Publication information
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Source: Star of the Magi
Source type: magazine
Document type: editorial
Document title: none
Author(s): anonymous
Date of publication: 1 October 1901
Volume number: 2
Issue number: 12
Pagination: 16

 
Citation
[untitled]. Star of the Magi 1 Oct. 1901 v2n12: p. 16.
 
Transcription
full text
 
Keywords
anarchism (personal response); atheism; Johann Most; McKinley assassination (religious response).
 
Named persons
Emma Goldman; Karl Marx; William McKinley; Johann Most.
 
Document

 

[untitled]

     IN an editorial on anarchism and atheism, the Chicago Tribune well says that anarchists are always atheists. Their fundamental proposition that there is no rightful government begins with the assertion that there is no God. If there is no God there is no moral government of the world, and in the general chaos it is every man for himself. If anarchy has any logic, anything beside its brutal hatreds, that is it.
     When that typical Anarchist, the unsavory Johann Most, was in Chicago, in a meeting of anarchists, speaking freely in German, he declared that the first thing they as anarchists had to do was to “destroy every altar, to extinguish every religion, to tear God down from the heavens.” What right, he said, would any man have to govern other men unless God gave him that right? “Down with God.” In this Most was only a rabid echo of Karl Marx. The assassin of President McKinley, like Emma Goldman, has been blatant in protesting his atheism, declaring that there is no God, that he has “no use for God.”
     It is a remarkable fact, and one that will not soon be forgotten, that just when the assassin imagined he was doing something to usher in the new social condition, in which there would be neither God nor government of any sort, there came from the heart of the President such an acknowledgment of God as had the effect to waken in the hearts of all the people such a sense of the relation of God to human affairs as had never before in our history found more impressive utterance.

 

 


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