The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition | Page 3

and papers. I
consult these--for my legs have given out in the effort to visit and
inspect all phases of the Bootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that
hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive
an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds
and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the
hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting. There are the Holy
Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests are fed by Transubstantiation;
the established Anglican Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests live by
"livings"; the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters, whose preachers practice total
immersion in Standard Oil. There are Yogi Bootstrap-lifters with
flowing robes of yellow silk; Theosophist Bootstrap-lifters with green
and purple auras; Mormon Bootstrap-lifters, Mazdaznan
Bootstrap-lifters, Spiritualist and Spirit-Fruit, Millerite and Dowieite,
Holy Roller and Holy Jumper, Come-to-glory negro, Billy Sunday
base-ball and Salvation Army bass-drum Bootstrap-lifters. There are
the thousand varieties of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic
and transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme
Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters with
half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift" and
"optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden
Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar per
volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian professors of
collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at several thousand dollars per
year each. There are the Nietzschean Bootstrap-lifters, who lift
themselves to the Superman, and the art-for-art's-sake, neo-Pagan
Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves down to the Ape.
Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of all these
cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting
have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting
at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you

may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical
character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters
comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the
Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes
the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the
priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of
them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their
bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to
more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale
Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less
chance of interference.
#Religion#
The reader, offended by this raillery, asks if I mean to impugn the
sincerity of all who preach the supremacy of the soul. No; I admit the
honesty of the heroes and madmen of history. All I ask of the preacher
is that he shall make an effort to practice his doctrine. Let him be
tormented like Don Quixote; let him go mad like Nietzsche; let him
stand upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites--on
these terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above
economic science.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about
himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his
animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its
weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be
harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the
formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic
self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached
to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to
say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and
spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of
class-cruelty and greed? What I say is--Bootstrap-lifting!
It is the fate of many abstract words to be used in two senses, one good
and the other bad. Morality means the will to righteousness, or it means
Anthony Comstock; democracy means the rule of the people, or it

means Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word "Religion". In its true
sense Religion is the most fundamental of the soul's impulses, the
impassioned love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to
foster and further it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious;
in that sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very
nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing it, I
would make clear that I hold it beyond assailment.
But we are denied the pleasure of using the word in that honest sense,
because of another which has been given to it. To the ordinary man
"Religion" means, not the soul's longing for growth, the "hunger and
thirst after righteousness", but certain forms in which this hunger has