yet he is commissioned to educate the young men of the country. Or is he to believe the scientist? Then the theological professor is the liar, and the Government pays for deliberate lies as in the other case. Would it be a matter to cause surprise if the loyal citizen between the horns of this dilemma, should lose more or less of the respect he had hitherto felt for the Government?

And even this is not all. Those old women who get the hard-earned money away from servant girls, under the pretense of giving them a love-philter to win back the hearts of their inconstant sweethearts, are arrested and fined by the authorities; but at the same time those men are paid fine salaries and upheld by the authorities, who obtain the money of the servant girls by the no less false pretense of getting their defunct relatives out of the fires of purgatory, by some hocus-pocus arrangement. Custom has it that we treat the clergy and the high dignitaries of the church, the bishops and cardinals, with excessive reverence, and men accept this custom and bow before it, who in their hearts, consider these men as cheats or simpletons, not superior in any way to the medicine-men of the red skins, who have their established forms of worship