The Bishop’s Special (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

(A blast from the past, from the March 1916 Socialist Standard)

In the January issue of this journal were recorded the statements of the Rev. Father Vaughan anent the reason God did not intervene to stop the war. The unmarried father showed us very clearly that only his – pardon, His – great love prevented Him from doing so. God, like the munition manufacturer and the ship-owner, was drawing good out of the war, and in such circumstances it was not to be expected that the merry mill which the bulk of the world finds so amusing, and which some (not excluding even Bishops, who in this respect are luckier than beershops) find so profitable, would be interfered with by the Divine hand. No, God, who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to be nailed up on a stick, as the only way in which he could prevail upon himself to refrain from strafing the world with fire and brimstone, was certainly not the bloke to prevent his children stirring up one another’s vitals with bayonets and other eminently suitable implements. The reverend father led us to that conclusion by ways so logically sound that to most of us he spoke absolutely the last word on the subject.

But after the Roman Catholic Church comes the Catholic Church of England. The Bishop of Chelmsford, speaking at Queen’s Hall on the 7th February, in the Day of United Intercession arranged by the World’s Evangelical Alliance, stoutly combated (without mentioning names) the claim of the rival show to know all about God and his whys and wherefores.

The Essex bishop, far from ascribing the non-interference of God in this game of butcher my neighbour to boundless love, declares that it is a question of politics. ‘God has his politics,’ the bishop assures us, ‘and would never be an ally of any nation that was not clean.’ So the fiat has gone forth. The reason England has not wiped the floor with Germany is that the English are so damned dirty – a bishop has said it.

As between the Romish father and the Anglican bishop, the present writer does not presume to judge. The theory that God so loves the world that he wouldn’t for anything save it from self-annihilation, has attractions for the reverent mind ; on the other hand, the idea of God as a politician, making known through his agents that cleanliness is one of the planks of his platform, and that, no matter what the demerits of the Germans, he will not ally himself with the itchy and the crumby – that idea is irresistible to those who dabble in the singularly clean and spotless game of politics.

But after all, these reflections do but touch the fringe of the question. Though Father Vaughan opines that it will take all eternity to thank God for the war, he will agree that it would be a mistake to carry the thing so far that there was no one left alive to thank God for having killed off all the others. He cannot, then, object to the All-loving being persuaded to temper his love with so much of Spartan sternness as will put a stopper on our murderous indulgences. So much for Father Vaughan.

Now the Bishop of Chelmsford tells us that ‘God is sitting on the fence,’ and plaintively asks, ‘how can we get Him to come down on our side and give us a mighty victory?‘

Much smaller bugs than bishops are may be permitted to offer suggestions on a subject of such universal interest as getting God to come down off his perch. An old bird-catcher whom I consulted on the off-chance declared ‘if yer can’t call him down yer must feed him down, and if yer can’t feed him down yer must call him down, and if yer can’t neither feed him down nor call him down ye’d better try a ‘en angel, and if that ain’t no good why yer won’t never take him up to Club Row.’

But we may reject that advice with scorn. Obviously the first step is to get ourselves clean. ‘We must cleanse England,’ says the bishop, and he is right. Let’s wash our shirts and our shifts; let’s scrape ourselves, pumice-atone ourselves, boil ourselves if necessary. Let’s co-operate for the job – my Lord Bishop, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours: I’m ready for any dirty job so long as we get the muck off. Then, when we have got through with that we might pursue the course which has proved so efficacious in the past. We might plaster the fence whereon God is sitting with such announcements as ‘Your King and Country Need You’;  ‘Isn’t This Worth Fighting For?’ ‘What Did You Do, Daddy?’ ‘Go ! Don’t be Pushed!” ‘I wasn’t among the first to go, but I went, thank God, I went.’ And if this was followed up by a visit from the recruiting sergeant, or, to stretch a point in view of the greatness of the occasion, from Lord Derby himself, murmuring the magic ‘What about it?’ we should surely ‘get God out of this dilemma,’ and ‘get him down on our side’ (as the bishop ‘reverently’ and gracefully put it) – unless the irreverent but far-sighted Germans have taken the precaution to lime His perch, in which case, perish me pink, there is a dilemma indeed.

Bill Bailey

Shrapnel Splinters (1915)

From the August 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed.

Why are all the labour crooks visiting “the front"?

Is it merely to run round telling us what a picnic it is?

War is hell — Capitalism is war — therefore, Capitalism is hell.

When are “we" going to dig the German Fleet out "like rats"?

Why has the gas-bag hero of Sydney-st. been so quiet lately ; is he waiting for it to come off?

When Mr. Churchill said : “There are worse things than bloodshed," had he a prophetic vision of losing his job?

Now that the value of physically fit men (such as shunters) has risen so, are we within sight of the adoption of automatic couplings?

Who are our merchant seamen most grateful to — the man who lowered the Plimsoll line “with a stroke of the pen," or the men who raise it with a torpedo?

Which is the easier death, to be “gassed" in a bleaching-powder factory, or "gassed" in the trenches? St. Helens chemical workers want to know.

Is it true that the miners who have enlisted don’t like trench warfare because it presents no change from the features of death by gas, explosion, fire, and earthfall of their trade?

What is to become of the mangel crop now that those patriots who cannot pull a trigger in the trenches have been frustrated in their noble endeavour to commence operations on the moors on the 5th instead of on the 12th?

“The enemy in their victors’ march know not what they are doing. Let them beware, for they are unshackling Russia."- (LI. George at Bangor, Aug. 5th, 1915.)

May we, then, be permitted to say ‘hock!" to those who are about to unshackle Russia?

"If right is worsted in this conflict civilisation will be put back for generations."- (Same speaker, same time, same place.)

May we, then, be permitted to assume that it is wrong that is unshackling Russia, and right, in the persons of Russian autocracy and its noble allies, that is preventing it from doing so? Or is the solution lo the riddle this—that Russia unshackled is civilisation put back?

The .lohnson-Jeffries fight was banned from the Cinema halls, but the Willard-Johnson fight was not. Is this change of policy due to the discovery both in France and England that the man of colour is morally fit to fight the white man (and therefore to give him a hiding) or to the fact that in the first case the black man won, while in the second case he lost? I only want to know where we stand on the colour question.

Bill Bailey

The Priest and His Piffle. (1916)

From the January 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

One, Father Bernard Vaughan, of the Roman Catholic Church in England, has been setting about his congregation with the jaw-bone of an ass. The jaw-bone was the reverend father’s own. The oily priest has been ass enough to attempt to answer the question: Why does not God stop this war? and he had better have kept his jaw-bone engaged upon the comparatively un-asinine occupation of chewing thistles. He couldn’t have made such a mess of thistles, and thistles couldn’t have made such a mess of him, however they may have revolted his belly.

The thesis of this detestable churchman’s onslaught, delivered at his church in Farln-st, W., on December 12th, is thus given by the “Daily Chronicle” (December 13th):

   Why does not God stop this war? If he were Almighty and All-loving he would have done so long ago.

The preacher spoke of this question as “a sample of the blasphemies sent by post” A sample of the bogey-man's correspondence it well may be, for without doubt thousands of the earnest befogged are daily propounding to themselves that riddle—hourly trying, and failing, to reconcile the idea of an All-loving Almighty with the hard, stern fact of world-wide war, and it would be strange indeed if some of these seekers after light did not take their enquiry direct to those who know all about God and his ways and his motives, not to speak of his love that passeth all understanding, and his strap-oil that sur-passeth his love. That the Holy Joe should publicly try his fist at such a reconciliation may be taken as symptomatic of his consciousness of the wide harbouring of this and kindred “blasphemies,” whether they find expression through the post or not.

It has been the custom among the aristocratic plunderers, we are told, to shove the fool of the family in the Church. The idea, of course, is that of all fields of roguery the Church offers the easiest opportunity. There, where the very choicest mugs foregather, a child could work the oracle. As a matter of fact children sometimes do, though the infant prodigy is now more often to be found practicing “practical Christianity” in the trenches as the more manly way of bringing to fulfilment the Scriptural prophecy: “A little child shall bleed them.” Anyway, it did not need any superman to invent the answer to the riddle which the reverend father made “revelation ” to his flock, though perhaps only divine inspiration enabled him to cut his coat in such true and exact knowledge of his sheepskin. He answered the whydiddle thus :

   God did not stop the war because, being Almighty, He could draw good out of it, and, being All-loving, He did so.

You see how beautifully plain it is. Military experts who have explained in the columns of the seven-times daily Press every military move long before it didn’t come off, the prophets who prophesied all sorts of happenings from “Constantinople in a week” to “war babies by the million ’ (and they didn’t mean Group 1), the blusterers who were going to “dig them [the German fleet] out like rats’ and “fetch” us if we didn’t go—all these have draped their words in obfuscation. One hardly knew what they meant. But the priest is clear as claret. God, being Almighty, could draw good out of war, and being All-loving, he does so. Of course, being Almighty, He could draw good out of peace, but it would be rank blasphemy against heaven and treason against the realm to suggest that he should find it in his tender, loving heart to do so. That, the corollary of the reverend gent’s tale, we can all understand, without doubt.

Nevertheless, not all truths are pleasant, however clearly they may be presented, and in times like the present, when so many thousands of mothers and widows and sisters are more than a little bit impatient under the process of being put through the mangle of war in order that good (for somebody) may be drawn from their sufferings, it would not ill-become the servant of All-loving God to make some excusably hypocritical concession to public opinion. None can resist the power of conviction attaching to the reverend gentleman’s illustration, which I give as reported in the “Daily Chronicle” :

     By the way of illustration Father Vaughan told the story of'a young cavalry officer who, before going into the trenches—where he was blown to pieces—wrote to a friend, saying: “If I am killed, tell my mother not to worry, because, but for this war she would never have met me in Heaven. This war has brought me back to my own self, and I have made it all right in the confessional."
    If that instance were multiplied ten thousand times, continued the preacher, they could see how good was drawn out of the physical evil of the war.

The dullest can comprehend that if ten thousand young cavalry officers are going to meet their mothers in Heaven who would otherwise never have done so, the war was jolly well worthwhile. That the All-loving Almighty should find more acceptable one of His lambs who happens to be returned to him in pieces is also only in accordance with human ideas. We also know that the road to Heaven is broadened to those who traverse it with feet and hands soaked with the blood of their fellows slain in battle—the All-loving would see to that. But it would have been interesting to have been informed whether the ten thousand cavalry officers who have to thank the war for the opportunity of meeting their very fond mammas in Heaven, would not have done so because but for the war they would have lived for ever, or because the devil was finding work for their idle hands to do before the All-loving busied them with butchery. If the latter, a class whose sons so regularly go to hell except they find salvation in homicide are worth all the sacrifice the workers are making.

The all-abounding love and wisdom of God are not things patent to the untrained eye of the man in the street. But, luckily, our reverend fathers are always alive to these matters. Here is light and leading from Daddy Vaughan: 

   Personally, I feel that it would take eternity to thank God for not having stopped this war as He might have done. If it had been deferred for ten years, my beloved country would hare been a Mongolian desert. . . . Our dear island home, with its cathedrals, minsters, and abbeys would have been utterly destroyed; we should have had nothing left us but “our eyes to weep with."

But a “but” saved us from the dismal plight of having nothing left to weep with but our eyes, to say nothing of the destruction of our cathedrals, minsters, and abbeys, and perchance also the slums, prisons, lunatic asylums, work-houses, mansions, broad-acred, well-wooded and watered ancestral domains concerning which the war poster asks Bill Higgins, ‘Isn’t this worth fighting for? ” The preacher proceeded :

    But God, being Almighty and wise, and loving, has spared us the horrors of Belgium and Poland and the despair of the Armenians.

The wisdom and the love of God, the priest thus shows, are not revealed alone in the fact of what He has saved us from: they are revealed even more forceably in what, evidently for our worthy sakes, he has put upon Belgium, Poland, and Armenia. There’s love for you; verily it passeth all understanding!

See how Father Vaughan flattens out the man who asks the fool question: “Can you deny that Christianity has been proved by this war to be a ghastly failure?” He replies :

  Christianity has not failed, because it has not been used. If Christianity had been used and recognised, there would have been no war at all.

So it is seen what a good thing Christianity would have robbed us of had it been “used and recognised.” If it will take all eternity to thank God for the war, surely it will also take some time to thank Him for rendering futile the efforts of His (don’t forget the capitals, Mr. Printer) clergy to get Christianity “used and recognised.” 

Meanwhile, eternity is a long time; and a job that is going [to] last for eternity ought to be got on with. Would it be out of place to suggest that the reverend gentleman go out into the highways and bye-ways and call upon the multitude to thank God for the war? One interested spectator would be.

Bill Bailey

News From Heaven: The Bishop's Special (1916)

From the March 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the January issue of this journal were recorded the statements of the Rev. Father Vaughan anent the reason God did not intervene to stop the war. The unmarried father showed us very clearly that only his—pardon. His—great love prevented Him from doing so. God, like the munition manufacturer and the ship-owner, was drawing good out of the war, and in such circumstances it was not to be expected that the merry mill which the bulk of the world finds so amusing, and which some (not excluding even Bishops, who in this respect are luckier than beershops) find so profitable, would be interfered with by the Divine hand. No, God, who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to be nailed up on a stick, as the only way in which he could prevail upon himself to refrain from strafing the world with fire and brimstone, was certainly not the bloke to prevent his children stirring up one another’s vitals with bayonets and other eminently suitable implements. The reverend father led us to that conclusion by ways so logically sound that to most of us he spoke absolutely the last word on the subject.

But after the Roman Catholic Church comes the Catholic Church of England. The Bishop of Chelmsford, speaking at Queen’s Hall on the 7th February, in the Day of United Intercession arranged by the World’s Evangelical Alliance, stoutly combatted (without mentioning names) the claim of the rival show to know all about Cod and his whys and wherefores.

The Essex bishop, far from ascribing the non-interference of God in this game of butcher my neighbour to boundless love, declares that it is a question of politics. “God has his politics,” the bishop assures us, “and would never be an ally of any nation that was not clean.” So the fiat has gone forth. The reason England has not wiped the floor with Germany is that the English are so damned dirty—a bishop has said it.

As between the Romish father and the Anglican bishop, the present writer does not presume to judge. The theory that God so loves the world that he wouldn’t for anything save it from self-annihilation, has attractions for the reverent mind; on the other hand, the idea of God as a politician, making known through his agents that cleanliness is one of the planks of his platform, and that, no matter what the demerits of the Germans, he will not ally himself with the itchy and the crumby—that idea is irresistible to those who dabble in the singularly clean and spotless game of politics.

But after all, these reflections do but touch the fringe of the question. Though Father Vaughan opines that it will take all eternity to thank God for the war, he will agree that it would he a mistake to carry the thing so far that there was no one left alive to thank God for having killed off all the others,. He cannot, then, object to the All-loving being persuaded to temper his love with so much of Spartan sternness as will put a stopper on our murderous indulgences. So much for Father Vaughan.

Now the Bishop of Chelmsford tells us that “God is sitting on the fence,” and plaintively asks, “how can we get Him to come down on our side and give us a mighty victory?"

Much smaller bugs than bishops are may be permitted to offer suggestions on a subject of such universal interest as getting God to come down off his perch. An old bird-catcher whom I consulted on the off-chance declared “if yer can’t call him down yer must feed him down, and if yer can’t feed him down yer must call him down, and if yer can’t neither feed him down nor call him down ye’d better try a 'en angel, and if that aint no good why yer won’t never take him up to Club Row.”

But we may reject that advice with scorn. Obviously the first step is to get ourselves clean. “We must cleanse England," says the bishop, and he is right. Let’s wash our shirts and our shifts ; let’s scrape ourselves, pumice-stone ourselves, boil ourselves if necessary. Let’s co-operate for the job—my Lord Bishop, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours : I’m ready for any dirty job so long as we get the muck off. Then, when we have got through with that we might pursue the course which has proved so efficacious in the past. We might plaster the fence whereon God is sitting with such announcements as “Your King and Country Need You"; "Isn't This Worth Fighting For?” “What Did You Do, Daddy?” “Go! Don’t be Pushed!” “I wasn't among the first to go, but I went, thank God, I went.” And if this was followed up by a visit from the recruiting sergeant, or, to stretch a point in view of the greatness of the occasion, from Lord Derby himself, murmuring the magic “What abaut it?” we should surely “get God out of this dilemma,” and “get him down on our side” (as the bishop “reverently” and gracefully put it)—unless the irreverent but far-sighted Germans have taken the precaution to lime His perch, in which case, perish me pink, there is a dilemma indeed.

Bill Bailey