The Banned Lecture

New Testaments from your pockets, you will find in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and the thirty-second verse : “ And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul ; and not one of them said that aught of the things that he possessed was his own, but that they had all things in common.” Of course one of them, and he too was a Jew, tried to hold out on the kitty, and was struck miraculously dead for his pains. Lenin and Trotsky never did as well ! So, as Roman Catholics are always telling us, the Church has a monopoly of logic, and the Pope argued that all Jews were communists. Anyone who had or wanted knowledge must be a Jew, and therefore a communist, and therefore—well, the Pope too believed in preparedness, though he probably called it a programme of disarmament. When people scrap battleships in the name of peace on earth and goodwill to men, it means that they have found battleships useless and too expensive, and that they have found something cheaper and more deadly. So the Curia kept a weapon in reserve, in order to be sure of having a nice jolly pogrom whenever they gave the word. And what was the word to be ? Nice quiet peasant folk, or genial hard-working hunters and fighters, are not easy to arouse to indis- criminate slaughter without reason. In order to get them going, there are only two things which you can play on—greed and fear. The motive behind the Crusades was the story of the fabulous wealth of the East. We find, in fact, that well-organised armies of buccaneers, such as the Templars, did bring back incalculable spoils, while the honest pious mugs ruined themselves in the process.