Baltimore Evening Sun (3 December 1913): 6.

Balance sheet of the Sunpaper-super-Mahon Christmas tree fund:

Needed for expenses $5,000.00 Collected to date 2,751.57 Amount yet to be collected $2,248.43 Days remaining 21 Amount to be collected each day $107.06 Amount collected yesterday 3.00

Orders for more thin 8,000 elegant brass cuspidors have come to Baltimore from the Eastern Shore during the last two weeks. The moment the Legislature gives the speakeasy its quietus a thousand lovely kaifs will spring up, each with mahogany bar fixtures, each with flashing mirrors, each with free lunch under glass. Be of cheer, gents! We charter the relief ships! Three months more—-and ye shall be rescued!

A DAILY THOUGHT. We shall make an artist or a scientist of him, so that he may lead an elevated life, above the vulgar.—Ludwig van Beethoven.

Some genial gentleman of Puritan leanings, breaking all precedents by signing his nume and address (though not for publication), sends me the following exhortation and denunciation, with the request that I read it, ponder it and embalm it in print:

Will you permit me to make a suggestion to you? It is this: Stop ridiculing and hindering those who differ with you as to the methods that should be employed to rid the world of such evils as intemperance and immorality. You seem to think that these are sins that cannot be eliminated and hence must be tolerated.

Did it ever occur to you that the men who are in this battle for a better world believe in a Being whom they call God?—a Being with whom they daily commune, who they believe is guiding them in their efforts and will stand by them until they triumph? I have been a close student of your Free Lance Column ever since its appearance in The Evening Sun and am forced to the conclusion that you either do not believe in God or, if you do, you have never come in close touch with Him.

If I am correct. Let me make a further suggestion: You have had one vacation this summer. Take another, say of 30 days. Spend that time in an earnest search for the Christian God. Perhaps you have tried it and failed: try it again. It will be worth your while. Bismarck tried it and found Him; so did England’s great premier, Gladstone. So did our Pierpont Morgan, and so may one Mencken.

Were these great minds deceived? Let me give you a pointer. The Christian church may be capable of fooling the women and the children and some of the men with her so-called superstitions, but she cannot fool the Bismarcks nor the Gladstones, nor the Pierpont Morgans. Nor can she fool the Menckens when they get all that is coming to them. So don’t be afraid of the church nor of her God. But take 30 days off and go search for her God and your God. Go out some night when it is clear and look up at the starry heavens and say with Napoleon: “Who made all these?”

Then turn your thoughts inward and ask who made this body, these eye sockets and those brain cells and filled them? Did you ever contemplate the possibilities of the human brain? They say our bodies are made of common clay. Go find the Apothecary who compounded that strange gray jelly-like substance that fills your brain cells and ask him how much of it is common clay and whether you are making proper use of yours. You may cut off your limbs, take out your eyes, plug up your ears and you are a man for a’ that, if you have a human brain.

So stop your fooling, young Mencken. Discover yourself, consider your possibilities. You are too good a man and have done too much for this community to mar your good works by being an apologist for intemperance and immorality. Don’t tell men that they can’t. You yourself fight with God and tell men that their can, because of the Christian God who will sustain them. A 30-day search will bring you and that God together. Go find Him!

In brief, the old charge of atheism—the charge that the Puritans have been bringing against the rest of humanity for 300 years. The Puritan revolt was ostensibly one against authority, but the moment it gathered force it began putting all rebels, and even all critics, to the torture. Today, as at the start, the fundamental principle of Puritanism is that every man who presumes to dissent from its tenets is an atheist and a scoundrel. On the one hand we have the Hon. Young Cochran setting himself up as pope of Maryland, and solemnly anathematizing all persons who do not subscribe to his ludicrous hash of pink-tea Socialism, sophomoric exegesis and copybook morality. And on the other hand, we see the Hon. William H. Anderson claiming the direct inspiration of Heaven, and proving it by playing peanut politics. And on the third hand, as it were, there pops up incessantly the bogus arcgangel (usually anonymous), who denounces all foes to vice crusading and such like moral bull-fighting as foes to decency, and reads them out of meeting as atheists.

Let me advise the present evangelist, of whose good faith I have no doubt, to devote a few moment’s sensible consideration to his shining examples. Did the faith of which he speaks make a “Christian Socialist” of Prince Bismarck? Did it make a vice-crusader or prohibitionist of Gladstone? Did it convert Pierpont Morgan into a Bonaparte, a Pentz, a Kenneth G. Murray? Certainly it did not. These men, good Christians all, stand today as irrefragable proofs that Christianity has nothing whatever to do with the half-baked theories and outworn sophistries of such booming ignoranti as Anderson, Murray, Cochran and Levering. Imagine what Bismarck would have said of the Pentz Society! Imagine Pierpont Morgan on the pathetic imbecilities of Cochran’s hero and mentor, the Rev. Dr. Edward Ellis Carr! Imagine Gladstone on Bonaparte—a first-rate statesman on a petty and puerile politician—Huxley’s antagonist on the defender of Sulzer!

I do not shrink from the accusation of atheism when it comes from such quarters. If it is a red, red sin to dissent from the sonorous flapdoodle of the Cochrans and Bonapartes, then I sin in excellent company. To point out a companion at random, there is the Rev. Dr. Arthur Chilton Powell. Did you read his farewell sermon at Grace and St. PEter’s Church last Sunday? A dignified statement of the Christianity of an intelligent and self-respecting man. A confession of faith with not a single “damn” in it. An earnest protest against all the cackling and cawing of the pulpit mountebanks, the snide “experts,” the moral wiskinskies, the self-worshiping false messiahs and tinsel Iokanaans.

This is my answer to my anonymous friend. Let him make sure that he himself has found the true faith before he concerns himself with me. And to that end, let him turn aside for a while from the American Issue, the pornographic pamphlets of the “sex hygienists” and the donkeyish advertisements of the Hon. Mr. Cochran—let him put all these things away for a space and devote himself to the New Testament. And particularly to the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, verses 13 to 33, and the eleventh chapter of Luke, verses 37 to 54.