AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY 363
is needed by the masses. But no wise man undertakes to decide the physical food another must eat ; how, then, can it be decided — and who can decide — what spiritual food the masses of the people must have ?
The fact that you notice among the people a demand for this doctrine, in no way proves that the demand ought to be supplied. There exists a demand for intoxicants and tobacco — and other yet worse demands. And the fact is that you yourselves, by complex methods of hypnotization, evoke this very demand, by the exist- ence of which you try to justify your own occupation. Only cease to evoke the demand, and it will not exist ; for, as in your own case so with everyone else, there can be no demand for lies, but all men have moved and still move from darkness to light ; and you, who stand nearer to the light, should try to make it accessible to others, and not to hide it from them.
' But,' I hear a last objection, * will the result not be worse if we — educated, moral men, who desire to do good to the people — abandon our posts because of the doubts that have arisen in our souls, and let our places be taken by coarse, immoral men, indifferent to the people's good ?'
Undoubtedly the abandonment of the clerical profes- sion by the best men, will have the effect that the ecclesiastical business passing into coarse, immoral hands, will more and more disintegrate, and expose its own falseness and harmfulness. But the result will not be worse, for the disintegration of ecclesiastical establishments is now going on, and is one of the means by which people are being liberated from the fraud in which they have been held. And, therefore, the quicker this emancipation is accomplished, by enlightened and good men abandoning the clerical profession, the better it will be. And so, the greater the number of enlightened and good men who leave the clerical profession, the better.
So from whichever side you look at your activity, that activity remains harmful, and therefore all those among you who still fear God and have not quite stifled
