Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/494

478 more evident and harmful; it has ever been the dry-rot of religion, eating out all that was best and sweetest. He appears to be quite favorably impressed with the way "the pagans were chased into the bosom of the Church with blade and brand." Surely he has read Lecky's History of European Morals, and knows that this same Church, so zealous for the conversion of pagans, had plenty of austere dignitaries whose children ran up into the hundreds, until like Joseph's corn they left off numbering. Verily, she was a precious hypocrite, with her indulgences in one hand and her dripping sword and fagot in the other, but hardly a happy example of a "social elevator." It has been generally admitted, at least by Protestants, that the moral and religious pall which overhung Europe during the dark ages was due to nothing so much as to the foul vapors given forth from that pit of corruption and hypocrisy which is now offered us as a "social elevator."

But perhaps our friend has a squint toward Rome, and may take exception to this scoring of the rnedieeval Church. Unfortunately, however, the same criticism holds of the Protestant Church of to-day, though of course to a far less degree. Hypocrisy is the cancer of every prosperous religion, and is to-day eating out its heart. The so-called orthodox Church is losing its hold on the masses, and why? Because it pretends to believe what it does not believe; because it persists in averting its face toward the twilight dimness of the past, instead of looking onward and upward toward the morning light.

But what is true of religion is universally true, that hypocrisy is a curse. It is one of the foul blots on all progress, and there is no health in it. The fact that it accompanies progress makes it no more a social elevator than misery and sin, which also flourish under progress. To every soul is presented this choice: "Here, O soul, is thy mask of flesh; behind it thou mayst work what thou wilt without fear of detection; behind it thou mayst think pure thoughts and noble aspirations, or thou mayst wallow in filth and plot murder and theft, and none suspect thee if only thou be an expert hypocrite." What a sensation there would be if by a fiat of Omnipotence this earth-mask might be stripped off now, in this year of grace 1891, and each trembling soul be exposed naked to the light, even as it shall in that great day! What a hunting of holes and hiding of heads—some carried so very high! What an exposé of dark closets and skeletons, and almost forgotten cesspools and underground ways; and what a dividing of sheep from goats when all the masks of hypocrisy were torn away! No more secret eating of sweet, stolen fruit; no more safe and secret hatings and backbitings and plottings; for wrong-doing and evil-speaking would rebound with the