GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM 673
not only a means to reconcile the individual to society; it
is also a device for inducing the poor and oppressed to
tolerate the particular order of society which impoverishes
and oppresses diem* Thus religion, the instrument of the
rich, is also the bridle of the poor.
The communist bids us consider in this connection the
significance of the praise which most religions have
bestowed upon the virtues appropriate to slavesnamely,
tflf*ifcfif3Hij humility) urMKdfiffhnf>f| and contentment; to
consider 9 top, how they have censured as the vices of
pride and presumption, qualities which in those more
highly placed are deemed to be virtues, and appear as
courage, originality, independence, and thq passionate
resentment of injustice and oppression. Tht Christian
religion goes further, and makes a virtue of poverty. It is
only, we are assured, with die greatest difficulty that the
rich man will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which opens
its gates to the humble and needy. Poverty and insignificance
are not, therefore, as they appear to be, and as the
world insists on regarding them, disabilities to be avoided
at all costs; they are passports to celestial bliss. As such,
they are rightly to be welcomed. The Christian religion,
indeed, expressly encourages men to cultivate them,
exhorting them to worldly improvidence and inertia
by bidding them take no thought for the morrow, and
to be content with that state of life into which it shall
please God to call them.
As it has pleased Him to call ninety-nine out of every
hundred to a state of extreme lowliness, religion, in so far
as it is taken seriously, assists the governing class to keep
the poor in their place. The governing classes have been
quick to seize the opportunity Christianity has offered them
of not only exploiting the workers, but of representing the
effects oftheir exploitation as a positive asset to the explmtees.
Religion, then, from the communist point of view, is
a gigantic deception; a deception practised not consciously
human minds, it will be remembered, are the instruments,
often unconscious, of processes which, set in motion