A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

Time and time again Brady reverts to the religious nature of socialism, which he also
refers to as :the religion of humanity”. He quotes from the Bible to support this view
(for example, from Matthew where Jesus gave certain edicts on labour and reqard)
and to verify his conclusions that “Communism and Christianity are one and the same
teaching”. He cites the fact that the early Christians shared their belongings (Acts,
chapters 4 and 5) and concludes that “Communism may therefore be accepted as a
widespread revival of the Spirit of the early Christians”. Any move towards
socialism, therefore (which in, in his view, a move towards the objectives of the Labor
Platform) was a step towards the reinstatement of the philosophy which the churches
espoused but failed to put into practice. This trend therefore involved not only social
and economic changes but also intellectual and moral ones. One “Scrutator” article in
1932 carried the bold headline: “State Election Saturday: The Voice of Labor is the
Voice of God”. 1 Brady urged, at every opportunity, a return to God and Christian
principles as the only solution to men’s troubles and in his own eyes and by his
criteria he was more “religious” than the clerics themselves:
The idea of God it is highest expression is the idea of Good, the inspiration to
righteousness, to peace and goodwill among men, to toleration, liberty of
expression, cleanliness, order, progress, reciprocity, intellectual development,
whatever is precious and permanent in social evolution. 2
And these noble sentiments were strongly endorsed by a religious periodical which
considered that Brady had “struck a keynote” and concluded that man does indeed
need to progress “to a far higher and wider conception both of Divinity and
Humanity” and noted with approval the voices “within the churches and without them
calling us up to the heights”. 3
But it should not be thought from all this that Brady was espousing the cause of
organised religion. In fact just the opposite was true. He regarded that form of
religion propagated by the churches as useless to man. He had early rejected both the
Roman Catholicism of his mother and the Protestantism of his father, humanist, but
never an orthodox religionist (or an atheist). Especially did he refute the churches’
apathy and neglect of the effects of the economic hardships of the depression of the
1930’s. He could be scathing on the subject, stating on one occasion that “I met a
bishop once who might have been a Christian under more fortunate circumstances”. 4
Long before the depression however he had used his pen to draw attention to the
churches’ neglect of the poor. Back in the 1890’s he wrote verses about it:
The Christ of the Cross, has he suffered in vain?
` Was Calvary bought at the price of his pain,
That Judas might sell it again, as he sold
That Merciful Man for the sake of the gold
We worship to-day in the Church and the street;
And hate one another, because it is meet
That the sweltering masses in penury toil
For the children of Judas to gloat on their spoil,
Forever and ever in silence and tears;
Like dumb driven cattle,
Like lash-driven cattle,
The workers toil on thro’ the night of the years. 5
1 The Labor Call, 12.5.1932
2 “The Way of Escape”, The Labor Call, 30.3.1933.
3 Unsigned article, “Getting Back to God”, The Commonweal, 1.5.1933
4 “What is Christianity?”, The Labor Call, 10.9.1931
5 “The Birth of the Morn”, The Australian Workman, 7.3.1891
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