Socialism in church history

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SOCIALISM

IN CHURCH HISTORY

SOCIALISM IN
CHURCH HISTORY

BY

CONRAD NOEL

The question which ought to hold a pre-eminent place in
the interests of Churchmen is, how we are to return to a
condition of things nearer to the intention of Christ— if it
may be. without violence or revolution : but if not, then
anyhow to return."— Dr. GORE, Bishop of Birmingham,
Barrow-in-Furness Church Congress Sermon, 1906

THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO.,

MILWAUKEE, WIS.
I9II

TO
MY WIFE

215023

THE ARGUMENT

MANY members of the Church of England are
socialists, and would establish a commonwealth whose
people should own the land and -the industrial capital
and administer them co-operatively for the good of
all. Such public ownership they regard as urgent,
and as a necessary deduction from the teachings of
the Church. They are not communists but socialists.
Far from seeking the abolition of private property or
the curtailment of personal freedom, they desire such
an industrial rearrangement of society as shall not
only increase the national output but shall secure to
the majority the wealth they produce and the liberty
they have hitherto been denied.

The Christian Faith cannot be summed up in the
word socialism, nor should it be finally identified
with any political or economic system. For all this,
Churchmen are convinced that the principles which
underlie socialism are, so far as they go, the principles
of the Christian religion as applied to political,
commercial, and industrial problems.

Orthodox Church folk recognise the statement that
the Church should have nothing to do with politics
or with material life as a deadly and soul-destroying

8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

heresy, contradicting the Christian doctrines of icrea-
tion,5ncarnation, and of the<Jesurrection of the body.

The kingdom of heaven, a kingdom not "of"
this world, but " in " this world, is thrust like leaven
into the ages, until every avenue of human activity
is leavened. The Church, established by God, as
the mouthpiece of the kingdom, must seize every
opportunity of interfering with the world, until it has
transformed its evil, warring, factious kingdoms into
the international commonwealth of God and of His
Christ.

To this end it must neither neglect nor confine
itself to the political sphere. It must be as ready to
make temporary alliances with political parties as it
is determined to entangle itself inextricably with no
political party soever.

The object of the present work is to justify the
foregoing position by an appeal to Christian history,
and to suggest that economic socialism provides the
practical and scientific form for our own day and in
one important human sphere for the realisation of
those very objects which the Church has always had
at heart.

It is not my purpose to identify Jewish legislation,
primitive Christian practice, Church law, with the
proposals of economic socialism, but rather to point
•out that the eternal purposes of Holy Church, ex-
pressed from age to age in various more or less
ineffectual efforts, must now be expressed in the
eminently effectual system of socialism.

Socialism is no fixed and final scheme of perfec-
tion, but we claim it as the solution for our day of a

THE ARGUMENT 9

multitude of evils. In the centuries to come socialism
will give place to some other system more applicable
to the needs of a now undreamt-of future.

Churchmen sometimes argue that, although eco-
nomic socialism does not necessarily involve " ration-
alist" positions, so many of its supporters are
unorthodox that they consider it dangerous to
identify themselves with the movement. But it is
precisely because the Church of to-day has so largely
failed us, that the construction of a socialist philo-
sophy has fallen into the hands of persons alienated
from the traditions of Christendom. All the more
necessary is it for that handful of Churchmen who
value not the dead letter but the living spirit of
tradition to come forward and make their own
intellectual contribution to the building of the
international commonwealth.

Previous writers have dealt with parts of the
subject. Amongst the authors to whom I am chiefly
indebted are Messrs Ashley, Rauschenbusch, A. J.
Carlyle, R. W. Carlyle, Stewart D. Headlam, Thomas
Hancock, and Charles Marson. So far as I know, no
existing work covers the whole ground, and I am
conscious how imperfectly what is a very large
subject is dealt with here. My hope in writing will
be realised if someone more competent than myself
should be tempted to deal with the subject at greater
length, and if meanwhile the present work directs
attention to a vital aspect of Church thought too
often neglected.

CONRAD NOEL.
Advent, 1909.

CONTENTS

PAGE

1. SOCIALISM IS

2. THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES . . . -33

3. THE GOSPELS .... -57

4. THE EARLY CHURCH ... • 91

5. THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL . . . 1 1/

6. THE SACRAMENTS ... .14!

7. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE . . .163

8. THE REFORMATION 195

9. THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM . . . 233
IO. BEFORE THE DAWN 253

I

SOCIALISM

Socialism defined — Its underlying assumptions — Analysis of private
industrialism — The nature of capital — No absolute ownership in
fact — The great pillage and enclosures — The capitalist landlord —
Extravagant claims of landlords — Rent and interest analysed — The
nature of modern interest — Brains and Hands — But interest at
present necessary — How will it be abolished ? — The practicability
of socialism — Its root in history.

I

SOCIALISM

"We see that it is not any form of ability, either in design or in
organisation (which is but design) or in manual effort, which secures
the largest rewards in industry. It is capital, as capital, which takes
the lion's share of the product of the mental and manual labour exer-
cised upon the small area of land which serves for the basis of our
industries. The landlord's share, although great, is relatively small." —
L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY, M.P.1

" Socialism is the principle according to which the community shall
own the land and industrial capital collectively and use them co-
operatively for the good of all." — Church Socialist League.

SOCIALISTS of every varying shade of opinion accept
the above definition of socialism. Jevonian socialists,
Marxian socialists, Church socialists, anti-Church
socialists, free-trade socialists, fair-trade socialists,
feminist socialists, anti-feminist socialists, free-will
socialists, determinist socialists, puritan socialists,
anti-puritan socialists, in a word all socialists, how-
ever much they may differ on other points, are in
absolute agreement on one point, and that point
is their socialism. They are socialists, not because

1 Riches and Poverty , chap. viii. , ' ' Those who Work and those who
Wait," p. 97 (is. net ; Methuen). Mr Money's book should be used as
companion volume with my own. Mr J. A. Hobson's The Industrial
Revolution : An Inquiry into Earned and Unearned Income (73. 6d. net ;
Longmans, 1909) should also be carefully studied.

'5

1 6 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

they are Theosophists or Jews, temperance men or
teetotalers, pro-peace or pro-war, but solely because
they accept the principle according to which the land
and industrial capital should be publicly owned and
publicly administered : wise or otherwise, just or un-
just, practicable or impracticable, socialism is one
and simple, and a man of ordinary intelligence could
grasp its main proposition in ten minutes. There are
many kinds of human beings, and therefore many kinds
of socialists, but there is only one kind of socialism.

These economic proposals for the transference of
land and industrial capital from private to public
hands are the expression of a certain conviction
about life. This conviction has been thus described
by Bishop Westcott of Durham, who, contrasting
socialism with individualism, writes : —

It is by contrast with individualism that the true
character of socialism can best be discerned. Individualism
and socialism correspond with opposite views of humanity.
Individualism regards humanity as made up of disconnected
or warring atoms ; socialism regards it as an organic whole,
a vital unity formed by the combination of contributory
members mutually interdependent. It follows that socialism
differs from individualism both in method and in aim. The
method of socialism is co-operation ; the method of indi-
vidualism is competition. The one regards man as working
with man for a common end ; the other regards man as
working against man for private gain.

People of all classes are beginning to realise that
much poverty is preventible. The socialist movement
is, and will always be, largely artisan, but it draws
from all classes. The more thoughtful and generous
rich are beginning to regard it as intolerable that
they should, through rents and interest, be living idly

SOCIALISM 17

upon the bounty of the poor. They are beginning to
understand that the overwork and underfeeding of
the worker are the direct consequence of the under-
work and overfeeding of the gentleman. They are
beginning to ask — Cannot this system be slowly or
swiftly transmuted into some juster, more orderly,
more efficient, and more human type of civilisation ?

Present-day industrialism is rooted in the monopoly
of land and capital, as essential both of them to
human life as air, sunshine, or water. The monopolist,
rich by possession of these essentials, exacts a yearly
tribute from the masses in the shape of rent upon
land, paid out of wages and salaries, and rent upon
capital, stopped out of wages and salaries. For if, as
is universally agreed, all (economic) wealth is the
result of mental and manual labour productively
employed upon land, and the majority of the
monopolists labour neither with their minds nor
with their hands, whence comes their income ? Not,
assuredly, down like manna from on high, but up
from those classes who, landless and capitalless, have
only hands and brains to sell, and are forced to sell
them to the possessors on terms involving the over-
work and underfeeding of the many (their underpay
and overwork being further secured by the existence
of a convenient margin of the unemployed poor,
hungry to beat down the wages of the overemployed)
and the underwork and overfeeding of the few,
supported from the privations of the producers.
Wealth does not come down from heaven, but up
from those man-made hells to which we condemn our
slave population.

2

1 8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

We only smile when the barrel-organs of plutocracy
grind out the maxim that capital must have its share,
for capital is inert machinery, railroads, factories, and
power over labour, every scrap of it being itself the
product of past labour. How can a railway have its
fair share ? We cannot do without capital ; we are
rapidly learning to do without the private capitalist.

Inanimate things have no rights, and the rights of
the private holders of certain inanimate essentials are
the very points in dispute. Most people now admit
that land, created by none and necessary to all,
should be the common property of all. In the past
it has been divided up, and the dividers have thriven
on the spoil. Socialism is a scheme by which the
dividing up of the people's land should finally cease.

But railways, mines, post-offices, factories, high-
roads, canals, and other forces of industrial capital
created by no single man but by the whole closely
woven industrial community should also be the
property of all.

For if in any community whatsoever there be
permitted the monopoly by private individuals of
sea, land, air, industries, sunlight, rivers, or mines
there will in that community be land lords, sea lords,
air lords, and share lords enforcing tribute for the
use of these essentials, and living unproductively
upon the fruits of this compulsion.

Landlordism and capitalism in their present form
are but a thing of yesterday. The theory of
absolute individual ownership developed rapidly with
the rapid growth of Christo-capitalism. With the
decadence of this particular form of religion we are

SOCIALISM 19

witnessing the decadence of the accompanying eco-
nomic heresy.

The upholders of the absolute ownership theory
appeal in vain to pre- Reformation times, for even
feudalism allowed what was but a strictly limited
right of private ownership, absolute ownership be-
longing only to the Crown, and the Crown, at least
in theory, representing the whole nation. Even
throughout the dark ages of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, the nation's right, though obscured,
was in law acknowledged, for landlords were compelled
to sell at the national bidding ; while under feudalism
lands were granted conditionally on public services
annually rendered. If the landlord were forgetful of
the conditions, the land could be promptly confiscated.
Until the reign of Henry the Eighth, the power to
bequeath land was largely restricted.

If the nation had the right to confiscate without
compensation the millions of acres of monastic estates,
belonging for the most part to worthy resident land-
lords, and give the third part of the kingdom of
England to landlords, often unworthy and non-
resident ; by what conceivable theory of justice can
the inheritors of this wholesale confiscation deny the
right of the nation to resume its ownership with
compensation ?

Certain great families reigned supreme before the
days of the franchise, and used their public office
for private ends in such a manner as would have
brought them to the gallows in healthier times. From
the socially disastrous period of the Reformation
onwards, encroachment after encroachment was made

20 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

upon the people's land, until we come to the period
of 1 20 years from 1760 to 1880, when a further ten
million acres were annexed, often without compensa-
tion. But the defenders of these old loot-bills of the
landlords use the following arguments: (i) The land,
in some cases, has changed hands by purchase ;
therefore the restoration of the land would be unfair.
But (a) some people formerly invested their honest
earnings in the legal purchase of slaves. Did this
warrant the indefinite postponement of slave-libera-
tion ? Why then should we indefinitely postpone
land liberation? (b) This argument would seem
tacitly to assume the nation's right to resume owner-
ship of all lands not so purchased. (2) Land is
nowadays practically worthless. Rents barely cover
the upkeep of estates. The landlord often gives
more than he takes.

We fully realise the inefficiencies of private enter-
prise, and grant that in some cases this argument
holds good ; but if any landlord chooses to plead as
above, we warn him that he is playing into the hands
of those who would confiscate his land without a
farthing of compensation. As a fact, all honourable
claimants will be duly compensated.

In reality this type of landlord is not landlord by
profession but an amateur. He is a capitalist who
acquires a country estate as a hobby, indulged in
by means of the proceeds derived from the serious
business of his life — banking, the factory, the mine,
the railway. There are still thousands of squires
living solely from rent. And if we consider the
problem of the town, we find that a certain family

SOCIALISM 21

bought the site of a northern town for a song, and
squeezes from the people of that town a yearly rental
of a hundred thousand. Nor do we forget that the
soil of London, worth an annual hundred thousand
agriculturally, now yields to the landlords an annual
twenty million.

Now, I will assume that you condemn the private
ownership of land. You have come to the conclusion
that, as land is necessary to all, to deprive men of
land is to deprive them of life. To deprive men of
land except on the landlord's terms, is to deprive
them of life except on the landlord's terms. But
there are many who will condemn private ownership
of land, air,1 sea, and sunshine, who will defend
private ownership of factories, railways, and the like.
They condemn rent, while they defend interest or
usury. What harm is there in A, the saver of a sum
of money, obliging B with the loan of it, in return for
a small annual interest in respect of risks run ?

In the first place, it is questionable if A has really
justly saved the money. Money represents and is the
symbol of society's debt to the individual for service
rendered. Now the vast majority of present-day sums
invested represent no such debt. Is society really
and justly in the debt of A, the saver? Does his
" pile " represent what society owes him for his
services? Has he inherited his money? If so, the
original debt (where there was one) has often been

1 Landlords are claiming ownership of the air above as well as of the
mineral wealth below the surface of their estates. A landlord can sue
the owner of an aeroplane for trespass. Rights in the sea are claimed
by the Duke of Northumberland and other landlords with coast-bound
estates, who seek to impose a tax on fishermen on every catch they
make within so many hundred yards of the shore.

22 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

repaid over and over again. Is he a "self-made"
man ? If so, he is either (a) a speculator, or trans-
ferrer of other people's money to his own pocket,
or (b) a mere exploiter of productive labourers,
or (c) part genuine mental or manual producer
and part exploiter. In the first two cases society
owes him nothing but a prison. In the third case
his " savings " only in part represent a real claim
upon society, for he has almost invariably been
grossly overpaid for the part he has played in pro-
duction. There remain an infinitesimal number of
cases where a man's savings may represent an honest
claim upon the wealth of the world for work rendered.
Let us then ask, in the case of these few exceptions,
which do not account for one-hundredth of the investing
public, Have they a right to do what they like with
their money ? Suppose our friend A belongs to this
class : has he a right to invest it where he has a mind ?
Every sane person admits he has no such absolute
right of investment. Everybody admits he has no
right to invest his " savings " in buying babies for
purposes of vivisection. No one will allow him the
right of investment in the Angola slave trade. Not
even in law is any such absolute right admitted. If
investment in certain lands or in certain industries
can be proved to be equivalent to investment in
slaves, or to be obviously disastrous to the community,
the public conscience will inevitably come to regard
such investment as immoral. We have admitted
that, in strict justice, A should not be allowed to
invest in land. There is no immediate moral con-
demnation upon land investors to-day, but the public

SOCIALISM 23

conscience which legalises such investments is coming
to be acknowledged as unhealthy and immoral. We
have come to this conclusion because we discovered
that if A, instead of consuming his claim upon society,
is permitted to exchange that claim for a plot of land
to be possessed, not for purposes of work, but for
extraction of rent, he has actually been permitted to
exchange his claim for shares in the white slave
market, and his family will thereby be enabled to live
idly, not for a few years by consumption of his claim,
and afterwards go back to work, but in all perpetuity
by laying a perpetual and compulsory private tax
(rent) upon the annual product of the workers. If all
the workers were in one way or another possessors of
land or capital, they would only make use of this
land and pay rent for it by choice and not by com-
pulsion. Land is limited in extent and essential to
all. Therefore landless folk are not free to bargain.

Well, then, if A may not invest in land, may he
not invest in capital ? may he exchange his " savings,"
or " claim on society," for capital, i.e. shares in a
mine, factory, or railroad ? May not A forego his
just claim and lend it to B to start or carry on
a business ; B to pay A an annuity in respect of
risks run ?

But this case of A and B as equal bargainers does
not exist in fact. If A and B had started life equally
equipped, and A were the virtuous saver and B the
profligate spender, i.e. if B were, solely through his
own fault, without money that could be converted
into capital, the non-Christian man of the world
might say : Why should not A, the virtuous, take

24 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

advantage of B, the formerly vicious ? Why should
not the elder brother start the converted prodigal in
business, and charge him considerable and perpetual
interest on the loan? The Christian religion, of
course, emphatically negatives this transaction ; but
the man of the world would certainly consider it just.

But in the vast majority of cases A and B are not
by any means equal bargainers ; for A, the individual^
lends to B, the group exploiter. B does not set to
work alone and unaided, purchasing plant and
supporting himself by means of A's loan, and paying
him a small return plus the original sum out of
profits. B promises usury x or interest to the absentee
shareholder, because B represents a group of workers,
landless and capitalless, and therefore not free to
bargain.2 He knows that these workers will be
forced to assent to his terms or starve, and that from
the profits of their joint labour is to come that interest
on shares, or compulsory annuity, on which our
widows and orphans — all shareholders are supposed
by critics of socialism to come under one or other of
these definitions — thrive so satisfactorily.

The attack of the socialist is not upon brain versus
hand work ; it is not aimed at the productive mental
labourers. All such workers would, under a socialist
reconstruction of industry, be adequately rewarded
for work rendered. Nor does the socialist attack all
forms of inheritance or of private property. It is
indeed because he believes in the rights of private

1 Usury until very lately meant interest in any shape or form.
This is its meaning in the English translation of the Bible.

2 Cf. Report of Bishops, etc. , forming a Committee of Convocation of
Canterbury on Economic Questions (2d. ; S.P.C.K.).

SOCIALISM 25

property that he is a socialist, for he finds these rights
are violated by capitalism. He desires solely to
build up a system under which those forms of
property which are essentially common to all because
necessary to all shall in point of fact be owned by all.
He desires this, in order that those forms of property
which are essentially private and peculiar should be
secured to the mental and manual labouring members
of the community, i.e. to all members of the re-
organised community, for by socialism we establish
a commonwealth in which all able-bodied and able-
brained persons are workers ; the children, the aged,
and the sick alone being entitled to support without
rendering productive service in return.

Now, although many people have come to believe
usury-bearing investments in land and industries to
be in the long run immoral and unjustifiable, it is
obvious that these investments perform an indispens-
able function in the immoral and unjustifiable anarchy
we are pleased to call the society of the present. It
would be as difficult as it would be futile to condemn
the individual landlord or capitalist under existing
conditions. If one were to ask him to abandon his
land or his shares, he would point to his wife and
children, and remark that after all one must live. Do
we want him to join the ranks of the millions com-
peting fiercely one against another for work ?

In spite, therefore, of the ultimate unwisdom and
injustice of such investments, they will not cease
until for the present industrial anarchy is substituted
such an ordered society as shall (a) make it possible
for one-time investors, if able-bodied and able-brained,

26 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

to become productive labourers, in the general interest,
or, if disabled, to find some source of support other
than investments ; and (U) create such collective wealth
as shall supplant private capital or the necessity of
financial appeal to private capitalists. It is such a
social readjustment that socialism proposes.

Reference has been made to collective wealth
supplanting private capital. The following instances
are to the point. The city of Leeds manages its
tramways. Under private enterprise the mileage of
lines was twenty-two. Under the first few years of
public enterprise the mileage has increased to one
hundred. Fares are lower, wages higher, hours
shorter. The service is comfortable and efficient.
Municipalities can borrow at cheaper rates than
private individuals. The interest on borrowed capital
is therefore low. Far from coming on the rates, an
annual £62,000 is paid out of profits in relief of rates.
Due amount is allowed for depreciation, and a sinking
fund is established for the paying up of capital in-
vested. In twenty years' time the whole of the
capital subscribed will be paid off, and the tramway
system will belong to the city, with no claims on the
part of shareholders to be met.

Prussia manages its railways. They were acquired
by issuing Government bonds in lieu of the former
share certificates. Although a low and uniform rate
of freightage has been adopted, which has given an
intense impetus to industry, such immense profits are
made that the railways alone contribute annually
millions of pounds towards the extinction of the
national debt. Capital is being paid off annually as

SOCIALISM 27

well as interest duly met. In fifty years the railway
system will belong to the nation absolutely. No
more interest will need to be paid. Borrowed capital
will have been entirely repaid.

Is it not evident, therefore, that with every
extension of the field of public enterprise, and with
every increase in the public capital, there will be a
narrowing of the field for private investors ? In a few
years they can no longer invest in Prussian railways,
or municipal stock. As the area of public enterprise
widens, the area of private enterprise must shrink.
People who formerly held stock in municipal and
national undertakings have not only been paid their
interest but have been paid back their capital out
of social profits. They have only to reinvest ? But
every day, with the increase of public effort and the
upbuilding of a public wealth, it is less and less
necessary to rely upon the private investor. Mean-
while nationalities and municipalities will be
reorganising labour, shortening hours, increasing
wages, offering more and more berths to competent
men and women. The private investor will give his
sons and daughters a business education. The
second generation, or at least the third, will no
longer be able to rely on usury or rent for a living.
They will begin to be educated in order that they
may learn and labour truly to get their own living in
that divine commonwealth to which it shall please
God to call them.

If Prussia is successful in organising transit, why
should she not organise agriculture? If Leeds can
manage its tramcars, why not its mills? If New

28 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Zealand can run a sawmill, why not Manchester a
cotton-factory ?

Granted, then, that socialism is just, there seems
evidence in favour of its practicability. Anti-
socialists point in vain to Athens, Sparta, Rome, to
Peru and other countries, for evidence against the
system they hate ; for in none of these places did the
people own the land and the industrial capital, and in
none of them, therefore, was socialism even attempted.

Neither would the success or failure of groups of
communist cranks existing in the midst of the hostile
environment of the present industrialism prove any-
thing either for or against the practicability of the
socialist proposal.

There are not wanting indications, however, that
socialism would prove an efficient solution of our
present difficulties. The Spencerian theory that a
multitude of small competitors are more efficient than
companies, trusts, municipalities, or nations working
by means of salaried managers has been shattered by
a fusillade of facts. Collective production is driving
competition out of the field. Not only does the
growth of the Trust illustrate the point, but the
success of public trading still further emphasises it.
Every effort is being made in the plutocratic press,
and in the writings of such authors as Mr St Loe
Strachey and Lord Avebury, to minimise the
significance of these successes ; but those who will
pursue the subject will find their contentions contra-
dicted by the official year-books of our colonies, the
Board of Trade returns, and by recent books on
Prussian and Belgian railway management. Mr St

SOCIALISM 29

Loe Strachey and Lord Avebury are answered very
completely in (i) The Economics of Direct Employ-
ment ; (2) Municipal Trading •• (3) Machinery (all three
penny pamphlets of the Fabian Society, 3 Clement's
Inn, Strand, W.C.) ; (4) Emil Davies, Railway
Nationalisation, price one shilling ; (5) The Common
Sense of Municipal Trading^ by G. Bernard Shaw,
price sixpence ; (6) Mind Your Own Business, by
R. B. Suthers (on municipal capital), price sixpence ;
(7) Behind German Dreadnoughts (on German public
experiments), price one penny (these two latter pub-
lished by the Clarion Press, 44 Worship Street, E.C.).1
Behind the economic proposals of socialism, the
anti-private rent and interest programme and the col-
lectivist theory of industry, there lies a fundamental
conception of society. The philosophy of socialism
is fellowship, justice among men, the value of the
whole of life, material, mental, spiritual. In the fol-
lowing pages we shall compare the Christian with the
socialist conception of life, noting the singular likeness
between the two, and trace the various attempts to
put these fundamental conceptions into practice. Our
inquiry leads to the conviction that this modern
experiment of socialism and those older experiments
have the same root. Their ojigin may be found in
that fundamental attitude towards life which is both
Catholic and Socialist.

1 Readers would do well to make themselves familiar with Mr George
Bernard Shaw's reply to Mr W. H. Mallock's argument concerning
ability. It will be found in Socialism and Brains (Fabian Society,
3 Clement's Inn, Strand, W.C. id.).

II

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES

Religion and socialism — The universal Spirit — The roots of our
tradition — Jewish and socialist philosophy in some respects
identical — Jewish origins — Moses as revolutionary — The conquest
of Canaan— The Judges— The demand for a king— Solomon as
Oriental despot— The rebellion— No divorce between spiritual,
mental, and material — The test of spiritual reality — Modern
critical theories irrelevant to our subject — The Book of the
Covenant — Naboth's vineyard — The reigns of Uzziah and
Jeroboam II. compared with the early Victorian era— The
prophet-politicians— The national poetry— Josiah the reformer —
God's jealousy and its economic implications — More social
legislation — Social message of Nehemiah and Ezekiel— Condemna-
tion of interest — Ezra and reform — The last layer of the Law —
Land legislation — The Old Testament attitude summed up in the
earlier chapters of Isaiah.

II

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES

" Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid. Wed it
to patriotism, it lives in the open air, and its blood is pure." — GEORGE
ADAM SMITH, Expositor's Bible : Book of the Twelve Prophets^ vol. i.
p. 25, 1886.

WHAT has the Christian religion to do with
socialism? We, whose spiritual ancestors claimed
Plato as a Christian, worship the God from whom
all good things do come, who giveth to all life and
breath and all good things, and hath made of one
every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the
earth, having determined their appointed seasons
and the bounds of their habitation ; that they should
seek God, if haply they might feel after Him and
find Him, though He is not far from each one of us,
for in Him we live and move and have our being.
Our theologians have incorporated Greek and Arabian
philosophy into the structure of the Christian faith.
Our thought and ceremonial are to some extent
assimilated from non-Christian sources. Our religion,
stifled and deflected in Palestine, expanded and
flourished in the wide room of the Graeco-Roman
world. Of all this we boast, for we have not

33 3

34 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

borrowed from alien sources, but from the Holy
Spirit whose reign is universal and whose inspira-
tion world-wide. But although trees are nourished
not only from the root, but from their hundred
thousand leaves, the root is after all of vast import-
ance, and the root of the Christian faith is to be
found in the Jewish religion. By a true instinct the
Christians adopted and adapted the Jewish scrip-
tures to their requirements, when they had no
accredited scripture of their own. Our literature
and our traditions are saturated with Hebraic con-
ceptions. To the Old Testament we must go, if we
are to understand the New ; to the national Kingdom
and Church of God as understood by the Jew, if we
would understand the international Kingdom and
Church of God as proclaimed by the Christians.

What, then, has the Jewish religion to say to that
economic socialism whose philosophy is fellowship,
justice between man and man, the value of the whole
life, material as well as spiritual, and whose pro-
gramme is the common ownership of the means of
national life? What, if anything, can the Jewish
religion tell us about private rent and interest, which
we believe are the destruction of fellowship, an out-
rage on justice, and a hindrance to the life of man,
body, mind, and spirit ? When we turn to the Jewish
sacred literature, we are struck with its variety —
songs, myths, history, parables, legal codes, and
drama: yet these varying notes are grouped more
or less into chords, and even the discords are finally
resolved into harmony ; for through all the wide
range of their literature there runs the binding con-

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 35

ception of God and His kingdom here on earth, the
sense of fellowship and of justice, the sense also of
the value of the whole life, material as well as
spiritual. As Israel grows towards unity, these
fundamental conceptions of ancient Hebrew and
modern socialist translate themselves into a social
and political system whose laws against rent and
interest are examples of their strenuous attempt to
set up a commonwealth founded in Divine justice
between man and man.

The Hebrews, a Semitic people, originally dwelt
in the Arabian highlands, a country of bracing
climate, rich soil, and abundant corn crops, coffee,
vineyards, vegetable gardens, and orchards.

As the population increased, the Hebrews, more
adventurous than their kinsmen the Syrians, Edomites,
and Moabites, wandered forth with their flocks and
herds, semi-communistic groups of alert and hardy
people; and after many vicissitudes we find them
settled in Egypt under the Hyksos dynasty, at first
in favour with the kings, but afterwards sorely
oppressed. Scourged and bullied by their masters,
their cry came up to God by reason of their bonds.
In the very palace of the Pharaohs the Hebrew
Moses was being trained in all the learning of Egypt.
The cry of his people might easily have been stifled
by the allurements of the court, but the brilliance
of a political future counted as nothing with him
when the Spirit of God had fired him with indignation
against the bondage of his people. The difficulties
were stupendous — all the force of Egypt and the
suspicions of his own kinsmen. Cursed by those

36 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

whom he would have delivered, the immediate result
of interference was a more terrible bondage. It was
as difficult to put heart into these spiritless creatures
numbed by oppression, as it is for the revolutionaries
of our day to fire the slums with the spirit of revolt.
" They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of
spirit and for cruel bondage." He drew back dis-
couraged, but again was driven forward by the energy
of God until the work was accomplished and his
people had escaped into the deserts beyond the
Red Sea.

Coming from a land where the rights of sepulture were
regarded as all-important, and the preservation of the body
after death was the passion of life ; among a people who
were even then carrying the remains of their great ancestor
Joseph to rest with his fathers, he yet conquered the last
natural yearning and withdrew from the sight and sympathy
of men to die alone and unattended, lest the idolatrous
feeling, always ready to break forth, should in death accord
him the superstitious reverence he had refused in life. No
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. But while
the despoiled tombs of the Pharaohs mock the vanity that
reared them, the name of the Hebrew who, revolting from
their tyranny, strove for the elevation of his fellow- men is
yet a beacon light to the world.1

The day of their deliverance was to be annually
observed, and when their children should ask them
the meaning of this festival, they should say : " It is
the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, who passed
over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt,
when He smote the Egyptians and delivered our
houses." God would give them great and goodly
cities which they builded not, and houses full of all

1 Moses, by Henry George.

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 37

good things which they filled not, cisterns hewn out
which they had not hewn, vineyards and oliveyards
and fields of plenty, and they should eat and be full.
So there came to them the idea of conquest and the
lust for that goodly land of brooks of water, of
fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and
hills; a land of wheat and barley, of oil and olives
and honey, of vines and pomegranates, a land wherein
they should eat bread without scarceness.

Moab said unto the elders of Midian, " Now shall
this multitude lick up that is round about us, as the ox
licketh up the grass of the field." Baalam, bribed to
foretell their downfall, is compelled to prophesy their
success : —

How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy tabernacles,
O Israel ! As valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by
the river side, as aloes which the Lord hath planted.
Water shall flow from his buckets, and his seed shall be in
many waters, and his king shall be higher than Agag, and
'his kingdom shall be exalted. God bringeth him forth out
of Egypt ; he hath as it were the strength of the wild-ox ;
he shall eat up the nations, and shall break their bones in
pieces.

The conquest of Canaan was slow, and the diffi-
culty great ; certain tribes were not loyal, preferring
to mix with the enemy and adopt their customs ;
many considered too swift and complete a victory
would not be wise : they must not annex more land
than they could till. To this transitional period
belong those natural leaders of the people whom we
know as the Judges. They arose in time of need ;
they came from the people and were acceptable to
them. These leaders were sometimes women. At

38 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

this time there were few social inequalities and no
abject poverty ; these evils belonged to the later
period of commerce and despotism. For the present,
the Jews were cut off from the sea-board and the
great trade routes by the presence of still uncon-
quered tribes. The ruthless nature of their warfare
is illustrated in the case of the Daneite tribe who
descend upon Laish, a people inoffensive and secure,
seizing their fertile lands and showing no quarter.
The whole of Canaan had been marked out among
the tribes for conquest, and on its annexation was
divided portion by portion by each tribe according to
the number of its families. The basis of their land
system would seem to have been not an absolute
but a relative peasant-proprietorship, with ultimate
ownership vested in the tribe.

It was only very gradually that the tribes were
welded together into a nation ; the people were
beginning to feel that they could never complete
their conquest under these spasmodic leaderships ;
they wanted a more permanent leader who should be
their general in war time and their law-giver in times
of peace. Their demand is resisted by the prophet
Samuel, who warns them of the dangers of kingship.

And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice
of the people in all that they say unto thee : for they have
not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should
not reign over them. According to all the works which
they have done since the day that I brought them up out
of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken
me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. Now
therefore hearken unto their voice : howbeit yet protest
solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 39

king that shall reign over them. And Samuel told all the
words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a
king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king
that shall reign over you : He will take your sons, and
appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his
horsemen ; and some shall run before his chariots. And
he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains
over fifties ; and will set them to ear his ground, and
to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war,
and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your
daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be
bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards,
and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them
to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed,
and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his
servants. And he will take your menservants, and your
maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your
asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of
your sheep : and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall
cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall
have chosen you : and the Lord will not hear you in that
day. Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of
Samuel : and they said, Nay ; but we will have a king over
us ; that we also may be like all the nations ; and that our
king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our
battles. And Samuel heard all the words of the people,
and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord. And the
Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make
them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel,
Go ye every man unto his city.

We find some reflection of this warning in an early
written law, wherein the king is forbidden to possess
much silver or gold, or to multiply to himself horses
or wives. And indeed their first king remained a
simple farmer to the day of his death. David marks
the transition from simplicity to wealth. This great
warrior-politician, who did so much towards the uni-
fication of Israel, had begun his life as a shepherd

40 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

But with Solomon, Samuel's forebodings are fully
justified and the old law disregarded. Solomon is a
good example of the Oriental despot. He made
slaves of the conquered peoples, and although he
did not actually enslave his fellow-countrymen, he
gathered together chariots and horsemen, made silver
to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to
be as the sycamore tree in the lowlands for abundance ;
his harem was immense, and the demands of these
luxurious foreign women, who had turned away his
heart from the simple customs of his ancestors, must
have constituted a colossal drain upon the resources
of the country. The fact that he was able to stave
off a popular revolt is a tribute to the wisdom of his
statesmanship ; the entente that he was able to make
with Egypt was of great value to Israel, and the poor
would, no doubt, be fascinated by the glitter and
lavishness of the court and the army, and, heavy as
was the taxation, would for the time acquiesce in a
huge expenditure made possible by foreign levies.

With the mention of this despotism and its large
revenues comes a significant mention of excessive
poverty, for at the king's death the people, led by
Jeroboam, come to Solomon's legitimate successor and
issue their ultimatum : " Thy father made our yoke
grievous ; now therefore make the grievous service of
thy father, and the heavy yoke that he put upon us,
lighter, and we will serve thee."

At first he is inclined to yield, but ultimately he
refuses the democratic counsel of the more conservative
advisers and replies : " As my father did lade you
with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke : my

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 41

father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise
you with scorpions."

But he had forgotten the power of the revolu-
tionary prophet. Ahijah drives Jeroboam to con-
spiracy; the revolution is ablaze, and the answer
comes swiftly : " What portion have we in David ?
what inheritance have we in the son of Jesse? to
your tents, O Israel." So the orthodox succession
loses ten out of the twelve tribes, and civil war is
only averted through the instrumentality of another
prophet.

The Hebrews are now practically in possession of
the whole of Palestine, but are split up into two
sections under rival kings, each accepting the same
law, and each professing to be the kingdom of God
on earth.

It will now be fairly evident that the Old Testa-
ment conception of religion recognised no divorce
between things spiritual and things material. Hebrew
spirituality was concerned with the bodies, minds, and
spirits of men, and translated itself immediately, as
all healthy spirituality at all times must, into political
action. Their kingdom was not of this world — that
is, was not to be modelled on the worldly customs
of the surrounding imperialism; it was to be the
commonwealth of God, founded in justice between
man and man. The reign of Solomon had been a
departure from the simple ideal of justice. The
earth is the Lord's, together with its products. Their
prophets and law-givers believed that the earth had
been given for the use of a peasant nation of workers,
and not for the profit of a rent-extracting minority.

42 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Capital, such as there was, must not enslave men by
means of interest ; the needs of the poor must not be
made the opportunity of the powerful. Landlordism
and capitalism are of this world ; now is God's earthly
kingdom not from hence. But as these spiritual beliefs
were real beliefs, and not modern Sunday platitudes,
they were immediately translated into national action
in the shape of laws.

It used to be the custom to group the Old Testa-
ment laws together and claim for all of them Mosaic
authorship. Modern critics challenge this claim, and
are inclined to regard the bulk of so-called Mosaic
legislation as being the outcome of the prophetic
period. There is, however, no reason why we should
doubt that Moses had some vision of a theocracy
founded on justice, in which there should be plenty
and to spare for all, of a people uncontaminated
with the customs of their neighbours, of a people
planted and rooted evenly and wisely in the land.
Moses would have seen the evils of landlordism,
capitalism, and usury in Egypt; they would be
vividly contrasted in his mind with the democratic
and communistic traditions of his own people. It
may well be that the Jewish law is essentially Mosaic,
although its actual committal to writing may have
been but gradual, and legislation would develop along
the lines of national experience. While not com-
mitting oneself entirely to the theories of modern
critics, it will be interesting provisionally to accept
certain of their conclusions and to trace the economic
history of Israel along the chronological lines that
they have suggested.

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 43

In accordance with this plan, we must here consider
the Book of the Covenant, which is supposed to em-
body the earliest form of the written law. The code
shows us that slavery still exists among the Jews, but
in a comparatively harmless form. Every seventh
year the Jewish slave goes free, unless he prefers
servitude. If a father sells his daughter into slavery,
he must not sell her to foreigners. Such a slave
could even marry into the family she served, and must
in that case be treated as one of the family, and could
claim food and raiment and her marriage rights if her
husband took another wife. If the claim was refused
she could go home. Man-stealing and taking interest
are punishable with death. If a person's clothing
was taken as security for a loan, it was to be returned
to him the same night. The existence of poor people
was contemplated,, but they were to be relieved in
various ways, every seventh year, for instance, being
a fallow year, when fields, vineyards, and oliveyards
were to be common to all.

An early form of the Decalogue seems to have
been included in this code. The Sabbath rest was
based on humanitarian considerations. The people's
ownership of the land is taken for granted in the
fifth commandment; the removing of one's neigh-
bour's land-mark would be the most glaring in-
stance of the breaking of the sixth, while the tenth
would secure the peasantry their ancient economic
rights. Health and strength would be the result of
national obedience to these laws ; national disaster
and individual disease would be the penalty of
disobedience.

44 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

The story of Naboth's vineyard is an example
of the clash between the lusts of an Orientalised
despotism and the rights of the Jewish democracy.

Ahab knew the tenacity with which the Israelite clung
to his freehold, and the sanctity which attached to the
ancestral inheritance, and hence, when Naboth refused to
sell, the king could only fume helplessly at the failure of his
petty plans for a private park. His wife was from Tyre,
where royal power was older and accustomed to move
rough-shod over the fancied rights of the common herd.
She sneered at his feeble grip and gave him a lesson in
handling the judiciary. But the judicial murder of Naboth
brought Elijah out to face the king, a grim incarnation of
justice and of the divine rights of the people. Ahab had
collided with the primitive land-system of Israel and the
prophetic sense of justice, and it cost his dynasty the
throne and Jezebel her life.1

The most significant period from our point of view,
as regards both the Northern and the Southern
Kingdoms, corresponds with the reigns of Uzziah and
Jeroboam II. It was a period of unparalleled pro-
sperity ; wealth was increasing by leaps and bounds.
It may not unfittingly be compared with the
beginnings of the nineteenth century in England,
for, in spite of this prolific increase, the poor were
becoming poorer in inverse ratio to the growth in the
fortunes of the rich. We read of idle lives given up
entirely to pleasure, of inlaid ivory houses, of town
and country residences, of costly wines and scent, of
the ever-growing claims of capitalism and landlordism.
Poverty increased, for the people were no longer
masters of the situation. " Capital controlled the
food-supply, and the landed estates displaced the

1 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis.

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 45

peasantry." A sudden war, a famine, an illness,
would push the poor man over the border-line into
slavery. The people, robbed of their lands, were
obliged to borrow at enormous rates of interest to
pay the taxes, and often sold their children to slavery
to meet their obligations. The revival of husbandry
was eclipsed by the growth of trade and of the city.
For the poor man there was no redress, for the law and
the official religion had alike passed into the hands of
the classes. Up to this period the land has been
covered by a sturdy warrior peasantry; now there
is no place for the poor man, and with the growth
of civilisation we note the inevitable appearance of
the landless proletariat. Internally, there was misery
and dissension : externally, the empire of Assyria
was rising on the eastern horizon "like a cyclone
cloud." " It moved down on the cluster of little
kingdoms in Syria and Palestine with irresistible
force," for it was " destined to grind up the tribal
nationality of the ancient Orient, and to begin the
work which Chaldea and the Greeks continued and
the Romans completed." 1

The dark ages of Israel called forth the Prophets.
George Adam Smith has said that no prophet
ever worked on the basis of principles only. He
came always in alliance with facts. As Maurice and
Kingsley are to some extent the creation of the nine-
teenth century, so Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah are
created by the needs of their time. It is remarkable
that men who suffer from some intimate and individual
trouble will find themselves turning to the pages of

1 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis.

46 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

these most spiritual of religious leaders ; yet these
leaders whose spirituality has endured were essentially
politicians, and would have stared in blank amazement
at the silly question, "Has religion anything to do with
politics ? " They were revolutionaries whose audacity
would have staggered Messrs Hyndman and Blatchford.
There is again illustrated in their lives the nature of
Jewish religion, its recognition of justice and the
needs of men's bodies, its denial that there can be
any spirituality apart from fellowship. The Spirit is
not given to the separate believer, but to the nation.
The very Psalms are, for the most part, national
songs. The "I" of the Psalmist is Israel in its
totality. Modern critics suggest that even the fifty-
first Psalm, so long supposed to be a Davidic poem
of personal repentance, is the wail of the nation in
captivity, with the walls of its city razed to the
ground. Where individuals are gathered together in
national fellowship, there is God in the midst of them.
Hence the tent or the temple becomes the trysting-
place, the symbol of unity and therefore of salvation.
Jerusalem is the Holy City, for it is at unity in
itself, and thither the tribes go up to worship the
national God.

Nathan and Gad had been David's political advisers,
Ahijah had stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had
resisted Ahab, Elisha had fanned the rebellion of
Jehu, Amos thunders against the misrule of the king
of Israel, Isaiah denounces the landlords and the
usurers, Micah charges them with blood-guiltiness ;
Jeremiah and the later prophets, though they strike
a more intimate note of personal repentance, strike it

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 47

as the prelude to that national restoration for which
they hunger as exiles.

The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old
Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the
nineteenth century thundered against the " Christian "
employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses
were cemented with the blood of little children,1 so
Isaiah cries against his generation : Your govern-
ing classes companion with thieves ; behold, you
build up Sion with blood. Their ceremonial and
their Sabbath-keeping are an abomination to God.
" When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine
eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood." The
poor man is robbed. The rich exact usury. " Woe
unto you that lay house to house and field to field,
that you may dwell alone in the midst of the land."
u Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of
your doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do
evil : learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the
oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord.
Though your sins be blood-coloured, they shall be as
white as snow ; though they be red like crimson, they
shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye
shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and
rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword."

And now the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom
have been carried into captivity. The Southern
kingdom is nearing its end. In this kingdom the
reign of Josiah, a genuine reformer, is marked by the

1 See Chapter IX. of the present book for condition of factory workers
and increase of wealth under Christo-capitalism.

48 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

discovery of the Book of the Law. Jeremiah and
Ezekiel are the prophets of this period. The code of
Josiah incorporates the earlier Book of the Covenant
and possibly some custom law, and applies the older
legislation to the needs of the time in the spirit of the
prophetic period that has intervened. The promise
of health and prosperity is reiterated. The laws are
to be taught to the children as part of their religious
education. All sickness shall vanish from the nation,
if men will remember God and the requirements of
His justice. The strict legislation against interest in
any shape or form is repeated. Its transgression is to
be punished by death.

It is the fashion to sneer at law-givers and prophets
on account of their religious bigotry and exclusiveness.
Why should they be so concerned to keep Israel from
contact with the gods and ideals of other nations?
It does not matter what a man believes so long as
his actions are in the right. The prophets would
have answered promptly, the economic action of the
nation is in the wrong, because the nation has lusted
after other gods. And, in point of fact, history is on
the side of the prophets. For we have seen that
when Solomon worshipped other divinities the nation
groaned under an economic burden too grievous to be
borne. The period of landlordism and capitalism
was the period of faithlessness to the jealous God of
Israel. Just as Palestinian theology has its expression
in something not unlike modern socialism, so Assyrian
and Babylonian theology has its expression in some-
thing not unlike modern commercialism. When the
Book of the Covenant is insisting on loyalty to the

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 49

national God, and nothing per cent., and the rights of
the people to their land, imperialism, landlordism, and
usury flourish in the countries all around them. The
rate of legal interest throughout the Babylonish
empire is twenty per cent, the laws of Menu permit
twenty-four per cent, and Egyptian legislation only
interferes to forbid more than a hundred per cent.

The fresh notes in the newly discovered legislation
are the land-mark law, which sternly forbids en-
croachment upon peasant rights ; consideration for
the foreigner ; additional sanitary and food laws ;
tithe regulations on behalf of widows, orphans,
foreigners, etc. ; that those who have no economic
independence should eat and be satisfied ; that loans
should be given cheerfully, not only without any
interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal.
To withhold a loan because the year of release is at
hand, in which the principal is no longer recoverable,
is described as a grave sin. When you are compelled
to free your slaves, you must give them sufficient
capital to embark upon some industry which shall
prevent their falling back into slavery. A number of
holidays are insisted upon. There must be no more
crushing of the poor out of existence, for God cares
for those people who have been driven to poverty,
and they shall never cease out of the land. Howbeit
there shall be no poor with you, for the Lord will
bless you, if you will obey these laws.

We do not know how far the nation responded
to these social ideals, but the year 606 B.C. marks
the overthrow of the Southern Kingdom, and a
few years later the destruction of the Temple. In

4

50 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

586 B.C. the peasant population is deported, and a
proletariat is left. In 536 B.C. a few return, but
this remnant becomes enslaved to the Persian king.
Usury and rapacity are everywhere rampant.
Drought and crop failures increase the misery.
The richer Jews, instead of learning compassion,
prey upon the miseries of the poor. In Malachi
and Ezekiel we read of fields mortgaged, usurious
loans, and child-slavery.

Nehemiah seems to have been the instrument of
national repentance.

Many had mortgaged their lands and vineyards to
pay exorbitant taxes to the king. They had even
sold their children to meet their debts. Nehemiah
angrily rebukes the rich oppressors, and commands
them to restore the land to the people, and to give
them back a hundredth part of the money, corn,
wine, and oil that they exact of them. Nehemiah's
demands are listened to, and restoration is made.1

For examples of the outspokenness of the prophets,
the book of Amos should be studied, as also the
words of Ezekiel and of the later Isaiah. Ezekiel
takes his stand against pessimism and fatalism (chaps,
xviii. and xix.). Each generation is responsible for
its own deeds. However evil the father's life, the son
may turn and act justly. He will not be punished
for his father's transgressions. He that

hath not oppressed any, but hath restored to the
debtor his pledge, hath spoiled none by violence, hath
given his bread to the hungry, and hath covered the naked
with a garment ; he that hath not given forth upon usury,

1 Neh. v. 4-13.

THE JE WISH SCRIPTURES 5 1

neither hath taken any increase, that hath withdrawn his
hand from iniquity, hath executed true judgment between
man and man, hath walked in my statutes, and hath kept
my judgments, to deal truly ; he is just, he shall surely
live, saith the Lord God.

With this should be compared a passage in
chapter xxii. : —

Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening
the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get
dishonest gain. And her prophets have daubed them with
untempered mortar, seeing vanity, and divining lies unto
them, saying, Thus saith the Lord God, when the Lord hath
not spoken. The people of the land have used oppression,
and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy :
yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. And I
sought for a man among them, that should make up the
hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I
should not destroy it : but I found none. Therefore have
I poured out mine indignation upon them ; I have con-
sumed them with the fire of my wrath : their own way
have I recompensed upon their heads, saith the Lord God.

It is to be noted that just as the sentence in Isaiah
about our sins being as scarlet, so dear to the hearts
of revivalists, is wrenched from its moorings, which
are social and revolutionary, so also the Prayer Book
sentence, " when the wicked man turneth away from
his wickedness," is taken from this social passage, in
which the wickedness is defined as taking increase,
and in other ways oppressing the poor.

The second Isaiah (chap. Iviii.), in the passage
commencing, " Cry aloud and spare not," lifts up his
voice like a trumpet against the rich man's injustice,
thieving, and hypocrisy : —

Is it such a fast that I have chosen ? a day for a man to
afflict his soul ? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush,

52 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou
call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord ? Is not
this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of
wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the
oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke ? Is it not
to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the
poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the
naked, that thou cover him ; and that thou hide not thy-
self from thine own flesh ? And if thou draw out thy soul
to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul ; then shall thy
light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day :
and the Lord shall eoride thee continually, and satisfy thy
soul in drought, and make fat thy bones : and thou shalt
be like a walled garden, and like a spring of water, whose
waters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build
the old waste places : thou shalt raise up the foundations
of many generations ; and thou shalt be called, The repairer
of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.

The result of this revival was that the people
promised to observe the seventh year of release and
to forego the exaction of all debts. This leads on
to the reforming legislation of the time of Ezra, which
is now considered to be the third and last layer of
the Law, and corresponds to much of our book
of Leviticus.

One notes particularly in this legislation that the
corners of the field are to be left for the poor, as also
the gleaning of harvests ; the poor have a right to
pick up the fallen fruits in the orchards ; oppression
and robbery, especially of land, are strictly prohibited ;
workmen are to be paid by the day at sundown ;
men are not to be worked on the holidays ; the
fallow year is to be observed for the sake of the
hired servants ; actual slavery has now disappeared ;
there is to be no favouritism nor unjust judgment,

THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 53

nor nourishing of secret enmities against one's
neighbour, for you are to remember to "love your
neighbour as yourself." Every fiftieth year is the
year of liberty. In that year all Hebrew servants
and their families are to be unconditionally freed, and
to return to their peasant holdings. For the freehold
of agricultural land and cottages is never to be sold.
Only leasehold sales are permissible, and the price
of these is to be determined by the average value of
the crops till the next year of release. House pro-
perty in the towns can, under certain conditions, be
sold outright. This code marks the total abolition
of Hebrew slavery.

There would seem to have been a genuine attempt
on the part of the nation to observe this legislation,
but with the development of commerce and of credit
operations, the strain of obedience to laws whose
observance would have been more possible in simpler
and more primitive times is greatly increased. No
doubt this economic development would lead to all
kinds of evasions, with which we may compare the
evasions permitted in Christ's time by even such
rigorists as Hillel.1 We have no evidence of the
material conditions of the people under the later
Persian and Greek dominions. Josephus, who is the
authority for the Greek period, was unfortunately a
snob, and showed no interest in social matters.
Wealth was increasing with the increase of the
population ; perhaps we may infer that, along with
commercial development and contact with other
civilisations, poverty was also on the increase.

1 And also the modifications of the later canon law ; cf. Chapter VI.

54 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

The Maccabean period sees a temporary improve-
ment. There is a recovery of national independence
under the loose suzerainty of Rome. The Jews
acquire a valuable sea-board and a consequent
over-sea commerce.

Then did they till their ground in peace, and the earth
gave her increase, and the trees of the field their fruit. The
ancient men sat all in the streets, communing together of
good things, and the young men put on glorious and war-
like apparel. He provided victuals for the cities, and set in
them all manner of munition, so that his honourable name
was renowned unto the end of the world. He made peace
in the land, and Israel rejoiced with great joy, for every man
sat under his vine and his fig-tree, and there was none to
fray them.1

1 i Mac. xiv. 8-14.

Ill

THE GOSPELS

Goodness as preparation for the Kingdom — National expectancy —
Various views of the Kingdom — John the Baptizer — His revolu-
tionary message — St John and our Lord contrasted — The Gospel
of the Kingdom — A Kingdom of body, mind, and spirit — Christ's
followers — His popularity — The children of the Kingdom to be
cast out — His reception at Nazareth — An " unpatriotic " sermon —
The Peter Gospel emphasising His unconventionality — Luke's
account of the kernel of His teaching — Blessed are ye poor — The
poor understand the Sermon on the Mount — The Sermon explained
— Inward conversion and outward change — Not to destroy but to
complete the old material-spiritual conception — The things that
are Caesar's — General principles and their varying application —
Can the present system claim to be in any sense an application ? —
The question of compulsion and Count Tolstoy's interpretation —
The use of the parable — From nationalist to internationalist
Kingdom— Parables of the Kingdom— Was the Kingdom to be
cataclysmic ? — The evolutionary theory — The seed growing
secretly— The sower, the net, and the tree— The pearl beyond price
— The unjust judge — Eagerness, persistency, and alertness essential
— Parable of the talents and of the steward of injustice — Attitude
of the Pharisees — Dives and Lazarus — The rich young landlord
and Zaccheus — Judge or divider — Parable of the labourers in the
vineyard — The alabaster box — The poor always with you — The
last judgment — God's Utopia and overmastering life — The rich
young man again— A general and not particular application — A
domesticated Christ.

Ill

THE GOSPELS

"Whatever aspect (of the Kingdom of God) any man emphasized,
it was still a national and collective idea. It involved the restoration
of Israel as a nation to outward independence, security, and power,
such as it had under the Davidic kings. It involved that social justice,
prosperity, and happiness for which the Law and the Prophets called,
and for which the common people always longed. It involved that
religious purity and holiness of which the nation had always fallen
short. And all this was to come in an ideal degree, such as God alone
by direct intervention could bestow. When Jesus used the phrase
'the Kingdom of God,' it inevitably evoked that whole sphere of
thought in the minds of His hearers. If He did not mean by it the
substance of what they meant by it, it was a mistake to use the term.
If He did not mean the consummation of the theocratic hope, but
merely an internal blessedness for individuals with the hope of getting
to Heaven, why did He use the words around which all the collective
hopes clustered? In that case it was not only misleading, but a
dangerous phrase. It unfettered the political hopes of the crowd : it
drew down upon Him the suspicion of the government : it actually led
to His death."— RAUSCHENBUSCH, Christianity and the Social Crisis,
PP. 57, 58.

SINCE the days of the Jewish Captivity, religion
had become more intimate and introspective. Oppor-
tunity was lacking for political expression, and its
absence drove the people in upon themselves, and
the aspect of the individual soul and its God was
developed. During the period of the Maccabees the

58 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

normal expression was regained, but even then the
nation was not free of the suzerainty of Rome. But
goodness, though individualised, was always treated
as a preparation for the national restoration, No
man by individual righteousness could live the life
God had intended for him ; that life could alone be
lived in the Golden Age of deliverance and of cor-
porate national independence. Such a restoration
of God's Kingdom was expected on all sides. The
kingdom of the Maccabees had broken in pieces
through force of external opposition and internal
discord. So far as human foresight went, it looked
as though no recovery of the nation would ever
again be possible. And yet the general expectancy
grew stronger every day. Now and again crude
revolutionary leaders arose who, after futile resist-
ance to the Roman power, were executed along with
their followers. Some thought the Kingdom would
be restored by means of one of these mad Mullahs
or Messiahs. Others, despairing of a general restora-
tion, were ready to retire into country places and
set up ascetic communities withdrawn from com-
merce and from sensuous enjoyment. Meanwhile
the Sadducees and Herodians, the Erastians of that
day, shrugged their shoulders and scoffed at the
turbulent enthusiasm of the crowds. The Roman
dominion suited them well enough. The scribes
and Pharisees looked forward, but with none of the
enthusiasm of the revolutionaries, to the coming of
the Kingdom. Meanwhile the law must be rigor-
ously observed — not indeed the whole law, but the
law as expurgated by the rigid Puritan mind. Self-

THE GOSPELS 59

exalted, complacent, despising others, they were a
party of fussy, trivial literalists regarding the common
people, who knew not the law, as accursed.

Above the clamour of these contending parties is
raised the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
John the Baptizer begins his mission in the wild
country of South Jordan, not far from the Dead Sea.
His religion is not so much a gospel as a call to
repentance in preparation for a gospel. Do good
works, and show your change of heart and mind by
the usual method of immersion in the Jordan. He
was here as a herald to clear away the jungle under-
growth and make straight the Messiah's path. A
total abstainer, he lived the simple life, clothing him-
self in coarse stuff and eating just what came to hand
in the wilderness. The Kingdom was close upon
them ; it was essential that they should return to the
old paths to walk in them. This repentance, this
internal change of front, though essential, was not the
Kingdom of God any more than a little girl's frock
is the party to which she is going. Repentance will
involve the levelling doctrine of the ancient Law and
Prophets.

Every valley shall be filled,

Every mountain and hill brought low ;

And the crooked shall be made straight,

And the rough ways made smooth ;

And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

His preaching causes a great sensation ; everybody
makes the excursion into the wilderness to hear him.
When the religious leaders come to his baptism, he
cries : O generation of snakes, who hath warned you

60 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

to flee from the coming wrath? Bring forth fruits
meet for repentance. Don't cheat yourselves into a
false security by thinking that you have Abraham
to your father. Man is not redeemed by the blood
of his ancestors, but by his own works. God is able
of these very stones to raise up children to Abraham.
The axe is even now laid to the root of the tree ;
every fruitless tree shall be destroyed. All worthless
things are to be burnt with unquenchable fire. And
the people themselves ask him what they are to do,
and he answers, they must equalise their property ;
the man with two coats must share with the man who
has none ; so likewise with money. The soldiers
ask what are they to do, and he tells them not to
add to their wages by robbing the peasantry, on
whom they are quartered. The tax-gatherers are not
to cheat, and not to squeeze the last farthing of
profit out of the people. As to the nature of the
Kingdom itself he has no clear vision, but he knows
that such social works as these are essential if they
are to enjoy it, if its coming is not to grind them as
powder. The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is im-
minent ; there is One coming immediately who will
not baptize with water, but with fire. The terrible
Messiah is even now at the doors.

John and Jesus are worlds asunder, yet a fulgent
sincerity rafts them together in the midst of the
slush and drift of that turbulent age. The last of the
prophets rebukes the upstart king for immorality,
and the rebuke costs him his life.

" Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came
into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying,

THE GOSPELS 61

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at
hand ; repent ye, and believe in the gospel." His
coming is described as the scattering of the proud,
the dethroning of princes, the raising of the humble,
the filling of the hungry, and the rich sent empty
away. Before His mission, in the loneliness of the
country, He is besieged with temptations. Was He
after all the Messiah chosen to redeem His country ?
What was to be the nature of His mission ? Had He
the power to carry it through ? But He proved Him-
self the conqueror of these doubts, and came again
into Galilee with the good news of the impending
Kingdom. The time is ripe, the Kingdom near ; turn
and believe the glorious news. John in his prison
heard and wondered. Was this really the Deliverer ?
The reply was swift and decisive. Disease was being
defeated, ignorance dispersed, evil crushed. Body,
mind, and spirit were being redeemed. Such were the
signs of the Kingdom of God. At once Christ
begins to gather round Him a society of men and
women, alert and true, who have eyes to see and ears
to hear, and begins to train them into an adequate
conception of the Kingdom and the King. It is a
band, for the most part, of fishermen and peasants.
A tax-gatherer and a harlot, both belonging to classes
ostracised from organised religion and society for
disreputability, are members of that band.

He goes about the commercial centres and villages
of Galilee, and the people are amazed at His cures
and His preaching. Everywhere He rebukes disease,
restores men's minds, strengthens their bodies, and
preaches the Golden Age. He cannot escape the

62 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

crowds. They throng Him, not only from Galilee,
but from the remotest parts of Palestine. Among
those healed is the slave of a foreign soldier, who is a
half convert to Judaism and popular with the religious
leaders. The soldier's faith leads Christ to exclaim,
to the astonishment of the people, Many shall come
from the East and West, and shall be on an equality
with Abraham and the Jewish heroes in God's
Kingdom, and the children of the Kingdom shall be
expelled. He gives no elaborate definition of the
Kingdom of Heaven, but only insists that this
Kingdom which was familiar to them, about which
they could read in their law and their prophets, was
to burst asunder the Jewish barriers and let all men
in. Hints there had been of such an universalism in
the Old Covenant, but for the most part that Covenant
had been nationalist, and the Jews of Christ's day
were narrowly exclusive. The people of Galilee
believe in Him, although it is doubtful how far they
understand His message. His native village is an
exception. He has become something of a celebrity,
and comes to Nazareth, and is allowed to expound
the Scriptures in the local meeting-house. He reads
the passage about the year of liberty, when the land
returns to the people and the oppressed are set free : —

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

Therefore he has anointed me to preach glad tidings

to the poor ;

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the oppressed at liberty,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

He hands the Scripture to an attendant and sits

THE GOSPELS 63

down; the eyes of all are fixed on Him and He
begins to say to them, " To-day has this Scripture been
fulfilled in your ears." They are puzzled, and ask
each other, " Is not this Joseph's son ? " He had made
an astounding claim, but He does not back it up
with the cures and other mighty works which have
made His reputation in other places. He answers
their doubt with the words, " No prophet is acceptable
in his own country." In truth, Elijah was not sent to
the widows of his own people, but to a foreigner in
the land of Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel
in Elijah's time, but only the foreigner Naaman was
healed. This unpatriotic teaching infuriates them,
and they hustle Him up the brow of the hill, and
would have hurled Him down.

These early days of His brief ministry were often
retold to the multitudes by St Peter after Christ's
death, and the Apostle would dwell upon His uncon-
ventionality and His audacity. St Peter grouped
together in his teaching five instances1 of this, and
each one of the five was a separate offence against
accepted religious standards. Sometimes He kept
the letter of the Scriptures ; more often He broke it.
But whether breaking or keeping it, Christ would
always bring His hearers down below the letter to
the spirit and motive which had inspired it. The old
morality had been made for man, not man for
morality. Human needs were above the letter of
the law.

Another account of His teaching summarises it

1 In the Gospel according to St Mark, the scribe of the Peter
teaching.

64 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

as follows : — " Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the
Kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now,
for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now,
for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye when men shall
hate you, and separate you from their company, and
revile you : rejoice and be glad, your reward is great in
heaven ; for in the same manner did their fathers unto
the prophets. Woe unto you that are rich, for you
have received your consolation. Woe unto you that
are full now, for ye shall hunger. Love your enemies.
Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that sneer
at you. Offer the cheek to the smiter, Withhold
not your coat from him that takes your cloak. Give
to everyone that asks; and of him that takes away
your goods ask them not again. And as ye would
that men should do to you, do ye also to them. . . .
And if you lend to them of whom ye hope to receive,
what thank have ye ? Even sinners lend to sinners to
receive as much. But love your enemies and do them
good, and lend hoping for nothing again." These
passages are generally interpreted as an appendage to
normal everyday commercial life ; but without doubt
our Lord meant them as the basis of all life.

Nowhere did He bless poverty ; but to those poor
men of Galilee, who had ears to hear and eyes to see,
He says, Blessed are ye poor men, for yours is the
Kingdom of Heaven. You understand it ; you have
made it your own ; you believe in it. They may
persecute you and revile you, but they cannot take the
Kingdom out of your heart, or shake your determina-
tion that it shall be established on the earth. It was
these people who could most becomingly pray, " Thy

THE GOSPELS 65

Kingdom come on earth as in heaven ; give us
day by day bread sufficient for the day." It was
these men who would best understand that the heavy
labour they had to undergo was the result of the
system of rent and usury and oppressive taxation
which was ruining their country, a system which was
the outcome of the ethics of the kingdoms of this
world. They would understand that in the establish-
ment of the commonwealth of God based on Divine
justice they would find a lighter yoke and an easier
burden. His teaching is again summarised in
another account as follows : — Store not up individual
private fortunes. You cannot serve God and greed.
Don't be over anxious for your life, for food or drink
or clothing. The birds do not sow or reap, nor
gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feedeth
them : are you not of much more value than they ?
The lilies of the field toil not, neither do they spin,
and yet they are beautifully clad. If God clothes
them, shall He not much more clothe you ? He is
your Father. He knows you need these necessities.
Seek ye first His kingdom and His justice, and all
these things shall be added to you.

If one compares this summary with the teaching of
the Old Testament on the subject of the Kingdom —
namely, that a commonwealth based on Divine
justice must exclude all non-producers, that is, all
possibility of living upon others by means of rent or
interest, that the earth and its product is to be the
property of all the subjects of the Kingdom, that God
has provided bountifully for the needs of all, that
they have only to obey these just laws of anti-rent

5

66 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

and anti-interest to discover that God's earth and its
product is sufficient for their needs — it is easy to see
with certainty and without shadow of doubt that our
Lord is referring to no mere inward change of soul
on the part of separate individuals, but to an inward
conversion of the said individuals regarding them-
selves as a united people, a change in view-point,
which will immediately express itself in collective
action. People who do not think, but clothe them-
selves in second-hand thoughts, object to modern
socialist legislation because of its outwardness. When
they begin to think, they will understand that no
revolutionary legislation is ever carried through
Parliament without first a tremendous agitation
throughout the country, with its appeal to the heart
and mind of the nation, and that in social reform
a change of heart does actually precede a change of
law. Lord Shaftesbury's Factory Acts were pre-
ceded by the conversion of thousands to a more
human view of life. The legislation for the feeding of
school-children is the immediate effect of a socialist
agitation of some twenty years, which has at last con-
verted the people of England to a sense of pity, and
that sense of pity has been embodied in a law ; the
result of that law is to heal the bodies of little children
and to bring hope to their souls. I four Lord had
meant to contradict the Old Testament idea of the
Kingdom, the idea of a people embodying its inward
belief in justice and mercy in outward and material
laws, He would have been very careful to say so, but
He deliberately denies this, saying : " Think not that
I came to destroy the law, or the prophets : I came

THE GOSPELS 67

not to destroy, but to complete. For verily I say
unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or
one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law
till all things be accomplished. Whosoever shall
break one of these least commandments, and shall
teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom
of heaven. . . . Except your justice shall exceed
that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise
enter the kingdom of heaven." And yet He Himself
broke the letter of the law, and defended His followers
when they broke it. Taking His teaching as a
whole, we come to the conclusion that the outward
law meant always for Him the expression or the
safeguarding of some human need, that He wanted
to bring His people back to the living principles of
law and prophet. The principle underlying the tribal
peasant-proprietorship and anti-usury law of the Old
Testament was that in a kingdom of righteousness
no one should be heavy-burdened in order that others
should escape the burden of work altogether. This
principle is reasserted in early Christian times in the
Church's economic motto: "If any man will not !
work, neither shall he eat." We are told that Christ
came to lay down general principles : this is one of
the principles which He laid down. He laid it down
that it might be carried into effect by a collective
people who had become convinced of its truth. He
did not say to them, You shall carry it into effect
by means of peasant-proprietorship, or by means of
feudal ownership, or by means of economic socialism.
He did say, You shall carry it into effect, and pro-
mised the spirit of wisdom and of life to the Christian

68 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

fellowship throughout the ages, which should guide
them so long as they were loyal to the ideals of the
Kingdom in the economic application of those ideals
best suited to the actual day and generation. The
letter of a law divorced from its spirit and intention
killeth ; the spirit or intention of law gives it life ;
the intention of the old law was that none should
idle, that all should be producers, that none should
live by means of tribute levied on the production of
others. We should be glad if our critics would tell
us in what sense the economic system of the present
day is an expression of the living spirit and intention
of the law of the Jews, which was not abrogated, but
extended and universally applied, by Jesus Christ.
It is not necessary here to discuss the further question
of whether Christ was an anarchist or a socialist — that
is, as to whether He was uncompromisingly against
every kind of enforcement of law by aristocracies,
plutocracies, monarchies, or democracies, — for our
modern Christian critics are cheating themselves or
us, and merely playing the hypocrite, when they
object to social legislation on this particular ground.
They have no intention of taking the bars and bolts
from their front doors, or abolishing the police or
any of those legal and compulsory safeguards which
secure to them their ill-gotten gains ; they are merely
joking with us, and their joke is in very bad taste.
The only serious and consistent opponent of social-
ism on the ground that it involves compulsion, and
that compulsion is intrinsically antichristian, is the
passive anarchist Count Tolstoy, who, although he
opposes legal socialism, more strenuously opposes

THE GOSPELS 69

the compulsory commercial individualism (which
comfortable middle-class Christians complacently
support) as being the most unutterably unchristian
thing the world has ever seen.

Now, Tolstoy's contention is that any physical
expression of an inward idea is unchristian, or rather,
such physical expression as should curtail the liberty"
of others ; all government, therefore, prisons, police,
armies, physical resistance or compulsion on the part
of individuals or communities, is antichrist. The
bomb-thrower and the government that hangs him,
the thief and his gaoler, the aristocracy who have
stolen the land by compulsion and the democracy
who would regain the land by compulsion, are equally
condemned. Now, Tolstoy's criticisms are suspect for
two reasons. First, he black-brushes out every in-
cident in the Gospels which does not square with his
preconceived notion of what a Saviour ought to be ;
he singles out a couple of texts and asserts that these
are the essentials of the Gospel. Other passages
contradict his interpretation of that couple of texts ;
they are therefore interpolations of a later date.
Secondly, his particular interpretation in this matter
contradicts the unanimous interpretation of the un-
divided Church. This does not trouble him, but it
troubles us, for the Christian Bible was not written by
Christ, but by members of His Church, and it was the
Church that finally selected certain writings of its
members and rejected others, and bound its selections
together under one cover which we call the New
Testament. If the unanimous interpretation of its
members be rejected with contempt as being the

70 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

outcome of a corrupt and incapable body, why should
not the action of members of this same corrupt and
incapable body be suspect, when it chose certain
writings and rejected the rest? Why should not
Tolstoy, and, indeed, all those modern interpreters
who profess to love the book while they despise its
authors and selectors, go to the rejected gospels as
their standard of what Christ really said, assured in
their minds that whatever this degraded and apostate
Church selects must be false, and whatever it rejects
must be true ? We cannot, therefore, regard with any
great degree of seriousness a critic who fixes an
absolute gulf between the human tradition labelled
" Gospels" and the human tradition labelled " Epistles
and Early Writings," and who is quite capricious and
irresponsible in his use of the sacred text.

He isolates a single sentence from the Sermon on
the Mount : " Resist not him that is evil," and inter-
prets it as meaning that no physical resistance, force,
or compulsion is permissible to Christian governments
or individuals. He can find no passage which in the
least modifies this conclusion, and he points in
triumph to a passage which confirms it : " He that
takes the sword shall perish by the sword." Jesus
was the meek and gentle persuader of the souls of
men. His Kingdom would indeed have its outward
expression ; it would involve a change in material
conditions ; the rich would get off the backs of the
poor ; there would be a universal but voluntary com-
munism, after the pattern of the communism of the
first days in Jerusalem. Probably the Kingdom would
be established very gradually by a slow evolution-

THE GOSPELS 71

ary process; but if the government should imprison
a man, or even fine him, for appropriating a
piece of the common land, it would be equally
guilty with the individual who prevents monstrous
cruelty to a child by knocking down its tormentor.
Tolstoy here has fallen into the trap that is laid for
all literalists ; he has ceased to be literal. For if we are
to isolate this particular text and interpret it literally,
it is equally hostile to passive and argumentative
resistance as to active and corporal resistance. It
does not say, " Resist the evil man with your brain, but
do not resist him with your arm " ; it says, " Do not
resist him at all." The fact is, we must take Christ's
teaching as a whole, and from it discover the intention
that underlies the whole. He found men much too
eager to revenge private wrongs. People refused to
regard themselves as a holy family, but were always
standing on their mean and miserable little individual
rights or fancied rights. He says in effect, " Be more
generous, be in charity one with the other, do not be
suspicious one of the other ; be large-hearted enough
to turn the other cheek ; life is short and the battle is
long, the battle against mammon and his allies, the
battle for the Kingdom of God." Now, such an in-
terpretation has not only the advantage of being in
accord with common sense and universal tradition,
but does not contradict the rest of Christ's teaching,
for the Prince of Peace was no peace-at-any-price
prince. On one occasion He uses physical violence,
upsetting the tables of the money-changers, and
driving them, together with the oxen, out of His
Father's courts. His language is not mild and con-

72 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

ciliatory like that of Tolstoy, but fierce and terrible.
He calls His king a fox, His disciple Satan, the
religious leaders vipers, hypocrites, and whited
sepulchres. His Kingdom is for the violent ; men
of violence are storming it. He comes to cast fire
upon the earth, and wishes it were already ablaze.
He brings not peace, but a sword ; He divides families,
the father from the son, the daughter from the mother.
John baptized with water, but He with fire. His
Kingdom will grind the unbeliever to powder, will
burn the tares with unquenchable fire. It shall be
more tolerable for Sodom in the day of judgment
than for the villages that refuse hospitality to His
followers. Now, whatever may be the interpretation
of these passages, they are simply irreconcilable with
the picture of the passive Tolstoyan Messiah, and
they suggest an answer to both the consistent and
inconsistent moderns who claim Christ as a non-
resister. Tolstoy says Christ was never angry ; St
Mark says Christ looked about Him with anger. The
fact is, the " Resist not evil " passage has absolutely
nothing to do with the question of compulsion. I
should be opposing Christ's teaching in that particular
passage, if I wrote a venomous attack on a personal
enemy in a newspaper as if I ran him through with a
sword. If Christ had said, " Do not physically resist
an evil man," we should have quite as much right to
urge another isolated text : " He that hath no sword,
let him sell his garment and buy one," but of course
such playing with texts is altogether useless.

Christ illustrated the nature of the Kingdom of
God by a series of stories drawn from the life and

THE GOSPELS 73

customs of His day. These stones served the double
purpose of attracting and enticing those who were
on the alert for truth, and repelling the hard-hearted
and wooden-minded ; the prejudiced could make
nothing of them. The parables not only brought
the people up to the high-water mark of prophetic
tradition, but increased and developed the meaning
of the Kingdom. The best that had been done in
the past had been to conceive of a kingdom of the
Jews expanding into a just empire which should rule
in righteousness over all the earth. The old con-
ception, whether of a little Palestine or an imperial
Palestine, had always remained nationalist ; now the
nationalist must give way before an internationalist
conception. Again, many thought the Kingdom
would instantly appear. Now, although I cannot
find any justification of the theory of a very slow
and gradual evolution of the Kingdom through
centuries after centuries, and although both parables
and apocalypses and scattered sayings all seem to
point to a sudden and cataclysmic appearance of the
Kingdom, yet such a consummation might not be
immediate, might be so long delayed as to discourage
shallow and impatient natures. Such a coming of
the Kingdom there would indeed be before that
generation had passed, but, though abrupt and terrible
and apparent to every eye, it would only be the
sudden consummation and fulfilment of the old
familiar commonwealth of the prophets, the coming
of a Kingdom not utterly strange and foreign, but
of one that had been from the very beginning within
their midst. They must not be disappointed by the

74 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

apparent rejection of the Gospel by the world. The
growth of a seed once sown is secret. It comes up
unexpectedly, one knows not how. Once planted,
one must leave it to nature's secret workings. When
the end comes it will be as vivid and universal as
the lightning: be alert, lest it come suddenly as a
thief at night and take you unawares ; — How can I
explain all this to you? What illustration can I
use? The Son of Man is like a sower. He sows
His followers up and down the field of this age, but
the Evil One sows also evil men. Don't be too
anxious to root up the weeds, when weeds and wheat
are both young. You may mistake the one for the
other. The age is drawing to a close; the harvest
is its end, and the Son of Man and His angels will
come as reapers, rooting up from the Kingdom all
things and all people that are an offence, and casting
them into the furnace of fire. Then shall just men
shine forth like the sun in the Golden Age. The
Gospel of the Kingdom will fall on all kinds of soil,
on deaf ears sometimes, on shallow natures quick to
accept and quick to reject, upon people who are
inclined to receive its ideals, but who are finally
choked with worldliness and over much property,
upon people who cannot stand persecution ; but some
will understand— their minds are bright, their hearts
alert — and these will be prolifically fruitful. Its social
gospel will attract all kinds of people, the good and
the bad; it is a net gathering every kind of fish. It
is sown in this little corner of the world ; it breaks
national boundaries and becomes a tree whose
branches overspread the earth. It works secretly

THE GOSPELS 75

and in various ways in men's hearts, but it is very
thorough and wide-spread, like leaven hidden in the
meal till all is leavened. It is worth everything else
in the world ; there is nothing like it ; it is the pearl
beyond all price ; it is the buried unexpected treasure
for which one sells all beside. Seize upon the idea
of the commonwealth, or let yourself be seized and
fired by it, and your dull existence will blaze up into
overmastering life. The past will be lit up by the
flames of the Kingdom, the future will be secure.

It is only those who hunger and thirst after justice
who can be filled, only those who keep their lamps
trimmed that will be ready for its coming. The pity
of it is that the sons of this age, the children of this
evil, competitive, suspicious world, are in their genera-
tion wiser than the disciples of the Kingdom. The
Golden Age must be carried by storm. If the people
of this age, by sheer persistency in their requests,
draw from an unjust and ungenerous judge their
particular demands, how much more shall the
supporters of the Golden Era win from the generous
Father of mankind that consummation of their hopes
which is in accordance with His own deepest longings !
But the sons of mammon are more alert and whole-
hearted in their pursuit of private wealth, than are
the sons of the Kingdom in their pursuit of common
wealth. Yet it is only those who are eager to hear
who shall hear, only those who have learnt to be
hungry who can be filled. To him that hath shall
be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he seemeth to have. That is
the law even in the affairs of this world. The

SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Deliverer seems a long time coming, the Golden Age
seems so very far removed. Meanwhile, you must
zealously increase your powers of service and forward
the interest of that commonwealth. The slaves of
the absent merchant prince understand that. To
one he has given ten talents. By making the best
use of them according to the code that exists in
trading circles he doubles them ; to another he has
given five talents, with a like result ; a third is slack
and indolent, and does nothing with the one talent
entrusted to him. Suddenly the merchant returns,
and the indolent slave excuses himself on the ground
that his master is a harsh and unscrupulous man who
is quite ready to reap where he has not sown, that is,
to cheat and rob. But, replies the merchant, if I
am an unscrupulous rascal, you as my slave were
bound to behave as the loyal servant of an unscrupulous
rascal ; in other words, you should have taken my
money to the bank, so that I should have received
mine own along with that interest which rascals do
not scruple to take. If we are as indolent in our use
of the powers God gives us for the advancement of
the commonwealth as the slave was indolent in serving
the merchant of mammon, his fate will be ours.

A manager is accused of wastefulness. His
master resolves to dismiss him ; he is compelled to
render his account, as the steward of injustice or of
the unjust mammon, that is, of private property.
Sharing property, or making it common, is called by
Jesus justice: "Do not your justice before men."
This manager finds himself in a fix ; he is without
friends, he has offended his master ; he has probably

THE GOSPELS 77

offended the merchants who do business with his
master by adding to the amount of their accounts
an additional sum as commission for himself; he
determines to put the matter straight with them, so
that when he is dismissed, all doors shall not be shut
against him ; he does the smart, business-like thing,
for which his master commends him. Should we not
be at least as alert — we, the children of light — on behalf
of the commonwealth, as are the children of this
dark commercial age on behalf of mammon ? Should
we not be as whole-heartedly communistic as the
commercial fools (cf. Luke xii. 20) are whole-
heartedly individualistic. Make to yourselves friends
by means of the property you unjustly possess ; sell
that ye have and give alms, so that, when the system
of mammon shall be at an end, the poor to whom
you have given may receive you into the eternal
tabernacles of the international Kingdom. What is
appropriate to you is the common property, in which
you will have your share in the Golden Age. Ex-
cessive private property is not your own, but belongs
to the poor from whom it has been robbed. If you
have not been faithful by distributing to those others
that which is theirs, how can you expect in the
Xingdom to come to receive that which is your own ?
You cannot serve God and greed. It is intensely
significant that there immediately follows this
comment : " The Pharisees, who were lovers of
money, scoffed at him." As a further comment
there is here inserted the story of Dives and Lazarus,
the story of the rich man who refused justice to the
poor man at his door ; and very soon after is related

78 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the incident of the enormously rich young man, who
refused to disburse his property, and the generous
rich man who did the best he could under the system,
giving half his income to the poor, and restoring four-
fold when he exacted more than his due. As to
laws of private property and squabbles about in-
heritance, Christ will have nothing to do with them.
He will be no party to settling private disputes
among capitalists : " Who made me a judge or divider
among you ? " Such people must beware of avarice,
the desire of private gain in contradiction to public
service. They must remember the fate of the
successful farmer, who thinks that life consists in
an abundance of private property, and who hoards
his gains in warehouses. To the man of the world
he may appear a clever fellow : God calls him a fool.
So is he that builds a private fortune, instead of
sharing with the poor.

To those Jewish converts, who will be inclined to
draw back when they see what is involved in the inter-
national ideal, and who will complain that they have
borne the burden and heat of the day, Christ replies
that the foreigners were eager and alert to work for
the same ideal, but had no opportunity, and that
therefore it was right and just that their reward
should be the same as that of the Jews ; for in God's
Kingdom men are to be paid, not by results, but
according to their needs.

His Kingdom is not of this world ; it does not
belong to the pushing, bullying, grasping spirit of
this epoch ; if it did, it might be established by push-
ing and grasping and fighting. It will be established

THE GOSPELS 79

on earth as in heaven by the conversion of the people
to the ideal of common wealth. The life of the
Kingdom is to be no mean, niggardly, ungenerous
existence. It is compatible with prodigal generosity.
The Christ who thundered against plutocracy (Mt.
vi. 24), who urged the re-establishment of God's just
commonwealth, now no longer on a national but on
an international basis, who absolutely forbade private
fortune - building (Mt. vi. 19), having driven the
money-grubbers out of His Father's Temple, is in
immediate peril of arrest and of death. He foresees
that His opposition to the plutocracy-loving Pharisees
and His teaching of the inner laws of the Kingdom
means the end. His disciples are afraid, but they
cannot understand that He will be defeated and
destroyed. He dines in the house of Simon the
Leper. No one seems to realise the immediate
danger, that in a few short hours He will be
snatched from them, and that the Cause will be, as
they would think, for ever lost. No one realised
the situation, excepting a woman. There came a
woman having a very costly cruse of ointment, and
she brake the cruse and poured it over His head
(Mk. xiv. 3 ; so also Mt. xxvi.). The ointment may
have been worth a price which would have kept an
artisan's family in comfort for a whole year. The
act was lavish, spontaneous, immense ; the prodigal
expression of a breaking heart that understood that
this was the end (Mt. xxvi. 12) ; those who stood by,
and among them disciples, were honestly indignant.
Their thrifty peasant minds were staggered at such
abandoned generosity. The thing was as silly and

8o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

as thoughtless as the folly of the widow who cast
her mite into the treasury, abandoning all that she
had. The creed of the Charity Organisation Society
had its adherents then as now ; but Jesus perceives
their obtuseness, and understands.

To their murmurings against the woman, " To
what purpose is this waste of ointment, for it might
have been sold and given to the poor," He replies:
Let her alone ; why annoy her ? she hath wrought
a good work on Me. You talk about the poor, but
the poor are always with you, and if you really so
chose you could at any time do them good ; but for
Me the end is very near. She hath done what she
could ; she hath anointed My body aforehand for
the burying, and verily I say unto you, that whereso-
ever this Gospel shall be preached throughout the
whole world, that also which this woman hath done
shall be spoken of for a memorial of her, In a later
account of the incident, Judas, the treasurer of the
party, is the grumbler, and cants about the poor, not
because he has any intention of distributing the
money among them, but because he is a thief and
wants the money for himself.

In our Lord's picture of the final judgment of
men it is not individuals as individuals, but indi-
viduals as nations who are arraigned. There are many
" religious " peoples who will call Him " Lord, Lord,"
and whom He will repudiate as strangers. The last
shall be first, and the first last. Coming in contact
with Him will constitute no claim on His Kingdom ;
the fact that one is related to Him by kinship or
nationality is nothing. The fact that He preached

THE GOSPELS 81

in their streets will increase their damnation. There
are many who will claim to have prophesied in His
name, to have been virtuous and orthodox, to whom
He will reply, " I was naked and you did not clothe
Me, hungry and you did not feed Me, in gaol and
you did not visit Me." These respectable claimants
will be shocked beyond measure : they have been
worshipping a gentlemanly God on a jasper throne,
and forgetting the demands of the poor and the out-
cast and the prisoners, in the throne of whose heart
God dwells. To these He says, " Depart from Me, ye
accursed, into the overwhelming fire prepared for the
Devil and his angels." There will be others, who
perhaps have been driven away from religion by the
hypocrisy of the unctuous, or who have never heard
His name, but who have been hungering for a
kingdom of justice, and who have been the cham-
pions of the desolate and the oppressed, to whom
He will say, " Come, ye blessed of My Father ; possess
the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning
of the world " ; so persistently does He urge His
preference for those who say, " I go not," but go, over
those who say, " I go, sir," but go not.

The Kingdom prepared from the beginning of all
things is the dream Kingdom of God's will and mind
— the Heavenly Utopia, which has existed always as
God's dream for the world, as the pattern after
which He wanted men to live, as the ideal for
which He brought them into being, the heavenly
city of friends which they are to grasp and appro-
priate and drag down out of the skies, planting it
firmly on this earth, fulfilling it in their commerce,

6

82 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

,-

their politics, in all their activities and in every
human institution.

In such a fellowship alone could they attain to
fulness of life, to that overmastering or overwhelm-
ing life which Christ promises to men when they
shall have established the Golden Age. Even in
this age they will experience something of that life.
To be filled with the socialistic ideal, though it mean
the breaking of old bonds, the division of families,
and the uprooting of old friendships, means also
closer comradeships, more living relationships with
persecution, and in the good time coming over-
mastering life.

Already a new vigour had come into the lives of
His peasant followers, a new purpose into their
minds, a new gladness into their eyes. When at
last their leader had understood that Jesus was
indeed the Deliverer, whose mission was the bring-
ing of the Golden Age, Christ begins the march
upon Jerusalem, the city of His final adventure and
His death. When they are getting near to that city
which has slain the prophets and rejected God's
messengers, a rich young man comes running to
them along the road. He was probably a landed
proprietor of Judaea. Christ is going before ; His
disciples, a little afraid, follow after. The rich man
has heard of the vigour of their mission and the
wonderful life that has come to them, and he asks
Jesus on what terms he too may possess this life.
It is significant that our Lord replies by reminding
him of the social precepts of his own religion. He
answers airily enough, " All these have I kept from

THE GOSPELS 83

my youth up : what lack I yet ? " According to one
of the early MSS., Jesus replies that he has not kept
them, for the poor are hungry at his doors. But
in any case, our Lord says, " if thou wilt be perfect,
go, sell what thou hast, give to the poor ; follow Me,
and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven." And he
went away sorrowful, because he was enormously
rich. Our Lord realised that the march upon
Jerusalem was somehow necessary for the establish-
ment of His commonwealth, and yet that it would
involve His death, and that through His death
would come the ultimate triumph. This adventure
therefore involved the burning of their boats, the
complete detachment of the soldier engaged in a
desperate campaign. Just as there are many who
are compelled by the fierce requirements of the
battle to refrain from marriage and the cares of a
family, so there are many to whom property is
a deadly encumbrance. Many agnostics, as also
Christian commentators, miss the point of the
incident. Agnostics often say, " Selling your pro-
perty and sharing out with the poor is no solution
of the social question." Christ never said it was.
He was not solving the social question ; He was
solving the question of the rich man's soul. He
saw that this man was being kept back from the
life-giving adventure of establishing God's Kingdom
by the entanglement of great possessions. His
business, then, was to get rid of them, to give them
to the poor. Thus only would he be free to follow
Christ and to be a soldier of the commonwealth.
And Christ's comment on all rich men was, " How

84 SOCIALISM IJN CHURCH HISTORY

hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
Kingdom of God ! It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven " ; just as we
might say, " It is easier for a camel to go through
a needle's eye, than for a proud man to enter into a
child's game of marbles." Some commentators have,
I believe, enlarged the needle's eye to the size of a
darning needle; others, in their anxiety to get the
rich man through, assert that our Lord meant a cer-
tain porch of the Temple that went under the name
of the Needle's Eye. But apparently the baggage
camels of the East could squeeze through that porch
on one condition only, namely, if they unloaded.

Modern criticism seems conclusively to have proved
that the claim to Messiahship was not at that time
considered to involve any theological claim to Divinity.
The idea, therefore, that the Jews combined with the
Romans to execute Christ because He asserted that
He was identical with God is not established. If one
has suffered much of modern preachers, one gets the
impression that they regard Christ as merely a preacher
of the domestic virtues. But supposing our Lord's
mission was merely domestic, supposing He had
asserted with vehemence merely the duty of being
kind to one's grandmother or considerate to one's aunt,
what Pharisee or scribe was there who would not have
hailed Him as a heaven-born leader? The conclu-
sion is forced upon one that the Pharisees, who were
lovers of money, scoffed at His communistic ideals,
which is exactly what St Luke tells us, and that the
Sadducees opposed His political claims, and that

THE GOSPELS 85

everybody came to consider Him as a much more
dangerous and revolutionary claimant to power than
any of the cruder and merely nationalist rebels against
the Roman dominion. He asserted at the Last
Supper among His followers, that He would drink no m
more of the fruit of the vine until He drank it in that
feast of triumph which should so soon celebrate the
ushering in of His Kingdom. The accusation at His
trial before Herod and before Pilate was the political
accusation that He claimed to be a King, who was to
establish a Kingdom not of this world, but in this
world : this accusation He did not deny. Hence the
superscription in various languages over the Cross,
" This is the King of the Jews."

Finally, a more serious objection is sometimes
brought in connection with the question put to Christ
about the tribute- money. It is an objection not
against socialism, but against Christian people taking
part or interest in any sort of secular government. In
their eagerness to prove the socialistic clergy wrong,
our opponents land themselves in the position of
anarchists, i.e. that we have nothing to do with
politics, and that things secular and sacred are abso-
lutely divorced. They really prove too much, for such
a position not only condemns the whole work of the
C.S.U., but the work of the Quakeress, Elizabeth Fry,
of the Evangelical Shaftesburys and Wilberforces, of
all statesmen who have believed that the Christian
Faith ought in some way or other to influence public
affairs. Of course, by the way, it would be an
absolute and final condemnation of an Established
Church.

86 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Now the objection may be valid, but it is certainly
rather stupendous and revolutionary, and for their
sakes as well as ours a careful examination is of
supreme importance.

In so far as the people accepted the Messiah, they
did so because they thought He would overturn the
Roman power and set up an immediate nationalist
kingdom. The Pharisees did not trouble to under-
stand exactly what He did stand for — but they were
money-lovers and scoffed at Him, for they perceived
that He did not want to overthrow Rome but mammon,
and to establish a commonwealth which would in-
clude the people they despised — the foreigner and the
outcasts. Very well, they would set a trap for Him,
by which He would either lose favour with the demo-
cracy by announcing the Tightness of the Roman
dominion, or would betray Himself into the hands of
the authorities by denying the Roman right to levy
taxes. They were not earnest inquirers on a point
that really troubled them (Luke xi. 54). He invari-
ably took infinite trouble with such questioners. But
the fool He answered according to his folly : the crafty
according to his craftiness. As we say now, He
proved a match for them all. He escaped the trap
and pushed them into it. To Him God's rights and
the ideals of the Kingdom were not besmirched by
paying taxes to the Romans. They were violated by
Jews or Romans who were dominated by the com-
mercial-individualistic spirit of mammon.

As to the right or wrong of this subordinate
question of Roman dominion that dominated their
thought, into that He would not enter. They had

THE GOSPELS 87

really settled that themselves by using the Roman
coinage. There was a saying among the Jews that a
people had not accepted its position as the conquered
until they accepted the coinage of the conquerors.
He slips out of the net by leaving them to settle
whether or no in fact they did acknowledge the
Roman dominion. What coinage do you in fact use ?
Let Me see. Bring Me a denarius. But it has
Caesar's stamp on it. So you've already settled the
question. You wanted to prove Me an anti-patriot
before these people ; but yourselves according to your
own story are anti-patriots, Render therefore unto
Caesar the things which you by your usage acknow-
ledge to be Caesar's, and unto God the things that
are God's.

What then are these things of God? What is His
Property? According to our Lord, as interpreted
by His Church, His is " the Kingdom, the power, and
the glory." And therefore, if we would render to
God the things that are God's, we must devote our- \
selves to bringing His Kingdom into men's hearts, so \
that they may express it in their laws and lives.

IV
THE EARLY CHURCH

The Church and the Book— The Church and the Resurrection — Ex-
pectancy and Pentecost — The first preaching — The "communistic"
experiment — Ananias and Sapphira — The Apocalypse of St John —
Kingdom and city — Where is the heavenly city? — The meaning
of " in heaven " — The Kingdom coming with power — The
criticism of apostates — The appeal to the Fathers — New Testament
interpretation — Economics and theology cannot be divorced —
Dogma and its political implications — St Chrysostom on com-
munism— Justin Martyr, The Didache, St Barnabas, Cyprian,
The Shepherd, St Clement, St Austin, St Ambrose, Ambrosiaster,
Lactantius, St Basil, St Zeno, Clement of Alexandria, St
Gregory, Tertullian — The right to live— The Church and the
manual labourer — Rich and poor in the Epistle of St James-
Democratic election— Labour bishops and labour conferences.

IV
THE EARLY CHURCH

" They found themselves in these cities of the Roman Empire as bands
of brothers, and they hit upon maxims which are now the basis of the
hopes of social reformers — such maxims as that you must find a man
work, and that you must find him wages, and you must find him
resource and support when he can no longer work. The three short
maxims which come out of an early Christian book are precisely the
maxims that we want to-day to revolutionise our society : ' For him
who can work, work ; for him who will not work, nothing ; for him
who can no longer work, support.' Those are very simple maxims,
and they came into their minds and practice because they believed that
God was their Father ; and so it was they created their social revolu-
tion for their time. And, if we will believe with the same simplicity of
faith to-day, we shall create a like revolution." — BISHOP OF BIRMING-
HAM (Dr GORE), Manchester Cathedral, 4th October 1908.

JESUS Christ did not bind writings together into a
book, but men together into a fellowship. He did
not say, " Upon this rock I will build My library," but,
" Upon this rock I will build My Church." One watches
with some curiosity the struggles of those critics who
would depreciate the Church at the expense of its
literature, the Bible, to prove this particular passage
unauthentic ; but it is at least as integral a part of the
sacred text as the passage in which they profess to
find the kernel of the Christian religion, namely, " The
Kingdom of God is within you." It is now generally

91

92 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

admitted that this particular saying should be more
accurately translated, " The Kingdom of God is among
you." But even if these critics were able to rid them-
selves of the saying they consider objectionable, it
would still remain unquestionably true that Jesus
Christ gathered round Him a band of followers and
trained them in the principles of the Kingdom of
God, so that they might become the mouthpiece of
that Kingdom throughout the civilised world.

In the time of His defeat and crucifixion as a
malefactor, we find them broken, defeated, and
scattered. All His promises had failed. The King-
dom is at an end. In an incredibly short time these
same men and women are together in Jerusalem,
filled with quiet yet exultant expectancy, welded
together in the certainty that the Messiah had risen,
had broken the bonds of death, had been among them
and spoken to them, and had at last ascended into
God's presence and power, that He might more effectu-
ally fill all things with His presence, and inspire the
disciples of the Kingdom with a life and enthusiasm
which, in their terrific force, could not be compared
with water, but with storm and fire.

They elect a disciple in the place of Judas to be
one of the twelve leaders of the democratic band.
For the rest, they continue in prayer and alert
expectancy. Suddenly they are filled with a spirit
like the rushing of a mighty wind, or like tongues of
flame, which drives them to speak to the multitudes.
There were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews of the disper-
sion from every nation under heaven, who were
amazed because every one of them understood that

THE EARLY CHURCH 93

which was spoken as if it had been given in the
language of his own country. Some were greatly
impressed ; others, laughing, charged them with
drunkenness ; but Peter — that same Peter who had
denied Christ, the once narrow nationalist peasant,
the now internationalist apostle by the power of
the revolutionary Spirit — implored them to give ear
unto their words, saying, " This is that which hath been
spoken by the prophet Joel."

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God,
I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh : and your sons
and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men
shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams :
and on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour
out in those days of my Spirit ; and they shall prophesy :
and I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the
earth beneath ; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke : the
sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood,
before that great and notable day of the Lord come : and
it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name
of the Lord shall be saved.

Jesus of Nazareth, whom they, by the hand of
lawless men, did crucify and slay, God hath raised up,
having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not
possible that He should be holden of it. Let all the
House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God
hath made Him both Lord and Messiah of the
Kingdom, this Jesus whom ye crucified.

They were pricked to the heart, and demanded
what they should do. They were to turn and be
baptized in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remis-
sion of their sins, so that they might receive this
wonderful spirit which animated the sons of the
Kingdom. For to you is the promise, and to your

94 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

children, and to all that are afar off. They were
exhorted to save themselves from this crooked
generation. About three thousand were convinced,
and these continued steadfastly in this teaching and
in fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread, and in
the prayers. The method of their salvation from
that crooked, commercial, unbrotherly age, is now
given in detail : —

Then they that gladly received his word were baptized :
and the same day there were added unto them about three
thousand souls. And they continued stedfastly in the
apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread,
and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul : and
many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And
all that believed were together, and had all things common ;
And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to
all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing
daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread
from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and
singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with
all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily
such as should be saved.

At the end of Acts iv. occurs another description
of their life : —

And the multitude of them that believed were of one
heart and of one soul : neither said any of them that ought
of the things which he possessed was his own ; but they
had all things common. And with great power gave the
apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus : and
great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any
among them that lacked : for as many as were possessors
of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the
things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles'
feet : and distribution was made unto every man according
as he had need. And Joses, who by the apostles was sur-
named Barnabas (which is, being interpreted, The son of

THE EARLY CHURCH 95

consolation), a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, having
land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the
apostles' feet.

This communistic expression of their faith in the
Kingdom was voluntary and spontaneous. A man
and his wife sold a certain property and kept back
part of the price, bringing only a certain part and
laying it at the Apostles' feet. These people had
pretended to be whole-hearted disciples of the
Kingdom and the fellowship. They wished to have
the credit of that assumption ; but this half-hearted
service, this niggardly keeping back part of the price,
was considered by Peter to be a Satanic cheating of
the spirit of brotherhood. No compulsion had been
brought to bear. They could have sold the land for
their own purposes. They need never have joined
the fellowship, nor pretended to care about the
Kingdom. They had lied, not unto men, but unto
God. It is said that their death followed so immedi-
ately on this rebuke that it was regarded as a judg-
ment on this niggardly deceit.

In an early writing, known as the Revelation of
St John, and so highly esteemed by the Church as
to find a place in the sacred Canon, the author sees
God's dream of fellowship taking flesh and being
realised upon the earth. This swift triumph of God's
commonwealth, superseding the kingdoms of this
world, and especially the Empire of Rome, which he
attacks with bitterness, is his great hope in the midst
of a corrupt age.

The symbol for this commonwealth changes from
family and kingdom to one of citizenship, for soon we

96 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

find ourselves on Greek soil and among Greek ideals.
To Ephesian citizens St Paul writes, " Fellow citizens
with the saints," and again, " I have lived the life of
a citizen " ; and again to the Philippians, " Behave as
citizens "; and from his prison in Rome, " Our citizen-
ship is in Heaven, from whence also we expect a
Deliverer." This passage, of course, can no more be
interpreted, " Our citizenship lies in a land beyond the
grave," than can the passages concerning the Kingdom
be referred to such a land. The City in Heaven, or
the Kingdom in Heaven, will be actualised when God's
will is done on earth as in Heaven.

To say a polity is "in Heaven" is to assert its
inviolability, its eternity, its assured victory on the
outward stage of practical affairs, because it is no
arbitrary, irresponsible, artificial commonwealth, but
the inner spiritual, unconquerable citizenship of the
heavens. So St Paul, the prisoner, could afford to
wait, for " our citizenship is celestial " and therefore
assured. Rooted in eternal realities, in the innermost
constitution of the world, it must some day blossom
in the visible cities of the earth. In Babylon we are
truly "captives and pilgrims, led astray by sin and
concupiscence." We are " to shake off this yoke, to
find in Jerusalem and in the city of our God true
liberty and a house of sanctuary not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens." l But when men have
entered into this city with foundations whose Builder
is God, it comes down from Heaven and is builded
upon the earth.

It is when we realise this burning enthusiasm for

1 Bossuet, Sermons.

fellowsr.

THE EARLY CHURCH 97

fellowship, for what St Jude calls "the common
salvation," expressing itself in such communistic
experiments as these, that we begin to understand
the CJhrist's assurance : " Verily there be some of you
standing here which shall not taste of death until
they see the Kingdom of God come with power." The
writer of the Revelation had seen his fellow-disciples
stretch up their hands to the heavenly Utopia and
grasp it firmly, and bring it down with power into
human institutions.

Modern commentators have exercised every in-
genuity in attempting to prove that this experiment
at Jerusalem was not only an absolute failure, but
a quite exceptional and isolated adventure, having
no integral connection whatever with the Christian
religion. These men hate all such practical ex-
pressions of the Kingdom. A sound rule of criticism
is to inquire, in the case of the moderns, where and
how they live, what club they belong to, and what
are their everyday political ideals. Apostates do
not make particularly sound critics of the religion of
Jesus Christ. Men of great learning, who stand
outside the Church of Christ and who have no
ecclesiastical axe to grind, are in no doubt about
the communistic tendency of Christendom. For
instance, the late Henry Sidgwick, himself an
agnostic and an anti-socialist, was convinced that the
Church has all along preached a gospel which is most
becomingly translated into communism ; and it is
difficult to see the point of those early attacks
on Christ's religion by Lucian, and other pagan
opponents, on the ground that His followers were

7

98 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

for the most part artisans, who lived together in
common, and the jeers of these same critics against
the Christian doctrine of equality, if there had been
no such doctrine, and no such tendency to com-
munism.

Our curiosity becomes amazement when the modern
anti-socialist critic turns out to be a High Church-
man, who is continually appealing to tradition on
questions of scents and vestments, and on every kind
of doctrinal issue. He has appealed to the Fathers — to
the Fathers he shall go. As an Anglican he is bound
to make this appeal, for the Church of England lays
down not the Bible and the Bible only as our
guide, but the Bible as interpreted by universal
consent of the Church. And surely this position
is incontrovertibly right, for the New Testament
is so truly the offspring of the Church that we may
say, " No Church, no Bible." The " Bible only " was
certainly not the religion of the Christians of the
first two hundred years, for the New Testament, as
we now have it, was not in existence. The good
news about the Kingdom and its King had, from the
first, been given verbally by members of the fellow-
ship which the Messiah had founded. It was only as
an after-thought that certain members began to
make jottings of the more salient points in the
teaching of the Apostles. These notes and jottings,
which came to be known as gospels, were very
numerous. They were not written to convert any-
body ; they were written to refresh the memories of
men and women already converted by the oral
teaching of the Church. Composed by members of

the Fell

THE EARLY CHURCH 99

the Fellowship from the teaching of other members
of the Fellowship, and finally revised and selected by
the Fellowship itself, they, together with a few letters
and one or two other writings, at last become the
Christian Bible. Meanwhile, the Church had been
using the Jewish Bible, along with its verbal teaching,
to explain to its hearers the nature of the Kingdom it
proclaimed. The significance of this fact will be
appreciated by those who have studied my second
chapter.

Now, if the Church is the author of the Christian
Bible, it is surely reasonable to appeal to the Church
for interpretation of doubtful passages. It is hardly
necessary to remind my readers that I do not mean
by the Church this or that individual clergyman or
layman, but the universally acknowledged leaders and
saints and doctors of theology and morality. A list
of these authorities is given us in the English Calendar
of Saints at the beginning of the Prayer Book. We
are not bound to accept the fanciful interpretation of
this or that early Father, where it is individual and
out of harmony with the rest ; but where we have a
practically universal consent among those whom the
Church delights to honour as wise and heroic men,
and especially in that period when Christendom was
undivided and Christians had not broken up into
enfeebled and warring schisms, more busily engaged
in fighting each other than in destroying the kingdom
of mammon, there probably is to be found the truth.

It is sometimes objected that it is ridiculous to
appeal to the saints and doctors of the Church on
ethical or economic matters. In that case it is

ioo SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

difficult to see why they should be considered such
final authorities on the shape of ecclesiastical clothes.
But in fact this argument arises from that heretical
type of mind that divorces doctrine from practice,
theology from ethics, in a way which would have
staggered the orthodox Fathers. The Creed -makers
were no mere theorists. They valued dogma as a
talisman of life ; doctrines were immediately translat-
able into individual and political action. For instance,
the heretics who asserted the divinity of Christ denied
His humanity, for they held man to be essentially
vile, and without dignity or divinity. But the Church
pronounced man, in spite of original sin, to be
essentially good ; human nature, though marred and
distorted, was at heart sound : so argued the great
St Athanasius and St Hilary, and their reasoning was
endorsed by the Church and elevated into a dogma.
In consequence of this dogma, common men were
heartened to claim their privileges as a divine demo-
cracy. If the bodily appetites of man were not the vile
things that Oriental Buddhists, Tertullianists,and other
heretics asserted them to be ; if they were so capable
of purification as to be the perpetual channels for
man's expression — for this is what the dogma of the
resurrection of the body means, — then it followed
that justice, in apportioning material necessities in
accordance with even the meanest of man's bodily
requirements, was an essential element in the new
religion. While brilliant philosophers of the Church
were contending for the doctrine of the Trinity,
because they saw in it the highest unity the human
mind is able to perceive — not the Arian meagre,

THE EARLY CHURCH 101

isolated unit of the single note, but the rich, collected
unity of the chord, — the people at the forge, in the
factory, and in the market-place were contending
violently for the same doctrine, with more material
weapons. For somehow or other they perceived that
the Arian dogma of God as solitary, unsympathetic
tyrant in a far-off Heaven, who could not or would
not bridge the gulf between God and man, worked
out quite immediately and quite practically in the
political dogma of a solitary and unsympathetic
tyrant here on earth, known to that period as the
Emperor of Rome, who would ruthlessly crush a
common man and his social-democratic aspirations.
But if we children of men were the offspring and
expression of a power in the heavens, Whose being
was best expressed by collective unity, that particular
theological belief expressed itself quite immediately
and quite practically in social-democratic ideas of
government among the Catholic artisans of that time.
The Arians were imperialists ; the orthodox Christians
were the democratic party.

To argue, therefore, that early Church opinion is
of weight in matters of theology, and worthless in
matters of economics, is to misunderstand entirely
the orthodox Christian religion, and to put asunder
what God hath joined together. Such argument,
tracked down to its source, involves a denial of God's
incarnation. An essayist who speaks of this early
period says: —

Where the Catholic faith is merely latent, there the
socialism is also less explicit. When the writer is unsound
in his orthodoxy, then he is almost sure to favour some form

102 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

of individualist law or possession. When the writer is sound
and saintly, then he is always entirely and unhesitatingly in
favour of the common holding of goods, of equality of
opportunity, of social freedom; and even when he is not
quite sound, he is always fiercely opposed to the covetous-
ness which calls itself enterprise, smartness, natural incentive
to exertion, thrift, and the like.1

It is essential that the Church of to-day should
rediscover the sacramental faith in life, namely, that
inward and outward are alike necessary, that the
true Catholic is neither a mere materialist nor a mere
spiritualist, but is frankly spiritualist and frankly
materialist ; that true spiritual conceptions will
express themselves immediately in political and
economic conditions; that political and economic
conditions are the reflection of spiritual and mental
conceptions. If political theories are to be true and
political life clean, these must be the outcome of true
and living dogmas held in the minds and hearts of
the people, for " the people who have made the great
revolution in human life are the people who have
taken their purchase for reforming human life from
some high region outside it. If all you have to do
is to establish a business, it may be that you can
establish that business by thinking about nothing
else. But, if what you have to do is to reform
human life, then you must take your purchase for so
big a thing out of the consideration of nothing else
than the character of God who made it." 2

What, then, is the state of the evidence as regards

1 Charles Marson, Essay in The Voice of the People, p. 204 (Innes,
1894).

2 Dr Gore, Bishop of Birmingham ; Sermon, Manchester Cathedral,
October 1908.

THE EARLY CHURCH 103

the Church's belief that the establishment of God's
Kingdom on earth will necessarily express itself in
common ownership of the essential means of life.
The attempt at Jerusalem was not accidental but
essential. " The communism attempted in the
apostolic age was cherished in the traditions of
the early and mediaeval Church as the ideal form
of Christian society." l The Patristic writers do not
consider it a failure; for instance, in his eleventh
sermon on the Acts, St Chrysostom points out that
private bounty tends to vainglory, but the early
Christians gave in their corporate capacity, commun-
ising everything, and it was for this reason that they
had great grace. He thunders against social in-
equalities. He points out how all could be made
rich by renunciation of private property. He sketches
the effects of the apostolic communism applied to
his own city ; urges that if it were possible when the
leaders were few, much more is it possible now.
Lucian the satirist describes the Christians as a
people whose first law-giver had persuaded them that
they should all be brothers of one another, and hold
such property as they have got in common.2

Justin Martyr says that Christians brought what
they possessed into a common stock and shared with
everyone in need.

Thou shalt not turn away from him that hath need, but
shalt share all things with thy brother, and shalt not say
that they are thine own.3

1 Sidgwick, History of Ethics.

2 Cf. Marson's articles in Vox Clamantium and The New Party.

3 Teaching of the Twelve, iv. 8 ; cf. Ep. of Barnabas.

io4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Such conduct is that of the true sons and imitators of
God ; God's gifts are given to all mankind, the day en-
lightens all, the sun shines upon all, the rain falls and the
wind blows upon all. To all men comes sleep, the splendour
of the stars and the moon are common to all. Man is
truly imitator of God when he follows the common benefi-
cence of God by imparting to all the brotherhood the good
things which he possesses.1

The second-century Shepherd of Hermas compares
the rich to round pebbles which cannot be fitted into
the building of God's Temple, until they are brought
to a more convenient shape by paring them of their
superfluous possessions.

The use of all that is in the world ought to be common
to all men. But by injustice one man has called this his
own, another that, and thus has come division among
mortals.2

What injustice is there in my diligently preserving my
own, so long as I do not invade the property of another ?
Shameless saying ! My own, sayest thou ? What is it, and
from what secret places hast thou brought it into the world ?
When thou enteredst into the light, when thou earnest from
thy mother's womb, what wealth didst thou bring with thee ?
. . . That which is taken by thee, beyond what would
suffice to thee, is taken by violence. Is it that God is
unjust in not distributing to us the means of life equally, so
that thou shouldst have abundance while others are in
want ? Or is it not rather that He wished to confer upon
thee marks of His kindness, while He crowned thy fellow
with the virtue of patience. Thou, then, who hast received
the gift of God, thinkest thou committest no injustice by
keeping to thyself alone what would be the means of life to
many ? ... It is the bread of the hungry thou keepest, it

1 Cyprian, in the third century, commenting on the communism of
the Acts.

2 St Clement, quoted in Ashley's Economic History ', bk. i., cf. pp. 1-8.
Probably the epistle is spurious and belongs to the ninth century, but
it voices the usual view of medievalists.

THE EARLY CHURCH 105

is the clothing of the naked thou lockest up ; the money
thou buriest is the redemption of the wretched.1

St Augustine insists that property is only a creation
of man-made laws : " Take away the laws of the
Emperor, and who can dare say, This is my villa, or
This is my slave, or This is my house ? " 2 He admits
certain rights of private property, but argues that
property is either an institution of the Divine or
the human law. If the first, then all is in God's
hands, and cannot belong to people who use it
unjustly ; for, he says, the earth is the Lord's and its
fulness, and all things belong to the just ; but if it is
created by merely government law,

What human law has given,
Human law can take away.

" God gives all things in common to all men," says
Ambrosiaster. He therefore argues that almsgiving
is the merest justice.

Lactantius, who is constantly quoted as an authority
in our English Church homilies, traces minutely the
rise of human society from the early simplicity of
semi-communism, which he contrasts with a frenzied
avarice which snaps up everything as its own. Justice
is ousted by rapacity ; community of life is lost, and
the tie of human society is unbound. Not only folk
gave no share to others of their own abundance, but
robbed others, making private plunder of everything.
What at one time had been for the use of all men,
was now consigned to the houses of the few. To
enslave others, they made a point of mastering and

1 St Ambrose ; Ashley's Economic History r, bk. i. pp. 126 and 127.

2 St Austin, Sixth Tract, John i.

106 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

collecting the necessaries of life, keeping them
thoroughly in their clutches. Under the name of
justice they sanctioned the most unjust of laws, to
protect their own greed against the violence of the
many. They got the upper hand by authority, by
wealth, by stealth. Honours were now invented, and
state uniforms and high positions to frighten people
with swords and halters, and to give some show of
lordly right to an obedience exacted from the stricken
and the terrorised. But this golden age of simplicity
had come back to us as a sacrament and earnest
in Christ.

St Basil answers the question about what is one's
own in the same way as St Ambrose, adding : —

If some person were to take possession of one of the
seats in the State Theatre, and thenceforth turn out all who
went into it, deciding that what has been provided for the
common use of the public was his private property, that
would be exactly like that which the rich people do. They
claim prior possession of the common property, and make
it private by anticipation.1

While we try to amass wealth, make piles of money, get
hold of the land as our real property, overtop one another
in riches, we have palpably cast off justice, and lost
benefidam communcm, social righteousness. I should like
to know how any man can be just, who is deliberately
aiming to get out of someone else what he wants for
himself.2

St Zeno of Verona, late in the fourth century, is
communistic in the extreme in commenting on the
experiment in Acts.

These are merely examples of the universal theory
of the first centuries, summed up in the seventh

i and 2 Translated by Charles Mar son, ibid.

THE EARLY CHURCH 107

century by St Isidore of Seville, when he says, " By
natural law all things are common."

" Thou shalt have all things in common with thy
neighbour, and not call them thy private property, for
if ye hold the imperishable things in common, how
much more the perishable ? " l

St Ambrose, commenting on the Sermon on the
Mount, speaks thus of the birds : —

They are a great example truly, and one worthy of our
faithful imitation, for if God's Providence never fails to
supply the fowls of Heaven, albeit they use no husbandry,
and trouble nothing about the prospects of the harvest, the
true cause of our want would seem to be avarice. It is for
this reason that they have an abundance of suitable food,
because they have not learnt to claim as their private and
peculiar property the fruits of the earth which have been
given to them in common for their food. We have lost
common property by the claims of private property.2

How far will your mad lusts take you, ye rich people,
till you dwell alone upon the earth ? Why do you at once
turn nature out of doors, and claim the possession of her
for your own selves ? The land was made for all : why do
you rich men claim it as your private property? Nature
knows nothing of rich men ; she bore us all poor.3

Nature lavished all things for all in common, so like-
wise God made all things to be produced, that all should
have common pasture, and the land should be a kind of
property common to all men.

Nature then produced common property.

Robbery (usurpatio) made private property.4

St Gregory the Great, the chief instrument in the
conversion of England, in his Pastoralis Cura, a
text-book for the guidance of bishops, teaches them
to instruct the faithful that it is not sufficient to for-

1 St Barnabas, Epistle. 2- 3' «»* 4 Marson.

io8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

bear coveting other men's goods, if one does not
bestow one's own in alms. The parable of the barren
fig-tree is the story of owners who idly keep what
could benefit so many : " A barren fig-tree holds the
land when a fool overcasts with the shadow of his
inactivity a place which another could use with the
sunshine of good work." Those who are niggardly
in almsgiving must be clearly made to understand
that —

The land which yields them income is the common
property of all men, and for this reason the fruits of it,
which are brought forth, are for the common welfare. It is
therefore absurd for people to think they do no harm when
they claim God's common gift of food as their private
property, or that they are not robbers, when they do not
pass on what they have received to their neighbours.
Absurd ! because almost as many folk die daily as they
have rations locked up for at home. Really, when we
administer any necessities to the poor, we give them their
own ; we do not bestow our goods upon them. We do
not fulfil the works of mercy ; we discharge the debt of
justice. Hence it was that Very Truth, when He told us
to be careful to show mercy, said, ' See that ye do not your
justice before men.' In harmony with this the Psalmist
too said, ' He hath dispersed, He hath given to the poor,
His justice remaineth for ever.' For when he reviewed a
lavish generosity to the poor, he chose to call it justice
rather than mercy, because what is given us by a common
God is only justly used when those who have received it
use it in common.

St Chrysostom, in his sermons on the rich man and
Lazarus, compares owners of property with robbers, who
go out into the highways and despoil the passers-by ;
they convert their chambers into caverns in which
they bury the goods of others. He speaks of inherit-
ance as generally the fruit of theft and crime. St

THE EARLY CHURCH 109

Basil refers to rich men as thieves. St Clement
holds that private property is the result of iniquity.
St Basil again says, " Who gives to a poor man gives
to God." St Jerome asserts that wealth is the result
of one's own theft, or that of one's ancestors. Ter-
tullian tells us that all property is common among
Christians, excepting wives.

Tertullian, in spite of his communism, was never
canonised, because he held the anti-Christian position,
" that every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."
Clement of Alexandria fails to receive canonisation,
perhaps because, although he is sound on the subject
of human nature, he is suspected of pandering to the
rich on the subject of private property. He would,
of course, have been horrified at the individualist
sentiments nowadays expressed by opponents of the
Church Socialist League in the pages of the Guardian
and the Church Times. Every early and mediaeval
orthodox writer would have considered the opinions
of modern individualist Churchmen as the frankest
heresy ; Clement, nevertheless, is inclined to temporise,
and allegorises such stories as that of the rich young
man and the needle's eye.

Recent researches of Dr Harnack and Dr Gore
have established the fact that what is now called the
" right to live " was a foremost principle of the Early
Church.

The early Christian Church was, in its temper and char-
acteristics, just what we should expect from all this teaching.
In the everlasting opposition of rich and poor, beyond all
possibility of question, it ranked among and spoke for the
poor. It did not so much exalt the dignity of labour
as make the obligation of labour positive and absolute on

no SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

all its members. . . . Each man is to labour with his own
hands, and so eat his own bread. There is to be support for
those who cannot work, but not for those who will not. The
Christian is to be content with the bare necessities of actual
life — having food and covering. What he earns over and
above that, he should not accumulate for his own enjoyment,
but give to him that needeth. The Lord's warnings are
reiterated upon those who seek to become rich men. They
can hardly escape perdition (i Tim. vi. 6).1

It will now be interesting to consider what manner
of men those early- Christians were who propounded
these theological and political doctrines. The French
theologian Bossuet speaks in one of his sermons of
the Church, which was founded for the poor alone,
for they are the true citizens of that happy city which
is called the City of God. We may compare this
with a paragraph from Dr Gore : " He chose his instru-
ments . . . from the class accustomed to live hardly
and depend for sustenance upon daily labour. To
this class he gave the prerogative position in his
Church. It is people of this kind who can pray most
naturally the prayer to God the Father, ' Give us
to-day bread for the coming day.5"2 The Christian
Church carried on the Jewish tradition as to the
necessity of labour.

Our Lord's immediate followers were, for the most
part, poor men. They were not drawn from the
ranks of unskilled labour, nor from the abject poverty
of the slums. They were skilled artisans, precisely
the type of men who are now found voting for
socialism in the Colne Valley and the manufacturing
cities of the North and Midlands, hand-workers, in

1 Bishop Gore, Manchester, 1908.

2 Bishop Gore, Barrow-in- Furnace, 1906.

THE EARLY CHURCH in

contact with the hard realities of life, and yet possessing
a comparative leisure and those bare necessities of
living, the denial of which drives the slum-dwellers,
not to revolution, but to the inertia of despair. The
men who had ears to hear the Gospel of a Divine
commonwealth were mostly master - boatmen and
skilled peasants; in addition to these we read of a few
disciples from outcast but not abjectly poor classes,
Mary of Magdala and Matthew, who has often been
described as a rich man, but who was more probably
a mere telonarius, existing on a small daily salary.
He was able to give a supper party to his friends ; but
small shopkeepers and artisans are no less able to
entertain. Modern Christians are fond of allegorising
and explaining away the simple facts of the Gospel.
They will hardly understand the significance of
Christ's " Come unto Me, all ye that labour," and of
His Mother's " He hath filled the hungry with good
things," until they bring themselves to realise that in
the early days not many high officials, not many
aristocrats, not many plutocrats were pressing into
the Church ; " but God chose the foolish things of this
world that He might put to shame them that are
wise, and God chose the weak things of the world
that He might put to shame the things that are strong,
and the base things of the world and the things that
are despised did God choose, yea, and the things that
are not, that He might bring to nought the things
that are." There was a tendency in early times to
snobbery. St James had to reprove some who were
too fussy in their attentions to plutocratic converts
with their gold rings and fine clothing. How the

ii2 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

English Church, or indeed any other, can permit the
pew-rent system in face of St James's utterances, is
one of those mysteries which will never be solved
until we can understand the intricacies of the modern
Christian mind.

To those who say that the Christian religion has
only to do with men's souls and not their bodies, St
James answers in anticipation : " If a brother or sister
be naked and in lack of daily food, and one of you
say unto them, Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled,
and yet ye give them not the things needful to the
body, what doth it profit ? " The motto of this
Epistle is : " Let the brother of low degree glory in his
high estate, and the rich in that he hath been made
low ; because as the flower of the grass he shall pass
away. For the sun ariseth with a scorching wind,
and withereth the grass ; and the flower thereof falleth,
and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth : so also
shall the rich man fade away in his goings."

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries
that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and
your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is
cankered ; and the rust of them shall be a witness against
you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped
treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the
labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you
kept back by fraud, crieth : and the cries of them that have
reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton ;
ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
Ye have condemned and killed the just; he doth not
resist you.

There can be little doubt that St James voices the
current Christian belief that the world is on the eve

THE EARLY CHURCH 113

of a revolution, for the King will come in His
Kingdom, the mighty will be put down from their
seats, the rich sent empty away ; the poor, whom
in the thought and language of the day, he calls the
just ones, for they alone have obeyed God's law of
labour, will be avenged of their adversaries.

St Paul, the manual labourer, asserts the universal
duty of work : if anyone will not work neither shall he
eat. He does, indeed, include intellectual and moral
ministry as labour, but for himself he prefers to
labour with his own hands and so earn his own
living. This duty of work was not treated by the
Church as the temporary advice of St Paul, but as
an essential note of New Testament teaching. It is
over and over again referred to by the Fathers and in
Church law, as the basic economic principle of the
Christian religion. The bishops and creed-builders
of the Church did not belong to the comfortable
classes. They were stone-cutters and masons, brick-
layers and carpenters, chosen by the whole Christian
democracy; none were too poor, too unlettered, or
too ordinary to be enfranchised ; baptism involved
the franchise for men and women alike, and, some
say, even for children. Athanasius was elected by
the vote of the whole people. Ambrose likewise
owed his archbishopric to the democratic vote.
St Cyprian and Origen, St Gregory Nazianzen,
St Jerome, St Leo, and a host of others bear witness
to the electoral rights of the christened democracy.
Our modern bishops are gentlemen l and are chosen

1 Many modern bishops have come from the artisan class, but on
becoming clergymen they now cease to be artisans.

8

ii4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

by capitalist governments. Bishop Alexander, in the
third century, was a charcoal-burner chosen by the
people. The Council of Constantinople, in the fourth
century, was composed of bishops who were plough-
men, weavers, tanners, blacksmiths, and the like.1
From the socialist point of view, it is not necessary
to insist on this labour aspect of the Catholic Church,
for the socialist who understands his business will
prefer a social-democratic duke to a plutocracy-
loving dustman, welcoming help from whatever class
it comes, and knowing nothing of class distinction.
The socialist movement does not merely aim at
securing this or that material advantage for the
skilled artisan. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that
the coming of socialism will be greatly accelerated
by the conversion of the artisan class, and that social
democracy is unattainable without the aid of the
skilled workman ; and therefore it is significant not
only that the doctrine of the Church is essentially
socialist, but that the councils which built up that
doctrine might, with little exaggeration, be called
labour conferences.

1 Cf. Charles Marson's pamphlet on The Church and Democracy.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF
ST PAUL

' ' The Powers that be " — The critics criticised— Jewish hostility to the
Empire — The crime of unsuccessful rebellion — Unhealthy anti-
imperialism — Early Christian self-satisfaction — St Paul reasserting
the universality of the Good Spirit — Saves the Church from
exclusiveness — The successor of Alexander — Wide-minded Jews
of the dispersion — "Slaves, obey your masters" — A revolutionary
counsel of obedience — St Paul on fairness and charity — Did
St Paul believe in a cataclysmic Kingdom ? — Onesimus — The
eternal and the temporal in Pauline teaching — The Church and
manumission — The reign of Nature — The Golden Age — The
Church and the philosophers on its implications — St Augustine
exceptional and eccentric — St Gregory on slavery — The stagnant
versus the living ages — The theory of Divine right — Divided
opinions on nature of civil authority — The socialism of the
Fathers questioned — The theory of stewardship — Almsgiving as
justice, not charity — Ashley's conclusion — Eternal ideas and
temporal forms.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL

" For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men, as
the world counts wisdom, not many influential, not many men of noble
birth, are called. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world
to confound the wise ; and God hath chosen the weak things of the
world to confound the things which are mighty ; and base things of the
world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things
which are not, to bring to nought things that are : that no flesh should
glory in his presence." — I COR. i. 26-29.

" If any man would not work, neither should he eat." — 2 THESS. iii. 10.

"For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the
members of that one body, being many, are one body : so also is Christ.
For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be
Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free ; and have been all made
to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.
. . . Much more those members of the body, which seem to be more
feeble, are necessary ; and those members of the body, which we think
to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour ;
. . . God having tempered the body together, having given abundant
honour to that part which lacked : that there should be no division in
the body ; but that the members should have the same care one for
another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with
it ; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now
ye are the body of Christ, and its several members." — I COR. xii.

"But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may
make good their want, that their abundance may make good your
want, that there may be equality. As it is written, He that had
gathered much had nothing over ; and he that had gathered little had
no lack." — 2 COR. viii. 14, 15.

THE Church socialist position is often assailed by
people who quote certain passages from the various

117

n8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Epistles which form so integral a part of the canon
of Holy Scripture. They argue that the socialist
position is ridiculous in the face of such Scriptural
injunctions as, " Slaves, obey your masters," and,
" Honour the king." l If this chapter is chiefly devoted
to a consideration of their contentions, it is because
St Paul's teaching on the democratic and socialist
nature of the Church's constitution has frequently and
fully been dealt with. It will be alluded to in the sacra-
mental section (Chapter VI.), and I have prefaced the
present chapter with quotations from his social teach-
ing. Should my readers accept the conclusions here
suggested in the matter of the Pauline attitude towards
government and slavery, they will be able themselves
to resolve the whole of his teaching into a harmony.

Before we proceed to a more minute examination
of St Paul's ideas, let us consider what is implied in
our critics' objections, and how far that implication will
lead us.

The authority whom Paul bade us obey was the
Roman Emperor, and the reason he gives in support
of his counsel is, that the Imperial Government is,
in his time, the supreme civil power, and the powers
that be are ordained of God. The limited monarchy
of modern England, the unlimited czardom of Russia,
the republicanism of France are as unlike each other
as anything could well be, but each, for its own country
and time, represents the powers that be. We must
ask our critics, do they consider that St Paul's counsel

1 Cf. with St Paul's teaching this Petrine passage, I Peter ii. 17 and
1 8. The Petrine and Pauline Epistles are remarkably alike in their view
of the nature of authority. The question of the authorship of St Peter's
letters need not concern us here.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 119

limits us to honouring the head of a given State only
in the event of his possessing the exact status of a
Roman Emperor? Supposing his counsel to be of
eternal obligation, does it, or does it not, bind us to
honour and obey the president of a republic, if we
are Frenchmen ; or if we are Englishmen, the powers
that be in England, namely, Parliament together with
a limited monarchy ? Is the Church of France ortho-
dox or unorthodox when it sings in the public liturgy,
" O Lord, save the Republic," seeing that the French
Republic is a different type of " power that is " from
Roman Emperorship? Is the Church of England
right or wrong in singing, " O Lord, save the King,"
seeing that the modern English monarchy is almost
as different a " power that is " from the Roman
Emperorship as is the French Republic ? The most
orthodox of theologians throughout the centuries
have generally held that this Pauline counsel, which
has in some sense been endorsed by the Church, has
in fact been so endorsed as meaning that Christians
owe honour and obedience to the civil government,
whatever may be the particular form of government
obtaining in their country in their own particular
period. The theologians are generally as careful to
add that there are exceptions to the rule, and to
admit on certain rare occasions an ultimate right of
rebellion. So careful and conservative a Catholic
encyclopaedist as St Thomas Aquinas leaves us
in no doubt on this point. If, therefore, our critics
insist on this line of argument drawn from St Paul,
I fear it must inevitably land them in implicit
obedience to a socialist government should such a

120 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

form of government ever become the power that is.
They will then no doubt be glad to remember the
tradition as to a right of rebellion, all allusions to
which they are now so careful to suppress. Taking
it quite literally, therefore, as these critics urge us to
take this Pauline counsel, it would only seem to
commit us to a general respect and obedience to an
autocratic, or a social-democratic, or any other prevail-
ing form of administration. In the natural course of
events — or, shall we say, in the Divine ordering of the
world ? — a people more or less gets the government
it deserves. And a counsel of obedience to the civil
government accords with the socialist feeling for
order and construction, in opposition to the anarchist-
individualist contempt for all human administration.

Beyond all this, St Paul's teaching cannot in fact
be literally observed in our own day, although the
spirit of it may, by the modern Church, be applied to
meet the entirely changed circumstances. Christian
people were in his day a small band in the midst of
a hostile world, without civil rights, altogether unable
constitutionally to influence politics, or to take their
part in creating the powers that be. Their natural
tendency was therefore to ignore every regulation
of the civil government, and this passive resist-
ance easily became active resistance under such
an administration as that of Nero. The enormous
Jewish element in these early Christian communities
would tend to perpetuate that crude hostility
to the Empire which had been so strong a
feature of the Palestinian Jew of the Gospel period.
Resistance to the Roman power was very largely the

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 121

outcome of that narrow nationalist hatred of the
foreigner for which our Lord had sought to substitute
a wide internationalism. Rebellion against Roman
administration was to be discouraged for at least two
very good reasons. The minor reason was that all
such rebellion at that particular moment, and under
those particular circumstances, would have resulted
only in massacre and defeat. There was not even
that vestige of chance in the situation which there
must be admitted to exist in Russia at the present
day. The wise general will encourage a fight against
enormous odds ; but in circumstances where he knows
that defeat is not only very possible, but is practically
speaking inevitable, he will consider it a crime to
sacrifice his troops. Obedience, therefore, for the
time being, would have been the only possible
policy, even if St Paul had been an absolute rebel
against the Roman authority. There are many
circumstances in which those who take the sword
will perish by the sword. But the major reason was
that the motive of this constant tendency to rebellion
in the early Church was by no means free of a
certain meanness and inhuman crudity. Not only
was there the Jewish tendency to despise foreigners,
but Christian communities themselves, whether com-
posed of Jews or Gentiles, or both, were peculiarly
subject to the temptation of pride and complacent
exclusiveness. If one has to beware when all men
speak well of one, one has almost equally to be wary
when all men speak evil of one. The man
who is over-appreciated, and the man who is
altogether unappreciated, are alike in danger of

122 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

being driven in upon themselves and of a conse-
quent Pharisaism. This is true not only of the
individual, but of the community : too easy a success
and too swift a popularity are perhaps its worst
danger ; but implacable hostility, universal misunder-
standing and persecution constitute a very real
danger also. Renan has a very illuminating passage,
in which, while he admits the truth of the saying,
" The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,"
he points out that the ruthless persecution and hatred
of minorities by tyrannous majorities does often create
a lesion in the minds of the persecuted body, and
drives it or deflects it from its proper channel into
some unhealthy and neurotic by-path. Without
committing oneself entirely to this statement, one
cannot but acknowledge that something of this sort
was occurring in the early Christian communities of the
first century, and that they were saved from its worst
consequences by the sanity and the genius of St Paul.
The tendency among these Christians of the first
century, in consequence of the contempt and hatred
in which they were held, was to drive them into a
self-sufficiency and exclusiveness which led to their
belief that all virtue resided in the Christian body,
and to their claiming that monopoly in God which
had been in former times the disastrous claim of the
Jewish nation. The Kingdom had been taken away
from that nation and given to a people bringing forth
the fruits thereof. They rightly felt themselves to
be that people, but, driven in upon themselves by
persecution, they were likely to deny the universal
Spirit from whom all good things would come, and

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 123

to regard the whole civilised world, Jewish as well as
Gentile, as not only corrupt and very far gone from
original righteousness, but as essentially evil and
absolutely under the dominion of him from whom
no good thing can come. It was such a spirit as
this that led them to rebellion against the civil
government of their day; it was this spirit which
St Paul wished to exorcise. He saw in civil insti-
tutions, however imperfect their form, some attempt
of the good human spirit of society towards adequate
expression. He recognised no absolute divorce
between the spirit of Seneca and Plutarch and
the good spirit of the Christian community. The
Christian revelation was the fulfilment of Greek and
Roman as well as of Jewish hope and prophecy.
The God whom the Athenians unknowingly wor-
shipped, Him he declared unto them, for they were
also His offspring ; in Him all live and move and
have their being, as their own prophets had said.
Greeks and Romans, who had not known the Jewish
law, had not been left without witness : " For when
nations which have no law do by nature the things
of the law, these having no law, are a law unto them-
selves, in that they show the work of the law written in
their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith,
and their thoughts one with another accusing or else
excusing them in the day when God judgeth the
secrets of men according to my gospel by Jesus Christ."
There is perhaps nothing more amazing in the
development of the Christian faith than the con-
version of St Peter and St Paul, the one a narrow
Palestinian peasant, the other a learned Jew of the

124 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

dispersion, but belonging to the straitest sect of
the Pharisees, from the exclusive, contemptuous,
nationalist view of goodness, to the universalism of
Jesus Christ.

St Paul saw in the imperialism of Rome as
essential a contribution to the international Kingdom
of God as was to be found in quite another direction
in the teachings of the prophets of Israel. As a Jew
of the dispersion and a Roman citizen, Paul had
inherited not only the thought of the Jewish but of
the Graeco-Roman world, the Hellenistic ideal which
meant fusion of race, unity of language, union of
cities, and religious toleration. He has been called
the successor of Alexander the Great, of Julius
Caesar and Augustus. The ideal Roman Emperor
had stood for a certain largeness of belief, according
to which no citizen was to keep himself to himself,
cribbed and confined within his own little city, but
was to be a citizen of the world. The Emperor
refused to act in one way to Greeks and in another
to barbarians. He would not be a constitutional
ruler to the one and a despot to the other. He re-
garded himself as heaven-sent peace-maker to the
civilised world. Alexander's ideal was the conception
of a spiritual Greece beyond the bond of Greek blood,
with which we may well compare St Paul's conception
of a spiritual Israel beyond the bond of Jewish blood.
All brave men, according to him, were Greeks; all
cowards, barbarians. Plutarch says of him that as in
a loving-cup he mixed together customs, marriages,
manner of life, and ordered all to think of the whole
world as their native land, of the camp as the citadel

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 125

and garrison of that land, and to treat the good in
all lands as their kinsmen, and only the evil as of
alien race.

The Jews of the dispersion scattered up and down
the civilised world would naturally be inclined to a
broader view than their Palestinian fellow-country-
men. They did in fact lay stress upon the more
universal aspect of the Messiah, whose work would
transcend the limits of Israel and whose reign would
establish a world-wide goodness and justice.1 There
were therefore in the world of that day Gentile and
Jewish lines of thought converging towards the
internationalism of Jesus. It would almost seem to
be as if a narrow Pharisaism dominated Saul's
nature, but that unconsciously he had absorbed what
we may call the modernist ideal, which was
working like a leaven beneath his surface ideas ;
the work was, though secret and gradual, thorough.
On the road to Damascus, in a blinding flash,
the truth came upon him that Jesus, whom
he persecuted, was the internationalist Saviour, the
very embodiment of that universal and liberating
spirit which he had unconsciously harboured, but up
till then consciously denied. We may seem to have
travelled far from the original question as to the
exact meaning in Paul's mind of "The powers that
be are ordained of God," but in reality we have only
sought to understand those deeper mental issues which
led him to check a crude and narrow revolutionism
with a certain vehemence.

If our critics insist on urging, as against the Church

1 Cf. Isa. xi. 9-12, xlii. 1-6.

126 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

socialist interpretation of religion, the counsel of
St Paul, " Slaves, obey your masters," we must again
ask them how far we may take them seriously. Does
this counsel, in their opinion, bind the Church to a
perpetual defence of slavery, whether it be the
corporal slavery of the Congo or the economic
slavery of Europe? Does it, to their mind, involve
the position that any effort whatsoever, whether by
method of argument, of converting public opinion,
of the ballot-box, or of the bayonet, is antichristian
on the part of black or white slaves ? Do they further
hold that the Christian public generally may not,
because of this one text in St Paul, vote for the
modification or abolition of any form of slavery ; or
do they only hold that such an abolitionist move-
ment is of the spirit of antichrist, if slaves or other
down-trodden people themselves take any hand in
it? We understand them to say that working men
may not vote for a constitutional change in economic
conditions, known as socialism, because St Paul said,
" Slaves, obey your masters." Must working men, then,
vote against it, or merely abstain from voting on that
issue? Do they go further and urge that Christian
people generally may not vote for a constitutional
change of this sort, because it would involve an
abolition of slavery, under which abolition it would
be impossible for slaves to obey their masters ? Or
dp these people hold anything at all ; are they merely
flinging a chance text at our heads, the force of the
fling being in the bitterness of their prejudices ?

If they reply, " But we absolutely deny that the
present state of society involves slavery of any kind,"

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 127

we must politely remind them that in that case the
counsel, " Slaves, obey your masters," cannot possibly
apply. If they further assert, "It was the force of
Christian opinion which abolished slavery in America,"
we must remind them that it did so in spite of
their rendering of " Slaves, obey your masters," and
would never have done so had it accepted their
rendering. In point of fact, the intellectual ancestors
of these reactionary Christians ridiculed Shaftesbury
and Wilberforce, and raged against them as un-
scriptural revolutionaries. " Woe unto you ! for ye
build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers
killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the
deeds of your fathers : for they indeed killed them,
and ye build their sepulchres." l

Again we must remind ourselves of the actual
constitution and the limitations of these early Chris-
tian communities. They were almost entirely com-
posed of slaves, and they were without constitutional
rights. Slaves had from time to time decided to
disobey their masters and had revolted against them ;
the consequence had invariably been ruthless massacre.
Once more, then, from the point of view of the wise
general, how could St Paul at that time and under
those circumstances, even had he been a fiercer
revolutionist than he was, have counselled slaves to
disobey their masters ? I have known more than
one foreign revolutionist, whose views were extreme
enough to satisfy the fiercest of his followers, who
has, under the particular circumstances of the moment,
checked the impetuosity of those followers, and to all

1 St Luke xi. 47, 48.

128 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

intents and purposes issued the order, " Slaves, obey
your masters." I have seen almost hundreds of strikes
averted by the counsel of labour leaders who would
not be suspected of pro-slavery inclination. It is
therefore not difficult to imagine that the leaders of
the Church, who were described as men who had
turned the world upside down — a sufficiently revolu-
tionary description, — should counsel obedience under
the particular circumstances.

But there was more than mere policy in such a
counsel. Just as the motive to revolt against the
civil government was not particularly worthy, so the
motive to revolt against masters was by no means
entirely free from suspicion. After all, conservatism
and obedience on the one hand, or revolution and
rebellion on the other, treated merely as abstract
conceptions, are things indifferent. St Paul had
preached to masters and slaves alike the Gospel of
a Kingdom in which there was neither Jew nor
Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, and we
can well imagine the difficult position of those few
masters who had been generous-hearted enough to
be converted to this revolutionary and democratic
philosophy. They would find that this essential
equality and fellowship was being seized hold upon
by all kinds of worthless and idle persons, not because
they believed in fellowship, but as an excuse for
putting the hated master into an intolerable position.
St Paul's counsel does rule out anarchy and misrule
grounded in hatred, while it leaves untouched that
constructive socialism which his own more essential
philosophy has done so much to encourage.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 129

There are several other passages in which St Paul
treats of the slave question. There is his advice to
men not to go wandering about, but to abide in their
calling ; even if they are slaves, to remember that
both their masters and themselves are God's freed-
men. A sentence in this connection about obtaining
one's freedom is interpreted variously as advice not
to strive for this freedom, or advice to gain one's
freedom if that is possible. The sense cannot at
present be conclusively determined. It is of course
possible that St Paul believed in the cataclysmic
coming of God's Kingdom in his own time, in a
revolution not by blood but by miracle, and that the
business of the Church was not to hasten it by
violence, but to be on the watch, and merely to do
the best they could under the present evil institutions.
It is exceedingly difficult to arrive at any certainty
on this point. If he really believed this, his teaching
as to slavery would be adequately explained. In
any case, I cannot agree with those critics who would
have us believe that, although St Paul's teaching was
essentially democratic, it made no actual or immediate
difference in the status of the slave ; for although he
urged slaves to work heartily as unto God, he urges
their masters with equal emphasis to give them justice
and equality, and although he sends back a runaway
slave to his master — both slave and master had
become Christians — he orders his master, very court-
eously but authoritatively, to receive him into his
household no longer as a slave, but as one of the
family, a brother beloved. He implores Philemon to
do this of his own free will and not of necessity, but

9

1 30 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the twenty-first verse of the Epistle leaves us in no
doubt that it was not mere consent but obedience
which St Paul expected.

It must always be remembered that in every great
prophet's teaching there are ideas of eternal validity
and temporal application. Individual interpreters
will rightly seek to distinguish the one from the
other. Moreover, we are not bound by St Paul's
ideas alone, nor by St James, nor by St John. It is
the business of the Christian to correct the concep-
tions of one by reference to those of another, and,
where the task is too heavy for the individual, to
appeal to that consensus of individual human opinions
which we call Church tradition.

Now if one reads Christian literature widely and care-
fully, one may here and there find passages from this
or that authority which seem to rely on the counsels
of St Paul for the support of autocracy or of slavery.
But the overwhelming stream of Church tradition
made in the direction of manumission and the abolition
of slavery. The whole Church — there are no excep-
tions— opposed Aristotle's essential difference between
slaves and freemen, holding with Seneca and Cicero
that all men are by nature free and equal. By nature
or natural law, the Church understood and taught a
Golden Age in which God's will prevailed. Most
Church writers put this age before the Fall ; all of
them believe that the object of the Christian religion
is the establishment of this perfect epoch ; all of them
hold that the Golden Age not only involves the
freedom and equality of men — the later pagan philo-
sophers preached a like freedom and equality, — but

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 131

that such freedom involves common property in the
essentials of life. St Augustine would seem to be
the only original thinker who, in practice, at one time
held a reactionary view about slaves. In one passage
of his writings he seems to suggest that slavery comes
upon the unfortunate, not because of their misfortunes,
but because of their sins. It is hardly likely that
modern opponents of Church socialism will assert that
all South American slaves were in bondage because
they were bad, while their masters were free because
they were good ; and it must be remembered that
St Augustine's thought was abnormal and eccentric,
and that in this very matter he speaks with no certain
voice, for in another passage he contends that slavery
is as unnatural as sin, and that no one may own a
man as he would own a horse or money. Gregory
the Great is fairly representative where he says :
" We act in a wholesome fashion if by manumission
we restore men, whom from the beginning nature
brought forth free, and the law of nations subjected
to the yoke of slavery, to that liberty in which they
were born." l

It is very significant that the great Christian writers
in constructive ages of Church thought, the men who
are generally admitted to have contributed most to the
upbuilding of Catholic philosophy, are glad to dwell
upon what I have called the eternal democratic con-
ception in the teaching of various Apostles; while less
original writers, who belong to more stagnant ages and
who contribute nothing to Catholic development, e.g.
writers of the ninth century, are fond of seizing upon

1 Gregory, Letters ', bk. vi. f. 12.

1 32 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the temporal advice of either Paul or Augustine, and
of elevating it into a position of eternal validity.

In the matter of civil authority Christian tradition
speaks with no very certain voice. In the early days,
before Christians had any constitutional rights, some-
times the powers that be, i.e. the Roman Empire, are
treated with contempt, at other times the Pauline
view is upheld. When the Emperors began to
support orthodoxy, the temptation towards a theory
of Divine right naturally increased ; but the Church
in its totality cannot be said ever to have endorsed
that theory. I have spoken of the stagnant ages as
contrasted with living ages that contributed to the
development of Christian thought. Roughly speaking,
we may say that the first five centuries showed life
and movement, and that the same life and movement
are visible from the eleventh century to the end of the
fourteenth ; and in these latter centuries the great
Churchmen held generally that kingship and civil
government have their source in what may be called
a Divine democracy. It seems universally to be held
that the object of civil government is the establish-
ment of justice; that therefore disobedience to the
government of men is disobedience to the God of
justice, for man is essentially a social creature. Men
must therefore come together into a society, and
human society involves some form of government;
therefore Christians were inclined to think highly of
the State. But where the State is manifestly evil the
tradition becomes uncertain; some of the Fathers
counsel obedience, others disobedience, for if the
object of government be justice, apostasy from this

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 133

object absolves the people from their allegiance.
St Ambrose, in the fourth century, had held that a
priest must reprove an evil ruler, and all rulers are
within and not over the Church. He put his theory
into practice when he excommunicated the pious and
orthodox Emperor, excluding him from the Eucharist
because he had been guilty of a massacre.

A general survey of the teaching of the Fathers
appears, then, to yield the result that they are
practically unanimous in opposing private property
in the essentials of life, that is, in land and in any
form of capital used for the purpose of extracting
interest. Ideally, such a state of things could not
exist ; in the Golden Age to which they all looked
forward it would not exist. They are not so unani-
mous in their practical applications of the socialistic
theory. Sometimes the immediate advice and action
of certain of their number contradicts their unanimous
conception of the nature of the Golden Age. On
the further questions of government and slavery,
tradition speaks with less certain voice, but on the
whole tends to democracy and abolitionism.1

In bringing this section (Chapters IV. and V.) to
a conclusion, it may be well to deal with the attempt
of a writer in the Economic Review of April 1895 to
defend the principles of modern commercialism from
the traditions of the early Church. The writer quotes
a passage from Irenseus aimed at that bitter and
extreme communism of certain heretics which may

1 Actual body-slavery died out of Europe from the sixth to the
fourteenth centuries. It was revived by the Portuguese in the fifteenth
century. Negro slavery was constantly defended by reference to St
Paul in Christo-capitalist times.

i34 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

be likened to the communism with which modern
newspapers charge the socialist of the present day.
The passage is of doubtful interpretation, for Irenaeus
holds1 that we should refrain from demanding our
own from such as may take it. The writer appears
therefore to argue that, even if socialists could prove
that much of the property of the rich rightfully
belongs to the poor, the poor must not demand it of
them ; but his own contention is, that the property of
the rich is really their own, and that the taxation of
the rich, by means of socialistic legislation, is little
short of theft. Now, if this is so, and if he still insists
on the authority of Irenaeus, he would seem to have
proved too much, namely, that it is unchristian in the
extreme on the part of his rich friends to demand
their own back again by resisting such legislation.

He quotes Justin Martyr2 to prove that, if the
Christians contributed to a common store, they each
put in only a little, and no compulsion was used. A
man gives " only if he is able, for no man is obliged."
But what does the writer want to prove? No one has
said that compulsion was used. Does he insist that
each gave as little as he decently could ? But the
passage seems to establish exactly the contrary.
They were, for the most part, poverty-stricken slaves,
so that each could only give a trifle, and they gave as
much as they could. He deals with a passage from
St Chrysostom with no better success. He discovers
that the saint held that the rich man is a steward of
the common property. He quotes Clement of Rome
as saying, " Let the rich minister aid to the poor, and let

1 Irenseus, Adv. Hcer.^ lib. ii. cap. 32. 2 Justin, ApoL, i. 67.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 135

the poor give thanks to God, because He has given
him one through whom his wants may be supplied,"
and he argues that here is a proof that, according to
the Fathers, the rich man's property is his own. If
further proof is wanted, can it not be had in St
Augustine's sermon on the text, " The gold is Mine
and the silver is Mine ? " for Austin says, " Let him who
is unwilling to share his goods with the poor, under-
stand when he hears exhortation to show mercy that
God does not order him to give of his own, but of that
which is God's." The writer seems to argue that,
because this author asserts that a man's property does
not belong to him, he really considers that it does.
The writer does not seem to know that the thought
of property belonging to the common Father of all
men, and the thought of that property as the common
heritage of all His children, are ideas interchangeable
in the traditions of the early Church.

No one denies the point that he is labouring to
prove, namely, that God is the primal owner of all
things, that the early Church considered that the rich
were the managers through whose hands the common
property was to pass. This was not an ideal state of
things ; the ideal state was the Golden Age which
knew nothing of rich and poor ; but the early Church
was unable to see any other way out of the present
difficulty than this liberal dispensing of God's property
by God's managers. But when this writer goes on to
say that the Fathers never breathe a hint of their
latent belief that society was wrongly constituted, he
is guilty of an audacity which must promptly be
challenged. His further quotations are peculiarly

136 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

unfortunate. He boldly asserts that the Fathers
would have denounced Proudhon's maxim, " La
propriete c'est le vol." But we soon find him referring
to St Ambrose as saying, " Nature has given all things
to all men in common, for God has ordained that all
things shall be so produced that food shall be common
to all, and the earth as it were the common possession
of all. Nature therefore is the mother of common
right, appropriation1 (usurpatio) of private right."
He further quotes Ambrose's conclusion that we are
therefore bound to help one another and " to put all
our resources into one heap " (in media omnes utilitates
ponere), to help each other by kindliness, by service,
by money, etc., that social feeling may grow and no
one be called from his duty even by fear of danger,
but that each may go on his way, whether of prosperity
or of adversity. This critic of Church socialism con-
siders this the most conclusive passage he can find in
support of his case. He thinks that Ambrose here
has supplied a strong basis for individualistic property.
If he considers that urging one to place all one's
resources into one heap because nature and God have
given all things to all men in common supplies the
best possible basis for individualistic property, I do
not think the Christo-capitalists will thank him for
having entered into this controversy. If his great
proof that the Fathers would have repudiated
Proudhon's " Property is theft " rests on a quotation
from one of them which asserts that theft is the
mother of private property, I fear that commercial
individualism will have to seek some other line of

1 ' ' Appropriation " is a curiously mild interpretation of the term.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 137

defence than the appeal to Christian history. The
fact would seem to be that the writer has confused
the ancient theory of alms-giving with the modern.
Nothing can be more certain than that the giving of
alms, in the early Christian tradition, was always con-
sidered " a debt of justice." It was of obligation ; to
refrain from it was to act as a thief; to give alms was
to distribute among the poor what was theirs by right.
Chrysostom, in his sermons on Dives and Lazarus, is
quite explicit upon this point.1 Stewardship had not
come to mean the vague thing it means in the mouths
of the modern pulpiteers ; it meant stewardship. The
rich man was steward of God's estate just as a land
steward is administrator of a landlord's property, or a
bank clerk administrator of the property of the bank
owners. The clerk receives a salary which is supposed
to supply him with the necessaries of life; the rich
man might take a salary as wages of administration
to supply him with necessities. If he took more,
or refused to disburse the property, he was considered
by unanimous Church tradition to be no better than
a common thief. We may sum up the situation
by a quotation from a studiously moderate non-
socialist authority, Professor Ashley. Commenting
on Clement's saying that it is only by injustice that
private property arises, since God meant property to
be common among men, he writes : —

This view as to the origin of property gave Christian
moralists a philosophical basis for their teaching. To seek
to enrich one's self was not simply, they could argue, to

1 Cf. also quotations from Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, etc. in previous
chapter.

138 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

incur spiritual risk to one's own soul ; it was in itself unjust,
since it aimed at appropriating an unfair share of what God
had intended for the common use of men. If a man
possessed more than he needed, he was bound to give his
superfluity to the poor ; for by natural law he had no
personal right to it ; he was only a steward for God. And
with Christian teachers such injunctions were no longer mere
philosophical deductions ; they came with all the weight of
practical precepts, pointing to duties to be observed and sins
to be avoided on pain of punishment in another world. 1

There is therefore no case to be made on behalf of
modern plutocracy and commercialism by pressing the
theory of stewardship, for, according to that theory, the
plutocrat who retains a penny more than that which
suffices to maintain him in the necessaries of life is a
worse kind of thief than the poor clerk who robs the
till ; and this is hardly what the writer wanted to prove.
Our modern critics are never tired of telling us that
we are not bound by the letter, but only by the spirit,
of Scripture and ancient tradition. There is no reason-
able doubt that the spirit of both does commit us to a
belief in God the common Father dispensing the earth
and its products to all men alike. The theory of the
stewardship of the rich is much more akin to the
letter of socialism than it is to the letter of commercial
plutocracy, but it is in itself just as much the temporary
letter or form of the Church's eternal conception of
common property as were, for instance, the Jewish
land laws. We may therefore suggest that a new
form is developing in our own day which more ade-
quately safeguards and expresses the Church's essen-
tial idea of common ownership than did this letter of
stewardship : that form is socialism.

1 Ashley, Economic History and Theory.

VI

THE SACRAMENTS

The philosophy of socialism restated — Nature and universality of sacra-
ments— The sacramentalism of Christ and the poets — Sacraments
of nature and of grace — The sacraments of creation, incarnation,
and the Church — Of baptismal regeneration and the sacrament of
confirmation — The human priest and the functions of priesthood —
Confession and absolution — Holy Orders and the Divine democracy
— Confirmation and the Eucharist as an offering — Body and soul in
the Eucharist — The sacrament of God's Body as the sacrament of
fellowship — The holy communion in the early Church — Havelock
Ellis on the sacrament of food — Unction and healing — Marriage
as the mirror of the family of God — George Meredith and Robert
Blatchford on the sacrament of marriage — Dante's Rose of Souls.

VI

THE SACRAMENTS

The sacraments of the Church are witness "that the unreal spiritu-
ality which exists in a barren and boastful disparagement of ritual
observances or of outward acts, of earthly relationships or of secular
life, of material feelings or of bodily health, clashes with Christian
teaching as sharply as it does with nature and with common sense." —
Lux Mundi) I3th edition, p. 310.

SOCIALISM derives its enthusiasm from a conception
of justice which challenges our industrial chaos, Tnd
demands the abolition of slaves and drones and the
reconstruction of an international commonwealth of
workers. Behind its demands are discovered certain
axioms, assumptions, doctrines about the nature^and
destiny of man, its two dominant doctrines being
concerned with the body and the fellowship.

(i) Concerning the body: That outward, sensuous,
material, physical things count. That to treat man's
body as vile or of no account, is to injure man and
to misread his nature; to ignore man's physical needs
is sacrilege ; to recognise the importance of material
considerations is not to be a " mere materialist " ;
although man does not live by bread alone, he does
live by bread ; physical desires — the instinct for food
and drink, the sex instinct, the instinct for warmth
and shelter — are not evil but good.

141

142 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

(2) Concerning the fellowship : That the individual
is not redeemed, saved, built up into rich and generous
personality in isolation, but in fellowship. Every
socialist at once understands the philosophic truth
underlying the phrase, " Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus."
The socialist dogmas are paralleled theologically by
the dogmas of creation, incarnation, bodily resurrec-
tion, the dogmas of the Communion of Saints and
of the Holy Catholic Church, and find their full
expression in the sacraments of the Church.

The Holy Spirit, that " Light of every man coming
into the world," has prompted the use of sacraments
in many parts of the pre-Christian world and in
varying religions, as testify the ancient cults of
Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans, the later religion of
Mithraism, and the present Brahmanic rituals. Sacra-
ment was by the early Christians understood to mean
"anything sensuous whereby something holy might
be thought or enjoyed" (Harnack). It came to
signify an outward visible sign of inward spiritual
grace given or presence conveyed ; but the sign or
" matter " is called " effectual," because it does not arbi-
trarily remind us of the grace signified, but effectually
expresses and conveys it. A cup symbolises drinking.
A red flag symbolises danger ; but facial expression
is not only symbol but sacrament, in that it effectu-
ally expresses or conveys the personality behind it.

At first the number of sacraments was indeter-
minate. They are numbered sometimes as three,
sometimes as eight, fifteen, or even thirty. Mystics
have believed that Christ spoke sacramentally in
saying, " I am the Bread, I am the Vine, I am the

THE SACRAMENTS 143

Door," in that He is in very truth the Bread, the
Vine, the Door, of which every visible and tangible
loaf, vintage, archway is the more or less effectual
expression. The poets speak of flowers as suggesting
thoughts that often lie too deep for tears,1 of the
flower in the crannied wall as microcosm of God and
man,2 of God's holy sacrament of spring,3 of the way-
side sacraments of our hedgerows.4 Poets and mystics
understand that God is really present to bless men
under forms of bread, wine, oil, salt, flowers, water,
fruit ; that the colour of the tulip, the scent of the
rose, the sound of the sea, the grace and symmetry
of the human body, are effectual signs of the presence
of the God who prevents and follows and enfolds us,
as the waters cover the sea.

All sacraments of nature and of grace take their
rise in the sacrament of Creation, for these worlds
are "the form whereby the beauty of God's mind
manifests itself" (F. W. Robertson), but the sacra-
ment of sun and moon, of sea and earth, of bird
and beast is not complete without the sacrament
of man made in the very image of God. And again,
it is only perfect man who perfectly images God,
for in us His image is blurred and distorted. The
human race but imperfectly expresses God, until
there springs from its loins the perfect being, the
very man of very man, the very God of very God.

The second fundamental sacrament is therefore the
Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Other men are sacra-
mental ordinances. This Man is the Sacrament of the
Gospel. Others are incoherent, unrelated, inarticulate

1 Wordsworth. 2 Tennyson. 3 Roden Noel. 4 Kingsley.

144 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

letters of God's alphabet, till they are pieced together,
giving meaning and tongue in the Verbum Dei, the
Eternal Word of God, the intelligible language of
man, first-fruit of the human harvest, Crown and
Consummation of this sumptuous world.

In Him is revealed the Kingdom or Commonwealth
of God as object and ground of our creation, as the
home of mankind, as the reality to which men must
come. Until they enter into the conception of this
Commonwealth, and seek to actualise it in their
midst, they are dead ; so long as they wage their
dreary wars and nourish their infidel suspicions, they
possess a death-in-life existence, but they have not
begun to live. If they are to enter into the life which
the Very Man has come to give them, and to give
them more abundantly, they must renounce " this
age," "this world," this satanic ideal of separation,
schism, mistrust, strife, competition, and be translated
into the Age of Reality, the life to come which even
now is, into the Kingdom of God's dear Son. Stretch-
ing up their hands towards God's dream or Heaven,
or ideal, they must seize upon it, and drag it down
out of Heaven, and plant it firmly in the secular soil
of this material world.

United we stand, divided we fall. No one, individu-
ally and in isolation, can fully accomplish God's
purpose ; therefore the Christian watchword is associ-
ation, and the Christ proclaims, " I will build My
Church." So we come to the third fundamental
sacrament, with its outward and visible sign, the
Church, and its inward spiritual significance, the
Kingdom of God. " I will build My Church," that in

THE SACRAMENTS 145

a visible society, pledged to exterminate the Devil
and all his works, man may bring into outward act
God's inward fact, the fact of the Commonwealth
which underlies our existence, and so translate the
cruel, competitive kingdom of " this age " into the
Kingdom of God and His Christ.

The man who begins to understand the sacraments
of Creation, Incarnation, and the Church can never
igain reject as " merely secular " the tangible, audible,
visible expression of a people's soul in laws, houses,
wharfs, ways, harbours, gesture, dress, drama, songs,
or language. He perceives the bond between inward
and outward, and rejecting the half-truth heresies of
spiritualism and materialism, pleads, " What God hath
joined together, let no man put asunder." The claims
of the senses and the need of political regeneration
are involved in the sacramental basis, for to starve
men's bodies is to rob the Holy Ghost, whose temples
they are.

There have been rare moments in the Church's
history when Christ might have taken the visible
fellowship or body into His holy and venerable
hands, saying, " This is my Body " ; such a moment
there was when " the multitude of them that believed
were of one heart and of one soul ; neither said any
of them that ought of the things which he possessed
was his own, but they had all things in common. . . .
Great grace was upon them all, neither was there any
that lacked." l

Baptism in Christ's time was the act by which the
Gentiles were regenerated by translation from pagan

1 Acts iv. 32 ff.

10

146 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

customs and beliefs into the environment of the
Jewish commonwealth. Sponsors further emphasised
the social character of this re-birth into a new people
and tradition.

Christian baptism is the gate into Christ's Church,
and claims every human being brought to the font,
irrespective of race or colour, although seemingly a
child of nature, of an under-world " red in tooth and
claw," enmeshed in the wrathful ape-and-tiger disorder,
as child of God and property of the Holy Ghost. The
baptized person is hereby brought into the society
which is pledged by institution, traditions, creeds,
gospels, sacraments to destroy the separate sub-
human kingdoms of earth, and to establish the human
kingdom of grace. Thrust by our first birth into the
isolation of a disordered world, where " each for him-
self" is the watchword, we are hereby given a new
birth, a new start, a new enthusiasm ; being claimed
as children of grace, and for the life of God's
Commonwealth.

But, say the critics, of what use is this re-birth,
when you are, as a fact, grafted into the inertia of
Laodicea, into the deadly complacency of Slowcombe-
on-the-Marsh, into a small coterie of self-conscious
Britishers, shallow Italians, or superstitious Spaniards ?
Scarcely do modern parishes care about the establish-
ment of God's Kingdom ; what even do they care
about the children re-born into their midst, as witness
the post-Reformation scandal of solitary baptism,
which bids fair to eclipse the pre - Reformation
scandal of solitary masses ? The baptismal rites
always contemplate the presence of God's local family

THE SACRAMENTS 147

to welcome the new member. Baptism in early times
was the greatest of social functions. Our hole-and-
corner celebrations of it throughout Europe are
witness of our apostasy. If the tree be dead, what
chance of life has the engrafted twig? If the
immediate parish be apostate, avaricious, pharisaic,
the immediate soil choked with stones and weeds,
God's scheme of the " common salvation " through
that interplay of gracious souls is altogether thwarted.

This is all appallingly true, but it is also true that
the grafting in of each new member brings a possi-
bility of renewed vigour to the local Church, and
that, in spite of the worst periods and most lifeless
localities, we are baptized into something beyond the
immediate period and environment. True though it
is that for some time the apostasy of a local Church
may thwart God's scheme, it is also true that the
fulness of the first century may supply the deficiencies
of the twentieth, or the vigour of the twentieth the
meagreness of some century past or future; the
sanity of one may counteract the superstition of
another ; the wisdom of one may counteract the
worldliness of another ; the spirituality of one the
pharisaism of another. We are not baptized into
Paul or Apollos, into the head of this or that sect or
Church, but into Jesus Christ and the whole company
of Catholic men, the living and the dead, nourished
by the rites, sacraments, gospels, traditions of the
living Church, limbs of the new Adam, regenerate
men, heirs of all the ages.

The character of Confirmation is essentially social.
Fifth and twentieth century theologians alike explain

148 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

it as conveying to the confirmed his right in the
royal and priestly body. In " orders " and " confirma-
tion " anointing is often used. There is the laying on
of the hands of the bishop in both cases ; in both
cases the grace of God's Spirit is the gift to be con-
veyed. The newly ordained priest celebrates ; the
newly confirmed priest assists by communicating, and
by the assent of the "Amen" at the close of the
consecration prayer.

Baptism declares the true childhood of all, and
effectualises it by placing men within an effective
society ; confirmation declares the true priesthood of
all, and effectualises it by admitting men to the
priestly sacrament of God's Board.

For men are not only God's children but His priests,
bound to sacrifice, bound to absolve ; confess one to
another ; forgive one another ; have charity, believing
all things, enduring all things, hoping all things of one
another. Mutual confidence must supplant division
and distrust. A fund of energy is generated by God's
belief in, and absolution of, men, and men's forgiveness
one of another. Man, as Mr Stewart Headlam says,
is " bound perpetually to be the priest in absolution."

The sacrament of Penance, a wise development of
this earlier belief, in the universal obligation of mutual
forgiveness, is an exceptional focussing of that natural
confession and absolution which is obligatory on the
whole human race. Until at least the year 250,
cases of discipline were settled by all the people, and
scandals confessed before the whole priestly company
of the faithful ; some authorities go further — possibly
too far — in declaring the primitive custom to have

THE SACRAMENTS 149

been a public confession of sins before each act of
communion.

Undoubtedly the orthodox Christian view has always
been that vice, however secret, is anti-social, frittering
away the energy consecrated to the service of God's
body, humanity. All sin is threefold — against God,
society,1 oneself. Forgiveness must also be threefold.

" Holy Orders " is the rite by which certain
members of the priestly body are set aside by its
chief officer as sacramental organs of the whole.
The Ordinals do not say, " Become now a Priest,"
but, " Receive thou the Office of Priest." Conceive of
the anarchy of a thousand people celebrating the
sacrament, each at the altar of his own particular
fancy ; conceive the laxity of a community in which
none were appointed as guardians of and witnesses
to the obligation of absolution, and you will under-
stand the value of discipline and delegation which we
call " Holy Orders." For slipshod anarchy and
unbrotherly schism are indeed an unholy disorder.
Just as in the Jewish kingdom the sacerdotal func-
tions of " a nation of priests " were focussed in the
Holy Order of the Aaronic line, so the " difference
between priests and laity is a difference in function,
not in kind,2 for the Holy Communion is an act of
the whole body through its organ and mouthpiece,
the ordained priest. " We break the bread," " We
bless the cup," says St Paul ; " We offer, we sacrifice,"
repeat the liturgies. " No priest says, I offer, but, We
offer, in the person of the whole Church" (Peter

1 Therefore, of course, confession to man is obligatory and essential.

2 Cf. Gore, Church and Ministry, and his Body of Christ.

150 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Lombard). "Sometimes there is no difference
between priest and people, e.g. when we partake of
the awful mysteries " (Chrysostom).

In old times theologians often declared that a layman
cast on some desert island might consecrate blades of
grass and so feed on God's presence in the Eucharist.
Theologians insist on the validity but irregularity of lay
baptism where necessity demands, or a baptism of blood
in the case of martyrs, or a baptism of sand in the case
of dying travellers, or even of an auto-baptism of de-
sire where matter and minister are alike unprocurable.
So also sacramental confession to laymen was some-
times urged. Cyprian, Origen, Lombard, Aquinas all
defend it, in exceptional cases, and Catholic bishops
have ordered it, in cases of plague or pestilence.1

The first duty of priesthood, then, is forgiveness ;
and the power to forgive resides in humanity and is
focussed in ordained ministers. The second duty is
sacrifice, for men must consecrate body, mind, and
spirit to God in the service of the God-infused
community. Therefore the confirmed, their priest-
hood being acknowledged, are admitted to the
Blessed Sacrament, and there offer themselves, their
souls and bodies as pledge of their determination
to live the good life of the Commonwealth.

But in the Eucharist, it may be objected, we offer
not ourselves but Christ. Yet in our own, the
Roman, and primitive liturgies this offering of
ourselves is made prominent. There is in reality

1 Cf. a R.C. handbook to Rome, Eccles., vol. ii. (Black), 1807;
cf. Gore, Body of Christ, pp. 330-331 ; cf. Pullan's Prayer Book,
Oxf. Lib. ed., p. 206.

THE SACRAMENTS 151

no contradiction between the two offerings ; for if
" the Christ in me " be the hope of glory, the light
that lights every man on his entrance into the
world, the better self, the self unto which we come
when we arise and go to the Father, the first-fruit of
the human harvest, the pledge of the best that is in
us, of all we may become, then to offer ourselves
apart from the God in us would be to offer our sins
and not ourselves — an offering of an unnatural,
subhuman, ape-and-tiger " not-ourselves." So we
present before the Father the very Man, the very
ground of our being and the very assurance of our
liberation, and in this presentation we offer Him our
very selves, our very souls, our very bodies.

Our bodies, it will be noticed, are included in the
offering (see also the words of administration and
Prayer of Humble Access), and the sanctity of material
things is an even more prominent note in the earlier
Christian liturgies, in which "the Meal"1 (as it is
still called in Russia) is treated as in itself sacrificial.
The sacrifice is seen in the offering to God of the
simple fruits of the earth, represented by bread and
wine — •" a veritable consecration of old dead matter
itself somehow redeemed at last." 2 Our own Church,
in restoring this idea of a reasonable sacrifice and
developing it, would seem to repudiate the fifteenth-
century idea of sacrifice as tribute for sin offered
by a priestly caste, not as mouthpiece of, but in
substitution for, the whole people.

1 It is possible that the term " Mass" had originally the meaning
of meal.

2 Cf. Pater's Marius the Epicurean.

152 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

It is significant, as bearing upon our two doctrines
of the body and of fellowship, that Gospels and
Church should promise some special manifestation
of the everywhere-present God when "two or three
are gathered together in My name," and an even
more complete manifestation in this pre-eminently
social feast with its material symbols and the fellow-
ship of the common table. So dominant was the
communal aspect of the Eucharist in the early ages,
that the " This is My Body " is sometimes interpreted
as meaning the people gathered together into a
compact brotherhood, for Christ is to be found in the
body of men. and fellowship is heaven and the lack
of fellowship is hell (the mediaeval motto). St Paul
reproves the Corinthians for their individualistic
selfishness, "their avarice which is idolatry," their
separateness, turning the sacrament instituted as
sign of fellowship to " their own damnation," " not
discerning the Lord's Body " ; for the bread, he reminds
them, is the "fellowship of His Body, the cup the
fellowship of His Blood." " For one loaf, one body,
we the many are ; for all of us partake of the one
loaf."1 Our Prayer Book insists on this aspect in
demanding that in preparation for communion we
must be in love and charity with our neighbours.
Our homilies call the sacrament "the strait knot of
charity," and urge that abstention from the common
feast is unbrotherliness, and the partaking of the feast
will only "increase our damnation," unless we are
just as ready to procure our neighbour's health of
soul, wealth, commodity, and pleasure as our own.
1 St Paul.

THE SACRAMENTS 153

" Examine therefore and try thy good will towards
the children of God and towards that excellent
creature, thine own soul." Holy communion bears
witness to and has its root in the deep philosophic
truth that in God "all things hold together" (St
Paul), and " there is no object in the range of being
which does not in some way partake in the ONE
who embraced all things from the first in one single
existence, ... in the unity which permeates all
things."1 This thought dominates the traditions of
the Church, and in its light is interpreted the
Eucharist. " For as this bread was scattered upon
the mountains, and having been gathered together
became one, so also, O Lord, gather together Thy
Holy Church from every race and country and city
and village and household, and make it a living
Catholic Church."2 Even as late as 1550, the
Anglican theologian Lever writes : " As of divers
corns of wheat the liquor of water knoden into
dough is made one loaf of bread, so divers men, by
love and charity, which is the liquor of life, joined
into one congregation, being made as divers members
of one mystical body of Christ; whereby I say as
one example in the stead of many, learn that the
more gorgeous you yourselves be in silks and velvets,
the more shame it is for you to see others poor and
needy — being members of the same body."

At first the social character of the Eucharist was
made plainer by its association with the love feasts,

1 Dionysius, quoted by Westcott in Religious Thought in the West.

2 Liturgy of Sarapion, Prayer of Oblation ; cf. Cyp. Ep.t Ixxiii. 13;
cf. The Didache and the Apostolic Constitutions.

154 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

of which it was often the culmination. Consider how
frequently Christ connects meals with religion, and
thus warns against a false spirituality.

A great supper is used as a symbol of His Kingdom.
Emphasis is laid on meals eaten with His followers.
His ideal is that " ye may all eat and drink in My
Kingdom." He is made known to friends "in the
breaking of bread." Both early opponents and
apologists testify to the ideal of communion as
shown in the common meals of the early Christians,
where master and slave met as equals. Chrysostom
speaks of the common tables set up in the very
churches ; so from fellowship in eating and reverence
of the place, " men learnt to live in charity one with
the other." Clement speaks of the love feast and
Eucharist as that " sacrament of neighbourly love,"
so that " he who eats of this meal shall acquire the
Kingdom of God," for the God of fellowship is
present in the social eating of the nourishing bread
and drinking of the generous wine.

In early times each city would appear to have had
but one altar and one communion, one single act of
worship for the whole local body. Ignatius urges
men to observe "one Eucharist." An interesting
comment on this is the practice of the early Roman
Church, for in Rome the bishop alone celebrated at
the single altar of the central church; no other
Eucharists were allowed, and when the Christian
population grew too great for the one church, and
daughter churches arose, Eucharists were not multi-
plied, but portions of the consecrated elements were
conveyed by deacons from one altar to the various

THE SACRAMENTS 155

congregations. So the Mass witnesses, as is pointed
out by a great scientist, himself an agnostic, to the
Divine mystery of food,1 for in this meal we realise
the present God as ground both of the most exalted
and spiritual emotions and of the common materials
of physical existence; the processes of bodily sus-
tenance are Divine, for at the back of them is the Divine
Spirit. The common, despised, simple material things
went indeed to form, and actually became, Christ's
Body, that Body transmuted and glorified by His
Divine will, and He would teach us so to consecrate our
physical life, the materials of our bodily sustenance, in
the service of God and Commonwealth that even the
bodies of our bondage may become like to His glorious
Body, and our souls and bodies may be preserved unto
fulness of life. May this not be the meaning of St
Augustine's famous eucharistic utterance, " Be what
you see, and receive what you are ? "

There are two other rites commonly called sacra-
ments in the historic Churches of Christendom. One
of them, namely, Unction, has unfortunately fallen
into disuse in the English Church, although the
Lambeth Conference of 1908 makes some attempt to
revive it.

But even in the present Roman rite there is a
beautiful recognition of the body and its function, for
the dying man is anointed on eyes, ears, nostrils, lips,
hands, feet, on all the avenues of sense, while the
priest pleads to the most tender and merciful God
that the penitent may be forgiven sins of the lips
and eyes and of other sensuous organs. Although
1 Havelock Ellis, The New Spirit.

156 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the hope of recovery finds a place in the accompany-
ing prayers, it has been deposed from its dominant
position in the earlier rites. For unction in reality
was a sacrament of healing, administered not at the
close but at the beginning of an illness, and was a
witness to bodily health as the will of God for the
human race, and outward sign of the sacredness of
the body and for the hope of recovery. Could the
Christians who composed this prayer have sneered at
the material world ? In the Gregorian Sacramentary
we read : " Send forth, O Lord, from the heavens
Thy Holy Paraclete into the fatness of the olive
which Thou hast deigned to bring forth out of the
green tree for the refreshment of the body, that it
may become Thy holy benediction, to everyone who
touches this ointment a means of protection for mind
and body." Here again is suggested the possible
transmutation of matter into the " glorified body," at
the bidding of a will which is in harmony with the
Supreme Will and in harmony with its neighbours.
For health is harmony within the body, or wholeness.
May not this lesser harmony be in the same way
dependent on the harmony of men within the will and
Commonwealth of God ?

Marriage, more than any sacrament, excepting the
two great sacraments of the Gospel, involves our two
socialist dogmas concerning the body and the fellow-
ship, and denies that any of the primal instincts are
" common or unclean."

There have been Manichean currents of tremendous
force that have swept through different periods of the
Church's history, all but drowning the sane and

THE SACRAMENTS 157

wholesome wedding of the material and spiritual.
Her foes have been of her own household, but her
liturgies and official teaching have been marvellously
preserved from the prurient divorce of what God has
joined together. The fact that so often in practice
domestic union becomes vulgar and trivial, the
Church attributes to man's failure to regard the conse-
crated union of lovers as " Magnum Sacramentum, " l
as no mere gratification of the senses, no mere
artifice of society, but as belonging, like every other
great human institution "to a gracious economy,"
for "it embodies and presents a Divine mystery;
beginning from Heaven, it can speak simply and
bravely of that which belongs to earth. It discards
the Manichean dogma once and altogether. It claims
the whole region of human feelings and sympathies
as a sanctified region." 2 One of the grievances of the
Puritan enemies of the Anglican Church was the
frankly sensuous, " With my body I thee worship,"
of the Liturgy. The bridal psalm tells of the bride
as fruitful vine and of the fructifying earth. The
collect illegally omitted by drawing-room decadents
calls upon the Father, "by whose gracious gift mankind
is increased, that these two persons may be fruitful
in procreation of children." The ministers of marriage
are not the official priests, but the lovers, who, how-
ever, must receive the recognition of society (Church
and State), and who come into the body of the Church
to signify their willingness to submit their private
choice to public sanction. The most Catholic of
modern novelists has attempted to restore the

1 St Paul. 2 Maurice, The Church a Family.

158 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

robust purity of the matrimonial teaching of the
Prayer Book and early liturgies : l " She gave him
comprehension of the meaning of love, a word in
many mouths, not often explained. With her,
wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify
a new start in existence, a finer shoot of the tree
stoutly planted in good gross earth ; the senses
running their live sap and the mind companioning,
and the spirits made one by the whole natural con-
junction." "In sooth a happy prospect for the sons
and daughters of earth, divinely indicating more
than happiness, the speeding of us, compact of what
we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensuous
whirlpools to the creation of certain nobler races,
now very dimly imagined." The fellowship of
marriage is emphasised by Chrysostom where he
advises marriage with a poor rather than with a
wealthy wife, for " private property divides lovers " ;
and continues, " not even the bodies of married
people are private ; how can their money be ? One
man, one living creature, is what you both are now,
and do you still say mine? That word is accursed
and unholy and brought in by the devil. Things
far more needful than this God made wholly agree-
able to us. ... We cannot say — my light, my
sun, my sea."2 The true marriage is not only an
internal community but broadens out into social
teaching and the fulfilment of neighbourly duties.
It is valuable as training-ground for the exer-
cise of virtues which expand in widening circles

1 Meredith, Diana, ch. xxxvii.

2 Chrysostom, trans, by Charles Marson in Optimist, 1906.

THE SACRAMENTS 159

to our neighbours, to our country, and to other
nations.1 For, says a modern socialist leader, "is
there any community as united and effective as a
family? . . . All the relations of family life are
carried on in direct opposition to the principles of
political economy and the survival of the fittest. A
family is bound by ties of mutual love and helpful-
ness: the weakly child is not destroyed ; it is cherished
with extreme tenderness and care. The rule is vested
in the parents, and not knocked down to the highest
bidder. The brothers do not undersell each other ;
the women are better treated than the men, not worse,
as in the factories, and each member receives an equal
share of the commonwealth."2

It has been well said that the roots of universal
love are found in the intimate physical union of
lovers,3 for the heart of the lover goes out to every
creature that shares the loved one's delicious humanity.
" A great mystery " truly, by which St Paul meant
not a silly puzzle into which we must not inquire,
but something so vital, primal, and inspiring that it
transcends logic and escapes the nets of definition.
If men are God's family they must model their
public and political life on the basis of holy human
families, the members of which fulfil not each one his
own but every one the commonwealth. Monopolist
narrowness, want of mutual belief and liberty, bully-
ing, nagging, jealousy, the modern proprietary rights

1 Knox Little, Marriage, p. 243.
3 Blatchford, Merrie England^ id. edition, p. 118.
3 Ellis, New Spirit, p. 121 ; cf. several passages in the writings of
Balzac.

160 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

of the male1— all these too often destroy the holy
sacrament of marriage.

Finally, every sacrament bears witness that " there
is really a free society ... to which we all in our
inmost selves . . . belong — the Rose of Souls that
Dante beheld in Paradise, whose every petal is an
individual only through its union with all the rest —
the early Church's dream of an eternal fellowship
in Heaven and on earth, prototype of all the brother-
hoods and fellowships that exist on this or any other
planet."2

1 Cf. Chapter VII., pp. 173, 174-

2 Quoted in Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming of Age.

VII
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Poverty preventible — Material readjustments— Anti-socialist arguments
met by the fact of the Middle Ages — Prosperity of the people from
1450 — By their architecture ye shall know them — The meaning of
hospitals — The property of the Church — A defence of the monas-
teries— Various monastic ideals — The life and power of the demo-
cratic parish — The anti-feudalism of the Church's parochial system
— How far it was " the Golden Age " of the labourer— The Church
as mediator between barbarians and Romans — The Aristotelian
influence — Becket and Langton — For what did they fight — The
materialist conception of history challenged — The Crown and
the people — St Thomas Aquinas on property — The deadly sin
of avarice : instances — Interest- taking and buying in the cheapest
market — The socialistic influence of the confessional — Canon
law on common property — On usury — Papal bull, 1176, on
credit operations — The Church and mortgages — Innocent III. on
lawfulness of moderate interest for invalids — Church law clashes
with Roman law — Land and labour as sole sources of wealth — Mr
Ashley's misunderstanding of socialism — The Church and compul-
sion— Newman quoted on compulsion — Anarchist archdeacons and
bishops — The peasant revolt — Summary of the social aims of the
Church — The old order changeth, giving place to new.

II

VII
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

" It is not true that the Church of our ancestors was the organised
fraud which it suits fanatics to represent it ; it is not true that the
monasteries, priories, and nunneries were mere receptacles for all
uncleanness and lewdness ; it is not true that the great revenues of the
celibate clergy and of celibate recluses were squandered as a rule in
riotous living. As a mere question of religion, Catholicism was as
good as any creed which has ever found acceptance among men.
Abuses doubtless there were, and most of them were bitterly attacked
by members of the Church themselves ; tyranny and persecution there
were too, in many forms ; but the Church, as all know, was the one
body in which equality of conditions was the rule from the start.
There, at least, the man of ability, who outside her pale was forced to
bow down before some Norman baron whose ruffianly ancestor had
formed part of William's gang of marauders, could rise to a position in
which this rough, unlettered swashbuckler grovelled before him.
Sixtus V. was picked up out of the gutter ; our Englishman, Nicholas
Breakspear, Adrian IV., was a poor labourer's son ; and these are but
two instances out of thousands of distinguished ecclesiastics of humble
birth. However dangerous also the spiritual authority of the Church
may appear to us, it was used, for the most part, notwithstanding all
the hideous corruptions of the papal court in the days of the Borgias
and others, for the people and against the dominant class ; and its
influence, as history shows, was almost unbounded. Kings and barons
alike trembled before it. ... So I might go on in refutation of the
foolish idea that the greatest institution of the Middle Ages, the most
complete and widespread organisation ever known on this planet,
was a mere collection of idol-worshippers and incense- burners, and
its ecclesiastical establishments nothing but dens of iniquity. My
purpose, however, is not to champion the Catholic Church against the
attacks of ignorant historians, but to show briefly the useful functions
it fulfilled in the social economy of the time." — HYNDMAN, Historical
Basis of Socialism in England.

163

1 64 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

WHEN we are facing the fact of our twelve million
people on or below the hunger-line, of our hundreds
of thousands of semi-starved school-children, of our
three-farthings an hour rate for women and children,
working often over sixteen hours a day in the sweated
industries, of our large areas of unemployed and
underfed, and of our thousands of homeless, one
often hears it said that we are wrong in considering
these things preventible. Poverty will always be
with us. These conditions more or less exist in all
times. Mere legislation or reconstruction of in-
dustries, or economic readjustments, have over and
over again been proved entirely futile ; you cannot
help people by Act of Parliament ; it is ridiculous to
suppose that Lord Shaftesbury's Acts preventing the
employment of five-year-old children in factories
could have altered the condition of children in
factories ; children of five years are therefore still
employed in factories, because our friends say you
cannot alter evils by Act of Parliament. The fact
that they are not so employed any longer does not, of
course, trouble the anti-socialist Christian who argues
in this way.

Now, the argument that poverty is not preventible,
that no change in economic conditions could reduce
it, that there has always been more or less this huge
margin of unemployment, that there have always
been more or less large classes working sixteen hours
a day, that other large classes have always been
without a roof to their heads, must be met with a
direct denial. The appeal to history on this point is
conclusive.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 165

Let us consider the lives of the English people
during a hundred years of what is generally known as
the mediaeval period, from early in the fifteenth century.
There were, it must be admitted, two or three brief
periods, covering from two to three years each, of
extreme misery caused by plague and famine, but it
is remarkable how swiftly and completely the people
recovered from these periods. Moreover, the plagues
were admittedly accidental. There is no controversy
between the opponents of socialism and its adherents
on this point. With their usual want of logic, people
who assert that no mere outward changes can really
better a nation, assert with equal cheerfulness that
plagues are now stamped out wherever the mere
outward change of proper sanitation, more sunshine,
less crowding, greater cleanliness prevails. That
particular form of mediaeval misery, therefore, they
admit need hardly recur ; but for that particular form
the hundred years I have chosen presents a startling
contrast to the last hundred years in our history.
The critics of socialism assert that unemployment
is more or less inevitable : during that hundred years
there was no unemployment. The critics of socialism
assert that there will always be, and that there always
have been, large numbers of people working fourteen,
sixteen, and sometimes eighteen hours a day : during
that hundred years hardly anyone worked above eight
hours a day. The critics of socialism assert that a
minimum wage is an impossibility : during that
hundred years the minimum wage was in full
operation. The critics of socialism assert that
there have always been large numbers of home-

1 66 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

less people: during that hundred years no man
or woman was homeless. The critics of socialism
assert that women in industry must naturally work
longer hours than men and be paid less : during
that hundred years women worked the same number
of hours as men, and were often paid as much.1
We are told that a permanent class of wage-
earners, at the beck and call of capital, is a neces-
sary condition for the prosperity of a country :
the England of that hundred years had no such
permanent class.

Let us look more closely into the life of the period.
There did not exist the great gulf between rich and
poor which so many now regard as inevitable. Con-
ditions were rougher for all ; but a rough life is not
altogether to the bad if one is secure in food, clothing,
and shelter ; the great majority of the people lived
upon the land, and the artisan minority were particu-
larly prosperous. Their unions were strong; black-
legging was forbidden, holidays were frequent, and
almost every artisan became an independent master
worker, having passed through a few years of appren-
ticeship. He owned his own tools and was not at
the mercy of an employer. He was free in everything
excepting the chance of becoming a capitalist in the
modern sense, that is, of cornering essentials and
thereby enslaving other men. The type of man
whom we now delight to honour, the successful
plutocrat, no doubt existed, but he was rigidly kept

1 Mr Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Cent^^ry (1909), cites
instances to the contrary, but in the worst cases wages of women never
fell to anything approaching the starvation rates of pay for women in
our own day.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 167

under and regarded as a scoundrel by the whole
community.

But only one-tenth of the population lived in the
towns. Agriculture was carried on by tenants of the
manor, who themselves often owned a small piece of
land and were part-owners of the common land of the
neighbourhood ; their fuel cost them little or nothing,
as they had the right of free fuel from the forests ;
they had also the right of snaring wild animals, which
were very numerous. The poacher of to-day is but
instinctively claiming an ancient privilege of the
people. Serfdom had almost died out. The tenant
had formerly been obliged to cultivate his lord's land
on certain days of the week, in return for his lord's
protection ; this labour service had by now been to
a great extent commuted into a small rent to the
manor. It has been estimated that the peasant of
that day would be able to earn his rent for the
year by a few days' work. A day's earnings would
keep a labourer for a whole week. Bread and ale,
the staple food of the people, were under close muni-
cipal inspection, and there are several cases of towns
owning their own bakery. The artisan as well as
the peasant often owned a small piece of land.
Towns and villages were solidly and beautifully
built. The architecture of the day expresses the
life of a joyous people. Ruskin and William Morris
have pointed out how one may read the life and
fortunes of a people in their art; and if art be
the language of a nation, the language England
spoke in those days reveals a merry England in
fact and in deed.

1 68 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

The cathedrals and parish churches were built
and adorned for the most part by local craftsmen.
" We get fairly bewildered by the astonishing wealth
of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling which
there must have been in this England of ours in
times which, till lately, we have assumed to be
barbaric." l

We often read of hospitals in the literature of the
day ; these institutions, kept up from revenues from
land or other sources bequeathed by will, were not
always, nor indeed chiefly, hospitals for the sick, but
were houses for the old and disabled ; they were in
a real sense substitutes for old-age pensions. The
Church held about a third of the total wealth of
the country ; most of this was in landed property.
The monasteries were large landed proprietors; the
monks were often themselves peasants who had
escaped from the risks and hardship of secular life
into the security of the monastery. They were fellow-
workers alongside of their tenants, and " abbots and
priors were the best landlords in England." Theearliest
improvements in agriculture were due to the clergy.
The Church's internationalism led to the introduction
of new articles of cultivation. Immense monastic
revenues led to improved husbandry on a lavish
scale. "This general employment which as land-
lords resident among the people they afforded, the
improvements of the farms and of their own buildings
which they carried out, the excellent work in road-
making which they did (a task specially necessary
in those times), in addition to their action as public

1 Jessop, Before the Great Pillage, p. 25.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 169

alms-givers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, shows what
useful people many of these much-abused monks and
nuns really were. . . . That the Church as a whole held
its lands in great part as a trust for the people cannot
be disputed, and as the children of the people in great
part formed the hierarchy of the Church, Church
property in land then meant something very different
from Church property in land now." l

The monastic system is a curious instance of the
associative, one might almost say communistic,
tendency of the Christian religion. For the monk, in
the first instance, was he who dwelt alone, a hermit,
who had escaped from the dangers of a turbulent
pagan society. In some senses the monk might
almost be considered Protestant, individualist, im-
patient of the collective discipline of the Church
and its democratically elected bishops. There is in
St Jerome, the monk par excellence, a passage which
contrasts strangely with the main stream of collective
Church thought. Churchmen generally had held with
Clement of Alexandria that God would be found
among men dwelling together, and that terms of
citizenship were most descriptive of the Christian
life. But St Jerome speaks as a precursor almost of
John Bunyan the individualist, who finds salvation in
escape from the city. The founder of Christian
monasticism counsels us to escape from towns and
the haunts of men, that we may find God in the
desert. But so strong is the socialist principle in the
Church that these solitaries inevitably come together,
and are soon discovered to have formed themselves

1 Hyndman, Historic Basis of Socialism in England.

i7o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

into bodies wherein fellowship is the rule and com-
munism the practice. In the case of most of the later
monastic leaders, it is because the world of their day
is so anarchic and disunited, and because in fellowship
alone they can discover God, that they found their
communities. The Venerable Bede, for instance,
turning away from the rudeness of Saxon England
to the fellowship of the monastery, finds in that
fellowship a heavenly citizenship. Heaven was to
him the city, his monastery a room in the "urbs
ccelestis."

The ideals of the religious orders were not always
the same. The strictly monastic aim was the
perfecting of the individual in withdrawal from the
world, and the helping forward of the salvation of the
world by the prayers of persons on the vantage-ground
of seclusion. But the missionary orders — as, for
instance, the Franciscans and the Cistercians — flung
themselves out upon the world with all the force of
a collective enthusiasm.

But it is not to the monastery alone or chiefly that
we must look, if we would appreciate the value of the
Church's contribution to mediaeval life. Nor must we
overestimate the influence of the central government.
Municipal administration wasof much moreimportance,
and was very largely democratic. The ecclesiastical
parish was completely interwoven with the life of the
people. " Now the parish was the community of the
township organised for Church purposes, and subject
to Church discipline, with a constitution which recog-
nised the rights of the whole body as an aggregate
and the right of every adult member, whether man or

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 171

woman, to a voice in self-government, but at the same
time kept the self-governing community under a
system of inspection and restraint, by a central
authority outside the parish boundaries."1

The rector of the parish was its chairman, but not
its ruler. Finance was not under his control. The
parish clerk, gravediggers, and others were paid
servants, not 'of the rector, but of the parish. The
parish owned considerable properties — houses, lands,
flocks, herds, jewels, silver, gold, furniture, bells,
tapestry, crosses, candlesticks, vestments, carpets,
pictures, service-books, and a host of other things.

"All the tendency of the feudal system, working
through the manorial courts, was to keep the people
down. All the tendency of the parochial system,
working through the parish council, holding its
assemblies in the churches where the people met on
equal terms as children and servants of the living
God and members of one body in Christ Jesus, was
to lift the people up." 2

It must not be thought that this period was without
its economic miseries ; it is only in comparison with
the dark ages, with the individualism of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, that it can be called "the
Golden Age of the British labourer." It was a
comparatively Golden Age, because the bulk of the
working nation had some access to land and such
embryo forms of capital as existed, because plutocracy
was ruthlessly kept down, and restrictions of every
sort were placed upon the owners of private property.

1 Bishop Hobhouse, Somerset Record Society, vol. iv. p. ix.

2 Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage, p. 22.

172 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

If it be asked how this result had been obtained, the
causes of it will be found to be complex. The Gothic
invasion had introduced democratic elements into a
dying civilisation. Uprooted from their own soil and
in the first flush of conquest, the conquerors may well
have seemed passionate and brutal, fully deserving of
the contemptuous nickname " barbarian " which the
Romans had given them. The immediate result of
this inpouring of new human forces seemed to be
anarchy and confusion ; the only element in the dying
Empire which was able to withstand the shock of this
disintegration was the Catholic philosophy and
system. The democratically chosen bishops were
really leaders of the people, and stood for order and
fellowship in the midst of the prevailing chaos. They
were friends of the barbarians, as well as of the
Romans : the Church stood on no distinction ; for her
there was neither barbarian nor Scythian, Greek nor
Roman, bond nor free, and just as Church philosophy
had in earlier times been developed by fusion with
certain living Graeco-Roman ideas, so now it was
developed by its incorporation of the most living
tradition of the invaders. The conquerors found in
the Christian bishops men who withstood them to
the face in the matter of their passions and extrava-
gances, but they also found in them men who could
interpret what was finest in their own thought and
customs, and the new Europe believed and was
baptized. One sees in English life of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries a Christian philosophy and
economic system, strengthened by Teutonic thought
and custom, warring against the more individualistic

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 173

elements of feudalism which had their origin in the
individual private property theories of the earlier
Roman lawyers. To some extent the popularity of
Aristotle among the dominant Catholic philosophers
of this period may have inclined them to a less
communistic view of property than had obtained
among the earlier Fathers of the Church ; but this
view was in some part counteracted by the ideals of a
rival school of Catholic thought, a school well repre-
sented in the philosophy of Duns Scotus. But the
Christian Aristotelians must be considered to have
made their intellectual contribution to a Catholic
philosophy by their appeal to Aristotle, for the
Aristotelian note is no less necessary than the
Platonic to the building of a Christian ethic.
Socialists are not communists, and need have no
quarrel with the catholicised Aristotle of Aquinas.
We find Church law everywhere modifying the
secular laws of nations which had come under the
dominion of the Holy Roman Empire.

But during the eleventh and twelfth centuries in
England the codified law of the Church and the
uncodified laws of feudalism were in opposition.
The English people felt dimly that Anselm was
fighting for their liberties against despotism. For
fifty years after his death the influence of feudalism
increased, and the Crown tightened its hold upon
the Church. The bishops tended to become mere
officers of the Crown. Feudalism made much of
offences against property, little of offences against
persons. In the patriarchal or feudal idea of the
family, the husband has absolute right over the wife,

174 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the father over sons and daughters. Parents might
give their children in marriage without their consent.
Neither Scripture nor Church law gives support to
this monogamic despotism. Church law again put
strict limits to the feudal theory of obedience of
slaves and servants. As the reader realises the
singular justice, leniency, and humanity of the
Church's law, and the brutality of the customs of
the realm, death being the punishment for offences
against property, he will begin to understand the
tremendous issues involved in the struggle between
Church and State. In order to escape the secular
law, thousands of folk were taking Orders in the
Church ; gravediggers, bell - ringers, secretaries,
lawyers, lawyers' clerks, sextons, scholars, and many
others were in one or other of its seven Orders.
Tyndale, true precursor of Christo-capitalism, voiced
the ancient feudalism and the coming commercialism
when he fastened the charge of bearing u the mark of
the Beast" upon all who rebelled against the king,
or against their overlords, or against the nigger-
driving of the feudal family by taking Orders and so
escaping into comparative freedom. According to
him, the king could do no wrong, a parent was
absolute master of his family, a lord absolute over
his servants.

St Thomas of Canterbury (1117-1 170), in his resist-
ance to King Henry II., was therefore championing
the liberties of the people. He was driven by the
necessities of the situation to appeal to Rome, and
so to strengthen a power, beneficent in chaotic days,
but malevolent at a later period. He was claiming

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 175

for as large a portion of the English nation as possible
exemption from the uncertainties of the " customs of
the realm," and the more lenient and even treatment
of international Christian law, a law which we shall
recognise as embodying the underlying assump-
tions of socialism, and as not unlike it in some of
its actual and practical judgments. St Thomas
the martyr was canonised in the hearts of the
English people. From that date onwards through-
out Stephen's reign religion was a living reality,
and the Cistercian revival became strong enough to
wrest England from the confusion of feudalism and
prepared the way for the Great Charter. The quarrel
between John and the Pope (1207-1213) ended in the
victory of Rome and the realisation of Hildebrand's
dream. England had become a fief of the Papacy.
Stephen Langton, at first the servant and ultimately
the opponent of Rome, formulated a democratic
policy for the people. " Rights and liberties were no
longer to be vague and shadowy things half-veiled
in sentiment, they were to be written down fair in
black and white and embodied in a charter."1

On 1 5th June 1215, the signature of the Great
Charter by John at Runnymede confirmed Langton's
policy. But the Pope betrayed the archbishop, and
supported the king against the people, annulled the
Charter, excommunicated the barons who had signed
it, and suspended Langton for refusing to publish the
excommunication. The Charter was subsequently
confirmed by Honorius III., and the Church of
England was at peace.

1 Wakeman's Church History ', p. 130.

1 76 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

By the middle of the thirteenth century the
religious revival had spent its force. The monas-
teries had become large landholders. The clergy
were often non-resident and illiterate. The Black
Friars and the Grey Friars restored the faith of the
democracy. The monk had sought the salvation of
his own soul. The friars saved the soul of the nation,
and " Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellow-
ship is hell," became a common motto. Their warm
hearts and coarse wit won the masses. They invaded
sleepy parishes, were offered on occasion the hospi-
tality of the church, but more often preached without
the parson's leave on the village green, and stirred up
strife and life wherever they went. Their mission
throughout England led to the recognition of repre-
sentative government and the summoning of the first
parliament.

The idea of representation was borrowed from the
Church, who took her full share in the upbuilding of
democratic England. But from the time of John's
submission Pope and king are united in unholy
alliance against the democracy, and the official
clergy and courtiers are not often found on the
popular side.

Critics who adopt what is called the materialist
interpretation of history, an interpretation based
on the assumption that ideas do not create con-
ditions, but that those conditions create the idea,
would, we suppose, ignore the part played by the
Church in constructing a prosperous England. They
would say that the people of that epoch were
comparatively prosperous because they happened to

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 177

have some access to land and capital : that they had
such access is undeniable, but that they happened
to have it must be emphatically denied. Their
prosperity was not due to chance happenings, but to
deliberate beliefs and a deliberate exercise of the
collective will, which embodied itself in this material
access and socialistic legislation of various kinds.
Individualist Protestantism, as we shall see in a later
section, revives the old Roman theory of absolute
ownership. Collective Catholicism denies that concep-
tion, and, in denying it, is able to apply a theory of
land and of other forms of property which succeeded
to a large extent in drawing the sting of feudalism.
In this country, for instance, before the Reformation,
land was considered not to belong absolutely but
relatively to the lords of manors. In reality it
belonged to the king, and was given to the baron or
the Church community in return for certain services
to be rendered annually to the nation. But the king
himself was, at least in theory, and to a great extent
in practice, no Oriental despot, but representative of
the whole people. All land was ultimately Crown
land, and the Crown meant ultimately the people.
This interpretation of the land laws tallies with the
law of the Church.

Every age has its popular encyclopaedia. Harms-
worth is the popular encyclopaedist of the twentieth
century. St Thomas Aquinas was the popular
encyclopaedist of the thirteenth. St Thomas does not
hold the extremer communistic theories of some of
the early Fathers. He would allow some kinds of
private property. He holds that such property is not

12

178 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

indeed found in natural law, but that both property
and government are legitimate within certain bounds,
and are not the result of sin, nor in contradiction to
that earlier law, but are super-added to it by the good
human reason. While men may therefore hold certain
forms of private property, they must administer it, after
the necessities of their own position have been guaran-
teed, as being common to all. Their superfluity is com-
mon, is the right and property of the poor. In certain
cases of necessity " all things become common."

" Where there is such evident and urgent necessity
that it is manifest that help must be given from
whatever is at hand, as, for instance, if a person is in
danger and cannot otherwise be helped, then we may
lawfully give assistance from the property of others,
whether it be taken openly or by stealth."1

He devotes considerable space to questions of
buying and selling. Advantage must not be taken
of the necessity of the buyer, nor may the buyer
take advantage of the ignorance of the seller. He
decides, in spite of some of the earlier Fathers, that
certain forms of trading are lawful ; but it is dishonest
to engage in the exchange of commodities if one's
motive be gain, and not a modest livelihood. A
moderate income derived from trading, if you are
yourself actively engaged in the business, — such an
income as shall be adequate to the support of your
family and household, or that you may have to give
to the poor or to the public service, — is legitimate.
Such an income is to be considered as salary taken
for work rendered. He would seem to admit the

1 Quoted by R. W. Carlyle in the Economic Review, Jan. 1894. .

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 179

morality of moderate rent from houses,1 but interest
from anything else, whether in money or in kind, he
considers unlawful. Even if you forego the use of
money by which a profit might be made by yourself,
you have no right to claim interest on that account,
or for the risk you run as lender. The only form of
interest that Aquinas would allow is a small sum to
secure the lender against the possibility of the non-
return of the capital. He absolutely condemns specu-
lative trading, or gain resulting from a skilful use of
the markets. The adequate reward of labour, a
proper living wage, must be considered in determining
the price of commodities. He lays down the absolute
law that all commerce must base itself upon the
Gospel precept, " Whatsoever ye would that men
should do unto you, do ye also unto them." " He
clearly considers that in any particular country or
district there is for every article, at any particular
time, some one just price : that prices, accordingly,
should not vary with momentary supply and demand,
with individual caprice, or skill in the chaffering of
the market."2 The significance of St Thomas is
that he was not only an original thinker, but the
representative of the more moderate traditions of the
Church on these subjects.

It is valuable to notice that when the economic
revolution of the eleventh century, involving the
growth of towns, the formation of merchant bodies,
the establishment of markets, sought to justify a

1 Rent on land itself was but grudgingly permitted by the Church.
God's ultimate intention was common ownership. Rent, therefore,
could only be taken as payment for services annually rendered.

'2 Ashley, Economic History and Theory, vol. i. p. 146.

i8o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

theory of absolute individual property and unlimited
freedom of contract, it was met by organised resistance
on the part of the Church, with its two doctrines of
the just price and the sinfulness of interest. These
doctrines were enforced from the pulpit, in the confes-
sional, in the ecclesiastical courts ; " and we shall find
that, by the time that the period begins of legislative
activity on the part of the secular power, these two
rules have been so impressed on the consciences of men
that parliament, municipality, and gild endeavoured of
their own motion to secure obedience to them."1

It has been pointed out in a previous chapter that
the original of the confessional was essentially social
and democratic, and now that the Church had begun
to come into its kingdom, it exercised an enormous
influence in the affairs of men. It required above all
that penitents should examine themselves as to their
guilt in the matter of the seven deadly sins. One of
these sins was avarice ; covetousness or avarice was
defined as eagerness for gain, or the desire of what
is now called getting on, the desire to be rich. The
theologians, following St Paul and St Augustine,
and indeed the law of the Church, stigmatised this
desire to get on as idolatry. In Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales, the Good Parson gives as example of the deadly
sin that extreme enforcement of the legal rights of
the lords of land which prepared the way for the
modern system of competitive rents. St Chrysostom
had led the way centuries before in his definition of
covetousness as the desire for more things than those
to which our faculties can correspond — over-endow-

1 Ashley, Economic History and Theory, vol. i. p. 132.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 181

ment, we might call it. Virtue is the mean between
two vices : over-endowment or avarice is the one vice,
the opposite of which is under-endowment, or thrift,
which the Fathers as unanimously condemned. In
books for the training of confessors, the taking of
interest is always instanced as one of the chief forms
of the deadly sin ; buying in the cheapest market and
selling in the dearest is another form. The penitent
was obliged to confess such actions as these, and
could not be shriven until he had promised to make
such amends as were possible.1

This teaching is not only to be found in Aquinas
and other encyclopaedists and in popular manuals of
devotion, but becomes an integral part of Church law
itself. Canon law, or Church law, was only very
gradually codified. At first, like all forms of law, it
is found in floating traditions and customs. In course
of its compilation, it is developed or modified accord-
ing to the particular tendencies of the age. There are
several strata of Canon law; the first compilation
belongs to the middle of the twelfth century. Con-
siderable additions are made about a hundred years
later ; a third compilation, now considerably swollen,
bears the date of 1298; a fourth belongs to the early
fourteenth century. The first two compilations, as we
should expect, are more frankly social-democratic
than the later, or rather, the later reiterate the earlier
law with all kinds of reserves and modifications. But
the law of the Western Church lays it down that, in
God's original intention for the world, the use of all
that is in the world ought to be common to all men,

1 Cf. Marson, Vox Clamantium, p. 215.

1 82 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

The earlier compilations, unimpeded by later reserves,
prohibit every kind of money interest. If you lend
money to a man expecting to receive from him more
than you have given, you are a usurer. " Usury is
whatever is added to the capital, whether it be food,
clothing, or whatever else you like to call it."1 All
payment of money in return for the giving of credit
is usury. Prohibition of this practice appears first
in a bull directed by Alexander III. in 1176 to the
Archbishop of Genoa, which city was then struggling
with Pisa for commercial supremacy in the Medi-
terranean. " You tell us it often happens in your city
that people buy pepper, or cinnamon, or other wares at
the time not worth more than £$ promising to pay those
from whom they receive them £6 at the appointed
time. Though contracts of this kind and under
such a form cannot strictly be called usuries, yet
nevertheless the vendors incur guilt, unless they
are really doubtful whether the wares will be worth
more or less at the time of payment. Your citizens
therefore will do well, for their own salvation, to cease
from such contracts."2 St Thomas Aquinas had
said : " A man has not the right to do what he likes
with his own," and this becomes the law of the Church.
In some cases, a lender who had not been promptly
paid back the capital had taken possession of the
poor man's land.3 The Canon law in such cases
laid it down as sin, if he did not restore the land
immediately he had received from its produce the
value of the sum originally lent. The law appears to

1 Ashley, vol. i. p. 158. 2 Quoted by Ashley, vol. i. p. 160.

8 Ashley, vol. i. p. 159.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 183

include under the sin of usury the action of those
who do not lend themselves, but retain what their
fathers, or those whose wealth they have inherited,
had received through usury, and also to condemn
those who borrow at a low rate of interest to lend at a
greater. This, in any case, is condemned in a manual
for confessors in wide use in the later Middle Ages.
The Jewish law on economic questions is often
referred to, as are also the precepts of the Gospel.
Rent on houses is apparently allowed, and in the case
of those who could not earn their own living, Innocent
III. had allowed that their money might be committed
to a merchant for the obtaining of moderate gain.
The first legal prohibition of usury was passed by the
Council of Nicaea in 325, but only applied to the
clergy ; the prohibition was extended to the laity in
Western Europe by the capitularies of Charles the
Great and the councils of the ninth century. Church
legislation clashed with the Roman law, which was
studied by the secular lawyers as the highest embodi-
ment of human wisdom, and which permitted usury,
enforcing the payment of interest as well as capital.

The capitalist had no right to a reward, in the
earlier opinion of the Church, unless of course his
remuneration was not that of a capitalist, but of an
actual trader or manager. The living wage was
always insisted on ; but it is in the Church's legal
theory of the sources of wealth that Canon law con-
flicts most directly with modern political economy.

It has been usual until recently, with the rank and file
of modern economists, to speak of three "factors," "instru-
ments," " agents," or " requisites " in production, viz. land.

i84 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

labour, and capital, and to put them all on very much the
same level of importance. Mediaeval thinkers saw but two,
land and labour. The land was the ultimate source of all
wealth ; but it needed human labour to win from it what it
was able to provide. Labour, therefore, as the one element
in production which depended on the human will, became
the centre of their doctrine. All wealth was due to the
employment of labour on the materials furnished by nature;
and only by proving that labour had been engaged in
bringing about the result could the acquisition of wealth by
individuals be justified. " God and the labourer," as one
widely read theologian expressed it, " are the true lords of
all that serves for the use of man. All others are either
distributors or beggars " ; and he goes on to explain that the
clergy and gentry are debtors to the husbandmen and crafts-
men, and only deserve their higher honour and reward so
far as they fitly perform those duties, as "ruling classes,"
which involve greater labour and greater peril. The doctrine
had thus a close resemblance to that of modern socialists ;
labour it regarded both as the sole (human) cause of wealth,
and also as the only just claim to the possession of wealth.1

Mr Ashley goes on to say that the canonist
doctrine only differed from modern socialist teach-
ing on this point, in that it allowed varying rates of
remuneration for different kinds of services. This,
however, is a mistake, for modern socialists allow
that such varying rates will, in all probability, obtain
in the socialised state.

It is sometimes objected by Christian critics of
socialism that it involves compulsion, and that the
Church can have nothing to do with compulsory
measures. This argument has been partly considered
in a previous chapter.

The early Christian had no political rights ; the
political power of the Empire was used to crush

1 Ashley, vol. i. p. 393.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 185

them out of existence. It is little short of amazing
that under such circumstances their leaders should
not have developed a theory of the essential evil of
government and of all compulsion, especially if they
had had in their minds a picture of a non-resistant
Christ, and were under the guidance of His Holy
Spirit. Their own socialist philosophy, the exist-
ence of which these particular critics do not seem to
deny, could under these circumstances only function
in voluntary experiments, in semi-communism, in the
giving of alms considered as a repayment to the
poor, as a debt of justice. But so far from holding
that State compulsion was essentially antichristian,
they developed the doctrine that State compulsion,
the pagan compulsion that was crushing them out
of existence, was in its essence Divine. We find in
Church tradition nothing of that horror of the State
which haunts the mind of so thorough-going an
individualist as Herbert Spencer. St Basil defines
the State as an organised whole, the parts of which
are men trained out of separate aims into common
life. A particularly autocratic ruler or despotic form
of that State was from time to time fiercely opposed.
We have already referred to St Ambrose's opposi-
tion to the Emperor, and there are in later centuries
treatises on kingship which are full of warning. The
king must appoint rulers who must protect the weak,
and not lord it over his subjects who are actually
their equals. There are brave sermons in the ninth
century, especially on the king as champion of the
poor, and coronation addresses warning kings of the
fate of tyrants. Sedulius Scotus threatens ruin to

1 86 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

evil monarchs, who are described as lions and wolves.
They are no true kings, but tyrants. " They reign, but
not by Me." But even these opponents of particular
tyrants are not led into a general opposition to
governments and their compulsions.

There was never any question, if the Church
should itself be in the position to obtain political
influence, of refusing that position ; and, in point of
fact, immediately it was able to function politically it
did so, and used its power in what our critics them-
selves call a socialist direction. John Henry Newman,
still an orthodox Anglican, and as always in politics
a conservative, has no doubts upon this point : —

Strictly speaking, the Christian Church has been a
visible society with necessarily a political power and party.
It may be a party triumphant or a party under persecution,
but a party it must always be prior in existence to the civil
institutions with which it is surrounded, and from its latent
divinity formidable and influential to the end of time. . . .
If the primitive believers did not interfere with the acts of
the civil government, it was merely because they had no
rights enabling them legally to do so. Where they have
rights the case is different. . . . Since there is a popular
misconception that Christians, and especially the clergy as
such, have no concern in temporal affairs, it is expedient
to take every opportunity of formally denying the position
and demanding a proof of it. In truth, the Church was
framed for the express purpose of interfering or (as irreligious
men will say) meddling with the world.1

Society works so smoothly and politely for the
comfortable classes that they forget that the civilisa-
tion which secures them in their comforts rests
ultimately upon force. By force they took the

1 Newman, History of the Arians, part ii. chap. iii. p. 264. Quoted
by Marson, ibid.} p. 201,

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 187

people's land ; by force they secure to themselves a
certainty of interest upon the wealth produced by
the majority : the rate is recoverable at law. For
behind the ballot box and parliamentary laws are
the bars of prisons, the batons of the police, and the
bayonets of soldiers. They do not question com-
pulsory government now. They are only shocked
when a just kind of compulsion is suggested as
substitute for an unjust. Anarchy strictly means
no government, no compulsion. It is a curious
position that we should have to teach Conservatives
not to use anarchist arguments. Man, as the Chris-
tian religion teaches us, is a social and interdependent
animal. By the divine law of his nature he lives in
society, and the fact of society cannot be considered
without the fact of force of some sort and in some
degree. If we were to be independent, says St
Chrysostom, " should we not be untamable wild
beasts? By force and necessity God has subjected
us to one another" (2 Cor., Homily 17).

For these reasons Christians who have been
trained to think will not use the argument that
socialism is necessarily wicked because it involves
compulsion. There is nothing in their New Testa-
ments to lead them to such a supposition ; everything
in their traditions contradicts it.

It may be thought that I have drawn too roseate a
picture of the Middle Ages, and that, even if it has
been proved that Church thought and Church legisla-
tion modified and corrected secular law in a socialist
direction, the actual results did not amount to much.
Some will bring forward the evidence of the peasants'

1 88 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

rising as conflicting with my contentions. What
cause was there for revolution if grievances were so
few ? But this rebellion predates my period, and
was itself among the many causes that led to the
later prosperity. Moreover, few people understand
revolutions. The slums never revolt. There is a
point at which all spirit of revolt is ground out of the
people. " It is a popular fallacy that long-continued
oppression and misery cause revolutionary impatience.
On the contrary, it is while the bit is new in the
mustang's mouth that it rears and plunges. To the
fellahin of Egypt poverty and exploitation seem as
inevitable as the fall of night and the coming of
death." 1 When a people saturated with memories of
better days are forced under the yoke, rebellion is
inevitable. Church tradition was with them ; the
landed plutocracy and ecclesiastical officialdom were
against them. It was the rising of a Catholic
democracy appealing to their religion in justification
of rebellion. They were led by priests and friars —
Wat Tyler, John Ball, Jack Straw — who, if they
knew little of Canon law, knew much of the Gospel
to which itself appealed. For over twenty years
John Ball and other priests had been preaching up
and down the countryside. Three archbishops had
opposed them. The sermon that led Archbishop
Langham to have him arrested and imprisoned is
characteristic of this agitation.

In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen ;
no man ought to become bond unless he has done treason
to his lord, such treason as Lucifer did to God. But you

1 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis ; p. 16.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 189

and your lords, good people, are neither angels nor spirits ;
both you and they are men, men formed in the same
similitude. Why then should you be kept like brute beasts ?
and why, if you labour, should you have no wages ?

Good people, things will never go well in England so
long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom men
call lords greater folk than we? On what ground have
they deserved it if all came from the same father and
mother, Adam and Eve ? How can they say or prove that
they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain
for them what they spend in their pride ? 1

One of John Ball's letters, a signal for the rising,
commences : " John Ball, Priest of St Mary's, greets
well all manner of men, and bids them, in the name
of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to stand
together manfully in truth." The organisation of the
peasant clubs throughout various counties, and their
intercommunion, was for the most part the work of
the clergy of the English Church. " Rarely has a
democratic movement produced such men of character
and capacity as the great uprising of 1381 produced ;
rarely has a people responded to its leaders as the
people responded in that year."

What, then, were the aims of the Church in the
earlier Middle Ages, in so far as they affected the
material and social life of men ? The attempt to
develop the tradition of the Gospel and the early
Fathers, and to apply it to the social life of their
age. The opposition to interest, the doctrine of just
price and living wage, the regulations of commerce
and agriculture, were methods expressing the Church's
desire that men should live justly in the bond of

1 Wat Tyler and the Great Uprising* by Joseph Clayton.

190 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

fellowship, that the Kingdom of God might be
established in their midst. We have noted the
intimacy between theology and politics in Canon law.
The greatest book of the Middle Ages, dealing at
such length with economic questions, is given a
theological title (the Summa Theologia). Anything
approaching a defence of plutocracy or an individu-
alistic commercialism is branded as heresy. The
modern divorce between theory and practice, between
God and man, between theology and politics would have
got short shrift in those days ; heresy was not only
deflection from right theological thinking, but accord-
ing to a Church law of 1 3 1 1, to quote one among many
instances, " If anyone fall into the error of daring
pertinaciously to affirm that to engage in usury is not
a sin, we decree that he shall be punished as a
heretic, and enjoin all ordinaries and inquisitors to
proceed with rigour against any suspected of this
heresy." l

There has been more than one attempt, on the part
of certain critics, to do away with the value, in a
socialist direction, of the early and mediaeval anti-
usury pronouncements and legislation. The opposi-
tion, it is contended, is based on an absurd miscon-
ception of the nature of money. But the mediaeval
conception of money was purely incidental. If one of
the arguments used to defend a certain proposition is
discovered to be unsound, it does not necessarily
invalidate that proposition, nor does its defender
abandon the position for that reason. And what was
the essential position of the Church ? That the poor

1 Ashley, vol. ii. p. 150.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 191

should not be exploited ; that all should be, in their
various stations, contributors and producers. It was
merely a repetition of the earlier economic law, " If any
will not work, neither shall he eat."

We are not bound by the letter of the earlier Canon
law, though, if we were so bound in it, we should be
compelled to fight the present system to the death.
We are bound by the spirit of that law, for it is the
spirit of the earlier tradition and of the Gospel. A
new form or outward letter is developing in our own
day, which more adequately safeguards and expresses
the Church's philosophy of the common life. That
form is economic socialism.

VIII
THE REFORMATION

Recapitulation — Protestant and Catholic ideas contrasted — Protestant
individualism the mother of modern commercialism — Individualistic
and Puritan tendencies in Catholic Communions — Modifications and
evasions of the Canon law — Mr Ashley whitewashes the later
practice of the Church — Jesuit and Calvinist defences of com-
mercialism — Molinseus : a farcical condemnation, 1 546 — Pius
VIII, 1830 : contrast with St Thomas Aquinas — Rigorism and
corruption — John Major, 1600, Papist and anti-Catholic — The
Blessed Thomas More's evidence on the miseries of the poor —
Protestantism indirectly pro-plutocratic — Calvin, the true and
honest Protestant — More and Calvin contrasted — Protestantism
boldly justifies usury — Lutheranism, a compromise — Luther
supported by the plutocracy : attacks the peasants — Luther some-
times denies the right of usury — Melancthon, the complete Pro-
testant individualist — Nitti's evidence on Church leniency and
feudal severity — Papal claims and pre-Reformation abuses — The
English Reformation and the people's religion — The Great Pillage
— Thomas Hancock's quotation — The Anglican interdependent
ideal is Catholic — Papist uniformity broke unity — Cranmer's
action quoted — Lever on the parliamentary permission to usury —
His protest effectual — Anglican bishops denounce the aristocracy
and plutocracy— The Anglican Church against interest and land-
grabbing—jewel on five per cent, as theft and murder— Latimer
before the landlords — Latimer quoted by Bishop Gore — Other
Anglican divines quoted— Protestant leaven at work : Bullinger's
decades — Anti-democratic Puritanism — William Laud, the martyr-
archbishop— Laud, the enemy of property and Puritanism — The
Puritan "liberty" and its defence of slavery — Individualistic
attack on the liturgy and catechism — Is the Papal Church the
friend of the poor ? — Between the millstones — The Restoration.

VIII

THE REFORMATION

" The enormous increase of money which had been produced by the
trade of Uzziah's reign threatened to overwhelm the simple economy
under which every family had its croft. As in many another land and
period, the social problem was the descent of wealthy men, land-hungry,
upon the rural districts. They made the poor their debtors, and
bought out the peasant proprietors. They absorbed into their power
numbers of homes, and had at their individual disposal the lives and
the happiness of thousands of their fellow-countrymen. Isaiah had
cried, ' Woe upon them that join house to house, that lay field to field,
till there be no room for the common people, and the inhabitants of the
rural districts grow fewer and fewer.' Micah pictures the recklessness
of those plutocrats — the fatal ease with which their wealth enabled
them to dispossess the yeomen of Judah. ' They covet fields and seize
them, houses and lift them up. So they crush a good man and his
home, a man and his heritage.' This is the evil — the ease with which
wrong is done in the country ! ' It lies to the power of their hands ;
they covet and seize.' And what is it that they get so easily — not
merely field and house, so much land and stone and lime ; it is human
life, with all that makes up personal independence, and the security of
home and of the family. . . . The tyranny of wealth was aided by the
bribed and unjust judges. . . . But meantime Micah feels that by
themselves the economic wrongs explain and justify the doom impending
upon the nation. . . . The rich in their immoral confidence that
Jehovah was neither weakened nor could permit such a disaster to fall
on His own people, tell the prophet that his sentence of doom on the
nation, and especially on themselves, is absurd, impossible. They cry
the eternal cry of respectability : ' God can mean no harm to the like
of us. His words are good to them that walk uprightly, and we are
conscious of being such. What you, prophets, have charged us with

V

196 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

are nothing but natural transactions.' . . . They pride themselves that
all is stable and God is with them ; . . . they feel at ease, yet injustice
can never mean rest. . . .

* ' While Micah spoke he had wasted lives and bent backs before him.
His speech is elliptic till you see his finger pointing at them. Pinched
peasant-faces peer between all his words and fill the ellipses. And
among the living poor to-day are there not starved and bitter faces —
bodies with the blood sucked from them, with the Divine image crushed
out of them ? . . . Many families of the middle class are nourished
by the waste of the lives of the poor. To a large employer of labour,
who was complaining that his employees, by refusing to live at the low
scale of the Belgian workmen, were driving trade out of the country,
the present writer once said : ' Would it not meet your wishes if,
instead of your workmen being levelled down, the Belgians were
levelled up ?' His answer was, ' I care not so long as I get my profits.'
He was a religious man, a liberal giver to his Church, and he died
leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds." — GEORGE ADAM
SMITH, The Twelve Prophets, chap, xxvi.1

WE have seen that the Catholic conception of
religion involves two theories which dominate modern
socialism, theories concerning the body and concern-
ing fellowship. The doctrine of both Church and
socialism concerning the body is, that outward,
sensuous, material things count ; that to treat man's
body as vile or of no account is to wound his whole
personality ; to ignore man's physical needs is
sacrilege ; that, though man does not live by bread
alone, he does live by bread ; that the physical
instincts, though dangerous and often leading men
into sin, are not essentially evil but good ; that the
mission of the Church is to redeem, not ghosts nor
beasts, nor mere creatures of intellect, but men ; and
that man is a tri-unity of body, mind, and spirit. The
doctrine of both the Church and socialism concerning

1 Compare this quotation with the evidence of the state of England in
the following chapter.

THE REFORMATION 197

fellowship is that the individual is not redeemed,
saved, built up into a rich and generous personality
in isolation, but in association. There is a wide sense
in which the mediaeval phrase, " Extra ecclesiam nulla
salus," is true.

When the Catholic philosophy dominated Europe,
we have seen it express itself in economic theories,
and to some extent practice, which would be described
by individualists of to-day as disastrous socialism.

It should be made quite clear that the mediaeval
Church was not in practice dominant, but was only
able considerably to modify existing anti-Christian
ideas and institutions. It must again be insisted
that this modification was not identical with economic
socialism, but that the main lines of attack by
Churchmen and others to-day upon economic socialism
are equally an attack upon the practice of their Church
in its quick and robust ages, and upon the funda-
mental and orthodox ideals of Catholicism which
formerly expressed themselves in anti-interest and
in sumptuary legislation, and now express themselves
in economic socialism. If we contrast the Protestant
conception of religion with the Catholic, and trace
the course of economic history after the Reformation,
we shall notice that in both theological doctrine and
economic practice Protestantism directly contradicts
the Catholic ideal. We must, however, remember
that no man is absolutely Protestant or Catholic, for
no man is absolutely logical.

Luther, for instance, retains many Catholic ideas ;
Calvin is more essentially Protestant ; and immediately
we have said that, we remember that Luther was not

i98 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

uncompromisingly opposed to the earlier mediaeval
conception of economics, while Calvin went beyond
even the Jesuits in his approval of usury. We shall
find the Roman Church becoming more and more
Protestant, laying less and less stress on the dogmas
of fellowship and of material sanctity. It is often and
rightly said that Protestant individualism is the mother
of modern commercialism ; but we must remember
that there are certain Catholic tendencies in Protestant
bodies, especially in the present development of those
bodies, and that anti-Catholic individualism has made
considerable inroads into the historic Churches, the
Church of Rome, the Church of Russia, the Church
of England.

These individualistic tendencies are to be noticed
in the pre-Reformation period. Just as there has from
time to time been a wave of Puritanism sweeping over
the life of Catholic bodies which came near to denying
the orthodox doctrine of the body, so there have been
waves of individualism in Catholic countries, theories
which came near to denying the orthodox doctrine
concerning fellowship. A wave of this kind was
passing over Europe in the later Middle Ages. A
Puritan tendency is noticeable in the pre-Reformation
Churches of France and England. Preachers who
fancied themselves to be unimpeachable Catholics
were popularising a base Sabbatarianism, appealing
to the intricate outward letter of the Jewish law for
a precedent, and interpreting that letter in the most
lifeless and inhuman sense. But neither the Roman
Church nor the post-Reformation English Church
would officially endorse such heresy ; the Roman

THE REFORMATION 199

Church was more willing to compromise with the
heresy that arose in another direction. Towards the
end of the Middle Ages ecclesiastical lawyers and
theologians were beginning to make all kinds of
evasions in the matter of the doctrine of fellowship
and its expression in socialistic legislation. Even
Mr Ashley, who stands almost alone among expert
historians of the period, in his endeavour to minimise
the break between earlier and later canonists, admits
that these modifications and evasions do sometimes
amount to the assumption of an altogether new
position. Langenstein, even late in the fourteenth
century, only defends rent charges from the guilt of
usury under special circumstances. To live upon
rents, if such a source of income enabled nobles to
live in luxurious idleness, or plebeians to desert honest
toil, is a violation of the Divine command, " In the
sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread." During the
fourteenth century the more conservative theologians
still brought all commercial and political practices to
that particular test : did they or did they not enable
men to live by means of rent and interest upon the
wealth produced by the working communities, and
to give no adequate service for wealth so extracted
from the producers ? Church officialdom, however,
begins to speak with less certain voice, and veers
round to the side of parliaments of landlords and
plutocrats. Mr Ashley would have us believe that,
with the rise of the middle classes and the develop-
ment of modern commercialism, the Church merely
adapted her teaching to the new needs, altering the
letter, but preserving the spirit. The later canonists

200 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

met the business man's desire for exemption from
the earlier law concerning usury, not by a frank
avowal that usury was justifiable, but by allowance
of an infinite number of exceptions to the general
rule. Mr Ashley is right when he says that " the
original prohibition had really aimed at preventing
the oppression of the weak by the economically
strong," but he goes on to say that the "gradual
exemption from the prohibition of methods of employ-
ing money which did not involve oppression, instead
of obscuring the original principle, may have brought
it out more clearly." It is the assumption that the
methods of middle-class commercialism do not involve
oppression which must be emphatically challenged.
The judgments of the later Papal courts in the matter
of rent charges are suspect, when we remember that
a large part of the revenues of ecclesiastical bodies
consisted of such charges. The pro-rent judgments
of Martin V. and of Calixtus III. become the basis
of an actual addition to the Canon law, which, however,
dates in the post-Reformation period.

It is immensely significant that the philosophy of
the undivided Church, and the political expressions of
that philosophy, should have been frankly socialistic ;
that after the schism of East and West the socialist
teaching is not quite so evident, but that the Western
Church was still making an effort to uphold the
social tradition and to apply it ; that the socialism
of the Church is fainter and less evident in the years
immediately preceding the Reformation, and that the
further schism known as the Reformation, which rent
the body of Christ into many fragments, marks the

THE REFORMATION 201

decline of Catholic socialism, that is, of essential
Catholicism in both the Protestant and the Papal
communions. The Franciscans are among the worst
offenders ; their popularity was therefore great with
the business men and financiers of the times. The
Jesuits, of course, being a purely post-Reformation
Order, are the defenders of individualist commercial-
ism as against the older Catholic belief; they are
anxious to prevent the moral standards of the Church
from coming into too violent a collision with the
necessities of everyday life. But the Jesuits were
only filling up the measure of their immediate
fathers, for the Lateran Council, under Leo X.,
had adopted many of the modifications and contra-
dictions of the later canonists, defining usury merely
as " gain sought to be acquired from the use of a thing
not in itself fruitful without labour, expense, or risk
on the part of the lender." Mr Ashley himself admits
that from this time " Churchmen were more and more
reconciled to the idea of payment for the use of money,
even by the poor who could make no business investment
of the loan" 1 In face of this new departure, the frank
justification of usury in 1546 by Molinaeus is not
surprising, and he might well have been spared the
charge of heresy brought against him by those who
would preserve the condemnation of the term usury,
when they had altogether ceased to condemn the
thing.

It may be added that leaders of the Roman Church
have been more and more inclined to justify the
principle of usury, but that even the Congregation of
1 Cf. Ashley, ii. p. 447.

202 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the Holy Office, with the approval of Pius VIII., in
1830 did not dare whitewash usurers. They decided
that those persons who regarded the fact that the
civil law fixed a certain rate of interest as in itself a
sufficient reason for taking interest were " not to be
disturbed." l Contrast this with St Thomas Aquinas,
who distinctly lays it down that even if interest is
permitted by law, that does not make the action any
less guilty.2

The defenders of this new departure in the direction
of commercialism have to account for the fact that it
belongs to a period admitted by Protestants and
Romanists alike to be corrupt, It was an age of
literalism which may be compared, for its sheer
futility, with the rigorist and literalist age which
preceded the coming of Christ. In both periods
religion had come to consist in detailed obedience
to ceremonial laws which had become meaningless.
In both ages the Pharisees, who were lovers of money,
saw to it that modifications should be made in favour
of those who were able to purchase them. The
monasteries were in their decadence; their later
alms-givings encouraged rascally idlers, and were not
of much help to the genuine poor. The motive of
alms-giving was even corrupted. People were to give
liberally, not because alms was a just debt and we
must hunger and thirst after justice, but because
heavenly comfort in the future could so be purchased,
and the pains of purgatory be lessened. Masses for
the dead, which in their essential idea are defensible

1 Churches and Usury, A. S. Rose, p. 31.

2 Cf. R. W. Carlyle, Economic Review, January 1894.

THE REFORMATION 203

enough, were actually defended for the grossest
reasons. The Mass itself, the social meal which
had been the safeguard of the Catholic ideal of
fellowship, had been turned into a private, individual-
istic affair. Religion was becoming a question of
payment, and the pious were those who had the
longest purse. The liberal foundations of hospitals
for the relief of the sick and needy had been diverted
into the pockets of lazy and plutocratic priests, who
thus lived upon the bounty of the poor. Glaring
abuses in connection with the doctrine of indulgences
were but one of many signs of the general decadence.
It was all very well for a later canonist, John Major,
a Scotchman,1 to urge the prohibition of vagabondage
and begging ; it was only part of his general policy,
for he had "shown himself open to the lessons of
practical life," in accepting Eck's1 bold attempt to
justify the taking of interest in the modern sense; but
vagabondage and beggary had been enormously
increased by the agrarian changes which deprived
tenants and cottagers of their land and made them
wanderers on the face of the earth. The Blessed
Thomas More thus describes the results of the
evictions then taking place : —

" By one means or other, either by hook or crook, they
must needs depart away, poor wretched souls — men, women,
husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woful mothers
with their young babes, and their whole household, small in
substance and much in number, as husbandry requireth
many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known
and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All
their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it

1 A Papist writer, circ. 1600.

204 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

might well abide the sale, yet, being suddenly thrust out,
they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And
when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what
can they then else do but steal, and then justly, pardy,
be hanged, or else go about abegging ? And yet then also
they be cased in prison as vagabonds, because they go about
and work not ; whom no man will set to work, though they
never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one
shepherd or hefdman is enough to eat up that ground with
cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many
hands were requisite."

The Act of 1533-34, limiting the number of sheep any
one man might keep, gives a similar account. Owing, it
declares, to the union of farms and the change from arable
to pasture, " a marvellous number of the people of this realm
... be so discouraged with misery and poverty that they
fall daily to theft, robbery and other inconvenience, or
pitifully die from hunger and cold."1

I have said that Protestantism has its expression
in economic practice, and that both in philosophy and
practice it is the opposite of that Catholic theory of
life to which the earlier Church was moving ; I have
suggested that in a very real sense the Roman Church
has narrowed down into an introspective Protestant-
ism, since the schismatic period of the Reformation.
It is curious to notice that the Council of Trent,
although it reformed many of the grosser external
abuses, tied the Papal communion down to rigorist
and anti-Catholic conceptions. Meanwhile, on the
Continent at least, religion was by the Protestants
being switched off the human democratic line, on to
lines which would not bring it into conflict with the
economic developments of the middle classes ; for
when one speaks of the economic expression of

1 Quoted by Ashley, vol. ii. p. 353.

THE REFORMATION 205

Protestantism, one must remember that it is not
direct but indirect. For the Protestant religion, in
its clearest and most logical aspect, divorces body
from spirit, and preaches that our faith is alone con-
cerned with men's individual souls and with questions
of spirituality. There have been attempts made
to prove that Luther and Calvin were directly
concerned as religious teachers with social reform, in
that they contributed to a theory of the separate
functions of Church and State which the majority
of people nowadays have come to accept. Religion
they held to be concerned with the spiritual side of
man, statecraft with the material. This theory may
or may not incidentally have led to wise modern
views, but in its origins it only serves to prove my
point. By teaching that religion, as such, is not
concerned with politics, Protestantism has played
into the hands of plutocracy, and has rightly found
among plutocrats its keenest defenders.

Hence the Continental Reformation may, in some
senses, be considered to have completed the corruption
of the immediately pre-Reformation Church ; for
although the protest was on the side of honesty, as
against evasion and a ceremonialism which had once
lived, but had now stiffened into the rigidity of a corpse,
yet it was on the side of such honesty as that of
Molinseus,whom we have seen demanding that tortuous
evasions should be abandoned, not that men might
return to the earlier condemnation of usury, but that
they might frankly defend it by an honest break with
their traditions. If one would study Protestantism
in its essence, it is to Calvin rather than to Luther

206 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

that one must go. Calvin hated indulgences, hated the
buying and selling of religion, hated the later evasions
of Canon law ; so did Sir Thomas More. Both were
honest, both attacked the corruptions of their age;
but where More desired an honest Catholicism, Calvin
desired an honest Protestantism ; it was not only
dead ceremonial he objected to, but ceremonial of
any sort; it was not only the petty evasions of
Canon law he minded, but the Canon law of which
they were the evasions. More was literally a reformer,
for he urged men to re-form an ancient Church by
understanding and being seized upon by the living
spirit of its tradition. More's reformed religion
would once more quite inevitably and quite naturally
have blossomed forth in sensuous and ceremonial
joy and in common fellowship. Calvin's religion was
essentially a denial of these things.

We find in Calvinism the peculiarly Protestant
theories that men are vile, that men's bodies are con-
temptible, that religion is a private affair, that man
cannot be saved through the mediumship and ministry
of men ; therefore no man shall come between " my
soul and my God." In Calvin's teaching we find that
genesis of Protestant individualism which regards
religion "as a little private transaction of a strictly
confidential character between a man and his God."
Henceforward the individualist plutocrats who are
greedily capturing the land and capital, and are
making everything private property, are inclined to
substitute individualist ideas of God for the common
Fatherhood of the Lord's Prayer and the Catholic
liturgies. One finds them continually, in their books

THE REFORMATION 207

of devotion, talking of " my God " as if He were as
much their private property as their houses and their
servants. It was indeed providential for the middle
classes, who were then coming into existence, that
this individualist religion, both in the Roman, and
even more in the Protestant Churches, should have
been ready to their hand. Calvin became the
champion of plutocracy, and his doctrines were
eagerly espoused by those who were making a little
Heaven for themselves on earth by plundering the
people's possessions, and looked forward to a little
Heaven above, which was to be a close preserve for
a small aristocracy of the pious. Bossuet tells us
that Calvin was the first theologian to propound the
modern distinction between interest and usury; and
if this is doubtful, it is at least true that he first
popularised this modern distinction. Ashley's com-
ment is intensely significant : " The judgment of
Calvin was certainly of much influence in weakening
the old repugnance to usury ; especially as the great
commercial people of the next century, the Dutch,
chanced to be Calvinists. Moreover, it is at once
apparent that a justification of usury itself was far
more impressive than the allowance of any number
of exceptions. Calvin's teaching was, therefore, in a
very real sense a turning-point in the history of
European thought." It must, however, be added
that even Calvin shrank from a defence of interest in
its grosser forms, for, according to him, usury must
not be demanded from men in need, nor must any
man be forced to pay when oppressed by need or
calamity. In after centuries his authority is quoted

208 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

for the later Protestant proposition that interest, so far
from being sinful, is in accord with the Word of God.

We must not look in those times of storm and
stress for strictly logical systems of religion. Even
Calvin, prince of logicians, left the Protestant system
incomplete ; the Neo-Calvinists filled up the gaps.

Lutheranism was far less logical, far more a protest
of the heart than of the head. It may be said to have
resulted in a compromise between Catholic and
Protestant ideas, Protestantism largly predominating.
More than one historian has contended that the
Lutheran Reformation was, in reality, a religious
reform in favour of the interests of the wealthy classes
in Germany. These classes were becoming powerful,
but were still excluded from political expression ;
their representation in State assemblies was merely
nominal. There resulted a bitter rivalry between the
feudal aristocracy and the rich industrialists, who
were supported by the lesser nobles.

In the meantime, the poverty-stricken rural population
rose up against their despoilers ; they burnt down the
castles of the nobles, and swore that they would leave
nothing to be seen upon the land but the cabins of the
poor. The rich middle class seemed at first to side with
them, and at Strasburg, Nuremburg, and Ulm the peasants
were encouraged, aided, and provided for. However, the
bourgeoisie soon grew alarmed at the spreading of insurrec-
tion, and made common cause with the nobles in
smothering the revolt in the rural districts. Luther, who
was then at the apex of his power, condemned the rising
in the name of religion, and proclaimed the servitude of
the people as holy and legitimate. " You seek," wrote he,
"to free your persons and your goods. You desire the
power and the goods of this earth. You will suffer no
wrong. The Gospel, on the contrary, has no care for such

THE REFORMATION 209

things, and makes exterior life consist in suffering, sup-
porting injustice, the cross, patience, and contempt of life,
as of all the things of this world. To suffer ! To suffer !
The cross ! The cross ! Behold what Christ teaches ! "
Were not these teachings given in the name of the faith to
a famishing people in revolt against the tyranny and avidity
of the ruling aristocracy, fatal to the future of the peasant
masses, whose very sufferings were thus legitimatised in the
name of the religion that should have come to their aid ? l

Luther's attitude is very puzzling. He admits that
the claims- of the peasants are not contrary to natural
law or to equity, but quotes Scripture to justify his
opposition to the rebellion. He does not seem ever
to have made up his mind upon the subject of
interest ; in his earlier writings he describes the
middle-class theory as a pretext, he denounces the
grip-monies, and exclaims : " Little thieves are put in
the stocks; great thieves go flaunting in gold and
silk." He is convinced that no form of usury is
Christian in which payment is demanded from the
deserving poor ; he goes further than Calvin in the
Catholic direction, for he absolutely condemns the
census per sonalis, i.e. the placing of a charge upon so
intangible a thing as an artisan's skill. In this con-
demnation he would seem to oppose, by implication,
the bulk of the share-holding and interest-mongering
of the present day. He allows, however, many
modifications of the stricter law, and is by no
means sound on the subject in the sense of the
early Church.

Melancthon is much more uncompromisingly in
favour of interest, his only reservation being that it

1 Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 75.

14

210 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

should be moderate, according to the estimate of just
men. He was more violent than Luther in his denun-
ciation of the communistic theories of the Anabaptists.
He regarded with horror, the canonist doctrine that
property belongs essentially to God, and was in the
first place given to all men in common, and that if,
by an arrangement of human law, some possess more
property than others, they must regard themselves,
not as owners, but as clerks or stewards of the super-
fluity of riches, and that what human law has arranged,
human law can alter. According to Melancthon,
property exists by Divine right. To deny the rights
of private property is contrary to the laws of nature
and the precepts of the Gospel.1

It would not, of course, be accurate to say that
there was no difference between the post-Reformation
Roman theories and practice and extreme Protestant
theory and practice ; and merciless as has been the
treatment of the poor in both Roman Catholic and
Protestant countries, this mercilessness has not been
so deliberately defended by Roman as by Puritan
apologists. It is generally admitted that the condi-
tion of the poor, even in the corrupt period immedi-
ately preceding the Reformation, was not so hopeless
as it became when the Church lost her estates. Nitti
describes the action of the civil power, after having
stripped the Church of her possessions, pressing an
iron hand upon the starving people ; the barons
oppressed their unhappy vassals, while the Church
feudatories, who had neither daughters to marry nor
courts to keep up, were very clement towards the

3 Melancthon, Operat Breitschneider edition, vol. iii.

THE REFORMATION 211

poor peasantry. While the unfortunate serfs of the
barons were harassed with continual vexations, the
vassals of the Church were treated with consideration.
The feudal aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie are
responsible for the despoiling of the Church. In the
kingdom of Naples, the extortions of the barons were
almost unendurable ; but the greatest abbey in the
south of Italy, the abbey of Cava, renounced all
right to the personal labour of its vassals, and
assumed the obligation of paying them adequate
wages. " The inhabitants of Cava," writes a liberal
historian, "enjoyed, under the protection of the
Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, immunity from
taxes, privileges in traffic, the use of an almost free
port at Vietri ; they cultivated fertile lands free from
burdens without the oppression of angheria or
perangheria, which had been abolished by Abbot
Philip in 1322, without any seigneurial vexations, in
a condition almost ex lege, not being subject to the
king, as were the cities of the demesne, nor to the
feudatories ; they prospered from day to day, till they
reached such a height of prosperity that even the
Neapolitans envied their flourishing commerce and
great wealth."1

If the study of the Reformation generally is in-
tricate, the study of the particular course it took in
England is no less puzzling. As a protest against
Rome, both in England and on the Continent,
nations which adopted the Reformation had come to
the quite definite conclusion that the claims of the
Pope had grown to be a menace to the welfare of

1 Quoted by Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 78.

212 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Christendom. Cranmer, at Cambridge, collected the
Papal assumptions ; here are some of them : —

If any man denies that the Pope is ordained of God to be
Primate of all the world, he is an heretic and cannot be saved.

Princes' laws have no force against the Pope's decrees,
and to oppose such decrees is sin against the Holy Ghost.

The Pope may depose kings and release subjects from
oaths of obedience ; appeal to him is final ; he may use
force against anybody. He is above all councils.

Neither the French nor the English Churches, nor
any other integral portion of the Catholic Church of
Christ, was free of this tyranny. English benefices
were handed over to non-resident Italian priests or to
mere laymen. In spite of certain Acts of Parliament
and the protests of Archbishops Peckham,Langton,and
Grosseteste, the Canon law, by its corrupt additions,
made the Pope an imperialist autocrat, who claimed
absolute rights over the Ecclesia anglicana and other
national Churches. Roman controversialists would
have us believe that the cause of the English Reforma-
tion is to be found in the lusts of the English king.
It would be as difficult as it would be undesirable to
whitewash Henry VIII., but his divorce was merely
the match that set light to the gunpowder. The
Pope had over and over again legitimatised such a
union as was proposed ; but Clement was between
two fires, and thought he could rather afford to offend
the English king than Catherine's nephew.

That the Reformation primarily aimed at clipping
the Papal claws is clear, but the further objects of
the English Reformers and the desires of the English
people are by no means clear. It was a kind of
intellectual turmoil ; ideas and customs were thrown

THE REFORMATION 213

into the melting-pot, and either the nation swung
round from Catholicism to Calvinism, from Calvinism
to Romanism, from Romanism to Anglicanism,
coming to some harbourage in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, or this vacillation is only true of a few
prominent men, the bulk of the nation all the time
remaining indifferent. Whatever was the process, the
result seems to have been that the people of England
further lost hold of organised religion, although it is
not until the industrial revolution in the eighteenth
century that the Church almost entirely loses its
influence upon the people. Protestant historians
have attempted to minimise the importance of the
pilgrimages of grace ; these risings of the people,
however, were a formidable protest against the
Protestant changes. They would have been more
formidable if the corruptions of the Church, the
scandals of indulgences, the money-grubbing of the
higher clergy and the Papal court had not sickened
and wearied the ordinary man. He was genuinely
shocked at the divorce, in spite of the King's popu-
larity, but could not regard the curtailment of the
later Canon law with anything but satisfaction.

The Church of England, that is, the christened
people of England, were listless and disheartened.
Some time before the Reformation the pillaging of
their parochial property had been begun by the
monasteries : the worst was still to come. It has been
stated that pauperism came in, not by the suppression
of the monasteries, but by the disendowment of the
parishes. If the robbery of the monasteries in the
reign of Henry VIII. was disastrous, the robbery of

2i4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the Catholic poor in the reign of Edward VI. was an
infinitely greater disaster. For about six years the
great pillage raged.

"The property of one kind or another owned by
the parish communities throughout England in the
first half of the fifteenth century must have amounted
to an aggregate which represented millions of money."
In the reign of King Henry VIII. the property
of monasteries, chantries, and hospitals was annexed.
There followed the spoliation of gilds, chapels of ease,
colleges, and more hospitals. And now in Edward
VI.'s reign "the plunder of the poor by the rich"1
increased in volume. Religion had nothing to do
with the business ; " the richer classes went raving
mad with the lust of gain." l The Protestant super-
stition that would do away with sensuous worship
because it cast the body and its sensuous needs
outside the realm of religion provided a cloak for
plunderers, who passed an Act that the missals,
images, pictures, etc., should be destroyed or de-
faced. But the scramble had already begun. " In
three years it may be said that almost all the parish
churches in England had been looted, and before the
end of the king's reign there had been a clean sweep
of all that was worth stealing from the parish chests,
or the church walls, or the church treasuries." In the
next generation there were churches by the score
that possessed not even a chalice or a surplice.
Our parishes were ruined. In the homilies of 1 562,
the homilist exclaims : " It is a sin and shame to
see so many churches so ruinous and so foully de-

Cf. Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage.

THE REFORMATION 215

cayed, . . . defiled with rain and weather, with dung
of doves and owls." Thus was accomplished "the
disendowment of all the parishes of England."1 It
was not, in Dr Jessopp's opinion, the suppression of
the monasteries but the disendowment of the parishes
that created pauperism. Compare the churchwardens'
accounts of any county parish in the fifteenth century
with those of the same parish in the seventeenth or
eighteenth, and what a change has come over the
scene ! Where there was at one time interest and
vitality, there reigns squalor and meanness in the
assemblies, now shrivelled to three or four parishioners.
Then came the conscientious objectors and the abol-
ition of the church rate, followed by the last scene of all,
in which the Local Government Act of 1894 describes
the once glorious parish commune as "a place for
which a separate overseer is or can be appointed."

It is amusing to listen to some descendant of the
Cecils, Russells, Cavendishes, Seymours, Dudleys,
FitzWilliams or the like, denouncing as robbers
those who would restore the land and treasures of
the people to their rightful owners. Whatever may
have been the underlying motives of the Reformers,
the motives of these gentry were quite evident.
Even the anti-Catholic sceptic David Hume is obliged
to admit that the suppression of the monasteries was
very much regretted by the people, for the monks
had not equal motives to avarice with other men;
they were most indulgent landlords and residents on
the soil ; when their lands were annexed, the rents
were at once raised by rapacious stewards and spent

1 Cf. Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage.

216 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

by the lords elsewhere, farmers were expelled,
cottagers robbed of their commons, and whole estates
laid waste; there was a great decay of the people
and a diminution of the former plenty.

The building up of modern landed estates and the
formation of new nobilities from the spoils of the
Church and the poor, mark each of the four great
epochs in the life of the Church of England. First
there was the dissolution of monasteries in the reign
of Henry VIII.; secondly, spoliation of the Catholic
poor in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth ;
thirdly, the abolition of the national episcopate and
the expulsion of those clergy who remained true to
Catholic tradition by the Puritan Parliament during
the Civil War; fourthly, the imposition upon the
people of the so-called Commonwealth by a military
oligarchy of Dissenters in 1649. Each of these
periods is marked by the " estating " of a greedy
nobility, old and new, at the expense of the Church
and its christened people.1

Amid the rival theories and controversies of
Catholic and Protestant historians on the Reforma-
tion period, one or two things stand out clearly. The
English Reformers did not wish to build a new Church,
but to reform an old ; they did not wish to create a
schism, they had no intention of breaking with
Catholic tradition. The Anglo-Catholic theologians
maintain that it was the later mediaeval Church that
had broken with its Catholic past. Jewel and the
English apologists repudiate the imperialism of the

1 Cf. Thomas Hancock, Pulpit and Press, "Clergy of the Church
of England on Landlordism. "

THE REFORMATION 217

Roman claim ; the Catholic idea had been the demo-
cratic idea of the General Council, the Pope claims
to dispense with councils. Gradually there had been
growing up in Europe, under the aegis and protec-
tion of the Church, independent nationalities. The
English nation had no desire to break the union of
Christendom ; it was the Papal autocracy and its
preposterous claims that would break Europe in
pieces. The English bishops have been accused of
Protestant insularity and independence. They
wished the Catholic Church to be independent of
autocracy. For the rest, they were not insular or
independent, for they appealed to ancient tradition
and to the decision of an international Catholic
council. Interdependence, the old Catholic ideal,
was theirs. If they were driven in upon themselves,
and if the Church of England became isolated and
self-sufficient, it was because the only international
unity possible in those days was despotic uniformity.
We have seen that the Church of Rome and the
individualist Protestant Churches were repudiating
Catholic ideals. The Church of England boldly
appealed to those ideals. The despotism of Rome
should no longer crush ancient tradition or the
liberties of English people; neither would the Church
submit to the despotism of the written word as
interpreted by the Protestant sectaries. Its watch-
word was not the Bible only, but the Bible as inter-
preted by the living traditions of the Church. Its
liturgy, largely adapted from ancient sources, its
calendar of saints and fathers, its insistence upon
sacraments are signs of its Catholicism.

2i8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

So absolutely is it true that one cannot, if one will,
divorce a good or bad theology from its economic
expression, that, just as Protestantism and Papalism
have been seen to have had individualistic expres-
sion, so the reformed Catholicism of the Church of
England at once expresses itself in protest against
the robberies of the aristocracy and plutocracy.
Even Cranmer, most vacillating of reformers, is
courageous in his opposition to landlords and
merchants of Kent in their attempt to rob the poor of
their common schools. Thomas Lever preaches over
and over again against the robbery of the people's
land as the greatest grief that had been done unto
the people of this realm. In a sermon before the
king he denounces the "covetous landlords" who,
" taking the ground in their own hands, turn all to
pasture."

Another Anglican theologian addressed to Parlia-
ment in 1551 "an information and petition against
the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm."
" Now I will speak," says he, " of the great and in-
tolerable usury which at this day reigneth so freely
this realm over all and chiefly in the city of London,
that it is taken for most lawful gains. Yea, it is well
most heresy to reprove it, for men say it is allowed
by Parliament. Well, the most part I am sure of the
godly assemble and Parliament do know that the
occasion of the Act that passed here concerning
usury was the unsatiable desire of the usurers, who
could not be contented with usury unless it were
unreasonable much. To restrain this greedy desire
of theirs therefore, it was communed and agreed upon

THE REFORMATION 219

and by authority of Parliament agreed that none
should take above ten pounds by year for the loan
of one hundred pounds. Alas that any Christian
assemble should be so void of God's Holy Spirit that
they should allow for lawful anything that God's Word
forbiddeth. Be not abashed (most worthy councillors)
to call this Act in question again." l He denounces
those who would gloss over the plain commands of
Scripture and pretend that the taking of interest was
the counsel of the Saviour. An apologist for usury
is no less than " a membre of the devil and a very
anti-Christ." The Church protest was so strong that
for the time it carried the legislature before it, and the
statute of Henry VIII. was repealed in 1552 under
Edward VI., and the preamble to the repeal admits
that " usury is by the Word of God utterly prohibited."
In later times the comprehensive policy adopted by
the Elizabethan government may be shown to have
hindered the formation of a strong and persistent
tradition in this matter, but during the reigns of
Edward VI., of Elizabeth, James L, and Charles I.
ceaseless protest was made by bishops and priests of
the English Church against the robbery of the poor
by the nobles and gentry. No wonder that these
aristocrats espoused the cause of a more tolerant
Puritanism. There is a discourse upon usury in
dialogue form by Thomas Wilson, Doctor of the Civil
Laws, one of the Masters of Her Majesty's honourable
Court of Requests, probably written some little time
before the Act of 1571. It was printed in 1572, and
went through several editions. In this dialogue he

1 Quoted by Ashley, EC. Hist., vol. i. p. 465.

220 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

refuses to draw any distinction between lending to
the well-to-do and to the needy ; he utterly condemns
the now prevailing distinction between biting and
fair usury. The imaginary opponent is made to
appeal to Molinaeus and the Calvinist divines, the
best of the age, as Bucer, Brentius, Calvin, and Beza," l
that is, to Papist and Protestant as against Anglo-
Catholics in this matter ; but the dialogue closes with
his conversion.

Bishop Jewel thunders against usurious practices,
saying:—

If I lend ;£ioo and for it covenant to receive .£105,
or any other sum greater than was the sum I did
lend, this is that, that we call usury; such a kind of
bargaining as no good man or godly man ever used ; such a
kind of bargaining as all men that ever feared God's judg-
ment, have always abhorred and condemned. ... It is the
overthrow of mighty kingdoms, the destruction of flourishing
states ; the decay of great cities ; the plagues of the world
and the misery of the people. It is theft, it is the murdering
of our brethren, it is the curse of God, and the curse of the
people. This is usury, and by these signs and tokens ye
shall know it.

Mr Rose also quotes Bishop Sandys as follows : — 2

By what means soever thou receivest more than was
lent, thou art a usurer towards thy brother, and God will be
a revenger against thee ; ... all reason and the very law
of nature are against it ; all nations at all times have been
against it as the very bane and pestilence of a common-
wealth.

Bishop Hooper says : " As for usury, it is none other
than theft."

Bishop Pilkington says : —

1 Ashley. 2 Churches and Usury, by H. S. Rose, p. 36.

THE REFORMATION 221

The usurer speaketh courteously and dealeth cruelly;
he defendeth his doing to be charitable when he eateth up
lands and goods, turneth infants abegging, and overturneth
the whole kindred.

Mr Rose concludes that there " is not the least
reason to suppose that these doctrines were not
representative of the views then held ... by the
fathers of the Anglican Church."

Jewel had been under no illusion as to the source
of interest. To the argument that a capitalist lends
money on usury to a merchant, and that the merchant
is able to pay him out of his gains, he replies : l " Who
then payeth the £10? . . . The poor people that buy
the corn. They feel it in every morsel they eat." The
only investment and interest he allows is an invest-
ment by those incapable of work, orphans, madmen,
diseased merchants ; and even in this case there
must be real risk.

So much for capitalism. We have seen how the
revolution in agriculture, which was turning arable
land into sheep-walks, and the despoiling of the lands
of the Church and the Catholic parishes was bringing
a greater misery upon the poor man than had ever
been. Bishop Latimer, described by a modern writer
as " the darling of the London poor," preaching before
the king, arraigns the nobles and court gentry in the
following words: "You landlords, you rent raisers
I may say you step lords, you unnatural lords, you
have for your possessions yearly too much ! " Him-
self the son of a small yeoman, he had witnessed the
decay of English agriculture and the expulsion of

1 Jewel's Works, Parker Society, vol. ii.

222 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the poor from their holdings and the rack-renting of
farms. " Whereas there have been a great many
householders and inhabitants, there is now but a
shepherd and his dog." " All such proceedings do
intend plainly to make the yeomanry slaves." " He
that now hath my father's farm payeth £16 a year
(four times the former rent), and is not able to do
anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his
children, nor to give a cup of drink to the poor."
" The commons be utterly undone, whose bitter cry
ascendeth up to the ears of the God of sabaoth."

Latimer, for all his Protestantism against Rome
and against candles and images, is a strong anti-
Calvinist. God has come to save all mankind.
11 Christ shed as much blood for Judas as He did for
Peter." The works he objected to, the works without
faith that could never save a man, are the adorning
of churches, the going on pilgrimages, the decoration
of images which some men substitute for the works
of mercy.

The images are to be clad in silk garments and those
also laden with precious gems and jewels, as who should
say that no cost could be too great ; whereas in the mean-
time we see Christ's faithful and lively images, bought with
no less price than His most precious blood (alas, alas),
a-hungered, a-thirst, a-cold, and to be in darkness, wrapped
in all wretchedness, yea, to lie there till death take away
their miseries.1

Later, we find Francis Trigg, an Elizabethan divine,
preaching in 1592 at Grantham : "All towns are
undone. Their common things and lands are taken

1 Quoted by Bishop Gore, Latimer as Christian Socialist (C.S. U.).

THE REFORMATION 223

from them ; ... so now, where Christ's family have
been maintained, grow trees or nettles."

Hutchinson, an earlier theologian, had told the
same tale. Nothing can exceed the bitterness of its
repetition in 1609 by William Symons, of St Saviour's,
Southwark. Three years later, Thomas Adams, not
yet expelled by the Puritan Long Parliament from
his cure of St Bennet's, Paul's Wharf, preached in
St Paul's Cathedral, in the reign of James I., against
the landlords and their thieveries, and speaks of the
" poor's blood which they have sucked." These men
must restore the stolen lands to the towns, the churches,
and the poor. Preaching in his own church in 1616,
he likens the depopulator to the wild boar that will
forage and lay waste all if he be not restrained.
"Yea, he lays waste the commonwealth though he
encloseth to himself. He wasteth societies, com-
munities, neighbourhood of people ; he turneth them
out of their ancient doors and sends them into the
wide world to beg their bread." He concludes that
this kind of beast should be hunted down.

But as early as 1586 the Protestant individualist
leaven was at work. The Province of Canterbury in
that year ordered the younger clergy to obtain a
copy of Bullinger's decades, and make an abstract of
one sermon every week. Now, this Continental Re-
former was a good anti-Catholic, for he held that
certain forms of interest were not in themselves
unlawful, nor yet condemned in the Holy Scriptures.
Only biting usury is there condemned. Calvinism
was making headway within the national Church,
and became in this country an absolute Puritanism,

224 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

developing its original doctrines in a more inhuman
direction than had been the case in Germany. For
instance, Calvin himself had been as free from
Sabbatarian views as Luther, who boldly pronounced
that if anyone wished to curtail a Christian man's
liberty in the matter of the Sunday, then he would
order them to dance on it, sing on it, ride on it, feast
on it, to do anything to maintain the ancient liberty.
This Puritanism was eagerly espoused by the land-
stealing class, who urged on the Nonconformist
against the bishops. The plutocrats often kept Non-
conformist chaplains in their houses, compelling their
tenants to attend their meetings and abstain from
communion with the mixed assembly in their parish
churches. These rich men were always preaching the
benefits of holy poverty to the clergy. Archbishop
Bancroft explains this to the people at Paul's Cross :
" They do greatly urge upon the ministry the apostolic
poverty to the intent that they may obtain the prey."
" I doubt not it is manifest to you that covetousness
hath thrust them into this schism." The monks at
their worst had been better than their plutocratic
successors. So says Prebendary Thomas Lever at
Paul's Cross, and tells the people they are stark blind
not to see it. Lever tells the king and the court
that the miseries of the people are due to the rob-
beries of the nobles, who have turned them from their
holdings ; " so now old fathers, poor widows, and
young lie begging in the mirey streets."

For the time, the rising tide of Puritanism is
stemmed by William Laud, the martyr archbishop,
who in season and out of season preached the doctrine

THE REFORMATION 225

of equality before the law, against the Puritan theory
of immunity in the case of courtiers and gentlemen.
Heylin seems to have thought his life might have
been spared, if he had only been as willing as were
the Nonconformists that the rich should fill themselves
with good things, while the poor were sent empty
away. The Puritan lecturers and private chaplains
of the plutocrat twitted the archbishop with the
meanness of his birth. The Puritan Baxter sneers
at Laud and his suffragans as upstarts who had
sprung from the dregs of the people. These up-
starts enraged the landlords by administering to the
churchwardens of every parish in their dioceses the
following oath : " Swear that, all affection, favour,
hatred, hope of reward, gain, displeasure of great
men, malice, or other sinister respect set aside, you
shall deal uprightly, truly, and justly, presenting all
the truth and nothing but the truth, without partiality,
having God before your eyes." " Hath any neigh-
bouring great man encroached upon any part of the
churchyard, enclosing it to his garden, etc. ? Present
him or them so transgressing." " Is any maintenance
given to free and public schools detained or inverted ?
By whom is it practised ? " No wonder the Puritans
complained : " Many nobles and worthy gentlemen are
curbed and tyrannised over by some base clergyman
of mean parentage." The archbishop compelled the
worthy gentlemen to disgorge part of the plunder.
We have heard of the tyrannies of the High Com-
mission Court. He had powerful landlords brought
into that court for seizing almshouses, common lands,
the endowments of free schools, portions of the

15

226 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

common churchyards, and for "walling up the ancient
ways." His enemy Fiennes charged him with being
the foe of " property and Puritanism." Laud stood
for the people of England. Cromwell stood for the
people of God in England. " Nothing angered Laud
so much as the claim of a great man to escape a
penalty which would fall upon others. Nothing
brought him into such disfavour with the great as
his refusal to admit that the punishment which had
raised no outcry, when it was meted out to the weak
and helpless, should be spared in the case of the
powerful and wealthy offender."1

When the people of Lancashire complained to the
king that the Nonconformists were laying upon
their shoulders burdens too heavy to be borne, to
curtailing their ancient right of enjoyment on Sundays
and holy days, it was by Archbishop Laud's orders
that the English clergy were compelled to read that
most Christian of documents from every pulpit, which
proclaimed to the people their liberty of games and
dancing on what the old Christian Fathers called the
Day of the Sun. The title Nonconformist is here
used in its historic sense as meaning one who remains
in the Church of England while refusing to conform
to the Catholic faith. The action the archbishop
took in the matter seems to infuriate our Protestant
historians almost as much as his opposition to
plutocracy. They leave no stone unturned to blacken
his character and to describe as martyrs the favourite
preachers of the plutocrats, who were using the pulpits
of the Christian Church to disseminate their anti-

1 Gardiner.

THE REFORMATION 227

Christian theories of the Sabbath and of private
property. These champions of liberty, expelled from
their cures for refusal to conform to the Christian
doctrine, carry with them their gospel of freedom
beyond the seas, and establish free Protestant States
in whose constitution the private property rights of
rich men are fully acknowledged, and their right in
slaves is proclaimed to be a precept of the Gospel.

When the Puritan Party gets the upper hand in
England, it demonstrates its love of liberty by boring
the saintly John Naylor's tongue through with a red-
hot iron, for daring to be a Quaker; abolishes the
festivals of the English people, Christmas, Easter, and
the like ; makes Sunday recreation penal, and generally
establishes that type of religion which has led a
revolted country into something not very far from
atheism. Meanwhile the Pilgrim Fathers in their
newly formed colonies were passing laws which
punished with flogging any man who should kiss his
wife on Sunday, and which reserved the death-penalty
for those who walked too far or played games on a
Sunday afternoon. Thus was liberty of the Protestant
kind fully established in this country and beyond the
seas. The Puritan lords had, as Clarendon says, never
forgotten " the shames which they called an insolent
triumph upon their degree and quality and a levelling
them with the common people."

Here is a newspaper report of the martyrdom of
Laud, published a few days after the execution : —

The Archbishop of Canterbury was this day beheaded
on Tower Hill. The man did stand much upon his
integrity, and at his death did justify his innocence,

228 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

expecting I believe some honour to be done unto him in
another age in whose almanacks he would shine in rubric
and be canonised for some saint or be crowned for a martyr.

The tendency of that Puritan age was to substitute
sermons for the Catechism. There was no document
in the Church of England that the innovators hated
half so much, for it must be remembered that the
Protestant Catechisms start with the assumption that
only an elect few can be saved out of the vileness of
common life, while the English Catechism starts with
the assumption that all christened people are members
of the one body in Christ, and every one members one
of another. This could not but shock the Puritans, who
held that God had created most of them for damna-
tion. They could not believe that God had cleansed
the common folk ; therefore they fought against " the
common creed, the common law, the common prayer,
and the common sacraments of Christianity." All
these things were to them common and unclean.

One of the complaints of Laud's adversary Henry
Burton against the Common Prayer was, "it cut short
sermons." The worship that is social strikes at the indi-
vidualism of the man in the pulpit; it is an apostolical
reminder to him not to think of himself more highly than
he ought to think. The pulpit, the symbol of individual-
ism, was the idol which they set up in place of the
Eucharist, the symbol of social unity and community, It
was held as part of the right relation of Church and State
both amongst the Nonconformists and Separatists that the
civil magistrate ought to compel "the mixed multitude,"
as they called the one body in Christ, to "hear" their
sermons and lectures.1

It has lately been contended by certain Roman

1 Cf. Thomas Hancock, "Archbishop Laud" (Pulpit and Press).

THE REFORMATION 229

Catholic writers that the Papal communion is always
the champion of the poor against the plutocrat.
They bring-, as evidence, the spoiling of the Church
of England, which they call the Church of Rome, by
Protestant landlords and other wealthy men. They
contend that if we had not thrown over the Papal
dominion these griefs would never have come upon
us. It will be sufficient answer to remind ourselves
that in Queen Mary's reign the Pope made advances
to England, offering to receive the wealthy thieves
back into communion, assuring them of full absolu-
tion, and that they would not be expected to restore
any of the stolen property.

Since the days of the Commonwealth, Christ's
poor have been ground between the upper and
nether millstone of the landed aristocracy and the
monied plutocracy. The Restoration under Charles
II. calls forth no such sturdy champions as Arch-
bishop Laud, and not long after, the Puritanism
which had triumphed outside the Church wins a
more lasting victory by capturing its pulpits and its
wealthy congregations.

IX

THE
NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM

Decreasing faith and increasing misery — Wealth increasing more rapidly
than population — A bastard religion — Christo-capitalists oppose
the Factory Acts — The condition of the children in mills, mines,
and fields — Cheaper than horses — The chloroforming of the poor —
The apostasy of Churchmen — The Dorsetshire labourers — A base
hymnology — The work of Elizabeth Fry — Revivalism — Shaftesbury,
Maurice, and Kingsley — Maurice and the Catholic revival — Maurice
on baptism— 1848— " Politics for the people."

IX
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM

" A number of the hireling prophets, whom we have seen both Amos
and Hosea attack, gave their blessing to this social system, which
crushed the poor, for they shared its profits. They lived upon the
alms of the rich, and flattered according as they fed. . . . The false
prophet spoke, consciously or unconsciously, for himself and his living.
He sided with the rich ; he shut his eyes to the social condition of the
people ; he did not attack the sins of the day. This made him false —
robbed him of insight and the power of prediction. But the true
prophet exposed the sins of his people. Ethical insight and courage,
burning indignation of wrong, clear vision of the facts of the day — this
was what Jehovah's spirit put in him, this was what Micah felt to be
inspiration.

" The prophet speaks :—

Thus saith Jehovah against the prophets who lead my people

astray,

Who while they have ought between their teeth proclaim peace,
But against him who will not lay to their mouths they sanctify

war !

Wherefore night shall be yours without vision,
And yours shall be darkness without divination ;
And the sun shall go down on the prophets,
And the day shall darken about them."

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, The Twelve Prophets, chap. xxvi.

' ' The condition of the labourers deteriorated from the time of
Elizabeth onwards, but in the middle of the eighteenth century it had
been materially improved owing to the increase of wealth from the new
agriculture and from the general growth of foreign trade. But then
came the great Continental wars and the industrial revolution ; and it is

"33

234 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

a sad but significant fact that although the total wealth of the nation
vastly increased at the end of last century and the beginning of this,
none of that wealth came into the hands of the labourers, but went
entirely into the hands of great landlords and new capitalist manu-
facturers."— GIBBINS, Industrial History of England, p. 186 (University
Extension edition).

WITH the decline of the Catholic faith the " Golden
Age of the labourer " passed away. There has been
since then a steady deterioration in the position of
the working classes, with the exception of a brief
period in the middle of the eighteenth century. The
argument that abject poverty was inevitable was met
in an earlier chapter by an examination of a hundred
years of English life which afforded a complete denial
to this statement. People who use this argument are
apt to shift their ground and admit that there really
was a comparatively golden age for labour, but to
account for it by pointing to the smallness of the
population in that period. The industrial revolution
of the early nineteenth century enormously increased
the wealth of the rich, but reduced the poor at the
same time to a more abject slavery than they had
known for hundreds of years. That this was not
accounted for by the increase of population is proved
by the fact that, although population has so vastly
increased since the fourteenth century, the output of
wealth per head has multiplied out of all proportion
to the increase of the population.

In the early nineteenth century you have on the
one hand "the idea of religion as a little private
transaction of a strictly confidential character between
a man and ' his God, ' " * and on the other hand an

1 Rashdall, Doctrine of Development.

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 235

economic state of affairs among the working classes
which historians dealing with the period do not
hesitate to describe as slavery.

Meanwhile, what had become of God's Catholic
Church, i.e. of the christened people of England ?
Puritan individualism had scourged them along the
road to Calvary, and now they find themselves crucified
between two thieves. The name of the one is " Next-
worldliness," the name of the other is Capitalism.
From its cross democracy cries, " I thirst," but the chief
priests and scribes deride Him, saying : —

Nothing is worth a thought beneath
But how I may escape the death

That never, never dies ;
How make mine own election sure,
And when I fail on earth secure

A mansion in the skies.1

Adherents of this bastard Christianity are never
tired of pointing the finger of scorn at socialism,
calling it atheism. None of the younger leaders of
the socialist movement in this country are atheists.
Many of the earlier leaders turned to atheism in
protest against the official religion of their day and
its monstrous consequences. Official Christianity
had brought the christened poor into chronic misery
and atheistic despair. Out of the depths the demo-
cracy cries : " My God, my God, why hast Thou
forsaken me ? "

These capitalistic Christians, who found the next
world so useful an asset in their war against God's
poor, chloroforming them into submission by threats

1 From a popular hymn of this period.

236 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

of hell and hopes of paradise, did not really think
that the chief end of life was the mansion in the
sky ; unless, indeed, it was by the merest accident
that they had secured to themselves so many desir-
able mansions on the earth. How had it been done ?
The wages of the fathers had been reduced to starva-
tion level, so that the mothers were forced into the
mills, the children sold into slavery. In 1819 the
condition of the people had so far improved that the
Christian rich could no longer obtain children of
under nine years of age for more than fourteen hours'
daily labour in their factories. An Act of Parlia-
ment to this effect was violently opposed by the
majority of Christian employers, and the ruin of the
country was as usual threatened. Such an Act was
tyranny ; it threatened freedom of contract ; it was
robbing the rich and interfering with the right of
the poor parent to do what he liked with his own,
So the Christo-capitalist weeklies argued then ; so
they argue now. The editor of the Spectator is even
now put up at Church congresses to defend those
iniquitous times. He is proud to call himself the
champion of the Manchester school, a school of
thinkers who opposed the Factory Acts as being
socialism and snivelling sentimentality.

Before the passing of those Acts, the workhouses
and semi-starving parents supplied child-stuff for
the working of the system. The pauper children
were from time to time inspected and packed into
waggons and canal boats and sent to the mills.
Child-traffickers often took the children off the
guardians' hands and kept them in a factory dis-

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 237

trict in dark cellars until the mill-owners could send
their inspectors to examine them as to height and
strength and general bodily fitness. They then be-
came the property of the employer, who did not
trouble to feed them or clothe them too well, for
children were so cheap and the supply almost
unlimited.

The following quotations are from the University
Extension edition of Gibbins's Industrial History of
England-. —

The hours of their labour were only limited by exhaus-
tion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly
applied to force continued work. Children were often
worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night. Even
Sunday was used as a convenient time to clean the
machinery.

Their life was literally and without exaggeration simply
that of slaves.

In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling
of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept
in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows
from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless over-looker,
and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punish-
ment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable
selfishness. *

They were sometimes literally fed with food that
the swine did eat. They slept by turns and in re-
lays in beds which were never cool, one set of
children being sent to bed as soon as the other had
gone ofT. The sexes were not always discriminated,
and disease and vice flourished. When the children
tried to run away, men on horseback were sent after
them and scourged them back into captivity. Irons
1 Page 179, etc.

238 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

were then riveted to their ankles to prevent escape.
They died off like flies in summer, and were buried
secretly at dead of night lest the number of the
graves should startle the people. What is true of
the factories is also true of the fields. Slave-gangs
of children were hired out to the farmers, and
brutally ill-treated and overworked. Child-slavery
in the mines was even worse, Girls and women,
as well as boys, were used as beasts of burden under-
ground, dragging loads of coal in places where no
horses could go, harnessed and crawling along the
dark passages.

The condition of the children reflects the condition
of the general mass of English labour in the early
nineteenth century. Working people were stabled
worse than horses, for they were cheaper than horses.
They were treated worse than dogs, for they were
cheaper than dogs.

The profits of farmers, landlords, mine-owners, and
mill-owners increased at an almost incredible rate.
Every attempt — and they were few enough — on the
part of the poor to shake off their chains was
denounced by middle-class official Christianity as
atheism and treason. For the most part the people
had been so nearly bled to death by underfeeding
and overworking, and so thoroughly stupefied by the
religion of next-worldliness, that they hearkened not
unto Marx, Owen, and Kingsley for anguish of spirit
and for cruel bondage. To the christened poor of
England poverty and exploitation seemed " as inevit-
able as the coming of death." It is only when social
reform has won for the people a little bread and a

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 239

little breathing-space that they revive sufficiently to
begin to feel their wrongs. Starved and sweated
Haggerston votes Tory. Colne Valley votes for
Revolution.

Mr George Russell has collected some of the
results of the Protestant individualist religion, and
they form an interesting commentary on the condi-
tion of the English Church in the early nineteenth
century. In 1794 Sydney Smith became curate in
charge of a village on Salisbury Plain ; he found
the church empty and the villagers "aliment for
Newgate, food for the halter — a ragged, wretched,
savage, stubborn race." Five years later he wrote :
" In England (except many ladies in the middle
rank of life) there is no religion at all. The clergy
of England have no more influence on the people at
large than the cheesemongers of England." William
Wilberforce, visiting Brigg in 1796, found no service
on Sunday morning, and all the people lounging
about the streets. He found Stamford in 1798 "a
sad, careless place ; . . . a shopkeeper said that none
of the clergy were active, or went among the poor."
Archdeacon Daubeny, vicar of North Bradley, just
before the close of the eighteenth century, found the
people so barbarous that they would pull down the
walls of the Church and vicarage, then rebuilding,
and cut and destroy the trees. In 1800 Bishop
Horsley said : " For the last thirty years we have
seen but little correspondence between the lives of
men and their profession ; a general indifference
about the doctrine of Christianity, a general neglect
of its duties." About the same time the Bishop of

24o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

London wrote that the state of the kingdom,
political, moral, and religious, was so unfavourable
as to excite the most serious alarm. In 1805 the
rector of Alderley, afterwards Bishop of Norwich,
found that the clerk used to go to the churchyard
stile to see whether there were any more coming to
church, for there were seldom enough to make a
congregation. The former rector used to boast that
he had never set foot in a sick person's cottage.
Mr George Russell shows that the official Church
had forgotten her mission to the poor and had be-
come the ally of the governing classes. So bitterly
were the clergy opposed to anything that could be
called socialism that the country parson was spoken
of as the black recruiting sergeant of the rich.
Mr Russell tells us that at that time the parson was
described as "a furious political demon, rapacious,
insolent, luxurious, having no fear of God before his
eyes " ; the popular cry in the villages was, " More pigs
and less parsons."

The bishops in the House of Lords incurred an
amount of hatred which only a perusal of their
votes can explain.

They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the
bloody penal code; they were the resolute opponents of
every political or social reform ; and they had their reward
from the nation outside Parliament. The Bishop of Bristol
had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London
could not keep an engagement to preach lest the congrega-
tion should stone him. The Bishop of Lichfield barely
escaped with his life after preaching at St Bride's, Fleet
Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for his
primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought
by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 241

of the mob. On 5th November the Bishops of Exeter and
Winchester were burnt in effigy close to their own palace
gates. Archbishop Howley's chaplain complained that a
dead cat had been thrown at him, when the Archbishop —
a man of apostolic meekness — replied : " You should be
thankful that it was not a live one."

In 1829 Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards the famous
bishop, wrote to a friend : " I think that the Church will fall
within fifty years entirely, and the State will not survive it
much longer."

The Rev. W. Nassau Molesworth says in his History of
England from the Year 1830 that he could himself recall
"the fierce shout of applause which rent the air at a large
public meeting in Canterbury — when one of the speakers
suggested that the noble cathedral of the city should be
converted into a stable for the horses of the cavalry." x

Here is an instance of the procedure of Church and
State about this period. In 1832 six agricultural
labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their
class, George Loveless, in receipt of 95. a week each,
demanded the ios. rate of wages usual in the neigh-
bourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An
appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench,
who decided that they must work for whatever their
masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at
first promised his help, now turned against them, and
the masters promptly reduced the wage to 75., with a
threat of further reduction. Loveless then formed
an agricultural union, for which all seven of them
were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to
the assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them
into submission. The judge determined to convict
them, and directed that they should be tried for mutiny
under an Act of George III. specially passed to deal

1 Right Hon. George Russell, The Optimist, p. 234, 1908.

16

242 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

with the naval mutiny at the Nore. The grand jury
were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers ;
both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing
type. The judge summed up as follows : " Not for
anything that you have done, or as I can prove that
you intend to do, but for an example to others I
consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven
years' penal transportation across His Majesty's high
seas upon each and every one of you."

The sermons of that time were very models of
Christo-capitalism, and if one takes the trouble to
trace the more particularly individualistic and next-
worldly sentiments in our hymn-books back to their
source, their origin will almost always be found in
the period we are now considering. The religion of
a thousand per cent, is admirably expressed in the
following verse : —

Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousand-fold will be ;
Then gladly will we give to Thee,
Who givest all.

The spirit of the nineteenth century breathes in
the Protestant addition to an early Greek hymn,
" O Paradise ! O Paradise ! " :—

O Paradise ! O Paradise ! I greatly long to see
The special place my dearest Lord
In love prepares for me.

One can hardly imagine that even God Himself
could forgive young people in robust health singing,
" 'Tis weary waiting here," unless it were on the plea
of their evident insincerity. We believe that Christ
was the revelation of the character of God, and He

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 243

did not go about the world encouraging young
people to seek an early grave, nor suggesting that
disease and premature death were His heavenly
Father's will. He had come that they might have
life, and He restored to the enfeebled material and
mental as well as spiritual vitality. Protestant
individualism flung back the gift of life into the face
of the Life-giver.

To about the same period belongs, " The rich man
in his castle, the poor man at his gate." It must not
for a moment be thought that this line is a relic of
feudalism, for the feudal system, whatever its faults,
never exalted the rich man or his estate of riches as
God ordered. It had its Orders of society, but it
was left to Christo-capitalism to preach the Divine
Right of vulgar plutocrats.

It may be considered fanciful to suggest that the
slightest tendency towards a Catholic democratic
revival would find its expression in the deletion of
these capitalist and next-worldly sentiments from
our hymn-book, and in a pro-socialist tendency among
the clergy and people. But what are the facts?
The English Church Hymnal contains none of these
versions, includes retranslations of old Catholic
hymns, reinserting the social sentiments, which were
carefully omitted in nineteenth-century hymn-books,
and includes a considerable number of hymns sung at
socialist gatherings. This particular hymn-book is
daily gaining in popularity, and bids fair to oust all
others in the future. The new Nonconformist
" Fellowship " hymn-book is even more outspoken.

Among Nonconformist bodies, the least individual-

244 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

istic have been "the Friends." Their belief in the
Living Spirit has to a large extent counteracted
their undervaluation of the outward and material
form, and the Society has given us Elizabeth Fry,
a great pioneer of prison reform, and other social
reformers.

There has been little short of a revolution in
the thought and spirit of the Church of England
within the last fifty years. Eighteenth-century indi-
vidualist Deism left the nation cold and indifferent.
Evangelical revivalism for the most part attracted
people of the upper and middle classes. Even
Wesleyanism, tinged at first with Catholic democratic
sentiment, and therefore with some slight enthusiasm
for social reform, soon became frankly individualistic,
next-worldly, and middle-class. Perhaps revivalism
of any sort, however perverted its theory of religion,
was preferable to the deadness of the eighteenth
century, for it meant an awakening of the heart, and
men once awakened sometimes prove better than their
creed. It would be hard to imagine a narrower faith
than that of Shaftesbury ; it would be hard to find a
more generous-hearted man than this great Evangelical
leader. The logic of his creed should have driven
him to the anti-socialism of Calvin and Charles
Wesley, but his heart escaped from the nets of his
intellectual creed into the glorious liberty of the
Gospel of Christ, and he became the champion of
the children of the poor. He had against him the
dead-weight of a huge Christo-atheist majority, but
his indomitable perseverance spelt ultimate victory.
But it is to Kingsley and Maurice, rather than to

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 245

Shaftesbury, that we must look for the rebirth of
that Catholic democratic theology which inevitably
translates itself, and in their own time began to
translate itself, into practical socialism. It is a
significant comment on contemporary teaching that
Maurice writes of himself, referring to his childhood,
as " a being destined to a few short years of misery
here as an earnest of, and preparation for, that more

(enduring state of wretchedness and woe." Clumsy
critics will always describe Maurice and Kingsley as
broad Churchmen, but in fact they protested against
broad Churchism as being almost as anti-Christian
as Puseyism or popular Protestantism. Their lives
were devoted to the revival of the Catholic democratic
Faith. Maurice was a profoundly original Catholic
theologian, not bound by the letter of tradition, but
developing its spirit. I might instance his teaching
on the Eucharist, on the sacrament of marriage, on
confession, on prayers for the dead, on many other
points of faith and morals; but perhaps his exposition
of baptism is most characteristic.

Maurice rejected the Protestant theory of an in-
visible Church, and the Romish theory of a vicarious
Church, in favour of the Catholic theory of the Church
as a visible society ordained by Christ to bring about
the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is the
world of men and women as planned in heaven, in the
ideal world of God's mind, will, intention. It is in
the truest sense the actual world, because it is the
world as divinely and eternally constituted in the will
of God. Over against it are the temporary " kingdoms
of this age" — i.e. of the competitive age in which men

246 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

are at sixes and sevens — which the Church has to
translate into the kingdom of unity or at-one-ment,
into the Kingdoms of God and of His Christ, into the
Kingdom in which each, by serving all, best serves his
eternal self and grows into full, eternal, or overmaster-
ing life. The underlying fact is the kingdom or
solidarity of men, the fact of God's Holy Family.
That fact is so blurred by egoism, impurity, and other
deadly sins and deadly ignorances, that men arrange
their lives, domestically, politically, commercially, as
if the fact did not exist. The Church is a body of
men converted to the fact and sworn to convert
others to the fact, and to frame the social life upon
the fact.

Broad Churchmen said that baptism declared the
fact. Maurice added that it not only declared the
fact, but helped you to effect it, by effecting something
for you — i.e. by translating you out of the false,
unnatural soil of barren individualism (your birth soil)
into the richer, more natural grace soil of a common
fellowship, a "common salvation," by incorporating
you into a visible fellowship established to bring into
practice and actuality the latent unrecognised fact of
men being God's family. Such a transplantation
constitutes a new chance, a new start, a new birth,
and hence is most accurately called Regeneration.

By this regeneration into a socialist fellowship the
individual may lose his egoistic soul or life " for My
sake and the Gospel's," and save it unto life eternal —
i.e. unto full, generous, robust, overmastering life. Of
course the partial apostasy from fellowship of the
local congregation, into which the child is immediately

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 247

received, impoverishes the new soil ; but so long
as the Church has the fellowship tradition, social
liturgy, and living socialistic sacraments, the part
apostasy of the local congregation, though appalling,
is not fatal, nor can it totally destroy the effect
of baptism.

Neither Maurice nor Kingsley were economic
socialists in our modern sense. Maurice, indeed,
was as pro-monarchy a man as Ruskin, but modern
socialism owes a considerable debt to both these
prophets of the nineteenth century. He speaks of
the dense commercial strength which one encounters
even in religion as a more overpowering nightmare
upon the soul than any bad influence ever felt. In
1840 Lord John Russell told the House of Commons
that the people of England were in a worse condition
than the negroes in the West Indies. By some curious
twist of the mind, common enough in the history
of religion, many of the Christian capitalists were
so filled with indignation against black slavery
abroad that they had no time to consider the white
slavery at their doors which was securing them their
enormous fortunes. The state of society in England,
wrote Dr Arnold to Carlyle, was never yet paralleled
in history. Cobden, champion of individualism and
opponent of Shaftesbury, yet inflamed the first
agitation of the anti-corn law league with story after
story of the tragedy of rural labourers; women
pawning their wedding rings to buy food, people
living on boiled nettles or decayed carcases of dead
cattle.

The great emigration was flinging numbers beyond

248 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

the sea, inflamed with revolt and despair and bitter-
ness against their own land.

In want, in terror, and with a sense of the crushing
injustice of the times, they cursed the land in which they
had been born. . . . The Reform Bill had disappointed
them, all their trade conflicts had ended in failure. Even
the resounding attacks against the Corn Laws, then begin-
ning to fill the country, excited little interest among the
working classes, and so they gave little response. The
betrayal and failure had made them sad and hopeless.

In 1848 the storm burst. The long period of European
sleep and silence suddenly flared into resonant action.
Lamennais, back " amongst realities once again " after the
experience of his fortress-prison, was called to represent the
people in a republican assembly. " A great act of justice is
being done," was his cry; "cannot you feel the breath of
God?" Mazzini, after years of obscure poverty in the
back streets, "the hell of exile" in London, was soon to
find himself raising the red banner of God and Humanity
upon the wall of Rome. Every throne in Europe tottered,
and most were thrown to the ground. The barricades
were up in Berlin, in Milan, in Paris. The air was filled
with the clamour and havoc of change. The revelation of
the coming of terrors seemed at last realised in the ways of
men; with the sun becoming black as sackcloth of hair,
and the moon blood-red, and the stars of heaven falling to
the earth, as a fig-tree when she is shaken by a mighty
wind.1

Maurice's method is well illustrated in his applica-
tion of the Bible, and especially of the Revelation,
to the interpretation of the moment. In Prussia, in
Hungary, in Lombardy, in Poland, the people were
up and were fighting in the streets. The Republic
was proclaimed in Paris. In all this Maurice and

1 Leaders of the Church, 1800-1900, p. 60, " F. D. Maurice," by
C. F. G. Masterman.

THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 249

Kingsley recognised the end of an epoch and the
coming of the Kingdom of God.

If any preacher had tried to impress you with the
belief that some signs and wonders were near at hand, if
he had tasked his imagination or his skiir in interpreting
the hard sayings in Scripture to tell you minutely what
those signs and wonders would be, are you not sure that
his anticipation would be poor and cold when compared
with the things which you have heard of and almost
seen? . . . Do you really think that the invasion of
Palestine by Sennacherib was a greater event than the
overthrowing of nearly all the greatest powers, civil and
ecclesiastical, in Christendom ? l

On 6th May 1848 was published the first number
of Politics for the People, under the editorship of
Kingsley. Physical force methods were repudiated ;
a passionate appeal was made to the Church. The
editor writes : " We have used the Bible as if it were
a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose
for keeping beasts of burden patient while they
are being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor
in order." Maurice was often alarmed at the
vehemence of the party he had created, but he stood
by his friends. Kingsley was like a flame. He
writes : " I will speak in season and out of season.
My path is clear and I will follow it. God has made
the Word of the Lord like fire within my bones,
giving me no peace till I have spoken out."

It is quite possible that Maurice and Kingsley and
their like would have drawn back from the develop-
ment of economic socialism as espoused by Church-
men to-day ; but just as the abolition of slavery is an

1 Quoted by Masterman, ibid.

25o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

inevitable deduction from Pauline philosophy, and
the Lollard revolution from the teachings of the
theologian who repudiated it, so Church socialists of
the present owe much of their socialist make-up to
these Catholic Fathers of the nineteenth century.
In them the voice of the Catholic Church, so long
silenced, had once more been uplifted.

X
BEFORE THE DAWN

The low-water mark in theology and life — The coming of dawn — The
passing of Christo-capitalism — Whateley and other bishops of
mammon — The Tractarians and Newman — Manufactured indi-
vidualistic revivals — Ritualism and social reformation— Father
Dolling— The Guild of St Matthew — The teaching of Stewart
Headlam — The Christian Social Union— The 1908 Pan-Anglican
Congress— Lambeth Conferences of 1867, 1878, 1888, 1908 —
Episcopal socialism and the 1907 report — Temporary reaction —
Socialistic Nonconformity — A Christo-capitalist newspaper — The
Roman apostasy — Uncatholic Puseyism — The autocracy of Rome
— Newman and Manning on the right of the starving to help them-
selves—An Italian manifesto— A Roman socialist and the Catholic
Socialist Society — Modern heretics and their newspapers — The
condition of England, a slight improvement on 1840 — The Church
in chains — International federation versus imperialism and com-
petition—The common bond of socialism— The opportunity of the
Church of England — The Church Socialist League.

X
BEFORE THE DAWN

"I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem; they shall
never hold their peace day nor night ; ye that are the Lord's
remembrancers, take ye no rest, and give him no rest, till he establish,
and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. The Lord hath sworn
by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength, Surely I will no
more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies ; and strangers shall
not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured : but they that
have garnered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord ; and they that have
gathered it shall drink it in the courts of my sanctuary."— ISAIAH Ixiii.

IT is generally admitted that the years 1800-1830
show the low-water mark of the Catholic democracy
both in theology and daily life. Perhaps neither
commerce nor religion can ever be so cruel or evil
again. The popular religion of our day is weak and
nebulous, the condition of the people miserable ;
but the worst is past, and we are witnessing the
faint streaks of dawn. Bishops no longer openly
justify the more monstrous forms of usury and slavery.
Christo-capitalism is dying. Its defenders are
almost silent. The Editor of the Spectator and
the Rev. Lord William Cecil receive an importance
altogether out of proportion to their intellectual
strength, because they appear to be the sole survivors
of ultra-individualism at Church Congresses and

254 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

other official gatherings. This curious creed lingered
on into the early eighties. By 1838 the plutocrats
had so gained in social and political power as to have
become formidable rivals of the landed aristocracy.
The bishops appointed by plutocratic governments,
and as yet untouched by the Oxford Revival or the
Catholicity of Maurice, reflected the Christo-capitalism
of their patrons. We find Archbishop Whately
teaching : " The Israelites were forbidden in the law of
Moses to lend to their brethren on usury, that is,
interest. But they were allowed by God's law to
receive interest on the loan of money lent to a
stranger, and this shows that there can be nothing
wrong in receiving interest"^ The Bishop of Man-
chester in 1880 wrote : " The great Founder of Christi-
anity recognises and implicitly sanctions the practice
of lending money at interest. ' Thou oughtest to have
put my money to the exchangers, and then at my
coming I should have received mine own with usury.' }>1
About the same time the Bishop of Rochester writes :
" Money, like every other talent, is to be made the
most of; and it is our duty to see that we do make
the most of it ; ... but making the most of it does
not necessarily mean the highest possible return for
it ; simply the highest interest compatible with good
security."1

To what extent, it may be asked, did the Oxford
Revival of 1833 contribute to that revolution in
thought and practice which is bearing the English
Church along in the direction of Catholic democracy ?
Its leaders were altogether opposed to what may

1 Cf. The Churches and Usury, pp. 41, 42.

BEFORE THE DAWN 255

be called the Manchester School in theology and
economics. One of them at least recognised that
there were political implications in the Christian
faith. If the fundamental philosophy of socialism
involves the worth of the body and the sensuous life
and the doctrine of fellowship, the Tractarians, insist-
ing on the outward and visible Church and the
ministry of men, the Incarnation of God and the
Communion of the Saints, sensuous worship and the
need of man's forgiveness, were helping to lay the
foundation of Catholicism in religion and socialism in
practice.

But the virus of individualism had not been
expelled, and even Newman, the genius of the
movement, remains in many respects a Protestant
to the end of his life. Mawkish introspection and
disproportioned next-worldliness still mark their
hymns and their books of devotion. Their mission
preachers, though touched with the Catholic spirit,
are not always clearly distinguishable from Christo-
capitalists of the Torrey-Alexander type. The
religion of these latter persons is now so unable
to revive Christian thought, that their boasted
revivals are rather to be seen on the hoardings
than in the hearts of men. The "ritualist"
movement of to-day tends towards social-demo-
cratic ideals, partly because it is the practical
development of Tractarianism, but largely owing
to the fact that it is infused with the spirit
of Maurice-Kingsley Catholicism. Father Dolling
is a good instance of this ; he was not a socialist,
but his sympathies were extremely democratic

256 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

and socialistic. He had probably never read a
word of Maurice, but in the preparation of his
sermons and of his theological defences against the
attacks of the bishops he generally turned to a
brother priest who was working with him and was
one of his greatest friends. This priest was a
thorough-going Maurician.

The Guild of St Matthew, under the fearless leader-
ship of Stewart D. Headlam, carried on the work of
the Catholic Democrats of 1848. This Guild claims
to be the first socialist society in England, pre-dating
even the Social Democratic Party. Its socialism is
certainly more uncompromising than that of Maurice,
but in one fundamental it differs from Maurice, and
in another from the economic Church socialists of
to-day. Maurice taught that the Church was the
mouthpiece of the Kingdom of God, and that the
Mass was the witness to the fellowship of that
Kingdom. Stewart Headlam teaches that the Church
is the Kingdom of God, and sometimes even appears
to teach that the Mass is the fellowship of men. In a
recent speech, he told the Guild that, if they could
not get people to be socialists, they could at least get
them to go to Mass, and he suggested that the more
or less universal substitution of Mass for Matins would
almost mechanically work out into an economic
revolution. Italy and Spain do not quite bear out
this contention. The Church socialists teach that
land and industrial capital must be in the hands of
the whole people ; the Guild would tax land in the
hope that the capitalists' power would be gone when
the value of the land was deflected from private

BEFORE THE DAWN 257

pockets to the pockets of the community. Mr
Headlam himself does not seem clear upon this point,
for he has for many years been on the executive of
the Fabian Society, who have pronounced clearly for
the public ownership of both land and capital. The
younger members of the Guild are invariably on the
side of Mr Headlam of the Fabian Society, and
against Mr Headlam of the single tax. But what-
ever be the economic position of this little Guild, its
theological and political influence on the thought of
Churchmen has been incalculable.1

The Christian Social Union, which includes many
bishops, and has a membership of over six thousand men
and women, is to some extent the child of the Guild of
St Matthew, but the Guild is not proud of its offspring.
It glories in its indefiniteness, and seems to consider
it a crime to arrive at any particular economic con-
clusion. It flings a wide net, gathering both good and
bad. An unkind critic has described it as for ever learn-
ing, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. But
whatever be its defects, it has convinced a large mass of
English church-goers of the importance of social ques-
tions. It has persuaded them that the Christian religion
essentially involves social righteousness in some form
or other. The danger of Social-Unionism is that its
leaders, arriving at no clear dogma in theology or poli-
tics, and being for the most part political undenomina-
tionalists, have no fixed standard by which to judge the
value or otherwise of any suggested social reform.

1 Readers should make themselves familiar with Mr Headlam's works,
and especially with his Laws of Eternal Life, an invaluable commentary
on the Church Catechism (Verinder, 376 Strand, W.C. ; 3^.)

258 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

The Pan- Anglican Congress of 1908 was a triumph
for Christian Social-Unionism. The idea of social
responsibility, and of a close union between politics
and religion, dominated the huge meetings at the
Albert Hall. The socialist tendency in the Church
of England cannot be doubted, for if even the bishops,
appointed by anti-socialist governments and recruited
from the ranks, not of the ablest, but the safest men,
are becoming influenced by socialist thought, the
socialist current among the rank and file must indeed
be vigorous.

Nor can it be said that the bishops are becoming
collectivist because it pays, for any tendency in this
direction is at once met by alarming diminution in
capitalistic subscriptions to home and foreign missions
and other diocesan funds. It is more difficult now
to be a socialist than it was ten years ago. People
are beginning to fear and hate us, for they have nowa-
days to take us seriously.

The socialist wave in episcopal quarters must be
attributed to another cause.

There is a great increase in the ranks of those
clergy who have felt the converging influence of the
Oxford Movement and the Maurice-Scott-Holland-
Headlam Movement. Their ranks have swollen so
enormously that it is impossible even for our enemies
to choose all their bishops from schools of thought
entirely uninfluenced by them. Therefore it comes to
pass that many of our prelates believe in the redemp-
tion of the body, in the sacredness of man's material
sensuous life, in a Divine kingdom of justice to be
set up here and now, and in original goodness.

BEFORE THE DAWN 259

Where there is this philosophy there will be the
possibility of socialism.

But where is this socialist tendency to be found
among the bishops ? Let us look at the facts.

At the first Lambeth Conference, in 1867, social
and economic questions were not so much as
mentioned. The same may be said of the Lambeth
Conferences of 1878 and 1888. Eleven years ago
bishops from all parts of the English-speaking world
again assembled at Lambeth, and the Lambeth
Encyclical of that year reports that many think the
present industrial system unjust, urges the application
of the principle of brotherhood ; for, as result of such
application, " many of the mischiefs of this system
would ultimately be prevented."

The rich must be warned that it is more difficult
for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than the
poor. The poor have their own temptations and
troubles. It is especially the duty of the Church to
lessen these troubles ; but they themselves must exert
themselves to acquire character and act on high
principle. Some are particularly in need of help,
e.g. the unemployed. Sympathy and study are
asked of Church people. The letter concludes lamely
enough : " Help in individual cases of need is the task
the Master gives us." The appended resolution
commends the report of the Lambeth Committee.
The bishops of the committee are glad to see increased
interest of Church people in economic questions.
They recognise that the Church represents Christ
here and now, and must set up the Kingdom of God
here in our midst, and must redeem the bodies as well

260 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

as the souls of men. Nevertheless, it is the duty
rather of laity than of clergy to concern themselves
with this side of the work, discretion is needed, and
the primary duty of the Church is, after all, to the
soul. The Church must not pronounce on the relative
merits of socialism and individualism, except in so
far as it is bound to drive in the following fourfold
wedge : —

(a) Brotherhood : as counterpoise to relentless
competition.

(U) Labour. Every man of every class is bound to
serve mankind. Idleness is not permissible.

(c) Justice. While on the one hand " inequalities
are inwoven with the whole providential order of
human life," and would seem to be recognised by
Christ, yet on the other, the social order " must not
ignore the interest of any of its parts, and must be
tested by the degree in which it secures for each,
freedom for a happy, useful, and untrammelled life,
and distributes as widely as possible social advantages
and opportunities."

(d] Public responsibility. " Certain conditions of
labour are intolerable." We repudiate and condemn
" open breaches of social justice," as also " the belief
that economic conditions are to be left to the action
of material causes uncontrolled by moral responsi-
bility," for "A Christian community is responsible for
the character of its own economic and social order > and
for deciding to what extent matters affecting that order
are to be left to individual initiative, and to the un-
regulated play of economic forces"

So far and no further had the official Church moved

BEFORE THE DAWN 261

by 1897. But I know of no official statement of the
bishops since that date which does not fully recognise
that the mission of the Church is to set up a Kingdom
of God on earth. This mission is insisted upon in the
present Archbishop's sermon at the opening of the
1908 Pan-Anglican Congress at St Paul's Cathedral.
The Church " must strive more valiantly to mend
what is ignorant and amiss in the world around us,
and to hasten on earth the coming of our Lord's
Kingdom."

Of course, utterances of individual bishops go much
further. The Bishop of Birmingham tells us that the
socialistic ideals of the Master and of the early Church
included the living wage, the right to work, support
for the weak, the aged, and the children ; we must
return to those ideals " if possible without violence,
but in any case return." The Bishop of Utah frankly
urges Marxian socialism and return by the method
of revolution. The Archbishop of Melbourne criticises
the practicability of certain socialist proposals, but
asserts that socialism in his country is founded on
Christian principles. The Bishop of London, in
words almost identical with those of the new Arch-
bishop of York, speaks of the ideals underlying the
Labour Movement, "Justice, Fellowship, and Equality
of Opportunity." They are his own ideals. The
Bishop of Carlisle urges drastic land reforms and the
equality of opportunity. The Bishop of Hereford's
collectivist radicalism is well known. The Bishop
of Truro demands sympathetic study of economic
socialism, and the Bishop of Wakefield has taken
the chair for Mr Keir Hardie.

262 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

It is also significant that the son of Archbishop
Temple, and sons of the Bishops of Manchester and
Southwark, and many others coming from episcopal
families, are socialists, while the son of a late Arch-
bishop of York has spoken from I.L.P. platforms.

The individual utterances of bishops do not perhaps
count for much. Some prelates are apt to hedge on
other occasions and destroy much of the force of their
previous words, but there are few of them who would
not now endorse Bishop Westcott's eulogium on the
underlying principles of Socialism : —

Individualism regards humanity as made up of dis-
connected and warring atoms; socialism regards it as an
organic whole, a vital unity formed by the combination of
contributory members mutually interdependent. It follows
that socialism differs from individualism both in method
and in aim. The method of socialism is co-operation ; of
individualism, competition. The one regards man as
working with man for a common end; the other regards
man as working against man for private gain. The aim of
socialism is the fulfilment of service ; the aim of individualism
is the attainment of some personal advantage, riches, or
place, or fame.

After the " socialist field-day " of the Pan- Anglican
Congress, 242 "archbishops and bishops of the
Holy Catholic Church, in full communion with the
Church of England, assembled from divers parts
of the earth at Lambeth Palace, in the year of our
Lord 1908." They issue an Encyclical, which
defines the Church as ordained for the welfare
of mankind and the true happiness of all. The
democratic movement presents an opportunity for
Christian service, for its ideals are the Christian
ideals of " brotherhood, liberty, and mutual justice."

BEFORE THE DAWN 263

For these ideals underlying social democracy the
242 bishops claim Christ's sanction, and the teach-
ing of the ancient prophets. " We call upon the
Church to consider how far and wherein it has
departed from these truths. . . . In so far as the
democratic and industrial movement is animated by
these ideals and strives to procure for all, especially
for the weaker, JUST TREATMENT AND A REAL
OPPORTUNITY OF LIVING A TRUE HUMAN LIFE,
WE APPEAL TO ALL CHRISTIANS TO CO-OPERATE
ACTIVELY WITH IT." This appeal is then in-
corporated in the formal resolutions, which conclude :
" The social mission and social principles of Christi-
anity should be given a more prominent place in the
study and teaching of the Church, both for the clergy
and laity."

The 242 archbishops and bishops assembled at
Lambeth urge upon Church people the consideration
of the report of their own committee of twenty- seven
bishops, and of the report of a committee of Convoca-
tion published in 1907.

These documents of the National Church will prob-
ably be looked upon by future ecclesiastical historians
as by far the most important pronouncements of
Anglican bishops since the beginnings of the
Reformation.

Their object is to consider "the tidal wave of
democracy, flowing in the direction of social recon-
struction." They note with satisfaction "the new
prominence given to the wage-earners," " the growing
sense of dissatisfaction," "the claim increasing in
intensity for justice in the distribution of the proceeds

264 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

of industry," as also the universality of the movement.
They continue as follows : —

" It is the privilege of the Church to welcome this
movement as one of the great developments of human
history, which have behind them the authority of
God. It follows that it is the mission of the Church
to help to keep the spirit of democracy true to the
Divine purpose. Its aim, therefore, will be to assert
a claim, and to recognise an obligation."

" The Claim. — That the whole sphere of human life,
material as well as spiritual, must be consecrated to
the highest purpose ; that every human aspiration,
that every natural human desire, is meant to find
its legitimate satisfaction, while all human wills
and activities must be brought under the sway of
Christian law."

" The Obligation. — That it is the duty of the Church
to apply the truths and principles of Christianity,
especially the fundamental truths of the Fatherhood
of God and the brotherhood of man, to the solution
of social and economic difficulties, to awaken and
educate the social conscience, to further its expression
in legislation (while preserving its own independence
of political party), and to strive, above all, to present
Christ before men as a living Lord and King in the
realm of common life."

"An attitude of aloofness on the part of the
Church, or timidity in facing its obligation, can only
mean a serious failure in its work and a hindrance to
its influence, and must tend to strengthen the feeling
amongst the wage-earners that the Church is the ally
of the comfortable rather than of the poor, and that

BEFORE THE DAWN 265

it identifies itself with the interests of wealth and
property ; with the result that the people become
indifferent to the Church, distrustful of its interest in
their lives, and persuaded that it is out of sympathy
with their hopes and aims."

"The question inevitably arises, Why does the
Church fail to win the sympathy and regard of those
who seek an ideal so largely in accord with the Lord's
own principles, since it is plainly wrong to suppose
that this democratic movement is in itself atheistic
or antichristian ? "

The answer is to be found on the one hand in the
shameful divisions of Christendom, in the lack of
practical fellowship, in autocratic methods of Church
government ; and on the other hand in elements of
individual and class selfishness and an inadequate
perception of the need of individual redemption from
the dominion of sin.

They reprove the Church for being too slack in
establishing groups everywhere for the study of social
and economic questions (groups suggested by them
in their 1897 report). Such groups of Christian men
and women should " make it their aim to bring the
sense of justice . . . which is common to Christianity
and to Democracy to bear upon matters of everyday
life in trade, in society, etc."

" We need Christian men and women who will give
serious study to social problems and make the best
of their opportunities of training in social service ;
who will then be qualified to take their place on
public administrative bodies, both local and national ;
who will protest both by word and example, both in

266 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

public and in private, against anything that is
immoral or unjust ; who will call into action any
legislative machinery which already exists for the
public welfare, and stir up public opinion on behalf
of the removal of wrong wherever it may be found,
thus making an earnest endeavour to share in the
transforming work of Christianity ' for their brethren
and companions' sake.' "

" In other words, the Church must concentrate its
resources on recreating, inspiring, and using its own
Demos, making of it a truly elect people, a laity, an
instructed and disciplined ' people of God.' But this
Church 'laity' is to be raised up for service to the
whole nation and to the world, and not for merely
denominational interests ; men of all classes of
society united as comrades to fight the battle of the
Lord against sin, the world, and the devil by virtue
of their baptism."

"This will lead on to a more general revelation
of brotherhood in the Church itself, without which
it is hopeless to expect to be able to win the
confidence of the people."

" On matters of public morality and social reform
Christians of various denominations can and do co-
operate, and it is therefore hoped that in this way
also the common service of men will increasingly
draw together those who are otherwise grievously
divided."

The Church must be active in proclaiming national
and international justice, the laws of health, the
importance of self-education, and in warning the
rich of the sin of idleness, the incompatibility of

BEFORE THE DAWN 267

selfish luxury with professing Christianity, and " the
duty of substituting justice ... for a condescending
and thoughtless benevolence."

They then insist on a thorough overhauling of
Church government in a democratic direction, the
upholding of material good and of spiritual vision
as both necessary to the development of the people,
for this is the dual ideal of "the ever-present
Kingdom of God."

The Lambeth Conference further urges the careful
study of the report of 1907 issued by the bishops,
deans, etc., assembled as a committee of the Con-
vocation of Canterbury.1 The Report commences
with a root-and-branch repudiation of Manches-
terianism or individualist commercialism, and approves
the teachings of "those deep-seeing men, Carlyle,
Maurice, and Ruskin." Modern economists are right
when they assert that —

" The majority of men are found to be not free to
bargain, or to pursue their own interests. They are
too weak and ignorant. They are exploited by the
strong. . . . The real end of industrial organisation is
to combine efficient production with such a distribu-
tion of the commodities produced as will enable the
greatest number of people to find a full opportunity
of self-realisation and joy."

"The true riches of a nation are vigorous and
happy men and women, willingly and intelligently
co-operating for the good of the community."

The report proceeds to show that the Christian

1 Cf. S.P.C.K. 2d. Report of Committee of Convocation on
Economic Questions, 1907.

268 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

religion is a development from that of the Jews,
whose Old Testament legislation insisted on a just
wage, prohibited interest, and secured the land to
the people, denouncing the exploitation of the poor.
In Old Testament times private gain was restricted
by public well-being ; manual labour is the necessary
basis of society. We are not bound by the letter
and detail, but we are bound by the moral prin-
ciples underlying this legislation. Christ deepened
and universalised Old Testament conceptions. Now,
the neighbour is "everyone who has need." The
pursuit of riches is condemned. " Each is to work
with his own hands to support the weak, that he may
have to give to him that needeth." These principles
apply not only to the Church, but also to the State.
" Individual salvation . . . has been disastrously
isolated . . . from the social idea of original
Christianity and the teaching of brotherhood."

" Christ, our Master and severe Judge, holds us
responsible for every one of His members whose life
has been wasted by our common neglect." " Idle-
ness, whether it is that of the rich or the poor man, is
an offence against God and man."

" It is intolerable that any part of our industry
should be organised upon the foundation of the
misery and want of the labourer."

The doctrine of the " living wage " is then insisted
on, and the duty of consumers considered. Private
action must be pushed as far as possible, but " un-
doubtedly the individual by his private action is able
to do little to alter what is amiss. The law must
help — that is, the expressed will and power of the

BEFORE THE DAWN 269

\

whole community." Churchmen must insist on
carrying out the present Factory, Truck, and Sanita-
tion Acts ; but, furthermore, although the committee
do not think it wise for the Church as a society to
identify itself with any one particular political party >
and while they urge fairness in preaching justice and
goodwill to all men, and particularly warn preachers
against mere flattery of and toadying to the artisan
class, yet they are compelled "to urge that the
Christian Church should make clear to itself the
nature of the demand for the reconstruction of society
which is at present urged upon us. Behind the more
technical (industrial and political) proposals lies a
fundamental appeal for justice, which the Christian
Church cannot ignore. It is bound to make a much
more thorough endeavour than it has yet made to
appreciate this appeal in all its bearings; and to
consider whether the charge made against the present
constitution and principles of the industrial world,
and the present division of the profits of industry,
is a just charge. Certainly the Christian society is
competent to deal with the fundamental moral
question, and is bound to press upon its members the
duty of facing it."

Then, in consequence of such deepened reflection
upon the fundamental moral issue, it is undoubtedly
the case that we shall need an advance in our present
law touching social and industrial problems. " It is
time, we think, that the Christian conscience of the
country voted urgency' among parliamentary and
municipal questions for all the group of problems
which concern the grossly unequal distribution of

270 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

wealth and well-being ; the waste of life and capacity
through lack of proper nourishment and training ;
the sweating of women's and children's labour ; the
deficiency, in the surroundings of so many, of those
things which are the ordinary essentials of physical
and moral well-being."

" We are convinced that the Church has a teaching
which it ought to give on all matters which concern
the acquisition and distribution of wealth, in its
bearing on human lives; and that this teaching
involves not only private effort, but municipal and
political reforms. Thus we want the Church as a
body to come forward to the support of such legisla-
tion as embodies or tends to render more practicable
the Christian view of the worth and meaning of human
life, and the belief in the Divine principle of justice."

Church people who are dominated by this ideal
must come forward as voters and candidates for
parliamentary and municipal elections ; for although
the older systems of alms-giving and the like must
not be neglected, " something more is wanted than
improvements in our methods of administering chari-
table relief. We have to go deeper to the grounds of
the existing misery and want and unemployment ;
and while we do our best to deal with the present
distress, direct our chief attention towards furthering
the reorganisation of society on such principles of
justice as will tend to reduce poverty and misery in
the future to more manageable proportions."

This, then, is the official teaching of the National
Church, as seen in the most recent deliberations of
her bishops on the subject of social democracy.

BEFORE THE DAWN 271

A reaction has set in since the Lambeth pronounce-
ments. The Archbishop of Canterbury — that same
Archbishop who bids us do all in our power to bring
in God's Kingdom here on earth, and who refuses a
five minutes' interview with the Leicester unem-
ployed, after their tramp to London under the leader-
ship of Lewis Donaldson, a loyal priest of the
National Church — seems bent on perpetuating the
heretical divorce between things spiritual and things
material.1 The Archbishop of York, dissociating
himself from economic socialists, defends them from
their baser assailants, supports their ethical assump-
tions, and certain of their political proposals. The
forces of plutocracy are doing all in their power to
stifle the bishops and prevent a repetition of the
Lambeth pronouncements, but the episcopal reaction
can only be temporary.

The revolution in thought is not confined to the
Church of England. The movement known as the
New Theology expresses itself politically in many
cases in socialistic schemes. The Rev. R. J. Campbell's
Progressive League, which numbers many thousands
of members, although it does not tie its people to
economic socialism, is largely socialist in tendency.
Not only the new theologians, like Mr Campbell and Mr
Rhondda Williams, but older- fashioned theologians, Mr
Rattenbury, Mr Kirtlan, and Dr Clifford, are socialists
and belong to some economic socialist society. An
undenominational international body known as " The
Christian Socialist Fellowship," urging the national-

1 Cf. the reason given by the Archbishop of Canterbury for not voting
on the Budget proposals of the Liberal Government of 1909.

272 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

isation of land and capital, is making rapid progress ;
while the Free Church Socialist League, formed in
1909, has considerable chance of success, although we
have yet to learn the nature of its economic basis.
This socialist movement among Nonconformist
bodies is the expression of their abandonment of
their original reasons for schism from the National
Church. Most of the leaders frankly state that they
have no particular quarrel with the English Church,
and see no essential value in separation from her.
The term Catholic has no longer any terrors for them,
and, though their theology is often hazy, such as it is,
it is an approach to the Catholic faith in the value of
fellowship and of outward life, and a frank denial of
Calvinism and the capitalistic religions of the recent
night. Sensuous worship is no longer held up to
ridicule, some form of liturgy is often adopted, Catholic
views of the next world often held. It is not a very
far step from all this to the recognition of one outward
and visible fellowship among men.

Official Dissent stands outside this Catholic move-
ment among Nonconformists. The most popular
Nonconformist journal still stands frankly for the old
Christo-capitalism. It is always ready to whitewash
a plutocratic sweater, so long as he shows the necessary
interest in missionaries, is severe about Sunday, and
sufficiently lavish in his donations to chapel building
funds. Some months back I was taken over the
worst slums in Glasgow — perhaps the worst in
Europe — and we had waded through darkness, filth,
and misery, and come out at the other end with sore
hearts and sore throats. The wages of this slumdom

BEFORE THE DAWN 273

were in some cases i6s. lod. a week ; the hours of
work and the rents were monstrous. The workers
are the victims of a loathsome skin disease arising
from the chemical vapours in which they are compelled
to labour. At one time no meal-hours were allowed,
and the regime was a twelve-hour day and a seven-
day week. When the pious employer who was
responsible for this state of things was attacked, and
a Nonconformist minister had sent back a cheque for
a chapel building fund, saying he did not like to
partake in the price of blood, the journal in question
came to the defence of the princely philanthropist,
and was particularly insulting to his critics. At the
time of his death, a writer in this same journal gushed
over the wonderful city, Glasgow, with its " numbers
of men of commercial standing and repute . . . who
cling to Evangelical principles, and while diligent in
business find in religious work for the benefit of their
humbler fellow-creatures the romance of their lives."
Referring lightly to the attack on the conduct of his
business, the writer suggests that it did not weaken his
influence among business men, " for he kept straight
on his course, and people bethought them that a man
of such obvious goodness could not consciously be
guilty of injustice to others." Fever-ridden slums and
poison-infested works are too close to the Christo-
capitalists and too necessary for their existence for
them to trouble much about them ; but, says our
eulogist, ' at one time, hearing of the danger of typhoid
fever in Livingstonia, he gave ^"4000 to provide and
send out several miles of steel piping to bring pure
and unadulterated water into the mission station."

18

274 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

Is it any wonder that, so long as this journal
calls itself Christian, Mr Robert Blatchford should
prefer to call himself agnostic ?

It has been suggested in a former chapter that the
schisms in Europe at the time of the Reformation
narrowed down the Church of Rome as much as any
other body. A study of her popular books of de-
votion, sermons, and hymnology would suggest that
she has been visited with neurotic introspection and
intellectual barrenness. The Catholic faith is more
completely denied in the official Roman body than
among certain English Dissenters. The High Church
Puseyite, in spite of his many social virtues, has done
his best to perpetuate or revive certain evil tendencies
in early Church history. He treats the Christian
ministry as a separate class receiving its authority,
not from the whole priestly democracy, but from
some distant planet. He calls this the authority
" from above," and describes democratic authority as
" from below," thereby destroying the Catholic idea of
the Church. Papal Catholicism is, however, the logical
development of High Church sectarianism. In this
system, not only is the priestly body of the people
ignored, but it is counted anathema that even the
priest-caste and their bishops should be considered
authoritative. The groundwork of modern! Romanism,
and to some extent of Puseyism, is that God is really
absent from the world. Their doctrine of the Real
Presence is a corollary of the Real Absence. God is
the occasional visitor, who must be brought down
into the world in Mass wafers and Papal encyclicals.
Nowadays the issue is Vaticanism versus Catholicism.

BEFORE THE DAWN 275

The Pope claims to be, not only above, but apart
from the bishops, priests, and councils, sole emperor
on earth representing the Sole Emperor in heaven.
The following are typical pronouncements of modern
official Romanism : —

The proposition which defines that power has been
given by God to the Church to be communicated to pastors
who are its ministers for the salvation of the soul ; under-
stood in the sense that the power of ecclesiastical ministra-
tion and government in the pastors, is derived from the
body of the faithful ; heretical.1

Moreover, the proposition which defines that the
Pontiff is the Administering Head ; explained in the sense
that the Roman Pontiff receives his administrative authority,
not from Christ in the person of St Peter, but receives from
the Church his power of administration, by which as the
successor of Peter, the true vicar of Christ and head of the
whole Church, he rules in the universal Church ; heretical.1

Papal and High Church journals alike condemn
the Catholic democrat for holding that the inter-
national Christian democracy is a royal priesthood,
and that, for the sake of Holy Orders, bishops, priests,
and deacons are appointed from the whole priestly
body for different functions and administrations, and
that the official priesthood is the mouthpiece of the
Christian democracy. As a Roman modernist has
recently said, " the theocratic conception of ecclesias-
tical authority is incompatible with democracy,
whether the authority be Papal, Episcopal, or
Sacerdotal. If ecclesiastical authority is to justify
itself, it must be of the people, for the people, by the
people. The Church must be democratised, or it

1 Encyclical on Modernism, " Pascendi," footnotes.

276 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

cannot survive ; and after all, in democratising itself
it will but return to its first principle." Cardinal
Newman, who is sometimes claimed by modernists
as their precursor, would have shrunk from such
sentiments. Cardinal Manning was theologically
narrower than his rival ; but his heart outran his
intellect, and although he was incapable of thinking
out a fundamental Catholic theology or of coming to
any clear economic conclusions, he put himself at
the head of the movement among the dockers and
other unskilled labourers, and wrote bravely in
defence of what was called the New Unionism.
Especially bold was his defence in the Fortnightly
Review of the right of starving men to steal.
The Archbishop of Toronto, in a letter to the
Chicago Times, defended Manning, asserting that
there was never any doubt, from the point of view of
the Catholic tradition, about the duty of stealing
rather than starving. Archbishop M'Hale also
supported them.1 Compare their contention with
Cardinal Newman's note to the Apologia, where he
admits as indisputable the right of starving men to
help themselves.

There is considerable plain speaking on social
subjects on the part of a small section of the French
clergy to-day, but the recent claims of the Papacy
and its anti-socialist attitude make their position one
of great difficulty. The clergy during the period of
the Revolution for the most part sided with the
aristocracy, but Lamennais and a vigorous minority
of priests and lay people brought new life into the

1 Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 381.

BEFORE THE DAWN 277

Church of France from 1840 to 1848. In the thirties
the Catholic cause was almost universally thought to
be lost. In 1843 tne Church had only one friend
in Parliament. In 1846 the one had become one
hundred and forty-six. In 1848 the Church party
was equally successful.

There is in Italy a Catholic democratic move-
ment, anti-clerical and anti-papist, which in many
respects recalls the action of priests, monks, and
laity under Garibaldi. Its adherents published in
1908 a manifesto entitled Why we are Christian
Socialists, which quotes with approval one of the
speakers of the Pan-Anglican Congress where he
says : " The Church should open her doors to this
new current of Christian life which is bursting forth
from the troubled conscience of the masses." The
time will come in which " Christian brotherhood
will triumph completely," but this will only be "when
the chains of servitude, which have been forged by
property and the wage system, shall have been broken,
and society shall have become a union of equals, each
of whom shall fulfil his own task and be able to
honour fully the claims of his own spiritual person-
ality." Mr A. L. Lilley quotes this remarkable
document as saying that, " if the dogma of original
sin has a meaning for us, it is in so far as it may be
regarded as the theological symbol of the origin of
private property. Indeed, on the day that man first
said, Mine and thine, with regard to the means of
production, the curse of God fell upon the human
race and its uninterrupted disaster began." "The
Gospel flourishes anew in this dawn of democratic

278 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

expectation. For Christ against the Vatican — that
is our motto ; for socialism against all the parties of
reaction and conservatism." l

A faithful band of Roman Catholic socialist laymen
in Scotland and England find themselves in a painful
dilemma. One of their most progressive bishops tells
them that it is no more possible for a Catholic to be
a socialist than it is for him to be a Wesleyan. A
Roman Catholic writer in the Clarion, March 1909,
fears that the Papacy now claims infallibility in
matters political as well as in matters of faith and
morals. The Catholic Times, the most influential
Roman weekly in this country, declares socialism to
have been condemned in the Encyclical Rerum
Novarum of I5th May 1891, and the Encyclical on
Christian Democracy of i8th January 1901. Despite
these denunciations from headquarters, there are a few
brave Roman priests in Europe and in America, and
many laymen, who are Catholic in their economic
ideas as well as in name. The Rev. John A. Ryan,
D.D., argues in the Catholic Fortnightly Review^ an
American publication, that the teaching of Leo XIII.
was aimed at communism rather than socialism.
According to this theologian, a Roman Catholic may
quite properly believe and advocate that —

The instruments of production and exchange should be
owned and managed by the community, but the private
owners of these instruments should receive fair compensation.

Landowners should receive from the State as much as
they have paid for their land, and should be permitted to
retain permanently and to transfer or transmit the land that

1 Quoted by A. L. Lilley, Church Socialist Quarterly, Jan. 1909.

i

BEFORE THE DAWN 279

they cultivate or occupy, but should be compelled to pay
to the State annually its full rental value, exclusive of
improvements.

Since the great industries managed by the State would set
the pace, small industries which an individual could operate
by himself or with the help of two or three others might
remain private. This would involve private ownership of
the simple machinery and tools used in such industries — for
example, agricultural implements and the sewing-machine of
the custom tailor or dressmaker.

The incomes of persons employed by the community
should be regulated by needs, efforts, productivity, the social
welfare, and not merely by the principle of equality.

All goods which immediately satisfy man's wants, such as
food, clothing, dwellings, furniture, utensils, etc., should be
privately owned, and subject to full power of disposal by the
proprietor.

The integrity of the family and parental control over the
children should be as secure as Catholic teaching desires.

Until recently, as has been said, the construction
of modern socialism has been undertaken for the
most part by men who, though they are often
Churchmen by the fact of their baptism, have repudi-
ated the theology and practice of the Church as it
presented itself to them. The Agnostics are just as
much Christian heretics as the Puseyite and the
Evangelical ; each holds strenuously by some portion
of the Catholic faith, each denies some other equally
essential aspects of it. Calvin and Dr Pusey believed
in God and not in man. Marx and Belfort Bax
believe in man and not in God. Many High Church-
men believe in original sin, but not in original right-
eousness. Many Atheists believe in original righteous-
ness but not in original sin. Mr Bernard Shaw
believes in God's goodness, but not in His power.

280 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

The Revivalists believe in God's power, but not in
His goodness. The editors of the Church Times,
the Clarion, the Guardian, the Agnostic Annual, and
the British Weekly respectively believe and respec-
tively repudiate integral portions and implications
of the Catholic faith. We might well exclaim
with St Paul, thinking of our own people
and of our own times, " He hath included all
under sin, that He might have mercy upon all."
There is in Agnosticism a real movement nowadays
towards the Catholic religion ; there is in " Ritualism "
as evident a movement in that direction. The Neo-
Evangelicals have abandoned their irreconcilability;
Nonconformists have abandoned the very reasons of
their schism. Modernist Romans are joining hands
with democratic Anglicans, Agnostics, Presbyterians,
and Dissenters. The socialist movement is bringing
all these forces together on a common platform, and
in our own day we see the revival of the Catholic
Church in its embryo stage.

The condition of the people is appalling. A Prime
Minister has told us of twelve million people on the
verge of starvation. We still send hundreds of
thousands of children to school in an underfed
condition. Sweating still flourishes in our towns, and
is little altered for the better since the time in which
Kingsley wrote his Alton Locke. The half-time
system for children still flourishes in the North, and
in the South of England child-labour is also excessive,
sometimes amounting to sixty hours a week. Our
industrial system still results in the overwork and
underfeeding of the many, and the underwork and

BEFORE THE DAWN 281

overfeeding of the few. Adulteration in trade is
everywhere prevalent, hours of adult labour are
generally excessive, overcrowding is too common,
and a large class of people seem to have learnt
untruly, by means of rent and interest, to get some-
body else's living in that rut of death in which it
has pleased the devil to leave them.

Yet for all this there has been change, not only in
thought but in conditions. Evil as are the conditions
of the twentieth century, terribly as they contrast
with the conditions of the fourteenth or even the
seventeenth, there is some slight improvement since
what we have called the low- water mark of 1800
to 1830.

It is significant that this improvement in outward
conditions should be concurrent with the embryo
revival of the Catholic religion. I have sketched the
part that bishops and clergy of the National Church
have played in this revival, and have traced the
various lines — Romanist, Anglican, Nonconformist,
Agnostic — that are converging towards this Catholic
religion.

In England the Church is fettered, as are its Non-
conformist offshoots, by reliance on the subscriptions
of the capitalist. Not only are bishops appointed by
capitalist governments, but the people have been
robbed of their rights in the parishes, and the private
patron appoints to the most important cures. On
ecclesiastical bodies, Convocations of Canterbury and
of York, ruridecanal meetings, diocesan committees,
the artisan class is almost wholly unrepresented.
For, in spite of all we have said, the official Church is

282 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

still the ally of the rich against the poor. For all
this, secular socialists are turning to the Church of
England for clear and forcible pronouncement on the
social question, and perhaps those of them who study
this book will find in it some answer to their own oft-
repeated question : " Why is it that definite Church-
men make better socialists than members of other
religious bodies ? "

The Church of England stands at the parting of
the ways; her own peculiar position should help her to-
wards socialism. The socialist is anti-imperialist and
anti competitive in the economic sphere. Is not that
precisely the attitude of the English Church in the
religious sphere? She criticises and repudiates the
imperialism of Rome and the competitive theories of
Dissent. Her ideal is one of national Churches, but
these national Churches are not to be insular and
self-sufficient; they are but democratically governed
provinces of the International or Catholic Church of
God. She herself appealed for an international
council in the troubled days of the Reformation.
For such an international council she still longs. Is
it inconceivable that the Church of England should
learn to be more flexible in things non-essential,
more firm in Catholic fundamentals ? There are not
wanting indications that she will allow a little more
liberty of prophesying to her nonconforming sons and
daughters, and might be persuaded to provide along-
side of her liturgies for extempore prayer and other
types of service dear to the nonconformist mind. Is
it outside the bounds of possibility that the service of
the Eucharist, symbol and bond of fellowship, should

BEFORE THE DAWN 283

once more become the common service of the parish,
and that all Christians uniting in that common
worship should be allowed considerable liberty in the
matter of other services and addresses? What is
most urgently needed is a reinterpretation of the
creeds and their application to the practical life of
men, the democratisation of the Church, an effective
desire to meet both Nonconformists, Atheists, and
Agnostics, listen to their criticisms, and, with their
help, rebuild the national religion, without sacrificing
a single essential principle. At the same time,
forgetting our insularity, we must hold out the right
hand of fellowship to those comrades in the Eastern
and Roman communions who love Catholicism more
than they love Pope or Czar. All this we must
do, after unreserved acknowledgment of our own
national crimes and blunders, cloaking nothing, con-
fessing everything. To have the strength and the
flexibility of tempered steel — that is the task of the
Church of England, in both the spiritual and the
material realm. To recover and to develop the
Catholic faith in every sphere — physical, mental, and
spiritual, — that is the work that lies ready to our
hands.

There is one body within the National Church
which has not yet been mentioned. The Church
Socialist League is the most vigorous champion of
Catholic democracy that has yet taken the field. Its
power is already out of all proportion to its numbers;
its growth has been phenomenal ; its activities are
numberless. It alone has the unreserved confidence
of the secular movement. A colossal work lies before

284 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY

it. If the League has the energy and the wisdom, it
may act like leaven upon the sluggish conscience of
the age. It may be that God is raising up its
members for the revival of the national religion and
for the hope of an international Catholicism. The
Church Socialist League may prove itself one of God's
chiefest instruments for translating " Christianity "
into the religion of Jesus Christ, and the kingdoms of
this world into the Kingdom of Heaven. For we are
witnessing in our own times the fulfilment of an ancient
prophecy : " And it shall be in the last days, saith God,
I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh : and your sons
and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young
men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream
dreams : yea, and on my bondmen and bondmaidens
in those days will I pour forth of my spirit ; and they
shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the
heaven above and signs on the earth beneath ; blood,
and fire, and vapour of smoke : the sun shall be turned
into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the
day of the Lord come, that great and notable day :
and it shall be that whosoever shall call on the name
of the Lord shall be saved."

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