_The Profits of Religion_ and _The Brass Check_ belong to a series of
treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later
examine education and literature as these two have examined the church
and journalism and which collectively will bear the title _The Dead
Hand_. Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr.
Sinclair directs his principal assault. In the arts he sees the dead
hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new
masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions
of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such
visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it
welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary
pattern of life to a perpetual order. As he repeatedly suspects
conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate
malice where he should perceive stupidity.

Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can
devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic
enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual.
Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels
more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who
will not instruct their daughters in anything but the sentimental
elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel
toward villains. It is much the same with his rather absurd novels
written to display the follies of fashionable life, _The Metropolis_ and
_The Moneychangers_: he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant
pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger
and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and
premature decay. Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the
ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many.