Holy Grab

By J.F.C. Fuller

Published in the Agnostic Journal

London, England

4 August, 1906

(pages 65-66)

As a humble seeker after Freedom and Truth, I, oh unfortunate one, had, before Sunday, July the twenty-second of the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and six, arrived at the hasty and miserable conclusion that all ethical champions of the Romish faith were as dead as the much lamented dodo. With the scorching tears of repentance I will henceforth attempt to wash clean the much-scribbled slate of my wretched existence, and, with ten thousand genuflections, I will straighten the miserable kink of my deluded brain. For a great light has arisen from the lupanar of the Seven Hills; this day a champion has been found in Gilead, "for the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea." The Rev. Father Bernard Vaughan hath spoken. I strike my head seven and seventy times seven on the ground before him and listen:—

"The prodigal son—the giddy, genial, dashing young Englishman—falls into the hands of the fast, smart set, who, in the words of the Lord, 'devour his substance.' Aye, they devour it as ravenously as the panther or the tigress in the Zoo devoured the raw meat tossed to them.

 

"Against the man-eating tiger of the jungle a man could defend himself; but before the man-eating tigress of Society he is powerless to escape. One thing every man may know who goes into this set: if he go into it with money he will come out without any. Husband, wife and children are crushed to death merely to gratify women in this set.

 

"Many a beautiful débutante going into Society, has been led to the card-room by her hostess—I know it—and at the end of the game she rises from the table innocent of what has happened; she is told, with the sweetest 'Good night, darling,' all that she owes. The family doctor and the family lawyer can tell you better than I can the number of innocent and beautiful English girls who have been ruined at the card-table—ruined and brought to the verge of the grave. And a girl with this curse on her—what can she do? She must pay her debts. Does she ask her father or her mother? No; she is too ashamed. She runs from one to another—she knows not whither—until at last some devil in human form, who has laid his trap, makes his bargain. He gives her money, the debt is paid; but the poor girl feels she can never be herself again. And this is going on every day."

Demosthenes further states that a poor ill girl on her sick bed said unto him: "I have called you to see to what man can reduce a woman. I am in the agony and the torments of hell."

Father Vaughan, give me your hand—one moment; the shade of Ananias—I mean R. A. Torrey—has risen up before me: I dismiss it with one of Mr. G. W. Foote's tracts, and will as fervently believe your revelations as I do those of St. John.

The last word quoted from your tirade is "Hell." Do you believe in the special locality for the damned? Your poor, sick patient did! Those who even possess as much as you do, will eventually go there. Do you believe when Christ descended into Hell he suffered the torments of the damned? Can you realize what these torments are? You can not. If you could, in five minutes you would be a raving maniac. Neither can have Christ; for if he had, he would have risen and swept the world clear of all life; for life with a hell is the greatest curse of God. This hell is the terror with which your Church has cramped the understanding of myriads upon myriads of human beings; this hell is the horror with which she has polluted the minds of millions upon millions of children; this hell, O trickster of Rome, is the joker of thy cheating Church, with which she has extorted money and gold, lands, kingdoms, and continents.

In the name of hell she burnt thousands of innocent men, women, and children; and not content with sending billions to eternal damnation, she painted this fair earth crimson with the blood of agony and the flames of destruction. It was thy swindling Church that invented the Rack, the Thumbscrew, the Wheel, the Boot, the Spider, and the Iron Virgin. The emblem of thy Church has been the Knave of Spades. She cheated till she could cheat no more; with her spade she has destroyed the monuments of the great, and with it she had dug the graves of the elect. Inveigh, if thou will'st, against the horrors of card-playing; but, remember, there are not so many cards in the whole world as souls that thy Church has put out of it in writhing agony. Her table has been an Aceldama, her stakes human lives, and her winnings holocausts of dead. She has play with human lives as the gambler has with his gold; and as the gambler she has created misery and woe, has cheated and tricked; but no gambler has ever turned his home into such an unendurable hell as thy Church for nearly two thousand years has rendered this world. She has bee the greatest cheat, the greatest trickster, that this world has ever seen, or is ever likely to see. In her girlhood she played "Beg o' my neighbours," in her maidenhood "Grab," and now she, the exposed harridan, plays "Nap."

"Bridge." What a small thing is "bridge" to the "Bridge of Sighs." Have you ever been to Venice, Father Vaughan? Have you ever looked at that interesting and quaint little arch that spans one of the canals? Have you ever thought of the scores of wretched victims who, in ages past, when your Church was supreme, were hurried across it never to return? More agony has crossed that Bridge of Sighs than ever crossed the span of the Beresina. I see that demigod, Napoleon, on a cold winter day, standing there by the horrible deroute; he clears the bridge with grape, and in a few minutes the tangled mass of waggons, horses, and men, are no more. I see the children of the Catholic faith, day after day, year after year, hurrying some trembling human being across that small Bridge of Sighs. Man-eating tigers indeed; they were diabolical fiends, the same who tore to pieces Hypatia, the same who drenched the world in the blood of the Crusades, and of St. Bartholomew. Where are the Incas and the Astecs? Ask thy fœtid Church.

Against the tiger man may defend himself; but against thy butcher church, for more than a millennium and a half, if man attempted to do so, she plucked his eyes out as a vulture; and now that she can no longer burn, and slay, and blind, she accepts: and, like a foul hyena, prowls round the dead and lives on the flesh of the great. Clubs have been thy Church's symbol also, and with them thou hast dashed out the brains and understanding of man, and driven him across that "bridge" which unites the Vatican with Hell.

"Many a beautiful débutante . . ."—true; but what has your church done for débutantes? The beautiful ones she has crammed into the brothel, and the ugly ones she has burned at the stake. She has belted the whole world with houses of ill fame; she has produced such writers as Liguori and Dens, whose works—if they were not of a "religious" character—would not be tolerated even in the brothels of Port Said. Their filth is the filth of Sodom, and their lust the lust of Gomorrah. Happier he who should go and kiss the posteriors of the goat of Mendes, than he who should read such revolting obscenities, let alone question with them a trembling supplicant. A man may offer money in exchange for a woman's honour, but only a priest can take her money and put questions to her which would make Mutinus himself blush, and Priapus vomit with disgust.

The heart is the emblem of love. The Queen of Hearts was the Virgin Mother of Christ. Thy Church has cheated with her as she has cheated with every card in her pack. The supreme trick of the trickster is the three-card trick; the supreme trick of thy Church is the three-god trick, and it has served thy old strumpet well these last nineteen hundred years.

As to diamonds, the heart of thy Church alone resembles them in their hardness. The diamond is the most brilliant of stones, and the Romish faith is the darkest of religions. She sprang from the sewers of the Suburra, and throve in the fornices of Byzantium; as Theodora, the Christian Empress of Rome, she not only shared the bed of an emperor, but ministered to the licentious pleasures of the populace as a courtesan. Thy church has indeed been a precious gem!

Co you believe, Father Vaughan, in Hell, in Persecution, in Auricular Confession? If you do, then in attacking card-playing society for faults which are as drops in the ocean compared to the crimes of the Church to which you belong, you become one of the meanest cheats who ever shuffled cards or souls; if you do not, then stand up as a man, and say so.

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