If our modern Sodoms were all razed to the ground, how Nature in all her perennial purity would rejoice exultantly? How she would wrap their tombs and crumbling tumuli with a blaze of shining glory:

If development persists along present lines, the time is not remote when it shall be truthfully recorded: “There is no marriage in America.” A terrible menace to manhood lurks in the dictation of Slave Majorities in this as in all other affairs. Under the plausible form of Divorce Proceedings, a devilish enginery has been established: by means of which the once pure and Saxon Invaders of North America, are rapidly transforming themselves into hordes of semi-socialistic free-lovers.

The sanctity of the Home is disappearing. No longer can it be asserted that a “man’s house is his castle.” Marriages are becoming proportionately less and less: and baby-farming by the Government, is in full blast. Home life is withering away under the blight of State Interference and Pastoral Benediction.

Look over at France where (with the growth of government supervision) the absolutism of the husband is attenuated to a mere fiction — and what do you see? A nation steeped in communistic eroticism, as in a stygian sewer. French women are notoriously unfaithful, and the most horrible sexual lusts are practiced and pleasantly laughed at. There promiscuity results in barrenness; and this, when supplemented by correlated self-sterilization, is rapidly transmuting the once all-powerful Frankish Confederacy, into a feeble and decaying tribe of wasted marasma-struck manglings, sheltering themselves beneath the all-protecting wing of an Asiatic Despot.

The title of a man to the proprietorship of his wife does not originate with Church, or State, or Majority Votes. It is inherent in the Man himself. It began in capture and is continued by capture, modified of course by mutual affection,[16] mutual toleration, and parental love. It existed before the State Monstrosity was invented, and it must be maintained intact, even if both Church and State (those twin devils), have to be utterly annihilated. The Christian Church commenced operations among Roman slaves and Syrian harlots. Its founder himself was the fruit of clandestine intercourse. He never married but consorted with publicans, pariahs, magdalenes, all his life. By his silence upon one famous occasion, he condoned adultery; and in his nebulous Paradise (which socialists and anarchists and other priestlings assert will “come” upon earth) he insinuatingly states there is “no marriage or giving in marriage.”

During the first three centuries “Christians” was another name for “free lovers” — meeting in catacombs and secret places, to enjoy promiscuous sexualism, before the “end of the world” came — an event they expected every day, for three hundred years.

The leprous repulsiveness of medieval sodalities and modern monasticism, is all too well known, and requires no more than a passing allusion. “The cells where corralled onanism dwells” are as notorious as they are ultra-natural. Not only the lairs of male and female celibates, but the vestries of churches and temples, have ever been hot-beds of lasciviousness, seduction, and all uncleanliness.

“The harlot is Christ’s sister, and the tramp is Christ’s brother;” proclaims “our dear comrade, W.T. Stead,” and he out to know. Has he not theatrically tried his hand at “being a Christ” (vide “Liza Armstrong and Modern Babylon”) — in order to turn an honest penny?

In deference to Barbarian prejudices (after the Alaric and Attila immigrations) the Early Church abandoned its communistic Free Loverisms. But to provide holy sanctions and written authority for its change of heart; monkish forgeries of “Epistles from the Saints” were manufactured on an extensive scale and cautiously published throughout Europe.

To-day, with the advent of Triumphant Democracy, all vile old slave-practices are being actively revived.

Verily! Verily! Triumphant Democracy, thou art a foul thing! — Triumphant Desolation! — Triumphant Amphimixis! Lo! this is the redeeming spirit that was to “cleanse the heathen as white as snow.”

Many modern chapels are little better than assignation houses; and the tambourined, uniformed Christlings of the slum-corners are boastfully recruited from the vilest of the vile. An enterprising Chicago pastor has even started a free-love seraglio (with himself as the divine Thunder Thrower) which he calls ‘Heaven;’ and one of its ugliest angels has boldly sworn in open Court, that she was impregnated by the Holy Ghost; to whom she bore a son — in the orthodox style.

Altogether primitive Christianity is in its renaissance. Behold it cometh to pass! “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven;” is being rapidly and joyously materialized.

Deity hath established Himself as Statute Law. ‘The State which is the People’ is His throne, and ‘the Church which is righteousness’ is his footstool. Glory! Glory! Glory! “All the ends of the world hath seen the salvation of our God.” Behold Christliness realizing itself through social institutionalisms! Behold the golden harvests grown from the seed of Legislation!

O for the Barbarian swarms of the Danube and the Rhine! — for the Blonde Pirates from the Northern Seas! O for men of a spirit, with lion hearts and lion brains! — for one cohort of True Knights, who would consolidate their Hopes and Convictions into Naked Swords! Alas! Alas! Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! The age of Chivalry is dead and gone. “So sleeps the proud of former days — so glory’s thrill is o’er.”

In all practical operations, non-principled persons possess a distinctive advantage over “principled” ones. Honesty never succeeds for when it succeeds, it is not honesty. There is no fair play in Love and War; and all life is made up of Love and War. Genuinely honest men, die as a rule like dogs — in a ditch; and in business affairs they are “nowhere.” In their dotage or ‘in God’s good time’ — they (nearly always) go over the hill to State Infirmaries, unknown, friendless.

What chance has a conscientious man, when pitted in statesmanship, literature, or commerce, against the Organized Knavery of sanctimonious and powerful cut-throats? To them he is a pigeon to be plucked — a buck to be hunted — a criminal to be chained — a madman to be made sport of — a lamb to be skinned — a heretic to be — burnt alive.

Certainly it is not good strategy for a man to openly proclaim his loss of faith in conventional moralisms: if he desires to get-on in the world. A wiseling keeps his real sentiments on this point to himself — guards them as his own life. The best mask for moral heresy is one of pretended sanctity. It is very effective. Nearly all the Higher Thieves are ostentatiously pious. Thus when you hear pulpiteers and journalists vociferously proclaiming their profound acquiescence in “moral principles,” it is safe to conclude that they are engineering some subterranean swindle.

‘Belief’ is a war-stratagem — an instrument of deceit, a convenient falsification formula — a beautiful hoodwink. Hence it is, that very religious and very holy persons, are almost always thorough-going scoundrels at heart — utterly unreliable — utterly untrustworthy. Generally their whole lives are one long drawn our mendacity, and genuineness-of-Thought or Action is in their mind, attenuated to a mere sham.

Politicians, authors, pastors, ‘prophets,’ historians, philosophers, and editors, are notorious falsifiers of nature and fabricators of subterfuge. Soaked in unnaturalism, saturated through and through with delirium-breeding hashish-literature, they become organically incapable of speaking, let alone of thinking or writing honestly. Artificialism has trained them to be prevaricators, and prevaricators they must remain until the clods from the grave-diggers shovel rattle down on their coffin lids. As the Old Man of the Mountains trained his fanatical Assassins, and sent them forth to slay, so Civilization trains its Fiendling Intellectuals and sends them forth to assassinate Human Nature. They are the murderers of manliness — the regicides of Thought — the annihilators of heroism. Would that I had a legion of demons, to wring their necks. They have smothered the grand and masterful old Northern realisms beneath pestiferous rubbish-heaps of Oriental Mythology — of Hebrew old clothes. They repeat automatically in sounding diction, what has already been stuffed into them, as it were, with a ramrod. Their learning is the learning of the ‘learned pig’ in a menagerie; and their virtue is the virtue of a conscientious Jesuit. March of Mind they call it! — ‘As organs grind the note they’re set to…brains jejune…Grind, year in year out, the same Old Tune.’