Its supreme manifestation is the vice crusade, an armed
pursuit of helpless outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of
the Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Himself, with his pious boast
that the sinners he jailed during his astounding career, if gathered
into one penitential party, would have filled a train of sixty-one
coaches, allowing sixty to the coach.
So much for the general trend and tenor of the movement. At the bottom
of it, it is plain, there lies that insistent presentation of the idea
of sin, that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which has engaged a
certain type of man, to the exclusion of all other notions, since the
dawn of history. The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines of
today are to be met with in the Old Testament and the New, and their
nearer grandfathers clamoured against the snares of the flesh in all
the councils of the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity has had
to reckon with them: they have brothers today among the Mohammedan Sufi
and in obscure Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers of the
Russian Raskol, or Reformation.
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