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HOW I BECAME 
 A SOCIALIST 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 BY 
 
 J. STITT WILSON 
 
 EDITION 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 
 
 BERKELEY. CALIF. 
 SEPTEMBER. 1912 
 
A WORD 
 
 The pamphlets included in this volume were pub- 
 lished at various times during the last four years, 
 1908-1912, while conducting Socialist propaganda in 
 England and the United States. They were never 
 intended as a connected whole. Some of them were 
 delivered on special occasions, as for instance the 
 "Bible Argument for Socialism," to the Methodist 
 preachers of San Francisco. "How I Became a 
 Socialist" was first printed, red hot, off my tongue, 
 in a little paper published for campaign purposes in 
 England. Before the last copies are exhausted, I 
 have had three hundred sets bound for those who 
 wish to preserve them. A new type of propaganda 
 material will appear as the social revolution proceeds. 
 This has had its place, and such of it as may yet 
 prove useful may be reprinted. I count myself 
 happy to have spoken or written anything, to have 
 had any part however small, in this great hour of 
 
 human trial and triumph. 
 
 J. STITT WILSON. 
 
 Berkeley, California, 
 
 September, 1912. 
 
How I Became a 
 
 I. 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 I was born in a Wesleyan Methodist home. Both 
 of my parents were devout members of the church. 
 My father was a class-leader and a man of great 
 spiritual power. Our home was often turned into a 
 place of worship and prayer, and the beginnings of 
 what afterwards became churches were organised under 
 our roof. My mother was a woman of great kindness 
 of heart. This was the distinguishing mark of her piety. 
 She was undemonstrative, while my father was one of 
 those men in early Methodism who were said to be 
 " powerful in prayer." They taught me to read the 
 Bible before I could pronounce the words. I recall 
 vividly to this day, the first lesson in the Life of Jesus. 
 It is a singular fact that the first story of Jesus my 
 mother ever taught me was how the ruling classes in 
 the person of Herod sought to kill the young child. 
 The New Testament was opened to my young mind not 
 as a book full of strange and fantastic doctrines, but 
 as containing the records of the wonderful life of a great 
 lover of men. The old family Bible had a few gruesome 
 pictures from which I turned away ; but the little 
 black-backed penny New Testament did not have 
 such pictures. One supreme picture was there of one 
 who loved human beings. I do not wish to convey the 
 idea that I was a " good little boy." I was a hearty, 
 healthy, robust lad, insanely fond of boyish sport, and 
 often victim or aggressor in the rows that were not in- 
 frequent in our school -days. 
 
 3O52O5 
 
2 MOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 I soon began to fight with the under-dog, however, 
 and at thirteen years of age I crossed a dead line, 
 in an inward spiritual illumination. At eighteen I was 
 preaching under the direction of the Methodists. 
 Later I entered Northwestern University at Evanston 
 (Chicago) 111., U.S.A., and became also a student in the 
 theological seminary at the same place. I was regu- 
 larly ordained as a minister in the Methodist body, my 
 last appointment being in Chicago. 
 
 It was during this four years' pastorate in this great 
 industrial centre that my heart and mind were 
 acutely directed to the terrible struggle of the working- 
 classes in the Battle for Bread. I saw this struggle 
 with my eyes. My heart and mind were compelled 
 to the issue involved. These four years were to me a 
 school out of which I came a Socialist. The experi- 
 ences I passed through, and the reflections that 
 eventually culminated in my Socialist convictions, I 
 partially uncover in these pages. 
 
 1. Three Forces in One. 
 
 Three forces in my life converged into one. These 
 forces were parallel, and indeed like all energies in our 
 human life, met, and touched, and parted, and united 
 again. They were always really one. But I shall place 
 them before you for clearness as three. Human life 
 is not the broken thing we make it by our analysis. 
 It is a unit, however separated its aspects may appear. 
 
 First, then, the facts drove me to Socialism. The 
 > injustices, misery, and wretchedness, and the unequal 
 struggle of the workers against such frightful odds com- 
 pelled me to study the underlying causes of this social 
 agony and I became a Socialist. 
 
 Second. I was a student of economics and sociology, 
 reading, observing, meditating, and this led me to 
 Socialism. Socialism is the social order corresponding 
 to truth in the intellect. 
 
 And in the third place I was passing through a series 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 3 
 
 Of Subjective experiences, experiences of the mind and 
 heart, moral and spiritual growing-pains and again I 
 became a Socialist. I shall devote a whole pamphlet to 
 this phase of the subject. See Part II). 
 
 The Social and Economic Necessity of Humanity : a 
 Scientific Study of Society : and Spiritual Light combined 
 to make me a Socialist. I know these three are one. 
 They correspond to the three-fold aspect of human 
 life : physical, intellectual, and spiritual. And so 
 it must be that a Programme which will satisfy human 
 need and abolish human suffering, must be Truth to 
 the Intellect, and Spiritual Release to the heart. 
 
 In a penny pamphlet you will not expect me to give 
 you anything like an adequate treatment of any of these 
 aspects. The subject is too extensive. I shall give 
 you but a running outline, with perhaps a fuller treat- 
 ment of the third element in Part II. 
 
 II. 
 EDUCATION BY RAW FACT. 
 
 From my earliest recollections my heart had been 
 moved at the sight of human misery, no matter what 
 the cause. And long before I came to Chicago that 
 citadel of Capitalism I had heard the cry of the 
 suffering. But it was not until I came face to face with 
 the actual poverty and misery and struggle of the 
 workers as a Class that the whole horrible tragedy pre- 
 sented itself to my mind as a social problem a thing to 
 be studied, thought out, acted upon by Society as a 
 Whole, and abolished. Poverty in the wholesale 
 shall I say had never impressed me. Poverty as a 
 socially inflicted curse to be socially abolished by radical 
 social reconstruction that had never come to my mind 
 before. 
 
 The very first day I entered upon my pastorate 
 in the heart of that great city, the gaunt spectacle of 
 poverty, stalking amidst abundance like a death-head. 
 
4 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 stared me in the face. The church which I served was 
 well-located to be my school of training for Socialism. 
 On one side not far away were the beautiful boulevards, 
 along which the motor cars and glittering equipage 
 of the rich rolled past spacious lawns and magnificent 
 and palatial residences. The north and west was 
 densely populated with artisans and labourers, and 
 eastward, towards the throbbing centre of the metro- 
 polis, along the river were the well-known sixteenth, 
 seventeenth, and nineteenth wards slumdom. Thus 
 the scene of my labours in the city was to me an 
 education in economics. On the other hand, I was 
 spending half of my time at the University in the richest 
 suburb of Chicago, where wealth and luxury were 
 displayed on every hand. This afforded me the other 
 side of the picture. 
 
 1. The industrial Tragedy. 
 
 At once the severe contrasts of wealth and poverty 
 were thrust concretely before my consciousness. From 
 home to home I passed among the people in my pas- 
 toral work. I knew the wages they received and 
 the wages they did not receive. I knew what rents 
 they paid, the cost of living and the cost of dying. 
 I knew how the men laboured from early to late. 
 I knew how the wives and mothers toiled. I knew 
 how the children worked. 
 
 I can recall to-day the very names and first names 
 . of the girls that went to the shops, and mills, and 
 factories to put in all their days for miserable weekly 
 doles their lives bitter with hard labour. I saw their 
 faces pale the roses fade the step grow weary and 
 the grave open to give them rest. Over many and 
 many such a grave I read the burial service, " The 
 Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away/' when I knew 
 I was reading a lie. I was accusing the Lord of the 
 crime of Capitalism, and sanctifying that crime with 
 ceremonial babble. 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 I knew the boys and girls who went forth to fill the 
 places of those who went no longer. I saw their young 
 lives offered on the altar of the gain-god Mammon. I 
 remember little Bob - , who with a bit of charcoal, 
 could sketch the faces of noted men on the flagstones, 
 to the amazement of the bystanders he darts up a 
 dirty alley at the approach of the policeman who comes 
 to disperse the crowd the charcoal is dropped he 
 goes for a dole per week to work for a " merchant 
 prince " who lives on the boulevard far away, whose 
 land-holdings alone, within sound of a gun-shot, are 
 worth two million pounds. I remember Nellie - , 
 who worked in the soap factory of the great benevolent 
 'soap makers, known over the world, millionaires. 
 Nellie fainted at one of my meetings one Sunday night. 
 She actually disturbed God's service with her secular 
 cries, " the soap is heavy is heavy too heavy ." 
 The big trays she carried across her body. She died 
 a suicide at nineteen. Capitalism was too busy 
 gathering profits from the unpaid labour of the girl 
 who took her place to attend her funeral. .... 
 (The next morning I read in the papers the account of 
 the charity ball. It took a full column to describe the 
 gorgeous apparel of the charitable dancers). . . . . 
 And I remember scores hundreds of human beings 
 they march before the eye of memory people I knew 
 I hear their cries beaten, baffled, foot-sore, weary, 
 hungry, depressed, broken-spirited I see that army 
 the victims of Capitalism 
 
 I say I saw these contrasts " wealth a monster 
 gorged 'midst starving populations/' I saw these 
 
 struggling multitudes they were as sheep 
 
 having no shepherd. . . . perhaps they had 
 shepherds. . . . perhaps. .... 
 
 2. The Great Lie. 
 
 I saw, then, in this school of mine what I have seen 
 ever since, and see to-day, in every great industrial 
 
6 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 centre of the world. I saw in this school, where the 
 Firm Face of Fact was teaching me, what I afterwards 
 saw in the slums and working-class districts of London 
 and other English cities that a Great Lie was walking 
 the earth, dressed up, disguised, masked by respect- 
 ability, and accredited by religion beating to earth the 
 toiling millions, gathering the product of their hard 
 labour, and placing it in the hands that never earned it, 
 and leaving the victims thus bruised and blasted with 
 good advice concerning their broken lives ! 
 
 3. The Seal of Fact Set. 
 
 I was not a Socialist. I had not yet read a line of 
 Socialist literature. I did not know a Socialist man or 
 woman. I did not know I was in the school of 
 Socialism. I was in the great Human World of Human 
 Fact and Human Struggle. I had no interests to con- 
 serve. I had no doctrines to defend as against my 
 brother-men. I was unsophisticated having no 
 political creed to stand by. I had rich friends, but none 
 to conciliate. I had no God who was dependent on the 
 gifts of the rich with which to carry on his meanings 
 in this world. The itch for prominence in the church 
 had not smitten me. I was passionately fond of study 
 and books, but it had never occurred to me that educa- 
 tion was a means of success in life, a ladder by which to 
 rise away from the people. In Part II. I will tell you 
 something else of my mental state. At any rate, what 
 I want to say here is that the Raw Fact of our present 
 civilisation set like a seal into my open and willing soul. 
 
 I saw people in possession of thousands and millions 
 of wealth, which I knew they had never earned never 
 could earn by any means of hand or head. 
 
 I saw the great working-class going in surging, 
 tramping armies to shop, factory, and mill, putting in 
 their youth, and manhood, and any old-age left to 
 them, in unceasing toil. I knew their labour was pro- 
 ducing all the bread, building all the houses, making 
 all the machines, and all the products of all machines. 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 7 
 
 I knew that the whole material of civilisation was the 
 work of their hands. 
 But I saw that they were not paid for their labour. I 
 
 saw that they were poor in varying degrees of poverty, 
 from the struggle to keep decently above water, to the 
 deep damnation of the submerged. I knew that they 
 never got what their labour produced " their just 
 reward was stolen " " the hire of the labourers was 
 kept back by the fraud " of Capitalism, to use a 
 scripture phrase. 
 
 I saw with mine own eyes that though they built all 
 the houses they were not decently housed ; that 
 though they ploughed and reaped in all the fields, and 
 tended all the flocks and herds, that they were not 
 properly fed ; that though they wove all the finest 
 fabrics, and stitched all the fair garments, they them- 
 selves were miserably clad. 
 
 I saw my brothers hunt for a job, offer themselves for 
 sale to master after master, in vain, day after day. 
 I helped them hunt. I went with Tom or Mack to 
 " use my influence/' and found fifty others looking for 
 the same job. And then I saw the armies of the 
 unemployed. 
 
 And I saw at such times the storehouses filled with 
 every kind of thing for human need the stored up 
 product of labour. But " labour " shivered in the 
 street, or crouched in the tenement, or trod foot-sore 
 and weary in the highway a " drug on the market." 
 
 I saw the skilled and the highly skilled mechanic sit 
 glum and ill-natured in his home, after his mocked 
 efforts to sell his labour-power, minding the babies, 
 and doing the house-work, while the mother and wife 
 was away in the sweater's den which was running 
 profitably. 
 
 I saw the battle, fierce, and unsuccessful of the 
 strikers, like men fighting in a fog or in murky darkness, 
 as they went forth to demand a living wage fighting 
 against the most skilfully and strategically organised 
 and compact masters' associations. 
 
S HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 I saw children by thousands answering the call, 
 " Suffer little children to come unto Me/' but when 
 they went it was to be offered on the devouring altars of 
 the Moloch Of Profit. I knew these children by name, I 
 tell you I remember their faces 
 
 I did not know this thing as Capitalism. I had not 
 read the books at first. The book of life the Tragedy 
 of the Fact was before me. I saw this panorama : 
 Millionaires suffocated by their Profits ; gambling with 
 a world's resources, making security for the few and 
 chance for the many ; toiling working-classes, doing 
 the work of the world, scarcely able to make a living ; 
 millions of poverty-stricken ones, snatching for crumbs 
 from the economic struggle degradation, misery 
 wretchedness, disease, death, and Hell ! 
 
 4. How the Seal Read. 
 
 I questioned. I watched. I pondered. I prayed, 
 The whole thing appeared to me like a devastating fire 
 that must be extinguished ; like an overwhelming 
 deluge, from which the people must be rescued ; like 
 unto a plague whose ravages must be stayed. 
 
 And now I will tell you the first constructive insight 
 that came to me, and gave me some relief, and Justin 
 the order of thought in which I received it. 
 
 I saw that the people were in this world : that they 
 had to make a " living." They were not angels but 
 men. They had to get bread and the necessaries and 
 comforts of life. 
 
 I saw that the only source of that existence was the 
 earth, the land, and its raw gifts : And I saw that these 
 could not be attained without labour, nor made avail- 
 able without machinery. 
 
 I saw that there was a struggle for existence among 
 us living men. And that that struggle resolved itself 
 into a fierce competition to get control of the earth, 
 the machinery, and the opportunities to labour. 
 
 I saw that my brothers and sisters, old and young, 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 9 
 
 were very unequal in that struggle. And I saw that 
 the whole base Of supplies the cupboard, as it were 
 the land and machinery was open to private owner- 
 Ship of the man or men who could win it, and not by 
 labour, but by " financiering/' by the game Of high 
 finance. 
 
 And then I saw that the only possible outcome of 
 such a struggle was, that after a fierce competitive 
 contest, with the losers falling like wheat before the 
 sickle never to rise I saw that the few powerful 
 cunning, able, unscrupulous, ruthless, and reckless, 
 loving gold and power, forgetting God and man that 
 these must inevitably win, and become the owners, the 
 controllers, the disposers of the whole base of supplies 
 by which the whole mass of the people must live and 
 labour. That's what I saw. And I reeled at the 
 thought. 
 
 Capitalism revealed itself to me as a ghastly and un- 
 forgivable crime against humanity. For the uttermost 
 tyranny possible to a human being, compelled to live by 
 labour, is to control the means of labour (his bread and 
 labour), which is his very blood and life. I shuddered 
 at the appalling curse that modern society inflicted upon 
 itself. I saw the whole commercial world and the Battle 
 for Bread and Labour clear through a gigantic gamble 
 with the land and machinery and products of labour 
 as the stake I saw the few triumphant winners far 
 in the lead, an irresponsible, godless, inhuman pluto- 
 cracyand when I looked again it was a gamble with 
 the very bodies and souls of my fellow-creatures ! And 
 I rose up and cursed it . . . . ! 
 
 The death-head that confronted me on the first day 
 I entered upon that Chicago pastorate was interpreted. 
 IT WAS CAPITALISM. 
 
 I was not yet a Socialist. I did not quite know my- 
 self as such. These lessons had not been taught to me 
 by books and teachers. The irresistible, all-compelling 
 Seal of Fact had stamped itself deeply, indelibly into my 
 SOUl. And I was reading the lettering thereof. And as 
 
10 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 I read that Seal, I uttered in my words what the great 
 Socialist teachers had taught long before in their 
 much clearer phrase. The Raw Fact was doing its 
 work in my being. 
 
 Soul and Fact were meeting each other. The need 
 of an oppressed, outraged, and defrauded class, seen, 
 felt, and known, was making me a Socialist. 
 
 III. 
 THE SOCIALIST CRITICISM OF CAPITALISM. 
 
 So far in my story I have told you how Raw Fact 
 wrought upon my consciousness and made me a 
 Socialist. 
 
 In Part II., under another cover, I shall tell you how 
 the facts of modern civilisation deepened and widened 
 my moral and spiritual convictions. I shall tell you 
 how my soul revolted against Capitalism : not only 
 against its injustice and cruelty and social tyranny, 
 but against its ideals, its business maxims, its morals 
 and its religion, which condoned and bulwarked the 
 system. And I shall tell you how this revolt against 
 Capitalism worked its way to a new constructive insight 
 into the meaning of the personal life in relation to the 
 Social Movement. 
 
 1. History, Sociology, and Political Economy. 
 
 The second element, during these four years, that 
 made me a Socialist was the study of history, soci- 
 ology, and political economy. 
 
 During the first year of my Chicago pastorate, the 
 facts I have narrated were my great instructor. It was 
 only natural that feeling as I did I should be drawn to 
 study particularly the great Social Problem thus thrust 
 before me. With avidity and patience I turned to all 
 available literature on the subject. I began to read 
 history in a new light paying less heed to the story 
 of strutting princes, as they appeared and disappeared 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. II 
 
 upon the stage of life, and more heed to the chronicles 
 of the common life, the story of labour, the history of 
 the working classes, and the accounts of great social 
 revolutions, which made for the freedom and emancipa- 
 tion of man. 
 
 Through the heavy volumes of sociology I waded, 
 following the pages, now of this author, now of that, 
 in the varying interpretation of the stream of human 
 events. Political economy, " the dismal science/' also 
 claimed my attention. And here I ought to relieve 
 my college instructors from any charge that they 
 converted me to Socialism. The very opposite was 
 the case. In political economy my professors were 
 " sound/' the text-books used were properly stale with 
 orthodoxy, defining and justifying the Capitalist sys- 
 tem. And if ever I could have been saved from 
 Socialist error, my head professor in sociology would 
 have been the man to do it. He was thoroughly anti- 
 democratic. He had a contempt for the working 
 classes, and a fawning devotion to the privileged and 
 powerful. He was strictly " class-conscious.'' He 
 could not conceive of industry being conducted in any 
 way except by millionaire profit-mongers or petty 
 competing business men. I cannot recall that I ever 
 heard him advocate a single progressive, reconstructive, 
 social principle. He was a most faithful servant to his 
 capitalist masters. 
 
 2. The Socialist Light Bursts. 
 
 However, I escaped the snare. I ransacked the 
 library shelves, and with my own interpretation of the 
 facts, as I have given it to you, as a working hypo- 
 thesis, I soon began to see the glimmer of the Socialist 
 light through all the pages. And then came the great 
 Socialist literature itself, like a balm to the aching mind, 
 like dawn after darkness, like springs of water in a 
 desert, like a breath of fresh air after suffocation. Here 
 the intellect found rest. One of the great sociologists 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 says, that perhaps the highest desire of the human 
 consciousness is the desire for Truth, and the highest 
 joy of the human mind is the Discovery of Truth, the 
 perception of principles. So the vision of the Truths 
 of Socialism has been to many a Socialist, as it was to 
 me, an intellectual ecstasy, for I had found the Truth 
 that would make the people Socially Free. I had 
 found the political and economic programme that was 
 the incarnation of my moral and spiritual passion to set 
 the working-class free from the social bondage in which 
 I saw them to be enslaved. 
 
 A full presentation of Socialist political economy can 
 be found in scores of books and pamphlets published by 
 the Socialist Press throughout the world. Therefore it 
 is not necessary for me to present in detail my 
 principles and convictions. However I may differ in 
 rfiy points of emphasis, or methods of presentation, I 
 am in full agreement with the fundamental declara- 
 tions of Socialism as held by Socialists the world over. 
 
 3. Political Economy A Short Lesson. 
 
 The word " economy " is derived from two Greek 
 words which mean " the law or method of keeping 
 house." And Political Economy is therefore the Science 
 Of National Housekeeping. That is to say : Here is a 
 certain area of land ; with its resources of coal, iron, 
 crops, pasturage, farms, sites, etc., with a certain 
 increasing equipment of machinery. This area is 
 populated by so many millions of people. Now, Politi- 
 cal Economy or the Science of Economics asks this 
 question : How can these millions of people utilise 
 this land, use the machinery, put forth their labour- 
 power, in order to guarantee each and everyone access 
 to the use of the land and machinery, that each may 
 labour and provide himself and his family with the 
 necessaries and comforts and satisfactions of life. The 
 question is : How to give freedom to all ; prevent the 
 few from controlling the many ; give to each approxi- 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 13 
 
 mately the product of his toil as his private property ; 
 and prevent some from securing for their own private 
 property that for which they have not laboured. 
 
 Surely this is a plain and fair question, and in face of 
 the facts, as I have cited them, it is an imperative ques- 
 tion. 
 
 As a matter of fact, then, Socialism points out that 
 the present Capitalist system, instead of being a system 
 of True Economy, is really a system of awful Waste 
 not only a waste of land, and a waste of mechanical 
 power, and a waste of products, but, worst of all, a 
 tragic waste of human energy and human lives. 
 
 4. The Socialist Criticism of Capitalism. 
 
 Socialism points out that the land is fertile and 
 abundant, capable of being the source of satisfaction 
 for all physical human needs : 
 
 That machinery with its Titanic might of steam and 
 electricity has vastly multiplied the possibilities of man 
 to turn the raw gifts of nature into the finished products 
 for use and enjoyment. 
 
 Socialism points out that no working-class in the 
 history of the world ever worked so faithfully, so effi- 
 ciently, and SO productively, as the working-class of the 
 present Capitalist System. The slave under the 
 master's whip could never be as punctual, painstaking, 
 and trustworthy, as the modern factory operative. 
 Hunger and necessity, and the Bread Battle of Free 
 Labour, are more powerful compellers than slave- 
 drivers' whips. 
 
 I saw that the product of labour was increasing to in- 
 calculable limits corn, bread, meat, clothing, shoes, 
 houses, furniture, machinery, etc., such a product of 
 human toil is past the dream of our fathers. The 
 store-houses were filled, and the trains rushed over the 
 land and ships tracked all the seas, laden with the 
 products of human toil 
 
 And yet and yet 
 
14 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 And yet what ? 
 
 And yet I saw the working-classes, whose labour had 
 produced this colossal mass of things for human satis- 
 faction I saw them in comparative poverty, and in a 
 constant, unremitting struggle for a decent existence. 
 
 Socialism declares that the fabulous fortunes of the 
 rich are built up out of the unpaid labour of the working- 
 class. 
 
 And I saw that out of this very surplus in the hands 
 of the Capitalist Class a surplus that should have gone 
 into the hands that earned it, the Capitalist Class 
 bought and owned and used for their still further 
 private enrichment and profit, the land and the ma- 
 chinery, which was the only resource by which the 
 working-class could live and labour. 
 
 I saw that the very faithfulness of the working-class 
 tended to more quickly fill the markets of the world 
 with the products of their toil a product so extensive 
 that their small wages could not buy it back and thus 
 their very efficiency drove multitudes of their class to 
 unemployment a pretty economy this ! 
 
 5. Security for the Few Chance for the Many. 
 
 I saw that Capitalism guaranteed comparative 
 security in private property to the capitalist class, to 
 the men that could win it in the Competitive Game ; 
 and, on the other hand, I saw that Capitalism gave 
 no guarantee or security of private property to the 
 worker in the natural product of his labour. 
 
 The greater part of the product of the labour of the 
 working-class went direct and first-hand to those who 
 could win it in the gamble of Capitalism, or to those who 
 controlled the tools and machinery and land, on which 
 and with which the workers worked. 
 
 I saw that the worker was neither guaranteed the 
 chance to utilise his labour, nor to receive the earnings 
 of his labour when he did work. His chances to labour 
 depended on w r hether the Capitalist class could make 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 15 
 
 a profit out of his energy. If the employing class could 
 do this then they would hire him. If they co\ild not 
 profit on his labour-power, then he might join the army 
 of the unemployed ! 
 
 How is that for economy of human energy ? 
 
 The present system is the best industrial system for 
 enriching the few out of the natural earnings of the 
 working-class that has ever existed in human history. 
 
 6. The Workers Divided at the Baiiot Box. 
 
 To cap this climax of the fraud upon the true and 
 natural private property that should accrue to the 
 working-class, the brains of the workers were addled 
 by Capitalist politicians and teachers in press and pulpit, 
 
 so that they believed that such a system was almost 
 " ordained of God/' When Socialists propose that a 
 system of industry to be just should prevent the Capi- 
 talist class from absorbing the true earnings of the 
 working-class, these devotees at the shrine of the Gain- 
 gods cry out, " Stop thief ! " To protest against 
 Capitalism's robbery is called a " vile political creed " 
 and " atheism." 
 
 And one set of politicians declare for certain minor 
 changes in the system, and the other party declares for 
 certain other minor changes in the system, but neither 
 of them declare for any fundamental change which might 
 interfere with the profits and winnings of the Capitalist ' 
 class. 
 
 And thus the workers are divided into two hostile 
 political camps, and no matter which camp wins, the 
 Capitalist class always wins, remains in the saddle, and 
 continues to exploit the working-class. 
 
 IV. 
 CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES. 
 
 Now if you will look straight at this system of 
 Capitalism you will see the basic wrong of the whole 
 system, from which all its injustices arise. 
 
l6 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 You remember Victor Hugo's story of the devil-fish ; 
 how the monster put forth one tentacle after another 
 and coiled it around his victim : how the hero recalled 
 that there was but one vulnerable spot in his brute 
 enemy ; how at the strategic moment he struck a blow 
 at that spot, and the terrible demon of the deep 
 shuddered, released his grasp, and fell dead. 
 
 1. The Grip of Capitalism. 
 
 Capitalism is a monster seizing the body politic. One 
 tentacle is put forth to grasp the major part of the 
 earnings of the working-class : another has seized the 
 working-woman : another reaches forth to the child : 
 another has fastened upon Government and made that 
 the instrument of the powerful classes : still another 
 has turned the pen of the journalist into a weapon by 
 which the injustice of Capitalism is praised and de- 
 fended : and still another has seized the pulpit, 
 silenced those who profess to speak for God and man, 
 or turned their phrases into open apology and defence 
 for the Crime of Capitalism ! 
 
 But there is one vulnerable spot in Capitalism. 
 If the working-class of the world can see that spot and 
 strike they shall be free. 
 
 The fundamental wrong, the basic Injustice of the 
 Capitalist System, is that the resources of land and 
 machinery, to which ALL THE PEOPLE must have 
 access, in order to live and labour, are owned by THE 
 FEW, and are conducted by the few for PRIVATE 
 PROFIT. 
 
 The workers must live : they have no resources but 
 their Labour-Power : this Labour-Power they must 
 sell by day or week to the employing class, not for 
 what that labour-power can produce, but for whatever 
 it will bring as a mere commodity in a crowded labour- 
 market. 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. \j 
 
 2. What Socialism Proposes. 
 
 It is necessary to point out with much repetition 
 this fundamental wrong of Capitalism in order to see 
 clearly that Socialism is the only possible programme 
 that will meet that wrong. 
 
 Since the fundamental wrong of Capitalism is that the 
 few own the Resources of living and run them for 
 Private Profit, Socialism proposes that the Basic 
 Industrial Equipment shall be Socially or Collectively 
 Owned and Democratically organised in the interests of 
 the whole people. 
 
 Socialism \vould thus guarantee employment to 
 every citizen. 
 
 It would produce things on a large scale for use 
 rather than for profit. 
 
 These things would be sold at cost Of production,, 
 plus the needs of social administration. 
 
 The hours of labour would be reduced. 
 
 The wages of all would be greatly raised. 
 
 And the purchasing power of these wages would be 
 greatly increased ; because production on such a large 
 scale would decrease cost of production, and the enor- 
 mous profits of landowners and capitalists would be 
 eliminated, and the great wastes of competing manu- 
 facturers and middlemen would be at an end. 
 
 As a result of the Collective Ownership of the basic 
 equipment of industry, such as railways, steamships, 
 collieries, land, shops, mills, mines, markets, stores, etc., 
 etc., there would be a greater amount of private pro- 
 perty possible to each worker than ever before in human 
 history. But no individual could accumulate and con* 
 trol as private property, the machinery or resources on 
 which other people depended for existence. 
 
 Everyone would be secure in the opportunity to work. 
 
 There would be no Capitalist exploiters to abstract his 
 earnings. 
 
 Goods produced cheaply would make his labour go a 
 long way. 
 
l8 KOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 The incentive to make a good living and to multiply 
 the comforts and satisfactions of life, would be opera- 
 tive for all. The incentive to control public resources 
 while people starved might be operative but could 
 not find scope. 
 
 The net result would be an increase of comfort and 
 happiness, of freedom, independence, and well-being for 
 all. The present Social Problem would be met and 
 solved, and the race launched on its next Great 
 Freedom from ignorance and servitude. Socialism is 
 the hope of the world. 
 
 3. Concluding Words. 
 
 Every great revolution in human history passes 
 through four stages. The Socialist movement is passing 
 through these four stages in different ininds and 
 different nations. 
 
 First, men begin to awake to a sense of the wrongs 
 and injustices from which they suffer. It is almost un- 
 believable how long a suffering class can endure 
 social injustice without protest. For a long, long time 
 wrongs that later stand out glaringly, are patiently 
 endured. Nay, more, the modern proletariat has 
 actually been grateful to the master-class for condi- 
 tions, which, in the light of Justice, are social outrages. 
 Witness the half-time system. The workers are blinded 
 by the darkness of Capitalism and played as pawns in 
 the political game. The slave-spirit leads them to flock 
 to the standards of their masters, if perchance a little 
 glory of the leaders may fall upon them. Then comes 
 some acute injustice, and an awakening follows. For 
 nearly fifty years now there has been a growing revolt 
 on the part of the working-class. The Trade Union 
 movement was the first organised expression of this 
 revolt against Capitalism. Many a hard-fought battle of 
 the trade unions, many a crushing defeat has been neces- 
 sary in order to weld them into the first elements of 
 class-consciousness. Evils taken as a matter of course 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. Ig 
 
 begin to be analysed, and revolt becomes more or less 
 intelligent. The workers protest against long hours, 
 low wages, unemployment, sweating, bad housing, 
 social degradation, and the general poverty and wide- 
 spread misery in human society. The first stage is a 
 protest against wrongs and injustices as effects. Indi- 
 vidual capitalists, landlords, or corporations are 
 singled out for attack for their greed and ruthlessness 
 over human life. The remedies sought and applied are 
 near at hand. Almost always they are temporary and 
 ineffectual. Every advance is a compromise. The real 
 evils continue, and with the growing sensitiveness of 
 human life in modern times, evils are more deeply felt. 
 This poverty and misery of the working-class, especially 
 in religious England and America, is something appal- 
 ling. One might wonder how statesmen can sleep in the 
 midst of it. 
 
 Then the second stage is entered upon. From dealing 
 with effects they turn to causes. It was inevitable that 
 some movement, reflective, philosophical, radical, even 
 revolutionary, should be precipitated out of the unrest 
 of the last half century. That movement might have 
 been called by any name. It has arisen and is called the 
 International Socialist Movement. Socialism is the 
 great interpreter of the fundamental cause of our social 
 and industrial injustice and the degradation and 
 slavery of the masses. The suffering of the workers, 
 secreted as it were a brain. That brain is Socialism. 
 This leaven becomes directive and constructive, not 
 only to the whole working-class, but through them to 
 the whole of civilization. 
 
 The third stage follows : As soon as the cause is 
 clearly perceived, the fundamental principle of the New 
 Order appears. Socialism points out that, since 
 private ownership of social resources, and private 
 administration of social production for private profit, is 
 the one supreme cause of the present enslavement of 
 the working-class, therefore the Social Principle that 
 must be applied to industry is Social or Collective 
 
2o HOW i BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 Ownership of the basic social resources of the people's 
 life and labour, and democratic organisation and 
 administration of social production for Social Use, 
 instead of for Private Profit : that Co-operation must 
 take the place of Competition and Private Monopoly : 
 that Private Property In the product of one's labour can 
 only be secured by making the social means of labour 
 into Social or Collective Property. 
 
 The last stage is the Class-Struggle in its acute form. 
 The working-class grasp the New Principle, and pro- 
 ceed to put it into Social and Industrial operation. 
 
 In this stage all previous stages concentrate. The 
 evils from which the working-class suffer are recounted, 
 and vividly uncovered to the consciousness. The cause 
 of these evils is stated with irresistible definiteness. 
 The new Principle is made a political watchword. And 
 the workers, forsaking all other political parties of their 
 Capitalist exploiters, rally to the polls as a class-con- 
 scious body, elect their own representatives to go to 
 borough and city councils, and national parliaments, to 
 put the New Principle of Social Organisation into 
 complete realisation. 
 
 In this pamphlet I have sought principally to 
 awaken the consciousness of my readers to the wrongs 
 of Capitalism, and to state the fundamental cause of 
 these wrongs, and point out the New Principle. 
 
How I Became a Socialist. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 No man can live in the closing years of the nine 
 teenth and the opening years of the twentieth century 
 without becoming poisoned with the Capitalistic 
 Spirit, or liberated by the Socialist Spirit, to some 
 degree more or less. I have told you (Part I.) in what 
 manner the facts of Capitalism wrought upon me to 
 make me a Socialist. I shall now tell you something of 
 the religious, spiritual, or psychological experiences 
 through which I passed, and how these experiences 
 eventually birthed me into Socialism. 
 
 You will need to read between the lines, and to com- 
 plete to some extent the avenues of thought to which I 
 may project you. I wish to be perfectly frank, and yet 
 I cannot tell all. The soul shudders to expose itself. 
 I shall tell you enough to appeal to similar meanings 
 in your own case, even though the accidents of 
 heredity or environment may greatly differ. We are 
 all children of this age, and we can reduce nearly all of 
 our life meanings to the same common denominator. 
 
 There came a time in my life when consent to live at 
 peace with the present Capitalist System of Industry 
 and Life and Feeling, without making active and in- 
 telligent protest, would have been to me moral suicide 
 and a total eclipse of the ultimate meaning of existence ; 
 and, on the other hand, the espousal of the Socialist 
 Cause, with all that it carries for the human race, 
 was to me a birth into a new world of spiritual signifi- 
 cance, which becomes increasingly luminous and 
 emancipating. Moral conviction and spiritual illumina- 
 tion led me straight to Socialism, 
 
2 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 1. The Church not Responsible for My Socialism. 
 
 It is needless to say that I never heard any Socialism 
 in my father's prayers. Nor did my mother's piety dis- 
 close to me teachings in political economy, as such. 
 Nor did I ever hear even the faintest echo of a Socialist 
 proposition in all my teachings that I listened to in my 
 youth and early manhood. I heard men called to 
 " good works/' to " charity," to " help the poor," and 
 to " give " to benevolent and charitable institutions, 
 but I never heard a minister of the gospel deal with 
 poverty as a social problem a socially-inflicted curse to 
 be socially abolished. Their call was to benevolence, 
 philanthropy, and charity within the present Capi- 
 talist System : it was not a call to change the system. 
 
 I entered the theological school. I studied under 
 some of the greatest church scholars and teachers 
 in America. These men taught under the very shadow 
 of Capitalism enthroned in one of its mighty citadels 
 Chicago. I never heard one of them present the cause 
 of the people in all they ever taught me. According 
 to these great men the slums needed " evangelisation " 
 and " city missions." They felt dimly that the working- 
 class was not reached by the church it was the god- 
 lessness, and beer-drinking, and pleasure-seeking of the 
 masses. 
 
 I am ready to acknowledge that I learned much 
 from those great scholars and fathers, but I never 
 received from a single one of them a single hint to show 
 that there was any great Social Problem, or Injustice 
 which the working-class suffered under Capitalism, or 
 any industrial oppression or wrong from which they 
 should be emancipated. 
 
 I studied the Greek New Testament, church his- 
 tory, theology and allied studies. But not one word did 
 I ever hear about the struggle of the people under 
 Capitalism to-day or a possible way out. My teachers 
 and examiners would acknowledge that I knew my 
 theology and church history and the rest. There were 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 3 
 
 three volumes of Christian theology with which at that 
 time I was so familiar that I could close my eyes and 
 turn the pages one by one and give the substance of the 
 main thought on each page. Had there been therein a 
 single inspiring or definite consideration of the relation 
 of Christianity to the Wrongs and Injustices of Capi- 
 talism, or any proposal whatever to deal with these 
 injustices, surely I would have known it. 
 
 The theological school was not my instructor in 
 Socialism except by way of negation, and they should 
 not be held accountable. 
 
 2. Nor the Great Preachers and Evangelists. 
 
 Nor did the great preachers, evangelists, elders, or 
 bishops of the church influence me toward Socialism. 
 I never heard or read a single syllable from these 
 leaders which impeached Capitalism as an unrighteous 
 or un-Christian social system. 
 
 When I began to take an active part in the labour 
 movement in Chicago a very moderate activity the 
 preachers looked askance at me. With perhaps one or 
 two exceptions I never received the slightest sympathy 
 or good cheer from any of them. When it was reported 
 to the higher church authorities of the well-to-do 
 members of my church that I was preaching one 
 sermon on the Labour Question each month, and hold- 
 ing a mass-meeting of working men to discuss the pro- 
 blems of Labour on Friday nights in the church, my 
 bishop (presiding-elder) wrote me a letter of severe 
 chastisement. He wanted to know if I was going to be a 
 loyal methodist, and was amazed at my youthful 
 stupidity in thinking that I could learn anything about 
 the Labour Problem by gathering a mass of work* 
 people into my church to " talk " about it. He warned 
 me that to do this in order to get light on the Social Pro- 
 blem was like " hunting rabbits with a brass band." 
 One of the higher officials who had known me in some 
 of my spiritual hungers and searchings, expressed the 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 fear that my SOUl was lost, for no other reason than that 
 I had sought to apply my spiritual vision to " set at 
 liberty the people that are bruised/' 
 
 The great orators of the church were inspired by 
 themes that suited well the richest congregations, 
 themes and treatment that never made the SOUlS Of 
 millionaires the least uneasy about the system in which 
 their ill-gotten gains were gathered, out of the " hire 
 of the labourers which was kept back." 
 
 I attended the greatest " evangelistic " efforts and 
 camp-meetings conducted for the express purpose of 
 producing " the highest type of New Testament piety." 
 But the conversion preached, the sanctification ex- 
 perienced, with rapt joy and exultation, and the conse- 
 quent piety practised, was wholly at peace with the 
 present unjust, unholy, unchristian Capitalist System. 
 
 To these " Holiness " teachers, the social system was 
 good enough indeed, was never mentioned. The 
 supreme effort was to bring individual egos, or souls, to- 
 certain subjective experiences, and to certain cor- 
 responding virtues experiences and virtues which 
 were quite at home in the Capitalist System. They 
 never once questioned the right or justice, or con- 
 sistency of Capitalism with the mind or spirit of Jesus. 
 
 Not the religion of Pharisees and hypocrites, nor the 
 lowest church-going piety, but the most aggressive and 
 earnest piety, of preachers and people was at peace with 
 Capitalism. 
 
 I went to these places intensely seeking light and 
 spiritual power. But those who taught and those 
 who sought " the highest standard of New Testament 
 piety " by prayer and fasting never once questioned 
 the Industrial System, which to me was the modern 
 Anti-Christ. 
 
 3. Capitalistic Religion. 
 
 If Capitalism could succeed in throttling the Socialist 
 Movement, and ride rough-shod over a despairing and 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 5 
 
 enslaved working-class, perpetuating the social robbery 
 of the people, I have no doubt that the leaders and 
 dignitaries of the churches, protestant and catholic, 
 would boast of the sublime efforts they had put forth 
 to withstand the " vile political creed of Socialism," 
 and they would tell of how God blessed them, and they 
 would claim the victory over Socialism as theirs. 
 
 But if Capitalism is abolished and Socialism is 
 triumphant, I have no doubt that the ecclesiastical 
 leaders will claim the victor}^ as theirs. So has it been 
 through the centuries. They have defended despotism 
 and fawned on tyrants, and bolstered up decaying social 
 systems, as long as these have lasted ; and then when 
 the Lord of Life in Human History, the Spirit and 
 Passion of Democracy, arose in spite of priest-craft, 
 and state-craft, and mammon-worship, the church has 
 glorified herself as the guardian-angel of Democracy I 
 And so we may see it again ! 
 
 Well, I ought to thoroughly absolve the church from 
 any responsibility in my education as a Socialist. 
 I ought to acknowledge also that wherever I have gone 
 over the world heralding Socialism, the clergy have 
 seen to it that they were in no way connected with such 
 a " base and ignoble mission " as mine. 
 
 Not in her theology, not in her interpretation of 
 social morality, not from the lips of her great orators, 
 teachers, officials, or evangelists did I receive Socialism. 
 Socialism was to them anti-Christ. Capitalism, which 
 their religion and morals condoned, was to me the Anti- 
 Christ. 
 
 4. My Soul and Capitalism. 
 
 If, then, I tell you in these pages how my soul sought 
 the Living Spirit That Is, and how in my seekings I was 
 led to Socialism, it was only as my very being burst 
 through and escaped the old that I was born into a new 
 ethical and spiritual meaning to Life which is the anti- 
 thesis of Capitalism, and runs at least parallel to, and 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 finds expression in, the great world-wide Socialist 
 Movement. 
 
 If devotion to the God of the Church means the 
 defence of Capitalism, as it apparently does, then must 
 
 1 be adjudged infidel to that God and that church. 
 And this not on the ground of mere opinion, but from 
 the deepest depths of all I know to be my soul or 
 spiritual consciousness. 
 
 For my uttermost spiritual light declares to me that 
 Capitalism is a wolf that devours the sheep : Capi- 
 talism is Mammonism socially and religiously en- 
 throned : it is the modern Pharaoh, making the lives 
 of the people bitter with hard bondage. 
 
 From the robed dignitaries of ritualism or from the 
 uniformed leaders of the Salvation Army, or from any 
 sect between these two extremes, we have no authori- 
 tative utterance that impeaches Capitalism in the name 
 Of Christ. Capitalism as a Social System is secure from 
 such attack. Capitalism which to my soul is Anti- 
 Christ is defended, supported and blessed by modern 
 Christianity. 
 
 II. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 1. Earlier Experiences. 
 
 I shall roughly sketch the main elements of my 
 experience which preceded and finally culminated in 
 the Socialist consciousness. I commit the account to 
 type because I believe it contains some universal 
 elements in the present great social and moral and 
 religious revolution on which the whole world has en- 
 tered ; because I believe it voices the feelings of many 
 others who are passing through similar experiences. 
 
 When I was a lad about thirteen years of age I had 
 an illumination arising from some remote areas of my 
 being, which in the light of later reflection, appears to 
 me to have been a natural, normal expression of the 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 " Socialization of Personality. " Is not every human 
 being the Son of Man the Soul of the Race incarnate ? 
 And if it were not for the dead hand of artificialities and 
 conventions, of dead doctrines, customs, and insti- 
 tutions, and private-property ideas, upon the very soul 
 of childhood, would not the Son of Man appear as the 
 normal thing in human consciousness ? Does not this 
 suggest also the true education that is yet to be 
 education through original inspiration. The first dis- 
 tinct release of my soul, the memory of which still 
 brings me to. silence and tears, was a leading away Of 
 
 my mind from merely personal concerns and feelings 
 to larger human and cosmic interests. 
 
 2. i Enter the Ministry. 
 
 The next epochal period of my life came when I 
 finally decided to enter the ministry in the Methodist 
 church. I was a schoolmaster, had been for a period 
 with a law firm, and felt drawn to the lecture platform. 
 My decision finally to become a Methodist preacher 
 grew out of the fact that I was already preaching while 
 yet teaching, and that seemed the most natural direc- 
 tion for my social consciousness to take. 
 
 In this crisis there was presented to me for reflection 
 and decision what had been as it were intuitively 
 forced upon me in the earlier experience to which I 
 have referred. The question really was this : Whether 
 my life was to be lived in following after private 
 interests and personal ambitions, or devoted to human 
 service. Whether there was now to be a larger 
 Socialization of Personality in my case or not was now 
 a question that I must now decide. It must be volun- 
 tary, a choice, a decision, an act of the will. 
 
 The whole meaning of righteousness was not a matter 
 of opinions or theories, or the development of certain 
 private virtues, or the fulfilling of certain religious 
 duties : but whether my mind and heart and very soul 
 should cease from merely personal values and private 
 
; HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 advantages, material or religious, and become a centre 
 and organ of values and advantages for humanity. 
 
 When the will finally functioned the human interest 
 and the welfare of men and renounced the private 
 interests, I entered into a singular exaltation of my 
 whole being. The missionary spirit fell upon me, and 
 has never left me. I began to apply myself to my 
 studies with intense zeal in order to secure the weapons 
 for my warfare, and with a quiet happiness I knew I 
 was in some way " not my own," but the servant of 
 my brother men. 
 
 3. Another Crisis. 
 
 The second year after entering the theological 
 seminary, I became alarmed at the species of paralysis 
 that had failed upon my moral energies and spiritual 
 enthusiasm. After reflecting over the matter, I left 
 the Institute and went away to a small country 
 pastorate, and there gave myself up to prayer and 
 meditation, and service to the people, looking for 
 Light and seeking for Truth. After a long period of 
 waiting, I was again birthed into a still deeper Socializa- 
 tion of Personality. 
 
 All other meanings to life seemed to be eclipsed. 
 It was not now a question of balancing private interests 
 and personal aims against human interests and social 
 aims. The question before me at this time was how 
 totally and utterly life might be made the organ and 
 instrument and agent of Universal Good, of the King- 
 dom of God in the Earth. It was at this time that I 
 received the insight concerning the Personal Experi- 
 ence of Jesus which I have treated in my pamphlet 
 on that subject. 
 
 And here also in this isolated country village my 
 mind received its first distinct illumination concerning 
 the social and economic and industrial significance of 
 the deepest spiritual experience. 
 
 I began to see that the Life of the Free Spirit must 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 find an expression in economic facts, and that economic 
 relations do register spiritual and moral relationships. 
 
 I began to see that our relations in the struggle for a 
 livelihood with material resources are the primary and 
 fundamental measure of human association, indicating 
 its justice or injustice, its heaven or its hell. 
 
 Here, then, I received the inner Fire of Truth, which 
 broke into a flame when in Chicago, a year or so later, I 
 confronted the oppressions of Capitalism. 
 
 4. The Soul's Revolt Against Capitalism. 
 
 My earlier religious experiences I have related in 
 order to show you the state of mind in which I was 
 introduced to the ravages of the Capitalist System of 
 industry. You will have observed that the illuminations 
 and enlargements of my consciousness were not 
 created by pondering over doctrines or suffering in 
 my conscience over certain vile sins. The release 
 of my soul was precipitated out of the Will in relation to 
 other human lives. 
 
 The question was how my interests and my will con- 
 cerning those interests should be related to human 
 interests and human welfare. 
 
 It is true I had subscribed to the doctrines of 
 Methodism, but these I had inherited, as it were. I had 
 reflectively considered them as a series of propositions 
 and decided that they were the Truth. I probably made 
 them carry my spiritual freightage for the time being. 
 However, the revolt of my soul was not so much 
 against any set of doctrines or dogmas. My revolt 
 was against the actual practices, the real life, the social 
 and business and economic structure and operation of 
 civilisation, which embodied and expressed the actual 
 beliefs of the people whatever their theories or doctrines 
 or professions were. 
 
 Capitalism is not simply a certain mode of owning 
 land and machinery and hiring wage-labour. Capitalism 
 is a plexus of social ideals, of commercial ethics, of 
 
10 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 business maxims. Capitalism is a mental atmosphere 
 
 of notions of success, of class feelings, pseudo-aristo- 
 cratic and anti-democratic in short, Capitalism is, as 
 Karl Marx taught, not only the economic basis of pre- 
 sent society, but the whole superstructure, of morals, 
 religion, art, and life, coloured and cursed by cor- 
 respondence to that false economic basis. Against this 
 whole fabric my soul revolted. 
 
 5. The Chicago Pastorate. 
 
 I went to the Chicago pastorate with my conscious- 
 ness partially socialized, as I have indicated. And the 
 very first day, in making my pastoral calls, my soul 
 broke into open revolt against Capitalist Society. I 
 could relate to you in detail to this very day the facts 
 of Social Injustice that confronted me. I had no name 
 for the thing I saw, nor had I ever heard intelli- 
 gently of Socialism. The facts began to march and 
 countermarch before me. It seemed as if that procession 
 were marshalled by death-heads and generalled by devils. 
 
 Little children imprisoned in bleak, unfriendly 
 streets and lanes, running in and out of miserable dens, 
 cynically called " homes " ; youths and maidens 
 hurried off in the early morning to shops, factories, and 
 mills women, old and young, fighting in the bread- 
 battle, offering their labour on the world-market 
 the armies of men, skilled and unskilled, pouring out 
 the blood of their labour-power into the mills of the 
 gain-gods, there to be ground into the rich coin of the 
 fortune-makers old-age, beaten, baffled, still strug- 
 gling on, compelled to live though dead and back and 
 forth, and up and down and in and out of this pro- 
 cession of struggling humanity there flashed in high 
 lights the burnished armour, the proud equipage, the 
 gaudy splendour, the untold luxury, the glittering 
 grandeur of wealth " A monster gorged, 'midst 
 starving population " . . . . And my soul re- 
 volted. ... My Soul Revolted ! 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 1 1 
 
 III. 
 
 "TOWARDS DEMOCRACY." 
 
 I had never been an aristocrat in this incarnation. 
 That goes without saying. So when this procession of 
 Mammon and the other Gain-Gods, the plunderers and 
 the plundered, marched before me, with the death-head 
 on the flag, I had no artificial barriers to get across in 
 order to feel that my lot was not with the bruisers but 
 with the bruised. I did not have to descend to meet 
 my brothers and comrades of the working-class. Any 
 artificial aristocracy that might have poisoned my life, 7 
 had received a powerful antidote in the Socialization of/ 
 my Consciousness to which I have referred. And thff 
 first outcome of my soul's touch with this hideous Social 
 Injustice of the Capitalist World was to give me a deep 
 but undefined unity of consciousness with the humanity 
 that suffered under that injustice. 
 
 1. The New Wine. 
 
 The categories of my religious experience and teach- 
 ing expanded and then burst with the New Wine of 
 Truth that poured in. 
 
 Righteousness began to mean more than the deepest 
 kind of personal virtue or isolate goodness. It meant 
 also right social and industrial relations and that 
 seemed impossible to Capitalism. 
 
 Justice I saw could not be measured out by the most 
 generous judge in the courts of law. The whole civilisa- 
 tion was unjust it was grounded in injustice. I 
 remember how ridiculous it once appeared to me to see 
 men adding up accounts and testing and stamping 
 weights and measures, and " making the balance just," 
 when I knew that the whole society was a gigantic 
 gamble with commodities and with the human beings 
 whose labour-power was the basis of it all ! A just 
 balance ! Fie ! 
 
 I had read and studied the Holiness literature. A 
 
12 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 sullen grief seized me when I found that the holiness 
 expounders and leaders had never once reflected on the 
 un-holiness of the whole Social fabric in which they 
 taught. They were defenders of the system the 
 highest type of spiritual police. 
 
 Holiness ! I saw the whole body sick and diseased 
 irom head to foot, " full of wounds, and bruises, and 
 putrifying sores/' as old Isaiah said long ago, and for 
 the same reason. " The hands of the mighty were full 
 of blood.'* There could be no holiness for me that was 
 not an antagonism to Capitalism, and a social recon- 
 struction and an industrial renovation a " seeking 
 of Justice and relief of the oppressed." 
 
 I saw coveteousness, which is idolatry, glorified, and 
 its blood-bespattered gifts received into the treasuries 
 of the church. I saw the Mammon-god winked at and 
 consent given that God and Mammon could be wor- 
 shipped without conscientious scruples Jesus to the 
 contrary notwithstanding. 
 
 I saw that it was acknowledged as just, and urged as 
 a virtue, and praised as a practice, to " lay up treasure 
 on earth, where interest and profit and rent doth 
 accumulate." 
 
 Missions for Jesus' sake were carried on with great 
 success, heavily financed by the profit-mongers, and 
 actually conducted by men deep in the financial game 
 men on whom it never once dawned that conversion 
 to Christ could mean any conviction whatever con- 
 cerning social wrongs and industrial injustice. 
 
 I heard it boasted that souls of working-class men 
 and women, under deep religious conviction, had made 
 restitution of the fares they had avoided to pay to 
 tram companies and railways. But I never heard of any 
 accusation of the tramway bandits that had plundered 
 tens of thousands of pounds of profits annually out of 
 the pockets of the working-class to say nothing of 
 any restitution of their ill-gotten gains. Nor did I 
 ever hear any accusation in New Testament terms of 
 those who had " heaped treasure out of the hire of the 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 13 
 
 labourers, which was by the profit-seekers kept back by 
 fraud." 
 
 And as that procession of human beings, marshalled 
 under the death-head flag of " Profit ! Profit ! ! 
 Profit ! ! ! " passed before me, my soul revolted. 
 
 My soul revolted against the injustice of Capitalism's 
 imagined injustice ; against the unrighteousness of its 
 righteousness ; and against the unholiness of its 
 holiness that could be at peace with such almost un- 
 forgivable social wrongs ; against the un-Christian 
 Christianity that administered the sacrament of Him 
 who " laid down His life for the sheep " to a civilisa- 
 tion that " laid down the sheep for the fleece. " 
 
 My soul revolted against Capitalism. In my Con- 
 science it was written, " Now is the judgment of this 
 Competitive System ; now is the Prince of this Capitalist 
 Age judged." 
 
 2. Constructive insight. 
 
 Revolt is only one aspect of the soul's movement 
 for a new social order. And so it was in my case. Had 
 I been born a Hebrew or a Hindoo this awakening of 
 the Social Conscience within me might have taken its 
 colour and interpretation from the religion of Jehovah 
 or Brahm. But being raised a Christian, my religious 
 inheritance was the New Testament and the Life and 
 Teaching of Jesus. As I have told you, I had already 
 been pushed to deep soul-experiences which had been 
 more or less interpreted in New Testament terms, 
 rather than in Theological terms terms of Life rather 
 than of Dogma. I now began to ponder and pray and 
 struggle for light as I had never done before. Light I 
 had to have. The religious and spiritual light that could 
 be at peace with Capitalism was to me darkness. 
 " If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is 
 that darkness." I could never expose the struggle my 
 soul went through. But I shall briefly run over some of 
 the main points of light which broke as morning stars 
 
14 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 upon my consciousness, and which have since deepened 
 and clarified and unified. 
 
 3. The Social Teaching of Jesus. 
 
 As the injustice of Capitalism, and the misery of the 
 poor, and the unrighteousness of the present social 
 order, pressed upon me, and as I found no spiritual 
 response, or human rest, in religious teaching that ran 
 along at the heels of Capitalism's juggernaut procession, 
 I turned to the Spirit of Truth within me and to a 
 deeper and more penetrating search for Light from the 
 Life and Teaching of Jesus than existing religion 
 offered. 
 
 And the first thing that deeply impressed me was the 
 social and economic significance of the Teachings of 
 Jesus. I cannot here elaborate what I mean by this, 
 for I am stating convictions briefly. The Sermon on the 
 Mount I saw was a code of social duties, so to speak, 
 a revelation of the fundamental principles of Social 
 Justice and human fellowship for this our every-day 
 world. Such a passage as that beginning with the 
 phrase, " No man can serve two masters/' is nothing 
 short of a brief but comprehensive Social Program. 
 It is almost impossible to find in the whole Sermon on 
 the Mount anything that could give an ecclesiastical 
 or theological colour to these sayings. They are ethical, 
 moral, social. There is actually an emphatic warning 
 in the sixth chapter against the public exhibition of the 
 least formal religiousness. And later He insists on 
 actual living " fruits " as the only proof or indication 
 that a life is the life of goodwill and brotherhood. If a 
 tree has leaves and fruit on it in due season why does 
 it need a sign up that it is living and bearing ? 
 
 When we come to even the more mystical teaching 
 in the Gospel of John, we find that instead of the Social 
 significance being modified, it is intensified. The ulti- 
 mate and only test of discipleship is Love. " By this 
 shall all men know that ye are my disciples that ye 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 15 
 
 love one another as I have loved you. He prays that 
 they all may be one. He says : "I lay down my life 
 for the sheep. Therefore doth the Father love me." 
 " And as the Father hath sent me even so send I you," 
 to be social redeemers of humanity, feeding your life 
 away to the flock. " He that saveth his life shall lose it, 
 but he that loseth his life shall save it." Every man of 
 them was to re-duplicate the Christ-Spirit for the race 
 according to the needs of his generation. 
 
 When he depicts the judgment of persons and 
 churches and nations and political parties, there is not 
 a single word about beliefs, doctrines, dogmas, church- 
 membership, baptisms, theologies, or any other thing 
 or thought that has been so emphasised by the priest- 
 hoods of the race. Not a word. The judgment is de- 
 clared on the basis of how you have stood in relation to 
 the physical and social miseries of your fellow-men 
 their hunger, and need, and wretchedness, and 
 bondage. Let those who may explain it away : there it 
 stands, until all such suffering is abolished. Righteous- 
 ness, love, the Christ-life, devotion to the Will of God, 
 can find no final test except that which Jesus Himself 
 revealed in His own life absolute sefiess devotion to 
 Humanity. 
 
 If we consider the great Gospel of the Kingdom 
 of God which He said He came to declare : just look at 
 the opening announcement : " The Spirit of the Lord 
 is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach a 
 glad message to the poor people ; he hath sent me to 
 heal those broken in spirit, to proclaim deliverance to 
 captives, to open the eyes of the blind, and to set at 
 liberty them that are bruised." Surely if ever there 
 was a Social Mission, here it is. No revolutionist that 
 ever lived had such a sweeping Social Vision for 
 Human Betterment and the deliverance of humanity in 
 this world to all the possible significance that human 
 life is capable of. 
 
 At this time it was deeply impressed upon me, the 
 supreme place of importance that Jesus placed upon 
 
16 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 these " teachings " or " words " or " sayings." Plans 
 of Salvation and Systems of Theology have greatly 
 obscured these teachings. We have had Paulism, 
 Calvinism, Methodism, and the rest. How the beaten, 
 sad-hearted, oppressed world aches this very hour 
 for the real application and realization of the teaching 
 of Jesus. 
 
 I do not believe that the living soul finds rest by 
 works, but by a living faith, that discovers and acknow- 
 ledges and enters into oneness with the Father. But a 
 man is not justified by faith unless his faith makes him 
 just. " Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the 
 things Which I say." " Every man that heareth these 
 sayings of mine and doeth them is like a man who 
 builds his house upon a rock he that heareth and 
 doeth not is a foolish man, building on sand." " The 
 words I speak unto you are life." " If ye love me keep 
 my words and ye shall receive the Comforter the 
 Spirit of Truth.!" " If a man love me he will keep my 
 sayings, and my Father will love him, and we will come 
 unto him, and make our abode with him : and the word 
 which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's which sent 
 me." Power in prayer, according to Jesus, depends on 
 these teachings abiding in us. And I say that these 
 teachings of Jesus are the most radical social utter- 
 ances, and can never fit with Capitalism. 
 
 Thus was my hunger and thirst rewarded. I saw that 
 the whole Social Vision and Program of Jesus made 
 Capitalism an outlaw. 
 
 I saw that all the Teachings of Jesus, spiritual or 
 social, were diametrically opposed to the ideals, and 
 theories, and basic practices of Capitalism. 
 
 I saw that the slightest embodiment in one's spirit 
 of the mind of Jesus to the sacred lives about us would 
 reveal Capitalism as the wolf that devours the sheep. 
 
 I saw that by Christ's interpretation of the judgment, 
 not only the Capitalist system, but the professing 
 Christian Church, is weighed in the balance and found 
 wanting. For the church is not ministering to the 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. !^ 
 
 necessity of human lives, bringing to them the Jus- 
 tice, and Freedom, and abundant Life of the Kingdom 
 of God, but is bulwarking by silence and open defence 
 this brutal Capitalist Society, that fattens and battens in 
 its immeasurable luxury and extravagance out of the 
 unpaid earnings of the working-class. 
 
 IV. 
 THE SEARCH FOR A PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Such a life as the Life of Jesus, and such Teachings as 
 he uttered, culminating in his tragic death at the hands 
 of the ruling class in church and state, must have some 
 fundamental principle as its root, and norm and centre. 
 
 1. The Eternal Unity. 
 
 And I saw that the very essence and heart of the Life 
 of the Son of Man was absolute and utter renunciation 
 of merely private and personal interests, and the 
 acceptance of his personal life as the organ, the voice, 
 the expression, the incarnation, of the uttermost divine 
 interests, and human advantages, as seen in the Light 
 of Truth, and Love and Freedom. This was the Will of 
 the Father. 
 
 Some have called this self-sacrifice. But that is not 
 correct. The very term carries with it an element of 
 negation and asceticism. This movement of the Soul 
 from the limited private self to the universal is Self- 
 Realization. It is coming to the fulness of the Stature 
 of Man. 
 
 The spiritual unity with humanity which Jesus 
 recognised and expressed in his individuality was not 
 the result of the condescension of greatness to 
 mediocrity, of high to low, of the good to the evil, of a 
 spiritual aristocrat to the defiling touch of the mob. He 
 felt that he was actually one with Humanity. Their 
 real life was his life. There is only One Life. There was 
 nothing else for him to be, nor for them to be, but that 
 Life. Thus denying the limited view-point of merely 
 
1 8 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 private, and personal, and temperamental, and local, 
 and racial interests, he incarnated social, universal, 
 human values, and meanings, and interests, and free- 
 doms. The uttermost human meaning is the divine. 
 Thus he was the Son of God and the Son of Man. 
 Thus was he Christ-ed. 
 
 It was then given to me to see that the secret power 
 of the Life and Mission of Jesus was not an isolated or 
 personal affair confined to himself alone. That power 
 and meaning is universal and cosmic. His life is a 
 revelation of the fundamental principle of man's life 
 as an individual, in a society of individuals ; in a world 
 that is not a dead aggregate, but a living organism. 
 
 When this light deepened in my heart I saw that 
 personal spiritual Illumination and cosmic release of the 
 Eternal Life that one Is, was not something to attain 
 as a thing-in-itself. It is only possible by the identifica- 
 tion of the individual with Totality, and the incarna- 
 tion in the individual of the human urge for satisfac- 
 tion and Freedom, and the abandonment of life to the 
 realization of Universal Human Freedom. 
 
 Thus, at the deepest reach of my most silent penetra- 
 ting prayer and yearning for Truth, I found my soul 
 driven outwards, as it were, to the Socialist Cause. The 
 summit of my spiritual exaltation was in the lowly 
 commonplace of the rough struggle of the Working- 
 class for their emancipation from the Darkness and 
 Injustice of Capitalism. 
 
 The uttermost effort of the intellect to find a philo- 
 sophy of Individual Life brought me square upon my 
 feet into the raw, real, actual, human fact, there to 
 relate my Will as the organ of the Universal Good- 
 Will, and to make my Life, in its way, an instrument or 
 agent for the Social and Economic Freedom of Man- 
 kind. 
 
 2. The Socialization of Personality. 
 
 Socialism proposes that the basic industrial equip- 
 
HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. ig 
 
 ment of land and machinery, which the people must 
 have and use for life and labour, shall be collectively 
 owned and democratically organised for the freedom 
 Of all, instead of being privately owned and pluto- 
 cratically managed for the private profit Of the few, and 
 thus making misery for the many. 
 
 Now just as the present private-property scramble 
 and gamble of Capitalism has accentuated, and nur- 
 tured, and intensified, and exalted the egoistic, selfish, 
 and anti-social forces of human life in business and 
 even in morals and religion : so Socialism will release, 
 and develop, and glorify the altruistic, brotherly, 
 and social elements of human life in all its phases. 
 
 And the individual Socialist of this transition period, 
 standing in intellectual, and moral, and political con- 
 viction against this Capitalism, from which personally 
 he cannot extricate himself, and in which he must still 
 live ; and standing for a Socialism which concretely he 
 must wait on Society as a whole to inaugurate this 
 individual Socialist passes through a personal psycho- 
 logical experience, a social " new-birth," in his mind 
 and spirit towards all new life. 
 
 This social " new-birth " might not inaptly be called 
 the Socialization Of Personality an experience in the 
 Socialist man corresponding to the socialization of 
 industry, which is the Socialist program in the material 
 world. 
 
 The eventual outcome of this experience is without 
 doubt to release the Social Man the Son of Man men- 
 tioned in the bibles of the race. This progress of 
 Socialization of Personality begins when a man ceases 
 from merely private interests, and begins to be the 
 register, in his body, or mind, of the ultimate human 
 value. As soon as his mind begins to think of his 
 interests as being locked inextricably with the larger 
 interests of a whole class of sufferers, who suffer from 
 the same socially inflicted wrongs then begins the 
 Socialization of Personality. As soon as this process 
 begins the Capitalistic consciousness is punctured. 
 
20 HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST. 
 
 Peter Burro wes, in his great " Revolutionary 
 Essays/' gives us this sublime paragraph : 
 
 " Human wisdom may be said to consist of a man's 
 ability to separate biography from history : while 
 human virtue is the will, based upon such ability, to 
 choose the larger social interest : and Socialism is the 
 sum in practice of such ability, and such will-of-the- 
 larger-life, in national and world administration/' 
 
 When we finally awake from the horrible nightmare 
 of Capitalism, with its unnatural accentuation of pri- 
 vate-property interests, developing and nourishing 
 the corresponding selfishness and egoistic states of 
 mind : when the Socialist Commonwealth shall have 
 made a social form and body in which the race-soul can 
 find a home and express itself : then the simple, easy, 
 glorious Truth of our Unity with one another and with 
 God shall appear, and a fellowship of souls, from 
 which we are now suffering exiles, will be commonplace. 
 
 There will be "no temple therein " ; religion will 
 not be a thing of days, and ceremonies, and forms, and 
 functions, a sort of excrescence in the social body ; it 
 will be the rugged health, and rosy glow, and inspired 
 glory of the common life, lived in Justice, Brotherhood, 
 and Freedom. 
 
The Impending Social Revolution. 
 
 I. 
 REVOLUTION DEFINED. 
 
 A revolution occurs in any field where a new principle 
 displaces an old principle. Thus, a religious revolution 
 is precipitated when the seat of authority in matters 
 religious is changed from a book or a priesthood, and 
 acknowledged in the heart or conscience of the indi- 
 vidual. A political revolution occurs when the functions 
 of government are transferred from the arbitrary 
 powers of kings or kaisers or sultans, and placed in the 
 mandate of the people. An industrial revolution hap- 
 pened when the power of steam was applied to 
 machinery in the latter part of the eighteenth and the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century. The other day 
 naval critics declared that the introduction of wireless 
 telegraphy and submarines would cause a revolution 
 in naval warfare. The airship will precipitate another 
 revolution in military procedure. Should Sir William 
 Ramsay discover the method of transmuting silver into 
 gold there would be precipitated a revolution in the 
 method of paying national debts. 
 
 1. The Social Revolution. 
 
 But no revolution has ever occurred in human his- 
 tory comparable in any respect with that upon which 
 we have now entered. It is so great because it is a 
 revolution in the economic relations of men. .The 
 relations of men in bread-getting are fundamental, 
 basic. And the social revolution of our time involves 
 the application of a new principle in the relations of 
 men to one another in getting their living, in the use of 
 the land and machinery. Such a revolution is 
 virtually a new dispensation in the life of humanity. 
 
2 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 Social ownership by the whole people of the basic 
 equipment of land and machinery is the new principle 
 destined to take the place of private ownership by the 
 few. And co-operative use and administration of this 
 equipment is the new principle in the relations of bread- 
 getting, destined to take the place of competitive or 
 monopolistic use and administration for private profit. 
 
 To educate the working-class to these two new prin- 
 ciples in the one Gospel of Socialism, to summon the 
 conscience of humanity to the righteousness of the new 
 regime, and to arouse the moral and social energies of 
 the people to a united effort to put these principles into 
 full operation this is the object of the revolutionary 
 movement. 
 
 2. Social Revolution, Not Mere Reform. 
 
 By keeping in mind that a new principle destroys the 
 old in fulfilling it, we shall be saved from confounding 
 the moral and political outlook of the Social Revolu- 
 tion with any mere deepening of existing moral ideals 
 or with any extension, however great, of individual 
 philanthropy or public charity. 
 
 So also we shall no longer confuse the issues of the 
 social revolution with mere social reform, however 
 desirable. The social revolution comes not to mend 
 the capitalist system, but to end it. No statesman, who 
 is wise, puts the new wine into old economic bottles or 
 effete systems, or new patches on the old and worn-out 
 social garments. Every little social reform seems for 
 the moment so encouraging that it saps the revolution- 
 ary energy of many. The working-class vote is baited 
 and caught. Time wears on. The workers toil on. The 
 exploitation continues. The axe has not been laid to 
 the root of the tree. Taxation that looks more just, 
 schemes for the unemployed, anti-sweating laws, trade- 
 union victories all are good, all necessary, all probably 
 inevitable in the transition period. But the hurt of 
 the people is not healed. However tremendous 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 3 
 
 the task, however titanic the effort, nothing but the 
 overthrow of Capitalism can deliver the people. 
 
 Social reforms, religious revivals, political up- 
 heavals, scientific achievements, which leave the basis 
 of the present social order virtually intact each and all 
 will fail to make a free world. 
 
 Except this civilisation be born again we cannot 
 enter the next phase of the Kingdom of God. That 
 which is born of the flesh of Capitalism is Capitalism. 
 That which is born of the new spirit is of the kingdom of 
 the free. Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be 
 socially born again. 
 
 3. The Revolution at Our Doors. 
 
 This revolution is now on. We do not have to pro- 
 phesy that it shall be. It is here. We have already 
 entered upon it. To the conservative classes the 
 revolution has been coming as a thief in the night. 
 But the birth-throes thereof have been given to warn 
 us for half a century. It now begins to disclose itself 
 as the conscious hope and task of the whole working- 
 class of the world. And it advances rightfully to claim 
 the conscience of men against all the opposition of the 
 perverted moral ideas and pseudo-religions of 
 Capitalism. 
 
 The spirit of the revolution is already disturbing the 
 peace of Capitalistic religion in the organised churches. 
 It is a menace and a pest to both the Capitalistic political 
 parties. It is molesting the orthodoxy of the old trade 
 unionist. It is about to claim the co-operative move- 
 ment as its natural child and ally. " Votes for 
 Women " is not an end, but an equipment of our 
 mothers and wives and sisters to do battle royal in the 
 great Social Revolution and after. The revolution has 
 already begun to answer the bitter cry of the children. 
 A little child may lead us. The dove of peace has fled 
 the peace conferences of Capitalism's armed camps, and 
 now hovers over the international congresses of the 
 
4 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 revolutionary movement of the working-classes. The 
 physical need of humanity, crying for just conditions of 
 life and labour ; the intellect of the race seeking for 
 order ; the soul and conscience of man hungering for 
 freedom and brotherhood all begin to fed the oncom- 
 ing tide of the new social order. Behold, it is at our 
 very doors ! A harvest of the ages is at hand ! 
 
 II. 
 THE SLAVERY OF THE AGES. 
 
 It used to be the custom of great preachers to dangle 
 the souls of men over the very flames of hell, or to hold 
 them up in the fierce light of the Last Day of Judg- 
 ment, and to accentuate the effect by dilating on the 
 uncertainty of life and the certainty and proximity of 
 death. This undoubtedly had the desired effect on 
 millions of people. Our tame, modern, scientific, 
 reasoned existence has no terrors or immensities which 
 the mind can face, so that it may be lifted out of its 
 contemptible mediocrities, and its petty personal con- 
 cerns, so that it might face a really vast situation. I 
 have sometimes felt a nausea as I have looked into the 
 faces before me and read the infinitesimal private 
 interests that imprisoned the people, so that it was 
 psychologically impossible for them to even tem- 
 porarily entertain a large human problem. Sometimes 
 I have wished for the " good old days " so that I might 
 dangle them awhile in the light of Inferno, or the Judg- 
 ment, so that they might look at the sweep of history, 
 and take a real insight from some historic generalisa- 
 tion without instantly wondering what their ignorant 
 next-door neighbour would say, or whether they would 
 loose a customer by it, or whether it would add a half- 
 penny on the rates. Surely we are a contemptible 
 spawn ! 
 
 It is almost impossible to state the simplest and 
 most patent observations on human life or human 
 history without gashing the sensitive petty private 
 interests of many respectable imbeciles. One could 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 5 
 
 wish for some holiday of the intellect when we might 
 present as in a play, or in a pageant, our real ideas, 
 so that they might, at least, get a hearing, even though 
 not to be taken seriously since shortly we were all to 
 come back to our deary ignorance and out of that 
 delightful holiday where we spoke the Truth in play 
 or pageant ! 
 
 It is well that Immortality is only accorded to those 
 who perceive Truth and Freedom and Eternal Delight. 
 If it were otherwise if Death did not gather his daily 
 harvest the earth would be stinking with the ancient 
 slime of Ignorance, of our elders and superiors still 
 refusing surrender to Light and Progress, and 
 endeavouring to shackle the race with their age-long 
 lies. blessed Death I We thank thee for the harvests 
 ihat thou hast gathered ! 
 
 Well. This is a long preamble apparently irrelevant 
 to the theme. But the mind of the race needs a jolt, 
 which indeed I shall not offer, but is hinted in a few 
 main principles of this pamphlet. I want to cut history 
 in cross-sections and look straight at its structure. 
 I shall weep no tears. I shall look and report what the 
 cold glance perceives. And when you look at cross- 
 sections of history and make sweeping generalisations, 
 you omit exceptions, and you are seemingly false to 
 some smaller viewpoints. 
 
 1. The Robbery of the Workers. 
 
 The most cursory reading of the history of empires 
 and civilisations may easily precipitate one into the mood 
 of old Omar Khayyam, when he declared that what- 
 ever being was orignally responsible for the dark 
 tragedy of history should be made to fall down as a 
 sinner before the human race, and with deep and full 
 confession of the crime against us, ask our forgiveness. 
 The common practice, we are aware, is quite the op- 
 posite. Let us proceed to look over the pages of his- 
 tory, and read the large handwriting which he may read 
 runs. 
 
6 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 Never has there lived a working-class that was not 
 legally and respectably robbed. The job has always 
 been done beautifully, with due ornamentation of 
 dignity, and we might say prayerfully and religiously. 
 
 I repeat. Never in all the history of the human race, 
 in its organised civilisations, have the toiling peoples 
 received the product of their labour. 
 
 That is the first never. The history of the human 
 race is an unceasing story of how the product of the toil 
 of the workers has been perpetually filched from them, 
 and they themselves, although producing all wealth, 
 reduced to penury and slavery. The great masses of the 
 people, generation after generation, have been held in 
 helpless servitude to the powerful and privileged 
 classes. This statement needs some concrete examples. 
 And the mass of matter to prove the statement is so 
 great that it would fill volumes. We select but a few 
 scattered pages. 
 
 The history of the primitive man shows that even 
 before the dawn of civilisation man was the prey of man. 
 The Assyrian kings, back in the dim past, boasted of 
 the number of the slaves they captured. The laws of 
 Manu in ancient Hindostan recognise slavery as the 
 basis of society. Alexander the Great, in a fit of 
 temper sold into slavery 30,000 inhabitants of the Greek 
 city of Thebes. Aristotle says that in Athens, 700 B.C., 
 the poor were in absolute slavery to the rich who con- 
 trolled the land. The actual material glory in the age 
 of Pericles was the product of slave labour. In 
 Delos, 10,000 slaves were sold in a single day. Rome 
 employed slave labour on the most gigantic scale ever 
 known in history. The overstocked slave-market was a 
 boon to the Roman Capitalists. Croesus, the Roman 
 Rockefeller, made his fortune out of the work of these 
 helpless, landless men. Great Caesar took thousands, 
 of Gauls to Rome and sold them into servitude to 
 noble patricians. 
 
 The Barons of the Middle Ages continued the crime. 
 They traded the serfs as land and cattle. The slavery of 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 7 
 
 Englishmen, in the early part of the iQth century, in 
 the manufacturing cities of the north, is only paralleled 
 for outrage by the slavery of the negro in the United 
 States during the same period. The trade in slaves in 
 America ran up to over 3,000,000 annually. The slave 
 markets were crowded, and great fortunes were lost and 
 won in this respectable gamble over human flesh. In 
 the memory of men now living it was a crime to teach 
 a negro to read or write. In this respect modern Chris- 
 tian nations were more devilish than the ancients, who 
 never forbade the education of the slaves. 
 
 Romaine Patterson says : " Every state fought for 
 liberty against every other state, but within each state 
 
 there existed a class to whom liberty was denied 
 
 It mattered not by what name the state was known. 
 The slavery which formed the main basis of wealth of 
 Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian kings formed like- 
 wise the main source of the wealth of the Athenian 
 
 and Roman Republics a system of servile 
 
 labour was consolidated, elaborated and prolonged 
 throughout the history of all the great empires and 
 republics of the ancient world, and it became the source 
 of their wealth/' 
 
 And the tragedy ends not. In one English city I 
 saw a mob of men, the fragment of 20,000 unemployed 
 landless, tool-less, friendless living or dying in a 
 victimage more severe than chattel slavery. I have 
 seen the same in New York and Chicago. Whether in 
 the old world or the New, right now, the working- 
 classes are systematically robbed of the major portion 
 Of the product Of their toil. At this very moment 
 millions of human beings of our own religion and lan- 
 guage and kin are ekeing out the miserable existence of 
 unowned slaves ; hundreds of thousands cannot sell 
 their labour to the masters of the world at any price ; 
 men, women, and children consume their lives away in 
 a bitter struggle to live, while wealth is being pro- 
 duced in uncounted millions. 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 2. The Secret of Exploitation. 
 
 During all these long ages the labour of the people 
 has been wonderfully productive, increasing more and 
 more until the present time. There has been no poverty 
 of nature, no poverty of the products of labour, no 
 poverty in the skill and muscle of the workers. But 
 the ruling and privileged classes have possessed them- 
 selves of that which they never earned. They have 
 taken it from the surplus product of the working-classes 
 of the world. 
 
 These industrial masters and oppressors of the people 
 in all the ages secured and perpetuated their mastery 
 and oppression by one simple economic condition, 
 viz. : They controlled the natural, material sources of 
 the earth, and industrial opportunities and equipment, 
 and utilised these resources for their own private 
 enrichment. Thus poverty and slavery have been in- 
 evitable to the many. 
 
 The irresistible force of sex-energy, planted im- 
 movably at the very roots of human existence, poured 
 its numberless millions of human beings upon the face 
 of the earth. 
 
 Once born, the strongest force in the breast of these 
 millions is the love of life. 
 
 Life is impossible except through access to the earth 
 and its gifts, as produced by human labour. 
 
 But the earth and its products and the mechanical 
 equipment for labour these millions found already in the 
 private possession of the strong and privileged classes. 
 
 And thus, rather than leap into fire or w r ater, or over 
 the rocks, or perish of hunger, the love of life mastered 
 these millions. They remained alive, but on the only 
 condition possible viz., as the slaves and hirelings of the 
 few who controlled the earth and the fulness thereof. 
 
 3. Man's inhumanity to Man. 
 
 The history of man's inhumanity to man 
 one long, terrible tale of unmitigated cruelty, brutal 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. <> 
 
 oppression, and unforgivable outrage upon the bodies 
 and minds and souls of the teeming millions. Rather 
 than die, they lived a living death under the dominion 
 and at the mercy of those who owned the earth. 
 
 The private ownership by the few of the sources of 
 physical existence, for ail this is the one abiding base of 
 all slavery, from the days of the Pharaohs to modern 
 Capitalism. The empires of Babylon, Persia, and Egypt, 
 and the Republics of Greece and Rome, were all built 
 upon the bleeding backs of baffled, degraded, and terror- 
 stricken human beings, by virtue of this principle. 
 And this record of ancient history finds its continuance 
 through Middle Age serfdom and the chattel slavery of 
 Britain and America up to the nineteenth century. 
 But the sad story does not end there. The present 
 chapters of the long drawn-out affliction of the enslaved 
 working-classes may now be read in the daily records of 
 twentieth-century Capitalism, with its sweating, un- 
 employment, and labour wars, in the accounts of 
 poverty-stricken multitudes exiled from the land and 
 beseiged in the unwholesome streets and alleys of our 
 great industrial centres. Just yesterday you may have 
 read in one column of the daily Press of women, leaving 
 their babes in single-room tenements, going off to make 
 paper boxes for us at one shilling and sixpence per gross, 
 and by working seventy to seventy-five hours a week 
 they earned a miserable 55. a week. In the next column 
 we read that an Earl dies leaving an estate in Lanca- 
 shire worth 4,000,000, including 70,000 acres of land 
 and urban property bringing in a huge rent-roll. 
 
 Take a cross-section of human history in any country 
 from Nebuchadnezzar to Marcus Aurelius, from Marcus 
 Aurelius to Louis XIV., from Louis XIV. to President 
 Roosevelt or Edward VII., and the horror of the 
 poverty and desperate struggle of the toiling multitudes 
 has only one cause the control by the few of the sources 
 Of life God gave to all. This is the base of all tyranny. 
 This is the ground of all slavery. This is the one root 
 unrighteousness of human history. 
 
10 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 Privately own and control for private profit the sources 
 of the bread and labour supply, and the toiling millions 
 are in chains, and the product of their toil must inevit- 
 ably flow into the hands of the class that never earned it 
 
 III. 
 THE DYNAMIC OF REVOLT. 
 
 But what if the product of the labour of the masses 
 has always flowed into the hands of a master class that 
 has controlled, and still controls, the means of life and 
 labour ? Does life consist simply in getting the product 
 of one's labour ? Are the rich so happy, are their lives 
 so complete, that they are to be envied ? Can the poor 
 not have life and joy even if they do surrender a large 
 proportion of the product of their labour ? Let the rich 
 and strong possess the earth ! Let them revel in luxury 
 and extravagance ! " Life is more than meat and the 
 body than raiment. " Let the poor and exploited workers 
 of the world have a gospel of life that needeth not these 
 things. Why all this ado about the product of labour 
 being taken from those who earn it, and placed in the 
 hands of those who earn it not ? 
 
 1. The Nature of Property. 
 
 It is in answer to this false position, in all its absurd 
 ramifications, that the Social Revolution comes, to 
 sweep away age-long ignorance and to establish a new 
 world of social righteousness, through a just social 
 economy. 
 
 The natural property of the eagle is his swift wing, of 
 the deer his fleet foot, of the bird his feathers, of the 
 horse his hoof. And the natural property of a man is 
 the normal product of his labour. Naked he comes into 
 the world, which is the house full of good things which 
 God gave him for use and enjoyment. By his muscle 
 and his skill applied to the gifts of nature he produces 
 the necessities, comforts, and satisfactions of life. These 
 material things constitutes soil in which man grows. 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. II 
 
 They feed his body. They make possible leisure for the 
 development of the mind. And the production of things 
 through labour in Justice and Brotherhood is the 
 sacrament of souls. Now, if one small class controls 
 the basis by which all live, and if the natural reward of 
 the labourer is intercepted, and his true natural pro- 
 perties never reach him, then the worker is not only 
 poor in purse, poor in the world's goods, poor in 
 
 material things ho is poor in all that human life can 
 possibly mean. 
 
 Rob the eagle of his swift wing his natural property 
 you have no eagle. Rob the deer of his fleet foot no 
 deer. Let the horse take not only his own hoof, but the 
 feathers of the bird no bird and the horse is doubt- 
 fully enriched. Let a ruling class rob the labourer of the 
 natural product of his toil, you have not a man left, you 
 have a Slave. And up to date in human history we have 
 had monstrous ruling classes, cursed by their ill-gotten 
 gains, living in a riot of wealth, and beneath them not 
 men, but slaves slaves with impoverished bodies, with 
 dwarfed and unenlightened minds, their souls beaten, 
 depressed, and degraded. 
 
 Thus we see that the problem precipitated by the 
 Social Revolution is not simply a quarrel between the 
 Haves and Have-nots. The problem of justice in bread- 
 getting involves the whole man. It is the problem of the 
 release of the mind. It is the problem of the free soul. It 
 is the problem of freedom, the problem of righteousness, 
 the problem of the Kingdom of God in the earth. By 
 all the sacredness and possibility of the soul of man this 
 problem must be confronted and settled. It is not a 
 side issue, it is a supreme issue. It is not for the after- 
 thoughts of your religion or righteousness. It is 
 primary and fundamental. 
 
 2. The New Righteousness. 
 
 All the thefts and dishonesties of all petty criminals 
 for all time, for which they have been hanged or incar- 
 cerated in shame behind prison bars, are as a drop in 
 
12 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 the bucket compared to the legalised plunder of human 
 lives by the propertied classes from the days of Pharaoh 
 to modern Capitalism a legalised plunder ever 
 sanctified by the priesthoods that have fed at the 
 tables of the rich. 
 
 All the murders and assassinations of history, com- 
 mitted by man against man through hate or passion, 
 and all the slain in feud and war, are few compared to 
 the millions of men, women, and children done to death, 
 and now being daily done to death by virtue of social 
 injustice, through the dark nights of poverty in the 
 terrible struggle for existence a struggle fearfully and 
 unnecessarily accentuated by the control which the few 
 maintain over the cupboards and larders of the world. 
 
 All the intellectual enlightenment of the centuries 
 is a mere trifle compared to that intellectual release, 
 and expansion of human genius if the multitudes of the 
 race were emancipated from economic servitude ; if 
 the toiling millions were secure in the product of their 
 toil, and thus able to secure leisure and equipment for 
 the culture of the mind. 
 
 All the personal injustice that man can inflict on man 
 in a free attack as an individual in the battle of life, 
 even on the basis of the brute struggle, is nothing com- 
 pared to the refined injustice incarnated in unjust social 
 institutions in the use of land and machinery, and the 
 maladministration of social labour. 
 
 All the unrighteousness and sin of individual lives, 
 one against the other, poured into one stream would 
 make a mere rivulet compared to this ocean Of unright- 
 eousness and sin against humanity, by virtue of mastery 
 of their only means of life and labour. The tragedy of 
 it all is that we have for centuries strained at gnats and 
 swallowed camels. We have tithed mint and anise 
 and cummin and have forgotten the justice and mercy 
 of social righteousness. 
 
 All the goodness, or loving kindness, tenderness, 
 mercy, even Christlikeness, manifested by all the indi- 
 vidual saints and converted religious persons and 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 1$, 
 
 church members for twenty centuries is a mere 
 twinkle of a star in the black night of history, compared 
 to the bright noonday of social righteousness and 
 brotherhood and human goodwill, which would be 
 released and become the open fact of the common day 
 if justice were established in the use of land ; justice 
 in the use of machinery ; justice in the administration 
 of labour ; justice, in short, in the bread-getting of the 
 race. 
 
 3. Socialism and the Christ-Mission. 
 
 If God is ever to wipe away the tears from the face of 
 man this age-long wrong must be overthrown. If the 
 mission of Jesus is ever to get the upperhand in human 
 affairs, the social revolution must come to pass. There 
 is no more good news to the poor unless there is the 
 message and the task to abolish this age-long night 
 of poverty. There is no deliverance for captives 
 unless this social captivity is ended. There is no setting 
 at liberty the people that are bruised unless this age- 
 long bruising machinery is stopped. If we are ever to 
 call the poor and the maimed and the halt to the ban- 
 quet of creation, the programme of the revolution must 
 be inaugurated. The Heavenly Father may know we 
 have need of all these things, and He may have provided 
 for these needs in the limitless resources of nature, but 
 we never can have them for the people except by seek- 
 ing the kingdom of social justice and human brother- 
 hoodwhich is the Kingdom of God which is the 
 social vision of the social revolution. 
 
 4. The Urge for Fulness of Life. 
 
 Man is not only a physical being with material wants. 
 He is an intellectual and moral being. He is a soul. The 
 earth and its fulness meets his physical need. The 
 universe is the field for his intellectual adventure and 
 discovery. And the fellowship of souls in using that 
 earth, and in penetrating the secrets of that world and 
 
14 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 life that is the joy and release of souls. Hence this 
 struggle for a living, with the work of the mind and the 
 relations of souls involved, is a struggle for all that life 
 can mean, for all that a soul can know, or feel, or be. 
 Hunger, in the case of man, is hunger of the body, 
 hunger of the mind, and hunger of the spirit. His battle 
 for a living involves them each and all. Moreover, he is 
 a soul in a society of souls, each filled with similar 
 desires. And out of our associated existence as souls 
 there arise our conflict and antagonism, and hence the 
 problem of freedom and fellowship. 
 
 We are not angels, but men. We are embodied souls. 
 The body, with its needs, constitutes the arena of the 
 soul's manifestation. In that arena the intellect must 
 find its expression and the heart its love and joy. Out 
 of that raw fact we cannot escape. In this battle for 
 bread we must find our freedom and fellowship. The 
 word must become flesh. This is our incarnation. The 
 highest philosophy, and the deepest religion of the 
 heart, cannot be an escape from the bread struggle, 
 but the redemption thereof. The riches of the mind 
 are dependent upon plain, matter-of-fact bread. The 
 highest symbol of spiritual illumination is the sacra- 
 ment of bread and wine. And up to date we have not 
 partaken of that sacrament worthily ; but we Shall 
 when we have abolished economic injustice, and have 
 organised our daily bread-getting in freedom and 
 brotherhood. Justice in bread-getting is the first great 
 sublime righteousness. For it means the perfected body, 
 the illumined mind, the comrade soul. 
 
 IV. 
 THE UN-ATTEMPTED TASK. 
 
 But now observe. Never in all these long centuries 
 with a few wonderful exceptions, now claimed as 
 examples by the present social revolution, has there 
 existed a movement which has had for its express object 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 15 
 
 the abolition of this unceasing crime against the human 
 race. This is our second never. 
 
 No movement has ever existed to guarantee to the 
 worker private property in the full product of his toil. 
 
 No movement has ever existed to deprive the few 
 of the power to control the sources of life and labour of 
 the many. 
 
 No movement has existed to organise industry on 
 terms of justice and human brotherhood. 
 
 You can find the words liberty, justice, and right- 
 eousness in all the religions, ethics, politics, and 
 philosophy of Assyria, Greece, Rome, England, and 
 America, covering a period of forty centuries, but, 
 without exception, those words signify social relations 
 that never inquire into this supreme and fundamental 
 curse of associated humanity. 
 
 Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we may place at the 
 head of the list of preachers of righteousness in which 
 this social injustice is unquestioned. Paul and Marcus 
 Aurelius ; Hildebrand and Martin Luther ; St. Francis 
 and John Wesley ; Hegel and Huxley, and Spencer ; 
 Gladstone and General Booth ; Prime Minister Asquith 
 and President Roosevelt, each and all preached, and 
 now preach, a liberty, a justice, and a righteousness 
 that sutains and sanctifies the power of the few to own 
 and control for private profit the resources of nature and 
 the power of machinery, and through this private con- 
 trol for private profit to exploit the human race, and 
 reduce the masses to servitude and degradation. 
 
 No religious body, no ecclesiastical organisation, 
 Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Nonconformist, from the 
 Pope of Rome to the Salvation Army, has ever sought 
 to guarantee the right of the people to live in freedom 
 on God's earth. They have never sought to secure to the 
 people the natural product of toil. No religion or 
 philanthropy has sought to organise men in relations 
 of brotherhood in the use of the earth and the means 
 of livelihood. 
 
 At this very moment, twenty centuries since the 
 
l6 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 ruling classes crucified Christ because He championed 
 the cause of the people, it is almost impossible to get a 
 church building in which to impeach this colossal wrong 
 against an outraged humanity, and to plead the cause 
 of social justice. 
 
 The capitalist system is the present form of con- 
 trolling the life and labour of the people, and at this 
 very moment, when great financiers are beginning to 
 cover their faces in shame at the sights of misery among 
 their own employes, and when even the politicians of 
 the old political parties all over the civilised world 
 begin to doubt the rationality and righteousness of 
 their political faiths, which leave the present system 
 intact, the most stalwart apologists and dependable 
 defenders of capitalism are the men who are called the 
 pastors or shepherds of the people, the men who ought 
 to voice the cry of the oppressed. 
 
 1. Our Relation to the Past. 
 
 In thus sweeping the pages of history, disclosing age- 
 long injustice, to get the historical setting of the 
 impending social revolution, and weighing up the morals 
 and religion of the world in relation to that injustice, 
 it may seem that we have discounted every gain of the 
 race that has come through the efforts of the great souls 
 and the great movements of the past. But the very 
 reverse is the fact. We can only honour Moses and 
 Jesus, and Bruno and Wilberforce, and the other great 
 ones by being true to humanity in our day, and 
 by preventing their righteousness being made a bulwark 
 for present unrighteousness. We must harvest what 
 they planted. They rejoiced to see our day. 
 
 The nineteenth century alone gave tremendous gains 
 to the race. But every one of these gains falls under the 
 heading of unfinished business with which we open the 
 century. 
 
 The nineteenth century gave us more machinery than 
 all the previous centuries of history. But that ma- 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 1 7 
 
 chinery has not lightened the burden of the people. 
 Unless that power can be socialised for the common 
 good it bids fair to become a curse and a tyranny. 
 
 In the last century trade unionism came to its power 
 and victory. But unless it proceeds to organise the 
 whole working-class to capture the equipment of 
 civilisation for the people, it will become only the aris- 
 tocracy of labour, in an industrial feudalism, beneath 
 whom struggle a vast underworld of unorganised, hope- 
 less millions. 
 
 Popular education, with its schoolhouses in every 
 ward and village, is a mighty achievement. But science 
 and learning halt like the ancient philosophies until 
 they proceed to socialise the bread-getting of the people, 
 and thus prevent the exploitation of an intellectual 
 proletariat. 
 
 The ballot is in the hands of the worker, and soon 
 will be in the hands of his wife and mother. But 
 political power is a means to an end, an instrument or 
 weapon. And if the industrial masters of the world 
 succeed in pitting one-half of the workers against the 
 other half in the political camps of the master-class, 
 then democracy shall become the bulwark of power and 
 privilege. 
 
 Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century 
 came to the very zenith of its power. It planted tens 
 of thousands of churches, sent forth its hundreds of 
 missionaries, enrolled millions of children in its Sunday- 
 schools, published the Scriptures in every tongue. 
 It followed the lead of some of the greatest preachers of 
 Christendom : Finney, Spurgeon, Moody, Parker, 
 Farrar. The Salvation Army, a host of leagues of mercy, 
 hundreds of groups of philanthropists, and scores of 
 charity organisations have arisen during the century. 
 Boast of all this relgious fervour and activity, and 
 charity and philanthropy, and you are boasting of a 
 royal beginning, but not an end, a preparation, an in- 
 auguration. The whole religious world halts. There is 
 1m actual danger that the Church shall disclose its 
 
1 8 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 pagan elements at the command of Capitalism, and 
 actually deny the Christ. For the Christ cometh through 
 the Social Revolution. 
 
 Thus the Social Revolution, instead of denying the 
 heritage of the past, accepts it, interprets it, and pro- 
 ceeds to realise and actualise that for which sages 
 and seers and saviours have lived and died. " First the 
 blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear/' 
 The Social Revolution is the full corn in the ear of 
 many a bloody planting in the fields of time. 
 
 So the Social Revolution does not come to destroy 
 but to fulfil. We do not point out this failure of Chris- 
 tendom, of religious movements, and philanthropic and 
 political parties for mere attack, but to show by striking 
 historical contrast the sublime task and the unparal- 
 leled righteousness of the Socialist cause. 
 
 What all religions and philosophy and politics up to 
 date have never attempted to perform, or never dared 
 to inaugurate, the Socialist movement proceeds to 
 do. 
 
 V. 
 SOCIALISM, THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 
 
 Accepting the parable of Jesus we may say that the 
 present Socialist movement, being the organised and 
 militant expression of the Social Revolution, is the good 
 Samaritan of all human history. 
 
 A lawyer had asked of Jesus the way of eternal life. 
 And in this wonderful parable Jesus discloses at once the 
 way of life to the individual soul, and the normal social 
 task of the sons of God. " This do and thou shalt live/" 
 said Jesus. In one brief line Jesus, the Master-Genius 
 and the lover of men, sums up the total of individual 
 and social righteousness. 
 
 1. Violated Humanity. 
 
 Behold the unusual significance of the parable of the 
 Good Samaritan. This human race, the body of God, 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 19. 
 
 went down the path of history from the days of primi- 
 tive man, through the days of the Pharaohs, and on 
 down to modern Capitalism. And during all these long 
 centuries he has fallen among thieves. These thieves 
 have first robbed him of the due product of his toil. 
 They have by this method stripped him of his natural 
 birthright, stripped him of his dignity, stripped him of 
 his rights, stripped him of that possibility of intellec- 
 tual enlightenment which should have clothed his 
 mind as with a garment. At this very moment he lies 
 before us naked and exposed in the helplessness of his 
 ignorance. But more they have left him half dead 
 more than half dead, in body, mind, and spirit. 
 
 And during all these long centuries, as I have pointed 
 out, whatever priesthoods and philanthropies and 
 politics have come along, and whatever they may have 
 done, they have passed by on the wrong side as far as 
 this robbery, this stripping, this universal economic 
 havoc is concerned. 
 
 But, by-the-by, after the long, long crime has had its 
 way, and priests and statesmen have passed by, the 
 despised and unlikely Socialist movement comes along, 
 the Good Samaritan of history, and finds the working- 
 class robbed, stripped, and actually half dead. 
 
 The Socialist movement finds two-thirds of the pro- 
 duct of labour abstracted from the worker by the 
 Capitalist class. We find his children driven from the 
 school and the fireside to the workshop and into the 
 sweater's den. We find the minds of these little ones 
 stripped naked, and bereft of the garments of light. 
 We find that the average age of the workers is actually 
 thirty-five years, only half the normal three-score 
 years and ten, to say nothing of the meanings and possi- 
 bilities of life that never emerge even during that short 
 thirty-five years. Nay, more, we find him on the road- 
 side. The vast majority of the working-classes have not 
 a spot on this earth in which they may dwell in security, 
 where they may labour in joy, except by sufferance of 
 the owners of the earth and" the profit-mongers of in- 
 
20 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 dustry. And tens of thousands of the unemployed are 
 literally on the roadside, robbed, stripped, and left half 
 dead. 
 
 2. The Oil of Economic Truth. 
 
 It is at this point that the Good Samaritan of human 
 history comes along, and first pours oil into the wounds 
 of the working-class. In the sacred literature oil is a 
 symbol of truth. Truth means healing and freedom, and 
 righteousness. In the last analysis truth is not a doc- 
 trine to be preached it is a vision to be seen. We 
 should have the word truth as a verb, then " truth-ing " 
 would mean perceiving that which makes men free. 
 The oil that the social revolution pours into the wounds 
 of the working-class is the truth of economics, revealing 
 the wealth of God's gifts in Nature, showing the 
 limitless power of machinery, uncovering the almost 
 miraculous power of the principle of co-operation and 
 organisation. The truth that men can organise industry 
 as brothers, using the earth and the equipment of 
 industry co-operatively this is oil in the wounds of 
 mankind. It is hope and healing and refreshment. It 
 quickens his broken body. It stimulates his blinded 
 mind. It arouses the moral and social energies as noth- 
 ing else can do. It inspires the will to a great social task. 
 And all over the world to-day this oil is being poured 
 into the wounds of a robbed, stripped, and half-dead 
 working-class. This oil in the wounds is the first great 
 work of the revolution. 
 
 If the present Socialist Movement has done nothing 
 else it has poured oil upon the wounded working-class. 
 And this oil is healing to the hurt of humanity. The 
 Socialist Movement has placed into the consciousness of 
 the worker a new conception of his own worth, his own 
 dignity, his own right in the universe. Socialists are 
 called dreamers. Very well. They have at least 
 awakened millions of workers from the nightmares of 
 ignorance, and if they have only offered the awakened 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 21 
 
 a dream, they have started the pscyhological activity 
 for worlds that are to be. There is a psychological 
 basis for Social Revolution. The average dull, 
 dreary, hopeless monotony of consciousness must be 
 broken. The low, mean, degraded conceptions of 
 life ought to be shattered. And thus a bolt of mental 
 dynamite must be discharged in the world of thought 
 and feeling. New possibilities to life, new meanings, 
 new avenues, new worlds must be opened up. The 
 literature of revolt must find a seeding ground in 
 deeper areas of consciousness. Where there is no 
 vision the people perish. The Socialist Movement, 
 quite irrespective of its immediate or more remote 
 political or economic proposals, is a vast social prayer. 
 It is an articulate cry for deliverance to the Kingdom 
 of the Good. It is a genuine revolt against unnatural 
 and abnormal conditions that fret and distress the 
 mind and heart. It is the ache for an intelligent 
 world. It is the challenge of the Race-Soul against the 
 limitations of experience. It is a summons for the 
 Truth that shall make free. It is the demonstration 
 that man the Spirit is master of his environment, 
 and not victim. The Socialist Movement, as a mere 
 psychological revolt, is one prophecy of the new 
 worlds of an emancipated humanity. It is oil and wine 
 to a wounded race. 
 
 3. The Beast of Civilisation. 
 
 In the parable it is said that the Good Samaritan 
 lifted the robbed and wounded man and placed him 
 upon his beast. What is this beast on which the robbed 
 and wounded workers of the world shall be placed ? 
 The answer is not far to seek. The Beast is the Power 
 and Equipment of Civilisation. Notwithstanding the 
 titanic achievements of modern times, there are tens 
 of thousands of human beings in the heart of our great 
 industrial life that are more helpless than savages. 
 The very presence and power of civilised life, when not 
 available for them, is a colossal disaster, like earth- 
 
22 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 quake, or fire, or flood, which no activity in the social 
 or economic life on their part can withstand. The 
 economic laws, like the mills of the gods, grind exceed- 
 ing small. Outside of railway stations, with their rush 
 and roar of modern achievement, stand the men and 
 women, as if paralysed by that awful avalanche of 
 power. Looking into the mill-gates, begging for work, 
 stand the ragged men, women, and children, looking 
 upon the machines that manufacture garments as if 
 by magic. Underneath the shadow of massive walls 
 of commerce you will find the shivering victims of life, 
 hungry, penniless, homeless. I have never read in the 
 annals of the redmen, that such acute suffering was 
 ever thrust upon isolated individuals by any social 
 system they ever established. In dull monotone, in 
 ten thousand churches, the prayer is offered : " Give 
 us this day our daily bread. " That prayer has never 
 yet been answered to any civilisation. Can it be 
 answered ? Shall the race come to a place where Bread 
 shall be sure, and where the problems of life shall be 
 in the higher realms of art and thought ? 
 
 4. Organise Civilisation. 
 
 The Beast is the Power and Equipment of Civilisa- 
 tion. The Socialist Movement that organises and 
 expresses the Social Revolution, proposes a re-organisa- 
 tion of our economic life so that the Economic Forces 
 and Activities shall be the Servant of man and not his 
 Master. The general propositions of the Revolution 
 may be outlined briefly as follows : 
 
 i. Under the present Capitalist system the Land 
 is privately owned, and privately administered for 
 private profit. The Social Revolution aims at the 
 Socialisation Of Land, thus guaranteeing equality of 
 opportunity in the fundamental resources of social 
 existence. The present budgets of England and Ger- 
 many contain elemental recognition of the principle 
 involved. That a few people should control thousands 
 upon thousands of acres or collect millions annually in 
 
THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 23 
 
 ground rents, while the " Son of Man has not where to 
 lay his head " seems the climax of social stupidity. 
 The Socialisation of Land Values, and then the 
 Nationalisation of Land will be found to be the inevit- 
 able programme of any people in the twentieth century 
 that will save itself from social disintegration. 
 
 2. Under the Capitalist System the Power of ma- 
 chinery is privately owned and privately administered 
 for private profit. The Social Revolution is directed 
 towards the Socialisation of that amount of this mighty 
 
 Mechanical Equipment as shall make the social body 
 
 free. No doubt a vast amount of production may still 
 be left for long enough in private hands, but the funda- 
 mental basic equipment for the necessities and com- 
 fort and freedom of the whole people should be socially 
 administered and pass into the social body, and be 
 accomplished as if involuntarily, as digestion or 
 assimilation in the physical body. 
 
 3. Under Capitalism the products of human labour 
 on land and with machinery are counters in a great 
 gamble for gain. They are produced for profit. It 
 was only yesterday that one man held the world's 
 wheat crop in his grasp ! When the Social Revolution 
 has had its first day the fundamental requirements of 
 man will be produced for use and not for profit, at the 
 least possible expenditure of human time and energy, 
 and with the greatest possible perfection and rapidity 
 by our marvellous mechanical devices, utilising the 
 powers in creation. 
 
 4. Since Land, Machinery, and the Products of 
 Human Labour are thus administered by private indi- 
 viduals for private profit ; and since human beings 
 alone can make these three available for social use, it 
 is evident that human beings are actually bought and 
 sold and gambled with under the operation of 
 Capitalism. Capitalism is an ill-disguised slavery 
 to an eye that will look. Capitalism says : "I have 
 nothing to do with human beings. I wish them well. 
 I buy and sell and monopolise the dead thing called 
 
24 THE IMPENDING SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 land. I organise and control the mere mechanical 
 equipment. It can neither know nor suffer. I market 
 products mere products ! I do not buy and sell men.*' 
 The Social Revolution sees through this mask, and 
 tears it off, and declares that Industry shall be 
 organised by man for man, and that the exploitation of 
 human life shall cease for ever. Humanity shall be 
 placed upon the Beast of Civilisation. The Socialist 
 Movement is the Good Samaritan of Human History ! 
 
The Messiah Cometh : Riding upon 
 the Ass of Economics. 
 
 TO get an underhold of the subject before us, I 
 wish to take the original wording of the theme, 
 as that exactly expresses to my own conscious- 
 ness the thing I want to say. My colleagues felt that 
 the subject, as I had at first stated it, lent itself to 
 humour or ridicule. Such a thing had never once 
 crossed my mind. The theme, to my mind, expressed 
 history and prophecy in one unique, symbolical phrase, 
 and so, for advertising purposes, I submitted another 
 wording which partly revealed and partly concealed 
 the message I have to offer you. But, in order that I 
 may give you the blood of my thought through its 
 natural artery, now that we are assembled I shall retain 
 the original wording, which is this : " The Messiah 
 Cometh : Riding upon the Ass of Economics/' 
 
 By this I mean that the word of truth and the moral 
 -and spiritual energy that is to deliver the people in our 
 time to a new world of freedom does not come by way 
 of the priest, the sacrament, the stained glass, the 
 theological formula, the holy day, the wrapt pietism of 
 the professional keepers of the kingdom, but it comes 
 via the factory gates, the cry of the hungry, the heavy 
 tread of the unemployed, the fields and valleys that 
 ache for a happy and contented people, the common 
 day of labour, the Battle for Bread. 
 
 
 I. 
 THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 
 
 There are traces of the hope of a coming deliverer 
 in the sacred literature of all peoples. This hope of a 
 Messiah was especially strong among the Jews in the 
 centuries immediately preceding our era. The con- 
 ceptions of this Messianic age greatly varied, but, in 
 
2 THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 general, the advent of the Messiah meant the dawn of 
 an age of peace among men, material prosperity and 
 happiness, and the release and perfection of the spiritual 
 powers of the race. 
 
 When the Son of Man appeared then He came in 
 a very unpromising manner. The glorious temple 
 glittered upon Mount Moriah. At its altars ministered 
 thousands of priests clothed with ecclesiastical dignity. 
 The system of worship was perfect. Nothing was 
 lacking to ecclesiastical architecture, ritual, ceremony, 
 and devotion. Surely the deliverer would come via 
 the path thus prepared for his feet where God was 
 duly worshipped, His service duly rendered, His Word 
 duly expounded. Or, if He came as a national hero, 
 He should be born of the nobility, reared among the 
 ruling-classes, received with eclat by deputations of 
 Church and State. As a conquering deliverer, He 
 should come riding on a fiery steed, caparisoned in gold 
 and glittering with armour. But, alas ! no more 
 disappointing advent could be imagined. The Son of 
 Man comes, His mother a peasant girl, His father a 
 carpenter, His disciples greasy fishermen, His followers 
 the rabble, the common people, " who heard Him 
 gladly/' and to crown the rudeness and baseness of 
 His advent the Messiah comes riding into Jerusalem 
 on an ass ! 
 
 There is something sublime beyond words in the 
 dream of a Messianic age. It reveals, in a cross-section 
 of human history, the sure promise of its realisation. 
 The race that can conceive of Messianic Personality 
 is inherently destined to bring to pass the Messianic 
 day of triumph over war, injustice, ignorance, and 
 hate. But ever it shall be that the keepers of the 
 oracles, by their very sense of power and their associa- 
 tion with the ideas and principles of ruling-classes, 
 shall be unable to perceive the approach of the Mes- 
 sianic Age, and shall be utterly disappointed and 
 disgraced by its method of approach. And so it is 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 3 
 
 to-day. A Messianic deliverance is at hand but on 
 an ass ! 
 
 1. The New Deliverance. 
 
 The peoples of the whole world are crying for 
 deliverance. Whatever past saviours and moVements 
 have done for the race, we are still undelivered ; we 
 are still unsaved. We await redemption ; salvation 
 remains a hope, not an experience. Social injustice 
 is rampant and ruthless. The weak are trampled by 
 the devotees of the Mammon-gods. The poor and 
 degraded crowd the great cities of civilisation by 
 millions. They crawl like vermin in a thousand centres 
 of industry. The working-classes of the world are 
 still ruthlessly defrauded of the natural product of their 
 toil. The bodies, minds, and souls of the people 
 are caught in irresistible currents of social and indus- 
 trial strife. And the people cry by reason of their 
 bondage. 
 
 2. The Urge for Freedom. 
 
 This urge of the working-classes of the world may 
 fitly be called a Messianic movement, and its goal a 
 Messianic deliverance. I think we may safely make 
 the word Messianic carry all the hopes and ideals that 
 fill the horizon of the Social Revolution. 
 
 The total urge at the base of the Social Revolution is 
 for Fulness and Freedom of Life. It is life asserting 
 itself against convention, barrier, power. If God is 
 life then the Social Revolution is God incarnate, 
 seeking expression and fullest dramatisation in all 
 possible concrete forms of abundant human experience. 
 He who reads the present-day movement as a struggle 
 between the Haves and Have-Nots, as if it were for a mere 
 division of spoil, a mere envy of the poor, or a mere 
 brute struggle to possess, knoweth not what he reads. 
 
 The whole ceaseless urge of this Labour Movement 
 
4 THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 is for the natural vigour, richness, and joy of physical 
 existence 9 which ought to be the birthright of every 
 human being. It is for leisure and liberty, for intel- 
 lectual culture and expression, the free flow of the 
 eternal fountains of art and genius. This urge is for 
 that expanse and flight Of the SOUl into a world Of 
 
 spiritual meaning and illumination, which is the crown 
 of being. The revolution is driven onward by the 
 dynamos of heart-hunger for love and comradeship, 
 which is the incarnate form of absolute unity. Such 
 is the sweep of the Messianic hope of the peoples now 
 bound in the chains of Capitalism. But the Messiah, 
 the Deliverer, the Emancipator to this Messianic age 
 cometh riding on an ass. That ass is the Ass of 
 Economics ! 
 
 3. Two Pictures. 
 
 I am writing these lines on a Sunday morning out in 
 the open fields. The smell of grass and air will make 
 my words ring true and purge them of artificiality and 
 convention. I am within sight of the great cathedral. 
 The chimes from the tower pour into my ears. I see 
 worshippers as they hurry to the service of God. 
 The ladies are beautifully, even elegantly, clad. They 
 clasp beautiful Bibles and prayer-books in their hands. 
 The gentlemen are dressed as for a state occasion- 
 top hats are a striking feature of the hastening pro- 
 cession. They have closed the shops and stores and 
 offices and banks. They are keeping the Sabbath-day 
 holy. They are now approaching the place of wor- 
 ship. The shining motor-cars draw near the cathedral 
 door with a modified Sabbatic speed. The lofty spire 
 pierces the blue. The sweet, rich, glowing sunlight 
 doth not enter. Within there is a " dim religious 
 light/* the light of heaven being obstructed by man's 
 stone walls, or, if admitted, only through the stained 
 glass of the narrow, mediaeval window. The wor- 
 shippers enter ; they have come to serve God to pray 
 to God to chant God's praises in many repetitions 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 5 
 
 to receive the sacrament at the hands of a robed 
 ecclesiastical dignitary to hear the word of God 
 explained. The theology is perfect ; who so impudent 
 as to revise it ? The ceremony is a poem ; who would 
 change the accent of a syllable ? The people are 
 exhorted to cultivate a Christ-like state of mind, to be 
 kind to the poor, to be faithful to the Church. His 
 theme was God, Christ, Religion, the Church. 
 
 Not more than a mile away from the cathedral tower, 
 away out in the open field, a crowd of people are gather- 
 ing. Let us go and watch them. The men are simply 
 dressed ; they wear caps they do not remove them. 
 The women are not numerous, but those present are 
 not robed in silks and satins. Children gather round 
 the speaker's box ; many of them are dirty and 
 miserably clad. They have poured out from the long 
 monotonous rows of tenements that reach to the edge 
 of the open. The speaker hushes the noisy babble of 
 the children before he can be heard. A drove of sheep 
 runs past in the field ; the lambs bleating distract the 
 listeners. There is no stained glass. The sun shines 
 down through the broken clouds ; there is a sprinkle of 
 rain. Will they have to disperse ? There is no 
 priest ; there is no chant ; there is no prayer. They 
 do not come to serve God ; they come to lift men ! 
 They carry no Bibles. The poor little urchins round 
 the box, and the tired, broken lives in the crowd are 
 to them an open Word of God. A carpenter is speaking 
 I don't know his name. I heard one of his comrades 
 say, " You better begin, Jack/' and he began. He 
 talked about land and machines, employment and 
 unemployment, rents and wages. He told them of 
 people worth millions and of millions worth nothing. 
 He told the story of a man who had dropped almost 
 dead from sheer starvation, hunting for work ; he 
 talked about crowded populations, about Liberals and 
 Tories, about ballots and Parliament, about the workers 
 in other lands facing the same cruel struggles. He 
 exhorted his fellow-workers to unite to alter these 
 
6 THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 wrongs. They heckled him. He mopped the sweat 
 from his face and neck. He was vehement, ungram- 
 matical, unpolished. His speech was much less ordered 
 than I have indicated. Jack got down from the box. 
 His theme was Economics. 
 
 4. The Contrast. 
 
 I have given you two pictures. There convention, 
 here romance ; there robes, here rags ; there ritual and 
 rubric, here the deep urge of man-soul. There, peace, 
 peace, here dissatisfaction, protest ; there melody, 
 here murmur. The one refined, the other raw ; the 
 one cultured, the other crude. The one hoary with age, 
 boasting of its centuries ; the other youthful, its hope 
 in the future. The one proud and pompous ; the other 
 poor and unpretentious. The one great and honoured, 
 the other commonplace, despised. That possesses the 
 oracles of God ; this pulsates with the cry of Man. 
 There they preach Christ ; here they plead for the 
 " least one of these/' His brethren. 
 
 It is in this latter group this murmuring, dissatisfied, 
 protesting, unpretentious, uncultured, despised group, 
 uttering in broken jargon the cry of the hungry and the 
 dispossessed, that I see one standing like unto the Son 
 Of Man, and I hear him say, " I am come with good 
 news to the poor, to deliver social captives, to set at 
 liberty the people that are bruised/' " and inasmuch as 
 ye have done it for one of the least of these little 
 children round the box, ye have done it unto Me." 
 The motor-cars whirl away from the temple of God, 
 and sweep past that crowd with disdain, and they^see 
 not that the Messiah is at hand riding on an ass ! 
 
 II. 
 ECONOMICS BREAD. 
 
 Let us return now from drama to plain prose. There 
 is the organised Christian Church, with its temples and 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 7 
 
 priests and preachers ; its ritual and sermon and 
 prayer and song ; its ecclesiastical and evangelical 
 activity. Professedly it is the keeper of the world's 
 conscience ; the expounder of the ways of God to men ; 
 it opens and closes the doors of salvation ; it is the 
 professed announcer of Redemption. If there is to 
 be a Messianic message, inspiring the Messianic Hope, 
 and introducing a Messianic Age, the next grand 
 advance of the Kingdom of God in the earth, by all 
 the rules of sequence, the Church should announce that 
 message and bear us into that new era. But it shall 
 not be so. Disappointment shall fall upon Zion. 
 They shall not lead the Messiah forth from their temples. 
 They shall come forth from their temples to meet the 
 Messiah. He shall come from a despised neighbouring 
 Nazareth, with the common, unbaptised herd about 
 him, and the children of the poor crying hosanna in the 
 streets ! The robed priest shall not know his God, and 
 the professed nonconformist pietist shall not know his 
 master ; and as the Lord of Life comes to answer the 
 long monotony " Thy Kingdom Come " of the divine 
 service, those who prayed that prayer will have no eyes 
 to see the coming of the Kingdom. For they expect 
 Him on a steed caparisoned in gold. How could they 
 recognise him otherwise ? But SO it Shall not be. 
 
 1. Sacred Words. 
 
 There is a vocabulary which is supposed to be reli- 
 gious, which alone is considered capable of conveying 
 the meaning of God to mankind. The words of that 
 vocabulary are sacred. All others are secular. Some 
 of these words are the following : God, Lord, Christ, 
 Holy Ghost, Prayer, Sin, Repentance, New Birth, Sal- 
 vation, Conversion, Justification, Redemption, Sab- 
 bath, Eternal Life, Heaven. It is said whosoever 
 speaks these words, in due relations, speaks the word 
 and will of God. Such words, it is said, will constitute 
 the base of that message that shall herald the coming 
 
C THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven in the Earth. These are the 
 words of the science of theology. These are the sacred 
 vocabulary. 
 
 2, The Science of Economics. 
 
 But there is another science a lowly, common 
 thing the Science of Economics. If you intend to be 
 alive in the next quarter of a century you may just as 
 well learn that word Economics. The word is derived 
 from two Greek words which mean the law or method of 
 housekeeping. Surely it is a long drop from the dome 
 of Heaven to a scullery, from the elysium of eternity to 
 a coal-shed, from the doctrine of holiness to a grocery 
 bill ! The word Economics has been retained for our 
 use, not with reference to the housekeeping of the 
 family, but with reference to the national house- 
 keeping. The idea is that the population is the family ; 
 the land is the larder, and cellar and garden and field ; 
 the vast machinery is the hoe, the spade, and the axe, 
 that is, the Equipment of Industry. And the Science 
 of Economics seeks to ask and answer the question : 
 Given so many millions of people, so many millions of 
 acres, so much energy and water and steam and factory 
 and machine, how can we keep house together, guar- 
 anteeing to everyone a chance to labour freely without 
 servitude ? Give to each the product of his labour as 
 fiis natural reward ? Make it impossible for the few 
 to control the life of the many ? Abolish unnatural, 
 degrading poverty in the midst of abundance, and 
 secure to every man, woman, and child the material 
 conditions upon which he or she may live a complete, 
 happy, wholesome, free, and full human life. This is 
 the business of the Science of Economics. And I say 
 unto you that the World-Deliverance, the Messianic 
 Advent, that is at hand, the greatest in all human 
 history, comes using the terms, phrases, and themes of 
 this lowly Science of Economics. This gospel of the 
 larder, scullery, coal-house, tool-yard, and field 
 becomes the message of the Son of Man. 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 9. 
 
 3. The Spirituality of Materialism. 
 
 The science of theology and ethics is declared to be 
 spiritual, pertaining to the highest things in life, the 
 ideal, the eternal things. The Science of Economics is 
 declared to be materialistic, a gospel of the belly, per- 
 taining to the fleeting things of time and sense. The 
 vocabulary of the one is sacred, that of the other secular. 
 And yet I say unto you that the Messianic Movement at 
 this juncture of human history comes to us using the 
 lowly, commonplace vocabulary of materialism. 
 
 Such words as land, steam, electricity, machinery, 
 wages, hours, shillings, pence ; labour and leisure ; 
 half-timers, infant mortality, sweating ; farming, 
 mining, weaving, sailing, railroading ; bread, blankets, 
 boots ; clothing, coal, rent these and their kin are the 
 words that can now carry the freightage of the divine 
 meanings to the future of the human race. The 
 Messiah starts with these words ; they are at hand ; 
 He does not coin them ; He finds them by following 
 the blood-drips of a crucified humanity. By using 
 these words in due relation to the birth-throes of the 
 race, He wields the two-edged sword of the Spirit. 
 These are the words of the Science of Economics. 
 By no other medium can the Christ-principle effect an 
 entrance into our actual human affairs. 
 
 The Messianic age does not come primarily with a 
 New Theology or a new code of ethics, but with a new 
 social vision for an emancipated humanity, and that 
 social vision has no other vocabulary into which it can 
 be translated, except the words of the Science of 
 Economics ; on no other vocabulary can the forces for 
 human emancipation of this era be floated. 
 
 These words are commonplace, out-of-doors, home- 
 spun not Sunday-like, but secular, matter-of-fact, 
 raw, realistic. When you pronounce them you smell 
 the sweat of human bodies in the slaveries of Capitalism, 
 not the cool, stone-like odour of ecclesiastical architec- 
 ture. As you utter them you hear, not the valved 
 
10 THE MESSIAH COMETH I RIDING 
 
 intonation of the priest in the conduct of ritual and 
 ceremony, but the roar of machinery and the surge of 
 the tide of humanity in the marts of trade. You hear 
 the spindle and the shovel, the hammer and the lever. 
 The Messianic Movement comes, as it always came, 
 outside the temple. The Son of Man cometh not only 
 when you do not expect Him, but in a manner you do 
 not expect Him. No stained glass, no stately cere- 
 mony, no pomp of dignitaries, no artificially preserved 
 dogmas ; but leaping like a Phcenix out of the decay 
 and ashes of Capitalism, bursting as water out of the 
 face of the rock, flaming forth like a volcano from un- 
 seen terrestrial fires ; so cometh the mighty Son of Man 
 in the great world-wide Socialist and Labour Movement 
 the Word of the Lord pouring through the truths of 
 Economic Science. 
 
 4. The Truth that makes Free. 
 
 The truth that the people shall know, and knowing 
 be free, cannot be stated in abstract theological 
 formulae, new or old, nor can it be taught in the detail 
 of a new ethical code. The truth that shall make them 
 free arises out of human need, human suffering, human 
 struggle, the human passion for freedom, the human 
 urge for completeness of life. The truth is not a 
 speculation, a statement, or a doctrine at all. It is a 
 deed, a social act, a way out. We would be more exact 
 not to use the word truth as a noun, but as a verb. 
 Thus truth-ing would consist in willing the way that 
 makes men free. We should be saved from the fallacy 
 of thinking that we were of the truth because our specu- 
 lations were exact and our doctrines orthodox. Jesus 
 said, "I am the Truth," but this was accompanied by 
 " I am the Way," and the way is the way of the 
 abundant life, truth-ing is moving upon the way that 
 leads to life in all its fulness. 
 
 The wrongs of Capitalism, its colossal lie, its brutal 
 injustice, its cowardly heaping in the midst of starva- 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 
 
 tion and penury, constitute the vast negative back- 
 ground against which the positive new revelation of a 
 free humanity is silhouetted. The background re- 
 mains until the revelation is read and interpreted and 
 acted upon. 
 
 Order is heaven's first law. Capitalism is the vast 
 social anarchy that we suffer for a time. But the time 
 of this ignorance is winked at no longer. Men are com- 
 manded everywhere to repent. To repent is to begin to 
 truth. It is an act of the will. Economics direct the 
 social will in the way. In that Socialist way is life and 
 freedom for the people. 
 
 The Science of Economics reminds one of the man- 
 fish, Cannes of Chaldea, mentioned by Victor Hugo. 
 This man-fish had two heads at the top the head of a 
 man, below the head of a hydra. He drank up chaos 
 by his lower gullet, and re- vomited it on the earth 
 through the upper mouth in the form of dreadful know- 
 ledge. So the Science of Economics feeds into its 
 hyrda-head the dung-heaps, the charnel-houses, and 
 filth-alleys, and hell-holes of Capitalism ; it gobbles up 
 the horrible chaos of wealth and poverty, of over- 
 work and unemployment, of vacant lands and reeking 
 tenements ; it swallows the colossal counterfeits of 
 religion, and its respectable caricatures on real right- 
 eousness ; it devours its plagues of charity and alms- 
 giving, and then vomits out of the mouth of man the 
 dreadful knowledge of a true Science of Human Society, 
 a social message of hope and deliverance for a weary 
 race, a Messianic announcement that the kingdom of 
 Capitalism shall be no more, that a new age of justice 
 and human brotherhood is at hand. 
 
 III. 
 ETHICS BROTHERHOOD. 
 
 All this sounds like crass materialism. All this 
 sounds as if man lived by bread alone, and needed no 
 
12 THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 other substance out of the words or creations which the 
 Father hath given us in the plethora of the universe. 
 
 That the Son of Man should come speaking of the 
 tenements in Liverpool rather than homes in heaven ; 
 of the rags of the poor, instead of the white robes of the 
 redeemed ; of the vast acreage of counties and coun- 
 tries, instead of the fields of glory ; of the hells in which 
 the crowded peoples jostle one another in New York 
 and Paris and London, instead of Satan's eternal tor- 
 ment ; of just wages for factory workers and farm 
 labourers, instead of the wages of sin ; of shovels and 
 spindles, instead of harps and crowns ; of labour 
 statistics, the number of half-timers, and the army of 
 the unemployed, instead of the roll-call in the grand 
 finale in a world beyond the sky ; that the Son of Man 
 should come questioning the titles to landed estates, 
 and demanding land nationalisation, instead of 
 pleasantly assuring rich deacons and millionaire elders 
 of their titles clear to mansions in the skies surely, 
 surely, this is a total surrender of the ideal, a total 
 abandonment to the abyss of the flesh and sense. 
 Surely this is a surrender to the mud-god, twin brother 
 to the mammon-god of Capitalism. But not so. Not 
 at all. The very opposite is the truth. 
 
 1. The Cry for Bread is the Cry for Fulness of Life. 
 
 This gospel of bread that meets the age-long cry of 
 humanity is the only root out of which the mighty 
 stalk of human freedom and social justice can grow, and 
 
 on this stalk alone can the uttermost and divinest 
 blossoms and fruitage of human life be born. 
 
 The cry for bread is the cry for life. Bread means 
 loaves, to be sure. But it also means boots and books 
 and blankets. It means education and music and art. 
 It means home and friends. It means travel and 
 fellowship. The cry for bread is the cry for life, and all 
 that life can mean. 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 13 
 
 But life is not possible without labour and the pro- 
 ducts of labour. And labour cannot be put forth 
 except on land or the products of land. But the 
 
 corn and cotton and wool and coal and iron cannot 
 be developed and distributed to advantage except by 
 machinery. And machinery cannot be utilised econo- 
 mically except by the co-operation of the multitude. 
 
 But this struggle of the individual for life, in the- 
 compulsory co-operation of all which civilisation entails, 
 precipitates each and every one of us into basic social 
 and industrial relations which must be made just and 
 brotherly and good, or all life is a nightmare of deadly 
 struggle and strife and pain. 
 
 For be it remembered, it is our fundamental, con- 
 stant, and abiding social and economic relations with 
 one another that make for freedom, and justice, and 
 human perfection ; not our incidental, or voluntary, 
 or passing personal relations. It is in our week-day 
 relations in the battle for bread, not our Sunday rela- 
 tions in religion and worship, that the real measure of 
 our righteousness is manifest. The week-day 
 relations register our freedom of life. 
 
 Now, the Science of Economics, which the Messianic 
 spirit rides upon in the social revolution, gets its depth, 
 and power, and glory, and sacredness, because of the 
 incalculable sacredness of the human lives with which it 
 is Concerned, and for which it comes to bring industrial 
 freedom. There is only one sacred thing beneath the 
 stars. Not churches, Bibles, constitutions, laws, doc- 
 trines, but human life. Whatever hinders, harms, 
 hurts, enslaves, degrades one of these little ones that 
 is the anti-Christ, that is the wrong. Whatever helps 
 or emancipates human life, stands human life up. 
 without a master and without a slave, in the freedom ta 
 be all that God meant it to be that is the right, the 
 good, the true. That is the coming of Christ. And 
 economics, with its social investigation, its statistics, 
 its impeachment of Capitalism, and its heralding of 
 
14 THE MESSIAH COMETH I RIDING 
 
 Socialism, gathers its sacredness, and rises to its su- 
 premely sacred mission, because at this juncture of 
 history it is the only beast on which the people can ride 
 to freedom. It is the only science that can organise 
 our social and industrial institutions in justice and 
 brotherhood. 
 
 No set of subjects can carry the new teaching of 
 social righteousness, except the subjects the Socialist 
 movement precipitates the Science of Economics. 
 Face the raw and terrible facts of Capitalism ; seek 
 for the abolition of those wrongs and injustices of 
 Capitalism ; seek for that truth which shall make the 
 people free and ail the deepest ethical conceptions and 
 convictions, all the rich feelings of the human heart, 
 all the deep urge of the Soul of Man will be released and 
 called into action. 
 
 2. The New Social Conscience. 
 
 This world-wide Socialist movement of our times, 
 in laying its emphasis upon land, machinery, products, 
 bread, labour, and life is precipitating upon the 
 conscience of the world a deeper and more searching 
 gospel of social righteousness than has ever yet received 
 a hearing on this planet. The human race was never 
 summoned to such a deep, far-reaching repentance as 
 that to which the Socialist calls us. 
 
 This Socialist movement, in talking and writing and 
 voting about bread, bread, bread, is interpreting a 
 value, and sacredness, and ultimate significance to 
 human beings that mammonism never knew and 
 ecclesiasticism has forgotten. But this value we can- 
 not secure or release except through a fundamental re- 
 adjustment of our economic and industrial life. With- 
 out any pretentious to be primarily a teacher of 
 righteousness, coming only as a herald of a Social 
 Revolution in the manner of our bread-getting, the 
 Socialist movement is already the prophet and the 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 15 
 
 interpreter of the new social conscience to the race. 
 
 The Socialist movement is the most universal and 
 synthetic gospel of social righteousness the world has 
 ever known. 
 
 The Church that bears the name of Christ is supposed 
 to be the moral and spiritual instructor of the race, but 
 any Christianity that is at peace with the cruel and 
 unpardonable injustices of Capitalism has betrayed all 
 that Christ stands for to the mammon-gods. Indeed, 
 to the extent that the religious bodies of civilisation are 
 becoming permeated with the Socialist ideal, with the 
 Socialist attack on Capitalism, and the Socialist 
 programme for a just order of society, and are repenting 
 of their complicity with the crime of Capitalism, to 
 that extent even the Church is becoming moralised, 
 her life quickened, and her vision clarified. It is not 
 for the Church to spiritualise the Socialist movement. 
 It is for the Church to be called back from her flirta- 
 tion and harlotry with the money-gods, and thus to be 
 spiritualised by contact with the motive and spirit and 
 programme of Socialism. 
 
 3. The Spiritual Significance of Economic Conditions. 
 
 Thus we see that out of the facts and forces, the 
 poverty and tragedy of our economic and industrial life, 
 in the struggle for bread, the Socialist vision gives new 
 meaning to all that men call good by disclosing the 
 social and economic base of ethics. The simplest look 
 will reveal this. 
 
 There is not a great evil in the world that is not 
 fostered by Capitalism. Coveteousness, "which is 
 idolatry/' tyranny, subordination of the very souls of 
 men, ruthless disregard of human life, are nutured by 
 Capitalism. The love of money, once declared to be the 
 root of all evil, becomes almost elevated to a virtue 
 under the hypnotism of Capitalism. " Laying up 
 treasure on earth/ 1 one of the most simple exhibitions 
 of pure mammonism, is sanctified, praised, and accepted 
 
l6 THE MESSIAH COMETH ; RIDING 
 
 by existing Christianity, and out of these treasures thus 
 laid up they replenish their ecclesiastical exchequers. 
 Human strife is glorified by Capitalism in the 
 form of competition. And nations armed to the 
 teeth unleash the dogs of war, involving helpless 
 populations in all the horrors of warfare, for no other 
 earthly purpose than to widen the markets of the great 
 capitalists. 
 
 On the other hand, there is not a good work or noble 
 effort of the race that is not impeded, or even frustrate!, 
 by Capitalism. Our prisons fill, our insane asylums are 
 crowded, prostitution multiplies in the streets, the 
 home is stricken, hospitals and almshouses are crowded. 
 Upon every philanthropy of sisters of charity, Salvation 
 Army lasses, and charity organisations, demands are 
 heaped that they cannot possibly respond to. The 
 Socialist movement, with its Science of Economics, 
 is the new philanthropy it is that comprehensive 
 social programme of good-will which comes not to 
 alleviate, but to prevent the wholesale poverty, suffer- 
 ing, and degradation inflicted by Capitalism. 
 
 Even the work of converting individual souls to any 
 spiritual life is turned into a caricature of real salvation 
 by the prevailing ideals, maxims, and practices of 
 Capitalism. No religious body in existence demands 
 their converts to renounce the world of Capitalism. 
 Is it not a spiritual tragedy to see the evangelist and the 
 preacher of the Gospel open the consciences of souls 
 about the merest trifles, offer them peace through 
 believing, and leave them as unawakened concerning 
 the colossal anti-Christ of Capitalism as if they lived on 
 another planet ? And their converts go on straining at 
 gnats of personal sin, and along with their teachers 
 swallow whole camels of social and industrial iniquity. 
 Nay, more. They appeal to Scripture, and use the 
 very name of Christ to sustain this unholy system. 
 Thus individual salvation halts for power and depth 
 and a mission until it becomes a call to the soul to lay 
 down life for the sheep. And when these converts 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 17 
 
 begin to lay their lives down for the Church, they must 
 become Christian Revolutionists, and interrupt the 
 wolves that drive the sheep from the pastures, and lay 
 the lambs down for profit. 
 
 4. Social Justice the First Righteousness. 
 
 The first general fundamental righteousness is social 
 justice. Concerning this I must make myself unmis- 
 takably plain. The tragedy of our present-day 
 Christianity is its moral and intellectual ignorance of 
 social justice. The moment you attempt to uncover 
 the social injustices of Capitalism, the Christian, the 
 philanthropist, the pietist begins to justify his own 
 personal relations to buyers, or sellers, or employes 
 or tenants. His conscience is individualistic. It has 
 never been baptised into the social fact, and the social 
 sorrow, and social wrong. Permit me to be plain. 
 There is none of us good, none of us just, none of us 
 holy, none of us kind. None of us not one who is 
 Christian. I care not how perfect your personal life 
 may be, how kind and generous, how good-natured, 
 how faithful, how fair ; I care not how religious and 
 devoted and prayerful ; I care not what rapt spiritual 
 experiences you think you enjoy, what exaltation of 
 feeling, what ecstasy of soul. You are a social sinner ! 
 You are a personal actor in the social injustice. 
 You partake of the greed and despotism and cruelty of 
 Capitalism. You cannot individually escape. I do 
 not wish to speak harshly. I only wish you to think 
 clearly. 
 
 Social justice or injustice is that which is incarnated 
 in social institutions, of which we are all partakers as 
 citizens. As a unit in the social body, you are guilty 
 with its guilt, or saved with its salvation. Social justice 
 is that which does not depend on the mercy or goodwill 
 of certain individuals, however good. It is an atmos- 
 phere in which all breathe. 
 
1 8 THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 That your child may attend the public school, that 
 you may get your letters through the post office, that 
 you may walk along the highway these are not by the 
 mercy of schoolmasters, postal officials, or landlords. 
 It is your social right on equal terms with any other 
 man. It is a goodness, a Tightness, a justice that is 
 socialised in social institutions of which you are a 
 member, a factor, a doer, a partaker. 
 
 So it is with social injustice. As long as Capitalism 
 remains, with its landlordism and monopoly, and 
 exploitation of labour, you are a sinner in its sins ; 
 you are unjust in its injustice ; you are cruel with its 
 cruelty ; you are brutal with its monopoly. You 
 crowd the people into city slums ; you sweat the labour 
 of multitudes. You drive the unemployed from city 
 to city ; you are an accomplice with the long, long 
 crime of Capitalism. 
 
 I do not say this to accuse you. I say this to point 
 out to you your duty, that you may repent of this social 
 sin and bear it away. The human soul that refuses to 
 acknowledge his complicity with this social crime, and 
 seeks to justify himself by his personal, isolate goodness, 
 may become a righteous Pharisee, but he cannot 
 become the Messianic soul taking upon himself the race 
 sin, and bearing it away in his efforts with his brothers 
 to establish social justice upon the earth, in just, social 
 institutions. 
 
 No man liveth unto himself. All the world serves 
 all the world. Who picked the tea, or gathered the 
 salt, or planted the wheat, or ground the flour, or made 
 the cutlery on your dinner-table ? Not simply the 
 cook who prepared your meal, and the maid who served 
 it, but the whole world of human labour waited upon 
 you in the vast plexus of modern industry. Sailors, 
 storm-tossed on the hurricane-deck ; engineers, flying 
 through the night over the rail ; labourers working 
 till their backs gave out ; shop-assistants, battling for a 
 decent livelihood ; little, pale-faced factory girls, 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 19 
 
 spinning and weaving for you ; miners, deep in the 
 bowels of the earth, risking life ; office girls, clicking 
 typewriters, for long hours and low wages, thousands 
 of miles from where you sit all of these, and tens of 
 millions more, daily pour out their life-blood in the 
 labour markets of modern industry for YOU. 
 
 And the social injustice, the industrial oppression, 
 the commercial tyranny, the economic slavery, they all 
 endure because of the fundamental wrong of Capitalism, 
 I lay at your door. " Thou art the man ! " 
 
 We are members of one another. The Science of 
 Economics reveals our economic sin as a vast, social 
 cancer, preying upon the social body. Capitalism is the 
 supreme lie of the world. In it we are all involved. How 
 can any speak truth ? Our other little lies within that 
 huge lie are all little tiddle-de-winks. Our imagined 
 honesty within that gigantic dishonesty is a trifle. 
 Our very kindness in alms-giving and charity within 
 that colossal wrong to the people is a farce. Our keen 
 scent for petty crime in the midst of this all-enveloping 
 and respectable crime against humanity is absolutely 
 tragical. Our imagined " peace " of soul in the midst 
 of the horrible strifes and antagonisms of competition 
 is a spiritual opiate. It does, indeed, " pass under- 
 standing/' The best piety and the most exalted 
 religion of our timid lives, lived in cowardly silence 
 without protest against the vast, wholesale sin of 
 Capitalism, needs to be repented of. And except your 
 righteousness exceed that kind of individualistic 
 righteousness, which knows not, nor repents not, of its 
 social sin, you shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom 
 of Heaven, either individually or socially. 
 
 The man who does not want economic justice in the 
 use of land and machinery for his fellow-man wants 
 nothing for his fellow-man. I care not how loud his 
 prayers, or how exalted his religious ecstasy. The first 
 simple demand of the Messianic movement is that the 
 
20 THE MESSIAH COMETH : RIDING 
 
 workers of the world shall be secure in the chance to 
 labour, and secure in the product of their labour. 
 
 No man can say he wants something higher for men 
 than that if he does not want that at least. The 
 social righteousness preached by the Social Revolution 
 is a lowly thing a first thing an initial step in real 
 righteousness. There is still room for the highest, but 
 it must be built on this base of the pyramid of righteous- 
 ness. Just as the lords and priests and ruling-classes 
 of the world in all ages have made the great mass of the 
 workers the base of the social pyramid, so, now, the 
 Gospel of Labour makes simple Social Justice in the use 
 of land and machinery the base of the pyramid of social 
 righteousness. You can build nothing on top until 
 that base is laid. Let us not joke longer with God, 
 thus cheating our own souls and defrauding the race. 
 
 Social justice is not an option in the Kingdom of God. 
 It is basic, primal, first. The man who wants it not, 
 the Church which wants it not, want nothing of real 
 righteousness, however devoted to ritual or exalted 
 by emotion they may be. It is time that judgment 
 began at the house of God in this matter. Your sneer 
 at the Socialist movement will come back upon you. 
 Beware, lest you be found rejecting the Messiah. 
 Beware, lest your righteousness be discovered to be 
 filthy rags. Beware, lest you may hear that stern judg- 
 ment, " Inasmuch as you permit Capitalism thus to 
 maltreat these, the least of my brethren, thus ye 
 treat Me." " Depart ; I know you not." 
 
 Out of this root of Economics, then, stuck deep into 
 the very mud and muck and manure of the world-life, 
 grows this mighty stalk of Justice and Industrial Free- 
 dom for all people. It is for this cause that the 
 Messiah cometh voicing His message in the vocabulary 
 of economic science rather than in the dogmas of 
 theology, codes of ethics, or creeds of Christianity. 
 This is why the Son of Man is seen standing in the rough, 
 uncultured crowds of the toilers in their struggle to be 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 21 
 
 free, rather than among the temple-worshippers in 
 their silent reverie and stolid complacency in the 
 presence of social injustice. 
 
 IV. 
 SPIRIT ILLUMINATION. 
 
 " But man does not live by bread alone.'* Man is 
 the Infinite incarnate. He must live by every word 
 every possibility of his being that proceedeth from 
 the mouth of Eternal Reality. There is a divine 
 meaning to human life that baffles interpretation. 
 Man, as we know him, is something to be surpassed. 
 Is there anything greater in all the universe than that 
 which is inherent, undisclosed, occult, hidden in the 
 Soul of Man ? Did the Author of the Universe have a 
 particular alien sort of spirit stuff, different from the 
 Ultimate Being, out of which this willing, knowing, 
 loving Man was made ? Is Love the one, same, 
 eternal, substance everywhere ? Is Life, Life, wher- 
 ever found, the same the Eternal ? There is nothing 
 to God to the Absolute Reality that is not the 
 inheritance of man. " He that hath seen Me hath 
 seen the Father/' said He, who is the first-born among 
 many brethren. 
 
 1. Socialism makes way for Man. 
 
 Majestic and terrible are the issues of the Socialist 
 movement. Underneath Capitalism there lie awful 
 explosives sunk there by seers, sages, and saviours, 
 who loved the average man, and in loving, found him, 
 glorified him, and heralded his coming. In impeaching 
 Capitalism and proclaiming Socialism, we shall 
 " touch off " some of those deep and awful revelations 
 of the divine significance of every human life. The 
 Socialist movement is like fire ; red, real, consuming, 
 forcing itself upon the senses with realistic might, but 
 
22 THE MESSIAH COMETH 1 RIDING 
 
 coming forth from locked-up invisible areas, and 
 leaping in lambent flames, to invisible realms, to un- 
 seen meanings, to spiritual significances, and to the 
 occult Freedoms of that which is beyond man, as 
 Capitalism knows him. 
 
 Socialism starts out with the most intensely prac- 
 tical, matter-of-fact, and material considerations of 
 
 Bread and Labour, and rises to the highest reach of 
 vision concerning the cosmic meaning of man. 
 
 It is as if we began with a skeleton cold, rattling, 
 forbidding, a bony framework of statistics, and econo- 
 mic laws and forces. But straightway the flesh appears 
 upon that skeleton, the heart pulsates with blood, the 
 eye glows with light, and we see the meanings of Social 
 Brotherhood, the Gospel of the Social Man. And 
 then, behold ! The enfleshed frame throbs with spirit 
 the transcendent it is the Eternal incarnate 
 disclosing angelic splendours ! 
 
 Thus Socialism enumerating untilled acres, calling 
 the roll of the slain labourers, measuring the power of 
 electric energy, calculating the speed of machines and 
 the powers of labour and the products thereof, is pre- 
 cipitating a World-Revolution. But the revolution 
 comes in order to make standing room for this god 
 that man is that every last one of us may live out in 
 varied and beautiful expression, the ultimate meanings 
 of His Being. 
 
 2. We await an Illumined Race. 
 
 The thing we have crawling the earth is not man. 
 
 It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We have 
 had the saint-man, the soldier-man, the priest-man, the 
 capitalist-man, the slave-man all of these are carica- 
 tures of man. But Man has not yet appeared. 
 
 Victor Hugo makes a list of those minds that reached 
 the hundredth degree of intellectual power. There are 
 just fourteen in the list. Dr. Bucke says that an 
 ordinary drawing-room would comfortably contain all 
 
UPON THE ASS OF ECONOMICS. 23 
 
 the men who in the centuries have attained that 
 Spiritual Illumination which he calls Cosmic Con- 
 sciousness. Galton declares that only one out of 4,000 
 of the English-speaking people exhibits any sign of real 
 genius. 
 
 What can we expect ? We have had a slave world, 
 filled with brutal soldiers, whining, drivelling priests, 
 or cruel, tyrannous, persecuting ecclesiastics, non- 
 conformist money-grubbers, droves upon droves of 
 intellectual and physical slaves. Ezekiel sat in the 
 street corner and ate dung to dramatise the mental and 
 moral state of any man who would consent to servitude 
 to own any man as master. With the moral life of 
 man whipped with fear for centuries under the hand- 
 cuffs of authority ; with the spiritual life of the soul 
 still poured into sickening, mildewed moulds ; with the 
 intellect still throttled, or abased, afraid to speak in 
 pulpit or press, in public or private, lest the bread be 
 taken away ; with the bodies of men exiled from the 
 natural bosom of the earth and locked in the nastiness 
 of Capitalism's sordid cities how can we expect the 
 glorious Being, Man, to emerge. He is still a grub in 
 the pupa. He has yet to put forth the beauteous 
 wings of his intellectual and cosmic life. He is a bulb 
 not yet the bloom. Man is in the womb of civilisa- 
 tion. The birth-hour approaches. The Son of Man 
 cometh ! 
 
 This Son of Man is something greater than anything 
 history has disclosed. Even the great specimens that 
 have been thrust forth in such severe isolation in the 
 paths of history seem one-sided. The great heroes, 
 conquerors, sages, and saviors but hint to us of the 
 fulness yet to be, in full-orbed glory. Saints disgust 
 with their asceticisms and voluntary poverty and other 
 worldliness. Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon, 
 though full of daring, and incarnating cosmic fearless- 
 ness, offend us with an unnecessary ruthlessness of pro- 
 cedure. Our philosophers are dreamers ; their great 
 ideas do not demonstrate in powerful volition. Our 
 
24 THE MESSIAH COMETH. 
 
 social revolutionists are wearisome fanatics ; they 
 have not that serenity and poise that we expect Truth 
 to display. Our Nature-lovers, our Thoreaus, would 
 woo us to isolation and sequestration. Our very 
 loftiest spiritual teaching offers us a species of thral- 
 dom, and invites us to obedience, and only slaves obey. 
 The utmost reach of science presents a world in eternal 
 chains of law. But the Soul of Man transcends all of 
 these. The Soul will finally refuse to be saintly, to be 
 ruled, to be dominated. The Soul refuses to be inferior 
 to anything or anybody anywhere in all the universe. 
 The Soul refuses isolation to Nature or from Nature. 
 The whole of Nature is a play-house to the Soul. And 
 the Soul ever and ever devours its gods and eats up its 
 worlds of laws and principles. The Soul of the Son of 
 Man is the Eternally Free. Its dream is its true reality. 
 Freedom, not only from all barrier, but to all expression, 
 is the natural atmosphere and climate for the Son of 
 Man. Slaveries, servitudes, bondages, victimage shall 
 be no more ! A Free Humanity has never yet been 
 but the hour cometh ! 
 
 Man is the tree that beareth all manner of fruits. Man 
 is a miracle-worker, a sage, a brother, a lover. He is 
 musician, artist, medium, voice of God ; an Apollo for 
 Beauty, a Hercules for Labour, a Jesus for Brother- 
 Love ; Joy-bringer, Spirit-taught divinity, Illuminatus! 
 
 The Socialist movement comes to plant that tree 
 which man is in Freedom and in Brotherhood and give 
 that tree, for the first time in human history, a chance 
 to shed its ripe, rich fruit of illumined, inspired, and 
 emancipated existence. The beast is the ass of 
 Economics but the goal is the Messianic Age. All 
 Hail! 
 
Moses : The Greatest of Labour 
 Leaders. 
 
 MR. WILSON began his address* by a humorous 
 reference to the number of tribes, clans, and 
 nations to which he claimed membership. 
 He frequently told his English audiences that he was 
 born a British subject under the Union Jack. When he 
 crossed the border into Scotland he assured them that 
 his mother's people originally came from Scotland, 
 and were strongly marked with Scotch characteristics, 
 and especially of the religious type for they were 
 Covenanters. " The Irish claim my streak of wit 
 and they are right " said the speaker, " because, for 
 generations my father's people lived in Ireland and 
 my grandfather's tongue was heavy with Irish brogue 
 and light with Irish wit." When he (Mr. Wilson) went 
 among the French he claimed kinship because before 
 his mother's people settled in Scotland as Covenanters 
 they were Hugenots, having been driven from France 
 in the religious persecutions. He had been on a speak- 
 ing tour in Canada just before coming to England, and 
 there he was quite at home for he had been actually 
 born and reared in Ontario. The only country in 
 which he had spoken his message where he could not 
 claim immediate race connection was in the United 
 States. The only real American was the North 
 American Indian. All other Americans were immi- 
 grants or the descendants of immigrants. On that 
 score he could claim to be as good an American as any. 
 
 * This pamphlet is printed from the report of Mr. Wilson's 
 address just as it appeared in " The Halifax Labour News," 
 June, 1908. 
 
MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 SOCIALISM INTERNATIONAL. 
 
 " But this humorous reference to my kith and kin 
 and country/* continued the speaker, " is an introduc- 
 tory word to the idea of internationalism which is at 
 the base of the whole Socialist movement. By claiming 
 many countries, I claim all ; by claiming all, I claim 
 none in particular. The Socialist is an Internationalist. 
 The struggles of the working class are the same the 
 world over. Their problem is one. Their common 
 sufferings unite them in a common cause. And the 
 next great unifying movement of the globe is Socialism 
 the Hope Of the World. Jap and Russ, Hindoo and 
 Englishman, Frank and German, Canadian, American, 
 Australian all one for the International Co-operative 
 Commonwealth. ' ' 
 
 1. A World-Wide Faith. 
 
 Here is the great solvent for our religious strifes. 
 Oriental faith and Western religion, Protestant and 
 Catholic, Christian and agnostic, materialist and 
 spiritual idealist all find in the Socialist movement a 
 blood-red current of the ultimate Good, and the Great 
 Idea Freedom, Justice, Brotherhood the Kingdom 
 of the Good in the actual facts of our common life. 
 The prayer of Socialism is the cry of the people for 
 bread, for opportunity, for abundant life. Its priests 
 are the heroic men and women among the working class 
 who are seeking to organise the workers for their final 
 emancipation from age-long slavery. The temples of 
 Socialism are not made with hands. The sacred bodies 
 of the people these are the sacred temples. 
 
 2. The Gospel of Humanity. 
 
 This great gospel of humanity is the swift Herald of 
 Justice. It is the sweet message of Human Brother- 
 hood. It is Lucifer, " swift with his angels out of 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 3 
 
 heaven propelled " coming with light to plant " the 
 Seeds of the World to be." Socialism is the great, raw, 
 elemental Incarnation of the Spirit of Democracy, in 
 World-History, and the Spirit of Comradeship in the 
 common life. Without ritual, ceremony, temple, 
 priest, or dogma, Socialism comes to fulfil the word of 
 the Carpenter who said, " By this shall all men know 
 that ye are my disciples, that ye love one another. 1 ' 
 Socialism comes to fulfil also the word of that other 
 brother " who was not proud of his songs, but of the 
 measureless ocean of love within him and freely 
 poured it forth," who said, " I will make the continent 
 indissoluble ; and I will make the most splendid race 
 the sun ever yet shone upon ; I will make divine 
 magnetic lands, with the love Of Comrades, with the 
 lifelong love of Comrades." 
 
 3- Socialism the New Unity. 
 
 As Socialism comes to give unity to the Working- 
 Classes of the whole world and thus to dissolve their 
 historic antagonisms and make them brothers and 
 comrades in a Common Cause, so the Socialist Move- 
 ment is the Heir, Incarnation, and Sum of the historical 
 heritage of the race in Literature, Art, and Science, in 
 Religion and Democratic Government. It is the net 
 plus of Human Progress and Prophecy. Nothing that 
 has made for Human Freedom is alien to us. All 
 revolutions that have emancipated the race are 
 historically present in the Socialist movement. Our 
 pulse registers them. They find that which they 
 prophesied incarnate in our militant activity. 
 
 All the great seers, sages, and saviors, lovers of Man, 
 and martyrs for Freedom, belong to us. We are their 
 incarnation. What they lived and died for is what we 
 live and die for, brought up-to-date, throbbing in the 
 20th century. And seeing we are surrounded by so 
 great a cloud of witnesses, we now run with patience 
 the race that is set before us. 
 
MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 As with the great Souls so with the Great Movements 
 for Freedom. They all meet in this mighty Socialism 
 as the tributaries of the Mississippi all pour into one 
 majestic stream, the Father of Waters. Socialism will 
 sum up and make secure and give expression to all the 
 blood-bought heritage of the race Religious Liberty, 
 Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Person, Freedom of 
 Speech, Political Freedom, including " Votes for 
 Women," Freedom of Soul, without master, without 
 slave Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. 
 
 4. The Great Souls are Ours. 
 
 Socialism being thus the plexus of Human Desire and 
 Passion, the sacred ark of Human Freedom, and the 
 Gospel of Human Brotherhood, it has the right to 
 exploit for its propaganda the lives of Heroes, 
 Emancipators, and Martyrs, who have made paths for 
 the feet of man from bondage to liberty. It is for us 
 to expound the life and labours of the Gracchi, of 
 Spartacus, of Bruno, of Hampden, of Columbus. 
 
 The heroic soul of Jesus, the Hero of the Common 
 People, the Lover of the Mob belongs to us. Eccle- 
 siastical Christianity, bolstering up the Mammon-Gods 
 of Profit and Power in Capitalism, has forfeited its 
 right to the name and the Message of the Carpenter of 
 Galilee. He belongs to us. He who called greasy 
 fishermen to his side, and gave his great vision of 
 Human Brotherhood into the hearts of " unlearned and 
 ignorant men " He will not mind our blunt phrase 
 and broken sentences. 
 
 The work of Moses belongs to us. Eliminating those 
 elements that are purely local and racial, and seeking 
 for those essentially human and universal elements in 
 the work of Moses, it is the Social Movement that to-day 
 inherits the spirit that led that great Israelite from 
 Horeb to the Court of Pharaoh. It is the Socialist 
 Movement that utters to-day the modern cry, " Let 
 
 my People Go " : " Say unto the People that they go 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 5 
 
 forward." It is the Socialist Movement that to-day 
 inspires the working class, smarting under the task- 
 masters of the Modern Pharaohs, and which presents to 
 them a Program and a goal for their deliverance. 
 
 The Socialist movement gets repeatedly baptised 
 with a richer and deeper consciousness of its signifi- 
 cance to the race-life, as it gathers up the total desire 
 and passion and hope of mankind into itself. Three 
 great historic peoples have poured their influence into 
 the stream of Modern life the Greek, the Roman, and 
 the Jew. And if we are indebted to the Greek for 
 culture, and the Roman for administration, to the 
 Jewish people, the Jewish Scriptures, and the influence 
 of Jesus, the Jew, we owe a debt for conceptions of 
 Social Justice, and Social Righteousness and the 
 ultimate values of Human Personality. 
 
 5. A Bible Argument for Socialism. 
 
 It is my purpose this evening to present a Socialist 
 argument, from the story of that Ancient Labour 
 Movement, chronicled in the Book of Exodus in the 
 Old Testament, and particularly from the work of 
 Moses, that greatest of historic Labour Leaders and 
 Statesmen. 
 
 Time will not permit me to draw the parallel in 
 detail at every point. But let me give you the main 
 points in which the great world-wide movement of the 
 working-class of the present time corresponds with that 
 of the days of Moses : 
 
 1. These people suffered industrial oppression and 
 social injustice at the hands of the Pharaohs- 
 Egyptian bondage then, the Injustice of Capitalism 
 now. 
 
 2. There came the summons for the man Moses to 
 organise these people for a General Strike, and to 
 deliver them out of their slavery into Freedom. The 
 Moses of the Working-Class of to-day is the Socialist 
 Spirit, the Socialist Message, and the Socialist Move- 
 
MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 ment, which demands, as Moses did, " Let my people 
 go." " Say unto the people that they go forward 
 into a good land, a land flowing with milk and honey." 
 
 3. They went forth into that land. They reached 
 the land of Canaan. This is before us as Socialists. 
 The Canaan of modern wage-slaves is the Co-operative 
 Commonwealth, when the working-class shall have 
 elected their representatives to establish the Right to 
 Work and Co-operative Industry the Socialization of 
 all means of life and labour needed to make the people 
 free from the Capitalist System. 
 
 4. Moses' great work was Social Legislation, and the 
 immediate Social Program of Moses concerned (i) Land, 
 (2) Interest, (3) Tools and these correspond with 
 the movement of Labour to-day to Socialise Land, 
 Capital, and Machinery. The parallel is striking and 
 full of instruction and inspiration for us of the 20th 
 century. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE OPPRESSION OF THE PEOPLE. 
 
 Nothing but the most extreme religious pre-occu- 
 pation and deep-seated spiritual individualism 
 could keep any reader of the Bible from seeing that the 
 whole marvellous history of the Jews, and their con- 
 tribution to Spiritual Idealism, culminating in the 
 person and mission of Jesus, is directly traceable to ft 
 great Labour Movement, a Social Revolution, an 
 Economic Emancipation. Christian preachers and 
 workers attack the Socialist Movement as a " base, 
 materialistic movement/' neglecting the higher and 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. j 
 
 holier things of life. Clergymen warn their young 
 people from the gross materialism of Socialism. The 
 Church boasts of the Holy Bible, of its wonderful 
 poetry, the depths of righteous fervour in Old Testa- 
 ment prophecy. The Church glorifies Moses, Joshua, 
 Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, and Jesus. And modern critics 
 have told us of the uncrowned kings in Art, Literature, 
 Science, and Government in recent centuries, such as 
 Spinoza in philosophy, Mendelssohn in Music, Marx 
 and La Salle in economics all Jews. But the Church 
 forgets and our litterateurs forget that the base and 
 beginning of the whole after-product of the Jewish 
 people, was their Economic Emancipation, a Social 
 Revolution ; a re-adjustment of the means by which 
 they made their bread. As I have said many times : 
 Freedom first. Industrial freedom first, and the rest 
 follows. Nothing, I say, but wilful ecclesiastical blind- 
 ness and a religious individualism, unwarranted by 
 either the Old or the New Testament, could prevent 
 the simplest mind from seeing this fundamental truth. 
 This is the gross materialism of Socialism ! 
 
 1. An Old Story of Industrial Oppression. 
 
 These Jews were a horde of dishonoured, des- 
 pised, and degraded slaves. Whatever social 
 excellence they might have had from Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob, had long since been worked out of them 
 in the slave-pits of the Pharaohs. As long as the ruling- 
 class needed an abundance of cheap labour they 
 permitted them to multiply. When their numbers 
 became so great that they might become strong 
 enough to revolt against their masters, then the rulers 
 introduced a policy of infant mortality by violence 
 against the male children. They also increased their 
 burdens to still further take the spirit out of them. 
 
 It makes your blood boil even now to read the Exodus 
 account of this injustice. It is a plain story of 
 industrial oppression by a set of self -chosen _ tyrants, 
 
MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 dictators, and lords of the people a ruling-class, living 
 in splendour and idleness and extravagance on the 
 product of the toil of the helpless working-class. 
 
 2. Listen to the Bible Narrative. 
 
 " They did set over them task masters to afflict them 
 
 with their burdens The Egyptians made 
 
 the children of Israel to serve with rigour. And they 
 made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, 
 and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field ; 
 all the service wherein they made them serve was with 
 rigour (and no dictionary will ever reveal what that 
 word "rigour" meant). And Pharaoh said, 'Ye 
 make them rest from their burdens, and he commanded 
 the taskmasters and officers, saying, Ye shall no more 
 give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore, let 
 them go and gather straw for themselves, and the tale 
 of bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay 
 upon them ; ye shall not diminish ought thereof, for 
 they be idle .... let then more work be laid 
 upon the men, that they may labour therein, and let 
 them not regard the vain words (!) of Moses.' (That 
 sounds like a warning of Capitalism to the working- 
 class against the teachings of Socialism !).... 
 And the taskmasters speeded them up, saying, Fulfil 
 your works, your daily tasks, as when there was straw. 
 And the foremen selected from the children of Israel 
 were beaten because they did not get the full tale of 
 work out of the under-slaves .... and 
 Pharaoh said, ' Ye are idle ! ye are idle ! ' " (What a 
 modern sound that has !) 
 
 3. The Suffering of the Slaves. 
 
 Let me read to you the account of this industrial 
 oppression given recently by an archaeologist : 
 
 " Here in Egypt are the tombs of Kings, 
 stupendous monuments not alone of monarchial 
 glory and pride, but of the reckless waste of 
 innumerable human lives. Deep in the sands dug 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. ^ 
 
 a myriad slaves, ignorant of everything save the 
 stern necessity of yielding up every bit of strength 
 in their bodies, and every last gleam of intelligence 
 in their minds, to the demands of the King. In 
 the quarries, on the roads, and on the walls for 
 scores of years there toiled these thousands of men, 
 wageless and half-fed, overworked and scourged, 
 sick, dizzy, and exhausted. The only hospital 
 they knew was the taskmaster's whip, which 
 stimulated into one last, agonised effort, the 
 exhausted muscles of a used-up body or the frenzied 
 movement of a reeling brain. Whether the glory 
 of monarchs demanded the speedy completion of 
 some expression of his selfish pride, or a too rapidly- 
 growing race must be reduced to manageable 
 proportions without massacre, the whole picture 
 of that useless, grinding toil testifies to an Ugly, 
 wicked contempt for human life." 
 This extract will help us to get the historical setting 
 of the Social and Economic Emancipation wrought by 
 Moses. 
 
 These overworked, under-fed slaves were broken in 
 heart. They lacked spirit to revolt against such 
 conditions. They lacked the intelligence necessary for 
 organised resistance. They sank down in despair in 
 the face of the power of Pharaoh. They were too timid 
 to act separately, too ignorant to combine. Where 
 could they go ? What could they do ? They did not 
 know enough geography to think of Canaan. And 
 apathy and anguish overcame them, as it is written, 
 " The children of Israel sighed by reason of their 
 bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto 
 God by reason of their bondage/ 1 
 
 III. 
 MOSES, THE DELIVERER, MEETS GOD. 
 
 When this brutal Pharaoh issued his edict to slay the 
 male children, one slave woman hid her babe in the 
 
10 MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 bulrushes, where Pharaoh's daughter came to bathe. 
 By a clever ruse of mother-love this slave woman got 
 herself appointed nurse to her own child. But Moses 
 became the adopted child of the princess. He was 
 reared in the king's court, educated in the palace, and 
 instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians, in the 
 University at On. 
 
 But he never fogot his own class. This son of a slave, 
 
 reared in the royal courts, when he was grown looked 
 out upon the sufferings of his slave brothers and sisters. 
 He was moved with indignation, and one day the 
 beating of his fellows went too far, and in a fit of anger 
 he killed an Egyptian taskmaster. For this Pharaoh 
 put a price upon his head, and 
 
 1. Moses Fled to Midian. 
 
 There Moses pondered over the terrible wrongs and 
 sufferings of his people. His propaganda of the deed 
 against individual hirelings of the system had done no 
 good. When an educated man of the temper of Moses 
 was led to violently smite this slave-driver down, we 
 may be sure his very soul had been wrought to a high 
 pitch of feeling concerning his brethren. And for all 
 the long years he tended sheep in Midian, he had time 
 to think it all out. " How can my brethren be delivered 
 from the slavery in Egypt ? " that was his question. 
 
 Moses, as you observe, was a gross materialist. Why 
 did he not invent some pretty rose-water " gospel " 
 to assure his people that no matter how long they 
 worked, andhow wretchedly they were fed and clad 
 and housed, and no matter how early they died, they 
 and their children, if they would be " good " and 
 " content J> with the station in which God had placed 
 them, would eventually get a mansion in the skies, and 
 a white robe and a harp in the grand orchestra. No 
 Moses was a man. He was not a semi-male and semi- 
 female entity whose soul could be satisfied to see his 
 people rot on earth, and take their joy in hopes of 
 heaven. He was a man as I have said. He had red 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. II 
 
 blood in his veins. And his blood was on fire. It was 
 the passion of freedom that flamed within him. 
 
 Well, there he pondered. " How can I set my people 
 free ? " And he entered a singular psychological 
 experience. I must omit any attempt to interpret the 
 account of that experience. I will state the facts. 
 Moses got into bad company for a man in his state of 
 mind. He met God. God met him. I am not going to 
 discuss God. I feel like Walt Whitman when in 
 announcing the fact of his Illumination, he said, " I 
 have despised riches ... I have stood up for the 
 stupid and crazy ... I have hated tyrants 
 
 Argued not concerning God . . ." 
 
 Moses met God. 
 
 Theologians have tried to explain the character of 
 God. They have failed. There is something terrifi- 
 cally abrupt in the blunt announcement of the Divine 
 Presence to this lonely meditating shepherd. It is a 
 revelation of the character of God. " Moses ! Moses! " 
 said God. " Here I," answered Moses. And then ! 
 
 2. God Said Five Things. 
 
 (i). This mean desert spot this sheep walk is holy 
 ground, for I am about to send you to emancipate a 
 working-class from industrial injustice. 
 
 (2). " I have surely seen the affliction of my people. 
 The cry of the children of Israel is come unto me, and 
 I have seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians 
 oppress them/* 
 
 (3). " I have heard their cry by reason of their task- 
 masters." Observe that God was clear in his economics. 
 I speak reverently. God did not seek for individual- 
 istic accusations of vice, and drink, and idleness, and 
 thriftlessness against these people. The Word of 
 God, which you people profess to prize, says " by 
 reason of their taskmasters." We Socialists agree. 
 
 (4). "I am come down to deliver them out of the 
 hand of the Egyptians, unto a land flowing with milk 
 and honey. " 
 
12 MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 (5). " Come, now, therefore, and I will send thee unto 
 Pharaoh, that thou may'st bring forth my people out of 
 Egypt." 
 
 I said Moses got into bad company. I repeat it. 
 He was bad enough. He had killed a taskmaster 
 had fled and was here plotting the liberation of his 
 people. He was a silent conspirator against Pharaoh's 
 tyranny. And the God that spoke was of the very same 
 mind as Moses. " I have heard their cry it is their 
 taskmasters these slaves must be delivered Go ! 
 I will be with you ! " 
 
 Speaking again with utmost reverence this God is 
 " materialistic " if the criticisms of the Socialist 
 movement from noted city pulpits are to be hearkened 
 to. I say, that as this announcement of God stands it 
 is grossly materialistic Not one word about their souls ! 
 Not one syllable about selecting the good ones and 
 leaving the wicked people in the hells of Egypt ! Not 
 one hint of the doctrine of immortality ! Not one hint 
 about dogma, doctrine, belief, church, ism, Bible ! 
 How much God might have learned if he had only 
 waited for the modern sermons of the soothsayers of 
 Capitalism ! But no. God says, " I have seen the 
 oppression of the people : I have heard them cry under 
 the curse of these taskmasters ; I am going to deliver 
 them to a free land " land, mind you and freedom 
 from social wrongs. " And now, Moses, thou art the 
 Servant of the Lord if thou wilt go and bring the people 
 out." 
 
 3. Slaves : Oppression : Milk : Honey. 
 
 Really now. Why does not God use religious for- 
 mulae, and ecclesiastical phraseology, and theological 
 terminology. In short, Why is God not orthodox? 
 
 Consider the vocabulary of God. I copy from the 
 Bible lying before me : " People, affliction, Egypt, 
 cry, taskmasters, sorrows, deliver, land, good land, 
 large land, oppression, bring them forth, out of Egypt, 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 13 
 
 milk, honey ! " These are the terms of a science of 
 economics. If you want to find them discussed, read 
 Karl Marx and Socialist literature, not systems of 
 theology ! Did you ever think of that ? Imagine God 
 talking about such common things as slaves, oppression, 
 land, milk, and honey ! 
 
 If such a God as that should speak such words as that 
 and call to the professing God-fearing bishops, and 
 clergy, and preachers, and church-members He would 
 utterly upset their peace of mind, and precipitate them 
 into the Socialist camp ! 
 
 The Socialists are supposed to have no God, and to 
 dishonour God, to be atheists in short because " They 
 see the affliction of the people, by reason of task- 
 masters," and are determined to bring them out of 
 bondage into Industrial Freedom from the Egypt of 
 Capitalism to the Canaan of the Co-operative Common- 
 wealth ! 
 
 While the Christians have a God and glorify him by 
 refusing to see the affliction of the people, and defending 
 the wrongs of the taskmasters, and voting at every 
 election to keep the people in the bondage of the Egypt 
 of Capitalism ! 
 
 If any preacher or church-member reads or hears 
 these lines, may I be forgiven for jarring your com- 
 placency, by announcing to you that your allegiance 
 to Capitalism is your disobedience to the spirit of the 
 God of Moses, and a denial of His will concerning the 
 freedom of men. No wonder the common people of 
 the wide-world are repudiating a religion that repu- 
 diates itself ! 
 
 IV 
 MOSES : THE LABOUR LEADER. 
 
 It may seem to some that I have over-proved my case. 
 I have made Moses out to be more of a materialist 
 (if interest in labour conditions of the workers is 
 
14 MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 materialism) than the most radical modern Socialist. 
 And, to make matters worse, by merely repeating the 
 words of the Angel of the Lord, which summoned 
 Moses to deliver the people, I have reverently shown 
 that the same interest in plainest terms is the concern 
 of God. 
 
 1. The Limitless Value of Human Personality. 
 
 I do not say for one instant that there are no concerns 
 but material concerns. I do not say for one instant 
 that there are not heights and depths of mental and 
 spiritual illumination, and of moral and social per- 
 fection and loveliness for every human being. I have 
 no desire to hint that Moses thought nothing about the 
 higher development when I say that when God spoke 
 to Moses God never mentioned the souls of these slaves, 
 nor anything of a religious character whatsoever, that, 
 therefore, there is no meaning to life except the 
 Capitalistic ideal of " eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
 die." 
 
 In describing the labour condition of these slaves, in 
 a previous paragraph, we see that their whole treat- 
 ment arose from the private control of their basis of 
 labour, and was sustained by a ruthless disregard for 
 human life. The very opposite of this was the spirit 
 of Moses. The sacredness and possibilities of every one 
 of these slaves was taken for granted by Moses, as much 
 as gravitation is taken for granted by a bricklayer or a 
 stonemason. When the Angel of the Lord says, " I 
 have seen the oppression of these people, and I have 
 heard their cry, and I have come to deliver them " 
 
 the ultimate, absolute, value of these people each to him- 
 self is taken for granted. 
 
 So it is with us of the Socialist movement. We will 
 not take second place in our estimate of the sacredness 
 and rights of every man in himself. The church defines 
 man as " soul." Very well. Pack that word as full of 
 meaning as human love and intelligence is able to pack 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 15 
 
 it. Perfect your definition with the aid of poetry and 
 philosophy. And then we Socialists shall keep the issue 
 still open. We Socialists say that a Capitalist Civilisa- 
 tion absorbed in greed and gold and profit, and the 
 aristocracies of these mammon-gods Capitalist civilisa- 
 tion is not able to define the soul of man. " By their 
 iruits ye shall know them." The value that Capitalism 
 and Capitalistic religion places upon human souls is 
 not measured by your religious talk, but by your ruth- 
 less use of land and machinery for private profit, and 
 your Capitalistic exploitation of human lives, a system 
 that coins their blood into profit. The labour market 
 
 registers your measure of care for souls. 
 
 We Socialists take it for granted that the children of 
 the working-man, who were fed on stolen pigs'-food in 
 Newcastle, are infinitely more valuable than can be 
 expressed by any religion which supports a civilisation 
 that produces such misery and degradation in the midst 
 of limitless abundance. 
 
 We do not complain against your spiritual conception 
 Of life. We protest against your crass, coarse, crude, 
 mammonistic conception of life, which permits human 
 beings to be treated as commodities as things as 
 wood, hay, stubble as grist for the Capitalist mill. 
 
 God's determination to bring these people out of 
 Industrial Oppression was his way of showing that the 
 " Heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind." 
 Your determination to keep the working-class in the 
 grip of Capitalism is your atheism and infidelity to that 
 God. 
 
 Moses' conviction that he could not live in peace with 
 the Universe unless he moved heaven and earth to 
 deliver these people out of intolerable conditions of 
 Social Injustice, was the revelation of his love to his 
 fellows, and the measure of his devotion to all Of their 
 interests up to the highest. 
 
 God's materialism (we rather like the word) is a 
 revelation of the Spirituality of the Divine Nature. 
 The materialism of Moses is the open vision of his soul, 
 
1 6 MOSES I THE GREATEST 
 
 that takes it for granted that a whipped slave is 
 infinitely more valuable than all the obelisks, palaces, 
 and pyramids that a proud, haughty, and ruthless 
 tyranny could erect. We would to God that the 
 modern men who profess to speak for God could get 
 baptised with the materialism of Moses. Such 
 materiaSism makes men. I have said before, Moses 
 was a man, with red blood in his veins. He was not a 
 semi-male, semi-female entity, speaking rose-water 
 spiritual recipes, delicious to the hearkening ears of a 
 ruthless ruling class. He was a Man. 
 
 2. The First Genera! Strike. 
 
 The direct, matter-of-fact way that Moses goes about 
 this task is like a revelation. Modern Realism might 
 take lessons from the Book of Exodus. 
 
 1. The Lord said to Moses, " Go unto Pharaoh, and 
 say, Let my People go." 
 
 2. And the Lord said to Aaron, " Go into the 
 wilderness and meet Moses. " 
 
 3. And Aaron went, and met him and kissed him. 
 
 4. And Moses told Aaron that he was on his way to 
 deliver his people from Pharaohism and take them out 
 of Egypt. 
 
 5. And Moses and Aaron gathered all the elders of 
 the people together and told them of the plan. 
 
 6. And the people believed and it is said that when 
 they heard that the Lord had Booked upon their 
 affliction, " then they bowed their heads and wor- 
 shipped/' 
 
 In short, the program of Moses is (i) to Pharaoh 
 " Let my people go " ; (2) to the People " Get out 
 of Egypt." The modern parallel is " Capitalism must 
 be abolished/' " On to the Co-operative Common- 
 wealth." 
 
 Moses then passes the word around and the whole 
 Working-Class is organised into tens, and hundreds, 
 
 and thousands. He was the first great trade unionist 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 1 7 
 
 Fortunately for his enterprise they knew they had 
 only one trade slavery it was all one whether they 
 hunted stubble, or dug the mud, or wheeled the mud, 
 or laid stone. They were Slaves. Moses was too wise 
 a man to think that he could save one class of these 
 labourers without saving all. He did not wish to 
 emancipate one aristocratic group, and leave another 
 " sweated " by the taskmaster. " Ye are all slaves ; 
 ye are all brethren ; organise as one man, and march to 
 Freedom/' Moses was the first great advocate of the 
 Class-Struggle. He was not a theorist, however, in 
 political economy. He was a militant strategist a 
 doer. 
 
 It would be interesting to read the minutes of the 
 meetings in which Moses and Aaron, and the elders 
 organised this First General Strike, now mooted again 
 throughout the world, as a possible weapon of militant 
 International Socialism. Pharaoh is not much good 
 when he has to dig his own mud, and bake his own bread, 
 and make his own bed. No. 
 
 According to the minutes of their meetings as pre- 
 served in the chapters of Exodus, we do know that 
 the first hints of revolt were met by severe conditions 
 at the hands of the taskmasters ; and we learn that the 
 slaves set upon Moses, saying that they were worse off 
 than before he came a thing often repeated in modern 
 history. And Moses, it is said, laid it back on the Lord 
 in very direct language, " Since I came to Pharaoh to 
 speak in thy name, he hath done evil to this people ; 
 neither hast thou delivered thy people at all." Moses 
 was going to keep the Lord to his materialistic program. 
 But the resources of Eternal Justice were not exhausted, 
 and if you read the minutes in Exodus vi., and on to 
 Exodus xii., you will read the history of a Class- 
 Struggle that may clear up your economics. 
 
 3. The Lord's Singular Advice. 
 
 At one of the meetings Moses reported that he had 
 a revelation from God that the night before the General 
 
1 8 MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 Strike was called, every man and woman should borrow 
 jewels of gold and jewels of silver and raiment from the 
 Egyptians. "When ye go," said the Lord, "ye Shall 
 not go empty." " Ye shall spoil the Egyptians, and put 
 the jewels and the raiment on your own sons and your 
 own daughters." It is singular that God should dare 
 to thus interfere with the sacred private property of 
 the Egyptians, in the interest of these thriftless slaves ! 
 Why had they not " saved " for a rainy day ? We 
 are not informed, except, that every day appears to 
 have been a rainy day for them. And then, of course, 
 the ruling classes had saved it I had almost forgotten 
 and two classes cannot retain the same product of 
 labour at the same time. That is so. That is worth 
 knowing. 
 
 4. A Dramatic Passover. 
 
 What a simple, direct word, that word " passover " 
 is. In the minds of most of the people, it is a mystical 
 religious Jewish festival. But come to earth. That 
 word and that feast belong to us. It sums up in the 
 most perfect simplicity the circumstances, the fact, the 
 memory, of that night of triumph, when millions of 
 organised slaves were led by Moses to PASS out of the 
 slavery of their taskmasters OVER into a new social 
 order. It is first an act, then a fact, then a memory, 
 then a religious feast. And finally it becomes so 
 traditional that its raw, real, matter-of-fact significance 
 is lost. And then it is expounded, explained, and 
 preached about, and actually exploited to prevent the 
 oppressed of modern times to PASS out of the Egypt of 
 Capitalism, OVER into the Promised Land of Social 
 Justice and Industrial Freedom. 
 
 Turn to your Exodus again and read the detail. 
 Moses was an optimist. That is to say, a man of faith 
 all-conquering faith. He laughed at impossibilities, 
 I learn this from the fact that he renounced the 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 
 
 Egyptian calendar, and began the counting of the years 
 while his people were still bleeding in the back from the 
 whips of the taskmasters. He said, "We go out this 
 year." Moses was not afraid of delivering the people 
 too rapidly. That is a disease of the moderns. 
 ' This shall be the first month of, the first year," said 
 Moses. " We don't count existence by the slavery 
 years. We begin to count the years with this year. 
 And this year we vote as one man to get out. And we 
 are going. That is all. Get ready." 
 
 There is nothing more dramatic in all human history. 
 He celebrates the Passover before they pass over. I 
 
 said Moses was a Man. Moses was not a liberal nor a 
 progressive. He was a revolutionist. No more Egypt 
 for him. Egypt had been tried, and, like modern 
 Capitalism, had failed. It enriched the Pharaohs out 
 of the labour of the impoverished workers. And the 
 Lord said, " I will smite the Egyptians." "It is a 
 night to be much observed unto the Lord for bringing 
 them out Of the land Of Egypt." Six hundred thousand 
 men (100,000 more than the present unemployed in 
 the kingdom) marched in ranks of five, besides women 
 and children, and a mixed multitude, with flocks and 
 herds, for Canaan. And the " pillar of cloud by day 
 and the pillar of fire by night," reduced to doubtful 
 mystic significance by modern religious teachers, stood 
 before this moving camp of toil-driven people. I shall 
 not dare explain away the miraculous elements. Things, 
 greater than miracles would happen to the Working- 
 Class if they would rise as one man to inaugurate the 
 Brotherhood of Man, in Socialised Industry. Let future 
 generations bear me record. 
 
 Pharaoh's horsemen and chariots and army pursue* 
 You remember that Pharaoh wanted them to vote 
 " liberal," and stay in Egypt ; that is, they might go 
 off a step or so from the abject slavery, but not out of 
 it. But when he found they meant business, that his 
 supply of cheap labour was about to be exhausted, he 
 
20 MOSES I THE GREATEST 
 
 showed fight. At this point the slaves showed signs of 
 surrender, and complained bitterly against Moses. " Is 
 not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, 
 Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians ? For 
 it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians than 
 to die in the wilderness." 
 
 5. A Great Social Salvation. 
 
 And then Moses uttered that famous text of triumph 
 which has been such a source of pulpiteering ever since. 
 41 Fear ye not, stand still, and see the Salvation of the 
 Lord, for the Egyptians, whom ye have seen to-day, 
 ye shall see them again no more for ever." (The text 
 usually ends with the second comma). Note the kind 
 of Salvation of the Lord Moses talked of. I think this 
 is the first time the phrase " Salvation of the Lord " is 
 mentioned in the Bible. 
 
 Let me state it again. The Salvation Of the Lord, 
 here referred to by Moses, is the deliverance of the people 
 out of the power of their Industrial Masters, who con- 
 trolled the Sand and the instruments of labour, and hence 
 also controlled life itself, and all its possible develop- 
 ment. This lesson must be rubbed into the conscience 
 of the religious people of our day. 
 
 " The Lord shall fight for you," said Moses. When 
 Moses showed a disposition to parley with God, the 
 Lord said, " Wherefore criest thou unto me. Speak 
 unto the children of Israel that they go forward ! " 
 And he did so. And just then the cloud whatever it 
 was lifted from before them, and stood between the 
 army of tramps and the regulars of Pharaoh. And the 
 rest of the story follows. The slaves marched to 
 freedom. Panic seized the Egyptian host. The sea 
 engulfed them. " There remained not so much as one 
 of them " says the record. " And Israel saw the 
 Egyptians dead upon the sea shore. And they saw 
 that great work which the Lord did upon their 
 oppressors ; and the people feared the Lord, and 
 
OF LABOUR LEADERS. 21 
 
 believed the Lord, and his servant Moses. " I think a 
 Lord like that is worth while to oppressed slaves, and 
 over-worked exploited masses ! (But rather an unfor- 
 tunate deity for the exploiters and oppressors !) 
 
 For the Lord said, " Against all the gods of Egypt, 
 I will execute justice." It is still to be heard, the voice 
 of the Lord : " Against all the gods of Capitalism 
 I will execute justice." 
 
 V. 
 
 MOSES: THE LABOUR LEGISLATOR AND 
 STATESMAN. 
 
 Thus had Moses organised the workers and marched 
 them out of Egypt into Freedom. Pharaoh's hosts 
 were in the bottom of the sea. The first May-day of 
 victory was celebrated with song and dance. 
 
 Moses had proved himself a successful Labour 
 Leader. He had led the first Great Strike and had won 
 out. But that was only the beginning of his great 
 work. He must now become a Labour Legislator, a 
 Labour Statesman. 
 
 Moses was not an M.P., nor a cabinet minister, nor 
 a priest, nor a pastor. He was indeed a Shepherd of 
 his people. And unlike modern Shepherds he found 
 pasture for his Sheep. That I regard as the first busi- 
 ness of pastors and shepherds. The briefest outline 
 of the first Acts of Moses give us the principles of the 
 Social Revolution needed for our times. 
 
 1. Water. 
 
 The dance is over, and the very next verse in the 
 record says, " they found no water/ 1 or what they did 
 find was bitter. And it is said " Moses cried unto the 
 Lord/ 1 I want to show you how the gross materialism 
 of this man Moses does not shed itself. Why did he 
 not give them sermonettes on the Spiritual Fountains 
 
22 MOSES : THE GREATEST 
 
 of which he himself evidently drank ? That would 
 have been so easy ! No. They needed water ; water 
 to drink they must have. They faced physical neces- 
 sity. Water is a greater immediate need than food. 
 
 Moses led them to water first. 
 
 2. Bread. 
 
 In 45 days after leaving Egypt, as they entered the 
 second wilderness, supplies gave out. The com- 
 missary department failed. Evidently they must 
 have " borrowed " considerable in Egypt. And they 
 began to murmur against Moses. They were not like 
 our modern " unemployed/' who turn around and 
 vote for policies and parties that produce unemploy- 
 ment. They held the Prime Minister responsible for 
 he had his hand on the helm. They said, " Are 
 you going to kill this whole assembly with Hunger?" 
 A very materialistic proposition. And this forces 
 Moses* next imperative Act. And he cried unto the 
 Lord. And the Lord is materialistic also. The Lord 
 said, " I have heard the murmurings of the children of 
 Israel : I will rain bread from hea.ven. At even you 
 shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled 
 with bread ; and ye shall know that I am the Lord." 
 And it was so. Think of the Lord of Heaven and earth 
 descending to such a commonplace materialistic matter 
 as flesh and bread to eat ! 
 
 3. A Health Department. 
 
 Along with the provision for these two immediate 
 necessities of the people, Moses established a Depart- 
 ment of Public Health. He showed the people that 
 none of the terrible diseases that they were swept off 
 with in Egypt should fall upon them. I cannot go 
 into the detail of his hygienic arrangements ; but 
 many a modern army has not preserved itself from 
 disease as did this horde of slaves. 
 
or LABOUR LEADERS. 23 
 
 The Socialist spirit and Message which is the 
 Moses to-day shows how the ravaging diseases that 
 smite the working-classes are due to over-work, under- 
 feeding, bad-housing, congested and unsanitary dwel- 
 lings. Small-pox, diphtheria, fevers of all kinds, above 
 all, the White Plague of consumption, that carries 
 off the working-class by hundreds and tens of thousands 
 
 all these are diseases of the Egypt of Capitalism. 
 4. Three Great Planks in Moses' Platform. 
 
 (1) The Socialist Movement demands that the land 
 shall be socially owned by the whole people ; that 
 land monopoly be made impossible ; that every man 
 shall be guaranteed equality of opportunity in the Use 
 of Land. Land is the Social Base of Human necessity. 
 It is water. It is Bread. It is life itself. Landlordism 
 is an unspeakable social curse. 
 
 The land, according to Moses, was never to be private 
 property. The land belonged to the Lord not to the 
 landlords this is the Jewish form of Land Nationaliza- 
 tion. That means Social Ownership for the Equality 
 of Opportunity to all. In case exchanges of use should 
 occur in process of time, in the year of Jubilee, every 
 50 years, the land all went back to the original tribes 
 and families. Any developing in- Justice was nipped 
 in the bud. Socialists do not ask for a reduplicate of 
 Moses' land laws. But we do demand the twentieth 
 century application of the principle involved. There 
 is no solution of the problem of the unemployed, and 
 poverty will grow apace, until landlordism is abolished, 
 and the land restored to the People. 
 
 (2) The Socialist Movement demands that the Capital 
 needed for the equipment of Industry, at least for the 
 fundamental needs of the people, shall be Socially 
 Owned. The first need of the people is the Right to 
 Work. No man should have to beg another man the 
 chance to work. That is slavery slavery of the worst 
 form, in some respects. 
 
24 MOSES : THE GREATEST OF LABOUR LEADERS. 
 
 The second form in which the power of Capitalism 
 is exercised is by the laws of Interest. " If thou lend 
 money to any of my people that is poor, then, thou 
 shalt not be to him, as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay 
 upon him usury." Here not only the practice of usury 
 is forbidden, but the exercise of the spirit or attitude, 
 or manner of the money-lender, who holds you at his 
 mercy, is forbidden. It is all nonsense to say that 
 " usury " means unlawful rate of interest. Interest on 
 money at all is strictly forbidden. The early Church 
 fathers vehemently preached against it. Capitalism 
 has succeeded in utterly silencing the modern pulpit on 
 these questions. 
 
 The Socialist Movement demands Social Ownership 
 of Capital, and thus the receipt of the total product by 
 the people who earn it. 
 
 (3) Under the law of Moses, the tools of the worker 
 could not be seized for debt. What good would this 
 guarantee of land be if he had not tools to work it ? I 
 just mention this matter in passing. Social Ownership 
 of Capital, just referred to, involves Social Ownership 
 of Machinery our present form of Tools. As Socialists 
 we demand the guarantee to every man of the Right of 
 Access to the Mechanical Equipment of Civilisation in 
 order that he may labour and provide for his existence. 
 
 Surety, this Statesmanship of Moses, that meets the 
 primal needs of the people, which prevents land 
 monopoly, abolishes interest, and guarantees to the 
 worker his tools, is full of inspiring instruction to the 
 men of our day. 
 
 And when the Bible is used as an apology of Capi- 
 talism, it is a fearful perversion ; and when the name 
 of God is used as a defence of Capitalism, we may well 
 ask, Is the Lord you refer to, the Lord who said unto 
 Moses, " I have seen the affliction of the People, and 
 I am come down to deliver them. Go now, and bring 
 them forth." 
 
The Hebrew Prophets and the 
 Social Revolution. 
 
 " X TO man hath seen God at any time." Certain 
 I^J impressions or feelings are interpreted as the 
 * " presence of God," and certain states of mind 
 
 and will as the " Will of God." Men who believed they 
 were thus moved upon by the Divine Presence, and 
 inspired to utter the Divine Will, have given to man- 
 kind a particular literature, and this literature has 
 been called the Word of God. So far as our Western 
 civilisation is concerned, that Word of God is known 
 as the Holy Bible, consisting of the Old and New 
 Testament Scriptures. 
 
 The Old Testament was the Sacred Book of the Jews 
 before the Christian era. This has been accepted by 
 the Christian world as co-ordinate with the New Testa- 
 ment. Together they form the basis of scriptural 
 appeal. No discrimination is made in favour of one 
 as against the other in the public preaching and teach- 
 ing of Christendom. Whatever discrepancies critical 
 scholarship may find in the text, whatever differing 
 degrees of inspiration may be attributed to the various 
 writers, the Bible is still the sacred volume of the 
 Christian Church and the acknowledged fount of 
 spiritual wisdom and truth to the Western world. 
 
 Now this Western civilisation is passing through a 
 great Social Revolution the greatest in all human 
 history. The spiritual base of this revolution is the 
 urge of the soul of the downmost man for fulness and 
 freedom of life. The least economic demand of the 
 revolution is the abolition of power and privilege and 
 monopoly in natural resources and industrial equip- 
 ment, and such a degree of co-operative administration 
 
2 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 of industry as shall guarantee to every man the com- 
 plete physical base and social environment of a full and 
 free life. Age-long despotisms are to perish in the 
 fuller triumph of democracy in the industrial field. 
 The goal of this world-wide revolution is the overthrow 
 of world-wide Capitalism. 
 
 Up to this present writing the Christian Church, 
 which holds and expounds the Bible the Word of 
 
 God is the moral and spiritual bulwark of Capitalism. 
 
 The conscience of Capitalism is peaceful and unaccused 
 by the teachers of the oracles of God. The members of 
 the Church, her young people, her children, have not 
 yet heard from their ordained teachers that Capitalism, 
 as a system of industry, is in any sense contrary to the 
 Word or Will of God. The most powerful opponents 
 and hinderers of a peaceful revolution are the avowed 
 and accredited ministers of the Word. By silence and 
 by open defence they constitute themselves as the 
 spiritual police to guard the ill-gotten gains of 
 Capitalism. The shepherds have not only abandoned 
 the sheep to the industrial wolves, which fleece and 
 devour the people, but these shepherds openly defend 
 the wolf in his depredations by appeal to the Word of 
 God, which they are ordained to preach. Or, if they 
 ignore the revolution, in its purpose and programme, 
 their contention is that the Will of God concerns 
 individual souls, individual sins, and personal salva- 
 tion. To deal specifically with the social conscience, 
 concerning definite social sins organised in social 
 institutions, to call the people to a great social repent- 
 ance, to summon them from Social Injustice to a great 
 Social Salvation that is considered to be beyond the 
 function of the preachers of the Word. When the 
 preachers do discuss the wrong inherent in Capitalism, 
 their programme is to mend, but not to end the 
 injustice. They do not lay the axe to the root of the 
 tree. They would put a new patch on the rotten gar- 
 ment of competitivism. They would put the new wine 
 of freedom into the vile old bottles of wage-slavery. 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 3 
 
 It is my purpose in this address to appeal to the 
 Hebrew prophets as a justification of the general spirit 
 and direction of the Social Revolution, and to show 
 that if they spoke the Word and Will of God, that Word 
 and Will belongs to us of the Socialist movement, and 
 not to the Church which stands as the apologist and 
 defender of Capitalism. The Church which refuses to 
 face the social problem, or when dealing with that 
 problem stands as the antagonist of Socialism and the 
 apologist of Capitalism, denies both the spirit and the 
 message of the prophets of Israel. They thus reject 
 what they themselves declare to be the Word of God. 
 
 THE PROPHETS IN GENERAL. 
 
 To the average mind a prophet is one who predicts 
 coming events. But this is a very subordinate element 
 in the Hebrew prophets. They were primarily 
 utterers, announcers, heralds of the Truth, to their 
 own people, and to their own generation prediction 
 entering in only as the inevitable logic of contem- 
 porary events. Their God was not a God of abstract 
 theology, but a God of history and Providence. They 
 never discussed theological formulae. They declared 
 the Will of God in relation to the actual life and institu- 
 tions of their nation and times. They lived in the very 
 throes of passing events. They told the plain and 
 unvarnished truth about facts and events. Had they 
 lived in our day they would have quoted statistics 
 with lightning effect. They would have uncovered the 
 raw and bleeding sores of our industrial life. They 
 were realists. Their inspiration was born out of the 
 realities of life. Fact, before the very face of anyone 
 who would simply look, was, to the prophet, the Voice 
 of God. When these facts ate into his consciousness, 
 and he dropped the plummet of truth and justice upon 
 them, then the hand of the Lord was upon him. And 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 he became so identified with the Will of Jehovah as 
 opposed to the wrong about him that his very per- 
 sonality seemed the Divine incarnate. The elemental 
 sense of right and humanity in his own soul was the 
 Voice of the Lord and his ground of appeal. He 
 needed no other. This applied to the passing events 
 constituted the Will of God. And when the prophet 
 spoke under this power, he declared the Word of God. 
 He had no Scripture to appeal to. He made Scripture. 
 
 This word he uttered with tremendous directness and 
 vehemence. God said unto Amos " Strike ! " Jere- 
 miah declares this word was as a fire in his marrow 
 Scholars tell us that the utterance of the prophet Joel, 
 in the original Hebrew, sounds like the rattle of 
 musketry, or the roar of artillery, as if the prophet 
 would literally fire upon them with the Word of God. 
 And Hosea says, " I have hewed them by tne 
 prophets " literally gashed them " I have slain them 
 by the word of my mouth/' These men do not argue. 
 They announce and declare. So penetrating and 
 illuminating, like lightning ; so fearless and direct, 
 like weapons ; so uncompromising, like truth, were the 
 words of these mighty men, that millions of our race 
 through long ages have acknowledged their inspiration, 
 and said, " Surely this is the Word of the Lord." So 
 high did these men stand as spokesmen for the Eternal 
 that when the great prophet of Nazareth appeared 
 seven hundred years later they could not acknowledge 
 him in higher terms to the popular mind than to say, 
 " He is one of the prophets." 
 
 II. 
 THE PROPHET AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 
 
 I have said that the prophet faced fact, that he 
 watched the march of events. Fact seemed to be the 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 5 
 
 wax in which his word was a seal. He dropped the 
 plummet of justice and righteousness upon these facts 
 and events. He does not deal in abstractions. He is 
 no dreamer, but an actor in the midst of affairs. 
 
 Now, before we can see the social significance of 
 the message of the prophets, and the relation of that 
 word to the present Social Revolution, we must take 
 note of the social conditions at the time in which they 
 speak. 
 
 1. The Age of Commercialism. 
 
 Israel was then (800-700 B.C.) passing out of the 
 simple agricultural stage into a commercial career 
 among the nations. The story of the social conditions 
 in which these prophets appear reads like pages from 
 the history of our own times, in which an age of 
 machinery, with all the attendant wrongs of commer- 
 cialism, has drawn the people from the land and 
 herded them in great cities, there to be exploited as 
 helpless victims caught in the maelstrom of world- 
 forces. 
 
 Historians of the time of Amos and Micah and Isaiah 
 tell us that the newly developed trade fell into the 
 hands of plutocrats. Wealth concentrated in the 
 hands of the few. Huge private estates were formed 
 out of the once common lands. The poor landowners 
 were bought out or fell into the power of their rich 
 creditors, and were ejected by violence and false 
 judgment. The peasant proprietors were destroyed. 
 The yeomanry perished. The cities grew apace, filled 
 with the exiles from the land. Here they met the upper 
 millstone of usury and oppression. 
 
 Inevitably there developed a luxurious and corrupt 
 upper class. The aristocracy racked their brains for 
 new ways of consuming the surplus wealth that they 
 had wrung from the poor. They built magnificent 
 palaces, furnished in ivory and beautified with art. 
 They had summer houses and winter houses, town 
 
6 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 houses and country houses, while the poor had not 
 where to lay their heads. This wealthy class enriched 
 the temples of religion with their generous gifts, and 
 lavishly endowed the religious teachers. " The rich 
 nobles were steeped in sensual luxury, the court was 
 full of gallantry ; and feminine extravagance and vanity 
 gave tone to aristocratic society, which, like the noblesse 
 of France, on the eve of the Revolution, was absorbed 
 in gaiety and pleasure, while the masses were ground 
 down by oppression and the cry of their distress filled 
 the land." (Robertson Smith, in " The Prophets of 
 Israel.") " All social bonds were loosed in the 
 universal reign of injustice." " Every man for himself, 
 and no man for his brother." But so great was the 
 wealth and splendour of the rich that it dazzled the 
 eye of all officialdom. Priest and preacher interpreted 
 the growing wealth as a sign of prosperity and as a mark 
 of Jehovah's presence among His people. The 
 shepherds forgot the poor out of whose labours this 
 wealth was extracted. The priests spent their days 
 in a delightful optimism. 'The glare of wealth, the 
 fulsome love of country, the rank incense of a religion 
 that was without morality these thickened all the 
 air, and neither the people nor their rulers had any 
 vision." (Prof. George Adam Smith, in " The Twelve 
 Prophets "). 
 
 2. The Rich and the Poor. 
 
 The gulf between the rich and the poor became wider 
 and wider. The rich were lifted away from the 
 struggles of the poor, and used these improverished and 
 exploited people as pawns for their game. Micah 
 says that the wealthy " stripped the skin off the poor, 
 and their flesh off their bodies." Zechariah declares 
 that the rich and powerful dealt with the people 
 actually as " buyers and sellers of sheep." The mighty 
 are veritable sheep merchants. Amos declares that the 
 social injustice is so great as to " cause the sun to go 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 down at noon, and to darken the earth in the clear day." 
 Isaiah pronounces judgment for the ruling classes: 
 " For ye have eaten up the vineyard : the spoil of the 
 poor is in your houses ! What mean ye that ye beat 
 my people in pieces, and grind the faces of the poor ? " 
 Such, then, were the social conditions in Judah and 
 Israel when the prophets burst upon them with the 
 oracles of Jehovah. Throw into the picture our age 
 of machinery the smoke of factory towns, the dull 
 monotony of the homes of the working-class, the 
 armies of the unemployed, the grim workhouse, child 
 labour, sweating, the game of the Stock Exchange, 
 and a few leaping 6o-h.p. motor-cars and the picture 
 is modern enough. The rich pile up their gains, the 
 poor struggle on, God only knows how ; the religious 
 ceremony and enthusiasm proceed unabated. We 
 need only an Amos, dashing like a lion out of the desert 
 into the midst of a high religious ceremony, or into a 
 revival meeting, to interrupt the scene in the name of 
 the poor ; or a Micah, wailing the bitter cry of the 
 oppressed ; or an Isaiah at court rebuking the proud 
 aristocracy, to give us a return of the prophetic period. 
 
 3. Hence the Message of the Prophets. 
 
 The new social conditions precipitated the message 
 of the prophets. Out of the new economic situation 
 there sprang new ethical values. And out of this new 
 economic and ethical vision there bloomed a new con- 
 ception of the spiritual meaning of life. And so it is 
 to-day. The new vital word of the Lord, ethical and 
 spiritual, to this generation is being born out of our 
 economic and social conditions. The Social Revolution 
 holds and utters the prophetic word. What the Hebrew 
 Prophets were to the social conditions of their time, 
 the Social Revolution is and is to be to our time. From 
 the spirit and message and labours of the prophets we 
 may gather insight and inspiration. 
 
S THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 III. 
 
 THE PROPHETIC MESSAGE PRIMARILY SOCIAL 
 AND POLITICAL. 
 
 Now what was the burden of the message of these 
 men of God ? Was it the message of the evangelist 
 and revivalist ? Was it individualistic, dealing only 
 with the personal, spiritual life and private morality, 
 ignoring the social needs of the people, and the social 
 sin in unjust social institutions ? Nay, verily ! It 
 was the very opposite of that. These prophets Of 
 the Lord did not strain at gnats of individual sin, and 
 swallow camels of social injustice and industrial 
 oppression. They dealt primarily with the public 
 morality of the whole people, as expressed in the 
 institutions and functions of the national life. Their 
 concern was not primarily with the so-called religious 
 life, but with the common, practical, work-a-day life of 
 the people. 
 
 1. The God of Israel. 
 
 In modern religion the thought is " God and the 
 soul " ; with Israel the basic idea is " God and the 
 people " in their collective capacity. Let us remember 
 that the character of Jehovah was first made manifest 
 as the chief actor in a mighty Social Deliverance. The 
 first word of God to Moses was this : "I have seen the 
 affliction of my people, by reason of their taskmasters, 
 and I am come down to deliver them/' God reveals 
 himself as hearing the cry of a working-class suffering 
 from unjust social institutions, and determined upon 
 their economic emancipation. The very name of God 
 meant nearly nothing until He had delivered the people 
 from Egyptian bondage. The name Israel means 
 41 God fighteth." Jehovah meant to these people 
 first : Freedom from industrial slavery ; and, second : 
 Justice and Equity in their new social state. The God 
 of Moses and the Prophets was the God of Freedom, 
 Justice, and Social Righteousness ; the friend of the 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 9 
 
 oppressed and the terror of the oppressors. While the 
 God of modern Capitalistic religion calls upon the 
 people to worship Him in their slavery, the God of 
 Israel called the people to worship on the ground 
 that He had brought them up " out of the house of 
 bondage." Such Scripture as they possessed at the 
 time of the prophets was a record of the great national 
 deliverances through which Jehovah had led them. 
 The words " salvation " and " redemption, " now used 
 almost wholly in respect to states of the individual 
 soul, in the early Old Testament writings, refer almost 
 exclusively to social and national deliverances. 
 
 2. The Social Message. 
 
 With such a history and such a revelation of the 
 character of God, no prophet could possibly go forth in 
 Israel like a modern minister or evangelist, to deal with 
 merely personal sins, ignoring fundamental social 
 unrighteousness, or to offer a personal salvation to the 
 few who might accept it, and ignoring the social deliver- 
 ance the whole people needed. 
 
 Nearly all the texts quoted from the prophets by 
 modern preachers are lifted right out of the context 
 and utterly deprived of their social significance, and 
 then forced to do service in a religious individualism, 
 for which they were never intended. When, for 
 example, Isaiah cries out to his people, " Though your 
 sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; 
 though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool/' 
 he is dealing with social sins. He has just scorned their 
 religious prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonies, and pleads 
 for plain, Simple justice as alone pleasing to God. 
 " Your hands are full of blood/' he cries. " When ye 
 make prayers, I will not hear/' Therefore, "Seek 
 justice, and relieve the oppressed, and though your sins 
 be red like crimson they shall be white as snow." And 
 Isaiah is typical of all. To find anything like the indi- 
 vidualism of modern religious teaching in the Jewish 
 prophets, you must go to the utterances of the 
 
1O THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 pessimists in the days of the captivity, when the social 
 unity of the race was broken into fragments and the 
 national hope almost extinguished. 
 
 3. Industrialism and Social Salvation. 
 
 The prophets of Israel, like the prophet of Nazareth, 
 reveal in their personality and message that highest 
 synthesis of the individual and the social body. They 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
 give themselves for the people. If it be claimed that 
 surely the prophets themselves were individually 
 41 saved " men, our answer is that their salvation did 
 not consist in the development of certain private 
 virtues, or in the orthodox advocacy of a certain theo- 
 logy, new or old. Their salvation as individuals con- 
 sisted in a total abandonment of every private or 
 personal interest, that they might plead the cause of 
 the people, and especially of the poor and oppressed, 
 against the power of wrongdoers. Thus they 
 incarnated the total human need and human life. Thus 
 the prophet became indeed the Son of Man as he 
 styled himself the Son of Humanity. His only 
 interest was the common, universal, social interest of 
 the whole people. The individual is " saved " when 
 the soul is filled with a vast social ideal and thrilled 
 with a social purpose. " To lose your own sorrow in 
 the vaster sense of national trouble, as Hosea did, that 
 is the first consciousness of a duty and a mission." 
 (Prof. George Adam Smith). 
 
 The excess of individualism in religion, which dates 
 largely from the Reformation, has been greatly 
 accentuated by the rank, competitive struggle in the 
 daily life of the people. But if the God of the prophets 
 is the Divine Reality of this universe, this acute 
 individualism and pietism is a poor loaf of the redemp- 
 tive purpose in mankind ; for it neither saves the indi- 
 vidual to that saviourship of humanity which is his 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. II 
 
 call and his privilege, nor does it save the whole people 
 from the ravages of the social and industrial dragons 
 that devour them. 
 
 4. They were Social Reformers. 
 
 These Hebrew prophets were social reformers of the 
 most radical type, as the most casual reading of their 
 lives and words will reveal. They were the voices of 
 Social Revolution in their day, according to its need. 
 Moses conspired against the tyranny of Pharaoh, and 
 organised the workers into a vast labour union, and 
 marched them to freedom. Samuel organised a new 
 order of prophets for the express purpose of creating 
 a national revival. Elijah attacked the king because 
 of injustice in land indosure. To Elijah God was the 
 refuge of the oppressed and the support of the weak 
 against the mighty. The influence of Elisha was 
 directly political. He was the very soul of the struggle 
 for independence during the Syrian wars. When he 
 died they called him " the chariot of Israel and the 
 horsemen thereof." The prophecies of Amos, Hosea, 
 and Micah are almost wholly social and political, 
 calling for economic and social righteousness. Joel 
 calls upon the ministers of God to weep and wail over 
 the misery of the people in their economic distress. 
 " All trees of the field are dried up ; yea, joy is abashed 
 and away from the children of men." He calls upon 
 the priests to put on mourning and beat their breasts, 
 because " the food is cut off the garners are desolate 
 the corn is withered the herds huddle together." Let 
 the priests cry, " Spare, O Jehovah, Thy people." 
 Ezekiel pronounced woe upon the shepherds who feed 
 themselves but neglect the flock, and let the strong over- 
 ride the weak. Jeremiah declares that he has been 
 sent to pull down and to tear at unjust and unholy 
 institutions, and to build anew in rightousness a 
 revolutionist, indeed, who barely escaped with his life. 
 The first chapter of Isaiah is the bitterest attack in all 
 sacred literature upon ceremonial religion that forgets 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 justice and social righteousness. Victor Hugo puts Is- 
 aiah in a list of the greatest geniuses in history, and 
 says, " He is the great reproacher he fixes a date for 
 oppressors he stands at the threshold of civilisation 
 and refuses to enter." Even Jonah, the last of the 
 prophets, calls upon the whole city of Nineveh to 
 repent ; and the record states that the national 
 repentance began with the people, included the very 
 beasts of the field, swells like a tide to the authorities, 
 until the king himself casts off his emblems and shares 
 in the communal fast. Here, again, God reveals his 
 interest in whole mass populations of the weak and 
 ignorant. " Shall I not care for Nineveh, that great 
 city in which there are more than twelve times ten 
 thousand human beings, who know not their right hand 
 from their left besides much cattle/' 
 
 When the trade unionists at Hull declared their 
 sympathy with the Socialist programme, or when the 
 Wesleyans wheeled a petition weighing half-a-ton into 
 the House of Commons, we have exhibitions of mass 
 movements for social righteousness. But if you wish 
 to see this passion for social justice, of which the 
 Hebrew prophets are our great exemplars, sweeping 
 over people irrespective of their creed, colour, or 
 nationality, inspiring men and women with the spirit of 
 devotion to a great social ideal, leaping forward to 
 capture political power in order to establish economic 
 freedom and justice in social institutions if you wish 
 to see this as never before exhibited in pow r er and sanity 
 of programme, you must behold the Socialist movement 
 of the world. 
 
 We have now seen that the message of the prophets 
 arose out of the social and economic conditions of the 
 people. We have also seen that their message was not 
 delivered to individual souls in terms of personal 
 pietism, but to the whole people in terms of social 
 righteousness. So the Social Revolution of our time, 
 with its new social conscience, and its economic pro- 
 gramme, arises out of the social conditions precipitated 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 13 
 
 by the age of machinery and private capitalism ; and 
 the propaganda of the Social Revolution is directed not 
 to individuals concerning their personal virtues and 
 vices, but to every man in the nation, as a social unit, 
 concerning social sin and economic injustice, and 
 national unrighteousness, from which no man can 
 individually escape, but from which escape can be 
 social only. 
 
 5. The Class-Struggle. 
 
 We carry the parallel one step further. While not 
 neglecting other elements of social morality, the 
 prophets of Israel emphatically ranged themselves on 
 the side of the poor, and against their oppressors. 
 They found themselves in the midst of a Class Struggle, 
 and in the name of the God of Freedom and Justice 
 they took the part of the toiling and oppressed common 
 people. No fact stands out more plainly than this 
 throughout the whole prophetic period. Indeed, this is. 
 so manifest that long before we come to consider the 
 matter specifically it becomes manifest in the general 
 study of the word of the prophets. They were the 
 champions of the poor. They ruthlessly impeached the 
 rich, powerful, oppressors and grandees in Church and 
 State. To these men of God Jehovah had delivered 
 these Hebrew slaves out of the hand of one master, 
 and He was not going to see them put under another. 
 He had brought them out of Egypt to make them free 
 and to establish them in a land flowing with milk and 
 honey, and any social development that turned that 
 freedom back, or took away that milk and honey, 
 Jehovah would destroy. In this respect, then, the 
 Social Revolution runs in close parallel with Hebrew 
 prophecy. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THREE SUBSTITUTES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. 
 
 Let us now see the attitude of the prophets concern- 
 ing this specific evil of industrial oppression and their 
 
14 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 demand for social justice. To the prophets social 
 righteousness could not be realised except through 
 righting the relations of men in their daily bread-getting. 
 
 Thus we see that the word of the Lord has to find 
 application in the regular, abiding, organised, economic 
 relations. God would accept nothing else, and nothing 
 less. Justice in bread-getting and land-using was the 
 first necessary constituent of anything that proposed 
 to be the will of God. For this kind of plain, matter- 
 of-fact, work-a-day righteousness there could be no 
 substitute. 
 
 But right here the prophets had to face what 
 prophets of social righteousness have always had to 
 meet, viz., grand, imposing substitutes and counterfeits 
 for real righteousness. 
 
 The religious consciousness is fundatinental in man. 
 If that consciousness does not find normal expression 
 in human brotherhood and right social and economic 
 relations, then it will become prostituted in abnormal 
 forms of expression. These forms are at least three : 
 First, correct theology, with an accompanying 
 pharisaism in morals ; second, ritualism and cere- 
 mony ; and, third, religious emotionalism. These three 
 the prophets of Israel had to meet. 
 
 Social righteousness, expressed in social justice, in 
 the freedom and security of the life of the people that 
 is the first and basic form of real religion and true 
 morality. If any man does not want social justice in 
 the use of land and machinery for the bread-getting 
 realities of the common life, he does not want anything 
 for humanity. Any religion that dodges this and prac- 
 tices substitutes is vain. These three substitutes for 
 real social righteousness have to be punctured in order 
 to fully reveal the will of God as simply love and 
 freedom, and love and freedom only, in actual 
 expression. 
 
 1. The Prophets and Orthodoxy. 
 
 Even a brief treatment of those three substitutes 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 15 
 
 is beyond our present scope. Jesus said, " Why call 
 ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say." 
 For, " By this shall all men know that ye are My 
 disciples that ye love one another as I have loved you." 
 No theology, new or old, however orthodox or progres- 
 sive, can be substituted for just and brotherly relations 
 in the fundamental and commonplace realities. The 
 way of the Greek was that of correct thinking and right 
 dogma ; the way of the Christ-spirit in all ages, includ- 
 ing that of the Hebrew prophets, is the Good-will, the 
 intellect to be made the servant of that will. The 
 prophets, anticipating Christ, literally made sport of 
 the religious teachers of their day, for substituting 
 
 accepted doctrines for righteousness. 
 
 2. The Prophets and Ritual. 
 
 But the supreme attack of the prophets was upon the 
 religion of ritualism and ceremonialism. As long as the 
 people thought that God could be pleased with prayers, 
 and songs, and ceremonies, and the repetition of 
 formulae, on stated high and holy days, and sacred ser- 
 vices conducted by robed and dignified religious 
 officials as long as the religious consciousness spent 
 itself in this way, the prophets could make no headway 
 in getting the people really right with God, nor could 
 they free the people from the injustice that was rampant 
 and unquestioned in the midst of all this palaver. 
 
 Amos, the first and one of the very greatest of the 
 prophets, makes ceremonial religion the " chief target 
 of his shafts." He saw the people, under the guidance 
 of their religious leaders, pouring the energy of the 
 religious consciousness into these pagan forms and 
 ceremonies, and he saw that this actually stifled the 
 real moral and spiritual life. Their altars and ritual 
 and forms and ceremonies actually hid the living God. 
 To go to the temple or church, to duly offer the sacrifice, 
 to chant the sacred songs, to repeat the prayers all 
 of this became a mere routine which, offered as a sub- 
 
l6 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 stitute for real righteousness in the common life, dulled 
 the social conscience, and made social insight impossible. 
 
 3. The Ridicule of Amos. 
 
 To Amos judgment must therefore begin at the 
 House of God. Not that Amos wished to attack this 
 ceremonial and ritualism as a thing in itself. He 
 attacked it because the people made it take the place 
 of Social Justice, and gave moral sanction to the 
 existing social conditions. We of the Social Revolution 
 think we go far when we declare that modern religion is 
 bulwarking the injustice of Capitalism. Amos went 
 
 further. He looked upon these religious places as the 
 very fountain of the social corruption, for the greater 
 priests were admitted to councils of State, and became 
 associated in feelings and interests with the corrupt and 
 tyrannical aristocracy, " and were as notorious as the 
 lords temporal for neglect of law and justice/* Amos 
 utterly repudiated the entire cult and all its doings. He 
 scorned it. He ridiculed it. He caricatured it. In one 
 place, after an outburst upon it, in which he calls the 
 very worship blasphemy and transgression, he actually 
 goes on to say, in the original Hebrew, " The house of 
 God shall go to the devil ! " For they had made it no 
 longer the house of God. 
 
 God speaks through Amos with the utmost abhor- 
 rence of the whole ceremonial activity, and in the same 
 breath calls for the real righteousness of justice in the 
 national life. " I hate, I loathe your festivals," said 
 the Lord. " Your thank-offering of fatted calves, I 
 will not look at them." To their religious music, the 
 finest the art of the day could produce, God will stop 
 his ear. " Let cease from me the noise of thy song ! To 
 the playing of thy viols I will not listen." " But let 
 justice roll on like water, and righteousness like an 
 unfailing stream." 
 
 4. The Denunciation of isaiah. 
 
 Isaiah adds his terrible denunciation of this ritualistic 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 1 7 
 
 substitute for social justice. Sabbaths and holy days, 
 prayers and songs, tithes and offerings all these 
 offered to the God of this great universe as if he were a 
 pagan deity God utterly despises. No commentary 
 can add vigour to the vehement scorn of the old prophet 
 to the whole of it. " To what purpose is the multitude 
 of your sacrifices unto me, saith the Lord. I am full of 
 the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts. 
 . . Bring no more vain oblations ; incense is an 
 abomination unto me . . . your prayer meeting, 
 even, is iniquity .... Yea, when ye make 
 many prayers I will not hear ; your hands are full Of 
 blood . . . seek justice . . . relieve the 
 oppressed . . . though your sins be red like 
 crimson they shall be as wool/' 
 
 5. Hosea and Malachi. 
 
 When Hosea, like John in the Apocalypse, beholds 
 the new earth wherein justice and righteousness shall 
 be established, he sees no temple therein, but the life 
 
 and health and freedom of the people. Malachi 
 
 declared that the priests were for light to the masses, 
 as shepherds unto the sheep. " The revelation of 
 truth " was to be on the lips of the priest. But they 
 had failed. They had neglected the sheep. They 
 stood by and let the pastures be taken away from the 
 sheep. The light that was in them had become dark- 
 ness. " And I, Jehovah, on my part have made you 
 contemptible to all people, and abased, in proportion as 
 ye kept not My ways and had respect to persons in 
 teaching the law/' 
 
 Thus we see the bitterness of the attack on formal 
 religion made by the prophets was made because the 
 priests and people poured the moral and religious 
 energy into religiousness instead of into righteousness. 
 Such a state of affairs had to be interrupted. It is a 
 significant fact that the attack upon modern 
 religion which arises in the Social Revolution through- 
 uot the world at the present time is made on similar 
 
I 8 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 grounds. The Socialists have no reason to meddle 
 with any form of religion that people may choose to 
 indulge in. But when that religion exalts itself as the 
 will of God over the souls of the people, and turns the 
 moral energies of the people away from the simple 
 righteousness of brotherhood and social justice, and 
 
 actually sustains and sanctifies injustice, then it is open 
 
 to attack as a menace to the freedom of the people on 
 the ground of being a moral sanction to the injustice of 
 Capitalism. 
 
 6. The Prophets and Religious Emotionalism. 
 
 The third substitute for genuine, everyday righteous- 
 ness is religious emotionalism. This found expression 
 in ancient Israel in the teachings of what the prophets 
 call the " false prophets/' These were not priests 
 administering ritual, but teachers of theology and 
 morality. Their religious activity had degenerated 
 into a mere profession or trade. Amos felt compelled 
 to declare he did not belong to that profession. They 
 were of two classes the one a sort of emotional 
 evangelists and the other a more sedate preaching 
 class. Professor George Adam Smith thus describes 
 them : " They went about in bands. They were 
 rilled with an infectious enthusiasm, by which they 
 excited each other and all sensitive persons whom they 
 touched. They stirred up this enthusiasm by singing, 
 playing upon instruments, and dancing ; its results 
 were frenzy, the tearing of clothes, and prostration. 
 The same phenomena have appeared in every religion 
 in paganism often, and several times within Chris- 
 tianity. They may be watched to-day among the 
 dervishes of Islam, who, by singing, by swaying of 
 their bodies, and repeating the Divine name, and 
 dwelling on the love and ineffable power of God, work 
 themselves into an excitement which ends in prostra- 
 tion and often in insensibility/' Even Saul got into 
 one of these groups and " got under the power/' stripped 
 off his clothes, and lay prostrate a day and a night. 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. I(^ 
 
 The more sedate and respectable of these false 
 prophets were simply preachers of a religion without 
 vision, that was fully at peace with existing evils. 
 
 " They were not always conscious liars. They were 
 the mouthpiece of the average popular opinion. " They 
 corresponded to those modern preachers who act as 
 eulogists of existing conditions, not because they 
 desire to deceive the people, but because they are really 
 charmed with things as they are, and have never had a 
 vision from God to shake their illusion. "- 
 (Rauschenbusch) . 
 
 So long, then, as the people believed that it was 
 pleasing to God to develop a personal, subjective 
 ecstasy, by singing and praying and contemplation, 
 and so long as they thought to please God by accepting 
 and living the poor, empty morality taught by the false 
 prophets, just so long the real righteousness for which 
 the prophets stood could make no headway. Hence the 
 fearful condemnation visited upon these false teachers 
 in the prophetic literature. They were blind leaders 
 of the blind. We find a similar castigation of such men 
 in the teaching of Jesus not that He condemned them 
 for what they did, but that they made their pharasaic 
 morality a substitute for genuine social justice and 
 righteousness. They fasted, prayed, and tithed mint 
 and anise and cummin, but forgot infinitely more 
 important things justice and mercy, and the faith in 
 which these naturally and inevitably grow. 
 
 A passage from Professor George Adam Smith will 
 reveal at once the secret of their false prophecy, and 
 show how it affected the relation of the rich and the 
 poor. " Micah's tyrants, too, had religion to support 
 them. A number of hireling prophets, whom we have 
 seen both Amos and Hosea attack, gave their blessing 
 to the social system which crushed the poor, for they 
 shared its profits." (Mark the modern parallel which 
 the Social Revolution discloses). " Those false pro- 
 phets lived upon the alms of the rich, and flattered 
 according as they were fed." At Ahab's table sat 
 
2O THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 four hundred of these fellows " subserviency to the 
 powerful made them liars/' " To them Micah devotes 
 the second oracle of chapter three. And we find 
 confirmed by his words the principle we laid down 
 before, that in that age the one great difference between 
 the false and the true prophet was what it has been in 
 every age since then till now an ethical difference, and 
 not a difference of dogma, or tradition, or ecclesiastical 
 note. The false prophet spoke, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, 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 the people. Ethical insight and courage, burning 
 indignation of wrong, clear vision of the facts of the 
 day this was what Jehovah's spirit put into him, this 
 was what Micah felt to be inspiration " . . . 
 
 7. The Prophet of the Poor. 
 
 Micah has been called the " Prophet of the Poor." 
 A simple, natural reading of his book will reveal the 
 message of the prophet, and disclose in one short lesson 
 all I have said, and show how the message of these 
 great Hebrew reformers corresponds in spirit and 
 direction with the present Social Revolution. Micah 
 pleads the cause of the people against the land-hungry 
 and the powerful commercial classes. The terrible 
 indignation of the seer is aroused at the thought that 
 his human brothers should be at the mercy of the greed 
 of the economically strong. Then he turns upon the 
 regular orthodox ministry of the day, who had flattered 
 these rich and powerful into their sense of self-righteous- 
 ness and justified their social injustice. His moral and 
 spiritual message he relates closely and almost extremely 
 with social conditions. I have no doubt that he daily 
 saw the bitter lives of the poor all about him, and the 
 luxury and pride of those who had gathered the surplus 
 from the labour of the people. His heart broke. He 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 21 
 
 burst forth with the Word of God. To Micah is 
 attributed the loftiest passage of moral and spiritual 
 vision in the Old Testament, and this sublime passage 
 is the climax of his message : 
 
 " Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord, and bow 
 myself before the high God ? 
 
 " Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with 
 calves of a year old ? 
 
 " Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams 
 or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ? 
 
 " Shall I give even my first-born for my transgression 
 the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? " 
 
 And the implied answer is No ! a thousand times 
 No ! Of what good is all this ceremonial, or sacrifice, 
 or palaver, or bowings to God or man ? 
 
 What then ? 
 
 " He hath showed thee, man, what is good ; and 
 what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do Justice 
 and to love mercy, and to walk humbly, unpretentious- 
 ly, unostentatiously with thy God." 
 
 And what doth the Lord of heaven and earth require 
 of us but the same ! 
 
 IV. 
 FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS. 
 
 As I have re- written this matter on the prophets to 
 reduce it to its narrow limits, I felt that I had, perhaps, 
 over-stated the national, social, and economic signifi- 
 cance of the work of these men. But when I re-read 
 their lives and words from the Old Testament I am 
 more than ever convinced that this phase of the 
 influence of Hebrew Prophetism has never been suffi- 
 ciently offered to the spiritual consciousness of Christen- 
 dom. 
 
 I am ready to confess that these prophets were 
 mystics, healers, miracle workers, illuminati. They 
 were no doubt men of silence and solitude and medita- 
 
22 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 tion, coming forth into action in civilisation. But 
 when they came forth they did not come imposing 
 ceremonies or rituals upon the people, nor speaking 
 about affairs religious, as we understand that word. 
 They burst into the raw, real life of the people, and dis- 
 closed its lies and ignorance in the light of Truth and 
 Justice. 
 
 All the modern critics of the prophetic literature 
 make this Social Radicalism stand out supreme. There 
 are not two sides to the question. Whatever else these 
 mighty men were, whatever other message can be 
 gathered from their writings, this social revolutionism 
 in the name of Jehovah is pre-eminent. If any pro- 
 minent preacher in London or New York would fill his 
 sermons or books with such vehement social teachings, 
 so plain, straight, undiluted, and frequent, he would 
 become a nuisance to our respectable church-going 
 classes. No petty moralising or eloquent treatment 
 of other themes sandwiched in would atone for such 
 utterances social and economic. 
 
 1. Renan's Conclusions. 
 
 In the prefatory word I have counselled my readers 
 to pursue this subject further by the study of the 
 books to which I have referred. In previous references 
 I have not mentioned the critical work of Renan on the 
 Prophets of Israel. And now I cannot do better than 
 offer some conclusions from his work, all of which sus- 
 tain the main points of argument which I have 
 presented concerning these great Hebrew teachers. 
 The testimony is complete that they were social 
 teachers, emancipators of the people, scorning mere 
 religionism, crying aloud for social righteousness, 
 defying kings and priests, and voicing the cry of the 
 voiceless. 
 
 Renan declares that the distinctive character of 
 Israel as a people commences with the prophets. 
 It is thru prophecy that Israel occupies a place in the 
 
AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 23 
 
 history of the world. This extraordinary development 
 of prophetism is, as it were, the main trunk of the 
 religious history of the world. The aim of Jehovah, in 
 taking pains that Israel should be educated as a holy 
 people, was the triumph of Social Justice. It is, 
 above all, by the conception of Providence and of 
 Social Justice in the earth that the Hebrew develop- 
 ment differs from all peoples. The Hebrew prophet 
 never appeals to rewards and punishments beyond the 
 grave. He hungers for Justice, and for speedy Justice. 
 An unjust world is in the eyes of God a monstrosity. 
 The Day of the Lord is a day of radical revolution : the 
 triumph of the weak, the confusion of the mighty. Zion 
 shall be the capital of a regenerated world in which 
 Justice Shall reign. A history of the origin of Chris- 
 tianity, if begun at the time when the primitive 
 Christian ideas were formed would have to start from 
 Isaiah. 
 
 " The Hebrew Prophets," writes Renan, " are true 
 protestants, reformers, and puritans. Not without 
 reason were their writings the habitual literary food 
 of the great agitatiors of the sixteenth century. 
 Inability to divide politics and religion is peculiar to 
 both." The priesthoods both at Jerusalem and 
 Bethel were frequently the means of retarding and 
 thwarting the essential mission of Israel. But these 
 prophets were not connected with services or sacrifices. 
 It was far from the temples, in valleys or caverns 
 11 that the most true, most just, and most democratic 
 God of that period inspired the profound sentiments, 
 swelling hearts, and violent indignation which have 
 counted among the vital pulsations of the heart of 
 humanity." This influence of Israel, unequalled in 
 human history, was not in the hands of wise kings or 
 sensible politicians, " but in the heart of visionaries, 
 utopists, and inspired democrats who commanded 
 revolutions and made and unmade dynasties. These 
 stern seers of Israel were unintentionally emancipators, 
 for they contended against the worst of tyrannies, 
 
24 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 the connivance of ignorant crowds with a degraded 
 priesthood." 
 
 2. Of Elijah, Amos, Isaiah. 
 
 Renan says that the biography of Elijah remains 
 like the powerful leaven of future revolutions. Tracked 
 by kings like a wild beast, he defies them with a 
 supreme impertinence. Amos was a malcontent. 
 The bulk of the writings, Assyrian, Egyptian, and 
 Chinese, is untruthful, and in the presence of kings, 
 adulatory. Not so Amos. The Book of Amos is the 
 first example of irreconcileable Journalism ever written. 
 The prophets were open-air Journalists reciting their 
 own production, adding to it, and often interpreting it 
 by some symbolical act. At a time when the idea of 
 right scarcely existed,, these extraordinary men 
 
 assumed the position of defenders of the weak and the 
 
 oppressed. Isaiah is the greatest of a race of giants, 
 the classical genius of Judaism, the tribune of Justice, 
 the inspired soul, the acting conscience of Israel. He 
 was not one of the sacerdotal caste. Hosea writes 
 with the fierce vigour of a man of the people. 
 He even employs their slang, terse, abrupt, penetrating. 
 According to Hosea, the priests have deserted the true 
 worship of Jehovah, seeking only to enrich themselves 
 with offerings. They live upon the guilt and sin of the 
 people, w r hich they artificially create. Bethel, that is 
 the House of God, shall go to Beth-aven, that is the 
 devil. Thorns and thistles shall come up on the altars 
 and holy places. Sacrifices are useless and an offence. 
 The Lord demands righteousness and Justice, and that 
 speedily. Such is the great and majestic message of 
 the Hebrew Prophets. 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 There are three great realities of our time which 
 constitute the points of thought in the argument which 
 I wish to place before you the Capitalist System of 
 Industry, the Socialist Movement, and the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 The Capitalist System is the present form or mode 
 of relationship which we bear to one another in the 
 struggle for a living, and to the land, the machinery, 
 and the products of labor by which we secure a living. 
 Capitalism is the most complex, colossal, and world- 
 wide system of society that has ever existed in the 
 history of mankind. 
 
 The Socialist Movement is a political and moral 
 revolt of the working classes against the intolerable 
 injustices of Capitalism, and for the establishment of 
 the Co-operative Commonwealth in the place of this 
 competitive, monopolistic system. Socialism is the 
 most stupendous organized movement of the workers 
 of the world for industrial emancipation, through 
 political action that history records. 
 
 The Church is the official institution for the in- 
 struction of the people in religious life and moral 
 conduct. Its sphere of influence as an institution is 
 practically co-extensive with Capitalism. The trader 
 and the missionary sail in the same ship. And the 
 Socialist finds the church in possession of the field 
 wherever he goes. 
 
 For over fifteen years I have been active in spread- 
 ing the truths of Socialism throughout England, Canada, 
 and the United States. I was led into the Socialist 
 movement through one of the deepest spiritual ex- 
 periences of my life. To me Socialism is an inevit- 
 able logic of the kingdom of righteousness on the 
 
2 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 earth. For all these years I have grieved over the 
 hostility and indifference of the Christian pastors and 
 people to this great cause of humanity. The greatest 
 moral hindrance to the Socialist movement is the 
 negative quality of social conscience among church 
 people. The excessive individualism of their moral 
 instruction leaves them indifferent to the social prob- 
 lem. As a rule a church member has no acutely 
 awakened conscience concerning the wrongs and in- 
 justices of Capitalism. He lacks social vision. He 
 has never studied human sorrow or suffering or sin 
 in the light of the economic conditions in which men 
 live. The average church member has no moral en- 
 thusiasm for that Social Justice and Economic Free- 
 dom for the people which Socialism proposes. I be- 
 lieve that this condition of the church is hostile to 
 the spirit of Christ, and a menace to the Kingdom 
 of God on the earth. It is for the purpose of turn- 
 ing the moral and spiritual energy of the Christians 
 from their ignoble support of Capitalism, and to 
 consecrated devotion to the Socialist movement that 
 this pamphlet is written. 
 
 1 The Preachers and the Bible. 
 
 You, the preachers of the Will of God, are the 
 active, aggressive agents in expounding the Bible to 
 the mind and conscience of the people. You number 
 hundreds of thousands. You occupy a place of undue 
 importance and influence among men. You are col- 
 lecting over five hundred dollars every minute from 
 the people for the professed purpose of teaching their 
 consciences and training them in the Will of God 
 the Bible being your text book. 
 
 You are the educators of the people as to what is 
 right and what is wrong. Not only so, but your 
 moral appeal to the conscience and the will is en- 
 forced by your religious teaching: religious teach- 
 ing that claims to determine the eternal destiny of 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 3 
 
 human souls. You claim to be called by God himself 
 to teach the truth and duty to men: and then you 
 claim that the eternal and unending condition of souls 
 hangs upon their acceptance or rejection, their obed- 
 ience or disobedience to your teaching. This is the 
 secret of your power over men your professed re- 
 lation to their eternal destiny. 
 
 Now this is a terrible assumption, and if it were 
 not so common it would appear to be a colossal and 
 unguaranteed assumption quite beyond our contempla- 
 tion that any human being whatsoever should ever 
 assume such power in relation to any other. But 
 since this assumption is acceded to by millions of 
 people you become, in a truly awful sense, the con- 
 trollers and disposers and keepers of the conscience 
 of your believing and adherent multitudes. 
 
 For twenty centuries and longer the simple multi- 
 tudes, trusting to your assumed authority have in a 
 serious measure, obeyed or feared you on pain of 
 eternal torment. What you condemn is forbidden. 
 What you condone is accepted. They are pleased to 
 feel at ease in their consciences about any institution 
 or social condition concerning which you are silent. 
 For are you not the interpreters of God? Who shall 
 gainsay your verdict? Whoever may take sacraments 
 at your hands, he is at peace with God. And what- 
 ever cause or movement professing to be good does 
 not receive your blessing and support that cause or 
 movement is a social or moral heresy worthy of neglect 
 or scorn or even persecution by the faithful. 
 
 For a score of times in twenty centuries, you have 
 defended or left unaccused that which the awakening 
 conscience and quickened intelligence of the people 
 has finally reprobated and utterly eschewed. For a 
 score of times you have placed the condemnation of 
 your assumed moral authority upon movements of 
 the people that finally have proved to be the very 
 sacredest efforts of the human race. 
 
4 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 I have just read "Studies in Christianity/ 7 by Prot. 
 Borden P. Bowne, of Boston, one of the profoundest 
 thinkers in the Methodist Episcopal church. In this 
 book, published in 1909, Prof. Bowne makes the fol- 
 lowing confession: 'The authority of God and con- 
 science has been invoked for numberless crudities, 
 imbecilities, and iniquities, and has been made the 
 mainstay of political and ecclesiastical oppression. . . 
 the conventional social conscience has often been the 
 
 bulwark of blind conservatism and oppression 
 
 One acquainted with history can truthfully address 
 the Church, considered as an ecclesiastical organiza- 
 tion and say: Which of the prophets has not the 
 Church persecuted? What new truth is there that 
 the Church has not opposed? What mental or moral 
 or social or political progress is there that the Church 
 has not protested against; and what tyranny or op^ 
 pression is there but the Church has not espoused and 
 supported? . . . whether in government or in morals, 
 or in social forms, and religious thinking, the most 
 bitter and determined enemy of progress has been the 
 ecclesiastical organization. About this there can be 
 no question .... If the Church could have had its 
 way, modern civilization would never have developed, 
 and humanity would have been ruined. We should 
 have been living in filth and squalor and superstition, 
 and intellectual abjectness of every kind. . . . Only 
 the instinctive and irresistible impulse of human nature, 
 whereby it has vindicated its own rights has saved 
 humanity from destruction by religion/' 
 
 And now we are again at a great crisis in human 
 history a crisis coming to concrete form in the eco- 
 nomic, political, and moral issue between Capitalism 
 and Socialism. What shall be the attitude of the 
 interpreters of the Will of God in this titanic strug- 
 gle? By open defense of Capitalism or by silence 
 concerning this unjust system, are you going to give 
 your people a lead against the Socialist movement? 
 Or are you going to voice the great social truths of 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 5 
 
 Scripture, and inspire the moral and spiritual powers 
 of the people to a peaceful solution of this Supreme 
 Issue of the Times? It is in this connection that I 
 wish to present to you The Bible Argument for 
 Socialism. 
 
 2. Capitalism and Socialism Defined. 
 
 Before proceeding with the argument in detail, let 
 us briefly define Capitalism and Socialism. 
 
 Men must live. In order to live they must have 
 the products of labor. These cannot be secured with- 
 out the labor of the worker. He cannot work with- 
 out access to land or machinery or both. Land, ma- 
 chinery, labor, products, and the laborer himself 
 these are the series involved in Bread-Getting. 
 
 Now under Capitalism, the land, the machinery, and 
 the products of human labor are all open to the private 
 ownership and private administration of private in- 
 dividuals or corporations for their private profit. 
 Hence we have a universal commercial gamble for 
 railroads, lands, coal, iron, steel, wool, cotton, &c. 
 The inevitable outcome of this vast game is the de- 
 velopment of trusts and combinations of the most 
 astounding magnitude. The social results are seen in 
 overwork, and unemployment, pauperism, crime, pros- 
 titution and poverty. We behold an intense struggle 
 for bare existence on the part of millions of our 
 people and a few millionaires with their almost in- 
 calculable wealth in control of the means of life of the 
 many. The upshot of this gamble and monopoly of 
 industry is a veritable trading in the very bodies and 
 souls of human beings. 
 
 The program of Socialism is that of Social Owner- 
 ship and democratic management of the basic industry 
 of the cities, states and nation. 
 
 What all the people socially need the people should 
 socially own. 
 
 What the individual needs the state should guaran- 
 tee him the inalienable opportunity to earn. 
 
6 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 What he earns the state should secure to him by 
 preventing that exploitation of trusts and monopolies 
 which everywhere prevails today. 
 
 The postoffice system, the public schools, the fire 
 department, illustrate the Socialist principle. They 
 belong to the people. They are not conducted by 
 private capitalists or private corporations for private 
 profit. We conduct them for the use and profit of all. 
 
 This same principle should apply at least to rail- 
 roads, express companies, street railways, telegraphs, 
 telephones, gas, water, electric and power supply. 
 
 Then the necessary industrial establishments, auxil- 
 iary to all these systems should belong to the people. 
 
 Following these all the large scale productive equip- 
 ment of the necessaries of life should be socially 
 owned. None of these things should be left to mon- 
 opoly or market manipulation by private individuals. 
 
 The state should make laws permitting every town- 
 ship, county, or city to adopt the policy of public 
 ownership and democratic management of any form 
 of local industry that the people might elect laun- 
 dries, bakeries, shoe shops, clothing establishments, 
 food depots, coal and wood yards &c. 
 
 Taxation of the unearned increment of land values 
 and of unearned incomes will destroy land monopoly 
 and thus keep the way open for homes, and farms, 
 and co-operative farm colonies in the rural districts, 
 and thus make for that isolation, and real freedom of 
 the individual and of family life which Socialism seeks. 
 
 For a long time to come large fields of industry 
 may be still left to private individuals. But the huge 
 monopolies of transportation, communication and ex- 
 change and the giant trusts. in the necessities and com- 
 forts of life, must be transformed into socially owne4 
 utilities and run for public use and not for private 
 profit. 
 
 Such is the program of Socialism. In one sentence 
 the object of Socialism is to establish Social Justice in 
 the use of the basic means by which men live. 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 7 
 
 We propose to do this by due legislation. To carry 
 such legislation we seek to mass the workers and their 
 sympathizers into a political party of their own 
 
 against all political parties or factions of the Capital- 
 ist class and their sympathizers. 
 
 3. The Position Stated. 
 
 Now my argument is: That the general spirit and 
 teaching, and the historical outlook of the Bible leads 
 inevitably to a direct impeachment of the Capitalist 
 System. If the Bible is truth, then the spirit and 
 basis, the practice and outcome of Capitalism will 
 stand accused and condemned as morally wrong, and 
 the church should lead the people against that unjust 
 and unrighteous Capitalist System. 
 
 And on the other hand: With the same standard 
 of Bible judgment the general spirit and purpose and 
 program of Socialism will be found to be a practical 
 application to modern industrial problems of that 
 humane spirit and ethical trend of the teaching of the 
 Bible. And the church should be in the very van- 
 guard of the Socialist Movement advocating this So- 
 cialist cause, and bulwarking Socialist legislation, and 
 the Socialist reconstruction of industrial society. 
 
 The Social Conscience of the people, through the 
 preaching of the social message of the Bible, should 
 be awakened and turned against Capitalism as our 
 common moral and social enemy. And that same 
 moral and social energy should espouse this new mes- 
 sianic movement, and help to bring it to its sacred 
 triumph over social injustice. 
 
 The Bible naturally divides itself into three epochal 
 periods of moral and social teaching (1) that of 
 Moses, (2) of the prophets, and (3) of Jesus. In 
 each of these we will find the most overwhelming 
 moral support of the Socialist Movement. 
 
8 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 I. 
 THE WORK OF MOSES. 
 
 The argument against Capitalism and for Socialism 
 in the history of Moses stands out as plainly and un- 
 mistakably as the Great Pyramid on the sands of 
 Egypt. 
 
 Here we have a plain story of industrial oppression 
 a set of dictators and lords of the people a capital- 
 ist class of that period living in idleness and splen- 
 dor and extravagance on the product of the toil of 
 the helpless working class, and controlling their means 
 of existence. Pharaoh and his aristocracy of nobles 
 and priests is a type of industrial tyranny strikingly 
 like our present capitalism, allowing for the changes 
 of centuries. 
 
 Listen to the simple Bible narrative: "They did 
 set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their 
 burdens. The Egyptians made the children of Israel 
 to serve with rigor. And they made their lives bitter 
 with hard labor, in mortar, and in brick, and in all 
 manner of service in the field. " They took away the 
 straw and exacted the full day's work. They increased 
 their hours. The taskmasters speeded them up. And 
 the foremen lost their jobs when they did not get the 
 full tale of work out of the under slaves. 
 
 And finally these overworked, underfed, exhausted, 
 broken-spirited workers cried out in anguish of spirit 
 against their capitalistic oppressors. They sank down 
 in despair in the face of their plutocratic masters. 
 They were too fearful to resist as units, too ignorant 
 to combine. They lacked the intelligence necessary 
 for organized resistance. Their case was hopeless be- 
 yond words. The record of their sufferings and dis- 
 tress, their misery and poverty, is one long harrow- 
 ing tale of Social Injustice and economic oppression, 
 and industrial tyranny. 
 
 It is at this point in the tragedy of their slavery 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 9 
 
 that the name of God is introduced. Whoever God 
 is, whatever guess any theology may offer us, the 
 most striking character of the Divine Being as re- 
 vealed in the books of Moses, is that God is abso- 
 lutely against the oppressor, no matter how steeped 
 in religion Pharaoh and his soothsayers may be; and 
 absolutely for the social deliverance of the exploited 
 workers from industrial injustice. 
 
 No juggling with Bible texts can ever make the 
 common people ultimately believe that the God of 
 Moses is a God whose spirit can give moral support 
 to Capitalism, or to any other form of exploitation of 
 human lives: "And the children of Israel sighed by 
 reason of their bondage, and they cried, and their 
 cry came up unto God by reason of their bondage. " 
 There you have it. God is here revealed as hearing 
 the cry of physically exploited men, and directing a 
 man to organize them for resistance to the oppressor. 
 It is God who inspires him to lead them to social and 
 economic freedom. And from first to last this char- 
 acter of God in the Mosaic account and this meaning 
 to his presence in history never once takes a second- 
 ary place. 
 
 1. The Work of Moses. 
 
 Follow that Divine Voice in the first dialogue with 
 Moses. Mark the awful simplicity and directness of 
 the charge: 
 
 "I have surely seen the affliction of my people: 
 The cry of the children of Israel is come unto me: 
 and I have seen the oppression wherewith the Egyp- 
 tians oppress them." 
 
 Moreover, God does not seek for individualistic ac- 
 cusations of vice and drink and idleness against these 
 people: "I have heard their cry by reason of their 
 taskmasters. 9 ' 
 
 Still further. There is no religious message so- 
 called about spiritual things. The priesthood of Egypt 
 
10 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 never tired of defining God and expounding the doc- 
 trines of the immortality of the soul and the resur- 
 rection of the dead. God speaks to Moses concern- 
 ing the social, economic, and industrial deliverance 
 of the people a deliverance to an actual physical 
 condition of industrial freedom in the world where 
 they must get a living. The subject of thought is as 
 materialistic as that of the rawest socialist on a soap- 
 box. 
 
 And to Moses: "Come, now, therefore, and I will 
 send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou may'st bring forth 
 my people out of Egypt. " Thus the distinct call of 
 Moses was to be a labor leader, to inspire, organize, 
 and free these exploited workers. 
 
 Prof. Kent, in his recent critical book, " The His- 
 torical Bible/' tells us that after biblical criticism has 
 done its utmost with the books of Moses, the work 
 of Moses as a great social deliverer of a working class 
 from their economic oppressors, stands out in bold 
 relief. He says that Moses experienced "a vivid 
 conception of Jehovah's transcendent holiness and 
 majesty," and immediately "an irresistible impression 
 of the needs of the oppressed Hebrews, of the possii 
 bility of their deliverance and of his own obligation 
 to return and lead them forth." The holiness and 
 majesty of God is the inspiration of the Social Mis- 
 sion of Moses, and the ground of the economic eman- 
 cipation for his people. And from first to last 
 throughout his inspired career this social saviorship 
 never takes a secondary place. 
 
 2. The Career of Moses. 
 
 This mission, and this conception of God turns the 
 whole course of his life. For this he attacks Pharaoh 
 right upon his throne. His miracles are wrought for 
 this purpose. To this end the plagues strike the op- 
 pressor. The passover is the commemorative feast 
 of deliverance from the slave driver, as the Song of 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 11 
 
 Moses is the jubilee ode of their actual escape to free 
 soil. The Sabbath was not instituted for religious 
 gatherings or ceremonies of any kind, but as a day 
 of rest and recuperation and recreation for man and 
 beast, unlike the incessant toil of life under the task- 
 masters. The mighty intercessory prayers of Moses 
 are for bread and water the first material necessi- 
 ties for his people, and type of all the physical basis 
 of life. "If Jehovah delighteth in us," cried Moses, 
 "then he will bring us into this land which floweth 
 with milk and honey . . . ." The judges he appointed 
 to assist him were to be men who "hated unjust gain." 
 In the laws of Deuteronomy, Justice toward the resi- 
 dent alien, and kindness to the poor are urged "be- 
 cause Israel was a slave in the land of Egypt and 
 Jehovah thy God redeemed thee." All later Hebrew 
 literature abounds in references to this event. The 
 words " Salvation " and " Redemption " are first used 
 of their emancipation from their capitalistic exploiters. 
 The Psalms would be meaningless without this his- 
 toric background. Amos and Hosea appeal to it as 
 the supreme reason why Israel should be loyal to 
 Jehovah. The goodness and power of God had been 
 manifested in delivering them from the industrial op- 
 pressor and leading them to a land of plenty. 
 
 In forty long and tedious years the vision of com- 
 plete social and economic freedom for his people never 
 faded from the soul of this mighty man. Nothing 
 could show more vividly how deeply this mission com- 
 manded his inmost being, and how vital it was in all 
 his fellowship with God than the last sacred hour of 
 his glorious career: "And Moses went to the top of 
 Pisgah and Jehovah showed him all the land and 
 said, This is the land which I have promised with an 
 oath ... I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes' 
 . . . and Jehovah buried him . . . ' 
 
 The last thought of his life, the last sight of his 
 eye, was not a disclosure of bliss in heaven for him- 
 
12 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 self, but the land of freedom on earth for his people. 
 
 How sublime! It was such a man of whom it is 
 written, "Jehovah knew him face to face." 
 
 3. -Socialism in Canaan. 
 
 It is significant to note that the three great social 
 bases of the commonwealth founded in Canaan cor- 
 respond exactly to three great demands of Socialism. 
 
 (1) The land was socially owned, and socially 
 administered in behalf of all the tribes and all the 
 families, the year of Jubilee securing again to any 
 that which had been lost by the misfortunes of affairs. 
 Landlordism was utterly forbidden and was practically 
 unknown. 
 
 (2) Interest on money or on any loan was abso- 
 lutely prohibited. " Thou shalt not lend upon usury 
 to thy brother, usury of money, usury of victuals, 
 usury of anything that is lent upon usury." One of 
 the most respectable and accredited methods of rob- 
 bing the people in our time, is listed in the Mosaic 
 code among the vilest of social crimes. On the con- 
 trary, gratuitous lending was commanded, lest the poor 
 might fall under the greed of the money lender. 
 
 (3) The principle by which tools or machinery was 
 to be secured to the use of the workman is strongly 
 stated in the social law of the millstone. " No man 
 shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: 
 for he taketh a man's life to pledge." Modern ma- 
 chinery is both the upper and nether millstone of 
 the workers today, and indeed the very life basis of 
 the working-class. The object of Socialism is to 
 guarantee access of every worker to this means of 
 life, now in the hands of the capitalist class. Every 
 hour Capitalism continues " the upper and nether 
 millstone" of modern machinery is being taken away 
 from the people. 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 13 
 
 4. The Spirituality of Such Materialism. 
 
 This materialism of the Divine Being is a revela- 
 tion of the deepest spirituality. God's determination 
 to bring these people out of industrial oppression was 
 his way of showing that the " heart of the Eternal 
 is most wonderfully kind." Your moral support of 
 Capitalism and indifference to Socialism, by which the 
 working class is kept in the grip of plutocracy is 
 atheism and infidelity to that God. 
 
 Moses' conviction that he could not live in peace 
 with God unless he moved heaven and earth, seas 
 and thrones to deliver these people from Social In- 
 justice, was the revelation of his love to man, and 
 of their interests up to the very highest. 
 
 God's materialism his interest in land, money, 
 tools, slaves, bread and water, for the people is a 
 revelation of the Spirituality of the Divine Nature. 
 The corresponding Materialism of Moses is the simple 
 open vision of his soul, that takes it for granted that 
 a whipped slave is infinitely more valuable than all 
 the obelisks, palaces, pyramids, and religious temples 
 and paraphernalia that a proud, haughty and ruthless 
 plutocracy can erect. We would to God that the 
 modern men who profess to speak for God could get 
 baptized with the same materialism of Moses and 
 Moses' God. 
 
 The churches and preachers today who by open 
 teaching or the consent of silence give moral support 
 to Capitalism, are faithless to the Spirit of Jehovah, 
 and are more akin to the priesthoods of Egypt that 
 bulwarked Pharaoh in his oppression, than to this 
 moral and spiritual giant who championed the cause 
 of slaves, and lead them to economic freedom, this 
 giant who inspires us of the Socialist Movement, even 
 yet after forty centuries to a corresponding purpose 
 and program. The church is called to repentance for 
 its subservience to the modern Pharaohs. 
 
 This part of the Bible, I say, stands out against 
 
14 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 Capitalism and for Socialism, as plainly and unescap- 
 ably to an honest heart as the Great Pyramid stands 
 out on the sands of Egypt to an honest eye. 
 
 I appeal to the simple hearts of thousands in the 
 Christian churches and ask you how can you read 
 this story of Moses, from your Bibles, and teach it to 
 your children, and then continue to uphold by your 
 moral influence and by your votes this unjust Capit- 
 alist System? If the same God who spoke to Moses 
 speaks to you, can you not hear the call to come with 
 us of the Socialist Movement and lead the people out 
 from under this modern Pharaoh? Is it not an awful 
 perversion of Scripture to so subdue its social teach- 
 ing as to give moral support to this Juggernaut Sys- 
 tem? With all sincerity I ask you to renounce your 
 sinful allegiance to such a wrong against humanity, 
 and to cast in your lot with the struggling people 
 against Capitalism. "I have heard their cry by rea- 
 son of their taskmasters .... saith the Spirit .... 
 come, now, and bring them forth to freedom." 
 
 II 
 THE PROPHETS. 
 
 The second great division of the Bible is the books 
 of the prophets, a literature dating from about 800 
 B. C. 
 
 No writings in the world throb with such insistent 
 impeachment of social and economic injustice and 
 such powerful and irresistible appeals for social right- 
 eousness as the utterances of the Hebrew prophets. 
 The excessive individualism of modern religion has 
 almost entirely covered up the social significance of 
 their wonderful message. 
 
 1. The Historical Setting of Their Message. 
 
 The Jews were then passing put of the simple ag- 
 ricultural stage into a commercial career among the 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 15 
 
 nations. The story of the social conditions in which 
 these prophets appear reads like pages from the his- 
 tory of our own times, in which an age of machin- 
 ery, and private capitalism, with all the attendant 
 wrongs of rampant commercialism has drawn the 
 people from the land and herded them in great cities, 
 there to be exploited as helpless victims caught in 
 the maelstrom of world-forces. 
 
 Historians of the time of Amos and Micah and 
 Isaiah tell us that the newly developed trade fell into 
 the hands of plutocrats as they trampled on the an- 
 cient laws. Wealth concentrated in the hands of the 
 few. Huge private estates were formed out of the 
 once common lands. The poor landowners were 
 bought out or fell into the power of their rich cred- 
 itors, or were ejected by violence and false judgment. 
 The peasant proprietors were destroyed. The yeo- 
 manry perished. The cities grew apace, filled with 
 the exiles from the land. Here they met the severest 
 forces of commercialism. 
 
 The aristocracy racked their brains for new ways 
 of consuming the surplus wealth that they had 
 wrung from the poor. They built magnificent pal- 
 aces furnished in ivory and beautified with art. They 
 had summer houses and winter houses, town houses 
 and country houses, while the poor were crowded in 
 their miserable quarters. This plutocracy enriched the 
 temples of religion with their generous gifts, and lav- 
 ishly endowed the religious teachers of the day. 
 
 The masses were meanwhile ground down by op- 
 pression, and the cry of distress filled the land. Micah 
 says that the wealthy "stripped the skin off the poor, 
 and the flesh off their bodies. " Zechariah declares 
 that the rich and powerful dealt with the people as 
 "buyers and sellers of sheep. " Amos calls them to 
 repent of a social injustice so dark as to "darken 
 the earth in the clear day." Isaiah pronounces 
 Judgment on the ruling class: "For ye have eaten 
 
16 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your 
 houses! What mean ye that ye beat my people in 
 pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?" 
 
 Such, then were the social conditions in Judah and 
 Israel when the prophets burst upon them with the 
 oracles of Jehovah. 
 
 2. The Burden of Their Message. 
 
 Now what is the burden of the message of these 
 men of God? Was it the message of the religious 
 revivalist? Was it individualistic and ecclesiastical 
 and priestly, dealing only with the personal, spiritual 
 life and private morality, ignoring the social needs 
 of the people, and the social sins incarnate in social 
 institutions? Nay, verily. The very opposite is the 
 case. These prophets did not strain at gnats of in- 
 dividual sin and swallow camels of social injustice. 
 They dealt primarily with the social morality of the 
 whole people, as a nation, as expressed in the insti- 
 tutions, functions, and practices of the national life. 
 
 These Hebrew prophets were social reformers of 
 the most radical type, as the most casual reading 
 of their lives and words will reveal. They caught 
 the spirit of Moses and of Moses' God. Moses had 
 conspired against the tyranny of Pharaoh, and or- 
 ganized the workers into a vast labor union and 
 marched them to freedom. And the prophets resist 
 the new social and industrial tyrannies of their own 
 people, and plead the cause of Social Justice, for the 
 poor. 
 
 Elijah attacked the king because of injustice in 
 land inclosure, as the Socialists of England are do- 
 ing today. To Elijah God was the refuge of the 
 oppressed and the support of the weak against the 
 mighty. The prophecies of Amos, Hosea, and Micah 
 are almost wholly social and political, calling for social 
 and economic righteousness. Joel calls upon the min- 
 isters of God to weep and wail over the industrial 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 17 
 
 distresses of the people: "All trees of the field are 
 dried up; yea, joy is abashed and away from the 
 children of men." He calls the priests to put on 
 mourning and beat their breasts because, "the food 
 is cut off the garners are desolate the corn is with- 
 ered the flocks huddle together." Ezekiel pronoun- 
 ces unmeasured woes upon the pastors who feed them- 
 selves but neglect the flock and let the strong over- 
 ride the weak. Jeremiah declares that he has been 
 sent to pull down and to tear at unjust and unholy 
 institutions, to build anew in righteousness a revo- 
 lutionist indeed who barely escaped with his life 
 from kings and nobles and priests. The first chap- 
 ter of Isaiah is the bitterest attack in all sacred 
 literature upon ceremonial religion that forgets 
 Social Justice and social righteousness. Victor 
 Hugo puts Isaiah in his list of the greatest geniuses 
 of history, and says, "He is the great reproacher 
 and fixes a date for oppressors he stands at the 
 threshold of civilization and refuses to enter." 
 
 Renan believes that this extraordinary develop- 
 ment of prophetism is the main trunk of the religious 
 history of the world. The aim of Jehovah, in taking 
 pains that Israel should be educated as a holy people 
 was the triumph of Social Justice. It is above all, 
 by the conception of Providence and of Social Justice 
 in the earth that the Hebrew development differs 
 from all peoples. The Hebrew prophet never appeals 
 to rewards and punishments beyond the grave. He 
 hungers for Justice, and for speedy Justice. An un- 
 just world, a world of oppressed humanity is in the 
 eyes of God a monstrosity. The Day of the Lord is 
 a day of Radical Revolution : the triumph of the weak, 
 the confusion of the mighty. They were unable to 
 divide politics and religion. They invaded the whole 
 struggle for existence with ethical insight as the oracle 
 of Jehovah. At a time when the idea of right scarcely 
 existed, these extraordinary men assumed the posi- 
 tion of defenders of the weak and the oppressed. 
 
18 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 They attacked kings, nobles and judges, and resisted 
 the "worst of all tyrannies the connivance of ignor- 
 ant crowds with a degraded priesthood. " 
 
 My contention is that the message of the prophets, 
 in spirit and in detail, is a powerful ethical impeach- 
 ment of the whole spirit, practice, and unjust basis 
 of modern Capitalism. And the logic of the spirit 
 and historical outlook of these great Hebrew radicals 
 is directly behind and within the spirit, purpose and 
 program of the Socialist Movement of our time. I 
 could ask no grander or more tremendous impetus to 
 the Social Revolution than a saturation of the mind 
 of the working class with the unequaled fervor and 
 vision of these great inspired Tribunes of the People, 
 these Heralds of Justice. 
 
 3. Social Justice No Substitutes. 
 
 There is one supreme distinction of the message 
 of the prophets which is particularly an argument for 
 the Socialist Cause, and pre-eminently the religious 
 need of our time. The prophets absolutely repudi- 
 ated the three grand, imposing substitutes and coun- 
 terfeits for social righteousness always offered by 
 decadent priesthoods whose spiritual teaching bul- 
 warks social injustice. These three substitutes are: 
 (1) correct theology, with an accompanying phar- 
 isaism in morals, and charity-mongering; (2) mere 
 religious emotionalism; and (3) ritualism and cere- 
 mony. These three the prophets of Israel had to 
 meet. 
 
 The religious consciousness is fundamental in man. 
 If that consciousness does not find normal expression 
 in human brotherhood, and right social and eco- 
 nomic relations, then it will become prostituted in 
 abnormal forms of expression. If any man does 
 not want Social Justice in the use of land and ma- 
 chinery for bread-getting, and to secure life and liberty 
 to the worker he does not want anything for humanity. 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 19 
 
 Any religion that dodges this issue and practices sub- 
 stitutes is vain. These three substitutes for real right- 
 eousness have to be punctured in order to fully reveal 
 the will of God as simply love and freedom love and 
 freedom in actual human relations of our common 
 work-a-day life. 
 
 1. The first substitute generally offered for real 
 downright Social Justice among men is correct 
 dogma. Even to this day this is a pleasant release 
 for the powerful oppressors of mankind. The hun- 
 dred richest exploiters and trustmakers in America 
 are members of churches. And tens of thousands of 
 the richest profit-mongers in the various cities are 
 prominent church men. They believe, or say they 
 believe, or at least give assent to the accepted ortho- 
 doxy. It is not only easy, but popular, and profitable. 
 
 This exaltation of orthodox opinion and assent to 
 dogma over simple love and brotherhood and tender 
 Justice among men dates from the adulteration of 
 primitive Christianity by Greek philosophy. There is 
 scarcely a hint of it in the teaching of Jesus. So 
 it is with the Hebrew prophets. They did not ex- 
 pound philosophical doctrines or speculative religious 
 dogmas. They appealed to the heart, to the con- 
 science to the social conscience. And when they ap- 
 pealed they did not deal with trivial offenses, or petty 
 sins, but with the manifest sins that were blighting 
 the nation sins that any man might see any time he 
 cared to look. 
 
 In this respect the Socialist Movement is singu- 
 larly identical in spirit and moral trend with the mes- 
 sage of the prophets. 
 
 2. The second grand substitute for social democ- 
 racy, as the basic element in the practical religious 
 life is religious emotionalism. The cultivators of 
 this substitute in the times of the prophets are among 
 the "false prophets" so fearfully berated in the 
 prophetic literature. One class consisted of a sort 
 
20 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 of emotional evangelists "filled with an infectious en- 
 thusiasm by which they excited each other. " Even 
 Saul "got under the power/' stripped off his clothes 
 and lay prostrate a day and a night. The other group 
 of these "false prophets" were simply preachers like 
 many today without vision, who were quite at peace 
 with existing evils. "They were not always conscious 
 liars. They were the mouthpiece of the average 
 opinion." A passage from Prof. Geo. Adam Smith 
 will reveal at once the secret of their false prophecy, 
 and show how it affected their relation to the rich 
 and the poor: "Micah's tyrants, too, had religion to 
 support them. A number of hireling prophets whom 
 we have seen both Amos and Hosea attack, gave their 
 blessing to the social system which crushed the poor, 
 for they shared its profits." (Mark the modern par- 
 allel which the Social Revolution discloses.) "Those 
 false prophets lived upon the alms of the rich, and 
 flattered according as they were fed." At Ahab's 
 table sat four hundred of these fellows "subservience 
 to the powerful had made them liars." "To them 
 Micah devotes the second oracle of chapter three. 
 And we find confirmed by his words the principle that 
 in that age the true prophet was what it has been in 
 every age since then till now an ethical difference, 
 and not a difference of dogma, or tradition, or eccles- 
 iastical note. The false prophet spoke, consciously or 
 unconsciously, for himself and his living. He sided 
 with the rich; he shut his eyes to the social condi- 
 tion 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 the people. Ethical insight and 
 courage, burning indignation of wrong, clear vision 
 of the facts of the day this was what Jehovah's 
 spirit put into him, this was what Micah felt to be 
 inspiration." 
 
 Now it is a remarkable fact that whenever in the 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 21 
 
 Christian centuries emphasis has been placed on some 
 special phase of religious emotionalism as a test of 
 discipleship, instead of determined conscious good-will 
 to men, religion has become degraded, and easily 
 trifles with real social righteousness, and strains at 
 gnats of personal conduct. We can see this in any 
 village or city right now. 
 
 The Socialist Movement exposes great social and 
 industrial iniquities, giant wrongs, colossal economic 
 robberies and indeed murders of the people, the 
 tyranny of the plutocracy and all the unrighteousness 
 directly inherent in Capitalism. Socialism like the 
 prophets is not inspiring a passing emotion of pity or 
 sympathy, or philanthropy, but is calling the deter- 
 mined conscious intelligent will of masses of men to 
 the establishment of Social Justice in actual every- 
 day human relations. In this respect the moral 
 fervor, and historical direction of Hebrew prophetism 
 finds its modern counterpart more nearly in the So- 
 cialist Movement than in any other movement or in- 
 stitution of our times, the church not excepted. 
 
 3. The Prophets and ritual. But the supreme 
 attack of the prophets was upon the religion of ritual- 
 ism and ceremonialism. As long as the people thought 
 that God could be pleased with prayers, and songs, 
 and ceremonies, and the repetition of formulae, on 
 stated high and holy days, and sacred services con- 
 ducted by robed and dignified religious officials as 
 long as the religious consciousness spent itself in 
 this way, the prophets could make no headway in 
 getting the people really right with God, nor could 
 they free the people from the injustice that was 
 rampant and unquestioned in the midst of all this 
 palaver. 
 
 The issue is plain, I am sure. Surely there can 
 be no true service or worship of the living God that 
 does not lovingly and devotedly serve humanity. 
 Surely there can be no true service to humanity that 
 
22 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 leaves men the victims of poverty, misery, unem- 
 ployment, and the tragedies of the struggle for mere 
 bread, in the presence of colossal trusts in control of a 
 handful of plutocrats, that rob and plunder the peo- 
 ple, and gamble with the resources of the nation. 
 Surely, surely any effort to please God with religious 
 palaver while ignoring these supreme wrongs and 
 awful sufferings surely such is a delusion and a 
 snare. And so the prophets taught. And so Jesus 
 taught later as he saw the rich devouring widows' 
 houses and seeking to strike a balance with God by 
 their long prayers. And with this the Socialist Move- 
 ment agrees. 
 
 (a) Amos Attack on Mere Ritualism. 
 
 Amos the first and one of the greatest of the pro- 
 phets, makes ceremonial religion the "chief target of 
 his shafts. " He saw the people, under the guidance 
 of their religious leaders, pouring the energy of the 
 religious consciousness into their pleasing religious 
 exercises on the Sabbath and other holy days. To 
 go to the temple or church, to chant the sacred songs, 
 to repeat the prayers all of this became a sanctioned 
 routine, offered as specially pleasing to God. To 
 neglect it was to be "ungodly." And it became a most 
 pleasant and profitable substitute for real social and 
 economic righteousness as it is this very day in New 
 York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Such a substi- 
 tute actually hides the living God, dulls the Social 
 Conscience, and makes insight on the great wrongs 
 and corresponding remedies, almost impossible. Per- 
 haps some devoted church member is now reading 
 these lines. How much time and energy do you give 
 to Social Justice to the Economic Freedom of the 
 people? How much do you care? Is the subject on 
 your mind? 
 
 To Amos, Judgment must begin at the house of 
 God. Not that Amps wished to attack this pleasing 
 "churchianity" of his time as a thing in itself. He 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 23 
 
 attacked it because the people made it take the place 
 of real Social Righteousness, and gave moral sanction 
 to the wrong social conditions. We of the Socialist 
 Movement think we go far when we declare that 
 modern religion, by its silence concerning Capitalism, 
 is bulwarking Social Injustice. Amos went further. 
 He looked upon these religious places as the very 
 fountain of the social corruption, for the reason that 
 the big preachers and religious functionaries of that 
 time were admitted to councils of state, associated 
 with the plutocrats of the time, and became associated 
 in feelings and interests with the corrupt and tyran- 
 nical aristocracy. Amos utterly repudiated the en- 
 tire cult and all its doings. He scorned it. He ridi- 
 culed it. He caricatured it. In one place after an 
 outburst upon it, in which he calls the very worship 
 blasphemy and transgression, he actually goes on to 
 say, in the original Hebrew, 'The house of God shall 
 go to the devil !" For thus neglecting the real human 
 interests of the people, they had made it no longer 
 the house of God. 
 
 God is represented as speaking through Amos with 
 the utmost abhorrence of the whole ceremonial ac- 
 tivity and in the same breath calls for the real right- 
 eousness of Justice in the national life. "I hate, I 
 loathe your festivals, " saith the Lord. "Your thank- 
 offering of fatted calves, I will not look at them." 
 To their religious music, the finest the art of the day 
 could produce, God will stop his ear. "Let cease from 
 me the noise of thy song! To the playing of thy 
 
 viols I will not listen but let Justice roll ^m 
 
 like water and righteousness like an unfailing 
 
 stream." Nothing could be simpler or plainer than 
 
 this. 
 
 (b) The Denunciation of Isaiah. 
 
 Isaiah adds his terrible denunciation of this sub- 
 stitute of mere church-going, and psalm-singing, and 
 religious ceremonial generally. No commentary can 
 
24 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 add vigor to the vehement scorn of the old prophet 
 to the whole of it. "To what purpose is the multi- 
 tude of your sacrifices unto me, saith the Lord. I 
 am full of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of 
 fed beasts. . . . Bring no more vain oblations; incense 
 is an abomination unto me. . . . Your prayer meeting 
 even, is iniquity . . . yea, when ye make many prayers 
 I will not hear, for your hands are full of blood/' 
 (the blood of human beings suffering the social In- 
 justice of the time.) .... therefore "Seek Justice 
 
 relieve the oppressed then though 
 
 your sins be red like crimson they shall be as wool." 
 
 Thus we see the bitterness of the attack on 
 formal religion made by the prophets was made be- 
 cause the preachers and people poured their moral 
 and religious energy into religiousness instead of 
 into righteousness. Such a state of affairs had to be 
 interrupted. Judgment had to begin at the house of 
 God. And the same has had to happen again and 
 again in human history ever since. And the same 
 must now occur again. The Socialists have no reason 
 to meddle with any form of religion that people may 
 choose to indulge in. But when that religion exalts 
 itself as the will of God over the souls of the 
 people, and turns the moral energies of the people 
 away from the simple righteousness of brotherhood 
 and Social Justice, and thus actually sustains and 
 sanctifies Capitalism, then it is open to attack as 
 a menace to the freedom of the people on the ground 
 of being a moral sanction to economic tyranny and 
 injustice. 
 
 All the modern critics of the prophetic literature 
 make this Social Radicalism stand out supreme. 
 There are not two sides to the question. Whatever 
 else these mighty men were, whatever other elements 
 can be gathered from their writings, and there are 
 such, this social revolutionism in the name of 
 Jehovah is pre-eminent If any prominent preacher 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 25 
 
 in New York or London should fill his sermons or 
 books with such vehement social teachings, so plain, 
 straight, undiluted, and frequent, he would become a 
 nuisance to our respectable church-going classes. No 
 petty moralising or eloquent treatment of other themes 
 sandwiched in would atone for such utterance con- 
 cerning the supreme curse of our time. 
 
 The logic of an honest sympathetic hearkening 
 to the message of the Hebrew prophets makes a 
 man a Socialist in our day an avowed, aggressive 
 antagonist of Capitalism. Thus the second great 
 division of Scripture stands for Socialism. 
 
 III. 
 THE LIFE OF JESUS. 
 
 The Bible is the most dangerously radical book ever 
 placed in human hands. The secret of the revolu- 
 tionary character of the Bible is that nothing ever 
 read by man places such infinite value upon human 
 personality as does this book. Presumably it is a 
 revelation of God: actually it is an interpretation oi 
 human values as opposed to every other value in the 
 world. 
 
 We have seen how in the mind of Moses who knew 
 God face to face the meanest slave in the clay pits 
 of Egypt was infinitely more valuable than the dyn- 
 asties of kings. Democracy buds early in this 
 dangerous book. As for the prophets, even their 
 vision of Jehovah, seems at times to be simply back- 
 ground in which to set the value of human personal- 
 ity. They defy kings, ridicule priesthoods and attack 
 judges, for the sake of the common people. But 
 when we come down to the prophet of Nazareth, every 
 other value seems to fade to nothingness, and the 
 meanest outcast, the lowest mudsill, the most neglec- 
 ted and forgotten specimen of humanity lights up as 
 
26 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 a gem in a dark place, and is clothed by his vision in 
 a radiance transcendent. 
 
 Men may wrangle forever over the theologies that 
 they think they dig out of the gospels, but on this 
 supreme value in the mind of Jesus of the com- 
 monest human life, the least and the last, there is 
 no dispute. He did not love fame or power or 
 money. He did not love himself. He did not love 
 his own life. He cared for nothing but human 
 beings. And if any received more care in his thought 
 than others, they were those neglected by the rest, 
 the disregarded and unthought of by the ruling classes 
 in church and state. 
 
 No mere marshalling of texts from the Gospels will 
 suffice us to prove or disprove whether the teaching 
 of Jesus leads to the impeachment of Capitalism and 
 the defence of Socialism though even by this method 
 also we Socialists have it all our own way. We must 
 somehow get a cross-section of the spirit, feel the 
 inner pulse of that majestic character in history, be- 
 fore we can satisfactorily make our argument and 
 appeal. 
 
 There is something in the Gospels that transcends 
 writers, texts, doctrines, parables and miracles. It 
 is a life a life as intangible as light a spirit. It 
 is the soul of which that wonderful story is merely 
 the body. It is the disclosure of this soul of the 
 Gospels that shall uncover the inhumanity of Capit- 
 alism and reveal the Socialist movement as a new 
 coming of the same Christ-spirit once more in the 
 human drama. 
 
 There is an unmistakable democratic coloring to 
 the whole career of Jesus that makes him an his- 
 torical heritage of the common people. Had not 
 theologies and ecclesiasticism distorted the simple 
 story, struggling slaves, and social outcasts, and the 
 people baffled by kings, tyrants, lords and capitalist 
 exploiters, in all the centuries would revere the name 
 of Jesus, as a veritable hero of the common people. 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 27 
 
 This democratic coloring of the career of Jesus is 
 not without vast social significance. Joseph was a 
 carpenter at a bench, his mother a peasant girl. While 
 she bears her unborn child, Mary sings a revolution- 
 ary song in this wise: "He hath put down the mighty 
 from their seats, he bath exalted them of low degree. 
 The poor he hath filled with good things: the rich 
 he hath sent empty away." It was to a group of the 
 comomnest laborers, namely shepherds, not to priests 
 at the temple or kings at court, that the announce- 
 ment of his birth was first made. Crowded out of the 
 poorest lodging house, Mary gives birth to her babe 
 in a stable no kings, no priests, no ruling class, no 
 aristocracy, present. When he makes his first public 
 appearance, it is in association with a socialistic agi- 
 tator, a wild unkempt Elijah, an unordained, un- 
 scheduled, unofficial prophet who was later put to 
 death, Josephus tells us, as a dangerous demagogue. 
 John was castigating the ruling classes, particularly 
 those of the church of his time, and a hint of his 
 social message is seen in the phrase: "He that hath 
 two coats give to him that hath none; he that hath 
 meat do likewise." It was under the hands of this 
 man, surrounded by a crowd of common people, that 
 Jesus was filled with the overwhelming sense of his 
 Messiahship. 
 
 When he enters upon his own public work he ac- 
 cepts no official dignities, calls his helpers from the 
 ranks of greasy fishermen, and on the roadside, or 
 hillside, or seaside talks to the common people who 
 tread at his heels and hear him gladly. His meet- 
 ings are destitute of any religious ceremony what- 
 ever prayer, song, liturgy or ritual as informal and 
 natural as the grouping of autumn leaves by the wind 
 of October. He even warns his hearers against 
 praying in public at all and prayer is at once the 
 simplest and the greatest religious ceremony. He paid 
 no attention to the gorgeous temple of God glittering 
 
28 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 on Mt. Moriah and declared that the dirtiest vagrant 
 in his motley crowd was the temple of the living God. 
 He lashed the ruling class in church and state the 
 Sadducee and Pharisee with merciless castigation for 
 the simple reason that they stood between the com- 
 mon people and real freedom. Explain it as you may 
 he blessed the poor and pronounced woes upon the 
 rich, and though preachers in all centuries since have 
 tried to bulge the needle's eye to let the rich into the 
 kingdom of heaven, he left it as he first stated it. He 
 warned against laying up treasures on earth, perhaps 
 for the simple reason that treasure chests can not be 
 filled by the product of one's own labor. All the 
 great fortunes of the world are wrung from the 
 labors of others by unjust social conditions. His 
 triumphal entry into Jerusalem is on an ass with 
 the simple populace strewing the palm branches. It 
 was not in the homes of the common people, but at 
 the house of the high priest that they plotted to kill 
 him. It was cash out of the church box that was 
 handed to Judas. And in the final tragedy on Cal- 
 vary he died with common thieves, and while the 
 respectable rulers of church and state watched his 
 life ebb away, he drew the criminal close to his 
 heart in an eternal embrace. 
 
 Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth, is the Democracy 
 of God Incarnate of God, who is no respecter of 
 persons, each and every man of infinite value, value 
 as deep as the Eternal. Such a quality of life as this 
 of the Nazarene, if it be accredited as truth and not 
 fanaticism, must over and over again precipitate the 
 world in revolution upon revolution until men are 
 free. No wonder that he said, "I come not to send 
 peace but a sword. " 
 
 Three things must inevitably follow any devoted 
 study of the Life and Teachings of Jesus. (1) The 
 heart will be turned to see the divine value of human 
 beings, as such, irrespective of culture, education, 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 29 
 
 wealth, position, spiritual development, or any other 
 thing whatsoever divine in his own right. (2) The 
 study of the Life of Jesus inevitably produces the 
 reformer's conscience. "As the Father hath sent me 
 even so send 1 you: And I lay down my life for the 
 sheep. Follow me and I will make you deliverers of 
 the people." A conscience at peace with Social In- 
 justice crushing human life can never be Christian. 
 Such a conscience can easily join church but cannot 
 follow the Christ. (3) This spirit of enthusiasm for 
 humanity can never rest in mere charity and philan- 
 throphy. The logic of such character is the full de- 
 mand of social democracy democracy realized in all 
 the social and industrial activities of our common 
 work-a-day life. The spirit of Christ can find no 
 rest in our day until a truly human existence is guar- 
 anteed by Social Justice to every human being. 
 
 Vested interests, social castes, artificial dignities, 
 power of man over man enthroned in law, or church, 
 or official functions all have felt the shock of this 
 Interrupter of history the gentle Nazarene glorify- 
 ing the sacredness of the elemental man. Another 
 shock is now overdue, and the net result of this 
 real Christianity in history will sooner or later lodge 
 its momentum against Capitalism. The new Christ- 
 ianity, which will be the old restored, will find its 
 world current through the International Socialist 
 movement. 
 
 In the last analysis, this universal gamble in land, 
 and machinery, and the products of human labor, on 
 a capitalistic world market, is a gamble in the very 
 bodies and souls of men. These material things are 
 the bases of their lives, and the ground of all human 
 release. 
 
 To monopolize land, to control the markets, to gam- 
 ble with human necessities, to foster trusts in machin- 
 ery and means of transportation; to use the tre- 
 mendous powers of new inventions to put uncounted 
 
30 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 millions in the hands of the rich; to make human labor 
 a mere commodity on the labor market, while the 
 workers struggle man against man for a bare living; 
 to make the whole world of industry a vast field for 
 the ruthless and unhindered operation of the greed, 
 avarice and ambition of private individuals and priv- 
 ate corporations for their private enrichment, is to 
 turn the bodies and souls of men, women and chil- 
 dren of the working classes into the merest pawns, 
 and playthings, and victims of the plutocracy. 
 
 This is the essence of Capitalism, and it is utterly 
 contrary to that sublime vision of the sacredness of 
 human life which is the soul of the Christ message 
 and spirit. Such a system is a monstrosity to the 
 democratic spirit of the Christian system. It stands 
 condemned without appeal. 
 
 The exacting Angel of History is about to foreclose 
 a long mortgage on the church. You have assumed 
 to interpret the oracles of God. You have declared 
 your love for souls. You have announced the eternal 
 value of the soul. But if a man is valuable any- 
 where he is valuable everywhere. If a human be- 
 ing is the supreme value in heaven in the presence of 
 God, then he is the supreme value this morning at 
 the factory gates. The Angel of History declares 
 to the church: "Yea, verily, the value of souls is in- 
 calculable. Therefore you are called upon now to 
 overthrow that vast gamble in human souls known 
 as Capitalism and establish on earth a social system 
 of industry, in which human life shall be the first 
 value; a system in which the equipment for making a 
 living shall be administered for universal human 
 needs and human freedom, instead of for private 
 profit of a ruthless plutocracy, which rides to indus- 
 trial and financial power over the bruised and 
 broken lives of the toiling masses." 
 
 This is the program of the Socialist Movement. 
 And no greater curse could fall upon the modern 
 
THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 31 
 
 church than to disprove the argument herewith pre- 
 sented. The curse of upholding Capitalism is already 
 too heavy upon the church. Only long, faithful, and 
 selfless championship of the cause of the poor and 
 the working classes against the exploiting plutocracy 
 and distinctly against Capitalism will redeem the 
 church from the dark cloud that now hangs over her. 
 I could covet for the preachers no greater service to 
 humanity, and for the church no greater mission, at 
 this juncture of history, than to assist in the peaceful 
 and speedy re-construction of the Social Order, the 
 transformation of Capitalism into the Socialist Com- 
 monwealth. 
 
 ********** 
 
 Whether therefore we follow Moses to the court 
 of Pharaoh to resist the proud tyrant, or go with 
 Amos to the House of God, there to jeer with him 
 at the subtle hypocrisy and to cry for Justice to roll 
 down like a stream, or whether we catch the spirit 
 of the Carpenter of Nazareth, the whole mighty and 
 cumulative volume of the divine energy of the Bible 
 leads us irresistibly against Capitalism the modern 
 Pharaoh, the modern anti-Christ. And that same 
 energy urges us on to lead the people to that new 
 Canaan, the Co-operative Commonwealth, and to that 
 new Messianic Age the establishment of Social 
 Justice in the means of getting our living on the 
 earth. 
 
 The Bible is against Capitalism and for Socialism. 
 We summon the common conscience of mankind to 
 the sacred issue! Wherever a simple, honest, good- 
 hearted man or woman of any sect, seeking to be a 
 Christian, reads these lines I pray you for the sake 
 of humanity to heed the word of truth now offered 
 
 to you* 
 
 ******** 
 
 There is an old saying, "Convince a man against 
 his will, he's of the same opinion still. 1 ' The coercive 
 
32 THE BIBLE ARGUMENT FOR SOCIALISM. 
 
 argument presented in the foregoing pages, seems ab- 
 solutely unanswerable. But that will not suffice. Sup- 
 pose we do prove in irresistible logic that whoever 
 would be a Christian in our day must also be a Social- 
 ist. Words will not suffice. Convincing argument is 
 not enough. How often do I feel this on the platform. 
 We need the good-will that hurries to act on genuine 
 conviction, that is ready to sacrifice for a sacred cause, 
 and to suffer loss, if need be for the Kingdom of God. 
 It is to be hoped that all through this argument there 
 is a breath of that spirit which inspires men and women 
 to consecrated devotion to a holy cause; that on every 
 page the heart, the will has been moved to action. 
 
 Do not complain either that there is no direct ap- 
 peal to the individual in terms of individual salvation. 
 That is a perfectly legitimate appeal, but it is not the 
 direct purpose of this booklet. The purpose of these 
 pages is to appeal to the common social conscience 
 of the people, and particularly to the conscience of 
 Christians through the Scriptures, and persuade you to 
 espouse the Socialist Cause. It is an appeal to you 
 to apply the righteousness of the Kingdom of God to 
 the Social and Industrial life. 
 
The Kingdom of God and Socialism. 
 
 I. 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 r I ^HERE are two terms* in our subject which need 
 some brief definition before we can adequately 
 consider the theme as a whole. 
 
 I. Socaal Evolution. 
 
 By Social Evolution we mean the development of 
 human relations and activities from lower and simpler 
 forms to higher and more complex forms ; we mean 
 that advance from conditions which hinder and mar 
 and blight human life, to conditions which free and 
 glorify human life. By Social Evolution we mean that 
 process by which social forms and economic structures 
 which are the outgrowth of ignorance and animalism 
 in society are supplanted by social and industrial forms 
 which are the expression of intelligence, and the incar- 
 nation of goodwill and human brotherhood. 
 
 In such a definition of Social Evolution we take for 
 granted that history is a progressive realisation of the 
 Kingdom of God in the Earth. Such a definition 
 accepts the word of Jesus : " Every plant, every 
 institution, every economic system that my 
 Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted 
 up." History is not the toss of events back and forth 
 between static parties or isolated personalities. It 
 is a struggle and victory, to be sure, but the ground of 
 the battle moves and the goal is ever nearer. The 
 advance is from cruelty to kindness ; from strife and 
 
 * See prefatory "Word" on opposite page. 
 
2 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 antagonism to mutualism ; from war to peace ; from 
 greed to fellowship ; from egoism to altruism ; from 
 the struggle for Self to the struggle for the Life of 
 Others. Social Evolution is from the Cain-spirit, 
 whose watchword is the ruthless " Am I my brother's 
 keeper ? " to the Christ-spirit, which says " I lay down 
 my life for the sheep/ 1 
 
 Modern critical study of races, and nations, and 
 social movements, in the new science of sociology, 
 both static and dynamic, justifies the intuitive hope 
 and sustains the faith of the soul, that the Kingdom Of 
 God in the earth is the disclosing reality of social 
 evolution, for which all else is mere scaffolding. 
 
 2. The Divine Immanence. 
 
 The second term in our subject is " The Divine 
 Immanence. 1 ' In defining the divine, words, indeed, 
 do but half reveal and half conceal the truth we feel. 
 We have revelations of the soul, but when we seek 
 words of the intellect to express what we mean, we 
 falter. It is no wonder that the ancient Jews lost the 
 pronunciation of their word for the deity. 
 
 We are, I think, without an adequate term to express 
 the conception of God that is coming to us. All 
 theology has abandoned, if not in words, then surely 
 in the inner spiritual life, the older and more extreme 
 statement of a transcendent deity. Before the trans- 
 cendent deity of Judaism, the Eastern religions had an 
 immanent deity in pantheism. But we can never 
 mean by immanence what they mean by pantheism. 
 
 I must confess that the phrase " divine imman- 
 ence ' suggests to me pantheistic, interpre- 
 tions of God. And we know that all such interpreta- 
 tations pushed to the extreme in personal experience, 
 even as exhibited in the experience of some of the 
 saints, are the negation of the supreme Christian pur- 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 3 
 
 pose as already suggested in our definition of the social 
 evolution. The word " immanence " is not sufficiently 
 dynamic for our more recent views of the Kingdom of 
 God in the earth. We are without a word in philos- 
 ophy or theology, and fall back on the word of Jesus, 
 the Kingdom of God. I rather wish that our subject 
 had been " The Kingdom of God and Social Evolu- 
 tion." No phrase so comprehends the personal and the 
 social, the spiritual and the economic significance of 
 life in one word, as does the word of Jesus. In this 
 paper I shall define briefly what I feel to be the Divine 
 Reality which is not completely realised in intellect by 
 any single word either by the philosophical opposites, 
 transcendence and immanence, or by the mystical 
 word Presence, which I shall frequently use. 
 
 3. The Older Teachjgig. 
 
 Theology for many a long century has been heavily 
 laden by its inheritance from Judaism, so far as the 
 conception of God is concerned. In order to declare 
 the holiness and righteousness of God, and to show 
 how transcendently beyond the average human life, 
 and the prevailing conditions of human society, were 
 the ways of the Lord of Hosts, the Hebrew mind placed 
 God completely out of his world. God was a mighty 
 Monarch, ruling a distant rebellious province, but 
 making occasional visitations against the unjust and 
 impious, and coming at intervals to reveal himself in 
 power on behalf of the faithful and devout. The truth 
 behind this conception, however faulty the theological 
 statement, can never be forfeited without incalculable 
 loss to the spiritual life. 
 
 4. The Modern Perception. 
 
 But whether it has been the influence of our philos- 
 ophical criticism and scientific investigation of the last 
 
4 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 century, starting from and returning to the perception 
 of universality and unity ; or whether it has been a 
 truer interpretation of the meaning of the words of 
 Jesus, and a deeper realisation of his spirit, It has ROW 
 fallen to us modern men in a special manner to per- 
 ceive intellectually, and to seek to realise in our spiritual 
 consciousness more fully the actual, ever-abiding, un- 
 escapable Presence of the Eternal Intelligence and 
 Love, as the only Life and Power and Reality of all that 
 is whether in Nature, or History, or the Individual 
 Soul. 
 
 To be at all we are compelled to have our being in 
 the Father. In Him we have our being. In Him we 
 have our life. In Him we move. More clear con- 
 ception of this Truth, and more conscious realisation of 
 this Reality, and more perfect definition of it in the 
 transparent words of intellect, and more practical 
 expression of it in our social and economic life, will be, 
 no doubt, the supreme programme of religious thought 
 and practice in the century upon which we have 
 entered. In the language of the Master of Baliiol, in 
 those wonderful Gifford lectures, such a religion must 
 " unite the immanence of pantheism with the trans- 
 cendence of monotheism " ; it must " rise to a divine 
 principle of all things, and yet be able to conceive that 
 principle as the living God, the inspiring source and 
 eternal realisation of the moral ideal of man . . 
 such a religion must see God at once without and 
 within us, yet it must be able to discriminate between 
 the higher sense in which He is within and not without. 
 It must see God in nature, without losing Him in 
 nature's manifoldness ; and in history without making 
 outward success the criterion of his favour. It must 
 find a still higher revelation of Him in the protest of 
 the conscience against the fact of successful injustice, 
 and a demand of the heart for a more perfect state than 
 has ever been empirically realised in earth ; yet it 
 must not set that which ought to be absolutely against 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 5 
 
 that which is, or suppose that the Judgment of God is 
 a future Judgment, which is not executing itself now 
 and here." 
 
 5. The Moral Depths Involved. 
 
 What this Divine Presence means I shall be com- 
 pelled to treat later when I come to discuss the personal 
 experience of Jesus, and we shall leave the definition 
 now as given ; suffice it to say that our consideration of 
 the Divine Presence in all its new setting and bearings 
 is not a mere question of theological hair-splitting, and 
 far from a petty attack on any old theology. It is 
 blood-red with vital significance for us. It is our 
 search for a closer walk with God, and for a diviner 
 service to our brother-men. It is a muscular endeavour 
 of the mind to state in faithful terms of our intelli- 
 gence the revelations and intuitions of the soul from 
 the living God of the present. Our theme is not 
 abstract and theoretical, but living, concrete, 
 practical. 
 
 Moreover, our consideration of the relation of the 
 Divine Presence to social evolution, is not a mere 
 discussion for the doctrinaire or the intellectual 
 gymnast. Western civilisation is in the midst of social 
 sorrows, economic injustice, and industrial oppression 
 which cry to heaven for redress, and we must square 
 our religious teaching and practice with the Truth that 
 makes men free with the manifest call of God to our 
 generation. We need our working clothes on to ask 
 the theme, and our militant armour on to follow it to 
 its logical conclusion. 
 
 II. 
 THE REDEMPTION OF NATURE. 
 
 In the light of the Divine Immanence we state more 
 emphatically, if possible, than the Jewish prophets that 
 
6 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 " the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." 
 To define the exact relation of the Divine Omnipre- 
 sence and Substance to the creation, and especially 
 to the land of this earth, and to the forces of nature 
 which we utilise such definition may be beyond our 
 present intelligence. But we may say with Paul that 
 the very creation groaneth and travaileth in pain 
 waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God. 
 And as the illumined sons of Truth and Love appear 
 it will become more and more fully acknowledged and 
 axiomatic that the physical resources of the earth, and 
 the forces of nature in which the earth is enveloped, 
 are the veritable presence of the living God for the 
 satisfaction and freedom of man. 
 
 1. The Land for the People. 
 
 The earth and her enveloping and permeating Force 
 constitute the living fountain, and the eternal cup- 
 board, and the divine storehouse of every physical and 
 material gift for the perfect satisfaction of every 
 physical need of the children of men. And let us not be 
 interpreted as speaking poetically, but in the plain 
 terms of a righteous social economy. The land of the 
 earth was given by the Father for the use and delight 
 of all men not for the few, who, by any means, legal 
 or illegal, may secure private possession thereof for 
 their private profit. The Divine Presence did not 
 store the cellars of the earth full of coal and oil and iron 
 in order that when opened in the 20th century, coal 
 barons, and steel magnates, and oil billionaires should 
 control these treasure-vaults of the earth, enslaving the 
 children of men in the mines, and then bleeding the 
 nation by monopoly sale of these gifts of God in nature. 
 The fertility of the soil, the descent of rain, the titanic 
 powers of steam and electricity, the tremendous power 
 of machinery all such are the gifts of the Father of us 
 all, for the satisfaction of the needs of all His children. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 7 
 
 These are not mere baubles and playthings to amuse 
 and delight the profit-monger in the satisfaction of his 
 greed or ambition. 
 
 2. The Earth is our Mother. 
 
 It has been said that the earth is our mother 
 changing the figure. If so, the hour has struck in the 
 history of man's life on the bosom of the earth to end 
 the monopoly by the few whether by kings in the 
 Congo, or millionaires at home of the abundant 
 nourishment of the earth. The time has come to 
 restore the breasts of the mother to the children. For 
 they cry bitterly in the night of our social and econo- 
 mic ignorance ; and they wither and die for the milk 
 flowing from the mother-breasts of the earth that 
 abundant supply now controlled by the few for their 
 private profit. 
 
 If the Divine Immanence is perceived as Life and 
 Truth and Reality, rather than as a mere theological 
 doctrine of a new ecclesia, held as a vague abstract 
 pantheism, or a poetic view of nature, then we shall be 
 able to teach and to put into our economic structure 
 the political economy of Jesus as given in the Sermon 
 on the Mount. 
 
 3. The Socialism of Jesus. 
 
 The Word of Jesus is " Ye cannot serve God and 
 Mammon. " Now, the service of God is only possible 
 by the service of our brother men, in justice and fellow- 
 ship. No temple worship of any kind or degree can be 
 substituted. It is absurd and superstitious to say we 
 love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not free and 
 make the possibilities of life complete for our brothers 
 whom we have seen. Such, at least, is the service of 
 God. On the other hand, the very root and fostering 
 condition of mammonism is the utilisation of the gifts 
 
8 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 and forces of nature for private profit rather than for 
 the social good. To this bear witness Moses, and the 
 prophets, and Jesus. 
 
 And Jesus proceeds : " Doth not the heavenly 
 Father feed the birds of the air ? Doth He not nourish 
 and beautify the lilies of the field by His very Life 
 and Power in soil and sunshine ? Shall he not much 
 more clothe and feed you, O, ye of little faith ? Is 
 not infinite provision made for your every necessity, 
 and your every comfort ? " But how ? By some 
 miracle ? Nay. By the higgle of the market, by the 
 strife of competition, by the individualistic struggle of 
 each against all for the control of land and machine and 
 product and profit ? Nay, verily ! How then ? By 
 making it our first business, by seeking first, to establish 
 with each other in our relations and economic activities 
 social justice and equality of opportunity and co- 
 operative use of industrial equipment 
 
 Such I believe to be the exact modern equivalent 
 in bread and butter issues of Jesus' words : " Seek first 
 the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all 
 things shall be added unto you/' Then shall life be 
 indeed more than meat, and the body than raiment. 
 It is little else now, and scarcely that, for millions in 
 the intense competition for bread and labour. 
 
 4. The New Social Order. 
 
 The Divine Immanence sheds abundant light upon 
 the truth that the earth and the fulness thereof is the 
 Lord's common gift to all men. To monopolise these 
 gifts for private gain is the very soul of mammonism. 
 It is an undivine use of nature. 
 
 From henceforth if we would serve the living God 
 it is of supreme importance that whistles blow, and 
 wheels turn, and that material goods be produced and 
 distributed under the auspices of the prayer that says, 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 9 
 
 " Give us (not me) our daily bread/* and of the 
 teaching of Jesus, that we cannot serve Mammon and 
 God. 
 
 The logical outcome of the Divine Immanence is 
 this : The socialisation and democratic management of 
 the basic natural and mechanical equipment of industry, 
 as the Divine Presence for the Life and Labour of all 
 the People. This will be, indeed, the communion of the 
 Holy Spirit the whole spirit now so broken by our 
 divisive private interests. And the sacrament of this 
 communion will be the now despised labour power of 
 man the flesh and blood of the common man. It 
 will be sacred once more in human history. This is, 
 as you observe, the economic programme of Socialism : 
 The Socialisation of the means of Production, Distri- 
 bution, and Exchange, to be controlled by a Democratic 
 State in the interests of the entire community, and the 
 complete Emancipation of Labour from the Domina- 
 tion of Capitalism and Landlordism, with the establish- 
 ment of Social and Economic Equality between the 
 sexes. 
 
 HI. 
 THE REDEMPTION OF HISTORY. 
 
 Again, in the light of the Divine Immanence a new 
 glory is shed upon the historical struggle of man for his 
 freedom. The historical process is no longer a chaos 
 of events, the picturesque procession of emperors, 
 and czars, and princes, and dignitaries. It is the 
 exfoliation of God in the people. As there is a red 
 strand in all the cordage of the British navy, SO the 
 red strand in the whole course of human events is the 
 disclosure and release of a free and divine humanity. 
 
10 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 God is in the people. History is of one piece. There is 
 no secular history. It is all sacred. Humanity is one 
 body. God is no respecter of persons, much as it may 
 run against our social or ecclesiastical vanity. And 
 thus the so-called secular struggle of slaves in Egypt, 
 or under Spartacus, or of the German peasants, or of 
 the modern trades unionists for a more complete basis 
 of physical existence, is covered with the Glory of God. 
 
 1. The Freedom of the People First. 
 
 The one sacred thing beneath the stars is a human 
 being. That alone is sacred which makes man free to 
 live out a complete human life. The historical struggles 
 for religious, and intellectual, and political freedom, 
 and now for industrial emancipation, are the very 
 birth-pangs of the coming of the divine in human 
 society. Freedom is the only atmosphere in which 
 the soul of man as the divine incarnation can breathe. 
 The struggle of man in history for freedom is the 
 struggle of God for freedom. This is loose and inexact 
 phrasing I admit. But I seek to convey the thought 
 that the perception of Freedom in the Soul of Man is 
 his highest revelation Of God. Our highest per- 
 ceptions of moral and social relations in Freedom and 
 Justice and Brotherhood, as achieved in history, and 
 still to be demonstrated, are not dreams and vagaries, 
 but are our open revelation of the Divine Reality. 
 
 This is the Kingdom of Heaven which is ever at 
 hand. This is the Divine Immanence redeeming history 
 from fatalism and pessimism, arid giving us a ground 
 for the most heroic and abandoned and devoted ser- 
 vice to the highest freedom and welfare of all the people 
 here and now in this present world. It will mean the 
 reconstruction of social, political, and industrial insti- 
 tutions, in order that each and all may have the most 
 complete advantage, opportunity, and equipment of 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. II 
 
 living a free human life. It is not Our first business to 
 convert souls to our particular theology, or religion, 
 or idea of personal piety or salvation. It is not our 
 business to build up a church ; it is the business of the 
 church to build a free world. Our first business is the 
 matter-of-fact, apparently secular, social task of making 
 each man, woman, and child free to live his or her own 
 life, and then perchance they shall teach us truth, and 
 salvation, and theology of which we do not yet dream. 
 Freedom first ! Freedom first ! We need not sigh for 
 heaven in some distant realm with such a divine reality 
 as Freedom present to us in the historical process. If 
 this world is a " vale of tears," it is our business not to 
 desert it for fairer worlds on high, but to wipe away all 
 tears from human eyes, by wiping away the social and 
 economic conditions which blight and baffle and bruise 
 the bodies and minds and souls of men. 
 
 Henry Drummond suggested that perhaps the 
 evolutionary process was devised by the Divine 
 Intelligence in order that on its discovery by us we 
 should also discover that indeed we were the builders 
 and social creators of the Kingdom of God in the 
 Earth. The raw material is presented for our work- 
 manship, not to gamble with. 
 
 2. The Sacred Cause of Labour. 
 
 In the light of the Divine Presence labour statistics 
 the productive power of machinery, truths on the 
 housing problem, the cost of making shoes or hats, the 
 process of sterilising milk, the meaning of land values, 
 the care of mothers, the nourishment of the school-child 
 all these matter-of-fact and raw subjects, together 
 with what they suggest of speeches, propaganda, 
 ballotting, and parliamentary action all take on 
 a divine significance. The social struggle Of the 
 people for freedom is the historic revelation of the 
 Christ. 
 
12 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 It may be that as the Father honoured the fields 
 and roadsides of Palestine, and the fish-smelling boats 
 of Galilean fishermen with a glory unapproachable 
 1,900 years ago, while the magnificence of the great 
 temple, the grandeur of the temple service, and the 
 show of the broad phylactery were ignored, if not 
 condemned, so now in the 20th century the most 
 common-place efforts of the very mud-sills of society 
 to achieve industrial and social emancipation from the 
 crime of capitalism, will be honoured by the divine 
 recognition, while the Lord of Life may pass by our 
 magnificent religious edifices, and our stately cere- 
 monial, or our every form of worship. May we recog- 
 nise the Christ as He approaches. Not only in such 
 an hour as ye think not, but in such a manner as ye 
 expect not, the Son of Man cometh. 
 
 We conclude with this aphorism : History is the 
 progressive realisation of the Immanent Kingdom of 
 God, and the struggle of the people for Freedom in the 
 common life is the most open vision of the Presence of 
 God. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE REDEMPTION OF PERSONALITY. 
 
 In the light of the Divine Immanence we have the 
 ground and spiritual basis for the most exalted type of 
 personality. If it is the Truth that the Father is 
 eternally present in the being of every one of us, 
 unescapably present, the very life of our life, and the 
 reality of our existence, the light of all our seeing, 
 awaiting a complete recognition, realisation, and 
 expression, then, indeed, when this Truth begins to 
 take hold of the deeps of consciousness, we may expect 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 13 
 
 to see the release of the most God-anointed personalities, 
 and eventually a spiritual awakening such as history 
 has never known. 
 
 When Jesus said, " I and my Father are one," 
 and "he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," He 
 was revealing not only what God is but what man is. 
 
 1. The Personal Experience of Jesus- 
 
 The Divine Illumination received when the Holy 
 Ghost came upon Him was to Him a revelation that 
 the whole universe is now and here the presence of the 
 One Eternal Intelligence which He called the Father. 
 Whatever were the guesses of ignorance, or the limi- 
 tations of supposed intelligence, He perceived that 
 there was no other Kingdom anywhere but the King- 
 dom of God, that there never had been nor never could 
 be any other Absolute Reality to Nature, or History, 
 or to the Individual Soul. Since there was no Reality 
 anywhere except the One Divine Presence, He perceived 
 that there was really nothing else for Him to be than to 
 be that. " I can of my own self do nothing. 
 Of my own self I am nothing. The Father 
 that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the work." And 
 there could, therefore, be no Reality to any other 
 human being except the same presence. The King- 
 dom of God was the All-ness of whatever really IS, 
 and this Kingdom was manifested as one with His 
 consciousness, and by this conscious unity Jesus 
 became Christed, i.e., the Christ. 
 
 2. The Divinity of Humanity. 
 
 At this hour of divine vision He perceived that what 
 He was all men were. He was the first-born among 
 many brethren. He was divine ; they were divine. 
 He was the Father incarnate ; they were also. His 
 vision and illumination under the power of the Holy 
 
14 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 Spirit was not particular, that is for Himself alone ; 
 it was universal, that is, for all men. He perceived 
 that the Father was no respecter of persons. This 
 was the summit of His insight. Jesus was no 
 spiritual aristocrat. He saw the democracy of the 
 Divine Being, and the complete, original, enfranchise- 
 ment of every human being in the heart of God. Thus 
 He revealed the Truth. By the Truth we mean that 
 which is utterly universal. The Truth cannot be private 
 or personal, or limited to particular persons or times 
 or places. The doctrine of the divinity of Christ is 
 true, but it has been so taught in other ages of the world 
 as to prove all other men un-divine. Jesus did not so 
 teach. He was not concerned about emphasising His 
 divinity, but in disclosing to them their divinity. This 
 was His mission. His revelation of His divinity, His 
 Oneness with the Father, in Power, Intelligence, and 
 Love, was to Him a discovery of the universal signifi- 
 cance of every human life. Jesus did not consider 
 Himself as a privileged personality, as one having 
 relationships with the Father from which others were 
 excluded. God was the Father of Jesus in no sense 
 other than in the sense that He is your Father and my 
 Father. The Father could be no more to Jesus than 
 He is for you. The ultimate significance of the Life of 
 Jesus, culminating in conscious oneness with the 
 Father, is the ultimate significance of our life, recover- 
 ing us from the limitation of ignorance, and restoring 
 us to true consciousness divine in the only Reality 
 that there is : The Kingdom of God. 
 
 Such I consider to be the meaning of the Divine 
 Presence in personality. Here we have concretely 
 dramatised in the Life of Jesus the quality of Life con- 
 sequent on the divine anointing which reveals the con- 
 sciousness as actually one with God. Now, such an 
 interpretation of the significance of human life here 
 and now, as thus dramatised and taught by Jesus, 
 must eventually precipitate three tremendous forces 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 15 
 
 in Social Evolution. Here we have the dynamic of 
 Social Revolution not only that of to-day but of 
 centuries to come. 
 
 I shall have time only to mention these three and to 
 offer slight comment on each. 
 
 3. The New Type of Spiritual Teacher Appears. 
 
 Such a perception is a call to us to duplicate in our 
 conscious religious experience the divine anointing of 
 the Spirit which was the supreme initiatory fact in the 
 life of Jesus. We are called to be anointed ones, 
 Christed ones to our generation. We are to be saved 
 only as we are saviours. We are to lay down our lives 
 for the sheep, in the great needs of humanity of our 
 day. Our mission is identical with the mission of 
 Jesus. There is not one quality of life for the master 
 and another quality of life for the disciple. " He that 
 said he abideth in Him, ought to walk even as He 
 walked." Jesus said, " They are not of the world even 
 as I am not of the world/' " And as the Father sent Me 
 even so send I you." 
 
 Nor is there one quality or condition of Salvation or 
 unison with God for the Master and another condition 
 for us. Truth is universal. We are to be Messianic 
 to our times, witnessing to the Messianic Vision of the 
 Kingdom of God, in the earth, filled with the Messianic 
 power of the Spirit, and disclosing to those who. see 
 not the Messianic consciousness. 
 
 Thus we shall see the release of Christed personalities 
 or a new type into the present surging current of 
 modern society. They will be inspired re-announcers 
 of Truth. They will be apostles of freedom for the 
 people. They will be the heralds of a new social order. 
 They will lay down their lives for the sheep. They will 
 count the cost and face whatever cross civilisation will 
 
l6 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 crucify them upon. It is true that they will come with 
 a new theology, but they will come primarily with a 
 new quality of spiritual life, and a new social vision. 
 And no matter to what extent we recognise the tre- 
 mendous significance of titanic economic forces and 
 mass movements in the re-making of the world, the 
 message of the Kingdom of God, as taught by Jesus, 
 gives a peculiar place of power and social potency to 
 anointed empowered human souls. " Ye are the light 
 of the world. Ye are the salt of the earth." 
 
 And the condition of this Christing of personality 
 is exceedingly simple, and has held the same through- 
 out the centuries, identical in every revival of religion, 
 irrespective of the changes of theology, viz., an entire 
 consecration, or dedication of the whole being, body, 
 soul, and spirit, to be the organ or instrument of the 
 Divine, of the Universal, of the Father in selfless ser- 
 vice of humanity. The depth of that devotion, and the 
 form of the service, change with the onward movement 
 of the kingdom, but the conditions are simple and 
 complete, and easily apprehended by the simplest soul, 
 and place the emphasis in all the relations of the soul 
 where Jesus placed it that is, primarily in the Will, 
 and secondarily and quite subordinately in the Intel- 
 lect. If we will the good-will of the Father, we shall 
 know the doctrine, and we shall become the attorneys 
 for humanity. 
 
 4. The Great Social Revival at Hand. 
 
 Such a divine enduement of persons here and there 
 will eventually precipitate a great spiritual awakening. 
 I look for the Religious Revival greater, deeper, saner, 
 more wholesome, but none the less more intense, and 
 irresistible than any in human history. This revival will 
 call forth the moral and spiritual energies of the people . 
 and concentrate that power on the labour of recon- ' 
 structing our social and economic system according to 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. ij 
 
 the programme of brotherhood and social justice. This 
 has never been attempted since the days of the 
 apostles. Piety, religious emotion, and moral feeling, 
 have been concentrated on the individual, and about 
 the individual, to the neglect of the social body. Not 
 a less quality of divine life in the soul do we plead for, 
 but a far greater. And for the energy of these inspired 
 hearts to be put forth, not in following the Capitalistic 
 war, and aiding the beaten and wounded, but in stop- 
 ping that war, and preventing this wholesale bruising 
 of their fellows. Our present type of conversion to 
 Christ is perfectly at peace with the supreme anti-Christ 
 of our times, the Capitalistic system. The converts are 
 enlightened about private vices and private virtues, 
 but they have never heard of the public and social sins 
 that are devouring the people. The sheep are being 
 devoured, but the shepherds have not even seen the 
 wolf. Therefore I say, a new Christian apostolate 
 shall appear, heralding the Kingdom, and there shall 
 appear a new type of convert a convert with a social 
 vision, a social prayer, and clothed with the power of 
 God to abolish Capitalism and establish the Co-operative 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 5. The Real Test of Devotion. 
 
 This perception of the Divine Presence in all men will 
 cover with halo as nothing else can do all the people 
 about us, who are now by class forms, and education, 
 and the curse of poverty, and the bitterness of Capi- 
 talism, practically outcasts, socially ostracised, and 
 looked down upon. They are the presence of the 
 Father, now not after they are converted to any reli- 
 gion, or after they have joined any religious body- 
 but now. Our burdened brothers, our tired and 
 baffled sisters, our tens of thousands of little children, 
 blighted in the Capitalist struggle, are now the Christ- 
 
1 8 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 presence, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least 
 of one of these ye have done it unto Me/' said the 
 Master. Our social and industrial treatment of men is 
 the measure of our real devotion to the Christ. Any 
 praise-singing, and creed-repeating, and Sunday- 
 worshipping standard of our devotion to Christ must be 
 judged by the Judgment Jesus Himself offers. What- 
 ever man is reckoned to be in the market-place and in 
 the factory, for the six days of the week, that is the 
 mark of our real devotion to Christ. 
 
 The Perception of the Kingdom of God as the only 
 Reality of Life, and its disclosure in personal experi- 
 ence and in social and economic relation as our 
 supreme Christian purpose will mean to our age a 
 devotion to the welfare of all the people, as the pre- 
 sence of the Father. This devotion will break forth 
 in a great spiritual awakening and Social Revival. 
 This Revival will exhibit itself first in personality 
 divinely anointed sons of God, whose only mission is 
 the Father's Kingdom, and, second, in the Redemption 
 of Nature from the God of Mammon. The Social 
 Programme will be the Socialisation of the natural 
 resources and productive equipment of society, for the 
 use and happiness and freedom of the people. This 
 is the next great step to the Kingdom of God in the 
 Earth. 
 
 6. The Mission of Jesus. 
 
 Thus again, a glad message will be given to the poor 
 people. The broken-spirited will be healed ; deliver- 
 ance will be preached to and realised by our social 
 captives ; social and economic intelligence will dis- 
 place our blindness ; and we shall set at liberty the 
 people that are bruised. 
 
The Message of Jesus to Our Times. 
 
 I. 
 
 A SUMMARY. 
 
 i. The ultimate meaning of History is the coming 
 of a state of Justice, Brotherhood, and Comradeship, 
 which Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven upon the 
 Earth. 
 
 2. The present Capitalist System is the Anti- 
 Christ of our times the social, political, and economic 
 negation and antithesis of the Kingdom of God. 
 Capitalism is Mammonism. 
 
 3. The inevitable necessity forced by Capitalism 
 upon the person to seek his private property ends in 
 the cruel and unnecessary struggle of competition, 
 crucifies the Christ-spirit, stifles the love-life of the 
 soul, and tends to make all religion pharasaic, and 
 less than the Truth and Love that make men free. 
 
 II. 
 
 i Capitalism stands impeached as a system of 
 legalised exploitation and plunder of the people, in- 
 carnating the Cain-spirit, though for a time still 
 defended by many who historically bear the name of 
 Christ. 
 
 2. Capitalism denies the first fundamental right 
 of human existence that is, Equality of Opportunity 
 in the use of the basic equipment of bread-getting 
 Economic equality. 
 
 3. The Socialisation of the fundamental Equipment 
 of Industry, the democratic organization and manage- 
 ment of industry for the sake of use, instead of 
 private ownership for private profit, is the economic 
 form to which the Christ-spirit leads. 
 
20 THE MESSAGE OF JESUS TO OUR TIMES 
 
 III. 
 
 i. The next great movement ior Human Brother- 
 hood and Social Righteousness will repudiate a Social 
 System that uses human beings as mere creatures of 
 private profit, absorbing their productive power to 
 build up immeasurable private fortunes, while the 
 workers themselves battle for bread and the oppor- 
 tunities of labour. 
 
 2. We are to see to it that the limitless resources 
 of Nature, which God gave to the people in usufruct, 
 and the marvellous Mechanical Equipment of modern 
 civilisation, and the titanic power of Industrial 
 Organization, shall no longer be controlled by the few 
 for mere private gain, but that these powers shall be 
 used for the Life, the Labour, and the Liberty of the 
 whole people. This is Socialism. 
 
 3. If the church, by cowardly silence or open 
 defence, continues longer to support and bulwark this 
 unspeakably unjust and unbrotherly system, with its 
 cruelties and antagonisms, and its refined, respectable 
 and legalised plunder of the people, then will the 
 church be adjudged Anti-Christ by the awakening 
 Social Conscience and Soul of the People, and the 
 Moral and Spiritual treasures of the race will find 
 expression and conservation in other forms. 
 
 4. From the present time on in our Cities and 
 Nations, statesmanship must no longer consist in 
 dramatic plays with organized plutocracy, but must 
 be a use of the Powers of Government to Socialize 
 all those Industrial Activities necessary to make men 
 free from economic dependence ; and to make 
 Monopoly of Industry for ever impossible. This is 
 Socialist Administration. 
 
 5. What the People Socially need, the People 
 must Socially own, in order to guarantee private 
 property to the individual in the product of his toil. 
 This is the programme for the Free Individual 
 through Socially achieved Liberty. 
 
 J.S.W. 
 
THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 TO THE CHURCH. 
 
 A few weeks ago I was grateful to receive 
 an invitation from the secretary of this Asso- 
 ciation to read you a paper on the "Message 
 of Socialism to the Church." 
 
 The subject is, of course, too large for any 
 adequate treatment in the time allotted. I 
 shall, therefore, narrow my theme to appro- 
 priate limits, and even then I shall be able to 
 give you but a suggestive outline upon the 
 subject. 
 
 There might be many messages of Social- 
 ism to the Church, depending much on the 
 point of emphasis in the mind of the Socialist 
 delivering the message, and varying, perhaps, 
 with the sect to which the message was given. 
 One might insist that the clergy should devote 
 more time and energy to changing the social 
 environment of all the people, and less to 
 the regeneration of the individual. Another 
 might accuse the church of being in complic- 
 ity with our industrial magnates, whose tyr- 
 anny is becoming intolerable to the Working 
 Class. Such messengers would see in the 
 church the greatest bulwark to the present 
 industrial wrongs, and in the clergy a sort of 
 spiritual police force to guard in the name of 
 
2 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Christ the ill-gotten gains of trusts and mo- 
 nopolies. Some might declare that your indi- 
 vidualistic interpretation of the ethics of 
 Christianity gives moral sanction to the social 
 tragedies of our day. These might accuse 
 you of straining at gnats of individual error 
 and swallowing camels of social injustice; 
 preaching, for example, "Thou shalt not steal" 
 to the child of the slum, who takes a hod of 
 coal to warm his dying mother in the rear 
 tenement, but "standing pat," as they say, 
 with Standard Oil, or "Divine Right" Baer of 
 Coal Trust fame. Others might attack your 
 theological and metaphysical positions, or your 
 interpretation of the evolution of society, as 
 teachings tending to bind the people still more 
 inextricably in their industrial chains, instead 
 of making them free. 
 
 But whatever truth there might be in such 
 messages I leave aside upon this occasion. I 
 do not ask you to cease your activities to ac- 
 complish the spiritual regeneration of the indi- 
 vidual. I do not ask you to change one syl- 
 lable of your theology. I do not ask you to 
 forsake your churches, your creeds, or your 
 Christ. I take you upon your own grounds 
 as professed disciples of Jesus and preachers 
 of his message to the world, seeking to finish 
 the work He has given you to perform, and on 
 this ground I point out to you what I believe 
 
TO THE CHURCH* 
 
 to be your place in this great struggle. 
 A Personal Word* 
 
 Perhaps you will pardon a personal word 
 just here, which may give a deeper sig- 
 nificance to what I shall say unto you. 
 Whatever differences there may exist in the- 
 ology or ethical theory, or modus operand! 
 between myself as a spiritual teacher and this 
 body, I wish to assure you that I am consumed 
 with the passion which inspires you, viz., the 
 highest moral and spiritual welfare of human- 
 ity. But I wish to tell you that it was after 
 one of the greatest spiritual and moral crises 
 in my life that I became an aggressive Social- 
 ist. It was not thru a limitation but by an 
 extension of moral vision and thru an increased 
 spiritual anointing that the economic program 
 of Socialism appeared to me as the social and 
 industrial expression of what we may call on 
 this occasion, the Kingdom of God in the 
 earth. To put it more strongly: There came 
 a time in my life when consent to live at peace 
 with the present social order, without an active 
 and intelligent protest, would have been to me 
 moral suicide and spiritual eclipse; and the 
 espousal of the Socialist cause was an inlet- 
 ting to a new world of spiritual significance, 
 which becomes increasingly glorious and 
 emancipating. 
 
4 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 I therefore speak to you as one devoted to 
 the highest immediate spiritual meaning to 
 the individual life, on the one hand ; and as an 
 avowed Socialist, working with and for the 
 class-conscious Socialist Movement, and vot- 
 ing for our candidates, and platforms. I may, 
 therefore, speak to you with the utmost frank- 
 ness and without insinuation. 
 
 The Social Mission of the Church. 
 
 Proceeding now to the message itself. Is 
 Christianity a scheme simply to prepare man- 
 kind for another world? You answer me 
 emphatically, "No." It is a message of life 
 and of power to perfect the race here and 
 everywhere; but here on the earth at least. 
 Christianity then has a mission concerning 
 human society. I ask a second question. 
 Is this mission simply a reaction resulting 
 from the presence of spiritualized characters 
 in the world, or is it positive, definite, con- 
 crete, specific? Making my question plainer: 
 Take three social problems, (i) Monarchical 
 despotism; (2) the liquor traffic; (3) chattel 
 slavery. I ask you, would your mission as 
 preachers of the Kingdom of God on earth be 
 at an end on these three great social questions, 
 when you had converted certain thousands of 
 church members to a certain inward state of 
 mind called regeneration, letting that state of 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 
 
 mind react on these social problems, and leav- 
 ing your followers uninstructed as to the con- 
 crete social program that would logically follow 
 from their spiritual life and philosophy, or do 
 you not deem it the business of the Christian 
 clergy and of the church, also, to aggressively 
 act as citizens of this world, using the polit- 
 ical equipment of civilization to make an or- 
 ganized and definite effort in social programs? 
 For example : to establish democracy and con- 
 stitutional liberty and to overthrow despotism ; 
 or to effect legislation to lessen or abolish the 
 liquor traffic. Or do you not think that it is 
 in the scope of your mission, if chattel slavery 
 still existed in America, to organize aggres- 
 sively or to work with existing conditions, 
 to defend chattel slavery from overthrow, if 
 you believe it an institution planted of God for 
 human good, or else to organize for the defi- 
 nite concrete purpose of abolishing slavery as 
 a curse to humanity. 
 
 In other words, must not the Christian 
 preacher ever reduce the principles of his 
 faith to specific form on one side or the other 
 of any great social problem before the civilized 
 world ? Must he not take his stand as a citizen 
 of this world, using the pen and the press, the 
 platform and the pulpit as instruments; and 
 the ballot, the popular elections, the houses of 
 legislature, and the acts of executives, as 
 
6 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 agencies to bring to peaceful and successful 
 issue great Social Movements, and thus to 
 write into historical documents the coming of 
 the Kingdom of God among men. Your in- 
 activity or your silence will be interpreted by 
 oppressors of men and the upholders of injus- 
 tice as God's sanction to wrong. 
 
 When I have pointed out what I believe to 
 be your duty in this respect, we should waste 
 no time in contrasting the respective merits of 
 these two phases of your duty, phases which 
 are not anthithetical but complementary, each 
 supplementing and fulfilling the other. Let 
 me remind you that I do not ask you to abate 
 your efforts for individual regeneration, nor to 
 modify in the least degree your interest in 
 souls. I simply insist that if you are spiritual- 
 ized characters yourselves, and if your church 
 members are regenerated individuals, you are 
 none the less citizens of this, our world, and 
 your increased moral insight and Christian 
 character should make you powerful to use the 
 agencies of civiliaztion, and the legal equip- 
 ment of civil society, for the triumph of great 
 Social Movements that make for the happi- 
 ness, freedom and upliftment of the whole 
 people. 
 
 But further. As the professed spokesmen 
 of Truth and Justice and Righteousness, as the 
 expounders of the oracles of God, and as the 
 
TO THE CHURCH* 
 
 apostles of the gentle Christ who died for men, 
 I charge you that wherever a great social 
 wrong exists, which hurts and harms one of 
 these little ones, which beats down and op- 
 presses the sons of men, or which involves us 
 as children of one brotherhood in strifes and 
 antagonism, and needless struggle, or which 
 limits the freedom, or harries the lives of the 
 people I charge you, as preachers of the King- 
 dom of God, that you must stand like men for 
 that right, that emancipation, or whatever 
 step, or practice, or system shall make men 
 free. Aggressive, positive, constructive action, 
 vigorous and determined, for the abolition 
 of social wrongs and injustice, is the demand 
 upon the pulpit today. No spineless, spas- 
 modic effort will suffice, but the abandoned 
 zeal and devotion of the saint, and if need be 
 of the martyr. "As the Father hath sent me 
 into the world, even so send I you," said your 
 Master, and He adds, "I lay down my life for 
 the sheep/' We might say in this connection 
 that no preacher, no church member who is 
 not willing to lay down his life, if need be, 
 for the cause of the people that needs assistance 
 in his day can be called spiritualized, regener- 
 ated, or Christian. This is the essence of the 
 Christ spirit, the very heart of the Christian 
 conscience. 
 
 But perhaps we live in dull and uninspiring 
 
8 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 days. If we only lived in the days when 
 primitive Christians, hunted as the enemies of 
 civilization, braced the brutalities of the 
 Caesars, then would we count not our lives 
 dear unto ourselves. Or if we only lived in 
 the dark hours of the middle ages, when men 
 struggled for religious liberty against priest- 
 craft, then would we face the fagot and the 
 flame for the right of men to worship God 
 according to the dictates of conscionce. Or if, 
 indeed, we lived but in the days of Sam 
 Adams and Patrick Henry, how gladly would 
 we have offered our lives on the altar of lib- 
 erty. Or later still, a half century ago, de- 
 votedly could we have stood over the hunted 
 slave and against his master, and hearing the 
 cry of the slave woman under the lash, we 
 would have borne her stripes. 
 
 But I say unto you, that never on the page 
 of history has there been such a cause as that 
 which is now upon us in this first quarter of 
 the twentieth century. Never has so subtle a 
 tyranny sought to establish itself over the lives 
 and bodies and souls of men as that which 
 grows to enormous proportions in our Ameri- 
 can life at this very moment. Never has there 
 been a movement so fraught with possibilities 
 of freedom and happiness and justice and 
 brotherhood as the present Labor Movement. 
 I do not hesitate to declare that no crisis in 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 
 
 human history ever held so much in the bal- 
 ance for the kingdom of God and the redemp- 
 tion of the world as the crisis thru which we 
 are now passing. No problem has ever so 
 forced the mind and heart of the race to the 
 very roots of right relations between man and 
 man as this Labor Problem. This problem 
 demands of the clergy and the church whether 
 the ethics of your Christianity are mere Sunday 
 pleasantries, and maxims of mere personal 
 satisfaction and safety, or tremendous, far- 
 reaching social principles which must be in- 
 corporated into the very basis of our social 
 and economic institutions, or else become a 
 hissing and a byword among the flesh-owners, 
 and a forgotten dream by the beaten toilers of 
 the world. These are not dull and uninspiring 
 days, but great days, demanding your most 
 heroic service. 
 
 The Bread Problem Fundamental* 
 
 Now I refuse to argue with you as to the 
 respective merits or importance of the spiritual 
 interests of men and of their material interests. 
 I can grant you, if you please, any degree of 
 superiority you may wish to give to the spirit- 
 ual over the material interests. And then I 
 will demand your consideration of the material 
 interests that are still absolutely fundamental 
 to human life. I will grant you that a man's 
 
io THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 life does not consist in the abundance of things 
 which he possesseth, but you must grant me 
 that he must have things, nevertheless, food, 
 clothing, shelter, after he has read your text 
 to its utmost meaning. I will grant you that 
 "man cannot live by bread alone," but you 
 must grant me that he cannot live without 
 bread. 
 
 Bread and all that is signified by that 
 wonderful word in the form of human needs 
 and comforts we must have. But our bread 
 does not fall as manna from heaven. In order 
 to get that bread we must labor. And in order 
 to labor we must have access to the material 
 resources of nature, and the mechanical equip- 
 ment for labor. 
 
 This struggle of men today for Bread, for 
 Labor, and for access to the material resources 
 whence that bread comes and to which that 
 labor is applied this struggle presents us with 
 the great Labor Problem, which rocks civiliza- 
 tion to its very foundation. From this strug- 
 gle the church cannot escape. To its solution 
 you are summoned. 
 
 Now Socialism confronts this awful struggle 
 in the name of the Working Class. And I 
 wish to hold your thought clearly to this one 
 point, that Socialism is not any of the fifty 
 things ignorant critics make it out to be. 
 Socialism is a plain, unmistakable economic 
 
TO THE CHURCH* 11 
 
 program to be carried out by the Working 
 Class thru political action, by the ballot-box 
 and legislative enactment. Socialism presents 
 an organized social movement and a social 
 program to abolish the unnatural elements of 
 this struggle and make men forever free from 
 the tragedy of our bread-getting. 
 
 Capitalism Condemned* 
 
 The battle for bread today is known in the 
 science of Economics as the Competitive Sys- 
 tem, or Capitalism. Against this system, So- 
 cialism brings its criticism and condemnation. 
 That criticism is at least three-fold. We de- 
 clare that the present system is (i) unjust in 
 its basis, (2) inhuman in its operation, and 
 (3) tyrannous in its inevitable outcome. We 
 shall consider these in the order given. 
 
 i. Our position is that it is basically unjust 
 to open the resources and equipment of the 
 bread and labor supply of the people as the 
 prize in the financial game of frenzied finan- 
 ciers. To lay the whole resources of a people's 
 livelihood open on the market to become the 
 private property without limit to the winners, 
 not only in a moderate business competition, 
 but to industrial buccaneering and commercial 
 brigandage, to thus gamble with the bread 
 supply and the chances 'to labor, ajid the 
 opportunities of life, is to gamble with the 
 
12 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 very souls and bodies of men. 
 
 As Socialists we ask the clergy to condemn 
 the present basis of modern industry as un- 
 just and inimical to the highest as well as the 
 most immediate material interests of the peo- 
 ple. We ask you to stand with the oppressed 
 in this conflict and against the oppressor. We 
 demand of you, as professed followers of your 
 Master, who came to "set at liberty them that 
 are bruised," that you stand against a system, 
 which, assuming the disguise of legitimate 
 business, in the language of Thos. Lawson, 
 "has for years as boldly, as coarsely and as 
 cruelly robbed the people as the coolie slaves 
 are robbed by their masters." 
 
 Our criticism is that ownership by private 
 individuals of the original elements and indus- 
 trial equipment of civilization, and the opera- 
 tion of these resources for private profit, is 
 unjust beyond powers of description. It will 
 yet be seen in the light of intelligence and a 
 truer ethical spirit to be an industrial basis 
 inevitably producing an incalculable and un- 
 ceasing robbery from the producing classes of 
 the products of their labor. It is a social 
 basis and an industrial mechanism that inevi- 
 tably wrings uncounted millions from the 
 children of toil and pours that wealth into the 
 lap of those who never earned it. 
 
 Statistics show that already one per cent of 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 13 
 
 the families in America hold more of the 
 results of labor than the remaining 99 per cent. 
 One single corporation, according to one of 
 its self-confessed accomplices, plundered the 
 people of over one hundred millions ($100,- 
 000,000) of dollars in the last five years ! 
 
 Men of the Christian ministry, your Master 
 said, "Every plant that my Heavenly Father 
 hath not planted shall be rooted up." Think 
 you that a plant which bears such fruit is 
 rooted in Justice and Righteousness? Nay, 
 verily. We Socialists are tugging at the roots 
 of that system of injustice and wrong. The 
 capitalistic system is unjust in its basis. It 
 stands without ethical defense. We ask you 
 to tug at the roots of this great wrong with us, 
 and abolish it. 
 
 2. Again, the Competitive System is in- 
 human and unchristian in its operation. If our 
 eyes are blinded by the sweat of the "strenu- 
 ous" life; if we are still hypnotized by the 
 modern ideals of "success," that bid the con- 
 testants climb to victory over the helpless 
 victims that fall in the mad struggle ; if our 
 hearts are callous from long familiarity with 
 the sights and sounds of the beaten and 
 baffled ones that strew the highways of mod- 
 ern gread-getting ; if our minds are more re- 
 sponsive to the Cain-spirit of the competitive 
 struggle, that ruthlessly cries, "Am J my 
 
14 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 brother's keeper?" than to the mind of the 
 Master who said, "I lay down my life for the 
 sheep," and if any of these are our dominant 
 states of mind, then we cannot see the Socialist 
 position that the present Capitalistic System is 
 inhuman in its operation. 
 
 "By their fruits ye shall know them" is as 
 true of social and economic systems as it is of 
 individuals. You cannot gather grapes of 
 thorns or figs of thistles. Neither can you 
 gather love, peace, mercy, tenderness, broth- 
 erly kindness, in short, the human and 
 Christ virtues from the operations of a sys- 
 tem that in its very basis provides for, and in 
 its practice demands, the development and 
 fruition of the very opposite passions of men. 
 
 Place the land, and the machinery, and all 
 products of all toil, open to the mad gamble of 
 private property seekers and exploiters of men 
 for private profit; place the very bodies of 
 men, women and little children as mere mar- 
 ketable commodities to be hired "whenever 
 'and wherever" the masters of the market shall 
 dictate, to be paid "whatever compensation" 
 the industrial monarchs shall choose; turn 
 80,000,000 of people loose in that struggle 
 a struggle from which there is no exemption, 
 a struggle imposed by nature and necessity, 
 give us, I say, that kind of a basis for our 
 bread-getting, and inhumanity and cruelty in 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 15 
 
 that struggle is inevitable. 
 
 The word Competition is an euphemism, 
 It is a mild commercial term for strife, antag- 
 onism, unbrotherliness ; for rivalry, jealousy, 
 and hate. The Competitive System, operat- 
 ing on such a basis, with such prizes, is 
 the open door and a colossal invitation and 
 temptation to fraud and to dishonor; to the 
 subtle but respectable grand larcenies of the 
 market masquerading as legitimate enterprise ; 
 to the now almost sacred right of amassing 
 fortunes of uncounted millions out of the very 
 blood of toiling multitudes. 
 
 The Competitive System is a system that 
 bears every fruit that is contrary to the mind 
 and spirit of Jesus. Your Christ could not 
 qualify in this struggle. His strenuousness 
 was of a different type. His conception of 
 success would invite to ignominious failure in 
 this system. "Blessed are the merciful," said 
 He. The Competitive System knows no 
 mercy. Wherever Mercy shows her fair 
 white brow it is to mitigate or ameliorate the 
 pain and tragedy of our industrial strife. 
 And if you point us to the lives of devoted 
 Christians, and to their deeds of mercy and 
 love, we respond that this is in defiance of the 
 principles of the System, and the logic of such 
 lives and such deeds must be to cease offering 
 the millions of lives, which flQ individual 
 
16 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 mercy can reach, to this merciless dragon of 
 industry. 
 
 We Socialists, then, demand of the disciples 
 of Jesus that you attack this Capitalist Sys- 
 tem, so cruelly inhuman, and unchristian in 
 its operation. At least we demand of you, 
 that if you refuse to struggle with us against 
 it, never to use the name of Jesus as an apology 
 for the crimes of competitivism. We demand 
 of you, that the oppressor shall not deal out 
 to the Working Class a double curse in the 
 exploitation of men, by carrying the profit- 
 bag in one hand, and the Bible, the cross and 
 the sacrament in the other. For it may be truly 
 said that Capitalism is the only considerable 
 anti-Christ of modern times. All the other 
 great forms of public wrong that curse and 
 blight us are either fathered or mothered or 
 nourished by this one gigantic anti-Christ 
 the Competitive System. 
 
 Let me remind you, also, that the members 
 of your flocks are unescapably involved in 
 this inhuman and unchristian strife. Their 
 individualistic piety grants them no release. 
 The social system involves them in its meshes, 
 either as agents or victims of its wrong, irre- 
 spective of their profession, their piety, or 
 their prayers. In the battle for bread, life is 
 reduced to the lowest common denominator, 
 capable of measuring all without except ior,. 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 17 
 
 For once let us thank God, the pilgrim to the 
 delectable mountains of spiritual safety can- 
 not escape from this City of Destruction with 
 his pack on his back to save his own soul. 
 He is bound to the race with unbreakable 
 social bonds. Every bite of bread he eats ; 
 every garment he wears, every coin that passes 
 thru his hand, as the sacrament of our com- 
 mon humanity, is tainted with the poison of 
 this system. And there is no spiritual innoc- 
 ulation that can render the church member or 
 the clergy immune. They, too, are sinners 
 with us in this social strife, and competitive 
 war of man against man. And with us they 
 must confess the social guilt, and expiate the 
 social sin. 
 
 3. Our third count against Capitalism is 
 that it is inevitably tyrannous, and despotic in 
 its outcome. 
 
 Given the basis described in our first criti- 
 cism; given the competitive struggle with the 
 winners of the heavy prizes in the lead ; and the 
 out-generaled and vanquished children of toil 
 now left to fight one another as unionist and 
 "scab" for the chances to labor chances now 
 in the hands of the winners ; given this unjust 
 basis and inhuman operation, and the climax 
 is the most cruel, heartless and arrogant des- 
 potism that mankind has yet confronted. 
 
 The winners feel that they are "self-made." 
 
i8 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 They point the losers to the codes of business 
 success, which have long since displaced the 
 ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. They 
 tell the 7,000,000 laborers, with an average 
 annual .wage of $380, to "save," and they, too, 
 shall become millionaires ! There is always 
 room at the top, you know. There is no 
 social responsibility anywhere. Neither Pres- 
 ident Roosevelt and his cabinet, nor the digni- 
 taries of the church, nor the Wall Street mon- 
 archs of trade, have any responsibility to see 
 that the opportunities to make our living are 
 open to the Working Class. The rule of the 
 game is, "Every man for himself, and the 
 devil take the hindmost." This is the un- 
 confessed but ill-concealed motto of the "stren- 
 uous life" as lived in the Competitive Struggle. 
 The winners have climbed to victory over 
 prostrate humanity. And shall they deal out 
 mercy when they have full control of the in- 
 dustrial situation? I trow not. Feudal lords 
 and southern slave holders might be responsi- 
 ble for the health and safety of serfs or slaves, 
 and here and there individual capitalists caught 
 in the toils of Capitalism may transcend the 
 system, and add a 10 per cent to wages, or 
 shorten the hours of labor, or provide some 
 extra benefit to an isolated group of laborers. 
 But the tyranny of this system wraps itself 
 about the Working Class like the coils of a 
 
TO THE CHURCH* 19 
 
 serpent. The system transcends the good will 
 of individuals. It knows no individuals. It 
 hears no cry of poverty or pain. It sees no 
 human suffering. "Things are in the saddle 
 and ride mankind." Steadily the game is 
 played. Steadily the chains and shackles of 
 an impersonal despot are placed on the ankles 
 of the Working Class. 
 
 Describing the relation of the personal and 
 impersonal factors in this tyranny, Lawson 
 writes in his expose of Standard Oil as follows : 
 "These men (referring to just one group of 
 Wall Street financiers) to whose eyes I have 
 seen come the tears for others' sufferings, and 
 whose voices I have heard grow husky in 
 recounting the woes of their less fortunate 
 brothers these men under the spell of the 
 brutal code of modern dollar making are con- 
 verted into beasts of prey, and put to shame 
 the denizens of the deep which devour their 
 kind that they may live. In the harness of 
 the 'system' these men knew no Sabbath, no 
 God ; they had no time to offer thanks, no care 
 for earthly or celestial being; from their eyes 
 no human power could squeeze a tear, no 
 suffering wring a pang from their hearts. 
 They were immune to every feeling known to 
 God or man. They knew only dollars." 
 
 Such a paragraph gives a hint of the cruel 
 and heartless tyranny and despotism of plutoc 
 
20 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 racy, which now sits enthroned in our Ameri- 
 can life, as the Competitive System comes to 
 its climax. 
 
 Apostles of Christ, can you apologize for or 
 defend a system which grows disgusting and 
 deadly even to its votaries? We Socialists 
 ask you as men who profess to teach the truth 
 of Him who came to proclaim liberty to cap- 
 tives and to make men free, to attack this 
 plutocratic tyranny. Stand, not for mammon, 
 but for men. Plead the cause of the people. 
 We invite the clergy and the church to join 
 with us in overthrowing this subtle tyranny 
 that is sapping the foundations of constitu- 
 tional liberty, making Christianity a joke, and 
 enslaving the working class under the specious 
 promises and masks of "prosperity." 
 
 The Program of Socialism* 
 
 But Socialism comes not to destroy but to 
 fulfill. In the darkness on the social horizon, 
 Socialism alone holds up the beacon light to 
 the Working Class, and thru them to the race. 
 That beacon light of Socialism is the result of 
 the most painstaking study of social and in- 
 dustrial life that has ever been given to the 
 world. 
 
 Written all over the pages of modern so- 
 ciety, so large that any eye looking for the 
 Word of God may read, the Socialist sees that 
 
TO THE CHURCH* 21 
 
 Organization must take the place of the chaos 
 and anarchy of competitive strife, and that 
 Co-operation must supplant Competition. The 
 Socialist sees that huge railroads, immense 
 factories and our enormous industrial equip- 
 ment must be owned by vast aggregations and 
 consolidations of capital. 
 
 Socialism therefore declares that this huge 
 industrial equipment can no longer be left 
 with safety to mankind in the hands of Pri- 
 vate Trusts and Monopolies, to be adminis- 
 tered by groups of Capitalists, using the Co- 
 operative principle and the mighty powers of 
 Organization for Private Profit to themselves, 
 and for the exploitation and enslavement of 
 the producing classes. 
 
 The Socialist reads out of the agencies and 
 activities of the present tyranny the truth that 
 shall make us free. Socialism therefore de- 
 clares that the people must proceed as rap- 
 idly as votes can be counted and law enacted 
 to transfer the basic industrial equipment of 
 the nation from private individuals and the 
 Capitalist Class to the nation, to the people, 
 to Social or Collective Ownership, to be organ- 
 ized democratically, and operated on the prin- 
 ciple of Co-operation. 
 
 This Socialization of Industry is the only 
 answer to the cry of labor. It is the hope of 
 
22 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 the world. And if the Church only knew the 
 day of her visitation, this Socialization of In- 
 dustry, as rapidly as human energy and zeal 
 and genius can accomplish it, is a veritable 
 second coming of Christ. It is at least one 
 divine event toward which the whole long 
 past has moved. If the Church of America 
 could be aroused from the hypnotic spell of a 
 materialistic, mammonistic and plutocratic age, 
 this plank of the Socialist movement the So- 
 cialization of Industry would sound like the 
 call of God to go up and possess the land, and 
 to "bring my people out of the house of bond- 
 age and out of the land of the oppressor." 
 
 Our National platform states our proposals 
 thus: (i) "The Socialist Party comes with 
 the only proposition or program for intelli- 
 gently and deliberately organizing the nation 
 for the common good of all its citizens. It is 
 the first time that the mind of man has ever 
 been directed toward a conscious organization 
 of society. 
 
 (2) Socialism means that all those things 
 upon which the people in common depend 
 shall by the people in common be owned and 
 administered. 
 
 (3) Socialism means that the tools of em- 
 ployment shall belong to the creators and 
 users, that all production shall be for the 
 direct use of the producers, that the making 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 23 
 
 of goods for profit shall come to an end ; that 
 we shall be all workers together, and that all 
 opportunities shall be open and equal to all 
 men." 
 
 I do not hesitate to say that this is the only 
 platform in America that has the purpose of 
 Christ writ large in an economic program. 
 Nor do I hesitate to say that this is the only 
 platform that an apostle or a disciple of Christ 
 can consistently vote for. 
 
 The message of Socialism to the church is 
 therefore a summons to spurn all policies and 
 platforms of parties defending and supporting 
 the present system, and to vote for the Social- 
 ist movement, its platform and its candidates. 
 
 Right here I should correct two crude objec- 
 tions that ignorance and prejudice have raised 
 against Socialism. First, it is said that we 
 would attack private property. On the con- 
 trary, it is Capitalism that has left one-half of 
 our population absolutely propertyless, which 
 is attacking private property. It is in the inter- 
 ests of private property, the result of honest 
 toil, for personal use and enjoyment, but never 
 for the exploitation of others, that we demand 
 the social ownership of the means of production 
 and distribution. 
 
 This phase of the question is clearly treated 
 in the National Platform of the Socialist Party 
 in the two following paragraphs : 
 
24 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 "Capitalism is the enemy and destroyer of 
 essential private property. Its development is 
 through the legalized confiscation of all that 
 the labor of the working class produces, above 
 its subsistence-wage. The private ownership 
 of the means of employment grounds society 
 in an economic slavery which renders intellec- 
 tual and political tyranny inevitable." 
 
 "Socialism comes so to organize industry 
 and society that every individual shall be secure 
 in that private property in the means of life 
 upon which his liberty of being, thought and 
 action depend. It comes to rescue the people 
 from the fast increasing and successful assault 
 of Capitalism upon the liberty of the individ- 
 ual." 
 
 Second objection: It is claimed that we 
 propose to take from the Capitalist Class by 
 force what they have so ruthlessly secured by 
 the schemes and practices and policies of this 
 system. Concerning this objection I will quote 
 to you from three of our standard authori- 
 ties. 
 
 Kautsky, the noted German Socialist, of the 
 most radical wing, says : "There are a num- 
 ber of reasons which indicate that a working 
 class regime will seek the road of compensa- 
 tion and payment of the Capitalist Class in the 
 Socialization of capitalist industry." 
 
 And Engels, in 1894, wrote: "We do not 
 
TO THE CHURCH* 25 
 
 at all consider the indemnification of the pro- 
 prietors as an impossibility, whatever may be 
 the circumstances. How many times has not 
 Karl Marx (the great authority) expressed to 
 me the opinion that if we could buy up the 
 whole crowd, it would really be the cheapest 
 way of relieving ourselves of them." 
 
 "Expropriation without indemnity," says 
 Vanderwelde, a leader in the Belgian Socialist 
 movement, "with the resistance, the troubles, 
 the bloody disturbances which it would not 
 fail to produce, would be in the end the most 
 costly." 
 
 Program of Amelioration* 
 
 Returning now to the program of the Social- 
 ist Party. If the proposition of the Socializa- 
 tion of Industry seems vague to men who are 
 trained to deal with principles as well as with 
 concrete practice, let me point you to the 
 program of amelioration which Socialism pre- 
 sents to the Working Class under the present 
 injustice and wrongs of Capitalism. 
 
 Here are some planks of amelioration which 
 as keen men you will observe were not dic- 
 tated by Wall Street politicians, but were read 
 out of the sufferings and struggles of the 
 Working Class in their unceasing conflict with 
 Capitalism : 
 
 "To the end that the workers may seize 
 
26 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 every possible advantage that may strengthen 
 them to gain complete control of the powers 
 of government, and thereby the sooner estab- 
 lish the Co-operative Commonwealth, the So- 
 cialist Party pledges itself to watch and work in 
 both the economic and the political struggle 
 for each successive immediate interest of the 
 working class : 
 
 1. For shortened days of labor and in- 
 crease of wages. 
 
 2. For the insurance of workers against 
 accident, sickness and lack of employment. 
 
 3. For pensions for aged and exhausted 
 workers. 
 
 4. For the public ownership of the means 
 of transportation, communication and ex- 
 change. 
 
 5. For the graduated taxation of incomes, 
 inheritances, franchises and land values, the 
 proceeds to be applied to the public employ- 
 ment and improvement of the conditions of the 
 workers. 
 
 6. For the complete education of children 
 and their freedom from the workshop. 
 
 7. For the equal suffrage of men and 
 women. 
 
 8. For the prevention of the use of the 
 military against labor in the settlement of 
 strikes. 
 
 9. For the free administration of justice. 
 
 10. For popular government, including in- 
 itiative, referendum, proportional representa- 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 27 
 
 tion, equal suffrage and municipal home rule, 
 and the recall of officers by their constitu- 
 ents. 
 
 11. And for every gain or advantage for 
 the workers that may be wrested from the 
 capitalist system, and that may relieve the 
 suffering and strengthen the hands of labor. 
 We lay upon every man elected to any execu- 
 tive or legislative office the first duty of striv- 
 ing to procure whatever is for the workers' 
 most immediate interest, and for whatever will 
 lessen the economic and political powers of the 
 capitalist, and increase the like powers of the 
 worker. 
 
 12. But, in so doing, we are using these 
 remedial measures as means to the one great 
 end of the Co-operative Commonwealth. Such 
 measures of relief as we may be able to force 
 from Capitalism are but a preparation of the 
 workers to seize the whole powers of govern- 
 ment, in order that they may thereby lay hold 
 of the whole system of industry, and thus 
 come into their rightful inheritance." 
 
 I challenge the moral and spiritual teachers 
 of America to duplicate the Socialist Platform 
 in any other platform ever written in Ameri- 
 can politics. Here is a philanthropy that is 
 not the price of blood. Here is a humanitar- 
 ianism that smacks not of vainglorious char- 
 ity. If the church really means to abolish the 
 
28 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 sufferings of mankind, here is a program be- 
 fore you which we could not dishonor by 
 even comparing it with that of any other 
 political party. 
 
 The effect of the Socialist Movement, even 
 in its minority, is thus exalted by one of our 
 opponents and critics, Max Nordau. After 
 speaking of the dreams and absurdities in the 
 Socialist propaganda, he says : "Whatever is 
 absurd in Socialism will remain an empty 
 word, and will be either interpreted as sym- 
 bolical or simply allowed to drop into oblivion. 
 It will, however, act as an impulse and force, 
 and bring about better conditions of life among 
 mankind. This one can safely prophesy; for, 
 in spite of its theoretical absurdity, Socialism 
 has already in thirty years wrought greater 
 ameliorations than all the wisdom of states- 
 men and philosophers of thousands of years." 
 Surely this from a critic is a remarkable trib- 
 ute, and if the mere propaganda of Socialism, 
 with occasional political triumphs, has already 
 had such a powerful effect in ameliorating the 
 conditions of the Working Class, what may 
 we expect when the Sleeping Giant of Labor 
 arises and inaugurates the full program of 
 human emancipation! 
 
 That noble American woman, Frances Wil- 
 lard, declared her faith in Socialism before her 
 death, and in her terse and beautiful language 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 29 
 
 states the spiritual significance of our move- 
 ment in the following words: 
 
 "I believe that COMPETITION is DOOMED. 
 WHAT THE SOCIAISTS DESIRE is THAT THE 
 
 CORPORATION OF HUMANITY SHOULD CON- 
 TROL ALL PRODUCTION. 
 
 "Beloved comrades, this is the frictionless 
 way; it is the higher way; it eliminates the 
 motive for a selfish life; it enacts into our 
 everyday living the ethics of Christ's gospel. 
 Nothing else will do it; nothing else can bring 
 the glad day of universal brotherhood. THE 
 
 REASON WHY I AM A SOCIALIST IS JUST HERE. 
 
 "Oh, that I were young again, and it would 
 have my life ! It is God's way out of the wil- 
 derness and into the promised land. It is the 
 very marrow and fatness of Christ's gospel. 
 It is Christianity applied." 
 
 I have but outlined the Socialist criticism 
 of Capitalism, and presented with but little 
 elaboration the Socialist program of emancipa- 
 tion of the workers and of the race. 
 
 In conclusion, I do not ask you, as minis- 
 ters of Christ to abate your efforts for indi- 
 vidual salvation in the smallest degree. I do 
 not attack your theology, nor your ethics, nor 
 philosophy. But I charge you to see that the 
 quality of individual salvation shall be that of 
 Jesus rather than that of Judas ; that professed 
 spirituality of character and discipleship to 
 
30 THE MESSAGE OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Christ either on the part of yourselves or your 
 adherents shall not be found bulwarking, 
 either by open defense, or by that silence which 
 gives consent, either by your voice or your 
 vote, a system which stands as the supreme 
 Anti-Christ of modern civilization. 
 
 I charge you, in the name of humanity, to 
 dedicate your talents and your lives to the so- 
 cial and economic freedom of mankind thru 
 the establishment of the Co-operative Com- 
 monwealth. 
 
 Methinks that if the gentle but mighty Car- 
 penter of Judea were with us on earth in this 
 great crisis, he would be found not with the 
 oppressor, but with the oppressed, ready again 
 to lay down his life for the sheep, to work 
 with the agencies at hand to establish this 
 next step of the Kingdom of God, the King- 
 dom of Justice and Brotherhood in the Earth. 
 
 Let his apostles and disciples follow ! 
 
 The first edition of this pamphlet was 
 quickly exhausted. The sixteenth thousand is 
 now off the press. At the close of this second 
 edition I wish to state again some convictions 
 of my heart : 
 
 The only meaning of human history is the 
 coming of a state of justice, brotherhood and 
 human comradeship, which Jesus called the 
 Kingdom of Heaven upon the earth. 
 
 The quality of life which was manifest in 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 31 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth is the ultimate quality of 
 life for the individual. It is the goal of moral 
 and spiritual evolution for the person. 
 
 The essence of that quality of life is the 
 spirit of absolute self-renunciation on the altar 
 of the human life of the whole the de-person- 
 alization of the ego-life, and the incarnation of 
 the social mind and social conscience and cos- 
 mic spirit. 
 
 This quality of life is not mere religiousness, 
 nor sentimentality, but is the love-life, the com- 
 rade-life, the escape from the nightmare of 
 selfishness, consequent on the highest philo- 
 sophical perception of the Unity of Being, the 
 actual Solidarity of Humanity, and the No- 
 thing-ness of the merely limited ego-life. 
 ****** 
 
 The present capitalist system is the Anti- 
 Christ of our times the present social, politi- 
 cal and economic negation and antithesis of 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 The Capitalist system is Anti-Christ to the 
 individual, functioning firmly the personal, pri- 
 vate, limited, ego, self-life, in the pursuit of 
 private personal ends. 
 
 This inevitable necessity forced by Capital- 
 ism on the human individual to seek his pri- 
 vate property ends in the cruel and unnecessary 
 struggle for existence, crucifies the Christ-life, 
 stifles the love-life of the soul, and makes all 
 
religion a pharasaism a Caiaphas to Herod. 
 
 The Capitalist system stands impeached b> 
 the highest spiritual insight of the race, as a 
 system of legalized plunder of the people, in- 
 carnating the Cain-spirit, and for a time still 
 unconsciously defended by those who histori- 
 cally bear the name of Christ. 
 
 Capitalism denies the first fundamental right 
 of human existence that is, equality of op- 
 portunity in the use of the basic equipment of 
 bread-getting economic equality. 
 
 Capitalism, therefore, by forcing men to an- 
 tagonism and strife, victory and defeat, mo- 
 nopoly and poverty, in bread-getting, denies 
 to men the last highest joy of existence com- 
 radeship, fellowship, brotherhood, love. 
 
 But the Christ mission cannot be realized 
 except by the overthrow of Capitalism and 
 the inauguration of Capitalism. 
 
 And the Christ mind and spirit cannot func- 
 tion in defenders of Capitalism, but will find 
 its incarnation in a new race of spiritual he- 
 roes a new Messianic movement which is 
 already at hand. 
 
 The call of the cross today is to the hero- 
 soul of the Christ-consciousness in the individ- 
 ual to incarnate protest against the Capitalist 
 system, and to incarnate the concept and spirit 
 of the democratic organization of industry 
 the next step of the Kingdom of God in the 
 earth the Socialist Commonwealth J. S. W. 
 
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