The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition | Page 8

children of Israel, which
they bring unto the priest, shall be his. And every man's hallowed
things shall be his: whatsoever any man giveth to the priest, it shall be
his.
In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the priests of
Ceylon first present the gifts to the god, and then eat them. Among the
Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must bring four new robes to
the priests; if they do this, the priests wear the robes; if they fail to do it,

the dead man appears naked before the judgment-throne. The devotees
are instructed that "he who performs this rite succeeds in both worlds,
and obtains a firm footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists, the
followers give alms to the monks, and are told specifically what
advantages will thereby accrue to them. In the Aitareyo Brahmanam of
the Rig-Veda we read
He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is born from the
womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the nature of the Rik,
Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge), the Brahma (sacred
element) and immortality, and is absorbed into the deity.
Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma, or
juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a god. Among the
Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the sacred juice is that of
the grape, and the priest is not allowed to throw away what is left of it,
but is ordered "reverently to consume it." In as much as the priest is the
sole judge of how much good sherry wine he shall consecrate previous
to the ceremony, it is to be expected that the priests of this cult should
be lukewarm towards the prohibition movement, and should piously
refuse to administer their sacrament with unfermented and
uninteresting grape-juice.
#Priestly Empires#
In every human society of which we have record there has been one
class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the "hewers of
wood and drawers of water"; and there has been another, much smaller
class which has done the directing. To belong to this latter class is to
work also, but with the head instead of the hands; it is also to enjoy the
good things of life, to live in the best houses, to eat the best food, to
have choice of the most desirable women; it is to have leisure to
cultivate the mind and appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and
distinctions, to give laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes,
to be revered and regarded--in short, to have Power. How to get this
Power and to hold it has been the first object of the thoughts of men
from the beginning of time.

The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is uncertain,
for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed with it. It
will be found that empires based upon military force alone, however
cruel they may be, are not permanent, and therefore not so dangerous to
progress; it is only when resistance is paralyzed by the agency of
Superstition, that the race can be subjected to systems of exploitation
for hundreds and even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all
priestly empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the
priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.
Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:
Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the Aztecs....Such
was the crafty policy of the priests, who, by reserving to themselves the
business of instruction, were enabled to mould the young and plastic
mind according to their own wills, and to train it early to implicit
reverence for religion and its ministers.
The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of this teaching:
To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the
maintenance of the priests. The estates were augmented by the policy
or devotion of successive princes, until, under the last Montezuma, they
had swollen to an enormous extent, and covered every district of the
empire.
And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices, whereby
the priestly caste maintained the prestige of its divinities:
At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the
prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the purpose, were
ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long. The
ceremony consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives are
said to have perished at the shrine of this terrible deity.
The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of the
priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:

The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the original legal
tribunal was the place where the image or symbol